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.

Movie Chat: Links and Lists

I love it when David Bordwell uses his, um, encyclopedic knowledge of film history for good, like he does here (via Andy Horbal's February links page) when he puts the slap down on Variety's claim that Thomas Schlamme pioneered the "walk and talk" shot.

Bordwell has some interesting, and nicely-illustrated, stuff to say. For example, he notes that the walk-and-talk is particularly suited to movies/shows that take place in "institutional" spaces like hospitals or police stations.

He goes on to point out the lack of variety in the way contemporary filmmakers stage dialogue scenes. According to Bordwell, nowadays, directors tend to use either the walk-and-talk or the stand-and-deliver, but in old-time Hollywood movies, they would spice things up with more elaborate blocking, stage business, and camera movement.

Personally, I prefer that kind of staging - for one thing, I think it opens up a lot of possibilities for performers, giving them more space to work with. "Lost" techniques like these keep me going back to old movies.

Also, I had fun following and participating in this conversation about movie list-making on Andy Horbal's blog itself. Last weekend I travelled to Worcester, MA for an annual list party that my undergrad film professor throws for some of his dedicated film buff students. It was lots of fun, and it has inspired lots of thinking about movies, lists, and arts & culture stuff in general, some of which should make its way to blog form over the next few weeks.

Movie Chat: Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine

So, I can see why some cine-buffs are disappointed that this movie was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. And I can also see why someone who rented this movie because it received a nomination might be a little disappointed with it. It's a small movie and I don't really think it's all that original. It's essentially National Lampoon's Vacation with the Griswolds replaced by a family with indie movie quirks - a father who's an inspirational speaker who needs inspiration, a son who's taken a vow of silence, a grandad who's addicted to heroin, a gay uncle who just failed a suicide attempt, a slightly nerdy little girl with a beauty pageant obsession.

I didn't really buy any of the quirky family stuff - that is, I didn't buy their quirks individually (I thought the son's entire arc was entirely unconvincing, for instance) and, more importantly, I never really bought them as a genuine family unit (as opposed to Vacation, where the "wacky" family dynamic feels like the real thing).

But...

The movie still kind of worked for me and there were moments that I thought were really quite nice. For instance: the look of satisfaction on Steve Carell's face after he's helped everyone push-start the family's VW bus perfectly captured the way that succeeding at a brainless, exhausting physical task can sometimes (momentarily) keep emotional and spiritual depression at bay. It's a tiny moment, but it's so true to life that it makes me want to forgive the parts of the movie that seem like they were dreamed up by screenwriters who have seen too many indie movies about dysfunctional families.

I also give the filmmakers a lot of points for not treating Greg Kinnear's character as harshly as I feared they might.

Anyway, I admired the movie's generosity enough that I was willing enough to let down my defenses and enjoy the uplifting ending on its own terms.

I'm less forgiving of the filmmaker's failure to give Toni Collette all that much to do: I liked her (along with everyone else in the cast), but her talent seems wasted here.

Movie Chat: Idiocracy

Idiocracy

The premise is a killer and though the follow through doesn't quite do it justice, I enjoyed the movie overall. I had a similar feeling when I first watched Office Space though: I like Mike Judge as a writer, but as a filmmaker he's just barely adequate. I mean, he's a step above Kevin Smith in terms of staging and pacing, but his gags and his, dare I say it, comic vision deserve a little better.

Idiocracy is not as uneven as Office Space, but it generally feels more forced and lacks Office Space's laid back charm.

Still, I think Idiocracy compares favorably to most contemporary comedies, which says more about the low quality of most contemporary comedies than it does about Idiocracy.

My favorite Hollywood comedy of the last few years was The 40-Year Old Virgin, which was well-written and had a great cast, but the best thing I can say about the filmmaking is that it's professional and doesn't look like a half-assed job.

But none of the movies I've seen have compared to some TV comedies from the last few years: Arrested Development, anything with or having to do with Ricky Gervais, or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Maybe I'm being a little too vague, but what I'd like to see more of are movie comedies that build gags through their moviemaking and not only through their stars' clowning. Not that there's anything wrong with the clowning, but I want the more elaborate gags of a movie like Used Cars or comedies get part of their humor from a unique visual style like Dick.

Movie Chat: The Queen

The Queen

Very smart and expertly-made, but narrow and a tad superficial.

But my response probably has something to do with my inability to take Diana-worship seriously.

I mean, I get, on an intellectual level, why the British public reacted the way they did, but I still think the whole circus was ridiculous. If anything, the "Americanization" of British society and the "celebritization" of the Royals seems like a better subject for someone like Preston Sturges or Ricky Gervais than it does a screenwriter and director who don't really think it is something to be concerned about, but rather something to accept and "get over".

I kind of see things the way my friend Nick Braccia does, who told me while we were chatting about this issue: "I enjoy the royals: I appreciate their connection to history. I appreciate that I can look at someone and say, 'That is the great grandson of Queen Victoria.' It somehow makes history more real to me, and, thus, I can view and assess things in greater context, rather than just the 'now', as if the world were invented when I was born, which is how I think most 'Americanized' people (or Americans) behave."

More substantially than its fuzzy point-of-view towards Diana-worship, I think the screenplay dropped the ball when it came to dealing with how self-serving the British press's attack on the Queen really was.

My guess is that The Queen falls into a certain class of based-on-reality, dealing-with-real-issues type movies that will not really work for you if you don't already share the moviemaker's underlying assumptions about the material. Another one for me is Capote, where I (a) don't buy that In Cold Blood is all that great and, even if I did, (b) don't think it is that surprising that a famous writer could actually be a cold-blooded opportunist. Coming at this from the other side, I really like 24 Hour Party People, but I can see how if you don't like the bands and the music it deals with or think that the punk, new wave, rave are inconsequential, the movie might come off as much ado about nothing.

Movie Chat: Monster House

Monster House

I'm not the biggest fan of these CGI animated movies (which is a nice, non-confrontational way of saying that Shrek makes my eyes bleed), so I wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did. It's a fully-realized, note-perfect, nicely cast homage to Joe Dante's 1980s movies, like Gremlins and The 'burbs, set in a Suburban America somewhere between E.T.'s and A Nightmare on Elm Street's.

Still, though, by the last half of the movie, the CGI had gotten on my nerves.

Since they were making a movie that owed so much in terms of plot, characters, tone, and style to those Dante movies, I wonder why they didn't, you know, use some of the same techniques - live actors, models, puppets, with computer FX to tie everything together. While I was watching it, I couldn't help thinking that the choice to use CGI was an empty one - aesthetically, at least. I mean, I suppose that the CGI allowed them to show the monster and the "actors" in the screen at the same time without any line separating FX from "Real People", but, for me, it wasn't really worth it. There's lots of impressive moviemaking on display, but every few seconds something would happen that would drive home the point that I was watching little computer people in a little computer world. For instance, when the two kids play basketball, the bounce of the ball just seemed off somehow.

It also doesn't help that most of the scenes inside the monster house look like they could be taken out of a junior version of the Alone in the Dark video game.

It's not like this movie is aimed at little kids (it has a PG rating for scary situations, crude humor, and "brief language"), who have been trained by Pixar to respond only to shiny, flashy, loud computer graphics. If I were 12 years old, I would definitely appreciate being able to watch a flesh-and-blood Maggie Gyllenhaal in a tight, punk rock T-shirt.

Slightly more seriously, by going with computer animated actors, they lose the, um, liveliness that a living, breathing performer brings to a horror movie. With horror movies, more so than with any other kind of movie, I want to have a direct, emotional connection with the actors. That's why Jennifer Connelly is so great in a movie like Dark Water: she opens up to the camera and we can read and respond to all the subtle - and not so subtle - shifts in emotion on her face. She lets us tune into her character's vulnerability and gives us the illusion that there's actual human emotions at stake.

So my thinking here is that the decision to use CGI here is not so much a creative choice as a marketing one: it lets an otherwise conventional movie stand out from the crowd and it gives some filmmakers a chance to show off their latest toys. (Polar Express, anyone?)

Now, compare Monster House to A Scanner Darkly, where, even if it doesn't work for you, the choice to go with rotoscope animation was made for a substantive, creative reason - it's meant to get across the way that doing drugs can affect your perception of the real world.

Heck, compare Monster House to Over the Hedge, where the choice to go with animation makes sense because actual raccoons don't take direction that well.

Movie Chat: Oscar Facts, The Unwatched Masses, Lists, and Favorites

Edward Copeland goes to the source to try to clear up some Oscar "fact" confusion. I now hope that Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, just so all those people who got their facts wrong, have their predictions come out wrong, too. (Link via The House Next Door).

I'm a big fans of lists - reading lists, year-end best lists , random lists - so I thought Andy Horbal's idea here was pretty neat. There's also an interesting discussion in the comments about the merits of the list Andy is drawing from. As always, I think the best approach to any list is to treat it as a way to start a discussion, not end one. Here's my own 10 best films I've never seen, according to They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

8 1/2 *
Tokyo Story
City Lights
La Dolce Vita
L'Avventura **
Persona
Andrei Rublev
Ordet
Au Hasard, Balthazar
Wild Strawberries

*I've seen 8 1/2, but it was so long ago that I don't remember much of it and couldn't, in good conscience, talk about it with any authority.
**I've seen parts of L'Avventura on numerous occasions. I've just never sat down to watch it the whole way through.

Looking through the list a little more, my big blind spots are Bergman, Tarkovsky, Ozu, and Bresson. I'll be watching a bunch of Ozu and Bresson over the next few weeks (treating myself to some classics after spending the last few weeks catching up with 2006 releases for an upcoming "list" party), but I think I'm going to save Bergman and Tarkovsky for when I'm, um, older. The big, forehead-slapping, "Why haven't I watched this yet?"-movie is Ikiru - I've seen just about every other Kurosawa movie, so at this point, it's a little embarrassing that I've left this one so long. (Also, check out Andy's interesting business proposition.)

On a semi-related note: my girlfriend and I sat down to watch the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde last night and I mentioned that Frederic March was one of my favorite actors. She said that was meaningless because everyone is my favorite actor. She wasn't being especially fair, there are lots of actors whose work I'm cool to or outright don't like, but I do have quite a few favorites.

Most film buffs are like this though, aren't they? We have lots of little favorites - favorite westerns, favorite character actors, favorite silent film directors, favorite horror movie actresses, etc. I could pretty easily start to list off my 100 favorite actors (March would definitely be there), which might seem a little indiscriminate, but I've seen lots of performances from lots of different actors.

Maybe I should just start using more specific language - i.e., Frederic March is one of my favorite old school, Hollywood actors: look for the way he tones down his theatrical style to make it work for the camera - although that might be a little too pedantic.

Comics Chat: Sloth

In his review of this book, Dirk Deppey writes:

It's always astounded me that Gilbert Hernandez doesn't enjoy the same sort of respect and acclamation that, say, Chris Ware or Art Spiegelman take for granted. He's a more expressive cartoonist than Ware, a far better storyteller than Spiegelman, and both his productivity and command of the comics language equal that of either of them. Despite being one of the most creatively fecund cartoonists currently working the English language, Hernandez nonetheless hasn't reached the high-profile publishing success that many other, lesser cartoonists have achieved in the current graphic-novel boom...

Instead, Beto's publishers -- aside from Fantagraphics, of course -- have been companies like Vertigo and Dark Horse, publishing houses with one foot in standard genre-comics production and one uneasy foot in literary waters ("literary" being an something of a generous assessment where Vertigo's concerned), companies lacking the marketing reach and literary prestige necessary to put him over the top.

Well, Dirk probably knows this (and may even have written it elsewhere), but there are a couple factors at work here above and beyond Beto's publishers.

If you take almost any issue of Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library and show it to a non-comics person who is reasonably into other kinds of arts and culture stuff, they will probably be wowed just by skimming through it. Looking at Ware's intricate, diagram-like pages, you can tell right away that something exciting, interesting, different is going on. Even if you end up not reading the story, it leaves an impression.

Beto's work in Sloth, Grip, and Love & Rockets, doesn't jump off the page and grab you in the same way. His visual style is much more traditional - Dan De Carlo and Steve Ditko by way of Robert Crumb - and while his narrative style is unique and challenging, you have to read (at least) a few pages for that to really sink in.

Anyway, I liked Sloth quite a bit. (Not as much as his Palomar stories and not as much as the, IMHO, criminally underrated Grip, but that's a pretty high bar for me - they make my all-time favorite list.) It shares a lot with Charles Burns's Black Hole, although its horror elements are much more in the background and its version of mundane suburbia is a lot less menacing.

Compared to Beto's other stuff, the character design is pretty tame - he doesn't get as, um, creative with his female characters' anatomies and I kind of missed that Crumb-like aspect of his drawing.

The story has some neat twists-and-turns that require a little Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive-style figuring out. I haven't got a 100% handle on what we're meant to think is actually happening on every page, but I'm intrigued by the mystery elements and Beto's handling of them is assured enough that I trust re-reading the book will make everything clear.

My one real, semi-major reservation is that Beto's use of the "teenagers living in soul-stifling suburbia" theme feels a little too generic, almost as if he's just paying lip service to it. It shows up so often in lit-fic comics (but not usually in Beto's) that I can't help but feel that his including it here is a way of pandering to the lit-fic comics audience.

Maybe I'm being unfair: I probably would have lapped this up when I was an alienated teenager (though I've never lived in suburbia). Still, though Beto doesn't serve up any cliches, I think in Sloth this theme isn't as well supported by specific, true-to-life details as it is in Black Hole or Ghost World.

Regardless, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wanted to get a taste of what Beto can do. It's a lot less daunting than that huge Palomar book and it's a more straightforward story than Grip.

Blog Chat: Film Buffs

This dialogue between Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich from The House Next Door is pretty interesting. I'm going to nitpick and shoot spitballs at it from the sidelines here, but if you're at all interested in concepts like "the future of movies" and "the death of cinema" it'll be worth a read.

First, I thought it was funny that while they point out the cyclical nature of those "death of film" think pieces, they didn't acknowledge that their complaints about fuddy-duddies like Paul Schrader ignoring non-narrative cinema are just as cyclical. Ever since Birth of a Nation, Film As Art Guys have been decrying the dominance of "conventional narrative" and evangelizing non-narrative film.

I used to be pretty gung-ho about non-narrative movies. Well, gung-ho about the idea of them - I have to admit that there weren't many actual non-narrative movies that I enjoyed watching.

Nowadays, though, my main interest is in stories and storytelling, and, at least when it comes to movies, books, and comics, give me Steven Spielberg, Gore Vidal, and Peter Bagge. I still like to read and talk a little bit about the artsier, "exploration and expansion of the medium" stuff, but I'm no longer driven to keep up with it. (I'm no longer driven to keep up with much of anything, which is a very liberating feeling).

I'd guess that most people are going to be like me: we go to the movies to get a story.

But, as this dialogue at 2Blowhards suggests, non-narrative "movies" have a future at YouTube. I'd wager that while there will never be a big audience demand for feature length, large scale, non-narrative film experiences, there will be a growing demand for small scale, five-minutes-or-less, non-narrative video clips, made with a sense of fun, outside of (or at least peripheral to) any existing avant-garde film/video movements, by amateurs and hobbyists.

Second, my major gripe with the piece is the shrill tone they take when they're attacking retrograde ideas about film. Who do they think they are - the film critic thought police? Statements like this...

It's a little embarrassing at this point to still be debating the issue of whether or not a movie is less of a movie because it was shot with a camcorder; and whether television can be art; and whether series television is inherently less worthy of attention than, say, your typical mainstream Hollywood genre film. People who catch themselves talking in those terms should cringe and correct themselves, because it's 20th century thinking.

...make me cringe.

Who cares if you're out of it? This constant pressure to keep up, to adopt the latest and most fashionable attitudes toward cinema (or to anything else for that matter) is pretty unpleasant. It doesn't feel all that different from the pressure we get from Big Media to stay on the cutting edge of consumable crap. And there's something a little bullying about their "get on the bus or get run over" language. I don't think these guys are bullies, at all, but I do think they get carried away here. Do they realize how badly they come off to someone who has honest disagreements with them?

Third, Keith writes that:

I do my best not to be closed off to the potentialities of any motion picture: "Hollywood films", "Foreign films", "Avant-garde films", "Home videos"—at a very basic, gut level these distinctions are anathema to me.

But it is a very rare person who is going to like all of these kinds of things equally, because, well, they each offer very different kinds of experiences. No one would say that because you like books you should try to like cook books as much as travel guides as much as volumes of poetry. We're all going to have our preferences: kinds of movies we respond more to than others, kinds of movies we just aren't interested in. Consider that even within a specific "type" of movie - conventional narrative Hollywood stuff - most people are going to have strong preferences for certain genres, styles, subject matter, etc. It always seems a little forced to me when someone proclaims equal love for all of these things (but that might just be because I used to try to force myself into thinking/responding that way).

This has been a little bit of a hobby horse with me lately, but I think criticism of any kind benefits when the critic is honest and upfront about the specific kinds of experiences he or she actually responds to and is interested in.

Tangentially, one of the defining moments of my own career as a film buff came during the first few weeks of my cinema studies program. I was talking with a classmate and I noticed that he had no familiarity with most of the movies I was bringing up (mostly old Hollywood, but also French stuff from the 1930s). After I asked him "Have you seen that?" for the sixth or seventh time, he told me: "I don't like watching movies much. I just really like the idea of cinema." I didn't say anything more about it at the time, but what I have come to realize is that I really don't care about "movies in general". I do, very much, care about specific movies, and I'm very much interested in the people who make them and they methods they use. But "the idea of cinema"? Eh.

Blog Chat: Cinephiles?, Gateways, Plagiarism, More Children of Men

Andy Horbal asks this question over on his blog:

Do you
A) identify with
B) feel alienated by
the term cinephile? Or would you choose
C) none of the above?

I chose B): to me "cinephile" sounds too much like "audophile" which I (perhaps unfairly) associate with people who are really into their stereo system. I prefer "film buff", partly because it's a lot more casual sounding.

Blake Bell has a thoughtful post on the mainstream comics industry's delusions about coming up with gateway comics.

Eddie Campbell has a (perhaps) provocative post about plagiarism, Roy Lichtenstein, and IP. He quotes R.G. Collingwood:

Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full-sized picture for next year's Academy. I will not rely upon the hanging committee's sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that they would exhibit it; but if they did, we should get brighter Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert them.

I bet you can find this kind of cross-pollination with the folks making videos for sharing on YouTube, too. Hmmm... Thinking about it, the line between the people producing original content for YouTube and the people just uploading found/captured videos looks pretty fuzzy.

And Sean Collins responds to my post on Children of Men. Once again, I find myself not only agreeing with Sean, but wishing that I had put it this way myself first:

...I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror... Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between "freedom fighters," increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven't seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets--put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.

The more I think about Children of Men, the less my quarrels with its ideas seem to matter. Usually, it goes the other way around for me, as it did with The Queen, which I saw around the same time, where the nagging, nay saying voice in my head was relatively quiet while I was watching the movie, but grew louder the more I thought about it.

On the other hand, I still think there's something a little underhanded about the way Cuaron et al. do a complete 180 on the novel's take on immigration. And it's the fact that the novel makes more sense regarding this issue that keeps me a little bit suspicious of Cuaron's choices.