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.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Friday, February 16, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, February 12, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, February 9, 2007
Comics Chat: Sloth
In his review of this book, Dirk Deppey writes:
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.
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...
...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:
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.
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.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Blog Chat: Cinephiles?, Gateways, Plagiarism, More Children of Men
Andy Horbal asks this question over on his blog:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Movie Chat: American Graffiti and The Hollywood Knights
So, there are a couple of things I do, that, uncharitably, annoy me when other people do them.
It drives me crazy when someone is talking about a well-known book/movie/etc. and someone else just has to bring up a related but (relatively) more obscure book/movie/etc. and tries to pass it off as "better" than the better known work in some way - more authentic, more complex, more direct, more accomplished, etc. "Who has the more obscure taste?" is a game that gets played with unfortunate frequency within pop-crit circles. Like: you're trying to talk about Pet Sounds but I can't shut up about Surf's Up.
I bring this up because I am about to do just that and I want to let you know that I know how irritating this can be.
I first saw American Graffiti over 12 years ago. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't blown away by it and I remembered it as being limp: George Lucas's nostalgia was a little too sticky and his characters a little too nice.
But I never really gave the movie much more thought, until I (much later) saw The Hollywood Knights, which I fell in love with in that special way I reserve for thoroughly disreputable movies. I mean, for most movie buffs, Hollywood Knights would be, at best, a kind of guilty pleasure. For me, though, Hollywood Knights is a desert island movie.
Anyway:
Hollywood Knights is - pretty shamelessly - an American Graffiti rip-off. But (and here it is) from the first time I saw it, I couldn't help but feel that this movie was American Graffiti done right. The whole early 60s, SoCal teenage scene in Hollywood Knights seemed more lively and more specifically observed and drawn - more true-to-life - than the way Lucas mythologized it in American Graffiti.
But as time passed, I started wondering if my memory was trustworthy on this movie. I mean, although my admiration and appreciation of Hollywood Knights was genuine, I didn't know if I was making out American Graffiti to be worse then it really was in order to prop up an obscurity I clicked with at the expense of a popular near-classic.
Was my mind playing tricks on me?
Well - I decided to record American Graffiti on my DVR a few weeks ago because (1) my girlfriend had never seen it and I thought it was something she might like and (2) I had grown suspicious of my memory of the movie. Maybe I had just started telling people I thought it was "overrated" as part of the contrarian pose I often like to take to stir up argument, er, discussion.
The verdict:
If anything, I remembered a better movie than what I saw.
(I think) Hollywood Knights really is a livelier movie and one that has a stronger sense of time and place, without pandering (all that much) to its audience's nostalgia. Knights is raunchier and funnier, too.
I was unimpressed by the performances in American Graffiti. Paul Le Mat would later play the same role better in another Mutrux flick, Aloha, Bobby and Rose, and Dreyfuss, electric playing the unlikeable lead in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is just cute and smug here.
But here's the Big Thing That Bugged Me:
Now, I know George Lucas is a car nut (the one and only conversation I ever had with him was about race cars), but he shoots the cars in this movie like they're parading down Main Street on the way to a classic car show. None of the driving - except (maybe) for the final showdown between Le Mat and Harrison Ford - seems real.
So, I'm tempted to draw a comparison to Lucas's later Star Wars efforts: he sets up all these pretty toys that he seems to care about a lot, but he struggles when he tries to do anything interesting with them. Or maybe: he doesn't even care if he does anything interesting with them - for him showing the cars/spaceships/aliens/etc. might just be enough.
It drives me crazy when someone is talking about a well-known book/movie/etc. and someone else just has to bring up a related but (relatively) more obscure book/movie/etc. and tries to pass it off as "better" than the better known work in some way - more authentic, more complex, more direct, more accomplished, etc. "Who has the more obscure taste?" is a game that gets played with unfortunate frequency within pop-crit circles. Like: you're trying to talk about Pet Sounds but I can't shut up about Surf's Up.
I bring this up because I am about to do just that and I want to let you know that I know how irritating this can be.
I first saw American Graffiti over 12 years ago. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't blown away by it and I remembered it as being limp: George Lucas's nostalgia was a little too sticky and his characters a little too nice.
But I never really gave the movie much more thought, until I (much later) saw The Hollywood Knights, which I fell in love with in that special way I reserve for thoroughly disreputable movies. I mean, for most movie buffs, Hollywood Knights would be, at best, a kind of guilty pleasure. For me, though, Hollywood Knights is a desert island movie.
Anyway:
Hollywood Knights is - pretty shamelessly - an American Graffiti rip-off. But (and here it is) from the first time I saw it, I couldn't help but feel that this movie was American Graffiti done right. The whole early 60s, SoCal teenage scene in Hollywood Knights seemed more lively and more specifically observed and drawn - more true-to-life - than the way Lucas mythologized it in American Graffiti.
But as time passed, I started wondering if my memory was trustworthy on this movie. I mean, although my admiration and appreciation of Hollywood Knights was genuine, I didn't know if I was making out American Graffiti to be worse then it really was in order to prop up an obscurity I clicked with at the expense of a popular near-classic.
Was my mind playing tricks on me?
Well - I decided to record American Graffiti on my DVR a few weeks ago because (1) my girlfriend had never seen it and I thought it was something she might like and (2) I had grown suspicious of my memory of the movie. Maybe I had just started telling people I thought it was "overrated" as part of the contrarian pose I often like to take to stir up argument, er, discussion.
The verdict:
If anything, I remembered a better movie than what I saw.
(I think) Hollywood Knights really is a livelier movie and one that has a stronger sense of time and place, without pandering (all that much) to its audience's nostalgia. Knights is raunchier and funnier, too.
I was unimpressed by the performances in American Graffiti. Paul Le Mat would later play the same role better in another Mutrux flick, Aloha, Bobby and Rose, and Dreyfuss, electric playing the unlikeable lead in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, is just cute and smug here.
But here's the Big Thing That Bugged Me:
Now, I know George Lucas is a car nut (the one and only conversation I ever had with him was about race cars), but he shoots the cars in this movie like they're parading down Main Street on the way to a classic car show. None of the driving - except (maybe) for the final showdown between Le Mat and Harrison Ford - seems real.
So, I'm tempted to draw a comparison to Lucas's later Star Wars efforts: he sets up all these pretty toys that he seems to care about a lot, but he struggles when he tries to do anything interesting with them. Or maybe: he doesn't even care if he does anything interesting with them - for him showing the cars/spaceships/aliens/etc. might just be enough.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Movie Chat: Double Features
This post at The House Next Door got me thinking about the worst double feature I ever attended.
I had always wanted to see Irvin Kershner's Loving, which, though available now on DVD, used to be really hard to find. I was pretty excited when I saw that the Film Forum was showing it as part of their American New Wave, Late 60s, early 70s series (this was back in 1996). It was the second movie of a double bill with another George Segal movie from 1970, Where's Poppa? I'm a big George Segal fan, so I was happy to see both of them, both for the first time.
Now, I liked Where's Poppa? a lot: it was funny and raunchy and had no sense of good tatse to get in the way of the fun. The crowd liked it, too. The problem was, they liked it so much and had such a good time at it, that, when Loving came on after a 10 minute break, they were still in the mood for laughs. They seemed tone deaf to Loving's minor key melancholy and, instead, they treated it as camp.
The problem is that the costumes and sets of Loving did look funny to a 1990s audience - mainly because they're so late-60s/early-70s. But the movie itself is serious and weighty. An audience that hadn't been revved up by Where's Poppa?, but instead had been treated to an even bigger downer of a movie like Born to Win, might have gotten onto its wavelength after a few titters at the actors' haridos.
Although maybe not. In my experience, Film Forum revivals tend to have the worst audiences in New York City. I mean, audiences for horror movies on 86th St. will be rowdier and louder, but that's what you'd expect for horror movies, which attract a lot of teens out looking for a good time. But you might think that someone going to the Film Forum to see Loving or Rio Bravo or Sunrise would be enough of a film buff to know how to behave at a theater. But these revivals end up attracting:
Because (1) I've seen enough old movies that it isn't a novel, alien experience, (2) I generally take these movies fairly seriously (or, at least, I try to meet them on their own terms), and (3) my approach towards movie appreciation is almost always non-ironic, I get annoyed pretty quickly when the folks around me respond as if everything on the screen is there for their detatched, knowing, amusement.
Oh, my dream double bill would be two by Floyd Mutrux: Dusty and Sweets McGee (because I've never seen it) and Aloha, Bobby and Rose, because I never get tired of seeing it and I missed it the last time it was playing at the Film Forum.
I had always wanted to see Irvin Kershner's Loving, which, though available now on DVD, used to be really hard to find. I was pretty excited when I saw that the Film Forum was showing it as part of their American New Wave, Late 60s, early 70s series (this was back in 1996). It was the second movie of a double bill with another George Segal movie from 1970, Where's Poppa? I'm a big George Segal fan, so I was happy to see both of them, both for the first time.
Now, I liked Where's Poppa? a lot: it was funny and raunchy and had no sense of good tatse to get in the way of the fun. The crowd liked it, too. The problem was, they liked it so much and had such a good time at it, that, when Loving came on after a 10 minute break, they were still in the mood for laughs. They seemed tone deaf to Loving's minor key melancholy and, instead, they treated it as camp.
The problem is that the costumes and sets of Loving did look funny to a 1990s audience - mainly because they're so late-60s/early-70s. But the movie itself is serious and weighty. An audience that hadn't been revved up by Where's Poppa?, but instead had been treated to an even bigger downer of a movie like Born to Win, might have gotten onto its wavelength after a few titters at the actors' haridos.
Although maybe not. In my experience, Film Forum revivals tend to have the worst audiences in New York City. I mean, audiences for horror movies on 86th St. will be rowdier and louder, but that's what you'd expect for horror movies, which attract a lot of teens out looking for a good time. But you might think that someone going to the Film Forum to see Loving or Rio Bravo or Sunrise would be enough of a film buff to know how to behave at a theater. But these revivals end up attracting:
- (a) Hipsters who think it is so funny that in, say, Rio Bravo, John Wayne talks so much like someone doing a John Wayne impression, that they laugh every time he opens his mouth.
- (b) People who watch old movies for primarily campy pleasures, so they end up treating any old movie as if it were a camp experience.
Because (1) I've seen enough old movies that it isn't a novel, alien experience, (2) I generally take these movies fairly seriously (or, at least, I try to meet them on their own terms), and (3) my approach towards movie appreciation is almost always non-ironic, I get annoyed pretty quickly when the folks around me respond as if everything on the screen is there for their detatched, knowing, amusement.
Oh, my dream double bill would be two by Floyd Mutrux: Dusty and Sweets McGee (because I've never seen it) and Aloha, Bobby and Rose, because I never get tired of seeing it and I missed it the last time it was playing at the Film Forum.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Blog Chat: Woody, Translations, Super Heroes
Half Sigma posts part one of his take on Woody Allen's Manhattan, a movie he obviously likes, but, refreshingly, isn't reverential about. I really like the commonsense analysis and the way Half Sigma brings the kind of sociological insights that anchor most of his posts to bear on the movie. Favorite line: "Does any woman really want to go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT? Does the faculty of MIT know about this?"
I've always been a little suspicious of the "no translations ever" crowd, so I was happy to see Thursday's very nice post on how translation relates to other interpretive arts. What's interesting to me is that by looking translation in this context, the anti-translation bias seems like a part of the phenomenon of book worship.
I haven't read either of the two comics that Marc Singer blogs about in this post, but I've read enough super hero comics that I completely buy the general point he makes.
I've always been a little suspicious of the "no translations ever" crowd, so I was happy to see Thursday's very nice post on how translation relates to other interpretive arts. What's interesting to me is that by looking translation in this context, the anti-translation bias seems like a part of the phenomenon of book worship.
I haven't read either of the two comics that Marc Singer blogs about in this post, but I've read enough super hero comics that I completely buy the general point he makes.
Movie Chat: Children of Men
Children of Men
Like Sean, I didn't know anything about the one-shot set pieces in Children of Men going into the movie. Unlike Sean, I did notice them during the movie - specifically, during the long sequence in the car - and they took my breath away. But, like Sean, I don't buy the argument that "the movie's technical proficiency is... evidence of its soullessness".
I did have problems with the movie: as speculative fiction, I think, compared to the source novel, it was incoherent. This makes sense in that P.D. James is a conservative Christian and Cuaron and his screenwriters are all leftists. The world that they extrapolate from the central idea (humans have lost the ability to have children) doesn't hold up to scrutiny all that well, but that's almost beside the point.
(Almost. I found the political/social commentary in the margins of Children of Men pretty annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the political/social commentary in the margins of Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, which really soured that movie for me. In Children of Men, they don't seem out of place, but in Y Tu Mama Tambien the overt political statements seem inappropriately tacked-on, as if, every ten minutes during Manhattan, Woody Allen had shown a shot of a homeless man, or another image of urban blight, and we heard a John Gielgud voice-over about how cold the city can be to many of its inhabitants.)
Still, though, Children of Men was such an overwhelming emotional and aesthetic experience, that I can ignore its more questionable political ideas. This is why I'll never be able to be a rigorous, brainy, conservative film critic like Alan Dale: I'm too willing to ignore a movie's dopey ideas if it sweeps me away.
And speaking of getting swept away (and dopey ideas), Children of Men felt like Spielberg at his best, which for me includes War of the Worlds and Munich, two movies that share a kinship with this one. Like War of the Worlds, Children of Men builds its visions of the apocalypse with ripped-from-the-headlines images. Like Munich, the political context ends up being a lot less important to the way I experienced the movie than the protagonist's moral journey.
I've enjoyed Cuaron's work in the past and I've almost always been impressed by it, even if it some of it rubbed me the wrong way, but this movie makes me think that he's one of the few filmmakers - like Spielberg - who can accomplish exactly what they set out to do.
Like Sean, I didn't know anything about the one-shot set pieces in Children of Men going into the movie. Unlike Sean, I did notice them during the movie - specifically, during the long sequence in the car - and they took my breath away. But, like Sean, I don't buy the argument that "the movie's technical proficiency is... evidence of its soullessness".
I did have problems with the movie: as speculative fiction, I think, compared to the source novel, it was incoherent. This makes sense in that P.D. James is a conservative Christian and Cuaron and his screenwriters are all leftists. The world that they extrapolate from the central idea (humans have lost the ability to have children) doesn't hold up to scrutiny all that well, but that's almost beside the point.
(Almost. I found the political/social commentary in the margins of Children of Men pretty annoying, but not nearly as annoying as the political/social commentary in the margins of Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, which really soured that movie for me. In Children of Men, they don't seem out of place, but in Y Tu Mama Tambien the overt political statements seem inappropriately tacked-on, as if, every ten minutes during Manhattan, Woody Allen had shown a shot of a homeless man, or another image of urban blight, and we heard a John Gielgud voice-over about how cold the city can be to many of its inhabitants.)
Still, though, Children of Men was such an overwhelming emotional and aesthetic experience, that I can ignore its more questionable political ideas. This is why I'll never be able to be a rigorous, brainy, conservative film critic like Alan Dale: I'm too willing to ignore a movie's dopey ideas if it sweeps me away.
And speaking of getting swept away (and dopey ideas), Children of Men felt like Spielberg at his best, which for me includes War of the Worlds and Munich, two movies that share a kinship with this one. Like War of the Worlds, Children of Men builds its visions of the apocalypse with ripped-from-the-headlines images. Like Munich, the political context ends up being a lot less important to the way I experienced the movie than the protagonist's moral journey.
I've enjoyed Cuaron's work in the past and I've almost always been impressed by it, even if it some of it rubbed me the wrong way, but this movie makes me think that he's one of the few filmmakers - like Spielberg - who can accomplish exactly what they set out to do.
Monday, February 5, 2007
More on Preferences
So, following up on this post:
If you're driven to be a film critic, then you probably:
If you're driven to be a film critic, then you probably:
- like movies
- like talking about movies
- like picking movies apart
- like comparing movies
- like coming up with arguments about movies
- like classifying movies
- like coming up with arguments about certain classifications of movies
Even if you also, say, like watching movies for relaxation (as I do), you're probably not going to be doing film criticism if that's the only (or even primary) reason you watch movies.
Looking at those likes, it makes sense that if you're a film critic, you will probably value movies that:
- give you something to talk about (the movie is "about something") - Rashomon is about "the subjectivity of truth and the uncertainty of factual accuracy", The Rules of the Game is about the death of aristocratic European culture
- offer a reward for being picked apart - it can be satisfying to puzzle through and work out a "solution" to Mulholland Drive or to uncover a single motivation for all the unconventional narrative choices in Before the Revolution
- reference other movies - because you get to make use of prior knowledge, which usually feels good
- play with conventions - recognizing patterns and recognizing when they are purposefully being broken is also satisfying
Which means you might be in danger of undervaluing (relatively, of course) movies that:
- don't lend themselves to being the subject of an argumentative essay
- have a straightforward meaning and purpose
- deal with conventional material in a conventional style
- aren't, at all, self-conscious
Of course, we've all seen cases where a critic-type finds that he likes one of these second type of movies and ends up creating a convoluted and (usually) unconvincing type one argument about it to rationalize why he liked it in the first place. (I've been guilty of this myself, on more than one occasion, although I can thankfully say, I don't do it all that much anymore).
To come at this from a slightly different direction. Let's say you asked a random guy to give you a list of the "5 Greatest Movies Ever" and he hands you a list that looks like this:
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
- Serenity
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
- The Matrix
It probably would make sense to say to yourself: "Hey, this guy is a sci-fi buff - and maybe even a Trekkie. I'll have to keep that in mind when he talks about the kinds of movies, books, etc. that he thinks are worthwhile."
So, if you take another random guy and get this list...
- Breathless
- Persona
- Rashomon
- Mulholland Drive
- The Searchers
...well, you wouldn't be out of line to think something along the same lines: "Hey, this guys seems to like movies that require lots of interpretation and 'figuring out'. I'll have to keep that in mind when he tells me about the kind of movies, books, etc. that he thinks are worthwhile."
Critics probably do themselves a disservice when they try to stand in for a general audience as a kind of movie-watching everyman. I'm sure it's the democratic/egalitarian aura surrounding movies - and pop culture in general - that leads them to do this, but it would be better just to come clean with their preferences.
1st Place for Something
Considering the amount of work I don't put into this, I'm pretty happy that if you Google for "underrated directors", The Forager Blog is the number one result.
Movie Chat: Talladega Nights
Talladega Nights
I considered not writing about this movie, but I realized that was because I'm not very good at writing about comedies (which is ironic, in a way, since I wrote my thesis on "comedy", but that's a little different). But this is just a blog, so why not practice?
I didn't like this as much as I liked Anchorman, which I thought had a unique vibe for a big dumb comedy. Anchorman seemed loose and quirky with the best gags coming out of left field.
Talladega was funny enough, but the only thing that really got me laughing (as opposed to chuckling or snickering) was the "Baby Jesus" routine. I liked the cast, for the most part, but I thought Sacha Baron Cohen's entire role was misconceived.
And I suppose it is unfair to criticize a big dumb comedy on the merits of how well it deals with its subject matter, but I think it misses out by centering on a feud between a redneck and a Frenchman rather than dealing with a conflict actually drawn from the NASCAR world - like rednecks vs. those mid-western and west coast pretty boys that advertisers and sponsors love so much (Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, for example). Maybe that would have been too much like Days of Thunder, though.
I considered not writing about this movie, but I realized that was because I'm not very good at writing about comedies (which is ironic, in a way, since I wrote my thesis on "comedy", but that's a little different). But this is just a blog, so why not practice?
I didn't like this as much as I liked Anchorman, which I thought had a unique vibe for a big dumb comedy. Anchorman seemed loose and quirky with the best gags coming out of left field.
Talladega was funny enough, but the only thing that really got me laughing (as opposed to chuckling or snickering) was the "Baby Jesus" routine. I liked the cast, for the most part, but I thought Sacha Baron Cohen's entire role was misconceived.
And I suppose it is unfair to criticize a big dumb comedy on the merits of how well it deals with its subject matter, but I think it misses out by centering on a feud between a redneck and a Frenchman rather than dealing with a conflict actually drawn from the NASCAR world - like rednecks vs. those mid-western and west coast pretty boys that advertisers and sponsors love so much (Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, for example). Maybe that would have been too much like Days of Thunder, though.
Friday, February 2, 2007
Movie Chat: Brick
Brick
I understand why people responded to this movie so positively: it looks great and it seems to achieve exactly what it is going for. Which impresses me to an extent (especially considering its relatively low budget), but, really, what it achieved just didn't interest me for more than 15 minutes. It felt like another "one note wonder", and, essentially, it's a one-joke movie: high school kids caught up in a Dashiell Hammett short story, tossing around lines of hardboiled dialogue right out of a 1930s proto-noir.
The style is neat and, like I said, for about 15 minutes that was enough. But the stylized dialogue doesn't have a purpose, or, at least, it doesn't have a purpose that I bought into.
I've seen some comments by the film's fans along the lines of "the style is meant to comment on how kids today are growing up too fast" (or "how kids today are forced to deal with adult concerns"). I guess I not only disagree with this thesis in general - if anything, kids today aren't growing up at all (although no one seems to be particularly grown up in America these days) - but the movie doesn't dramatize this idea, really, so it seems like a notion that the film's fans have tacked onto the movie as a kind of rationalization.
Of course, I'm not even really sure that's what the filmmakers are up to, but if they aren't, what's the heightened, hardboiled dialogue there for?
My guess is that it's the other way around: they wanted to do something in a Hammett-like style, but doing a standard noir would be, well, standard (and another Red Rock West would be soooo 1990s), but with high school kids it stands out - it's a hook, a gimmick. It isn't a bad gimmick, but, again, after 15 minutes I saw that they pulled it off and they didn't have any other tricks. A tightrope act that lasts ten minutes is great: one that lasts an hour-and-a-half might be an impressive display of endurance, but the thrill just isn't there at the end.
Really, though, I've been spoiled by Veronica Mars, which is about a teenager who is forced to grow up too fast. But because that show deals with specific cases (i.e., there's lots of characters on it who are in a perpetual state of adolescence) the show's point never seems half-baked.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing him in the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot.
I understand why people responded to this movie so positively: it looks great and it seems to achieve exactly what it is going for. Which impresses me to an extent (especially considering its relatively low budget), but, really, what it achieved just didn't interest me for more than 15 minutes. It felt like another "one note wonder", and, essentially, it's a one-joke movie: high school kids caught up in a Dashiell Hammett short story, tossing around lines of hardboiled dialogue right out of a 1930s proto-noir.
The style is neat and, like I said, for about 15 minutes that was enough. But the stylized dialogue doesn't have a purpose, or, at least, it doesn't have a purpose that I bought into.
I've seen some comments by the film's fans along the lines of "the style is meant to comment on how kids today are growing up too fast" (or "how kids today are forced to deal with adult concerns"). I guess I not only disagree with this thesis in general - if anything, kids today aren't growing up at all (although no one seems to be particularly grown up in America these days) - but the movie doesn't dramatize this idea, really, so it seems like a notion that the film's fans have tacked onto the movie as a kind of rationalization.
Of course, I'm not even really sure that's what the filmmakers are up to, but if they aren't, what's the heightened, hardboiled dialogue there for?
My guess is that it's the other way around: they wanted to do something in a Hammett-like style, but doing a standard noir would be, well, standard (and another Red Rock West would be soooo 1990s), but with high school kids it stands out - it's a hook, a gimmick. It isn't a bad gimmick, but, again, after 15 minutes I saw that they pulled it off and they didn't have any other tricks. A tightrope act that lasts ten minutes is great: one that lasts an hour-and-a-half might be an impressive display of endurance, but the thrill just isn't there at the end.
Really, though, I've been spoiled by Veronica Mars, which is about a teenager who is forced to grow up too fast. But because that show deals with specific cases (i.e., there's lots of characters on it who are in a perpetual state of adolescence) the show's point never seems half-baked.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing him in the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot.
Preferences
Commenting on Spengler's recent piece on modern art, Peter Suderman writes:
Really, I think the difference for the modern/abstract art and music lover, or at least for me anyway, is that while most people experience art and music in a fairly surface, sensory manner, and therefore gravitate, quite reasonably, toward art that's comfortable and pleasant feeling, I tend to experience art from a far more argumentative, analytical perspective. Most people prefer stuff that calms the senses; I, and a minority of other cantankerous folks (many of whom tend to be critic-types) prefer material that riles the mind. This is often a source of frustration for critic types who feel that everyone should follow their experience, and although I don't propose a solution, it does seem to me that critics and others of similar disposition should generally refrain from castigating general audiences for not getting something. (Other critics, however, are fair game.) [emp. mine]
I think this points to something that most everyone acknowledges during casual conversations about the arts, but that doesn't often make its way into on-the-page (or screen) critical writing: your preferences, background, etc. are going to play a huge role in determining what kinds of movies, books, music, etc. engages you, what kinds bore you, and what kinds just put you off.
For example, it doesn't surprise me at all that Grant Morrison was named the #1 comics writer by comics bloggers: his comics are written as if their primary purpose is to be blogged about. That is, they require and reward a certain kind of allegorical interpretation and symbolic puzzle solving that is enhanced by the cross-blog-pollination of interpretations and solutions.
Another favorite example (which I've stolen from Michael Blowhard), the canonization of Ulysses by academics probably has something to do with how well that book rewards academic-style reading and criticism.
I suppose I'd, er, prefer it if more critics would be up front about their own preferences. I mean, I know it's best to read any kind of value judgment in a piece criticism as if the author had stuck an "In my opinion" in front of it, but revealing personal preferences gives your audience a better handle on the way you approach art and makes your value judgments a lot more useful.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Movie Chat: The Black Dahlia
The Black Dahlia
The movie looks so good in terms of design and it hits just the right mood and tone for this kind of neo-noir that I wish I could have enjoyed it more a la Michael Blowhard and the guys at The House Next Door.
I'm a big supporter and admirer of Brian De Palma, but I don't think the script or the original James Ellroy novel are really to blame here. In the past De Palma has done more with less, but he doesn't put anything on the screen here that hooked me and reeled me in, so I was left admiring the movie's production values without ever being engaged by it.
Unlike Snake Eyes or Raising Cain (which are definitely "minor" De Palma), it doesn't have charismatic and engaging lead performances or any filmmaking-muscle-flexing set pieces that make movies buff like me drool.
Unlike Femme Fatale, it isn't a "through-composed", arty, neo-noir-ish exercise.
And unlike The Fury, The Untouchables, or Mission to Mars, De Palma isn't able to get into the pulpy material and give it conceptual coherence and emotional heft.
My diagnosis: De Palma falls short of making another one of those pulp opera experiences because he misdirects his actors. Josh Harnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarlett Johansson look like they fit in their roles, but their performances are all pretty fuzzy. Hilary Swank is pretty entertaining as the femme fatale, but the other leads just don't seem very game.
I think Mia Kirshner, who appears in only three scenes, gives the performance of the movie: her aspiring actress character is, herself, trying to show off the ability to move from artifice to "genuine" emotion and back again and Kirshner turns this into a perfect little po-mo portrait of the artist as a would-be starlet. It's on a smaller scale, but it reminded me of what Naomi Watts does in Mulholand Drive. Kirshner pops out of the movie: she creates a fully-realized character in the middle of a cast of fuzzy copies of characters from past noirs.
Kirshner is definitely helped by how her role was conceived: she's the only actor in the movie given the lines and the space to create a realistic, detailed character - everyone else is forced into trying to do a type.
I've liked Josh Harnett in other movies, but when he's supposed to be larger-than-life or kind of mythic (as he is here and in Sin City), I just don't buy him. He's too nice and too dull and he doesn't have the kind of showy, technical, actory skills that can juice up roles like these. He can be better than fine when he's playing average nice guys (in Hollywood Homicide, where he's funny and gives his character a natural, believable quirkiness), but he seems out of place when he's not playing a standard juvenile lead.
Harnett is another one of these "pretty boys" who have replaced actual leading men in Hollywood movies, so it may not be surprising that De Palma can't get him to work in this part which requires an actual leading man.
I wonder if part of the problem is that De Palma was aiming for something partway between the European-style genre doodling of Femme Fatale and the highly-charged genre opera of his big-budget Hollywood entertainments (The Untouchables and Mission to Mars, say). The movie isn't playful enough to work as the former and isn't emotionally engaging enough to work as the latter.
The movie looks so good in terms of design and it hits just the right mood and tone for this kind of neo-noir that I wish I could have enjoyed it more a la Michael Blowhard and the guys at The House Next Door.
I'm a big supporter and admirer of Brian De Palma, but I don't think the script or the original James Ellroy novel are really to blame here. In the past De Palma has done more with less, but he doesn't put anything on the screen here that hooked me and reeled me in, so I was left admiring the movie's production values without ever being engaged by it.
Unlike Snake Eyes or Raising Cain (which are definitely "minor" De Palma), it doesn't have charismatic and engaging lead performances or any filmmaking-muscle-flexing set pieces that make movies buff like me drool.
Unlike Femme Fatale, it isn't a "through-composed", arty, neo-noir-ish exercise.
And unlike The Fury, The Untouchables, or Mission to Mars, De Palma isn't able to get into the pulpy material and give it conceptual coherence and emotional heft.
My diagnosis: De Palma falls short of making another one of those pulp opera experiences because he misdirects his actors. Josh Harnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarlett Johansson look like they fit in their roles, but their performances are all pretty fuzzy. Hilary Swank is pretty entertaining as the femme fatale, but the other leads just don't seem very game.
I think Mia Kirshner, who appears in only three scenes, gives the performance of the movie: her aspiring actress character is, herself, trying to show off the ability to move from artifice to "genuine" emotion and back again and Kirshner turns this into a perfect little po-mo portrait of the artist as a would-be starlet. It's on a smaller scale, but it reminded me of what Naomi Watts does in Mulholand Drive. Kirshner pops out of the movie: she creates a fully-realized character in the middle of a cast of fuzzy copies of characters from past noirs.
Kirshner is definitely helped by how her role was conceived: she's the only actor in the movie given the lines and the space to create a realistic, detailed character - everyone else is forced into trying to do a type.
I've liked Josh Harnett in other movies, but when he's supposed to be larger-than-life or kind of mythic (as he is here and in Sin City), I just don't buy him. He's too nice and too dull and he doesn't have the kind of showy, technical, actory skills that can juice up roles like these. He can be better than fine when he's playing average nice guys (in Hollywood Homicide, where he's funny and gives his character a natural, believable quirkiness), but he seems out of place when he's not playing a standard juvenile lead.
Harnett is another one of these "pretty boys" who have replaced actual leading men in Hollywood movies, so it may not be surprising that De Palma can't get him to work in this part which requires an actual leading man.
I wonder if part of the problem is that De Palma was aiming for something partway between the European-style genre doodling of Femme Fatale and the highly-charged genre opera of his big-budget Hollywood entertainments (The Untouchables and Mission to Mars, say). The movie isn't playful enough to work as the former and isn't emotionally engaging enough to work as the latter.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Feast or Famine
When it comes to playing RPGs its either feast or famine for me. I hadn't managed to get a game in for most of the summer, due to stuff like moving, vacation, going to a wedding, etc., and an attempt to follow up a pretty satisfying Sorcerer & Sword game with a run of With Great Power... kept hitting scheduling snags.
But then, in the last five days, I've played four different games: Shock: Social Science Fiction, 1001 Nights, The Princes Kingdom, and the much-delayed first With Great Power... session. My eventual goal is to play, consistently, at least one game a week, but I don't see that happening quite yet.
But then, in the last five days, I've played four different games: Shock: Social Science Fiction, 1001 Nights, The Princes Kingdom, and the much-delayed first With Great Power... session. My eventual goal is to play, consistently, at least one game a week, but I don't see that happening quite yet.
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