white tank top

Have You Seen...? #4 (Revanche)

2012-01-16T13:58:00.000-08:00

The first film to arrive on my resuscitated Netflix account (Christlike, I forgave the company for their 2011 trespasses) was Götz Spielmann's Revanche. The film is all Johannes Krisch's as our protagonist Alex, a man straight of out a Charles Willeford book. Perhaps if Cockfighter had been Woodchopper. In the first act of the film I thought Krisch had an aspect of Robert Carlyle's Begbie in Trainspotting, if a bit less sadistic and recessive. Early in Revanche Alex is employed as a sort of brothel handyman, ill-advisedly in love with a coworker.

But Alex's seemingly straightforward bank robbery getaway story with Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko, whose eyes are always expressive of her imminent doom) proves to be a Janet Leigh in Psycho-style MacGuffin. After Tamara exits we're left with two sets of houses out in the Viennese sticks and a story of Alice Munro-level insularity.

Alex moves in with Grandpa Hausner (Johannes Thanheiser, the Max von Sydow of Austria) a man who is very attached indeed to his haus, saying on more than one occasion: "they'll carry me out." Through the woods live Robert (Andreas Lust), a tense policeman entangled in Alex's botched robbery escape and his wide-of-bosom wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) who takes Hausner to church on Sundays and is having some problems getting pregnant...

The tale unfolds with a sense of inevitability that I've always enjoyed. The simple plot allows Spielmann to give us an incredible intimacy with Hausner's farm. We see two spaces (the woodshed and the kitchen table) from an almost scientific variety of angles--progressive woodcutting and breadbreaking are captured by a camera shifted about 70 degrees clockwise with each shot. If it's the back of Alex's head for lunch in shot A, it's Alex's face in profile for breakfast in shot B. The pattern of the still life table and shrill table saw give the film a lulling, timeless quality, with Susanne's Sunday visits the only indication that there are individual days.

One unforgettable cut in Revanche: a shot of Susanne's legs scissoring as she walks away segues into a matched frame of block of wood chopped in two. The woman and the kindling spread out in to the light while Alex pounds away in the darkness of the barn. He's such a devoted lumberjack that it made me want to put on work gloves to keep the sap off my own hands (he did not, as I did this weekend, get his first mani-pedi).

The film's soundtrack is spare with emphasis on the haunting. The lakeside cry of the loon and the moan of Hausner's accordion intertwine in a quiet, elegiac frenzy. And then there's Alex's iced-over voice asking Susanne, with a tiny cross on her chest, "what does your god have to say?" In Revanche, not much.

Best of 2011

2012-01-03T22:55:00.000-08:00

My 2011 began on a miserable February morning but I came out of a fog at precisely the 2:35 mark here. I responded to "All of the Lights" not with an epileptic seizure but with joy. For the rest of the year, I sought out films as unmistakably well made as Rihanna's sideboob.

Best Acting

I enjoyed the deadpan friction between Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in The Guard, their triumph over the inherent 48 Hours-ness of the film's scenario. John Hawkes continued his reign of indie chilliness in Martha Marcy May Marlene, singing "She's Just a Picture" just to make sure you can still feel the hairs on the back of your neck. God knows I need to nominate Ryan Gosling for something in his fast cars/shooting stars year, so I'll give a shout here to having my dream haircut in Crazy. Stupid. Love. As Emma Stone bitterly exclaimed, in one of the great lines for our age, "it's like you're Photoshopped!" It's my sad duty to bid adieu to fat Jonah Hill in Moneyball, where he's excellent as Brad Pitt's assistant, crunching numbers and patiently showing Billy Beane and a nationwide audience what a metaphor is.

Best Actressing

In an otherwise forgettable picture, I adored Anna Kendrick's young shrink in 50/50, particularly the scenes in which she tried, with tenderly awkward earnestness, to comfort cancerous Joseph Gordon-Levitt by putting her hand on his arm. Rooney Mara, and her escalator-sliding Lisbeth Salander, beats out Hanna's Saoirse Ronan for most athletic performance I saw by young women growing up in that ghetto university. Midnight in Paris's Marion Cotillard was worth going back in time for, though Rachel McAdams' Inez would have made anyone want to jump into a vortex.

The Good Pictures

Three and half stars is easily the most bestowed WTT rating. If I see a film, it's probably supposed to be good and I probably won't like it quite as much as its most ardent fans. Take the list from the last two weeks of the year: The Artist, Shame, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. All handsomely made and well-acted but with too many flat patches and without the I-want-to-study-that-again-right-now factor I get from my favorite pictures. Because I want you to see everything, here are some more good but not great picks: The Descendants, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball and The Names of Love. And don't neglect the solid documentaries Bill Cunningham New York, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, The Interrupters and Senna.

The Most Disappointing Picture

I closed last year's list by saying 2011 looked like a good year simply because Terrence Malick would release a new film. One could argue I was setting expectations just a touch too high but The Tree of Life is my least favorite Malick. It garnered the same three and a half star rating as The Other Guys after I saw the films back to back this summer. I watch The Thin Red Line over and over for flourishes like the blue butterfly floating through the battlefield; I defend Malick's right to put something so blatantly artistic in the midst of Guadalcanal. But the reason the butterfly moment (or the face buried in earth moment, or any of a dozen other moments) works is that it beautifully interrupts and expands upon the propulsion of a story. I feel like The Tree of Life flips this balance; it's at least 80% moments of flourish, with a less motivated butterfly scene and less story (or cohesive episodes) than even A New World, which rests close to the outer edge of my patience for Malick's wandering eye.

The Best Pictures

5. Drive - If I go by the I-want-to-see-it-again test, perhaps this should have been #1. Sitting third-row-close to an enormous XD screen I could feel the smog through my hair as Ryan Gosling drove into cool guy immortality (he's even prescient about the Clippers being relevant!). Nicholas Winding Refn realized that sometimes you don't need more than pulpy bad guys, awesome jackets and an ephemeral pop soundtrack. In fact, it's time to crank up "A Real Hero" rightnow. (Anyone pointing to the shallowness of this picture would do well to remember how deeply the author of this post loves Miami Vice.)

4. Mysteries of Lisbon - Dearly departed Raoul Ruiz went out with a sprawling masterpiece in the best Masterpiece Theater sense of the word. To me this is the defining still life, set piece epic that Barry Lyndon is supposed to be. The film isn't strictly chronological, unfurling instead forwards and backwards with a bit of magic--much like one's memory. Silky camerawork follows each coutured step of the impossibly handsome cast, from Ricardo Pereira and Clotilde Hesme to Lea Seydoux and Melvil Poupaud. Beguiling, beguiling--a friend to WTT on many future gloomy Sunday afternoons.

3. Certified Copy - The most mysterious film of the year. Abbas Kiarostami offers us the extreme pleasure of not knowing exactly what's happening but also not caring, soaked in the Tuscan sun and startling, true dialogue. The topics here are the two that matter most: love and art. I'm not sure if Juliet Binoche and William Shimmel have just met or have known each other forever but I'm going to spend a lot more time trying to figure it out.

2. Take Shelter - This is the film 2011 deserved and it ought to win every domestic award. An immense performance by Michael Shannon as a man with storms in his head all the time. Great supporting acting by Jessica Chastain and Shea Whigham as his bewildered wife and his best friend. Superficially, this is the story of a man battling the onset of schizophrenia but it's the best depiction I've seen of life in America today. We don't have enough money to maintain our lifestyles, our children need special care, we're isolated in our own communities and, oh yeah, the incidences of superstorms are increasing exponentially and it's all just fucking scary. Jeff Nichols (who also directed the must-see Shotgun Stories) dispassionately raises the pressure by degrees to the point where average, middle class life becomes unbearable.

1. Melancholia - Speaking of catastrophes...Lars von Trier, the director responsible for some of the best films in the last 20 years and maybe the worst, recovered from his Cannazi fiasco because this film is so damn good. His the kind of art I seek out: 100% and 0% on Metacritic. It's all or nothing and Melancholia is all. I've read that this is just a film about self-involved Lars comparing his mental illness to the end of the world. I've read that Kirsten Dunst's performance is an overly-exaggerated portrait of depression. Oh, no. Lars and I know there's no hyperbole in Justine--she'll leave Alexander Skarsgard's apple orchard wedding night dream crumpled on the couch, she'll be unable to bathe even if Charlotte Gainsbourg drags her all the way to the tub. So, after sheer terror of discovering that Melancholia is returning on crash course with Earth, Justine absorbs its blue energy and reflects it back. Shots lose the frenetic energy of the first act; the end of the world is stately; we're going all the way this time. After the protagonists and their small teepee of sticks evaporated and Wagner crashed once more into my ears, I walked out of the theatre giddy.

And just remember this: if you want it you can get it for the rest of your life.

Three Times: Drive

2011-09-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

Three early details that made me an immediate fan:

1. Drive starts with the sequence that first teased all of us on #TeamGosling. While enjoying the anonymous Impala cat and mouse game a thought kept creeping through my irrepressible sports fan head. Gosling repeatedly turns up the volume on the basketball game and it doesn't make sense because no one in the history of the world has been that interested in the outcome of a Clippers/Raptors game! I tried to tell myself that the radio was just reinforcing the passage of time but I remained vexed, distracted by the mental image of a sweat-drenched Chris Kaman. This anxiety only abated when--a ha!--a Staples Center parking lot becomes the key to Gosling's escape (he even puts on a Clips hat to blend in with the crowd, a move so insouciant it dropped this jaw).

2. Where many directors would try to squeeze in as many pieces of back history as possible into the first act, Nicholas Wending Refn layers Gosling's Driver with automotive details. Not only does he go from getaway to stunt to neighborhood driving, he chews a toothpick with grooves like tire tread and sleeps in room 405--his home is a freeway.

3. When introduced to Carey Mulligan and son, I was distracted by all the crap they had on their wrists. Only after the third or fourth time they appeared did I recognize them as Silly Bandz, a realistically low budget collection and subtle talisman of their bond.

Three favorite faces (as studied via Refn's devotion to close ups):

1. Bad Guy Division: Ron Perlman wins for Nino, whose consistently mentioned Jewishness is overshadowed by his more obvious Easter Island moai-ness (with a nod to runner up Albert Brooks and his saurian neck).

2. Diverting Lady Division: While Carey Mulligan is content to stick with the steady-gaze-of-frozen-pain look patented by Michelle Williams, Christina Hendricks lights it up as Blanche, Driver's less-than-reliable partner in crime. Mad Men fans will note her somewhat trashier Cleopatra-eyed glamor in this film but she still stops traffic in a long shot against a pawn shop wall. Her time onscreen ends all too soon at the worst motel I've seen since No Country for Old Men (if not Twentynine Palms). Tangentially, I have to note that Anthony Lane threw a huge spoiler in his Drive review when he mentioned "a crime against nature" that fells a character. In a film featuring Ms. Hendricks, there's exactly one person who's death could be called a crime against nature (but don't worry Anthony--I still want to be you when I grow up (and I don't care about spoilers either)).

3. Matinee Idol Division: Six years after starring in Half Nelson (earning him the much-coveted WTT Best Actor of the Decade award), Ryan Gosling is finally a dominant figure in cinema. He's a hugely appealing movie star, sly-smiling though films as different as Crazy, Stupid, Love. and Drive, with The Ides of March in the wings as further Oscar fodder (it's a better run of form than, say, James Marsden's). He's inspired lyrics as insipid (yet catchy!) as "you have proved to be a real human being and a real hero" and YouTube comments as stirring as "I jerk off with driving gloves now."

Three funniest Carey Mulligan Drive facts:

1. In this film she is mother to a child called "Benicio."

2. Ms. Mulligan is given the only straight up joke in Drive and it's also name-related. Legend has it that when she was introduced to her husband, Standard, she asked him, "Where's the Deluxe version?" Har har har. I actually found this to be one of her more effective moments in the film--the hesitant smile she wears in the retelling speaks to the small humor of the story being eclipsed by the idiocy of her subsequent choices that evening.

3. Irene is employed by Denny's Diner. My least favorite chain restaurant is depicted as a disgusting dead end for all involved! While Irene is (at least) the one millionth weak female role in a Hollywood film, it was good to see Mulligan in something I didn't find completely objectionable (after An Education, Public Enemies and Wall Street 2).

Three things I rolled with as a Refn-Gosling fanboy that others might reasonably contest:

1. I've read several people who claim Refn (a Dane) doesn't "get LA" but I enjoyed the way Drive jumbles up our idea of California on film. I'm indifferent to the helicopter shots of the skyline and zooms into those ubiquitous strip malls but his treatment of nature felt original. At the concrete end of Los Angeles River, Driver, Irene and Benicio enjoy themselves amidst beige and sage eucalyptus trash. We glimpse forlorn palm trees in the rain through less-than-clean apartment windows. And the beach, when it finally appears, is a midnight vision of doom. All things I hadn't exactly seen before.

2. I'm attracted to gratuitous things. For Driver's strip club shakedown of an ill-fated minor mobster there's gratuitous violence AND gratuitous nudity. To watch Gosling swing an angry hammer against a tableau of preening strippers is to not know where to look. A Pollockian blood spatter decorates saline-enhanced breasts and satiny white scorpion jackets alike.

3. For sheer contentiousness, I love that Refn put in the elevator scene (so well set up by recurring, more naturalistic, elevator shots throughout the film). People say, "really, the lighting dims from regular to romantic?" I say, I loved the brightening and darkening of shots in Tom Ford's A Single Man and I love it now. People say, "what's that, like, the longest elevator ride EVAR between five floors?" I say, but we switch to slow-mo mode for the kiss, no? People say, "it's just a cheap contrast between smooching and ass-whooping." I say, Refn's always about the high and low, operatic camerawork and American History X-esque sound effects. It's all out "This.Is.Cinema." grandstanding. Gimme more.

Real Country Rain

2011-09-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

I'll remember my four years in Seattle as an introduction to near constant rain and and what, in the parlance of Crazy Heart at least, might be called "real country" music (note: this preference for "real country" is not totally hard and fast). The most satisfying of my dissatisfying Seatown day jobs involved sitting in a room entering information into spreadsheets while listening to six or seven hours of Pandora radio (to be fair, this job also involved unlimited free caffeinated beverages and daily MarioKart Wii tournaments). While I've crafted rock, hip hop and electronica stations, the country one always gets the most play (despite the algorithm's unquenchable desire to include an hourly John Denver track). Now, as a song by Billy Bob Thornton plays, I give you the Seattlest songs I've thumbed up...

Brandon Rhyder "I Love the Rain"

This one is pretty embarrassing. The absurd personification of a natural phenomenon. The obvious choices in rhyme. The improper use of the subjunctive tense. The presence of actual rain sound effects. For these reasons I first resisted liking the song and waited, in that paradoxical Pandoran way, to hear it again before succumbing to the thumbs up button. I'm still impatient with Brandon but that second verse and the lines "she reminds me of a woman I knew / how she would brood over little things," give me that ideal mixture of nostalgia and regret--the ultimate achievement of any country song. (And this video obviously gets a bonus point for the presence of a wet Gosling.)

Steve Earle "The Rain Came Down"

Steve Earle is a more acceptable real country figure and this song is right in his wheelhouse. Listening to it I can embrace the vague sense of my family's agrarian past while also drumming on my desk. I loved imagining defending my 300-square-foot studio from the Man--"you ain't takin' my land!" This workmanlike tone made Earle playlists the best for washing dishes as well.

Patty Griffin "Rain"

From the number of incorrectly ascribed YouTube versions of this song, apparently Patty Griffin sounds just like Norah Jones. But clearly the animated guitar lady above has red hair and is speaking directly to me about irreconcilable differences. I can't think of a more recursive line for my time in Seattle than "I don't wanna beg you baby / for something maybe you could never give." I just want another chance to live (in a somewhat drier climate).

Three Times: Norwegian Wood

2011-06-30T22:46:00.000-07:00

Three reckless assumptions made while waiting in line to see a film about a Haruki Murakami book I hadn't read:

1. There will a man who suffers because his beloved is missing/dead/spectral. It's the only way Murakami does things. In Anh Hung Tran's Norwegian Wood, Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) loves from early adolescence Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), a quiet girl unavailable to Toru until the suicide of her boyfriend Kizuki (Kengo Kora). So Toru goes on pining for Naoko, who winds up ensconced in a remote psychiatric ward with really poor patient oversight (there's a lot more hand jobs than I've observed in contemporary American facilities).

2. The man will be unable to act with any agency. Toru spends most of his time away from Naoko in his college dormitory. During one downcast luncheon he meets Midori (Kiko Mizuhara, created by some genetic alchemist for maximum cuteness and wearing enough carefully selected barrettes to make Style Rookie jealous). Despite her well-developed skills in flirtation, this Pinkerton dreamgirl cannot shake Toru's loyalty to Naoko.

3. The film will be filled with jazz. Here I was way off, and not just because the story obviously involves the title song. Somehow the Radiohead fanboy news did not trickle down to me that Jonny Greenwood was scoring the film. I scribbled in my notebook that the sounds are like "mournful glaciers" and the music was, at least at Seattle's Egyptian, bracingly loud (grumbling sidenote: this is the same theatre management that turned the volume all the way down for Malick's The Tree of Life, to the point that subtitles would have been helpful).

Three favorite visual details:

1. Norwegian Wood, particularly in the opening sequences, is loaded with quickly sketched, memorable images. Toru spends his only pre-sanitarium time with Naoko in the lavender light of her apartment, with background lilacs and hydrangeas emphasizing her delicate nature. When they embrace, their bodies run down the frame diagonally to create more tension than your average sex scene.

2. Charmingly, late 60's Japanese university students carry their books strapped together in belts, which are often complimentary to their outfits. What's more, these outfits often involve brightly patterned sweatervests! At times there's such a giddy display of Japanese prep on screen that I had to stop myself from clapping.

3. Later in the film, Tran supplies a great metaphor for the nature of letter writing. Toru's missive to Naoko is interrupted when he starts to pick at a barely healed scab in the palm of his hand. This action is interspersed with shots of nettles from around Naoko's sanitarium--all of that thorny past drawing blood.

Three secondary characters with surprising impact:

1. Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) is Toru's playboy college chum, with hair never less than carefully-coiffed and a closet full of rakish turtlenecks. He's the man that makes you ask yourself how rad was college in Tokyo in the 60's? He encourages the caddish side of Toru and why not--he's constantly hooking up with ladies in swank apartments that are decorated indistinguishably from an Anthropologie store.

2. Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune) is Nagasawa's long-suffering girlfriend, totally peripheral for all but one sequence, when she hosts a dinner party. As she gives Nagasawa a tongue-lashing for his unapologetic girl swapping, the camera bears down on her and we have one of the most extended closeups in the film. She's wearing clear-beaded necklace that makes it look like her head had been reattached to her neck. Hatsumi's turn in the spotlight even ends with a cab ride straight out of In the Mood for Love.

3. Reiko (Reika Kirishima) is Naoko's roommate/guardian/music teacher for most of the film, though she eventually gets to know Toru much better (through a kind of sexual grieving familiar to Murakami fans and Chazz Reinhold). She performs an aborted acoustic version of "Norwegian Wood" early on--only to drop out for almost an hour--and returns at the very end for logically confused reasons. I suppose she promotes melancholy.

Three notes on the relationship between Tran and Murakami's work:

1. I felt that Tran did well to make his own Norwegian Wood though he could not resist a quintessential Murakami passage. Midori, on the topic of dessert:

"Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window."

There's the author's theory of love in four short sentences.

2. Tran generated more drama than I expected in a Murakami adaptation with his aggressive use of sound. Besides Greenwood's sometimes punishing score, there's a lot of anguished wails from Naoko that rip through all Toru's gentle affections. No matter what else I think about her acting, I acknowledge that Rinko Kikuchi can make some really loud noises.

3. Tran draws closer to Murakami with his choices in cinematography. There's a recursivity of long tracking takes that follow characters at a distance, like the lovely one in which the camera starts with Toru and Naoko on a forest path, winds with them a while, then loses them in the trees. Lengthy scenes like these reminded me of Jun Ichikawa's tidy Tony TakitaniBlind Willow, Sleeping Woman). Murakami works are not fast-paced and I'm thankful that Tran used deliberate compositions instead of an over-reliance on voiceover narration. A few weeks after seeing Norwegian Wood, I'm just as nostalgic as I ought to be.

Six Summers Ago I Was 22

2011-06-18T17:27:00.000-07:00

[I started last summer’s reading with “I Like You More Than Friends” by Cord Jefferson and had the idea to write something similar. It’s only taken me a year to do so! If you need to set a mood for this longread, put on Tegan & Sara’s The Con, which they were kind enough to record for this period in my life. The whole album and “Nineteen” in particular, which I can’t listen to at all unless I listen to it twenty times in a row.]

Six summers ago I was 22, looking out the window of the cafeteria at Bennington College and asking myself who is that Cuban woman who’s always outside smoking?

The act of dragging on a cigarette accentuates cheekbones in a way that’s always appealed to me and I was not unmoved by this humid, noirish scene: a young lady, puffing away under a streetlamp adjacent a dumpster.

There was (perhaps) a Cuban in the writing program that I had (perhaps) not met at first-termer orientation, that monument to stilted conversation. It was days later when some helpful soul, no doubt judging me for ogling this girl out the window, said her name was R and that she was the youngest person in the program, just 20. This was upsetting because I’d thought I was the youngest (and, therefore, the most precocious) writer. Though I can assure you I still looked like the youngest writer.

When I was finally introduced to R it turned out I’d made that most common of errors: mistaking a Jew for a Cuban. Her profile was Roman and it turned out she was just kind of tan. If we’re being honest her haircut was, if not a purebred example of the species, at least in the mullet family. But nicely highlighted with a quarterhorsey sheen, resting on her wide shoulders.

My reading in this era was mostly confined to high Modernism so my mental catalogue of R must have also included Hemingway’s description of Brett Ashley, her “curves like the hull of a racing yacht.”

Longtime readers of WTT know I have just the slightest tendency towards cynicism and this was in full force as I listened to the program director’s oft-repeated spiel about how the Bennington Writing Seminars were a vortex. The first week of the residency was more like a tepid whirlpool of mercilessly unseasoned vegetarian meals eaten with disapproving middle-aged women. I was all eye rolls and afternoon naps until the final weekend in Vermont, when it got really fucking hot.

On a sweltering night (perhaps the evening after my constant shit-talking induced a four error debacle from Tom Bissell in the poetry vs. prose softball game) I stepped into an even swelteringer barn to hear Frank Bidart deliver a 75-minute long reading. “The Third Hour of the Night” is a life changing artwork that, amongst various murders and buggeries, is about Benvenuto Cellini boiling every piece of metal he can find to forge his Perseus. When the windows to his workroom burst into flame in the poem I looked up at the windows in the barn, wondering if they’d do the same.

Wandering back dormward that night I thought long and hard about the profound sacrifices one must make for one's art and whether or not I could still sneak into the cafeteria and get some more Moose Tracks ice cream.

A day or two later, before my lunchtime Moose Tracks ration, I was alone at the end of a long laminate table, eyes downcast to avoid another round of beginning writer conversation filled with phrase, “my work,” when R appeared and asked if I might eat with her. I don’t remember how I replied but there wasn’t any decision-making involved. I’m highly suggestible.

R’d been so perturbed by her classmates’ critique of her workshop essay that she’d stayed up all night and rewritten the piece to the satisfaction of Phillip Lopate (in 2005 parlance: P-Lo). I’ve always been impressed by people who do things—in my five Bennington residencies I wrote precisely nothing. Of course I’d like to read the piece I said. Yes right now.

My memory elides any events between reading her essay (I’m sure I found it quite good) and the last evening of residency, as the party for graduating MFAers wound down. I discovered R was upset again, this time because a student had claimed to hate her, “for being so fucking talented and so young.” At the time this seemed like a silly reason to hate someone, and I told her so. I added that the hateful woman had fled my workshop crying when her (not even terrible) poem about a barn fire was being analyzed.

To be fair, most of us were basketcases by the end of a residency: depressed, horny, tearful, belligerent. I think Bennington authorities limit sessions to ten days because any longer and there’d be too many homicides. It’s a wonderful place.

My conversation with R moved to a nook outside my corner room in Swan (Swann’s) dorm. The picture window at our backs, the folded quilt underneath us, the wall sconce amber lighting all around—these objects straddle a before and after in my life.

R startled with her perception and intelligence and I tried to follow in a feverish, dehydrated way, saying anything to keep pace. Then as now, I’m often short on amusing biographical material. R was not.

She piled personal details that I wouldn’t then have dreamed fact checking. She described undergrad years at Sarah Lawrence—addictive, I still think of the letters in the name of the college formed from lines of cocaine. She described her broken engagement—charming, crazy kid stuff. She described her health—grim, despite all appearances. She described her family—Tenenbaumian, with at least one autistic-genius brother and a figure skating mother.

The best thing about writing poems and having long one-on-one conversation is that you really get to stare at something. At a reading earlier in the week, our director Liam Rector ended his poem “Song Years” with the words, “the cruelty of it overwhelmed me.” I could take the conspiratorial shape of her eyebrows, the directness of her tiger’s-eye colored eyes (perhaps—I’m notoriously bad at remembering eye color) and the vicious white of her teeth. But the pink definition of the bow of her upper lip is just cruel.

In the second hour of the conversation I noticed R starting to throw out some subtle signals: “I knew the next person I’d fall in love with would have long hair.” I looked over my shoulder.

I remember the negotiation was tense as to whether we could kiss. I’ll eat lunch with whomever but I’m no pushover when it comes to making out with beautiful women—you can’t just force me into it. I demurred, as one sometimes does when one’s intuition and one’s pants are pointing in opposite directions. Only after more compelling arguments were made did I solemnly agree we would make out. But certainly not until after I’d brushed my teeth. The hard water out of the tap.

I smelled of whitening toothpaste and deodorant (I had reapplied and made a joke of transferring some from my underarms to hers). R smelled like the whole day. We walked from my building to hers (the smokers dorm!), which overlooked something called (and I’m not making this up) the End of the World. We had to go there because her room had “a real bed”—that is, one with a grownup, non-plastic mattress. We slapped at late night mosquitoes and sometimes our hands trailed behind resolute shoulders long enough to bank into each other.

Here’s the part you won’t believe. Her room was lousy with fireflies. She’d left the window open and the screen was mostly holes and there were green streaks all around. I’m not even sure the room had a light. We took laughing hold of as many bugs as we could, insect bodies bumping gently into our closed fingers as we threw them into the hallway, where they mostly wandered back while we went for more. There were always more. Fireflies are very stupid creatures.

R hadn’t lied—her bed was a real bed. The first residency you don’t know to bring your own sheets so your skin suffers the low thread counts you’d expect from a down at heels mental institution. The sheets were one of several excuses I used to explain the fact that I couldn’t stop shivering. I feared I was revealing a lack of worldly experience because, even in the dead of night, it couldn’t have been less than 80 degrees out.

R’s blue-striped halter-top, paired with rather surprising leopard print knickers, and the onslaught of oxygen-stealing kisses didn’t help me regulate my breathing. I was embarrassed in an undershirt and disintegrating gym shorts. These were my younger and more vulnerable years—picture Linus and his blankie.

The lucky thing is that people who are great at something can help others to raise their game. “Mmm, you’re fun to kiss.” There were further requests and not a few close calls but I preserved in maintaining my honor. I even, unconscionably, slept for an hour or two.

R was up early for a workshop (we were here to become writers?) and I walked the dewy path back home. Waiting for the shower water to warm I contemplated myself in a pained, baked-contact gaze: raccoon eyes, suffering skin, and disastrously puffy hair (my god the humidity!)—I had forgotten I looked like that.

I’d brought Tender Is the Night for comfort reading and picked it up to forget for a while longer. The best is young Dick and Nicole, so in love, staring off the sanitarium verandah at those Swiss cities below, braceleted in white light. Never to be seen again.

Best Friends' Weddings

2011-06-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the world's biggest (admitted) fans of the 1997 Julia Roberts vehicle My Best Friend's Wedding, which makes it less surprising that I reflected on the film fondly while watching Kirsten Wiig star in Bridesmaids. The most obvious connection is at the end, when our lavender-garbed heroines come to terms with losing their best friends to their best friends' spouses. Whether it's the dashing Rupert Everett or the doofy Chris O'Dowd, said heroines are then consoled by someone with an accent originating in the UK. And, given the frequency of glittering helicopter shots, Bridesmaids' Milwaukee is almost as glamorous as MBFW's Chicago.

Otherwise, it's surprising how much successful Hollywood comedies have changed in the last 14 summers, starting with the stars themselves. MBFW is cast in the classic structure: romantic leads (megastar Roberts and rom-com stalwart Dermot Mulroney) and supporting characters (up-and-coming Cameron Diaz and suave homosexual Rupert Everett). Bridesmaids, however, follows the Apatow-Phillips ensemble-casting-over-top-line-star formula with Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, Ellie Kamper and, to an extent, Rose Byrne recognizable first as television actors. Though Wiig co-wrote the film and appears in almost every frame, I could almost as easily imagine any of the aforementioned women as leads.

IMDB says Bridesmaids is only 20 minutes longer than MBFW but it felt much longer to me. Roberts is locked safely in a decades-old formula, with each sequence (slapstick, musical, dramatic) tied up in a bow and cut. Wiig's film is unrulier, with higher quantities of both madcap and slack scenes. We don't just have the suggestion of gastrointestinal distress, we have characters vomiting on the heads of characters who are vomiting, a woman shitting in the sink, a woman shitting herself in the street in a wedding dress. (This necessitates a fashion tangent: one thing I always notice in MBFW is Julia's anachronistic high-waisted black jeans. 1997 must have been about the last moment you could get away with wearing such a cut without appearing deliberately unfashionable. They're something closer to what McCarthy wears in Bridesmaids.)

For me the most gripping moment in Bridesmaids is a downbeat scene the morning after Wiig's character hooks up with O'Dowd's cop for the first time. She wakes up to find he's purchased a ton of kitchen equipment so she can bake for him all day. We're meant to think this is a sweet idea that she can't get into it because of her commitment issues but it seemed to me like a fucked up, "get in the kitchen!" moment. She's justified in rejecting his offer regardless of the "baggage" from her previous failed baking venture (ruthless Wisconsinite graffiti artists changed the Cake Baby moniker on her closed shop to "Cock Baby").

But, even more than dick jokes, the Apatow-Phillips era is defined by lines are often improvised or appear to be improvisational. Bridesmaids peaks on the girls' airplane trip when Wiig gives her inspired, zonked out riff on the snottiness of more or less everyone on board, from friends to flight attendants. My favorite line in the film is probably Rose Byrne dripping (from her first class seat) that there's more "sense of community" in coach. The fakery required for everyday socializing is then delightfully eviscerated each time Wiig emerges through the curtain to first class. Roberts does any number of deplorable things in MBFW but she would never allow herself to be so big a mess. Our comedies grow untidier by the day.

What the Eyes See in Black Narcissus

2011-05-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

Thanks to SIFF I was able to get a-twitter about all those Powell & Pressburger closeups that allowed me lengthy gazes into the eyes of each character in Black Narcissus.

It struck me as an even better film on the big screen, as the human portraits proved just as vivid as the matte painting vistas of the Himalayas (contained entirely in Buckinghamshire's Pinewood Studios).

Because these things never really interest me in films, I'll set aside whether the film is really a commentary on the failings of colonialism or the triumph of misogyny or consequences of big game hunting (Sabu's snow leopard coat!). Just as they do with art itself in The Red Shoes, Powell & Pressburger employ Black Narcissus as a metaphor for the overwhelming power of memory.

We see Deborah Kerr (before she was Sister Clodagh) fishing in an impossibly beautiful jewel of a lake in Ireland and hear Sister Phillipa (her hands covered with callouses) movingly explain how she has to get away from Mopu's vistas before she loses her sanity.

The problem for the nuns, stuck up in the high winds and crystal skies, is not a loss of faith. It's that the setting makes their clarity of vision, their remembrances of things past, too sharp to bear--deep focus stares search the horizon for things that will never appear again.

A Review in Verse for Werner Herzog

2011-05-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog's Love Letters (in 3D)

There is not art tonight

But that of memory.

Yet how much room for painting there is

In the tight passages of Chauvet cave.

There is even room enough

For the drawings of my forefather's forefathers,

32,000 years ago,

That have been locked so long

In a slide-sealed limestone cliff

That are etch-edged and fresh,

And liable to shock as Pollock.

Over the great carpet of calcite crystal

Steps of cave man and cave bear.

It is all lit by invisible red flames.

It trembles as rhino limbs rushing through time.

And I ask myself:

“Are your eyes strong enough to bear

these species that are but echoes:

Is this camera strong enough

To carry a wild horse back to its source

And back to us again

Belted over with stars?”

Yet I would lead my grandson by the hand

Through millennia we'll never understand;

And so I stumble. And the crystals drip into stalactites

With such a silence of forgotten dreams.

*

(All apologies to Hart Crane, both for this poem and for the existence of James Franco.)

2011 SIFF Preview

2011-05-16T21:14:00.000-07:00

SIFF 2011 is here and I've frustratedly skimmed the web and print editions of the calendar to find the gems. SIFF.com has an excellently named but, for me, unhelpful tool called SIFFter to wade through the 422ish films showing this year.

#1 category SIFFter needs to add: "This film is by a legitimate director who you should probably care about and not just by some dude." I need to press that button and get 25 or so results. When I try to sort that way myself I get about eight. And don't think that category is an absurd comparison to those actually used in SIFFter. There's one called "Love Me, Do!" and I want to know why not "Love Me, Do Me!"

But I would hate for the complaints to run longer than the actual preview! So.

Alluring film NOT showing at SIFF:

The Tree of Life. Damn you Cannes Film Festival. The Thunder to our Sonics yet again.

Alluring films showing at SIFF:

Submarine. Good-looking teen romance, 97-minute Belle & Sebastian video, both? Dig the Godard fonts and color palette anyway. (MAY 20 or 22)

The Trip. You've seen the Coogan-Brydon Michael Caine Accent-Off, right? A whole film of that! I'm not a Winterbottom fan but it seems unlikely he can fuck this one up as profoundly as he did The Killer Inside Me. (MAY 21)

Black Narcissus. Not new (probably showing as a nod to the doc Cameraman screening at the fest) but it's Powell & Pressburger at a literal high point in their careers casting Sister Clodagh into the Himalayas with the wind freeing everyone from their sanity. Perhaps my favorite setting for any film and featuring not only Deborah Kerr at her least annoying but also an absolutely ridiculous Jean Simmons as an Indian strumpet. (MAY 21)

Beginners. I don't really want to see this film (subtitled dog alert!) but you should watch the trailer because Christopher Plummer has the same reaction my mom did when first exposed to house music. It's unclear whether he too will go on to refer to it exclusively as "home music." (MAY 24)

Steam of Life. You might think I want to see a bunch of naked Finns because I have a longstanding secret crush on Teemu Selanne. But you'd be wrong--I just love saunaing! I hope that, like the trailer, there are no subtitles so the philosophizing doesn't obscure all that Finnish junk. (MAY 25 or 26)

Mysteries of Lisbon. This will require some bravery (it's four hours long and the screening costs $16) but I do love me some long movies. Raul Ruiz cinema is so Proustian that he directed Marcel Proust's Time Regained (and I really enjoyed the parts I saw while awake!). I'm impressed by the swooning and hauteur of the trailer but Mysteries would really be can't-miss if someone promised a Cristiano Ronaldo cameo. (MAY 28)

The Interrupters. This is an easy sell--a new documentary by the maker of Hoop Dreams. I'm only worried because each subsequent viewing of Hoop Dreams has left me more depressed and the first adjective used to describe this exploration of Chicago's gang violence is "heartbreaking." (MAY 28 or 29)

On Tour. WTT's favorite non-Gosling actor, Mathieu Amalric, directs this film about a traveling burlesque show and...who cares? Mathieu Amalric=must see. (JUNE 9 or 11)

Norwegian Wood. Tran Anh Hung is one of those legit directors. The Scent of Green Papaya won loads of those Frenchie awards in '93 and Cyclo is a personal favorite because it felt like '60s Godard scored by Radiohead. And OMG it's from a Haruki Murakami book! Gonna be a Seattle scene for sure. (JUNE 11 or 12)

*

Any local followers (or luminaries flying in for SIFF!) are encouraged to check these out with WTT--I'm very good at standing in line while holding an umbrella and thinking of unflattering things to tweet.

Throw the Dice

2011-05-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

Mostly I read things because smart people compel me. My happy visit with Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband comes from a post by Katherine Hill.

But, in a larger sense, I like to think I also read things because they reconcile irreconcilable parts of my life. This morning The Beauty of the Husband has also done that.

I still find Carson's Autobiography of Red more affecting overall than TBOTH (perhaps it's worth noting that, biographically speaking, I'm more familiar with mythic unrequited redness than the truthful complications of marriage) but, thanks to a recent viewing of Bright Star, I had better occasion to gasp at this Keats-centric book.

The reminder of why I read poetry came in the book's 22nd tango, "Homo Ludens." Carson's plainspoken thunderbolt:

If a husband throws the dice of his beauty one last time, who is to blame?

For years I've tried to wrap my head around seemingly illogical romantic leaps made by family, friends, exes, etc. and I've never known how to put it until reading that line. They're throwing the dice of their beauty and, finally seeing that, I can draw a fresh breath. I've always enjoyed watching craps anyway.

(Next week I hope WTT will return to the cinema. But, after all, May is National Poetry Month, right?)

Unpublishable Poetry: Turquoise & Silver

2011-05-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

Turquoise & Silver

I needed her to leave so I could see
weather-ringed eyes in morning or evening
riveted fingertips that find the seams the cotton
snarl over her sun-spiced hip her chest piece

phoenix raised by needles and madness to match
fingers of smoke and motorcycle choke clutching
a tomahawk rosary chain chinked from her teeth
a smile going away up one side of her mouth

I was young and allowed my imagination
these malignancies strung across her brain
as real as a turquoise-collared tank top
the summer storm she’s always been running

us down the blue mess of our wrists banked together
semiprecious stones veined with cigarette ash
she’s lasering off the wings and I go with them
to listen to the silver sound of keys erasing

my mistakes my rages meteorological
I’ll never see her restored
skin dimpled as mail a mainline wedding
invitation its envelope licked and postmarked blue.

My Life Last Night

2011-04-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

Last night it occurred to me that my life is just like Sam Worthington's. Not like his life in Avatard (because I'm not in a wheel chair, obvs.) but more like in Last Night. I roll home to my apartment and all of its expensive faucets and focus on finding a free outlet to charge my cell phone. But my wife, Keira Knightley, is in kind of a foul mood and has stripped down to a rather combative white tank top. Regrettably, I make an exacerbating comment about the deleterious effect a third glass of wine has on the missus (that one never works). She re-tousles her hair in frustration and questions whether we should be married at all.

Keira (in my head I always over-enunciate it: "Keyyy-raaahhh") is one of those blocked writer types always letting the ash grow too long on her cigarette (which she's not supposed to be smoking!) and layering more clothes over her spindly frame. Maybe she can't write because she finds herself trapped in Massy Tadjedian's Last Night instead of the "Last Night" of a far better author, James Salter. And, just in case Keira isn't self-conscious enough, her leonine French "friend" arrives to ask her at least three times, "but whyyy aren't you wriiiting?" To be fair, there's a moment at the end of Last Night when Keira forces out a surprise tear that made me gasp and say aloud, "that was good," as it slid down her cheek. I couldn't tell if she was acting.

But Sam Worthington-Me has his own problems. I want to be faithful to my wife Keira even though she overindulges in spirituous beverages but there's the problem of my coworker, Eva Mendes. She's physically attractive in a totally different way than Keira. We go on a business trip to Philadelphia and while some boring guy does all the work with the clients we flutter our eyelashes at each other. We share a long scene in a well-lighted bar that resembles the best sequence in Out of Sight except not quite as good. I'm all alone in a hotel pool with a hot Latina--her perfectly calibrated backstory of heartbreak, her damp underthings. What can I do?

And what can I tell Keira, if anything? Maybe we'll just rent Out of Sight (do they have DVD rental shops in SoHo?) so she can learn something about editing and I can learn something about chemistry.

Joe Wright's Gift

2011-04-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

Is Joe Wright the best director we have for first acts? If you sat down for only a half hour of Atonement or Hanna you'd think you were in for a masterpiece (WTT will give Wright a break and pretend The Soloist never happened).

His self-possessed little friend Saoirse Ronan (the catalyst Briony in Atonement) certainly helps Wright engage an audience. And Hanna, this quaint parable on the pleasures and perils of homeschooling, is refreshingly kinetic from its blood red opening credits.

The first 30 minutes overflow with memorable detail. An Andy Goldsworthy-worthy shot of ice floes in the shape of an eye. A close view of Hanna's painfully chapped lips. The contrast between Hanna and her father (Eric Bana, doing his best to play a badass Erik with a K) target-practicing antlers in the forest and antagonist Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett) vigorously employing electric dental tools before the wooded wallpaper in her mod apartment.

In her first brush with civilization, a shocking bit of violence (and its resulting spray) gains Hanna some very tastefully done blood freckles. As she continues her escape, the rock'n'roll Chemical Brothers score kicks in and the camera slides 360 degrees around black site tunnels.

Popping up through an unexpected manhole cover, Hanna still matches the landscape, her snow white furs exchanged for desert orange prison scrubs. She meets a charming young lady from England who immediately compares the speechless Hanna to M.I.A. and asks if she's from Sri Lanka too. The film's first misstep follows: a heavy-handed sequence in a Moroccan flophouse where Hanna is overwhelmed by an electric teapot, a fluorescent light and a television. That is to say: MODERNITY.

And then...increasingly confused plot points, unmotivated characters (e.g. German Tom Hollander wearing eyeliner), and an orgy of sub-Bourne chase scenes (we're living in a Paul Greengrass world, might as well accept it).

They say Hanna might be a franchise but I think Wright's next picture should be the start of three more projects, presented at once.

Three Times: Jane Eyre (2011)

2011-03-31T21:33:00.000-07:00

Three introductory statements on my ignorance of Jane Eyre:

1. I haven't read the book because I'm not a girl (j/k!). I read Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea instead of Jane Eyre because presently American universities are overrun with post-colonialists (not j/k!). Nor had I seen any film adaptations (though now I kind of need to see Orson Welles go ham as Rochester). But what I enjoy about Jane Eyre, and seemingly all British classics, is that they're stories of captivity. Come to terms with it or die trying to escape.

2. Charlotte Bronte's language is delightful. My favorite lines regard Jane's drawings, her "accomplishments," of which she says, "I'll save them until they're wanted." Ah, to believe that. And how could I have lived this long without hearing the heartbreaking way Jane asks of Rochester's proposal, "are you mocking me?"

3. There's a nice physicality to the piece, beginning with the way young Jane is whacked across the face with a heavy volume on birds. That's literature as I like it: concussive.

Three helpings of praise for the lead actors:

1. My crush on Michael Fassbender is well-documented. In Jane Eyre, he has to hold back on his smolder a bit. To emphasize the fact that he's supposed to be a somewhat ugly, director Cary Fukunaga's camera backs away and Rochester recedes into dark corners. Though I was able to purr a bit at the cuddly red brocade robe he wore when locking his wife back up in the attic.

2. I've missed the films that have brought Mia Wasikowska to this stage but she's good as Jane. The series of poorly fitted dresses that droop around her shoulders help accentuate the sturdy neck into which her chin is often pointed. Wasikowska's best moments come when Jane checks herself for a moment before saying something really vicious. The scornful looks shot over teacup brims from her brown eyes are savory indeed.

3. Fassbender and Wasikowska together are able to remain coltish while falling for each other. "All governesses have a tale of woe," and "beauty is of no consequence," and "you transfix me quite," etc, etc. I got all the way to the end of the film wondering if they might hate each other just as easily as love each other. So the actors accomplished their main objective.

Three unfortunately curtailed sequences in Jane Eyre:

1. As a filmgoer, I like to linger but Fukunaga seemed to lack the trust to hold shots long enough. Right from the start he sets the camera casting after Jane as she flees over the moors. Just as I was starting to enjoy the way her blue and grey plaid matched the rain and rock, she's whisked away to safety. Fukunaga doesn't have to be Reygadas but I'd encourage him to move more deliberately through his set pieces.

2. At the height of Rochester and Jane's romance, the film moves outside on a day with a bit of actual sunlight. It's a sequence reminiscent of Pocahontas out of pocket amidst the topiary in The New World but without Malick's intuitive brilliance. Fukunaga has the lyricism but not the poetry.

3. After Jane leaves Thornfield and settles into even greater isolation, there's shot of her one room schoolhouse being snowed under. How sad that it lasts about three seconds--the mounting powder could have worked as the best symbol in the whole film. It's a wild, wild shot but gone before you can really see it.

Three reasons to be hopeful for the career of Cary Fukunaga:

1. He's excellent in the small details. After we see Bertha Mason locked in her attic framed with thick cobwebs, there's a quick cut to Jane rapidly unraveling the ties to the dress she wore for her aborted wedding. I also admire an earlier shot where a young girl's hair caught is incidentally caught in a bouquet of flowers--it helps underline the naturalism of this retelling.

2. Fukunaga gives a rack focusing master course for the sequence when Rochester throws a party for his rich neighbors and forces Jane to sit with them. Thanks to busy lensing, the two classes are never seen in focus at the same time. Jane is forever separate and we practically hear her resentment hissing.

3. I don't know many non-horror films with such an emphasis on the skin of its characters. Exploring some black passage of Thornfield, Jane comes across a portrait of a nude figure and brings her candle all the way up to the oil, showing darker layers of paint under the pink outer flesh. Especially in shots of Judi Dench and Fassbender by the hearth, the flickering light plays on their sallowness in a most unflattering way. Fukunaga thoroughly examines even the porcelain countenance of Jane, ready to expose any flaw.

Inspired Pairings: Enter the Void and "All of the Lights"

2011-03-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

The first two minutes of Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void:

Hype Williams' "All of the Lights" music video:

I love the idea that Hype and Kanye went to an independent movie theater to watch Enter the Void together and came out with the idea for their font orgy music video (did they perhaps share a bag of Sour Patch Kids?). I find it a much better piece of work than Kanye's more celebrated "Runaway" "film" (for which Mr. Williams served as a "writer") but that's probably just my prejudice against the depiction of white slaves. It's amusing to consider that Mr. Williams is perhaps even more adventurous than Noe with the overlay and movement of his titles.

As shown by the YouTube comments for the Enter the Void sequence, there's considerable cross-pollination between Kanye and Noe fans here, which I find artistically encouraging (as we must always try to move into aesthetic concerns beyond Rihanna's own inspired pairing).

Anxiety and The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

I attacked Inception because the dreams that comprise the film were directed by Michael Bay, not by you or me. I laughed again at Hollywood's inability to capture nightmares. So I was shocked into real anxiety by how closely the events in George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau match the twists of my own recurring dreams.

Without getting too far into the film's deeply silly plot, suffice to say: senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon, still running all over the place but in less comfortable shoes than he wears in the Bourne franchise) wants to be with Elise (Emily Blunt) but is thwarted at every turn by fedora'd "angels" (for lack of a better word) who insist that she is not part of his preordained life plan.

In The Adjustment Bureau and my dream, you're trying to find someone. You're late. You're lost. You start running. Dangerous obstacles get in your way (cars crash violently on a street you're about to cross, the floor falls away and there's a vertiginous drop right in front of you). You go through doors, find you're in the wrong place, go back out the door and find yourself in a third location, also wrong. You're panting, frantic, hopeless. Naturally, things work out better for David in the film than for me in my dream, perhaps because my sense of direction is so bad (and I'm never wearing a magical hat that gives me superpowers).

David eventually gets a little help from the angels, and this is the rub with The Adjustment Bureau. He learns, for instance, that the angels can't read his thoughts when it's rainy (David Denby joked that the protagonists should have just moved to Seattle (the joke is especially apt now, in March, the wrist-slittingest month of all, weather-wise)). Anthony Mackie (as Harry) and John Slattery (as Richardson) give cool enough performances but their constant presence necessitates too many laughable lines of shouted, angel-related dialogue: "You've hit your ripple limit!" or "Anyone in a hat is a threat!" Plus the library where all the angels hang out is not as architecturally appealing as the one in Wings of Desire. The angelic exception is Thompson, played Terence Stamp (check his A-MA-ZING scarf with complementary patterns on either side) who flexes real power and menace.

I know that for big studio producers Philip K. Dick stories=good movies but I would have moved this film in a different direction (and, from what I've read, the Dick story "Adjustment Team" differs substantially from the movie version). The narrative tension suffers because we know in the first 15 minutes that David is fighting against a huge conspiracy and will do so for the rest of the film. I would have allowed room for the idea that the angels are just part of David's paranoid personality, part of the larger understanding many people have that our whole lives are being controlled by a shadowy god and/or government.

I'd also like to see Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in another film, perhaps one in which they aren't being harassed by malevolent angels the whole time. There's too many Damon and dude conversations and not enough Damon and Blunt--unlike 95% of Hollywood films this millennium, these two romantic leads actually seem like they want to have sex with each other. And that's why The Adjustment Bureau is worthy of netflixing.

In Love for the Mood of In the Mood for Love (or Something)

2011-03-11T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'd recommend Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love anywhere, any time, from iPhones to plasma TVs meters across but, after seeing it in theater last week, I recommend it most of all on film stock. In cinema I prefer the love in my comedies to be requited and love in my dramas to be unrequited. ITMFL, with the so-quiet-it's-almost-nonexistent courtship between Chow (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), falls in the second category.

Another way to summarize the film, from my other great discovery of the week: movie barcodes.

That white stripe in the middle is a fade out we see after an image that captures the incredible layering and precision of WKW's art. In this viewing, I noticed for the first time the complexity of the shot where Maggie Cheung centers the frame in her least densely patterned dress of the film: a daffodil print. She stands looking out a window fringed with foliage, next to floral curtains and in front of a sofa emblazoned with leaves. On her glass: more painted flowers. Floating at the bottom of her beverage: tea leaves. WKW's vision is total--he's left nothing out.

I paired my viewing of the film with Ming Wong's "In Love for the Mood" video installation at the Frye Museum. I can't pretend to unravel all the levels of meta- at work but to take a stab: Ming's piece is a multi-language, single gender reenactment by a white actress of a scene from ITMFL in which Chow and Su Li-zhen are not being themselves but are instead pretending to play the roles of their own unfaithful spouses. Postmodern confusion aside, it was fascinating to be in a room with the installation looping on three flatscreens with languages echoing around from surround sound speakers.

In more ways than the title, Ming's video loops seem an inversion of WKW's film. Rather like Godard's hidden earpiece technique with Anna Karina, Ming gives the actress her lines as she's speaking and her phonetic pronunciations are full of mistakes. Whereas Su Li-zhen breaks off speaking because of emotional devastation, the actress in the Ming's piece breaks off and giggles because she doesn't speak Cantonese. Despite precisely recreating the visuals of a scene from In the Mood for Love, "In Love for the Mood" feels offhand, less serious. WKW is notorious for the number of takes he requires, demanding that his actors' voices match an exact cadence he has in mind. Perhaps Ming's "first rehearsal" art reveals some of the sweat that's required to make WKW's frictionless celluloid machines.

Forget the Oscars, Let's Dance

2011-02-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Last night I watched James Franco with a grimace then a smile as he deep sixed his status as Hollywood's It Boy. All the while I was thinking: by god, there's not enough dancing at the Oscars this year.

This is probably because I'd just enjoyed two recent films that prove closing with a dance number can be a brilliant gambit. (Close confidants already know I have a soft spot for this guilty pleasure.)

But in the current cinema, check out Giorgos Lanthimos' excellent climax to Dogtooth:

Like many of the emotionally deadpan sequences in the film, this starts out tittering and finishes sinister. And that's before the next scene, in which the older daughter (the sister who dances longer) uses a barbell for something other than its intended purpose. The static long shots emphasize the way the camera (and the viewer) can't seem to turn away from the bizarre machinations of this family.

Next we have Andrea Arnold and her (I'm using this word in all honesty) breathtaking finale to Fish Tank:

Here's two more sisters that need to get out of dodge. Mia, in her standard monochromatic clothes, centers the screen and is brought for the last time between her colorful mother and younger sister. It's rather silly to post it in this space, of course, with no other context from the film. But you must see it or see it again--Fish Tank is The 400 Blows in our time.

Have You Seen...? #3 (The Last Days of Disco)

2011-02-22T06:53:00.000-08:00

If you haven't already, see Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco for the beautiful title alone. The rocking tonic of it puts you at ease straight away. And Stillman is never less than at ease (be sure you see Metropolitan too), somewhere in between the delirious romantic comedies of the 30's and self-contained worlds of Wes Anderson.

I'm a pretty even mix of prudish and voyeuristic impulses so The Last Days of Disco gives me an ideal heroine: Alice (Chloe Sevigny). With her new best friend she embarks on a life as a slush pile reader for a stodgy publishing company, unhappy shotgun apartment resident and devotee of a Studio 54 stand-in referred to only as The Club. In the course of the film Alice becomes increasingly disillusioned but never less than demure. You'll be beguiled by Ms. Sevigny's beauty and try hard to push from your mind the overwhelming image (from Brown Bunny) of Vincent Gallo's semen trickling out the sides of her mouth.

The great regret of the film is that Alice's catty friend Charlotte is played by Kate Beckinsale and not Parker Posey. I picture her in filtered images like the one above, where you can squint and imagine the star of The House of Yes. For advanced viewers, familiar enough with the cadence of her voice that hearing it is second nature, turn down the volume and imagine that Ms. Posey is delivering Charlotte's hard-edged words under those dark forelocks (e.g. "Anything I did that was wrong, I apologize for. But anything I did that was not wrong, I don't apologize for.").

All of Alice and Charlotte's potential mates are cads, but the most extreme is Des, (Chris Eigeman, not seen nearly enough), the consistent Oscar Wilde figure in Stillman's work. All his lines feel clever and offhand, such as, "I'm going to turn over a new leaf in Spain. I'm going to turn over several new leaves," but Des is always sucked back into his nebulous job at the Club. There he runs into various exes, who are upset when they learn that he's not gay after all (Des' game is to break up with women by claiming he's just realized his homosexuality).

I appreciate Stillman most for employing heightened, well-enunciated dialogue that is disarming, perhaps not strictly believable, but actual good writing. As opposed to the mumbling "authenticity" of a certain genre of indie cinema at present, the forces that have conspired to present us Greta Gerwig as a star.

I firmly believe that The Lady and the Tramp debate scene, a close cousin to the Smurfs sequence in Donnie Darko, should be canonized. Des' somewhat less caddish lawyer pal Josh (Matt Keeslar) holds forth on the hidden meanings of the animated canines. A taste:

There is something depressing about it, and it's not really about dogs. Except for some superficial bow-wow stuff at the start, the dogs all represent human types, which is where it gets into real trouble. Lady, the ostensible protagonist, is a fluffy blond Cocker Spaniel with absolutely nothing on her brain. She's great-looking, but--let's be honest--incredibly insipid. Tramp, the love interest, is a smarmy braggart of the most obnoxious kind--an oily jailbird out for a piece of tail, or... whatever he can get.

Precisely! I knew there was a reason I never liked that Disney offering.

I figured I hadn't seen a Whit Stillman film since The Last Days of Disco because of my general ignorance but it turns out I haven't seen a new Stillman film because he hasn't made one in 13 years. IMDb says he's filming a certain Damsels in Distress right now but, unconscionably, without Chris Eigeman.

Still, The Last Days of Disco lingers with the recursivity of the dance floor--Alice's everlasting shyness, looking away as her arms go up. The camera stays in a long shot, showing the community of dancers, not just the stars. And, as proven by countless wedding parties, the sweetly schizophrenic Josh is right: disco is forever.

My Life Story as Written by Walker Percy in The Moviegoer

2011-02-19T16:54:00.000-08:00

I'm only on page 3 but this is relevant to my interests:

After the movie Linda and I stood under the marquee and talked to the manager, or rather listened to him tell his troubles: the theater was almost empty, which was pleasant for me but not for him. It was a fine night and I felt good. Overhead was the blackest sky I ever saw; a black wind pushed the lake towards us. The waves jumped over the seawall and spattered the street. The manager had to yell to be heard while from the sidewalk speaker directly over his head came the twittering conversation of the amnesiac and the librarian. It was the part where they are going through the newspaper files in search of some clue to his identity (he has a vague recollection of an accident). Linda stood by unhappily. She was unhappy for the same reason I was happy--because here we were at a neighborhood theater out in the sticks and without a car (I have a car but I prefer to ride buses and streetcars). Her idea of happiness is to drive downtown and have supper at the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. This I am obliged to do from time to time. It is worth it, however. On these occasions Linda becomes as exalted as I am now. Her eyes glow, her lips become moist, and when we dance she brushes her fine long legs against mine. She actually loves me at these times--and not as a reward for being taken to the Blue Room. She loves me because she feels exalted in this romantic place and not in a movie out in the sticks.

Except I would have driven, naturally.

Three Times: The King's Speech

2011-02-16T18:13:00.000-08:00

Three reasons to begrudge The King's Speech for existing:

1. The key line in the poster above: "Based on the Incredible True Story." It should read: "Man with Infinite Resources Overcomes Stammer." Very credibly.

2. The King's Speech is a transparent, awards-grabbing "prestige picture." With all caveats about how the Oscars are a joke anyway, it would be a shame if, in a year when America produced two excellent films (The Social Network and Winter's Bone), the biggest award went to a profoundly mediocre British movie. The Academy is also locked into a pattern of awarding "make up call" Best Actor and Actress statuettes to people who probably should have gotten Oscars before. In this case I'm almost okay with it, as Colin Firth (as the only-interesting-because-he-stutters King Bertie) will win even though he really earned his award for A Single Man last year. Geoffrey Rush, as the speech (and several other kinds of) therapist Lionel Logue, could well pull down Best Supporting for general cheeky Australianess.

3. The entirety of the film is contained in the trailer. For viewers with even a passing familiarity with 20th century English history and the conventions of the biopic genre, there is not a single surprise in The King's Speech. And all the big, "meaningful" lines are in the preview as well (many of these are terrible, see below).

Three visual elements that confirm Tom Hooper should stick to directing television:

1. There's one laughable shot where Bertie's head is entirely blocked from view by a gramophone. The irony! Only the machine can make itself heard!

2. The fact that we cut and back and forth to a kettle on the fire as Lionel (literally!) brings his first conversation with Bertie to a boil.

3. Hooper waffles between different visual styles from sequence to sequence. In what I can only assumes are attempts at grandeur, he frequently employs a retreating camera for long shots. Except the camera doesn't track backwards smoothly, nor does it bounce up and down quite enough for a true handheld feel. Everything he does, he does in half measures. Even simple two shots of characters talking are poorly framed right into the actors' jowls.

Three most wince-inducing lines of dialogue in The King's Speech:

1. Lionel: "Why should I waste my time listening to you?"

Bertie: "Because I have a voice!"

Lionel: "...Yes, you do."

2. [royal family inexplicably watching clip of Hitler speechifying]
Little Girl: "What's he saying?"
Bertie: "I don't know but... he seems to be saying it rather well."

3. Lionel [to Bertie in regards to a King George V coin on the table]: "You don't need to carry him around in your pocket."

Three reasons we should have seen a film starring Guy Pearce instead:

1. Guy Pearce plays the reluctant King Edward VIII, whose life is actually interesting. While we worry about how Bertie pronounces words beginning with "P," Edward provides the pithy response, "kinging," to a query about how he's spending his time. His answer points to the two proper activities for onscreen royalty: nation building and fornicating.

2. Edward's lady of Shanghai, Wallis Simpson, is played by Eve Best with the sauciness we used to see from Helena Bonham Carter, wasted as Bertie's boring scold of a wife. The best sequence in the film is centered on Edward and Wallis, clearcutting ancient firs and scouring the ancestral mansion for the best bottle of champagne.

3. But I'll be honest. I really love Pearce in The King's Speech for his natty attire. His aviator outfit is a sheepskinned dream, his tweeds hang just so and my foremost life goal is to one day own a cabled sweatervest half as luxurious as his.

Two Blushing Pilgrims

2011-02-14T07:13:00.000-08:00

Because I am a hugely romantic person, I decided the best preparation for this Valentine's Day would be taking in a Gnomeo & Juliet and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet double feature. The former was a sparsely attended screening (and, yes, I did feel the ticket taker judged me for going to see Gnomeo) and the latter was a midnight screening with a nice mix of couples and perverted nighttime wanderers.

You might be shocked to learn that Gnomeo & Juliet is not a good film. Kelly Asbury has managed to direct a movie that antagonizes Shakespeare from start to finish, in spite of the permanently blushing gnomes of the title. After beginning by calling Romeo and Juliet a "boring" play, he refuses the Bard's language in favor of sub-Shrekian howlers from "let's go kick some grass!" to "a weed by any other name is still a weed." Not even appearances from garden gnome Elton John help very much. Full disclosure: I did not see Gnomeo in 3D, which might have made all the difference...

I'll move to the only element of the film that is not instantly forgettable: Mercutio's role is (perhaps?) filled by a pink lawn flamingo named Featherstone, a somewhat inspired character. He seems a broad caricature of a Hispanic homosexual in the manner of Agador Spartacus in The Birdcage but, to my great fascination, Featherstone is given a backstory in which he is paired with another pink flamingo. This second flamingo, who never speaks, is differentiated from Featherstone by its mascara'd eyes. It is absurd to think that Featherstone would be paired with a straight female lawn ornament so I got to thinking of possible explanations for this lost love. It occurred to me that the other flamingo could be made up in drag. If I had a chance to interview Asbury, this is the only question I would ask about the film.

I first saw Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet in the most appropriate setting: a freshman English class in high school. That was half a lifetime ago and, as I recall, there was actual Leo-induced swooning by some of my classmates those sunny afternoons.

Much criticism of Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet places it in contrast to Franco Zeffirelli's well-loved 1968 version. I found myself oddly defensive of the newer film though, perhaps because we all get defensive about our sentimental youth. The most amusing part of the 1996 reviews is the vicious critique of Luhrmann's "MTVification" of the story (how quaint to remember when MTV played music videos). The frantic, small screen style of the editing is richly nuanced compared to what the channel might inspire today--a reality TV Romeo cast on the Jersey Shore.

Certain engaging details emerge when you're not watching Romeo + Juliet on a 20 inch TV from across a classroom. Benvolio has tanlines from his shoulder holster and Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is capped by the Montagues sampling Ecstasy. I was pleased to see that "Post Haste" delivery services fail to leave important packages at your home just as regularly as UPS. And, although I'm in favor of gun control, the "Swords" and "Daggers" are pretty awesome with their custom pearl inlaid grips blinged with Roman Catholic iconography.

What's not awesome is the diction of all the actors in the film except the dearly departed Pete Postlethwaite, with whom some hint of iambic pentameter remains. I understand nothing Mercutio says (on a perhaps related note I don't recall seeing Harold Perrineau in a film since) but Luhrmann frequently has his characters repeat key lines so we get a second chance at comprehension.

The reason to see the film are the moments of greatness concentrated in the first half hour. I struggle to think of a scene that better conveys love at first sight than the aquarium meeting of DiCaprio's Romeo and Danes' Juliet. The tears made of tropical fish. The doomed ballad "Kissing You" from Des'ree. The obscenely handsome baby Leo. The frenetic wonder of the camera.

Back to my 14-year-old ride home on the number 3 bus, reading my Folger edition of Romeo and Juliet. I got to Act 1 Scene 4 and the star-crossed lovers (I thought about how someone had actually coined that term!) started their Elizabethan flirting. "My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss."

No matter how you feel about Luhrmann or DiCaprio or Shakespeare, you have to admit: Romeo had some game.

Out Stealing Clouds

2011-01-28T07:09:00.000-08:00

I steal all my best ideas from Katherine Hill. Not only am I taking her idea of posting about neato word clouds, I'm also going to use Ernest Hemingway as my first example:

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Turns out just right, no?

I am furthermore going to borrow Katherine's idea and add a word cloud of my own writing because it's amusing. This is from my grad school submission which was, for reasons known to my 22 year old self, a crown of sonnets.

Field Poem

An added benefit to this one was my theatrical gasp of horror as I reread the poem (you'll note the preponderance of "like" and "thought," always the hallmarks of good writing). Now, thanks to the word cloud version, I can view Field and Trace as pleasantly colored abstractions and pretend the actual poem doesn't exist.

My first date with Superstar

2011-01-26T07:12:00.000-08:00

I was a little hazy on the details but I knew that my mom and stepdad saw Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story as it was originally, haphazardly distributed. So I texted the matriarch herself, who wrote back saying it was their second date, in a church basement, on "Samsonite folding chairs" (Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor would be very impressed by those specific details mom!).

I credit my stepdad for selecting the film because he has inexplicable viewing habits (if you only knew, dear readers, how many times I've seen parts of the Goop-Huey Lewis gem Duets in his presence). But I myself neglected to see Superstar until this weekend, which is inexcusable given its autobiographical and Haynesian significance. Not to mention the film commences with Karen Carpenter's death, exactly one month after my momentous birth.

This was not the campy Carpenter biopic I was expecting (given that all the main roles are performed by modified Barbie dolls, I thought campy was the only possible mood). Instead, I saw a documentary on anorexia and a wider examination of 70's America, with Haynes' sharp eye cutting up cultural, political and social trends frame by frame.

The director's greatest strength here is editing--while only 43 minutes long, Superstar has as many cuts as a feature length film. He matches cuts ironically: a shot framing a pile of fried buffet food turns into to the first appearance of an Ex-Lax box. Even better, a topographical globe spins into a disco ball, spraying light over the band. That vision informs some of the great cuts in Far From Heaven, as when Julianne Moore turns from her kitchen straight into the revolving doors of her husband's office building.

The lighting in Superstar is dim but evocative. I'm think of a particular scene where darkness envelopes Karen as she sings, changing her orange-y face to the head of match, burning out. When presenting biographical tidbits on Karen, Haynes often uses black text over muddy background footage. Thus the information is hard to read against, say, a long shot of lunch meats in a grocery aisle. Only when more garish intertitles appear can we read them clearly, in the faux-hysterical style of Frank O'Hara exclamations in "Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)."

The real heart of darkness is still the music of The Carpenters. "We've Only Just Begun" is what music might sound like if conceived and recorded by Stepford wives. I find that particular song the most uncanny and unsettling, matched perfectly to the frictionless walk of Barbie-Karen.

I know you have that most important question on your mind: can I watch this online for free? Yes (it's unavailable on DVD because Haynes did not get Richard Carpenter's permission to use the songs and, quite possibly, because Richard is portrayed as monstrous ass in the film).

The Art in Barry Hannah

2011-01-23T19:24:00.000-08:00

"I go back to the dinette and sit with Rebecca. I smoked about four Luckies in a row and looked into her face without saying anything for a while. Rebecca's face is a charm. She goes heavy on the blue eye makeup. Her neck is a long-ish classic from the old paintings of what's-his-name. Her nose is forward and long. She lights a Lucky and the exhaust is gray through the large sensitive nostrils. She's half-Jew, the rest Greek. Okay, now I've come back from the humiliation of never thinking up a better poem than Mr. Hooch. Then we go through two cups of coffee apiece. Modigliani." --Barry Hannah, Ray

This is one of a dozen or so paragraphs in Ray that made me set down the book and contemplate the day for a moment. Hannah excels at self-contained prose blocks that are poem-like in their completeness. It's a brilliant, plainspoken description but circling back to Modigliani puts it over the top.

I've been a big Hannah admirer since his use of the n-word at a Bennington reading ruined the lives of a lot of middle-aged ladies. While perhaps not on Amy Hempel level of slavish WTT devotion, he's certainly a more palatable Lish acolyte than Raymond Carver.

The real Ray comparison I want to make is to Thomas McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade, another great favorite of mine from the last few years' reading. The protagonist of the latter, Skelton, would certainly enjoy sharing a few six packs with Ray. I like to imagine the good doctor crashing the plane that Skelton eventually converts into his domicile.

Sure, McGuane is more reliant on a propulsive plot and Hannah more focused on portrait of the man. But both books are sunbaked to a crisp and enough to make me love reading about the South even if I'm not scheduling any visits.

Would You Rather: No Strings Attached or Friends with Benefits

2011-01-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

Now that all the silly award season films have faced WTT judgment, we can get back to the juicy stuff, like a trailer breakdown of No Strings Attached (now playing at a theater near you!) and Friends with Benefits (you'll have to count the days with me till 22 July).

Beyond blatant insipidness, they also share a common theme: the exploration of whether hot male and female friends can be close without also needing to do the sex. But which film will be better? Let's break it down scientifically...

Title:

I prefer the straightforward Friends with Benefits because I have trouble understanding tricky metaphors like No Strings Attached (it could be a movie about experimental puppets or Michael Bay CGI).

Stars:

It's tough because the female stars provide easy White Swan vs. Black Swan fodder and the male stars make us think of the best episode of Punk'd. If roles were reversed, Ashton and Mila could have rekindled their 70's Show flame and JT could have been the lauded dancer who knocked up Natalie. Still, I lean towards FWB because that is the film that does not feature Mr. Kutcher.

Supporting Cast:

I'm so proud of Greta Gerwig mumblecoring her way to a straight paycheck role in NSA. I believe there is a shot of Ms. Gerwig with Charlie's Angels hair sharing a knowing look with Olivia Thirlby, who appears nowhere else in the trailer. Not to mention Ludacris with some guest verses!

But in FWB Patricia Clarkson convincingly uses the term "slam piece." Then Woody Harrelson, firmly ensconced in the WTT Top 5 Contemporary Supporting Actors, asks if Mila Kunis has a penis. Plus a nine-year-old Asian girl being overly serious. I could kiss that casting director right on the mouth.

Funniest Line:

NSA: Ashton: "You can't fight me, you're miniature. You fight like a hamster!" It's funny because Natalie is wee and with hamster jokes there's always the whiff of Richard Gere's asshole (and Natalie loves a good laugh).

FWB: JT: "I could sing some Third Eye Blind..." He proceeds sings one of the worst radio songs of all time not written by TEB. Really, the second half of the trailer is a running gag on a Semisonic song. Which could be a bad sign.

Worst Line:

FWB: JT: "Every time you curse, you blink." Under no circumstances is it believable that Mila would blink when she curses.

NSA: Ashton: "We're having sex." Natalie: "I knooow!" I can feel the sweat pouring off the writer's brow on that one.

Wardrobe:

It's hard to tell about the wardrobe in Friends with Benefits because Mila Kunis is in underwear or naked for the whole preview. So I have to go with Natalie in a white tank top for the win!

Verdict:

Too close to call--you'll just have to see them both.

Best of 2010 Pt. 2 (and WTT Post #100!)

2011-01-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

After two years of constant bitching, I found 2010 to be an excellent start to a new decade of film. Also, I'm pretty sure this post will mention several films that actually came out in 2009 but didn't open here until 2010, which makes the list even stronger. I haven't seen Certified Copy and Of Gods and Men and Toy Story 3 and much else but I like to think that nothing major released in Seattle has eluded me. (You'll note that I tried to link my earlier reviews where possible below.)

Best Actors

It's a good year when Ryan Gosling is in two movies--even though All Good Things got bad reviews I don't doubt he's excellent in it--and he blows Michelle Williams right off the screen in Blue Valentine. I'm continually impressed by Jesse Eisenberg's uncanny ability to pick roles in good films and loved him in Holy Rollers and The Social Network. He'll probably be passed over for Colin Firth (who should have won last year for A Single Man) in the awards season but his Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered longer. I can't get over Michael Fassbender in Fish Tank, one of the few times I see an actor for the first time and immediately think this guy is gonna be a star. Go get it Mr. Fassbender. And the man of the year is Edgar Ramirez. Carlos is Raging Bull 30 years later--a once in a lifetime showcase for an actor. And I think Mr. Ramirez might even exceed DeNiro in the physical transformation(s) category. The film is five and half hours long but I'd have watched it for ten because Ramirez is that transfixing.

Best Actresses

It seems Ms. Portman's cuticle-abusing dancer will beat out Jennifer Lawrence's Ozark Odysseus for the big prize this year but we know better. Ree Dolly is the center of indelible film and Lawrence has opened a lot doors with this debut. We also had the re-arrival of sorts for Tilda Swinton, who swoops through I Am Love using the Russian-accented Italian she learned for the film (not to mention the most her most fabulous hair performance ever). As usual, Isabelle Huppert was the best thing about White Material, dragging the film along by the scruff of its neck. Sure, her dogged belief that harvesting a coffee crop could bring order to a country at war is insane, but Huppert commits to the character of Maria so thoroughly that we're strapped in the whole crazy way.

Best Documentaries

Marwencol - I'm always a sucker for a good documentary about fucked up artists trying to get work done. Mark Hogancamp's miniature world is a revelation, as is this film's gentle reminder that some people have to overcome a lot more than a boring day job to make their art.

Restrepo - A no-frills take straight from the soldiers on the ground examining the untenable situation in Afghanistan with all the attendant loss of life and national dignity. Somehow it manages to be only the second most depressing 2010 film on the war...

The Tillman Story - ...because this came out too. It's a great investigation of Pat Tillman's fratricidal murder but so infuriating I keep recommending that friends not watch it. I found myself in knots of rage wishing that Bush Jr., Cheney and the lot of congressman who presided over the farcical inquest on Tillman's death were parachuted into the Korengal Valley and left to fend for themselves.

Sweetgrass - Here's a patient, straightforward doc on taking sheep to pasture that leaves you pondering the future of the "frontier" and the capitalized West. The timeless spell of cowboys going to work is undercut with the reality of an exhausted shepherd struggling to find cell phone reception on the high ridges of Montana wilderness.

This Way of Life - As some counterbalance to all the well-executed downers this year, we have a film about triumph. Peter Karena does not triumph in money or comfort but in the refusal to let his family be constrained by ridiculous cultural mores. I'll never have his will to live life his own way but I can at least visit New Zealand, breathtakingly varied and beautiful throughout the film.

Best Pictures (so many good films I couldn't limit myself to just ten)

12. Blue Valentine - I find this one more admirable than great but, since I abhorred Greenberg, I wanted to applaud at least one of 2010 films willing to explore failed cunnilingus, surely an underseen onscreen phenomenon. Ryan Gosling is predictably great as Dean, able to be sexy as hell as young mover and shaker and devastating as a prematurely dissipated housepainter (this decline is best symbolized by the fitted leather jacket he wears in flashbacks that's replaced by a paint-spattered white tank top in the present). As always, Michelle Williams just looks sad (why must she always try so hard to project despair?--she's naturally sorrowful, even "fun-loving" Jen Lindley looked sad all the time). Still Derek Cianfrance pushes hard with lacerating closeups that give the film a Scenes from a Marriage-style relentlessness.

11. Red Riding Trilogy Part 1: 1974 - I'm pretty sure that James Ellroy had nothing to do with the production but this is the most Ellroy picture I've seen. Hollywood films, from the excellent L.A. Confidential to the unwatchable Black Dahlia, have glossed over the true pulpiness of his work. But the three segments of Red Riding, particularly Julian Jarrold's Part 1, are deliciously trashy. There's an American Tabloid-level of gratuitous sex and violence with all the showy rack focusing you could want. Andrew Garfield is bell-bottomod journalist at the center of the mess in Yorkshire (town motto: "where we do what we want"), Rebecca Hall is shockingly plausible as a Veronica Lake femme fatale and of all the great British character actor heavies in the film, Sean Bean is the heaviest--pure terror.

10. Everyone Else - In this German gem, I watched Chris unravel his relationship with Gitti and kept saying to myself, "I'd never be that cruelly condescending in conversation," then realizing I have been, repeatedly. This horror show of passive-aggression is not a good movie to see if you're in a rocky relationship (or perhaps a good movie to see if you want to break up with some one). Great, natural performances from the principal actors and skillfully shot by Maren Ade in sunny Sardinia with no superfluous "we're on vacation in the Mediterranean" panoramas. It's a sad story that approaches the second act of Contempt before surprising once more at the very end.

9. Somewhere - The value of art is not determined by its subject matter; it's determined by how good the art is. Sofia Coppola does not need to concern herself with "branching out"--she needs to concern herself with making excellent films, which she's done again here. I found the cinematography in Somewhere much less glamorous than in her previous films and the portraits more harrowing. Perhaps because I tend towards silence, I got enough sustenance out of every significant look between Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning (and, for the record, it was absolutely necessary for her to scissor garnish onto the eggs benedict).

8. I Am Love - I don't get the criticism that this film is "too melodramatic." We love the melodrama! We love Douglas Sick and Max Ophuls and lamented that we couldn't see all their films in HD until Criterion saved us! I will admit that this picture strays in certain scenes (especially the bees in the flowers) but watching the first sequence in snowy Milan I thought I might be in for one of the best films of all time. It makes the top 10 just for that.

7. True Grit - If it weren't for all the gunplay and corpses, this would be the perfect film to show your kids. I'd want my daughter to be exactly like Mattie Ross. I predict a big Oscar nom comeback for the film, with the Coens, Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld all in line for recognition.

6. Fish Tank - Andrea Arnold and her lead actress Katie Jarvis just don't flinch in a movie that you keep expecting to flinch. The last scene tears your heart out because it's so sad, inevitable and true. I'm ecstatic for 2011's Wuthering Heights.

5. Our Beloved Month of August - I've never seen a film quite like it, with Miguel Gomes just letting the camera record and then arranging documentary and scripted scenes into a big circle. It's like the way I prefer browsing a "literature" section instead of "fiction" and "nonfiction." Full of love, rural scenery and music so godawful I can't wait to hear it again.

4. White Material - Claire Denis is on a hell of a roll. Here she employs the best actress alive to dramatize an unnamed, inexplicable African country at civil war. That sounds like the setup for a loud, bombastic film but Denis keeps the volume low and the camera moving. It's confusing, clear-eyed and original.

3. The Social Network - The unlikeliest film in the WTT top 12 because I doubted mainstream Hollywood could pull it off. I thought this one had to be overhyped but it won me over scene by scene. I defend it against the absurd allegations of misogyny, I defend the dreamlike regatta sequence, I defend Justin Timberlake down to his last slimy tentacle of hair. And, you know, it actually has something to say about our culture now (I hear my father, who's barely able to check his AOL email, might be joining Facebook soon).

2. Winter's Bone - I've already written a bunch about it and my prediction from May has come true: there's no better domestic film this year (WTT loves a good self-fulfilling prophecy).

1. Carlos - It just wouldn't be WTT if I didn't overlook all the best domestic offerings and give the biggest prize to a film directed by a Frenchman (Olivier Assayas, coming a long way from Boarding Gate). I need to do a more extensive review when Carlos is released on DVD bit it just feels like the biggest achievement of the year. Thinking back on the dizzying six hours in the theater watching, I was struck by the way Carlos was really about a promising young man who doesn't pan out the way anyone wanted (not his far left teachers, not his terrorist handlers, not himself). As he ages, the failures, both physical and ideological, mount and his downward trend proves inescapable. He's Carlos the Jackal with the attendant fame and female company but he keeps going to the same party, and it is depressing in every way.

*

For 2011 prospects, what more needs to be said? There will be a new film by Terrence Malick.

Best of 2010 Pt. I

2011-01-06T21:01:00.000-08:00

I'm falling behind on my year end lists for 2010 but it's not all my fault. Somewhere and Blue Valentine only reach the provinces this weekend and I don't want to make a post without having seen them. For now I'll focus on my personal highlights from the year that was and follow up with a best of next week(ish).

My twitter account

Do you follow me yet? I promise an absolutely nonsensical string of movie news, forced jokes and incoherent rants relating to Michigan State sports. What more do you want?

I am seriously shocked at how effectively Twitter accumulates relevant articles from talented folks. I've read loads of good nonfiction since I started an account and perhaps at some point I'll even learn something.

My first film festival immersion

Nothing delights my snobbish nature more than getting into movies before everyone else and securing my preferred front and center seat. Since the teenage heartbreak of being denied entry to Amores Perros at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival no less than three times, I've coveted that glossy, hologrammed press pass. Thanks to City Arts Magazine, I got it for SIFF 2010 and reviewed 16 films.

In addition to getting a great seat for free, I had the opportunity to watch new movies without too many preconceptions. Even if I try to avoid reviews before seeing a film, the buzz always filters in and I have to react for or against it in some way. But writing without falling in line with a Metacritic score is most invigorating. While I was certain to agree with the critical acclaim for SIFF favorites Winter's Bone and I Am Love, I was surprised to find that I was harsher on films that were later applauded, like Howl, which I thought plainly terrible, and Night Catches Us, which seemed too amateurish for serious consideration.

My first proper call out

As an important public figure (writing biweekly musings for City Arts Blog), I was subject to constructive criticisms in the Comments field for the first time. After dodging a fair amount of bullets for negative reviews, I was put in my place for a single paragraph on the staggeringly trite short film Ana's Playground. In Jennifer's words:

Wow, this review of Ana's Playground is so far off the mark that I question the validity of this review. Do you have a pulse? A heart? It reminds me of the Woody Allen line, "those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym." I'll take it a step further. Those who aren't brave enough to make films trash others art.

I find this critique of my character so blindingly insightful no further comment is necessary.

My new candidates for #1 crush

2010 was not a great year for my old favorite Scarlett Johansson and I'm forced to search for a new #1 Crush (cue the Garbage song for the Romeo + Juliet MPS). SIFF films brought to my attention Bang Chau (above left, from the feel-good Norwegian film Upperdog) and Ari Graynor (above center, as an updated gangster's moll in Holy Rollers, who you might also remember stealing scenes in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist). Zoe Kravitz (above right, the predictably cute progeny of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet) was likewise irresistible in It's Kind of a Funny Story.

With all three, I found their chemistry with cautious young male leads the most invigorating parts of films that would otherwise be fairly pedestrian. While it's unclear whether I'll ever see another film with Bang Chau (who is, according to her site, something of an aspiring Norwegian pop starlet), Ms. Graynor is going to be in a David Gordon Green comedy and Ms. Kravitz will star as "Sweetness O'Hara" in Yelling at the Sky, a film that's sure to be another triumphant pairing of co-stars Gabourey Sidibe and Tim Blake Nelson.

My love affair with The Last Picture Show

I've seen enough films now that it's hard for one to bust into the all time top 10. Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show did it in 2010 (it's the background to my twitter page for goodness sakes!).

I first saw it as I often do, while eating dinner and checking important sports scores on my phone, but the film gradually commanded my full attention. By the time I got to Sam the Lion's monologue (here in shitty reproduction and not as meaningful on its own) I had moved to a posture of full slack-jawed wonder.

Some days later, on holiday with my friend Ashton on the Olympic Peninsula, in a cabin so rustic it did not even have a television, I watched again with full attention and it cemented itself as a favorite.

Celebrating the new year and turning another year older, I repeat Sam the Lion's words to myself more and more. "I'm just as sentimental as the next feller when it comes to old times," and "if she was here I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about five minutes." Yep.

From the Righting Serious Wrongs Dept.

2011-01-05T18:40:00.000-08:00

(edited to reflect compulsory re-watching of Raising Arizona and to, you know, actually include all the Coen Bros. movies.)

So, splashed all over the cover of The Seattle Times this morning was a critic's ranking of all the Coen Bros. films. The list is so laughable/enraging that I was glad when a double check of the byline revealed the person is not an actual employee of my hometown paper (Ann Hornaday (huh huh) writes for The Washington Post and I've of course never heard of her). In case you don't want to click through, suffice to say she puts No Country for Old Men 14th, only five slots under The Hudsucker Proxy. She also has some cop out about the ranking being based on "how eager [she] would be to watch them again." Nonsense, go play with a puppy.

While I do think there can be stimulating debate on this topic, here is a ranking that is at least not totally ridiculous.

The Classics

1. Fargo (14-year-old self thought it wasn't that great because he saw it right after The Usual Suspects, 14-year-old self was dead wrong--go Bears!)

1a. No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy done right--hilarious, sadistic, gorgeous American dreams)

3. Blood Simple (I still believe I am due to be murdered by an extremely patient M. Emmet Walsh)

4. The Big Lebowski (not a day goes by I don't need to use one or another lines from this film, and that was true before I was on a bowling team, throwing rocks)

The Very Good to Good

5. Raising Arizona (after a fresh viewing the cartoony cinematography still keeps this from Classic status though I greatly admire the relentless pace, great period clothing and Holly Hunter's haircut)

6. True Grit (despite surface similarities to other of their films, a new direction for the Coens full of surprising Little House on the Prairie wholesomeness)

7. The Man Who Wasn't There (big plus for Billy Bob leg shaving and Scarlett Johansson madness, little minus for alien stuff)

8. A Serious Man (I see how people can find it hard to get into this one but there is truly a revelation in the last five minutes)

9. Burn After Reading (I've rarely laughed harder than I did at Brad Pitt's pronunciation of "rapport," and John Malkovich's reaction to that pronunciation, plus J.K. Simmons behaves exactly as I imagine high level government officials would)

10. Miller's Crossing (well-executed but less ambitious than their great films)

The Ones I Think Swing and Miss

11. O, Brother Where Art Thou? (I never bought into the Odyssey retelling theme and, prepare yourself for a sacrilegious thought, I think the music is borderline annoying)

12. Barton Fink (too much ham in that sandwich for me, and I'm noticing a strong inverse relationship between how much I like a film and how much time John Turturro is on screen in that film)

The Bad

13. The Hudsucker Proxy (as unwatchable as most all Tim Robbins movies)

14. Intolerable Cruelty (the Coen Bros. film that tries to be the most funny is the least)

The I Haven't Seen But Know Is Garbage

15. The Ladykillers (Ms. Hornaday and I agree!)

2046 as Christmas

2010-12-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

My Christmases sound like Mark Kozelek's "Have You Forgotten," Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown and Nat King Cole where holiday cheer is washed with a certain aching nostalgia.

These Christmases look like Wong Kar-Wai's 2046, a film featuring a recurrence of December 24ths I've watched more or less every winter since it came out in 2004. I saw it first almost by myself at Landmark La Jolla, slicing Haribo gold-bears bilaterally with my incisors and looking contentedly at the reds and greens onscreen. It was a less a sequel than a coda to In the Mood for Love and I always prefer codas, a fluidity of time instead of a march, circles instead of lines.

Intervening years have, of course, changed me and now, watching Tony Leung's dapper newspaperman Chow Mo-wan, I'm gutted (I notice I've even started wearing sweatervests like he does). It's not just the suspicion that romance might be dead in our culture. It's that even in the best, most symphonic partnership the question "Why can't it be like it was before?" is always coming. That's what Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi, astonishing every time) asks Chow-san again and again until he has to turn away. He walks around with his hurt smile every day with the same question in mind, not that it helps, as "before" is quite a different place for him.

I like to identify with Chow, his omnipresent memories of Su Li Zhen (Maggie Cheung in ITMFL, Gong Li in 2046, that one) and the power of atmospheric noodle stalls in the rain. Then I look down the way to Fremont where some fluorescently minded person has installed the exact opposite.

The movie also proves writing itself is like the train to 2046, the paradoxical future location where everything is as perfect as it was in the remembered past. The hours spin away as you move closer and closer to an ideal past tense reflection where nothing ever changes. A past perfection that must be there, even if no one has ever taken the train back.

This Christmas I decided that, if I had a moment with Chow, I would read to him Liam Rector's "Song Years" and it would go like this.

Song Years

For years I lived in a kind
Of wistful song world where
One foot was always out

The door, almost like a sailor
Ready, anxious even, to decamp
Once more for the sea,

And always the American highway
And its great story calling, built by
The American restless and all

Its subsequent moving. Loosely
Around the seasons I moved
Looking for what I thought of

As a natural life, and looked back
At anyone who stayed put as if
They had given up,

Given up something
That should never be
Given up,

Ever.
No sooner
Would I get some place

Than I'd begin
To check train schedules
And other venues of departure.

I hated the notion
Of insurance and never
Had any. I gave

Myself no place to fall.
I thought of all this as keeping
Myself clean, keeping

Myself honest. It really
Wasn't a variant
Of the old high school

Locker-room chant of find 'em,
Feel 'em, fuck 'em,
And forget 'em, I told myself,

But sometimes,
Especially when I was packing,
It surely felt that way.

I was always leaving one
For the next one. I wished them
Well and remained friends

With most of them. I hoped
A right one one would come along
For them, and they would be

More ready for their lasting lover
Given the lessons, good and bad,
We'd taught each other.

Fall would come
And I'd head north
For apple-picking, winter

Would find me holed up
In Vermont for a moment,
Working on some chilly construction,

And spring was always
A sure-fired scamper south.
Summer mostly meant

Going out west for, I suppose, hope.
Change is slow and hope is violent.
I wanted the speed and handling

Of a good sports car; I wanted
Things not as they should be
But things as they are.

Most songs are sad and most people
Do not want to live in song world,
Except when some loved one leaves

Or maybe over a drink, alone, at home,
Or perhaps in a car, ever more alone.
Someone is always falling or being thrown.

Most songs say
But one thing:
"My heart aches,"

And if you doubt this
Listen to the songs.
And tonight

Let us all together send out
Our love to the songwriters
For moving us.

I moved this way
Until the cruelty of it
Overwhelmed me.

*

Merry Christmas Chow-san. Tell Wong Kar-Wai I need you in just one more film. Maybe set in spring?

Paintings in Proust

2010-12-18T18:03:00.000-08:00

I just picked up Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust and it's as sumptuous as I was promised. A sort of catalogue raisonne of a most interesting private collection. Here is Proust himself on Antoine Watteau:

I often think with a mixture of sympathy and pity about the life of the painter Watteau, in whose work lives the painting, the allegory, the apotheosis of love and pleasure....It has been said that he was the first to have painted modern love, meaning by this, no doubt, a love of conversation, the pleasures of the table, promenading, the sadness of masquerading, fleeting water and time, all hold a higher place than pleasure itself, a sort of gilded impotence.

I do think that the book will help me see a fuller picture when I reread In Search of Lost Time (I plan to start again immediately after winning the lottery, quitting my job and lining my studio with cork).

Three Times: Black Swan

2010-12-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

Three reasons to see Black Swan:

1. You have to wait an unconscionably long time, but when Nina (Natalie Portman showing every vein in her neck) breaks out as the Black Swan it is a breathtaking five minutes. The fantasia of the music and the Swan's phantasmal feathers had me on the edge of applause.

2. I think Darren Aronofsky has found his calling card (like Hitchcock appearing in all his films). He will always use an actor or actress who has undergone horrible plastic surgery and use them to scare the audience straight. As many others have pointed out, Barbara Hershey (as Nina's smother) has far too little skin in parts of her face and too much in others--a deadringer for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.

3. Mila Kunis is a pleasant diversion from the relentless tightness in the rest of the film. It's amazing how she sounds exactly like she does in Forgetting Sarah Marshall or That 70's Show or anything she's ever been in and it somehow works as Nina's "liberated" rival Lily.

Three reasons to miss Black Swan:

1. For the cuticle obsessed, like myself, this is a hard movie to watch. I wanted to scream at Nina to, for the love of god, use some moisturizer. Some really expensive Norwegian hand cream. Despite Ms. Hershey's best efforts, the scariest thing in Black Swan is the scene where Nina tears a strip of skin from her cuticle down to the second knuckle of her finger. The horror, the horror.

2. It feels like Aronofsky went about the casting with cruelty in mind. In addition to the Hershey freakshow, there is Winona Ryder as a washed up dancer in the troupe who later becomes a crippled washed up dancer. And Vincent Cassel is wasted with the insultingly repetitive lines he is forced to spit out as ballet director Thomas (pronounced toe-MA) Leroy.

3. The whole film, in fact, is terribly repetitive. Nina goes to practice, comes home, has a freakout in her teenybopper bedroom then wakes up to go back to practice. There's no narrative propulsion to the project, just anticipation for the next lurid activity.

Three things to know about that Portman/Kunis "hot lesbian sex scene" in Black Swan:

1. There's no nudity.

2. Any eroticism is mitigated by the CGI goosebumps spreading over Portman's skin the whole time.

3. And it's all in Nina's imagination (as Lily delicately puts it, "you had a lezzie wet dream about me?"). The more diverting scene is the one where Nina wakes up and starts masturbating until she realizes that her gargoyle mother is the room with her.

Three reasons you might want to just watch The Red Shoes instead:

1. Powell and Pressburger understood that a dance film is more entertaining if you actually get to see dances being performed. The Red Shoes offers wide shots of entire pieces before audiences, instead of closeup fragments of pieces seen only in rehearsal. The demands of the profession are shown but the film is not about endless drudgery and dry skin.

2. While Black Swan has lots of creative shrugs and leg warmers over leg warmers, The Red Shoes has a much more impressive array of costumes. The impresario Boris Lermontov's green dressing gown outstrips anything the Mulleavys came up with.

3. The Red Shoes relies on a far better metaphor of performance. When the Swan Queen dies her martyr's death at the end of Swan Lake, it's really a relief for Nina because her life is torturous. Compare that to the story of the red shoes, as described by Lermontov: "Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on." Such is art as it should be, never tired.

Re-Cast #1: The Great Gatsby

2010-12-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

So they're remaking The Great Gatsby and Baz Luhrmann has already incontrovertibly screwed up. The casting is all wrong: the squinty DiCaprio as Gatsby, the nicey-nice Carey Mulligan as Daisy (it should have been Blake Lively--catch my full re-cast after the jump) and the always insufferable Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway.

Lots of films, especially adaptations of literary classics, are undone by the actors chosen. Though in 1974 I would probably have picked much of the same Gatsby cast that Jack Clayton did (the choices for male leads, Robert Redford, Sam Waterston and Bruce Dern, still seem spot on). But just think about the 1949 and 2006 versions of All the King's Men. In the original all the composite characters and plot reductions drive me crazy and in the recent remake too many of the actors are British and/or phoning it in.

I tried to hash out the dream Gatsby cast with my friend Ashton and here's what we got.

Jay Gatsby: I favor CGI Robert Redford from 1974 since he always had the right look, or Brad Pitt, his anointed successor. Ashton thought James McAvoy, which works pretty well, or maybe Tom Hardy could step in.

Nick Carraway: I say Ryan Gosling because I want Ryan Gosling in every movie.

Daisy Buchanan: Blake Lively is the finalist who should have been Luhrman's pick; she's closer to Daisy in The Town than Mulligan is in anything she's done.

Jordan Baker: Anna Kendrick with her hair darkened and cruel smiles ramped all the way up is my favorite. Eva Green could also channel her Dreamers vibe as Jordan.

Myrtle Wilson: Scarlett Johansson would never do it even though it'd be a great role for her. If she ever decides to start doing good movies again.
Tom Buchanan: Josh Brolin (he'd could even keep all his True Grit mannerisms).

Ashton made many fine suggestions for the director of this film, once somebody puts a stop to Baz's madness: Danny Boyle, Joe Wright (only if it's written into his contract that he makes it lie the first hour of Atonement only), even Roman Polanski. In true WTT fashion, I'm going to ignore all these fine choices and say I want Sofia Coppola to do it. Because I think Marie Antoinette comes close to Gatsby-esque excesses and because she needs to redeem her dad's flat script in the '74 version. So now we're all set!

Alternately, we could bring this cast and crew back together:

But there's always more horrifying news, like Danny Boyle committing to make a sequel to Trainspotting.

Cover Art: The Thin Red Line

2010-12-07T22:32:00.000-08:00

Since it's in the all time top 3, I've got to say a word about the new Criterion Collection Blu-ray art for The Thin Red Line. This notwithstanding the fact I don't own a television or a Blu-ray player. As always it's the art, the art, that matters.

First it must be noted that any cover would be an improvement over the DVD I own, which is basically the movie poster with a "Fox War Classics" banner across the top. You might be able to argue whether The Thin Red Line is anti-war; you cannot argue that it's anti-war film genre.

I often just start gushing over Criterion Collection covers but in this case I, like Capt. Staros, am full of demurs. My main problem is with how much it resembles a book. I've read James Jones' novel and it is not close to the greatness of Terrence Malick's film. Given the director's free improvisations with the characters, the book on which its based fades away completely while re(re-re-re-re-re)watching the film. Also, I don't get why it reads "the thin RED LINE" with the font sizing. There's no literal "red line" to cross--the title comes from the statement: "there's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad." I will credit the designer for making the majority of the space open sky and clouds. The still used for the cover is from a scene where Malick makes the actions of the soldiers subordinate to the movement of light over landscape.

This original mock-up, which I became aware of because I encourage Criterion Co. to spam me, is much closer to my vision of The Thin Red Line. It could be controversial because it puts Jim Caviezel all out in front of an ensemble piece, but Witt is the main dude and the tree/shoulder emphasizes the film's crucial recursivity: man being absorbed back into nature. The fractured font is also closer to what I would choose, even if it again presents a false dichotomy between "the thin" and "red line." It's all brought back together by the circling of black birds and spray of red-orange sparks.

From the This Just Happened Dept.

2010-12-05T20:35:00.000-08:00

If you're like most people, you think all these blog posts on "the arts" are boring as hell (just see the one below!). So this post is for most people, because it's more or less a light bulb joke.

Every time I have to change the light bulb in the more challenging of my two kitchen fixtures (they don't match), I'm overwhelmed with trepidation. Until this afternoon, I had cooked my gourmet meals at the WTT compound in half-light for a week. But today, inspired by Christmas card writing procrastination, I acted decisively and swapped the bulb. You must imagine a fixture much like this one:

I stand on a chair, screw in the new bulb, and do my best to twist the fixture back in the two brackets that hold it in place. Each and every time I tentatively test the security of the light while stepping down from the chair I say to myself: Kirk, you just have make it out from under the fixture right now and then, if it falls, it will surely happen when you are no longer directly underneath.

The chances are low that I would be hit by a falling light fixture in my apartment. But, to echo the best line in Patty Berglund's autobiography in Freedom, they are, alas, not zero.

Cut to me some hours later, ravenously hungry and just plating a heap of penne pasta done to al dente perfection, as always (note: not really). There's a brief sound, not unlike glass scraping off a metal bracket, then a very cinematic THUMP--CRACK--SHATTER as the fixture strikes me on the left temple, breaks on the counter and dinner plate, and smashes into an impressive number of shards all over the linoleum and carpet.

My first thought is rage at the 20 cents worth of ruined pasta, one noodle of which rests forlornly on my slipper. Then I note that there's no blood (just red sauce) and I'm not seeing stars but instead yellow lightning bolts, which are much more appropriate for the occasion. I'm charmed.

I continue to monitor myself for concussion-like symptoms, hoping to avoid an Eric Lindros-like future of punchdrunkenness. I've learned the important lesson that I can change a light bulb by myself, but not necessarily without injury.

Fields

2010-12-05T18:14:00.000-08:00

Next time you're in San Francisco don't miss the awesome, stroller-free Pier 24 Photography.

One of the many pleasures when I visited was the room devoted to Andreas Gursky, including 99 Cents, the magnificent photo you see above. Using digital manipulations I can't begin to understand, Gursky created a vast, impossibly sharp image. I only tore myself away from studying the picture when I became embarrassed at how long I'd spent staring, walking forward and backward.

It seems to me that the consumerist distribution of colored packaging mirrors the egalitarian use of shades in Gerhard Richter's color field paintings, another favorite.

Immersion Theory

2010-12-04T20:35:00.000-08:00

Two of my great pleasures this week, along with Simpsons mania at Splitsider and the continuing presidential insistence that wearing a shiny bomber jacket around military dudes will make them look real tough, have been the documentary Marwencol and Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless.

Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol seems like a short, sweet documentary about an outsider artist but its meta (or meta meta) implications linger well after the 80 minute running time. After being beaten into a nine-day-long coma, Mark Hogancamp loses his memory and, without much professional psychiatric care, begins to reconstruct his life with G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls. They represent himself and his acquaintances and inhabit a handmade, fictional WW II-era hamlet named Marwencol.

His stories have shocking, telenovela-style plot twists (e.g. exes are disappeared by blue-haired Belgian witches) with a Michael Bay-level of violence (red is clearly the most used color of craft paint). Mark's idiosyncracies (besides the fact that he's created a 1/6th scale alternate reality behind his trailer) reveal themselves as the film goes on. As the owner of 200+ pairs of ladies shoes, he's able to use the term "Manolo Blahnik slingback" knowledgeably while trying on a pair.

A feature in Esopus Magazine eventually lands Mark a gallery opening in New York City (where he laments wussing out and wearing "fucking man shoes!"). But I'm still considering which part of his work that I like the most. The stories are great and I hope he's writing them all down. The figures and buildings themselves are gorgeous, not to mention the customized miniature fashion he mains down to distressing individual threads of doll-sized military police armbands. And the photographs (which a critic points out are refreshing for their lack of irony) are what sell in the galleries and what, I hope, keep the man in food and action figure money for years to come.

That a book about the making of Fitzcarraldo would be interesting is not surprising; that it's both an in-depth look at exactly how unlikely it was that the film would ever be made and a startlingly detailed travelogue puts Conquest of the Useless high on my list of compulsively readable books. One can pick a great quote by opening the book at random, but here's an example:

Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one is there. He has taken possession of almost all the forks. This morning he stole the milk bottle used by Gloria's little daughter, and Gloria saw him out in the bushes sucking on the nipple until the bottle was empty. She is convinced the monkey will rape the baby, and she wants him shot before he does so. Around his waist the monkey still has the piece of electrical cable with which he had been tethered, and when he climbs he holds the cable high in the air with his tail, with which he can grasp things like a hand; that way it cannot interfere with his movements.

In this passage we see the one of the myriad, vaguely terrifying challenges that the production faces but also Herzog's winking affection for creative adaptation in the wild. As the director of Fitzcarraldo he must work through many such constraints, handling his actors with the same dexterity he does his prose.

Herzog begins his journals with a focus on slices of jungle life but he really revs up when putting down the original star of Fitzcarraldo, Jason Robards Jr (he's introduced a coward whose real problem stems from his "inner emptiness"). He complains about everything, even the "porcelain toilets" that Herzog was so careful to provide in their remote Peruvian camp.

I'm enjoying the hell out of Conquest of the Useless, and Klaus Kinski hasn't even arrived yet...

In these works, Hogancamp and Herzog live their art every day, even if they are occasionally interrupted by the need to make meatballs or slash snakes with machetes. I sense that Herzog would have gladly made his own documentary on Marwencol (I picture him listening to recordings of the assault on Hogancamp and telling Mark he must never listen to them).

I want the same immersion in my day-to-day but the challenge is finding meaningful art in three hole punching and filing.

Rom-Com Futures

2010-11-23T18:32:00.001-08:00

This week on the CAB I talk about the likable Rachel McAdams picture Morning Glory, and wonder about the near future prospects for the the romantic comedy genre, which seem perpetually dim this century.

This looks like a no:

And really it's a no not just because of my irrational hatred for Anne Hathaway and rational dislike of Jake Gyllenhaal. The idea of two loveless misanthropes as attractive as Jake and Anne falling for each other is contrived even for this genre. I don't understand jheri curl Jack Black's joke about Jake being abducted by aliens and I get Anne's "it's really hard to believe" Viagra joke but it isn't funny. Bottom line: you'll go to this movie if you'll watch any rom-com or if you're tantalized enough by the chance that Ms. Hathaway will really be naked onscreen.

This looks like a maybe:

I won't lie--50% of my desire to see the film is Reese's off the shoulder, over the hand blue sweater outfit, which certainly can't be missed (the producers know this so that's why it's in the trailer nine separate times). But there's also Jack and Paul Rudd (whose "not from my perspective" line is probably the best offering). And James L. Brooks made As Good As It Gets, a title that places itself perfectly in the last 15 years of rom-coms. I credit the casting director for selecting Owen Wilson and Domenick Lombardozzi as Washington Nationals pitchers--I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see them come out of the bullpen for the Nats next year.

The problem is I don't have any must sees to post. Where's the great comedic director who includes less than 50% dick jokes? And where's my Philadelphia Story DVD?

The Way We Live Now

2010-11-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

This week on the CAB I discussed the relevant merits of Zacharius Galifianakis and his latest film Due Date. But the more interesting of his films this season is Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's It's Kind of a Funny Story.

Galifianakis does have to stretch a fair bit to inhabit Bobby, a depressed father trying to do for fellow psych ward patient Craig (a very Culkin-esque Keir Gilchrist) what he can't do for his daughter on the outside. I particularly liked the subplot in which Bobby is embarrassed to the point of rage that he doesn't have a proper shirt to wear to his group home interview.

In more important news, I have a new candidate for the coveted WTT #1 crush: Zoe Kravitz (it turns out 50% Lenny Kravitz and 50% Lisa Bonet is 100% good looking (and I checked--she's 22)). While Craig develops a more conventional relationship with Emma Roberts' Noelle and her well done facial scars, I thought his teenage obsession with Zoe Kravitz' Nia was much more realistic. Nia is dating Craig's best friend and his every interaction with them is a perfect iteration of a young man's ecstatic suffering. When Craig realizes his mental illness could be a lure for Nia their scenes are the most charged moments the film.

I wish Boden and Fleck had allowed themselves a little more wildness in It's Kind of a Funny Story--they are so careful to avoid offending any groups in the film that it lacks the bite that could have put it over the top (they also continue the trend of unnecessary animated sequences cluttering up recent films). I think back on Half Nelson and feel it was much riskier but perhaps I'm really remembering Ryan Gosling's still-rattling, once-in-a-decade performance (I'm pumped that he's finally back with Blue Valentine and All Good Things this winter). With Sugar and their latest film, the directors have shown themselves to be precise executors of compelling stories, if fundamentally conservative.

Baffled as to why there hasn't been more blogging this month

2010-10-31T19:22:00.000-07:00

There hasn't been nearly enough blogging in October and I'm ready to make excuses.

1) October is my least favorite month and everything always goes wrong!

2) I've been exhausted by my twittering!

3) I've been reading things that make me reconsider my blogging efforts!

I'm just digging into the reborn Baffler. Astra Taylor's piece, "Serfing the Net," sticks out especially for its up-to-the-moment relevance to blogging. She makes great points about corporations that pirating from the pirates (like Nike appropriating designs first seen on bootleg shoes). She claims that Google doesn't really want to digitize every book in the world because they're a bunch of socialists--they want that almost infinite number of pages for targeted advertising.

Taylor talks about a future where gathering online followers is the only way for an artist to survive (because of the ad revenue their hits could generate). As even Free! author Chris Anderson is forced to admit, "Free can't yet compare to Paid." And this, from the triumphant climax of "Serfing the Net":

There's a dignity, a right livelihood if you will, that comes from supporting oneself through creative work undertaken with integrity. Yes, artists will work for love, not money. There are many occupations where that is case. But the idea of building a massively profitable industry on the uncompensated labor of say, teachers, would strike most as loathsome, not daring and innovative.

So I guess you can look forward to lots of Google ads in this space, as I look to put the "fee" in "free." I hope it doesn't put off my robust readership!

Still not on Facebook but...

2010-10-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

Due to the exhausting responsibilities of starting a WTT Twitter and other real job things I haven't yet weighed in on The Social Network, the biggest film of the year, if we pretend Inception never happened (which is my plan). I went into Fincher's new movie in full no-way-it-can-be-as-good-as-people say mode and it surprised me with its brilliance.

There are so many intriguing facets to the film (the realistic darkness of dorm life, the twitchy dialogue "like a Stairmaster," the cream-trimmed Harvard blazers of the Winklevi) but I'm focused mainly on Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, en fuego). The most insightful line I read in any of the fawning reviews of The Social Network was by David Denby, who said there will be as many interpretations of Zuckerberg as there are people who see the film. Which is quite a trick to pull off, and a credit to Aaron Sorkin's script and Eisenberg's immersion in character.

I fall more in the "his assholishness is appropriate for a man in his position" camp, whereas other people I've talked to have, reasonably, completely discounted him as a thief and a jerkoff. I guess what I found appealing about Zuckerberg's character is his unflagging willingness to not play ball. He calls out lawyers when it would be better to be meek: "have I adequately answered your condescending question?" He might be a latter-day, somewhat autistic Gordon Gekko, but that's still more Gekko than Michael Douglas is for 90% of Wall Street 2.

Zuckerberg also speaks a crucial line for our times in the Winklevi deposition, which you know from the trailer: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." There's the crux of The Social Network. On one hand, he's just being a prick--he kind of took their idea and sandbagged them during the 40 days he needed to start a 75 billion dollar website. On the other, he's telling the damn truth: your ideas are only worth what you make of them. If I were the writer of a great American novel, I'd have a great American novel, not piles of notes. It's execution, execution, execution or you're another schmo watching invention patenting infomercials on cable.

I also have to briefly address the ludicrous allegations of the film's misogyny. What am I missing? There are two principal female characters in The Social Network: Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) and Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones). They are intelligent, successful women presented in total contrast to the gross immaturity of the men who dominate the film with their childishness. We're really getting so shrill over the presentation of other women (who are essentially extras) as drunken/stoned objects of male desire? I'm not sure what Fincher could have done differently to decrease the supposed misogyny, short of turning the only other sympathetic character, Eduardo Saverin, into a woman. Surely we're at the point where we can separate the misogyny of characters from the misogyny of works of art, right?

For instance, I watched Vera Cruz yesterday and I suppose I could dismiss the film because the women are beautiful but rather shiftless and scheming. But instead of ejecting the DVD I continued watching for a classic Gary Cooper strong-silent performance, the incredible physicality of Burt Lancaster and Robert Aldrich's fabulous long tracking and panning shots. At some point you have to find something better to bitch about.

@thewhitetanktop

2010-10-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my role as an active participant in the City Arts Fest, I am now in possession of a WTT Twitter.

I'm frightened for me too. Someone fetch my Twitter pillow.

@something RT: something #something something!

Did You Know I Am Also a Dance Critic?

2010-10-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Neither did I. But this was fun.

Sleeping Buffalo

2010-10-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

Be sure not to miss my poetic homage to Gordon Gekko at CAB.

The image above, found in the office of Bretton James, is my second favorite buffalo in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (the first being John Buffalo Mailer). The oeuvre of the artist, Simen Johan, runs a little deeper than that of Mailer fils and several of his images would be perfect accompaniments to other films.

For Werner Herzog's next adventure in South America:

For the unhinged 21st Harry Potter film, where Daniel Radcliffe is in his mid-40s:

For Lars Von Trier's first post-lobotomy feature, which will have two talking foxes:

For M. Night Shyamalan's next film, which will certainly involve at least one kid who looks like this:

Bred for their skills in magic

2010-09-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Somehow (I blame having a day job), I've missed until today news of the birth of new liger cubs.

One reads Harper's Index to become depressed and Harper's Findings to laugh:

Three liger cubs were born in a Taiwanese zoo whose keepers had allowed an African lion and Bengal tiger to cohabitate. Previous attempts to separate the couple, said the zoo's owner, had made the lion "very angry."

Impeccable comic timing, as always. Apparently the zoo owner is subject to a stiff $1,500 fine for illegally cross-breeding the great cats.

That anything nefarious could happen in something called The World Snake King Education Farm in Tainan, Taiwan is absolutely shocking. I think they just did the only natural thing when faced with an angry, and no doubt horny, African lion.

So Many Title Shots

2010-09-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

From the timewaster who brought you Fake Criterion Covers (still going, check the new Pi cover), I give you the Movie Title Stills Collection.

You can browse start titles (and many end titles) by year which, if nothing else, is a great study of trends in font.

Some live up to the excellence of the film:

Some do not:

And one is just the best:

Overall the site functions as a nice survey of films to put on the queue. I marched forward from the 20s and it pains me to say we might be mired in the most boring era for film titles!

While Michael Haneke can be counted on for excellence, don't look to America for any inspiration.

(Isn't Good Night, and Good Luck using the default font for iMovie?)

The only disappointment is that the little "buy" links don't take you to a page that miraculously sells high quality images of the title--they take you to an Amazon page to buy DVDs.

Holidays in the '40s

2010-09-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

Because I'm a huge fraidy cat, I'm never too keen on watching seasonally-appropriate horror movies on Halloween. But now, having seen Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, I'll be ready with a suggestion when the time comes.

In man's continuing quest to determine all the reasons women won't sleep with us, here's another: Irena (Simone Simon) can't sleep with Oliver (Kent Smith) because if she does she will turn into a panther and kill him. I'm a believer, and would have immediately backed away from Irena but Oliver is that kind of cardboard cutout American who won't take no for an answer. He consults his work chum Alice (Jane Randolph), who isn't a lesbian and therefore produces a romantic complication and Dr. Judd (Tom Conway), who becomes quite captivated by Irena's case.

Tourneur does not miss any opportunities for dramatic lighting. He gives Oliver and Alice a long sequence where they are illuminated only by bright light tables, heightening the effect by having a black kitten walk across the top of one. At only 75 minutes, there's a focus on each shot being as efficient and memorable as possible.

The chilliest scene, straight out of nightmare, has Alice swimming alone in a pool late at night, perhaps with a panther lifeguarding. The camera revolves around the room over and over as we wait for more than the shadow of the panther to appear. Tourneur brilliantly captures the pitch of the pool waves and Alice's screams for help. In the end, her bathrobe takes the brunt of the offensive but her days of evening pool exercise are probably over.

Irena has an abiding interest in the black panther at the zoo, which she visits frequently. Twice she has the opportunity to steal the key to its cage and we have to ask ourselves the delicious question: does she want to let the panther out, or herself in?

The film ends on a stunning tableau, an exquisitely composed shot that blurs the line between the woman and the cat. Plus there's a quotation by John Donne!

So Cat People is charmingly acted, short, scary, beautiful and it ends with poetry--what more do you want?

It seems a mistake that the film was released on Christmas Day 1942 when it's so clearly a Halloween movie. The better 40s Xmas feature is The Shop Around the Corner.

It's a great regret of my life that Jimmy Stewart does not attempt a Hungarian accent in this Budapest-set film (I had to content myself with the way he slurred his coworker's surnames). Nowadays reading papers in Hungarian and working in a shop with Hungarian signage would necessitate all actors speaking in ridiculous variations on an accent. It's almost as if Ernst Lubitsch knew then more than directors do today...

Stewart is Alfred Kralik, one of the principal employees of Hugo Matuschek's (Frank Morgan) store. His friend, and sage family man, is Pirovitch (Felix Bressart). The obsequious Ferencz Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut) is Kralik's natural rival. He seems a little light on his feet so it's all the more amusing when we find he's banging the boss's wife. Pepi (William Tracy) is the inimitable errand boy. And then there's Klara (Margaret Sullavan) who would be great looking if she didn't insist on wearing the most unattractive blouses.

The film is funny two ways, both in the above average jokes and in the rampant misogyny of the screenplay. The shtick is that Kralik and Klara are falling in love as pen pals while hating each other at work. There's a lot of fine repartee (Klara says things like, "Well I really wouldn't care to scratch your surface, Mr. Kralik, because I know exactly what I'd find. Instead of a heart, a hand-bag. Instead of a soul, a suitcase. And instead of an intellect, a cigarette lighter... which doesn't work. "). But Kralik has all the power in their relationship because he finds out that Klara is the recipient of his missives and tortures her with this knowledge for an hour or so before finally revealing the truth.

To complete a joke established early in the film about bowleggedness, Kralik makes every lady's dream come true and reveals his skinny legs, complete with sock garters. Lubitsch crowns the picture with other fine scenery--a lingering shot of the Christmastime streets of Budapest. The fake snow and real bustle make for a perfectly romantic ending (I once spent a decidedly less picturesque Christmas Day working retail in a Las Vegas casino, about which no film has yet been made).

All in all, The Shop Around the Corner is a perfect sneak attack for an impromptu December night in with your sweetheart. What am I saying? My plot will be ruined if I try to pull the move on anyone who reads this blog...

We Are Going to The Town

2010-09-22T15:44:00.000-07:00

Watching The Town, I was concerned at the start when my main focus was on which Boston sports team would be on Ben's next track jacket (the Pats must be upset that none of their gear was ever on display). And it takes an hour to shake the Don Draper off of Jon Hamm's FBI agent (it finally happens when he wears a particularly unfortunate flannel shirt).

But enough about the clothes--this is a thriller about bank robbers, after all! As the pre-credit titles inform us, The Town is Charlestown, where there's more men working with submachine guns and Skeletor masks than anywhere else in the world. In case we might forget where we are, a hundred or so helicopter establishing shots of the Bunker Hill Monument help us remember.

Director Ben Affleck chose Ben Affleck to star as Doug, a gifted bank robber who's (spoiler alert!) also a pretty swell guy. His partner is Jim (Jeremy Renner, very at home and more comfortably trashy than Affleck), his ex is Jim's sister Krista (Blake very Lively) and his boring new girlfriend is Claire (Rebecca Hall), an employee of a bank he robbed.

The big problem: the movie should have been about Jim, not Doug. Look at either Scarface. Paul Muni and Al Pacino weren't the nice guys, they were the guys with sadistic spark that Jeremy Renner gets to display all too infrequently in The Town. The best scene is probably the one where Jim and Doug beat on some townies. Doug keeps his hockey mask on during the assault to avoid reprisal but Jim tears his off so the victim knows who to fear. A hint for Affleck going forward: we're more interested in the scary guy than the scared guy.

I'm sure the screenplay was how it was in the source novel and blah blah but as a director you have to see the actor who brings the heat and go with him. This is maybe harder to do if you're the director and star with less heat.

At least he looked sexy as hell. I find the older Ben, with a lined forehead, grey hairs and ripped body to be much more attractive than baby Ben. While Doug struggles to stay awake while talking to Claire as she plants flowers for poor children to trample, he has better chemistry with the slatternly, unapologetic Krista. For important historical background on this matter, see Vulture's 59-page slideshow "Blake Lively's Breast Looks" (hey--I just report the news!). I much preferred Affleck's "I'm trying to be a classy guy but I'm really not" vibe to his "I'm trying to be a classy guy" vibe with Rebecca Hall. Who was just boring.

Despite all demurrals, I'd recommend the film. It's well-cast (with fine additional work by Chris Cooper and Pete Postlethwaite in what I understand to be flawless Northern Irish accent). It has my best ever chase scene starring a minivan. And it steals the ending of The Shawshank Redemption so neatly that I had to tip my hat. If only Ben's bearded Florida revelry were interrupted by Blake Lively approaching on a canoe, asking where she could score some Oxy...

Joaq

2010-09-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

After Casey Affleck revealed that I'm Still Here was a hoax, I could go see it. I can't take any more of this Exit Through the Gift Shop, Catfish, etc."is it real or not?" nonsense.

My favorite indication of Joaquin Phoenix's false hip-hop persona (besides the fact that the film has fucking writing credits (pull your head out of your ass Roger Ebert)) was his rap name itself: JP. Every time I heard "JP" I didn't know to whom we were referring, as the man's name starts with W and F sounds.

My main takeaway from the film is that Hollywood fame is hellish. There's so much empty waiting around time, arranging meetings that won't be kept, finding cars and drivers and planes to nowhere, nibbling unsatisfactory room service, listening to the dull squawk of "entertainment news," saying "what's up?" to dozens of strangers and letting your assistants run your life so that you can emerge from these uncanny spaces and be erased in a storm of camera flashes.

In general it might make you so depressed that you start to look like Vincent Gallo with a more uneven part in the mustache of your beard.

I'm Still Here is only interesting in the parts where pieces of Phoenix's acting life come through. He has a nice beef about the Academy stupidly praising Revolutionary Road over Reservation Road and it's interesting to learn that he doesn't watch the movies in which he acts...maybe, if you can take him at his word. Stupid mockumentaries.

All of this leads to the question: have you seen Joaquin's theoretical swansong, James Gray's Two Lovers, even if he hasn't? His performance, as the all-time most irresistible 30-something man who lives with his parents, is immense, one of the finest I've seen in the last decade. Leonard Kraditor's combination of conviviality, moroseness, intelligence and naivety isn't quite like any other character I can recall. Phoenix, totally locked in, makes his every move worth close inspection.

He so outshines Gwyneth Paltrow (resembling a forlorn corn husk as the supposedly passionate Michelle) that I felt bad for her. She should have been driven to retirement, though I'd be remiss not to mention her flashing a single boob for Leonard, which was world class. Michelle is better paired with her married lawyer boyfriend, played by a bespectacled Elias Koteas with his usual aplomb.

Vinessa Shaw fares somewhat better as Sandra, Leonard's conventional choice for a mate (they usually speak on a land line while Michelle talks to Leonard on a cell phone, in a not terribly subtle move by Mr. Gray). The parental-approved couple share a fabulous scene at a ice blue boardwalk restaurant where she observes that Phoenix is frozen in place and gifts him a pair of gloves. The gesture is warm but the situation isn't. Napkins arranged in the water glasses around the couple are like stilled fountains.

Isabella Rossellini, playing Leonard's mother, is the only figure intuitive enough to see Leonard's next moves. She's there in the end (at a chilly New Year's party) to observe her son throw it all away in the name of love and then take it all back. Phoenix acts the climax with few words but we see perfectly Leonard's blend of total calculation and terror. His behavior is cruel enough to poison one's idea of love--what a feat!

A Splendid Interpretation of a WTT Favorite

2010-09-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

Outrages

2010-09-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

I spent Sunday outraged at one thing or another.

First there was an official ruling in the NFL so egregious it could only happen to my Detroit Lions. The details are not terribly interesting but the fallout can be summed up thusly:

I did not record that clip but I used many of the same words in my description of the situation.

Football is a stupid thing to get worked up about and it wasn't until later in the afternoon I found something truly worthy of anger.

The Tillman Story is one of the few valuable films I've seen that I would caution people before watching (the transparency of Restrepo makes that difficult movie much easier to take). After absorbing the story of the Tillman family, I sat in the theater shaking, wishing I had picked the easy escapism of Centurion.

Amir Bar-Lev's documentary begins with a great shot of Pat Tillman, then a starting safety for the Arizona Cardinals, trying to stay still for ten seconds while doing a promo for Monday Night Football. He can't do it, saying ten seconds "is a long ass time to just sit there." While the background material on his roughneck nature did not surprise me, his lack of religious beliefs or conservative politics did. He was a liberal atheist who died believing the war in Iraq was illegal.

The circumstances around his death by fratricide go far beyond the "fog of war" generalities that have been used in all reports that I've ever read on the subject. The gist is as follows. While tracking back to the rest of his battalion with a couple of other Army Rangers, Pat Tillman is pinned down by friendly fire from the very Rangers he is trying to help (it has never been determined that any enemy combatants were present at the scene). A member of the volunteer Afghan security force running beside Tillman is killed by the Rangers immediately, presumably for looking too much like an enemy combatant. Tillman throws a smoke grenade in the air, to try to alert the firing soldiers that they are on the same side. The Rangers continue shooting at Tillman and Pfc. O'Neal, approaching as close as 40 yards to their position. After shouting for the last time, "I'm Pat fucking Tillman, why are you shooting at me?" Tillman's head is blown completely off his shoulders by heavy rounds and the sound of blood pouring from his neck is, accordingly to O'Neal, "like a water fountain."

After a heroic fight against government and military stonewalling, the Tillman family forces the matter before Congress. Then, once again, the terrible facts of the matter mount. That all the highest ranking Army generals knew how he died and lied about their handling of the situation when questioned by Congress ("I don't recall," "I don't recall," "I don't recall"). That Donald Rumsfeld knew and lied about it when questioned by Congress ("I don't recall"). That George W. Bush knew and propagated lie after lie not just to obscure the truth, but to use Pat Tillman as a recruiting tool for the military. That this is another American scandal without justice, for the conspiracy is too vast to be publicly revealed.

Pat Tillman should have been back this weekend, finishing out his football career as a fan favorite. Instead he's dead, murdered by the men he helped protect, used unwittingly as propaganda by the country he served, in a story few of the fans who loved him will ever know.

The National Grass

2010-09-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I went to see The National. Well, because I had a free ticket. (Note: the picture above is not from the Seattle show yesterday--I tried to find a real picture from the show but all Seattle news sources failed me. But that's pretty much what the dude looked like.) I know the songs of The National just enough to be annoyed that I don't know all the lyrics to the good songs, which are sort of hard to tell apart. I spent all day watching football and hoping it would rain and I wouldn't be able to go, because the show was outside.

I planned to stand up (and rock out!) but of course once I saw that sitting was an option I did that. I sat far to the front but off stage left, in the area that young mothers stood and danced with children up past their bedtime. The light show strobed the intermittent puffs of smoke from the interior of the gently rocking crowd, almost like people in a movie theater. Really the best part was the smell of grass (the kind on the ground) in the park and the lowering darkness that made people less and less distinguishable until they were avoidable shadows.

Luckily The National have a song just for my mood (not to mention post-9/11 America): "Afraid of Everyone." I think part of it goes: "I'm afraid of everyone, I'm afraid of everyone / They're the young blue bodies / With the old red bodies / I'm afraid of everyone, I'm afraid of everyone." I need to get those lyrics straight for the next time I try to enter society for the mutual enjoyment of music.

Flawed Killers

2010-09-09T21:09:00.001-07:00

Taking a short break from the art house, I’ve just seen two films that really stack up some bodies—Anton Corbijn’s The American and Jean-Francois Richet’s Mesrine: Killer Instinct.

In the former, there are a few too many reminders that assassin Jack (George Gloomy) is, in fact, the American in Castel del Monte, Italy. He orders an americano at least three different times. When he goes to a bar, he hears “Tu Vuo’ Fa’ L’Americano” (more memorably done in The Talented Mr. Ripley). The next time he arrives the bar is showing Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, the easiest choice for Italian-American mash-up. We would have known he was an American from how he’s always driving a car alone—Corbijn could have opted for subtlety.

Although such a figure can be a bit of a cliché, I did enjoy the fatherly priest played by Paolo Bonacelli. He is full of insight for Jack: “journalism cannot make you rich” and his extravagantly bagged eyes were hard to shake. I thought Corbijn did some of his best work in framing Jack and Father Benedetto—they don’t often face each other when speaking, but elaborate focuses and blurs keep the eye trained on the pair.

Corbijn never gets the same intimacy between Jack and Clara (who, like all small town Italian prostitutes, is gorgeous and bilingual and keeps a vibrator and pistol in her drawer) because the camera is usually trained somewhere south of her eyes. The fact that the actress who plays Clara, Violante Placido, is Simonetta Stefanelli’s daughter (you remember Stefanelli as Michael Corleone’s Sicilian wife in The Godfather) intrigued me to no end, but I wouldn’t have guessed the relation.

Though many critics have called the film boring, my main regret is that The American wasn’t ponderous enough. The best scenes feature Jack gathering materials and working alone on the weapon he’s been commissioned to build. There was an opportunity to detail the level of craftsmanship, as seen in a film like The Conversation, but it doesn’t happen. Just when we see the mercury go into a tip of the bullet, the film cuts to the bullets being packaged. I wanted to know exactly how the bullet was finished, and how Jack knew his product was perfect.

Elsewhere, Corbijn is superb. He offers a great scene of arrival in Jack’s first choice of a hideout—Castelvecchio. Stepping out of the car in a small square, he silently catches the eyes of three locals, gets three stone-faced stares in return, hops back behind the wheel and hightails it out of town. In another sequence, Jack moves from the red light of Clara’s room to the amber light of the slick midnight streets to the bright white light of his work table—a perfect illustration of a cipher shifting between roles.

While I’ve never warmed all the way up to Mr. Clooney, Vincent Cassel I love. I’m drawn to the barely masked sadism that plays across his roles in Irreversible, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, La haine, Eastern Promises and even the Ocean’s pictures. That he’d already won the best actor César for Mesrine seemed a sure sign the film (released here in two parts) would be excellent.

And yet, in part 1, Killer Instinct, the only excellent thing is Cassel’s sneering visage (especially when sporting the Joaquin Phoenix-as-rapper look). Perhaps because Mesrine was a real figure, Richet felt pressure to include every crime he ever committed. The pace of the murders exhausted me and that’s just half of the film. No secondary characters are developed beyond sight (I learned, for instance, that Gerard Depardieu hasn’t grown old as much as he’s grown out).

As Mesrine racks up a body count, so too does Richet accumulate visual styles and motifs. While the credit sequence mostly uses a (1968) Thomas Crown Affair frame within frame style, it ends with a clear homage to Bonnie and Clyde. Some nice matching cuts do well to shift the action spatially, but the director also falls into some trite shots, like several dizzying 360 degree takes meant to invoke Mesrine’s delirium in jail. Of films I’ve seen recently, Nicholas Winding Reyn’s Bronson achieves much greater cinematographic cohesion, which allows a deeper study of its protagonist.

I might still check out part 2, Public Enemy #1, if the lure of co-star (and WTT favorite) Mathieu Amalric proves to be too much.

Matisse at MoMA

2010-09-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Of all the big name paintings at MoMA's Matisse: Radical Invention show, the one that's stayed with me longest is his above "Bather," from 1909.

The iconic, saved for last paintings "Bathers by a River" and "The Piano Lesson" are tremendous examples of art that is plainly correct, in a way that makes us feel Matisse's perfection of color, figures, space and brush/knifestrokes must be intuitive. The canvases are like the best poetry, with the finest details (of fabric, form, architecture, anything else) on top, then layered by importance. And some of the show's ordering was fun, like the way that still lives of apples matched the heads of the "Moroccans" in one room.

But back to my "Bather." He's rather hunched, like me studying him, and poised, black outlines quivering. The part that grabbed me was the aqua in his wake. The lighter blue infers movement in the otherwise flat blue sea. In that tension I could almost feel the water myself.

While shifting my weight from leg to leg as I looked, I thought of the bit in Mates of State's "An Experiment" that asks, "I wonder if I could tie the ocean to your knees?" I also wished I had headphones to drown out the super-parents parroting the "correct readings" of paintings from audio guides to their 5-year-olds' ears.

Surely I would have been a better instructor, after the children got over the trauma of me dispatching their mothers and fathers with swift kicks to the head

Late Summer Graham Greene

2010-08-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

"The rollers came in from the Atlantic and smashed over the sea-wall. The spray drove across the road, over the four traffic lanes, and beat like rain under the pock-marked pillars where they walked. The clouds came racing from the east, and he felt himself to be part of the slow erosion of Havana." --Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana

I'm in love with all romantic descriptions of places I've never been and the above is just one Greene dispenses effortlessly in Our Man in Havana. I'm pleased to have picked such an appropriate title for the end of summer (it sure seemed well over in Seattle today). The characters, from Wormold the reluctant agent turned fabulist spy to Capt. Segura the wooer of Milly (Wormold's daughter) and unapologetic torturer, are so humorously drawn together that one can believe that the nuclear threat is really no more than a few sketches of vacuum cleaner attachments. Huzzahs also for Dr. Hasselbacher, an old timer who spends a great evening out, certain that he's won the lottery before the numbers are drawn: "Tonight I have won....Tomorrow I may have lost, but nothing can rob me of my victory tonight."

Throughout, I was reminded of Robert Polidori's photographs of Cuba, a wide book of which I would often flip through in my salad days as a part time independent bookseller. In his Havana, we see how the revolution has frozen Cuba, at least spatially, in the colonial era that Greene captures so well.

Now that all the painful reading is over I get to watch the film version. With Alec Guinness starring and Greene BFF Carol Reed directing, my hopes are high.

Hello Time Waster

2010-08-24T09:38:00.000-07:00

If you happen to have a job that involves hours of slow time, I can't recommend enough clicking through the entire 166 page thread of fake Criterion Collection covers on mubi.com. Start at the end and go backwards until fired.

There are cool designs:

Hilarious film choices:

And art so inspired you can't believe the DVD isn't already available for purchase:

If this thread is any indication, Stanley Kubrick remains the most fanboyed auteur (though he must be hearing Christopher Nolan's footsteps already).

Overall, it's amazing how important font is. Even the best designs are undone by font that doesn't look believable. But when the right combination hits the cover is instantly definitive.

If you wanted another thing to think about when watching films, now you can ponder which images would inspire the finest Criterion cover. Now if someone would just start a thread on booklet art...

Michiko, Surely You Jest?

2010-08-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

Surely surely surely Michiko Kakutani read this smackdown before writing her review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom? Either way, the piece is hilarious.

Compare Shivani's key claim:

Every good book is Chekhovian or Jamesian or Forsterian or Updikean--she has mastered the technique of saying nothing in a review by comparing books to an author's previous books and to classics which have nothing to do with the book at hand.

To the first sentence of Kakutani's review:

Jonathan Franzen's galvanic new novel, “Freedom,” showcases his impressive literary toolkit — every essential storytelling skill, plus plenty of bells and whistles — and his ability to throw open a big, Updikean picture window on American middle-class life.

And, in case that wasn't enough, a partial list of others to whom Franzen is compared in the review (which is about 1100 words):

Pynchon
DeLillo
Mann
Machiavelli
Nietzsche
Tolstoy
Dickens
David Foster Wallace
Freud
Darwin

If only she had capped it off by saying that Franzen was in the ballpark of her all time fave Gary Shteyngart...

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

2010-08-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in life you fall into a relationship of convenience and then, just when you realize it was all a mistake, you can't get out of your rut. This summer, my rut is Friday Night Lights (the overrated TV, not the overrated book).

It started innocently enough--I missed college football and had blown through all the episodes of the Big Ten's Greatest Games that didn't involve my Michigan State Spartans suffering a terrible defeat. Why not watch a little of the most football-related show streaming on Netflix?

I've also been playing co-ed softball doubleheaders which, for me, results in more or less continuously pulled quads. (WTT PSA: Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be softball players. I'm only on my team because a previous member broke her ankle at first base and, last Tuesday, we won a game by forfeit when an opposing player slid into second base and wound up with a kneecap 90 degrees out of alignment. Better to participate in a low-risk sport, like boxing or base jumping.) And so, with my ice packs firmly in place for at least 43 minutes, I slink into the variable Texas accents of the Taylors, the Garritys, the Collettes, the Williamses, the Rigginses, the Saracens, the Clarkes and all their attendant Latinos.

The main reason to watch the show is the charming, even plausible, relationship between Coach Taylor, his wife Tami and their unfortunately-banged daughter, Julie. It's fun to watch to see two people who use the word "y'all" as much as Coach and Tami get into it with each other, their eyes glowering and affectionate. There's lots of nice scenes where Coach just wants to watch football on the couch and the ladies make him talk about some silly lady business but then, in spite of himself, he gets all worked up about the silly lady business.

Of course I also have some natural affection for (Sex) Panther Tim Riggins, as he shares with WTT a similar hair style (though, it should be noted, I'm much better looking). He draws the most attention for his lack of guile and the way he wears his rumpled cowboy shirts just so. If only he weren't saddled with an absurd long-term affection for the insufferable Lyla Garrity (the girl full of kindness and goodness that you hope gets it first in a slasher flick).

I have less use for Smash Williams, who is ineffective in pulling off the third person voice. I did enjoy the period where he was dating the preacher's daughter though. I loved Waverly because the sure sign that she had bipolar disorder was her dinnertable recitation of a Robert Hayden poem. Poetry memorization: only for the insane.

Matt Saracen's best feature is his tentativeness, the way his eyes never lock on to anyone. That and the fact that got over his break up with Julie by balling his grandmother's live-in Guatemalan maid.

Tyra Collette is sexy in a way that makes me think of a frecklier, elongated version of Kristin Cavalleri from Laguna Beach. She's perfect when sleeping around and callously torturing Landry Clarke in Season 1 but, lamentably, the writers seem intent of giving her a heart in Season 2. It was truer to my personal experience when Landry (in a shocking turn, the writers give the ugly nerd all the funniest lines!) just stared at Tyra and made aimless jokes about algebra.

Speaking of Season 2--remember when Landry killed a guy with a lead pipe?!? This points to the largest problem with the series (more so than the horrifically conceived and executed football footage): way, way too many big plot points. Having watched mostly HBO productions the last few years, I was unprepared for the amount of story that has to be squeezed into each episode of FNL. Every time you think a twist might be coming, it comes, and usually it comes within one commercial break of when you have the thought.

I probably won't continue on with the show after the second season because it has so many problems. Maybe I'll just watch the first bit of Season 3, just to see what's happened over the summer...

Homework

2010-08-09T19:51:00.000-07:00

Writing my City Arts Blog review on Restrepo it was hard not to fall into arguments like "as an American, you need to see this to understand why we need to get the fuck out of Afghanistan." In spite of certain realities, I don't like to consider myself a shrill liberal bedwetter and the film really does do a good job of skirting the politics around the war.

But it's so disheartening watch a man who really cares about proper counterinsurgency, Capt. Kearney, undo his own laborious attempts at diplomacy with rash (if justifiable) assaults on villages that may or may not be providing material support to the Taliban. And to see in long take, close up young men who will never be the same for the things they've seen and done in the Korengal has upset me for days in a way that reading the daily New York Times stories never has.

Wender's Ripley

2010-08-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

When Dennis Hopper kicked the bucket I read the obituaries carefully trying to pinpoint some films that I could watch with the "good" Hopper, as I actively dislike his performances in every film I can think of besides Blue Velvet (and even then, it's Lynch who deserves the credit for lassoing the absurdity into usefulness).

Many critics complemented Wim Wender's The American Friend and that was first up, given my desire to see more Wenders and passion for all things Ripley. To cut to the chase: it's the same old menacing ferret routine from Hopper and he bored me. But Wenders' direction, and Bruno Ganz's character Jonathan Zimmermann, the true star of the film, make it worth a Netflixing.

Hopper's Ripley is less a tasteless, obsessive compulsive murderer (as portrayed by Matt Damon, John Malkovich, Alain Delon, et al) than an addled Eli Cash figure who tangles the terminally ill Zimmermann (a picture framer who's being framed!) in an assassination plot. Ganz is wonderfully wracked as a man caught between morality and the kind of money that could set up his wife and son after his death. It's fascinating to see how the act of murder charges Zimmermann with a new vitality, the adrenaline coursing through him as he makes his escapes. One moving scene has him slinking home to present a gyroscope to his son in the bathtub, moments before his wife chews him out for, you know, killing people for money.

Wenders makes all kinds of idiosyncratic choices with The American Friend. To fill the roles of two old criminals, he picks the directors Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller, both satisfyingly salty. He drenches some exterior shots with so much primary color that I have to wonder if Mr. Beatty had seen the film before directing Dick Tracy. Ripley is provided with the only car he could possibly drive through Hamburg: a white Ford Thunderbird with red interior. And, for a thriller, Wenders gives a lot of screen time to small moments, like a staredown between Zimmerman and a lapdog on a train and a conversation between art dealers on whether the shade of blue gives away one of Ripley's forgeries (they decide the painting will sell in New York regardless). By establishing such a textured backdrop, Wenders ensured my commitment to the characters as they careened towards their deranged ends.

From the Talented Bastard Dept.

2010-08-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

I keep seeing these awesome posters for the Rolling Roadshow but today I looked at who designed them: one Olly Moss.

Somehow the Rolling Roadshow does not hit Seattle (presumably because Olly couldn't design a cool enough Heathers poster).

But there's still his website where, luckily, I can't find a way to purchase posters or t-shirts. A sampling of things I need to have, right now:

Disagreeing with Pauline Kael

2010-08-06T17:29:00.000-07:00

Because my education in real film criticism has to start somewhere, I've been reading Pauline Kael's Reeling and enjoying the frequency with which I disagree with the last unanimously lauded film writer. Sometimes, as with her harshness towards Sam Peckinpah and Peter Bogdanovich, I can see her points and would probably lose an argument with her on his merits as a filmmaker. Elsewhere, I feel more combative to her opinions and approach.

And so, Badlands. She begins with a discussion of how Malick made the film at the same age (29) that Godard made Breathless and that Badlands is not as good. Not to set too high a bar or anything...

After establishing to her satisfaction that Malick is a lesser light than the greatest filmmaker of all time, she continues, "The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn't admire it, I didn't enjoy it, and I don't like it."

Even though I think a "succession of art touches" is kind of how you define a film, I'm actually impressed that she was willing to set something so petulant to print. Reading these lines were my first indication that the lady might be protesting too much. Kael returns over and over to the idea of the character's (and by extension their director's) emptiness. Her laughable take on Sissy Spacek: "She's just blah." I would argue it's brilliant to watch Spacek show the accumulating cracks in Holly's facade of adolescent love cliches. As the character puts it, "At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear, but just kind of blah, like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub."

In another strong statement, Kael writes that she found the "cold detachment" of Badlands offensive. I guess I can't be offended by Malick, who explores his detachment so beautifully. He has always pushed man far out into nature and explored the cruelty of each in turn (think of the scene in The Thin Red Line when, amidst a hail of Japanese bullets, the American soldiers also have to navigate around a viper lunging at them as they crawl uphill). Kit and Holly roll through the Badlands in wide angles that emphasize the smallness of humans on that western landscape where we've always projected our ideas of freedom. Instead of focusing on the plight of two characters blowing around the countryside, I think of the countryside itself, before and after. Kit's violence takes its place in the continuum of bloodshed in movie Westerns the just as real-life Charles Starkweather entered the history books with all the other murderers in the American West.

I should note that it's much easier for me to praise a film that I first watched after it had been canonized as an American classic than it was for Kael to write a review in its original theatrical run (she didn't get to take into account all the fabulous Bruce Springsteen music it inspired!). Perhaps, after Christopher Nolan has been anointed a greater director than Hitchcock and Fellini combined, I'll be ridiculed for napalming his crowning masterpiece, Inception.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish: The Pitch

2010-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

This one slipped through the cracks a little bit but, while reading the latest underwhelming piece of best 20 under 40 writing in the New Yorker (Tea Obrecht's "Blue Water Djinn") I was reminded of another beach story: Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." The only difference is that the latter might be the best thing the magazine ever published (the only story that Nabakov gave an "A+" besides his own pieces) and the former is...not.

Earlier this year, in Lillian Ross' Postscript for Salinger, there is one item that left me breathless:

"Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' and he said that is was uplifting news. 'I mean it,' he told me. 'She's a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I'm tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.'"

This is a film the world needs, even 45 years after the fact. I can smell the nail lacquer on BB's fingertips right now.

The principal cast and crew puts itself together in my mind instantly. Bardot is Muriel, Jean-Paul Belmondo is Seymour Glass, Godard directs, Coutard shoots. The year is 1965 and Godard goes right from Pierrot le fou to Bananafish, capping the greatest six-year stretch in the history of the cinema.

We could start in homage to the shot that ends Contempt--tracking back left after "Silencio," a long shot across the beach creeping up to a modern hotel in the south of France...

(Long aside on casting: In 1965, if BB, Belmondo and Godard all died in a dune buggy accident on the way to the set, you could back them up with Deneuve, Delon and Demy. If that group all got lost in a sandstorm, you would still have Moreau, Marc Michel and Malle. Keep that in mind when you try to cheer yourself up on the state of the art in 2010. I guess you could roll with Ludivine Sagnier, Melvil Popoud and Francois Ozon (the only advantage here is you could use Moreau's fabulously ravaged voice as the mother). To play in deeper hypotheticals, if we were making the film in, say, 2000, WTT demigods Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric and Arnaud Desplechin could have knocked it out of the park, though the actors now might be a bit too old.)

Okay, the reason this film will be great is Salinger's evergreen voice. Pick up Nine Stories. That cadenced dialogue is crisp a clean sheet in the summer breeze--we need to bring back telling people, "don't be fresh." My favorite sentence is about the young girl, Sybil, as seen by Seymour: "She ran a few steps ahead of him, caught up her left foot in her left hand, and hopped two or three times." Just imagine the mid-60's French equivalent of a Fanning sister doing that. Adorable.

The thing is that "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is only 23 narrow pages long. And we don't want to turn into a pure invention like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But I think there are enough hints at backstory dropped in Muriel's conversation with her mother to provide some enticing flashbacks: the funny business with the trees; the incident with the window; those horrible things he said to Granny about her plans for passing away; what he did to all those lovely pictures from Bermuda. You only see the couple together in flashback, until the last moments on the twin beds. Godard will figure everything out, using "Seymour: An Introduction" as necessary.

And if it has to be a short film, let it rub shoulders with La Jetée or An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. I'm telling you, sit a minute and picture Seymour and Sybil out finding bananafish. It's grand.

Not Sebald

2010-07-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

"I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order." --W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

What a perfect description of what I try to do every time I sit down to write. But why is Sebald so much better at it? Just look at the smug bastard.

After that sentence he's able to segue as smooth as a Spanish midfielder from checking out an innkeeper in a mirror to a discussion of provincial Italian theatre to a remembrance of a Chinese optician named Susi Ahoi who keeps making everything go out of focus and then back in, now as then.

A Defense of Hans Zimmer!

2010-07-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

You see, it's not his fault that the "score" to Inception is so atrocious.

It's that damn Edith Piaf (=Marion Cotillard=Mal!!!) whose song “Non, je ne Regrette Rien” sounds even worse when dramatically slowed down.

Now, my question is: how much did ole Hans get paid to to sludge up a Piaf song and turn the volume up to 11? At least six figures right?

(I like that the video is cut in half. It makes unraveling the meanings really challenging, like Inception! The NYT piece on the subject is here.)

Make It Better #2 (Inception)

2010-07-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Even though I'm well-versed in John Q. Public's tendency to heap praise on Hollywood garbage, I have to admit the love for Christopher Nolan's Inception bewilders me. Looking at the other huge, Oscar contending hits from the last three years, I can at least understand the draw. Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the most predictable film ever made but it's an easy escape into an Otherized spectacle (Bollywood dancing! Music by M.I.A.!). Avatard is likewise harebrained but walking with the blue Evan Turners through the 3-D spores from the tree of life was viscerally cool. Even Nolan's own Dark Knight had that one moment of joy when the Joker stuck is shaggy head out the car window into the magic hour air.

Inception, somehow, has even less to recommend it than all the other dreck (the comparisons to 8 1/2 are my favorite but why stop there--it's the Citizen Kane of the subconscious!!). I'm going to award Mr. O'Hehir at Salon the award for best zinger: "Inception may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan's dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay." It's so irredeemable that, for this edition of "Make It Better," I'm offering proposals to Mr. Nolan that could have helped push the film all the way into the land of farce, where it belongs.

1. Mr. Nolan, sir, could we make the music MORE portentous?

I don't think Hans Zimmer went far enough with the drum and trombone wailing. My eardrums were tested, but did not quite rupture. Given the hundreds of millions that this film is making, could you hire people to whack audience members over the head with frying pans during future screenings? We ought to leave Inception concussed and bleeding from the ears. My theory is that Leo wears that perpetual sweaty grimace because he was forced to listen to the soundtrack while acting.

2. Mr. Nolan, could we make the character names MORE symbolic?

It's been pointed out in many reviews but I still can't get over it. Ellen Page plays an architect of labyrinthine dreams named Ariadne. Fucking ARIADNE from Greek myth. It's not like the team gives her the codename Ariadne because she makes puzzles or because she helps save Cobb from THE MAZE OF HIS SUBCONSCIOUS IN WHICH HIS WIFE IS THE MINOTAUR--it's her actual fucking name. But I don't think it's the best choice. Given her role as the person who must explain everything that happens in the film, in the most transparent, stilted dialogue imaginable (e.g. "Do you think you can just lock her in a prison of memory?!?"), she should be renamed Exposition (Codename: Ariadne). She exists for the purpose of exposition and should be called that outright.

Also: Cobb's wife's name is Mal (BECAUSE SHE IS BAD!) but this is too subtle. I think certain viewers in Indiana might miss the point of a character just called Mal. I propose she be renamed Mal Evilheart, to remove ambiguity.

3. Mr. Nolan, could we make the film MORE humorless?

There is one moment in the film, apropos of nothing in a hotel lobby, where Arthur bends over and kisses Ariadne/Exposition to distract some bad guys--wait, I mean "dreamer's projections!"--and says the gambit was worth a shot (you'll note this line was spoken by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is far too amusing to be in this film). I uttered a short chuckle, which was the only time I laughed with the film all evening. The rest of the time was spent laughing at lines like, "I'm asking you to take a leap of faith!"

4. Mr. Nolan, could we have MORE slow motion shots of the van falling into the water?

I know there are dozens in the film already, but there were times in the last act where, for up to 60 seconds in a stretch, I was unaware of exactly how close that fucking van was to the water line and when the "kick" would rouse the passengers. If only you had tried to ramp up the dramatic tension just a little bit! There's still more juice in that lemon! Maybe in the DVD extras you could include an hour-long, slow motion film of just the van falling with your commentary on exactly where the team is on all the other levels of the dreams within dreams for each frame. (I honestly believe that fans of Inception would watch such a segment.)

5. Mr. Nolan, could we have ONE title card added right at the end of the film?

It should read: OMG GUYZ WILL THE TOP STOP SPINNING?!?!?!?!!?!?!?

Thank you for your kind consideration.

P.S. If, by chance, you want to see a dreamy movie that isn't aggressively stupid, check out Alain Resnais' Wild Grass.

Crash (not the film that I already know is shitty, the other one)

2010-07-21T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've just finished J.G. Ballard's Crash, which has to be the smuttiest book I've ever read primarily in a work breakroom (all apologies to James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime). I wondered if anyone preparing their Lean Cuisines took note of what I was reading with the Grinch's smile on my face.

My main point of entry for the novel is that, since my first accident at age 17, I've imagined, to the point of distraction, crashing my car and being maimed in the wreckage each time I get behind the wheel. If I'd only added a total conflation between the collision and the moment of orgasm, I'd be close to the mindset of the novel's main characters: the proto-reality TV goons Ballard (errr...) and Vaughan. There are so many mechanical and mammalian juices in this book that it's practically damp in your hands.

To pick my favorite of the dozens and dozens of repetitive, but somehow always new, descriptions of the crash/orgasm juncture:

"I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park. Disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses."

Obscenely beautiful how Ballard accelerates into these complex sentences of grotesque passion. You can't read this book and think of car interiors the same way. If I ever see a sedan with "mustard leatherette" upholstery, like that in the main vehicle Vaughan drives, I'll be unable to sit down on it.

While we get many iterations of straight sex in many iterations of back seats (wait for the jaw-dropping car wash sequence in particular), the climax of the climaxes in Crash is between Ballard and Vaughan. I credit the author for making good on the homoerotic tension he built for 200 pages. Ballard and Vaughan are the only two characters who, by any stretch of the imagination, love each other as they fuck.

There's also a good deal of wishful starfucking throughout the book--Vaughan's endgame is to die in a crash that also kills Elizabeth Taylor. So it's natural that they made a movie of it (though my mother will be sad to know it's without a racist Sandy Bullock).

At first I was horrified by the excesses of the trailer, then I realized it appears to be a straightforward depiction of events in the book. I'm still too scared to rent the film (mostly because James Spader is in the lead role) but I look forward to my next adventure in Ballard's prose.

Polanski's Repulsion

2010-07-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

Because I was so excited to hear about Roman Polanski once again escaping extradition the States for sodomizing a 13 year old and because it was on the shelf at the library, I just watched his 1965 film Repulsion.

My favorite thing about the film happened before it started. I put in the DVD and for whatever reason moved on to another important task (like bitterly refreshing the gamecast of the Tigers getting swept by the Indians). Some minutes later I noticed a faint clanging of bells and began investigating all open Firefox windows for an annoying pop up. Not finding anything that could be making the noise, I spent a while looking for an unknown alarm on my computer. I was wondering whether I had some kind of ear infection as I started the film, where the constant refrain of church bells is just one of the many signs that Carole (Catherine Deneuve) is losing her mind.

The plot is a straight line: Carole's sister leaves her alone in an apartment for two weeks with a decomposing rabbit and very bad things happen. The only reason to see this film is the not inconsequential pleasure of watching Deneuve wandering around in a nightie for 90 minutes (David Thomson has accurately compared her effect in this era to liquid cocaine). Polanski claimed that he just made Repulsion to get funding for the "more personal" Cul-de-sac, which is just like Coppola making The Godfather so he could direct Apocalypse Now, right?

Also, the somewhat sheepish essay in the Criterion booklet says that Repulsion is a big influence on the painter Luc Tuymans, which is kind of bewildering but neat.

Winter's Bone Redux

2010-07-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

I already saw Debra Granik's Winter's Bone at SIFF and loved it but I couldn't resist seeing the film again as a paying customer. I mostly wanted to confirm my laudatory thoughts because I've walked around calling it "the best American film of the year" (though a friend pointed out that Malick just might be coming out with The Tree of Life by the end of 2010, a real challenger on the horizon).

Perhaps because I'm preoccupied with artistic development this week, I got to thinking about the music of Winter's Bone in the second viewing. Since I didn't have to listen closely for crucial plot points, I was better able to enjoy the homespun songs that shroud the background (the music in Sayle's Matewan is the closest comparison I know). I was hoping there was an official soundtrack out there but apparently not.

The main class distinction among the people of Christian County seems to be the presence of satellite tv dishes on the porches of the more successful meth cookers. Those without television, like the Dollys, even consider picking up a banjo and making music (as mandatory instruction on topics like scatter gun safety allows). When Teardrop and Ashlee start strumming at the end of the film, it's a doubly happy moment. Not only will the family live on--they might even excel at something other than drug manufacture.

There's also the news that star Jennifer Lawrence has signed on to the new X-Men picture....It should be a more glamorous role for her but I hope that we aren't looking back in six years with the same wistfulness we feel for the Lost in Translation-era Scarlett Johansson.

William Finnegan on Surfing

2010-07-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

There are so many remarkable things about William Finnegan's 1992 New Yorker piece "Playing Doc's Games" that it's hard to know where to begin. Well, I should begin by saying you need to pony up subscription money to read this piece, or track it down elsewhere (but, with their thousands of archived articles available online, The New Yorker has become a better value).

First, there's the magazine itself, allowing two consecutive issues to be dominated by lengthy articles about surfing by a then less-known writer like Finnegan. Now I can only imagine the space being filled by a facile Malcolm Gladwell article on some contrary-sounding hypothesis that only his brilliant mind can elucidate, or an Oliver Sacks column on a New England man with a humorous brain condition. Not to mention all the poetry sprinkled through the issue (they're still mostly uninspiring poems from wizened old men, but there's more of them!).

I wouldn't normally be fascinated by thousands of words on surfing, but Finnegan's piece contains multitudes. He gives the precise descriptions in a New Yorker article: locations, techniques, subcultures and heroes. But Finnegan goes much deeper into his own psyche than I ever would have guessed. What begins as a standard glowing portrait of his charismatic friend Dr. Mark Renneker, a surfer/doctor/writer/guru/humanitarian, turns into a study of an artist finding his way.

Finnegan is lured by the easy blend of camaraderie and instruction he gets as a member of Doc's posse, trying to prove himself on the violent waves off Ocean Beach, San Francisco. But, after a few winters in the water, he realizes that surfing can be as distracting to one's vocation as any other addiction. For me, the piece's finest scenes feature a writer who needs the waves and the wind and the longboards and the friends almost as much as he needs to be alone.

So surfing and writing both abandon us with our fears, which I'd never guessed from my hours sitting on the beach, watching guys line up across the tide.

Irreversible and The Killer Inside Me

2010-07-12T17:40:00.000-07:00

My review of Michael Winterbottom's new film The Killer Inside Me is up on the City Arts Blog today and I wanted to further examine it next to Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, to which it has been widely compared.

The biggest difference I can find is the polar editing choices made in the films. While Winterbottom uses fast cuts to the point of distraction, Noé cuts as little as he can, trying to give the appearance of long, continuous shots wherever possible. For me this deflects a criticism I had of The Killer Inside Me: when Winterbottom lingers on Lou Ford's brutality towards women, it stands out. While the infamous 9 minute long rape of Monica Bellucci is excruciating, one can argue that Noé is following the internal logic of his own film, where all takes are extended. In actuality, if not in our emotional memory, Noé spends equal time on a scene of violence as he does on a sequence of his characters' everyday discussion.

And most of those discussions touch on anal sex, which is key to his project. I found the frequency of the comments somewhat distracting but the point is clear: violation is always on the minds of the "regular" guys, not just the sadistic rapist. With The Killer Inside Me, it is simpler to watch and say, "well, these horrifying beatings are just the actions of a psychopath." This mental distinction (and the fact that Casey Affleck is still Ben's little brother) made it much easier for me to get to sleep.

On top of the superior editing choices, Irreversible also has an advantage over The Killer Inside Me in cinematography. The latter has a pleasant enough small-town-Texas-in-the-50's look but Noé is audacious enough to use a color palette from hell. Many reviewers argued that the redness was overdone (and it probably wasn't politically correct to start off all the hell/devil/tunnel metaphors in a gay bondage club called Rectum) but I thought the look fit the subject at hand. When the story unwinds backwards to the beginning and spring greens and pinks begin to appear, the colors are as refreshing as they've ever been.

Reasons Not to Walk to the Rose Garden

2010-07-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

It's getting dark. The clouds along the horizon are grey enough to hold rain. My eyeglasses are the wrong prescription. I don't know whether to wear a long or short sleeved shirt. Some people continue to use vuvuzelas for the purpose of evil. My shoes make to much noise on the gravel path. The garden is lousy with bees. The roses aren't as good as they used to be before they switched to natural pesticides. I don't like the way different roses on the same bush can be different shades and textures of the same color. I used to walk through the garden with people who are gone. Some roses are the wrong shade or brightness for the celebrity after which they're named (e.g. Cary Grant). Many hybrids don't even smell like roses. "Rose people" might be there with maps open making overly detailed comments. I should spend the time reading my friend's manuscript or watching a challenging film. The walk is eight blocks, uphill.

Reasons to Walk to the Rose Garden

For a few minutes looking through the backs of rose petals, the light might be just perfect. And it was.

(Altissimo, climber.)

All SIFF All the Time

2010-05-24T19:42:00.000-07:00

White Tank Top has the pleasure of covering the 36th (I think) Seattle International Film Festival. Updates from the stable of talented City Arts writers can be found at the CAB SIFF page.

So far the films I've seen are most notable for the chemistry between the principal actors. In Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman's The Extra Man, Kevin Kline and Paul Dano make a good comedic duo, but Dano and the temporarily-freed-by-Tom Katie Holmes produce negative sparks.

Results are much warmer between the exquisite Tilda Swinton in Luca Guadagnino's swooning I Am Love. She lights up the screen with Edoardo Gabbriellini, a man able to tempt a modern day Milanese princess with his exploits in the kitchen.

But the most exciting development might be the electricity between youngsters Jesse Eisenberg and Ari Graynor in Holy Rollers. They are powerful acting together, so much so that I wish director Robert Asch hadn't been resigned to make a small good film instead of a large great one.

Pranksy

2010-05-02T14:26:00.001-07:00

This week I borrowed a Frank O'Hara poem as a response to the Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop. I find the whole Banksy phenomenon hard to swallow—do we really need to be upset that a single Banksy rat stencil was lost in a Melbourne street-cleaning?

When I worked at a Capitol Hill bookstore, two types of people picked up the Banksy book Wall and Piece we carried: young guys in hoodies browsing the pages and older folks dressed for a night out who would bring a copy to the register and ask “do you have a clean copy of this for me to buy?” This distinction between Banksy consumers is further defined by Exit Through the Gift Shop (it can’t be a coincidence that forged Princess Di banknotes are the best art he’s ever made).

Playing Squash

2010-04-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago I saw the trailer for a film called Mancora, and it immediately appealed to my most intellectual film-watching tendencies (in a lot of the same ways Y Tu Mama Tambien did).

Somehow, this terribly written, acted and directed film did not reach theaters in my town. However, God gave us Netflix queues for a reason.

Despite its myriad faults, Mancora has the mile-wide cheekbones of Elsa Pataky, who I wouldn't say is bad looking in a white tank top:

It also has Phellipe Haagensen, whose name is incredibly hard to spell, playing the sort of mystical stoner he perfected in City of God.

And I kept watching our protagonist, Santiago (Jason Day), wondering where I'd seen him. Every time he rubbed a palm over his shaved head I had a pang of memory. It finally hit me. He's a dead ringer for Talan from MTV's Laguna Beach!

Unfortunately for Mr. Day, Talan is the better actor--but after figuring out their resemblance I was finally able to focus on each wave of banality as it crashed in.

Director Ricardo de Montreiul makes absolutely nothing happen for the 40 or so minutes it takes the characters to leave Lima and reach the titular beach town (he also has a fascinating inability to maintain continuity between day, evening and night shots--it takes somewhere between two and eight days to reach the coast). The film should really be reimagined as a feature-length advertisement for the real Mancora, Peru. Apparently, the populace is composed entirely of men who give you drugs and alcohol for free and incredibly tan young women who are dead-set on engaging you in threesomes. I, for one, found these plot elements completely plausible and in no way did scenes like the glass-polishing seen below exemplify the chauvinism of the director.

Poor Santiago is forced away from his true love by two locals who woo him into their bedroom with the only funny line in the film: "We're playing squash, wanna join us?" Yes. It turned out Santiago had a deep, untapped passion for the sport (though, confusingly, there were no visible racquets in the room).

See how pensive Santiago was before he learned how to play squash? Here's hoping this self-described "spiritual journey into paradise lost" takes up its rightful place as a late night fixture on Cinemax.

Herzog Hits and Misses

2010-04-12T21:25:00.000-07:00

This week on the CAB I take on the title and many other things in Werner Herzog's polarizing new film My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done.

While not even Verne Troyer can save that one, it wasn't so long ago that I saw Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Maybe it was the fact that Herzog (despite good opportunities) didn't use any bird's eye view cameras in his latest film, whereas Bad Lieutenant featured iguana AND alligator cams.

It also has Nic Cage and his bad back oscillating between the influence of Harvey Keitel and Jimmy Stewart as he shells out lines like, "You don't have a lucky crack pipe?" I defy you to name a better B movie ensemble cast than Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Xzibit, Fairuza Balk, Jennifer Coolidge and Shawn Hatosy. Not to mention My Son, My Son players Brad Dourif and Michael Shannon, who have much less screen time but much more to do in Bad Lieutenant. Arrange the queue accordingly.

See Fish Tank ASAP

2010-03-16T20:37:00.000-07:00

For some reasons why, check City Arts.

With 300, Hunger, Inglourious Basterds and Fish Tank behind and Jonah Hex, Centurion, Jane Eyre and Knockout straight ahead, I'm not even going out on a limb when I say Michael Fassbender is the next big thing.

The best I could do towards a WTT:

white tank top Goes Big

2010-03-03T16:06:00.000-08:00

A white tank top column will now be appearing (approximately) every other week on the CAB (the City Arts Magazine blog).

The first entry is on The Messenger.

Here's an additional picture of a white tank top, for your pleasure.