Homme Fatale

I spent some time over the winter watching Mark Cousins's mini-series, The Story of Film. While there's a great deal in that series to admire, there's also something about it that really rubbed me the wrong way: Cousins' privileges "classical" film, which is almost purely formalistic, over "romantic" film, which is more often conceived as entertainment. Cousins calls "romantic" filmmaking a "bauble," which seriously slants everything he presents. There's an unexamined assumption in this dichotomy that "classical" filmmaking is more "realistic" and truthful than "romantic" filmmaking, that the urge to entertain is somehow antithetical to truth, which is the core of art. This explains a lot about the landscape of film these days. "Classical" and "romantic" have become almost politicized. I was thinking about all of this as I walked to my car after seeing The Stranger by The Lake (2013, directed by Alain Guiraudie), which is a film that occupies the formalist "classical" camp. It's one of those European films that eschews quick cuts and a musical score and focuses on transgressive behavior. The only problem I have with it is that I didn't believe the film's central narrative. It's all well and good to confine your action to a single location, to keep non-diegetic music off the soundtrack, to look at the stickier facts of the physicality of human beings, but all of that is for naught if you fail to provide human beings that seem credible. This is the fallacy of pure formalism. The form doesn't always trump the content. "Realism" doesn't always mean real.

Note: spoilers abound here.

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A Winter of Our Discontent

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo) is the best of the Marvel Studios Avengers movies, one that manages the not inconsiderable feat of linking its eye-drugging fantasy with real world real politik in a way that engages the mind as well as the adrenal glands. It's also a film that cements the Avengers movies as an inheritor of the James Bond films, which they resemble more than they do the superhero movies from other studios. The Winter Soldier also argues forcefully against the grimdark superhero genre even as it indulges in some of its tropes. A deconstruction of the deconstruction? Maybe.

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Welcome to the Dollhouse

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine after seeing Wes Anderson's new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), when he mentioned that he found the film's structure to be ungainly. He called it a matryoshka doll, one of those Russian dolls that nest progressively smaller dolls inside themselves. As a literal description of the film's structure, he's right. It's a narrative constructed of flashbacks within flashbacks--needlessly, my friend thought, because only one of the framing narratives has any real connection with the main thrust of the film. I think this is only a marginally useful description of the film. I prefer to think of it as a dollhouse, a comparison that has occurred to me before while watching Anderson's films: In the sequence in Moonlight Kingdom, for instance, when the house becomes a series of panels and the film turns into a kind of comics page. It's also a lot like a dollhouse that's been opened so that you can get to the rooms inside. As in that film, a lot of the humor in The Grand Budapest Hotel is predicated on dressing up its actors in elaborate costumes (no Harvey Keitel in short pants this time, unfortunately--Keitel plays a role more in keeping with his screen persona). I don't really know what it says about Anderson that he sees in film a huge dollhouse where Orson Welles saw a train set. Both directors see a vast toybox in any event.

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Ashes in the Wind

It's a given that Hayao Miyazaki's new film, The Wind Rises (2013) is beautifully made. Studio Ghibli is synonymous with beautiful animation, and this film is not different. Technical virtuosity can only take you so far, though, and putting a human dimension in to his films has long been a hallmark of Miyazaki's films. He does that here, too. Miyazaki has flirted with politics in the past, as well. The environmentalism in Nausicaa and that same environmentalism mated with a critique of capitalism in Princess Mononoke are examples of this. The Wind Rises is mostly set between the World Wars as Taisho-era Japan gives way to Imperial Japan and fascism, and yet, this film about a modest aeronautic engineer seems to willfully ignore the politics its story suggests. Oh, it touches on them--it can't help it--but there's no strong statement, no critique. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 is the film's central horror, not the calamity of World War II. This seems odd to me, given that its hero designs the famed Japanese Zero. He's complicit in the disaster, but the film not only doesn't deal with this fact, it seems completely indifferent to it. This seems, I dunno, misguided and naive at the very least. If I view it in a less benign mood, it seems revisionist, sanitizing, and profoundly dangerous.

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True/False 2014: Brought to Light

One of the instructions given to screeners for True/False is to treat documentaries as "cinema." Does a given film play well as a movie? There are documentaries by the scores that fail at this very specific function, whether from a misguided view of documentary as journalism or from a simple inability to string together a coherent narrative that will hold an audience's attention for seventy five minutes. The ones that succeed at this, though, sometimes succeed big. Some footage is inherently cinematic, for want of a better word.

My own corollary to this is: "trust your b-roll." Film after film fails to make the leap to "cinema" from a simple desire to explain too much, whether with intrusive textual elements or an over-reliance on talking heads. It's a cliche to say that a storyteller should show rather than tell, but it's true. I mean, you can get away with a movie that's interviews and archive footage, but that is often dependent on who you're interviewing and what they're talking about. Last year, True/False showed The Gatekeepers, which is a stark example of what I mean by this: it's a film that's cinematically dull. It's almost all talking heads. It's who those talking heads are that makes it compelling (in that film, it was the last six heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli security service). That film became an Oscar nominee, though it lost the award to Searching for Sugar Man, a film that fails as a document but succeeds as feel-good entertainment. It's a double edged sword.

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True/False 2014: But Is It Art?

Every year, several of the films at True/False are designated as "secret screenings." These are often films that are contracted to premiere at other film festivals or which are only conditionally finished. Regardless, one of the codicils of watching these screenings is that you don't talk about them in public afterward. In other words, they're embargoed. I tried to avoid the Secret Screenings this year because one of my motivations for attending True/False is to blog about it. Still, I did see at least one of them, and it's vexing. This film forms a natural double feature with Penn and Teller's film, Tim's Vermeer. The writer in me wants desperately to link the two films, because both of them take a look at what constitutes art. You can't always get what you want, as a couple of wise men once said, and I don't want to rock the boat.

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True/False 2014: Merchants of Some Death

I saw a confluence of films surrounding the problem of violence and culpability for violence this year. There are always a steady stream of these kinds of movies at True/False. The world is always going to hell in a handbasket somewhere on the planet; that's manna for documentary filmmakers. Filmmakers aren't the only opportunists out there, though, and sometimes filmmakers cross paths with those other opportunists.

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True/False 2014: Hindsight is 20/20

Long careers in the arts--particularly in arts that are thought of as "entertainment"--are hard to string together, so when someone manages to become an elder statesman in such a profession, there usually comes a time to look back and wonder at it all. Career retrospectives are popular entertainments unto themselves. Greatest hits compilations are sometimes a musician's best-selling album. Stadium shows are sometimes singalongs in which music that was once growling and transgressive has become comforting and safe. So few filmmakers make vital cinema into their later years that it's hardly worth it to count the ones who do. Some of them just hang up their hat and take up real estate or some more mundane business. Several films at this year's True/False look back at the lives of aging artists. There's a bitterness in these films, but also some measure of celebration. It can be a heady mix.

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True/False 2014: The Higgs Boson Blues

I don't know if it was by design--it probably wasn't--but one of the first line-ups of films at this year's True/False put Particle Fever right before 20,000 Days on Earth. Particle Fever documents the starting of the Large Hadron Collider, one of the largest science experiments ever mounted by human beings. One of the primary aims of the Large Hadron Collider was to verify the existence of the Higgs Boson, the keystone of the current Standard Theory of how the universe works. 20,000 Days on Earth follows musician Nick Cave as he composes his last album, Push the Sky Away, including a song called "The Higgs Boson Blues." If it wasn't planned, it's a classic case of synchronicity. Really, there's no guarantee that the audiences for these film would be substantially made up of the same people, so why plan something like that?

Be that as it may...

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True/False 2014: Lizzy Borden Had An Ax

There's an old Harlan Ellison story called "Hitler Painted Roses" that postulates a woman who burns in hell for a murder she didn't commit. In his notes on the story, Ellison suggests that the idea was inspired by Lizzy Borden, who everyone knows "gave her mother forty whacks," and all that. The only problem with this is that Lizzy Borden didn't do it. She was knocked out on laudanum at the time. She was acquitted after the jury deliberated for a mere forty minutes. Facts don't really matter here, though, because what everybody knows about Lizzy Borden comes from a children's rhyme that went viral. Surely, Ellison surmised, Lizzy Borden burns in hell to this very day and never mind that she was innocent.

Several of the films at True/False this year address public perception of real-life criminals, taking what "everybody knows," and turning it inside out. Human beings are messy creatures, after all, neither angel or devil but some mixture of the two. Unfortunately, we are all profound mysteries to each other, a fact that these movies confront head on.

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True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Acting Out

The True/False has started in earnest, but I've still got a couple of films from the screening process to write about. As I was saying in my last post, there's a dichotomy at True/False between films with large-scale concerns and movies that have a much more narrow scope. Some of the films with a narrower scope are personal stories or accounts of quirks in the way the world works. These are sometimes the festival's most pleasurable films. Sometimes, they are the most unpleasant. Regardless, they're usually the most daring entries at any given festival. The fun part of festivals is the blindness surrounding these films. You pays your ticket and you takes your chances and good luck to you.

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True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Every Cut is a Lie

The night before True/False opened, they launched their companion series, showing with the festival, of "neither/nor" films. This year's series features Iranian meta-cinema from the 1990s. True/False, as their name indicates, has always been fascinated by chimeras, films in which fact and fiction intermix. The documentary as a form has always been untrustworthy. It's a feature and a bug that goes all the way back to Robert Flaherty. Few films are as aware of this fact as Abbas Kairostami's Close-Up (1990), which launched this year's series. It's the ultimate chimera.

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True/False 2014, Preliminaries: Women and Men

The True/False film festival returns to my fair city this week. I've been to every edition of True/False in some capacity. The last two years, I've had the privilege of serving on the screening committee, so I've seen a few of the films playing at the festival already. As was the case last year, this didn't make picking my schedule any easier, but it does let me write about several movies ahead of the opening of festivities. As usual for True/False, there are a host of films that are overtly political mixed in among films with smaller and quirkier concerns. I used to think that True/False was curated with this in mind, but the zeitgeist in documentary filmmaking is self-assembling, even in the slush pile. No assembly required.

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Talkin' Roots Music Blues

I've been trying to write about the Coen Brothers' new film, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) for weeks without success. The film is receding in my memory now so if I don't put something on (digital) paper now, I probably never will. It's not that the film is impenetrably obscure. It's not. It's as watchable as anything the Coens have made. It's just that it's also hermetically closed, a moebius strip of a movie. It's one that doesn't let you get close to it or hang a thesis on it. Maybe it's just me. In truth, this is a film that hit me at a low point. It wasn't a film that I really needed at the time, which makes my relationship to it so complicated that I don't know where to start.

I think the word that best describes Inside Llewyn Davis is "morose." It's a grey film filled with grey characters doing grey things in a grey world. It has a downer of an ending and a downer of a beginning--a given, since it ends where it begins. It's a portrait of disillusion and failure. Its protagonist, the eponymous Llewyn Davis, is depressed and angry and confused at the outset. It's a state of mind from which he never emerges during the film. It tends to make the experience of watching it less pleasurable than it might be, especially if one is experiencing some of the same existential crises as Davis.

Note, here there be spoylers.

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Netflix Roulette: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

It's been a while since I gave the ol' Netflix Roulette Wheel a go. Spinning the wheel this weekend gave me The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010, directed by Luc Besson). Color me surprised. I'm a fan of the Jacques Tardi comics, but I had no idea that this film even existed. My surprise was tempered a bit by director Luc Besson. I'm not a fan. Be that as it may...

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The Play's The Thing

I don't have any deep insights into the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman beyond a vague distaste for the moralizing tone of some of its observers. It doesn't matter how he died. His family will grieve and then go on and sooner than you might think, the manner of his death will be outshone by what he did in life. This is the way these things happen. The shotgun does not outshine Nirvana. The needle does not outshine Hendrix. This is right and proper. I'm probably the wrong person to even be writing about Hoffman, because Hoffman has always been an actor who doesn't connect with me. I appreciate what he did, but my own tastes run to watching other people. This has nothing to do with his worth as an actor. He was very, very good at what he did.

According to the folks at my local art house, Hoffman appeared in more films to play their screens than anyone else other than Patricia Clarkson. They decided to send Hoffman off with a screening of his 2008 film, Synecdoche, New York, one of Charlie Kaufman's existential mindfucks. Given the way that the film maneuvers itself into a state of nothingness, it's likely the perfect film to stand as the actor's epitaph. It's a film I've resisted writing about, in part because I'm not sure how to encompass all of the thoughts it evokes. It's a film where its metacinematic structures create a vortex that sucks everything into it. More than that, it's a film that defies easy synopsis and forget about unpacking everything in it in the 1200 words of a blog post. Future film scholars will pore over feelies of this film like cyberpunk Talmudic scholars.

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All Roads Lead To Rome

"Late one night the club was heaving, I saw a vampire move across the floor.
Old and white with a silver cane lusting for youth through the mirror."
--The Mekons, "Club Mekon."

I stayed to the end of the credits of The Great Beauty (2013, directed by Paolo Sorrentino). The end credits wander lazily down the Tiber, coming to rest, eventually, on the Ponte Sant'Angelo. I don't want to read anything into this, because there's not really much symbolism here to decode. But it IS representative of the visual glory of Rome, something that is one of the film's primary concerns. It's also representative of the uneasy relationship between Italians and the Catholic Church, which is also one of the film's primary concerns. When, at last, it was done, a woman who had also stayed to the end asked me to describe what the film is about in three words. "Life," I said after a moment's reflection. "Death. Ennui." That's a gross oversimplification, because the film is also about art and movies and religion and how they all intersect in an Eternal City that has seen better days.

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Mulling Over 2013

My ballot for the Muriel awards is due tomorrow and I have no freaking idea what's going to be on it. 2013 was one of those years that was so saturated with worthy films that regardless of what ends up on any given top whatever list, the omission of some film or other is going to feel like a lack. One film that I would love to put on my Muriels list, possibly even at the very top of it, is Shun Li and the Poet, but because of the way it was released (or, more to the point, not released in New York), it's ineligible. This, of course, is the peril of being a cinephile anywhere but New York or Los Angeles. Some of my favorite films this year are hold-overs from last year that are also ineligible for my list. Not that it matters much. I have a wealth of material to choose from. I made a huge list over at Letterboxd a couple of weeks ago to organize my thoughts, but it grew so fast that I doubt its utility. There are almost fifty films on that list.

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Nothing Up My Sleeve...

 Now You See Me (2013, directed by Louis Leterrier) is candy. It's a caper movie about magicians, which is a high concept that says everything about the film. They say that a Hollywood pitch needs to be forty words or less. This movies pitch is only six words. That must have appealed to the suits. It appeals to me, a bit. I've been watching a lot of heavy films in the last month and a half, so candy is not something at which I turn up my nose. Not at all.

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Hearts of Ice

Frozen (2013, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) finds Disney's animation unit making some sport of its own traditions. In doing so, it drags the Disney formula kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. If the songs were any better, this might even stand with the best of Disney's classic animations. Alas, when it opens its throat to belt out a song, Frozen crashes to earth. What's left is a pretty good movie that could have been a great one. Still, one takes pleasures where one finds them I suppose, and this movie does indeed offer pleasures aplenty.

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More Human Than Human

I don't know what I was expecting from Spike Jonze's Her (2013), but whatever preconceptions I may have had weren't even on the same continent as the movie itself. I mean, I knew the plot: lonely man falls in love with his operating system (probably easy when that system is voiced by Scarlett Johansson), but that high concept barely even describes the depth of thought and feeling in this movie. This is a full blooded science fiction movie that imagines huge concepts within the confines of its very specific focus on one lonely man. It's a universe in a teacup.

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The Dragon's Lair

In the taxonomy of movie monsters I keep in the back of my mind, the best dragons ever put on film are Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer, Maleficent at the end of Sleeping Beauty, and the dragon in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. There are others that I like quite a bit, including the Hungarian Horntail from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and the lead beastie in Reign of Fire. We'll leave aside the notion that Godzilla is a dragon for the nonce. Most dragons these days trace their lineage to Vermithrax, who I think of as the Mother of Dragons even more than I think of Daenerys Targaryen in that role (Daenerys's dragons also trace their lineage to Vermithrax). Into this mix comes Smaug, the villain from The Hobbit who sits on a mountain of gold in his chambers beneath the Lonely Mountain. In The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), the second installment of Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation, Smaug takes center stage as Moriarty to Bilbo's Holmes.

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The Good Arab

The Attack (2012, directed by Ziad Doueiri) takes a difficult subject and crafts a noir thriller around it. In doing so, it runs rings around other more "serious" films that attempt to tackle the subject of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict directly and winds up going beyond the politics into realms of epistemology. "Who are we really?" this movie asks, "and how well does anyone know anyone?" It's a dark film, a pessimistic film. It's utterly riveting.

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A Wolf in the Fold

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I have a short list of filmmakers whose films I try to see at the first opportunity, often the first night they open near me if circumstances allow. One of the names on my own list is Martin Scorsese and I doubt I'm alone in this. Marty is some kind of living icon of cinephilia these days, due to his work on film preservation and outreach. Even if he never made another film and confined himself to these tasks, he would be one of the most important and revered people in film.

Marty and I have been having a bit of a falling out in recent years. I hated his Oscar-winner, The Departed, and only half-liked Shutter Island, which is ridiculous but lovely. I did love Hugo, but I haven't felt the urge to watch it again. One thing that has really bothered me in recent years about Scorsese is the obnoxious way his films push women to the margins in favor of an aggressive masculinity. That's a strain of his filmmaking that really comes to the fore in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), a film that wallows in dude-bro masculinity and its misogynistic dark side. It's a tumescent film that comes to the screen with its rampant cock pointing straight at the audience. It then proceeds to stroke it furiously for the next three hours(!) before dousing them, bukkake-like in the jizz of its own self-indulgence.

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Midwestern Gothic

"Hell, I even thought I was dead 'til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska."--Little Bill Daggett, Unforgiven

I don't know that director Alexander Payne mocks mid-westerners in his films set in the heartland. I mean, I live in the rural mid-west and I recognize a LOT of the characters who populate Payne's films, from Tracy Flick to Woody Grant. I recognize the cultural and economic wasteland he depicts, too. His new film, Nebraska (2013), is ostensibly a comedy, but its stark black and white cinematography turns it into a mournful comedy at best (if that's not an outright oxymoron). This is a film that's laboring under a pall of disillusion and disappointment, set amid a bleak landscape spotted with vultures picking over the remnants of the American dream.

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Innocence and Experience

I'm not entirely sure how to process Blue is the Warmest Color (2013, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche), because it short-circuits a lot of the ways I tend to think about movies. It's a deeply problematic film and it's one that I would ordinarily take to task for the way it deals with sex and sexuality, but I would be lying if I said it didn't have a profoundly emotional effect on me. Somehow, it works, even though it probably shouldn't.

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Where There's Smoke

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013, directed by Francis Lawrence) is more or less the same film as its predecessor. The filmmakers behind it prove that they are savvy to the way people consume sequels. That it also happens to be better than its predecessor in just about every conceivable way is just some kind of weird alchemy that happens with sequels sometimes, perhaps because it can jump right into the story without having to set up the primary conflicts and relationship (or the world in which it takes place), but I think it's more than that. The craft--for want of a better word--is better. This film cost considerably more than its predecessor and that expense winds up on the screen. This is a case of more being more. But it's not just that, either. Francis Lawrence (presumably no relation to star Jennifer Lawrence) comes to the film from genre filmmaking and proves to be more adept at the film's genre requirements than Gary Ross ever was. The action in this film is more comprehensible, the genre beats more on the mark, and in general, the style of the film is smoother and less rawboned. This is true even in the film's more miserablist settings, where Lawrence has reined-in the lazy shaky-cam of its predecessor and created images of surprising power. The opening shot of Katniss, for instance.

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Dirty Laundry

I saw a headline on one of the entertainment sites a few days ago that posed the question of whether or not Stephen Frears's new film, Philomena (2013) was anti-Catholic. Given the subject matter of the film--the sorry history of the Magdalene laundries is central to its narrative--I'd say it's not anti-Catholic enough. This film goes out of its way to be understanding, but I can't imagine the headspace that permits its heroine to forgive. I'm much more inclined to less Christian reaction, myself, especially given that this is a "true story," as the saying goes.

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The Big Quiz Redux

This time of the year is kind of a slog for me, with most of my movie viewing confined to festival screeners (about which I can't write) and award season movies. I've been struggling to write about the last several films I've seen, which is why things have been so quiet around here. I'm hoping to have pieces about Philomena and Blue is the Warmest Color up by the end of the weekend, but we'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, here's another of Dennis Cozzalio's film quizzes from the extravagantly named blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Enjoy:

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Dying in Dallas

I've been dreading Dallas Buyers Club (2013, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee). I always dread films made by cisgender filmmakers in which transgender characters feature prominently, especially if those trans characters are played by cis actors (as they almost always are). Someone in the activist spaces I frequent once mentioned that consuming media while trans is like playing Russian roulette, though lately I've been thinking that it's like playing Russian roulette with a live round in every chamber. You're going to take a bullet to the brain without fail. It won't be random. It's just going to happen. The cause for my concern with Dallas Buyers Club is Jared Leto's character, Rayon, a trans woman character constructed by the filmmakers for reasons I'll get to in a bit. She's fictional even though the film itself purports to be based on fact. Leto has been getting Oscar buzz for his performance, and why not? It's a character and performance that's almost a parody of Oscar bait: straight actor playing gay? Check. Playing trans? Check. Dying tragically? Check. Dramatic weight loss? Check. It's almost diagrammatic. (As I write this, Leto has just been awarded Best Supporting Actor by the New York Film Critic's Circle, which isn't a bellwether by any means, but still...) Of course, star Matthew McConaughey does the weight loss thing, too. This is a film full of scarecrows.

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