"The New Yorker: Tabloid of Record"

http://bit.ly/ro5vnL

This is honestly the most visually interesting thing I've seen all week. It's the Church of Scientology's response to the exposé of the Church that recently ran in The New Yorker, and it's like a perfectly concise catalog of contemporary propaganda visuals.

In the first few seconds, you get an artificial aged film effect, a smug and angry voice-over that sounds like the South Park parody of a smug and angry voice over, harshly lit and hastily assembled 3-D animation. Then it suddenly takes a turn into 1950s newsreel style actors mugging disinterest and a Zhdanovite spiel insisting that the multi-Oscar winner is an unknown nobody.

The fact that it's incredibly clumsy just makes it all the more interesting. As Stephen King noted in Danse Macabre, less artful productions are often more useful as historical documents than good films. The hackish filmmakes lack an artist's individual voice, which means you get a much clearer sense of what was considered proper visual technique at the moment. This clumsy thing is unlikely to convince anyone---it's not a creative visual masterpiece of innovative propaganda techniques, like Triumph of the Will. It's more like an evening watching Fox: defamiliarize for a second, and you'll see all kinds of genuinely odd and obvious visual tropes that the blinkered filmmakers and audience regard as perfectly normal. And how weird is that?

Gaijin Games, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, stuff

My adoration for Gaijin Games has been made clear before. Out of that last post grew a rapturous---and I hope interesting---review of Bit.Trip Flux, over at Slant Magazine.

"Like Dziga Vertov's films, Mondrian's paintings, or Balanchine's choreography, BIT.TRIP FLUX presents the spectacle of a medium reveling in its essential properties, offering an aesthetic experience that wasn't possible until the form was created to engender it."

And then that led to an interview with Gaijin Games CEO Alex Neuse, which is chock-full of interesting practical tidbits and the occasional matzoh ball of conceptualism.

"Usually games teach the player how the game world works and stick to it; like when I'm playing Halo, I know a Grunt isn't going to suddenly split into four slower moving Grunts. But BIT.TRIP is all about simple visual elements that could do anything, and a lot of the humor of the BIT.TRIP games comes from that kind of surprise attack."

Meantime, my tradition of arguing with Glenn Kenny (all in good fun!) continues, as we argue about Death Wish, argue about Scorsese, and occasionally argue about criticism and Lester Bangs.

"I'm quite happy to say that social responsibility is more a negative than a positive virtue. That is, no artist is obliged to deliver "a positive message", but you are indeed obliged not to be actively evil. Y'know as if you were a person---you don't actually have to do missionary work, but you should refrain from yelling "ching-chong-Chinaman" every time you see a Vietnamese person on the subway. "

And finally... I've been writing regular game reviews over at Slant, which has been great---writing something that feels lower-stakes than my usual creative output is incredibly effective as a confidence booster. And occasionally, I get to write something as fun as my review of Pokemon White.

"So how does someone old enough to have voted for Paul Tsongas end up playing the new Pokemon game?"

Red Riding Hood

I really wanted Red Riding Hood to be great, largely because the idea that Catherine Hardwicke would take her anger over being fired from Twilight and channel it into making the American equivalent of a Catherine Brellait film was a hugely appealing meta-narrative. My hopes were raised when I saw that she'd cast Amanda Seyfriend, arguably the greatest and most underrated actress of her generation. Ever since Veronica Mars, I've been eager to see Seyfried get a role that lets her show off her tremendous actorly intelligence; like Robert DeNiro, she makes very smart choices even when playing dumb characters, and can convey inner life with great economy of gesture. In Mean Girls, Seyfried's every slack-jawed stare was active and compelling, and the lines she did have were bring-down-the-house funny with wittily faux-earnest chirpiness. And in Veronica Mars (the first season, the good one) she took a cliched L.A. party-girl character and made her specific and individual through one layered line reading after another.

So I ignored the bad reviews Red Riding Hood got, especially since most of them seemed like more lame boynerd Twilight-bashing. The tendency of male critics to gleefully embrace power/revenge fantasies and scream in indignation when confronted with fantasies of romance is just embarrassing, almost as embarassing as the Dungeons & Dragons-rulebook grumblings that the McCullen clan aren't "real vampires", whatever the fuck that means. I kept hoping that Red Riding Hood was going to be the movie that turned Catherine Hardwicke into Kathryn Bigelow, a female director who can make Hollywood genres seem new again via sharp intelligence and a unique perspective.

No such luck. Red Riding Hood is unforgivably dull, routine, and worse yet, appallingly professional. The problem isn't the panting romanticism, but rather the lack of same. An early flashback scene mixing bunny-slaughter and pre-teen lust takes place in vast beds of studio-built, brightly artificial flowers, and the first ten minutes had me looking forward to more Guy-Maddin-for-girls production design and unhinged, Almodovar-esque melodrama. But that visionary quality is lost the instant the movie proper starts. From then on it's all tediously "good" shots, in which every pan begins with a vertical movement, ends with a horizontal movement, and focus-shifts from foreground to background on an important beat. It's all quite proper and utterly numbing, and there's no way for wooly, hairy, slavering romance to break out when every beat is so carefully manicured.



And the orange-and-teal! Oy, the orange-and-teal! You don't get a sense of timelessness when your movie looks exactly like every other goddamn piece of digital color correction in the last ten years. Shot after shot is built around an orange thing in the foreground, teal in the background and then---OMG!!!!---rack focus to an orange thing in the background! Red and white are perfectly good colors to use in this story, and the occasional cameo appearance by purple suggests that someone in the production design department wants to make the movie look a little more interesting, but ultimately the color choices, like the camera setups, are indistinguishable from any other Hollywood action movie, part of the appalling homogenization that computerized industrial filmmaking has wrought.

Even Seyfried is reduced to typical young-actress mummery, wandering around with big eyes and a half-open mouth instead of making her character into a convincing human being. But then, nearly everyone in the movie suffers from the same lack of individuality, which I largely attribute to Hardwicke's refusal to let any of the actors decide clearly whether they're inhabitants of a medieval world completely different from our own, or basically modern people who just happen to be in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't help that the scriptwriter seems to think that the villagers are living before the invention of subtext; every line expresses exactly what it says, leaving the actors with no choices worth making. Only Gary Oldman gets to do anything other than be tediously sincere, perhaps thanks to English actors' inimitable knack for ignoring bad direction and breaking off bits of scenery to nibble when given nothing better to do.

Worst of all, although the movie early and often hammers on the theme that Valerie is set apart from the others by an inner darkness which gives her a unique connection to the Wolf, the script never, ever lets that be expressed through action. In some misguided attempt, perhaps, to make her "relatable", the first scene's intriguing hints of sadism are immediately dropped, and she's never allowed to have so much as an uncharitable thought. The movie seems to want to rebuke the fairy-tale division of victimized girl and threatening male by locating the Wolf's darkness within Valerie, but her only moments of violence are harmless (and ineffectual) gestures of self-defense. So while the movie is built around the Wolf's desire to make Valerie his consort, his temptations never seem very tempting to this Good Girl, and the suspense becomes purely external---WHO is the werewolf? WHAT was her wanna-be boyfriend doing when the attack happened? WHICH herring is the red one?---rather than character-driven. Suspense built around character choices deepens the audience's involvement in the story; suspense built around narrative conditions is merely screenwriter preening.

I had hoped that getting booted from Twilight would inspire Hardwicke to make something loopier, more intense, and more personal, but instead, she's trying to be Chris Weitz, making movies as polished, professional, and of-no-possible-interest-to-anyone as The Golden Compass. Every shot is nicely composed, Hollywood-busy (that is, full of background activity that never threatens to catch the viewer's interest), and perfectly un-striking. A fairy-tale movie needs to seize the viewer, either through unexpected grungy realism or wildly expressionist eccentricity, and force them into the kind of childlike credulity that movies and fairy tales can conjure. They need love, sex, blood, and profound weirdness. Red Riding Hood's clock-punching won't give anyone nightmares, fantasies, or even something to think about on the drive home. What a waste.

Some Came Fighting

Another link-to-comments post... I'm criminally unable to resist baiting Glenn Kenny, the erudite proprietor of Some Came Running. With the result that I sometimes end up putting more time into comments on his posts than anything written here! Here's a highlight or two:

-Arguing about Howard Hawks and John Hughes

-Arguing about Eastwood, and dialogue

-Arguing about Lester Bangs, and Matt Zoller Seitz

-Arguing about Carol Reed and auteur theory

-Arguing about Godard

There's nothing at that Read more link! It's just a default!

Documenteur

Though Agnes Varda has said that Documenteur is her favorite film, it's not her best. Despite an opening statement that all gestures are inherently false, the movie's non-acting, first draft dialogue, and awkward dubbing never becomes an effective style. Instead it's just alienating in a non-Brechtian sense, making it hard to get as emotionally involved in the film as the director clearly is. Meanwhile the sedate montage and script keep the film from achieving much intellectual frisson. But Varda's visual knack is as strong as ever, and the film is, for all its script problems, an incredibly powerful evocation of depression's effect on vision.

Part of the movie's trouble may be that the story, inspired by Varda's painful separation from husband Jacque Demy, was just too personal for her to achieve the compassionate yet unforgiving perspective of her other films. In Cleo From 5 To 7, for example, Varda is at once skewering Cleo's narcissism while remaining deeply sympathetic to her fears of losing the beauty she's utterly dependent on. Similarly, Varda's masterpiece Vagabond exudes deep sorrow for its protagonist's lonely death while never forgetting that she's a pain in the ass whose fate is pretty much her own damn fault. Even a documentary like Ydessa & The Bears teases the subject's self-dramatizing grandiosity (especially embarrassing when placed beside the Holocaust memories Ydessa's work deals with) while acknowledging the power of her emotions.

No such tension is achieved in Documenteur; the circumstances behind the protagonist's separation are never touched on, her love for her child is never problematized, even her sorrow is a little generic. Despite an occasional bout of willfulness or temper, and Sabine Mamou's interesting face, there's just not much to identify Emile, the protagonist, as a unique individual, or make her anything but a transparent reactor to circumstances. Worse still, in the film seems to aim for a simple identification with its lead that is much more conventional than what Varda usually pulls off with such aplomb. When she cries, we're to cry along with her, and when she succeeds we're prodded to admire; this is cinema rhetoric of the most ordinary kind, and it's a shame to see Varda fall into it.

Varda's photographic eye, however, is always unique, and that alone makes the movie worth a look. Too many cinematographers, and too many viewers, think that saturated colors and high contrast equals good photography. What's striking about Documenteur is how much Varda accomplishes visually with natural light, soft contrast, and deliberately dull colors. Though obviously shot quickly and cheaply, the look is reminiscent of beautiful 70s productions like McCabe and Mrs Miller or Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More.








The title Documenteur blends the French words for "documentarian" and "liar", just as the film blends documentary and fictional (albeit roman-a-clef, semi-fictions). But more intriguingly, the film's visual texture suggests the way that plain sight can lie, manipulated by circumstances. Emile is a woman in the throes of despair, but unable, due to the obligations of child-rearing, to succumb to that despair with romantic dissipation. Instead she crawls through her day, hoping the feelings will go away, and in the meantime living as though submerged in dirty water. Varda objectifies this situation by shooting the world's most famously bright city with deliberate dullness that poses as objectivity. The loose blocking and natural light exudes you-are-there documentary realism, but it's all deliberately muddy.







One of depression's most insidious powers is its ability to pose as accurate perception, as though the hollowed-out world the sufferer sees is truer than the illusions of the happy, and Documenteur perfectly captures both the grimness of that world and its pretence of simple reality. The camera is both documentarian and liar, it's very identification with the depressed protagonist compromising its ability to capture reality.







The film is also notable for its ground-level view of Los Angeles, an L.A. without palm trees or movie stars. Keeping her eye downcast, Varda ably captures the placeless residential districts of the city, and its low-key immigrant communities. The shots of dumpster-diving for furniture, or fishing on Venice Beach, evoke precisely what day-to-day life is like in L.A.'s eternal June, while the scenes in the luxurious beach house portray how the rich of late-70s L.A. built faux-organic hermitages that produced the illusion of nature while remaining sealed off from the outside.

What the fuck is Alain Resnais thinking?

I can't remember the last time I experienced such a gap between what the reviews told me and what a movie delivered as Alain Renais' Wild Grass. According to reviews good and bad, it's "cute", "freewheeling", "zany", and a lot of other adjectives that might lead you---certainly led me---to think it's a brightly-hued, albeit surreal, romantic comedy, ruefully self-aware and polished with Gallic wit.

Wild Grass is nothing of the sort. Like Resnais' classic Last Year At Marienbad, it's a horror movie about the fundament of misogyny: a man imposing his ontology on a woman with no regard for her subjectivity---but this time made much creepier by the director's ambivalent complicity in that imposition. It's also genre-damaged, confused, and profoundly slippery; I still can't decide if it's a cunning attack on the romantic comedy and the romantic thriller, or merely an old Frenchman's grumbling act of gender senescence, like listening to your Grandpa complain about not being able to pat the waitress' butt.

Misogyny drives the plot at every step, beginning with Margaritte Muir getting her purse (ahem) snatched by a young man outside a shoe store. Elderly ex-con Georges Palet finds her wallet, but before he can return it, he becomes fixated on Muir's ID photo. She calls to thank him for the purse's return, but like many a self-important male, Palet convinces himself that a simple act of decency merits a free pass to her vagina. He begins--- really there's no other word for this---stalking Muir, starting with angry phone calls and escalating to tire slashing. Muir calls the police, who warn him off in a marvelously-observed scene charting just how to give a suspect enough rope.

Now here's where things get really icky. When Muir attempts to confront Palet at a movie theater, she finds herself feeling affectionate, maybe even a little in love with her stalker. She ignores her friend Josepha's warnings and starts more or less pursuing him, though always insisting that his long-suffering wife come along. Her attraction to Palet (every woman's attraction to Palet!) is never explained, or even formally accounted for; even a tipsy Josepha seems unable to resist his liver-spotted charms, going from angry and afraid to putty in his hands the instant he moves in for a kiss.

The idea of an bitter, charmless old man who's irresistibly attractive to woman thirty years younger than him is a pretty standard trope of commercial cinema (and the repulsive late novels of Phillip Roth, prominently displayed at one point in the film), and it's disappointing that Resnais can't bust out something at least more unusual. Worse yet, the script blatantly violates the Bechdel rule, portraying a world where women, when alone, talk about nothing but cute boys. It's hard to believe the man who made Last Year At Marienbad and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, either of which could serve as surrealist versions of The Handmaid's Tale, is making any kind of prescriptive pronouncement about womanhood. And there's certainly enough metacinematic gags to make me resist simply psychologizing the characters, or treating this behavior as reflecting Resnais' assumptions about the world. But there's not a firm enough satiric perspective to make the idea that this film is simply an apologia for sullen male privilege completely dismissible.

The semiotics of the movie make it even harder to pin down what Resnais' attitude towards his characters' lunacy is. As Palet's stalking escalates, Resnais deploys the long, wide shots and skittering strings of a standard-issue woman-in-peril thriller. But then, many of the scenes with Palet and Muir are scored with chipper jazz, and surrounded by bright colors, as though Resnais was making a parody of romantic comedies, where behavior that would get people put in a loony bin is just accepted as charming. In interviews, Resnais has said it's a movie about l'amour fou, but there's not much amour on display here, just a series of purely selfish demands, made with contempt and executed joylessly. It's like The Stepford Wives from the husbands' point of view.

The result isn't so much fascinatingly ambivalent as deeply unsatisfying, in no small part because the movie pivots on deliberately irrational behavior but bounces between genres where behavior is everything.. In a comedy, especially a parody, we accept characters doing ridiculous things because that's what happens in comedy. But if you're making a thriller, implausible action kills audience tension; it's not very scary to watch a moron walk off a cliff. Resnais refuses to commit either way, but it seems less like he's trying to do both than like he's trying to do neither---the shots aren't iconic enough to be comedy, nor withholding enough to thrill. There's occasionally low-comedy situations, like an extended open-zipper gag, but they're never very funny, and the sheer ferocity of Patel's contempt for women (and the movie's complacent furthering of that contempt) makes the laughs stick in the throat.

Many of the critics consider it "prosaic" to treat the movie's specifically gendered freakiness as being at all relevant to actual gender politics. But no one seems to have an idea what, if not misogyny, the movie is actually about. Is this an elaborate fantasy of Patel's that Resnais is cooly transcribing, like a highbrow Brent Easton Ellis? The film opens with a shot of wild grass piercing the pavement, but Georges is a relentless mower of his carefully-planted lawn; is this a satire of bourgeois repression? If so, it would need to explode its narrative more than it does, the way Resnais' early films emphatically did. Like Palet, the movie seems to have something violence and uncontrollable lurking beneath its manicured facade, but it never quite allows it to escape, and the result is a painful wreck.

Best Films of the 00s

Because what's the point of having a blog if you can't make the occasional dumb list? Starting at the top, with the single best movie of the decade, which is....

Full Frontal: I've defended this at great length before, and I continue to think that this is the single best summation of The Way We Live Now, a funny, sharp, compassionate look at life inside the mediascape, with a visual palette that gets more interesting with every viewing. This movie always makes me feel like Martin Donavan in Surviving Desire---You don't think this is the best movie of the decade? Then watch it again. (Honorable mention to the deliberately slight but completely unique Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience---would that more major American directors were trying to make movies about real people in these unreal lives).


Werckmeister Harmonies: The cinematography, like the story, grounds itself so firmly in reality that it's able to transform into myth. The long takes, the focus on just getting from Point A to B, and the deep, sharp photography have been major influences this decade, and the performances are still riveting. Even Tarr hasn't caught lightning in a bottle like this since, but Werckmeister is probably the most genuinely magisterial movie we've had in a while.

Mulholland Drive: It's not Lynch's best because it's elliptical and beautiful, though it is. All his films are. It's his best because production circumstances forced Lynch to think through his story a lot more than he's used to, and the result is the rare Lynch movie that's more than the sum of its parts, where all the images and sounds cohere into a narrative that's at once scary and genuinely moving.

The Gleaners and I: Deceptively casual, this is one of the smartest of the current crop of docu-essays. Without pretension or ego, Varda bats around capitalist excess and cinema convention and like a master juggler, makes it look easy.

A Mighty Wind: In the commentary, even Christopher Guest seems a little surprised at just how moving this turned out to be. It starts as just another Guest-style parade of goofballs, but somehow turns into a touching portrait of aging---the way we form communities to keep out the cold, the way we end up at once just who we were at the start and also unrecognizable, and the way our best intentions fail us. That it does this while still being very funny is what makes it a masterpiece.

Up!: Any best-of-the-decade list has to contend with the massive achievement of Pixar, cranking out a long string of critical darlings that are also massive hits. It's a little early to say for sure, but Up! may be their best one yet, combining a thoughtful story with relentless visual inventiveness that never strays too far from character. It's the kind of animated film that makes all live-action films seem a little lacking in expressive resources.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy: We may never, as Lester Bangs says, agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis, but the LotR trilogy comes close. And just like the LotR books are a sort of compressed history of Middle Earth, so are the LotR films a compressed history of film. They deploy every special effects technique ever invented, from Meliés-style forced perspective to artificial-intelligence-driven CGI (with plenty of models, makeup, and mattes in between), and also makes use of every directing technique ever conceived, from the Griffith-esque battle scenes to contemporary digitally-controlled camera swoops. Like Joyce's Dubliners, If every other film was destroyed but these, you could still extract everything that had ever been.

Y Tu Mamá También: A strong reminder---as if we needed one---that the quality of the plot is only tangential to the quality of the film. In summary, it sounds like a perfectly average teen sex comedy, but the Nouvelle Vague-influenced technique turns it into a casually funny, honestly sad portrait of how relationships are inextricable from the social circumstances in which they form, a subject few movies even know how to approach.

The Man Who Wasn't There: Maybe the Coen's most complete statement about the relationship between crime and storytelling. There's plenty of jokes, but they don't overwhelm the sadness at the movie's heart, and the retro visuals are both arrestingly sharp and endlessly worthy of close analysis.

A Prarie Home Companion: Not just because Altman will be missed, though he will be. PHC stares unblinking into the void and doesn't bother with self-protective laughs or self-indulgent despair; it just shrugs, smiles, and keeps on singing. Maybe the culmination of Altman's echt-Midwestern no-big-deal sensibility, which so often produced masterpieces that don't take themselves too seriously.

Runners-up: Spirited Away, Donne Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Grizzly Man, My Winnipeg, Spider (much more uncompromising than A History of Violence), The Incredibles, Lost In Translation, Waking Life, The Hurt Locker

Paranormal Activity

What keeps Paranormal Activity from being quite as good as its obvious inspiration is a shortage of subtext. Blair Witch delivered plenty of shocks'n'scares, but what made it capital-A Art was its savvy analysis of mediation. "Nobody gets lost in America," Heather said, but the camera-obsessed characters find themselves more lost the more they look, and the final shot's multileveled attack on the act of viewing pulled the thematic threads together with sharp clarity.

Paranormal Activity doesn't go that deep, largely because its whole story is its central couple, and they're pretty generic---he's a cocky guy, she's a meek girl, and together they're just like every other couple we've ever seen in a horror movie. Some of the commenters at Jim Emerson's Scanners have actually had the most interesting points to make about the movie's themes----Jeffrey Simons noted the ways voyeurism becomes an element within the story, not just the way the story is told, and "Joseph" made the interesting suggestion that the whole movie is closer to Repulsion than Rosemary's Baby, a story about a woman lashing out rather than a woman persecuted.


[spoilers below the jump]



One aspect I haven't seen mentioned, though, is how the film plays with its own dog-that-didn't-bark: the young couple in the big new house... with no talk of children. But that's not to say children aren't a presence---at the other end of the hall from the bedroom there's a room we glimpse only in passing, with a big bed, and a giant teddy bear. That seems to be where the demon comes from in many of the scenes, and the stuffed animal suggests that it's the planned bedroom for the planned child, should Micah and Katie ever start filling this big house with something other than expensive toys.

More explicit, but more witty, is the way the couple's dynamics get affected by Katie's haunting---they start out affectionate, though a little out of joint with each other. But as the hauntings get worse, sleep deprivation becomes the defining element of their relationship, and much of the "negative energy" that feeds the demon is generated by their snapping under the pressures of exhaustion, like many a young couple with a new visitor making their nights into constant vigilance. Similarly, a major turning point of the film into full-on horror is when an invisible presence crawls into bed with them, as though the demon itself is a nightmare-prone toddler determined to enact Oedipal rage.

A terror at sexuality floats all through the movie, and not just because the locus of its horror is the couple's bedroom. Katie's haunting began with an apparition at her bed when she was eight, and her telling of the story, complete with helpless sister, could easily be read as a recovered memory of molestation. The signs of the demon---breathing on the neck, invasion of the bed, and grabbing of the leg---resemble the moves of an aggressive seducer (particularly when we see that the demon's ultimate goal is to be inside Katie). And every time Micah brags about setting up a camera in the bedroom, it's impossible not to think that he's planning to make an awesome sex tape once this whole demon thing blows over.

What keeps Paranormal Activity from greatness is that it never quite gets specific enough with any of this---the themes float through the film but don't really develop, and it's frequently disrupted by superfluous elements, like a completely pointless bloody cross (in a movie where no character shows the slightest religious inclination---Blatty wept!). Still, the material's charged, the directing is solid----the slightly dutch-angled shot of the bedroom, with the door and the hallway beyond it balanced by the visual weight of the bed, is an image film students should study carefully---and it's ultimately pretty goddamn scary. A good spook-show rather than great cinema, but still enough tension that I'll remember it for quite a while. And if nothing else, I'm still overjoyed that it whupped Saw VI.

The Time-Traveler's Wife

Given its immense book sales, a movie of "The Time Traveler's Wife" was inevitable, despite its lack of climax, conflict, or drama. The book is actually a pretty good time, despite being chock-full of moments where characters must accommodate the demands of the plot by behaving like completely different, mostly brain-dead people, most prominently in the heroine's out-of-nowhere whining about wanting to be pregnant despite the high likelihood of "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"-style complications. Though I suppose one could defend this sudden, senseless, self-destructive shift in attitude as quite realistic.

For those who don't know the plot: The book's about a guy who, like Billy Pilgrim, is permanently unstuck in time. Every couple of days, he's suddenly shot into the past for a few hours, but his journeys seem to center around a particular woman. He first appears to her when she's a little girl and he's a man in his thirties, which is about the age he remains for all the visits to her in childhood, as well as when he appears during her horny teenage years (fear not, he remains entirely gentlemanly). When she's in her mid-20s, he tells her that they're going to meet soon---that is, she's going to meet him in his actual linear life, and he won't know her yet. When they do meet, he's actually a few years younger than she is, and much more awkward than the older man she's known up until now. But love blooms, and they have some beautiful years together.

It's all very sweet, and not too badly written. But what really sells the book is its ruthlessly perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy. Not just the predestined love aspect, though that's certainly no small thing; no, it's the traveler who's a projection of a man too perfect to exist outside of fiction(which makes casting Eric Bana, who's played a lot of too-good-to-be-true men, appropriate, though how I'd love to see him in a remake of "Suspicion"). For the (largely female) readership, the time traveler is both the suave older man who won't fuck you no matter how hard you beg, and he's also the stumbling younger guy you can slyly seduce, and he's the sweet, bumbling hubby who you can mold into the aforementioned suave older man (and he'll happily go along with it, because you're trying to make him into the man he already is/was/will be). The fact that the heroine's actual father is barely-glimpsed and seemingly unlikable only further underscores the time traveler's role as simultaneous daddy and boytoy. And his chronological unreliability gives the story the vital "sisters must do it for themselves" aspect that any successful piece of female-oriented pop fiction needs.

Of course, such wish fulfillment is a vital part of all popular fiction---witness detective novels' endless procession of men who are tough, independent, hard-living, and seemingly irresistible to hot babes who conveniently disappear. But it's sort of rare to see a piece of popular women's fiction so eager to dive into genre devices (and sci-fi devices at that) in the interest of crafting a shamelessly perfect fantasy scenario. It has some of the glassy-eyed intensity of very specific fetish porn, the sense that you're reading something carefully crafted to fit perfectly in the keyhole in someone's brain.

Serial Mom

Flickr gallery for this piece here

I've always liked John Waters' movies without ever thinking he was a particularly good director. Which is fine---the amiable amateurism of his films is much of their appeal. But after massively enjoying Serial Mom, I'm starting to think that Waters, like Wagner, is better than he looks.

Because the thing is, Serial Mom is funny as hell---guffaw-out-loud-in-an-empty-living-room funny. But aside from a handful of quotable lines, the script isn't all that striking. Which has weirdly little impact on the movie's immense hilariousness. Most of the scenes have flatly functional dialogue---"Officer, we don't allow gum in this house." "Sorry, ma'am." ---- but through some strange alchemy, it plays like gangbusters.

That flat functionality is maybe the most defining characteristic of Waters as a filmmaker. Much of the fun of the Waters/Divine pairing was always the discordance of this loud, ferocious creature and the weirdly narcotized world that contained her. From his early films to the present, his compositions have a theatrical, frontal quality. Even at climactic moments, when the screen gets more angled and kinetic, the camera hangs back, arresting momentum.

This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what a director is supposed to do---"keep the audience immersed" is pretty much the filmmaker's first commandment. Serial Mom pays extensive tribute to goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis, not least in its combination of luridly violent subject matter and bizarrely uninflected visual style. In Lewis, that was just the result of his mild-at-best technical competence---where a great (hell, good) director might have a villain terrify you through commanding movement of the frame, Lewis' baddies just lean into the lens and leer. But Waters has always idolized the accidental Brechtianism of crappy exploitation movies of the 50s and 60s, before ubiquitous film school degrees made even low-budget sleazefests blandly mediocre.

The damned thing is that in Waters' films, it works. The air of campy quotation turns every piece of set dressing into a giggle, and the foursquare framing makes a guy spitting out gum into a weird little gag that isn't really funny, except that it is. His proscenium-oriented direction is definitely distinctive; his auteurist cred is certainly triple-A. But more important, his storytelling voice is incredibly effective at his project of making the whole world look sublimely freaky, turning even the most normal behavior into a too-tight Halloween mask.

Judd Apatow

There's something of a running complaint that Judd Apatow presents a perniciously misogynist view of woman as unfun taskmasters of free-spirited men. The latest manifestation of this misreading is up at Slate's Double-X blog, because if there's one site guaranteed to always get the arts wrong, it's Slate.

It's an understandable misapprehension---Seth Rogen is a lot more fun than Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up (though Heigl seems to be building a solid comedy career out of being the new Margaret Dumont), and Steve Carell's pals in The 40-Year-Old Virgin get a lot more jokes than Catherine Keener. But it seems to fundamentally miss what Apatow's movies are about, which is the need to put away dudehood's childish things. Both Virgin and Knocked Up (and, from what I've heard, Funny People) hammer pretty obsessively on the necessity of putting down the bong and leaving the brahs behind in order to become a functioning adult.

This is, obviously, a pretty common theme in romantic comedy. What makes Apatow different is that he doesn't take the line seen in movies like The Hangover: "Being a dude is totally fun, but you gotta stop doing it 'cause chicks don't like it and dudes like chicks." Instead, Apatow is always very conscious, even when the boys are having their fun, of how hollow that fun is. All the guys in The 40 Year Old Virgin are gradually exposed as liars, hypocrites, and frauds. Even more pointed is the flophouse that Rogen inhabits in Knocked Up---for the first half-hour or so it looks like a great place to hang out, but it gradually seems increasingly purgatorial, culminating in the pinkeye outbreak that leaves everyone looking like zombie junkies. This is where so many of the Apatow-imitators fail---they try to shoehorn all the growing up into the finale, rather than leading us to its necessity.

If anything, the problem with Apatow's movies is their monomaniac focus on a heteronormative family as the only fulfilling life. Though Catherine Keener is a little funkier than most romance objects, there's a real lack of any kind of alternative culture in Apatow's world, and the preachy insistence on showing how anyone who doesn't end up well-scrubbed and properly paired is doomed to a life of chronic masturbation gets not-a-little grating. It's hard to imagine a current Apatow movie providing a moment of subculture pride like the first shot of Freaks & Geeks. Looking back on that show, it seems like it was Paul Feig who provided the identification with the underclass, while Apatow was the talent-spotter (and a helluva spotter, considering how many of the F&G crew ended up comedy stars).

Still, I can't much condemn Apatow for being about as limited in his perspective as almost every other romantic comedy ever made. If anything, much of the criticism of his films misses the extent to which he's simply rewriting classic screwball comedies with the gender roles reversed. Movies like Bringing Up Baby often revolved around a stuffy, career-obsessed male who's transformed by his meeting with a wacky, free-spirited female; if anything, the biggest difference is that the women of screwball comedies were required to change much less than Apatow's males.

Public Enemies

There's a taciturn quality to Michael Mann's Public Enemies that I'm sure he regards as a virtue. Mann's deep love of macho playacting (he's like Scorsese without Scorsese's critical detatchment from his big-dicked poseurs) certainly extends to his own direction, which is at once swoony and brisk. And there's some real virtue to it---his refusal to subject us to what-does-it-all-mean speechifying can be welcome.

It can also leave us sort of unclear on, well, what it all means. Public Enemies is good fun---the clothes are nice, the picture looks good (though some of the gun battles take on a weirdly interlaced, flat quality when the camera moves too much), and it's great fun to see a bunch of actors comport themselves in all those period jackets. But in the end, it's sort of unclear why Mann wanted to tell this story, what he expects us to take from it, what distinguishes this movie from any of the other versions of the tale. Mann obviously assumes we have a fair amount of foreknowledge of Dillinger's fate---every mention of the Biograph theater fairly thrums with foreboding---which makes it all the more important for him to make clear why he's bothering to tell it to us, and he just won't.

There's hints all over the place---sometimes he seems interested in the Heat-like battle of wits between Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Purvis. Sometimes his attention is grabbed by the gap between Dillinger the celebrity and Dillinger the man, best articulated a scene where Dillinger goes unnoticed in a movie theater full of people searching for John Dillinger, largely because he's just a guy in a hat rather than a 15-foot-high mug shot. Sometimes it seems like the love story is what he wants to tell, signaled by the big music cues that come in whenever Dillinger and his best girl, Billie Frechette, are separated or reunited.

But every time a thematic thread is raised, it's soon dropped---nothing ever sinks in. Purvis is introduced unerringly shooting down Baby Face Nelson with a scoped rifle---as the Fuzzwife noted, Mann seems to be setting up a conflict between Dillinger as a tommy gun (inaccurate but deadly) and Purvis as a rifle (just one shot, but it's a good 'un). But Purvis' shooting skills never come up again, nor does his patience, nor does his accuracy. Dillinger's celebrity is frequently teased, but it never really resolves---Mann certainly doesn't even seize the opportunity to give us a shot of Dillinger dying in front of the movie theater, which would solidify that idea.

Even the love story doesn't really take over, not least because while Frechette gets a little speech about her boring life up until now, Mann's too disdainful of psychologizing to really let us see that as an aspect of her character. Marion Cotillard doesn't get to dig into Frechette as a thrill-seeker, or as a girl from the rez trapped in bad rez choices of bad rez men, or as a country mouse enjoying big-city sophistication---she's just a plot device, placed in the movie to wear clothes, take off clothes, look pretty, get slapped, and cry. Maybe a better actress could have found a way past Mann's disinterest, the way Christina Ricci did in Buffalo '66, but considering Mann's relentless drive to move ahead whether or not a character trait has been established, probably not.

For all Mann's meticulous shooting, the overall impression is one of sloppiness---it's like Mann glued a bunch of scripts together and started shooting without bothering to resolve it into a single draft. This rushed, ramshackle quality extends to the little things as well as the big, as Mann has a terribly bad habit of failing to introduce information until the last possible minute, not as a suspense trick, but because he simply seems to have forgotten what we need to know. An early example is in the scene when Dillinger comes to the coat check where Frechette's working, fights off a customer, and takes her away. Just before Frechette goes from turning him down to leaving with him, there's a moment when she looks at the other girl working the coat check, and that seems to change her mind. Maybe it's because she sees something in the other girl that she doesn't want to become, maybe it's because she sees the girl's admiration for this tough guy who so badly wants to be her boyfriend. But it's almost impossible for us to even think about the question, because we've literally had zero visual indication that there even is a second girl at the counter before the shot where Frechette looks at her---I don't have a disc here, but I don't believe the other girl is even visible in the wide shots.

Another small but telling example---what sends Dillinger to the Biograph Theater is the heat of the Chicago summer, and the Biograph's air conditioning. But one the day he decides to go, after a series of scenes of Dillinger setting up various plans, he comes into the house and, in one shot, runs his wrists under cold water and says "It sure is hot---let's go to the movies." It seems like Directing 101 to establish that it's hot beforehand, so that you don't have to cram cause and effect into a single, clumsy moment like that, but here again Mann seems to be shooting scenes with no awareness of where a scene is going, so he has to carry out this kind of clumsy shuffle whenever the plot demands a reason for action.

Similar directoral sloppiness besets the action scenes. When Purvis and his boys have Dillinger holed up in a rural hotel, there's a lengthy discussion of who's going to approach from the north, who from the south, and what the plan is for closing the exits. But Mann never gives us shots that would make clear which way is north, who's coming from where, or how the plan goes wrong. It's fine if he wants to sacrifice spatial clarity for visceral excitement---I'm not a purist about knowing who's standing where---but it's bizarre to do so after giving us so much setup discussion of the directional plan.

Public Enemies is a perfectly good time at the movies---I went to see Johnny Depp wear cool clothes and shoot guns, and it delivered. But while I don't mind its anemic moral vision, it's narrative messiness borders on real contempt for the audience. Taciturn silence looks great on a western lawman, but on a storyteller, it's more than a little irritating.

You're Welcome, America

It's no fun to be a racial scold. And it feels pretty ridiculous when I've vociferously defended Resident Evil 5 from charges of racism---maybe more than it deserves. But among the many good things about the end of the Dubya regime, one benefit is that I'll no longer have to watch liberals wandering into genuinely icky minstrel-show territory.

The most recent sample is Will Ferrell's one-man show: "You're Welcome America - A Final Night with George W Bush", which was shot for broadcast on HBO. For the most part, it's a fairly entertaining piece---though the jokes are mostly just recitations from the Harper's Index, Ferrell's Bush impression has always been eerily spot-on. It's not just the accent, though he does do a lovely job of nailing the way Bush's affected drawl slips and slides depending on his self-image. What Ferrell gets is Bush's belligerent confusion, the way his slitted eyes seemed to be looking equally for a brawl or an escape. No matter how much I hated the guy, I always felt a little bad for him too---deep down, he seemed to know how out of his depth he was, and much of his cowboy toughness was a transparent cover for his well-deserved insecurity.

All that's fine, and good, and pretty funny. The problematic part comes about halfway through, as Bush/Ferrell is going through his memories of the members of his cabinet (you already see where this is going, right?). There's fairly standard jokes about Wolfowitz, Rummy, and a pretty funny bit about tickling Richard Perle's jowls to make him giggle. But then he turns to Condoleeza Rice, and things get profoundly icky, as an African-American woman dressed up like Condi comes out and does a music-video lambada with Bush.

Allow me to proffer a suggestion to comedians who would like to not be racist assholes: If your gag involves an African-American woman doing a hoochie-mama dance, think twice. If your gag involves a powerful African-American woman being turned into a white man's sexual fantasy, think three times.

The worst part---what makes it not funny along with racist---is that the tired sex-mammy stereotype doesn't map onto Condi at all. What's striking about Condi is her icy hatred, the way she would always flash the stink-eye when she thought no one was looking. Building jokes around her evil-nun persona could be plenty funny, and you could even get some comedy gold out of the contrast between Bush thinking of her as a warm mammy, and her actual chilly deadliness---like everyone in the Bush administration, she seems to have specialized in carefully manipulating the dauphin.

But presenting her as a gyrating stripper doesn't map onto her as a person---it's simply the most available stereotype of a black woman under 50. That's what makes it racist as well as bad comedy; it's hard to believe a pro like Ferrell could come up with something both less funny and more egregious than the Right's ugly-Chelsa jokes, but he did.

The Yakuza

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The Yakuza is not a lost classic of '70s cinema. Robert Towne was paid an awful lot for the script, which does do a nice job of using noir tropes as setups for chop-socky fight scenes, but it's lumpily-paced and frequently confusing, with hunks of exposition so ungainly that Lumet has no choice but to fade and dissolve his way through the speeches..

It's always fun to watch Robert Mitchum wisecrack with the guys and pine for the girl, and paunchy, puffy 70s Mitchum is just as much the ideal man than the young, beautiful Robert Mitchum---maybe more so. He and the able, charismatic Ken Takakura seem like they could get a really good rhythm going were Takakura not so visibly derailed by the English language---when acting in Japanese, he's as quick and smooth as in the fight scenes, but every time he has to speak English he drops his arms to his sides and twists his head like he's frozen at a desk. Their climactic fight scene, when they jointly kill several score bad guys, armed with Takaura's sword and Mitchum's Halo-like pistol & shotgun combo, is their one chance to get a good non-verbal relationship to happen, and it's squandered by the back-and-forth editing and uncreative framing.

But even though Pollack's visual direction is stolid, the visuals are still pretty thrilling, thanks in large part to Stephen Grimes' endlessly groovy production design. Grimes has a star-studded production design career, and he sinks his teeth into the scripts opportunities for campy japonaiserie, including a bright-blue boss' office with surrealist decor, and a sauna with inexplicable high-contrast red floor, equally inexplicable aquarium and even more inexplicable Porkysesque window to the girl's locker room. He has a great time filling the frame with artful patterns, or just a whole lotta brightly-colored Asiatic stuff, as well as finding some terrific city-of-the-future locations.

Director of Photography Kozo Okazaki also does a lot to keep the visuals exciting too, with great use of good ol' 70's Technicolor. The variety of rich, stylized hues are enough to make you weep for the candy colors that were to take over Hollywood filmmaking. I'll admit, this may be entirely personal, as despite being a child of the 80s, I feel that way about most films made between about 1968 and 1981---even the worst have a look that feels real in a way almost no color film would again, which may be one of the reasons 70s horror, no matter how crappily-made, has as unnerving authenticity.

Lumet's actual direction is really just workmanlike, with enough pans, dollies, and fades to feel properly professional, but most of the real visual magic is being worked by the production team. This is one of the nice things about having a full-crew sense of who makes a movie---even when the movie isn't much as a whole, there's still plenty of fine workmanship to admire, as well as some bizarre costume choices to, er, enjoy.

Tetro

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Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro really shouldn't be watchable at all. The story of crippled princelings setting things to right with love smacks of the fairy tale, which is fine, I guess, for opera, the form Tetro keeps throwing itself against. But the actual storytelling in the movie is kind of a mess---after an efficient first act, plot points get raised distractingly and connected obscurely, information about the characters is taken for granted, and the dialogue often thuds its ways through Big Themes and narrative repetition (the words "on the boat" are repeated like the cast has been assigned tongue twisters).

What makes it hold together is that the whole movie is so utterly, tongue-dryingly beautiful. The black and white---choke!---videography fills every shot with a range of shade and texture that I didn't think even HD video could pull off. The high-definition online trailers don't convey quite how stunning it is on the big screen; this, even more than Che, is the movie that convinces me that DV is ready to take over from film visually, not just economically. And the framing, replete with shadows, mirrors, and careful balancing of elements, pulses with compositional intelligence---nearly any still captures the movie's themes of doubleness, dominance, and foreignness better than all the family shouting matches.

The film's full of the things that make a film enjoyable long before it makes any sense---visual ravishment, eruptions of comedy and eroticism, and a sure-footed forward momentum. It also helps that all the performances are as good as in anything Coppola's ever directed (yes, including that)---he knows how to give actors enough stage business to keep their performances natural, and when to give them space to roll. It's no surprise that Maribel Verdu continues to be both an intelligent performer and spectacularly hot, but it's equally great to see Vincent Gallo do some of his most generous scene-work ever, as though he's finally ready to stop being a performer and become an actor. Some of the dirty jokes risk descending into late-Bertolucci satyriasis, but they're presented with such delight that it's impossible to stay mad.

Honestly, I'm glad that Tetro doesn't bother to solve its narrative problems. There's something liberating about seeing a film at once so aesthetically accomplished, so obviously personal, and so blithely not giving a fuck whether you're following along. What Coppola wants is to move you, and a good Catholic boy knows that the best way to do that is to dazzle the eyeballs right out of your skull.

Coppola, like Tetro's title character, is an artist who's been tormented by both the success and the failure of his art---under the huffing and puffing of his 90s films, you could feel his yearning to sit like Harry Caul, peacefully playing saxophone amidst the wreckage of his career. The story's strange elisions---the way themes are abruptly yanked into play, the way plot points get taken for granted, even the characters' somnambulistic tendency to seemingly forget the explosions that happened in the previous scene---don't seem like failures of craft so much as the inarguable, inscrutable decisions of an individual language. Even the movie's oddest narrative jump---how Bennie goes from wanting to be saved by Tetro, to wanting revenge on Tetro, to wanting to save Tetro---seems in retrospect like a perfectly accurate depiction of the family, where love and punishment often twine together too closely to ever be put in sequence.

The Girlfriend Experience

I liked Bubble, Soderbergh's previous digital improv experiment, a helluva lot, largely because it got the white working-class speech I grew up with better than any movie I've ever seen. The Girlfriend Experience is a very different milieu, and a much more sharply satiric experience. Where Bubble was immersed in its characters' unmoored, dead-end lives, TGfE keeps its distance, both narratively and visually (nearly every shot of Christine puts some object between us and her).






It's very hard to identify with anyone in the film, but I'm okay with that, and I'm hugely irritated by how many critics seem to regard that as a fatal flaw, writing as though Modernism never happened (although the NY Post's description of it as "a stag movie as conceived by the editors of the Financial Times" is actually pretty apt). It's all the more depressing considering that many of those same critics know to pay homage to directors like Resnais and Antonioni, even as they refuse to consider a contemporary American with similar objectives.

As usual, a lot of my thoughts come out best commenting on other sites. At Amy's Robot, Amy mostly liked the film, but we disagree about Grey's performance. And I have a lot to say about Lauren Wissot's review at The House Next Door; Wissot manages to combine Pauline Kael's unpleasant sense of aesthetic entitlement with the smugness of a San Francisco sex activist, then tops it off with Armond White's defensive laziness, but I always have fun getting peeved with her.

Full Frontal

"The language of images—maybe not threatens, but directly changes actual lived life. I mean, consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they'd seen people kiss ... maybe a hundred kisses. My parents, who'd grown up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they kissed. Before I had ever kissed anyone, I had seen tens of thousands of kisses, of people kissing. And I know that the first time I kissed, much of my thought was 'Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?'"

—David Foster Wallace—

Though it's been accused of being unfeeling, intellectual, and abstract, Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal is actually a sterling example of a genre usually derided by highbrows: the romantic comedy. What makes it great is its refusal to take the conventions of the romantic comedy for granted, along with its nagging fear that the attempt to represent romance through these conventions might be an act with real-world consequences. In the last minutes of Full Frontal (spoiler alert, I suppose, though if you can't guess this then you've never seen a rom-com) when the Plucky Single Gal finally meets A Nice Guy, she muses "It was just like a movie." But the question Full Frontal worries at obsessively is: If we imagine love through an unreal medium, does that threaten the reality of our love? It's the question Soderbergh has been asking ever since Sex, Lies, and Videotape: How can we be present for each other with all these screens in the way?



Full Frontal's many characters orbit around Gus Delario (David Duchovny), the producer of the romantic comedy Rendezvous, Full Frontal's film-within-the-film. Gus is a sleazy, life-hating pervert, exactly the kind of guy you'd expect to be behind a movie like Rendezvous, a phony piece of shit that, like most romantic comedies, seems a deliberate attempt to destroy any ability people might have to understand their own emotional lives.

Rendezvous tells the story of an entertainment journalist, Catherine (Julia Roberts), and an up-and-coming actor, Nicholas (Blair Underwood), who fall in love. Or rather, are shoved into it—even the actors comment on how little chemistry they have together, and Rendezvous pushes them into each other through bizarrely manipulative means, including a mysteriously-appearing love letter, an arbitrary fainting spell, and a sudden confession that's clearly coming from the screenwriter rather than the character.

The artificiality of the romantic comedy is made clear visually as well as narratively. The opening scenes of Rendezvous, handsomely shot on 35-mm film, with the enveloping colors and volume-defining light of a Hollywood feature, are followed by scenes from the life of Rendezvous' screenwriter, Carl Bright (David Hyde Pierce), presented with almost over-determined visual cruddiness. When Carl's wife starts her day by flinging open the bedroom curtains, the frame fills with the whiteout wash of digital video, and all the non-Rendezvous scenes thereafter are characterized by graininess, shaky camerawork, and flat lighting.



The deglamorized presentation of Carl's morning with his wife, coming just after the slickness of Rendezvous, invites a reading of the Rendezvous scenes as representing smiling unreality, and Carl's life as The Real. Only that contrast doesn't remain stable either. Just as things are getting heart-tugging, with Carl recalling a dream in which "I had no effect on anyone" while his wife ignores him (awwwww!), little jump cuts forcibly remind us that this, too, is a scene, assembled from multiple takes. The digital video, quick zooms, and echo-y sound make it look like a reality show, but it's definitely not reality, and woe to anyone who mistakes a movie—whether it's Rendezvous or Full Frontal—for the real thing.



The genre of the reality show—the ultimate in tricking the viewer into believing that the manipulated is authentic—is invoked again by Adolf Hitler (Nicky Katt), who's introduced singing the theme song to the TV show COPS. Okay, it's not actually Hitler, it's an actor playing Hitler, performing Carl's play The Sound and the Fuhrer in a tiny downtown theater. Then again, he's referred to in the credits simply as "Hitler," so maybe it really is Adolf himself, now an egomaniacal actor in L.A. rather than an egomaniacal actor in Germany.

Though the only real antagonist in Full Frontal is sheer postmodern malaise, Hitler is the one character the film has no sympathy for—he's a monster, an utter waste of air. And much of what makes him so evil is that he's a creature of pure performance, convinced that his starring role puts him at the center of the world. He preens and demands attention, he name-drops actors as though he knows them (with that horrible L.A. habit of using famous peoples' first names—"It's like Al said—Al Pacino"), and worst of all, he brags that "I broke up with my girlfriend when we started rehearsing this play." Ed (Enrico Colantoni), the director of The Sound..., says that his interest in a play about Hitler came from the idea that "It's evil, it's monstrous not to have feelings," and here, Hitler commits Full Frontal's idea of the ultimate monstrosity: sacrificing love on the altar of performance.

Performance, though, is not just the business of actors. When Ed is opening the theater, musing about his Internet dating profile, he says "It's a place where I can lie" just as the lights come up on the black-box stage. The juxtaposition of a dating-site profile and a theater is a provocative reminder that everyone who has ever looked for love—which is to say, everyone—is putting themselves on a stage, making themselves into a performer, and they naturally look to other performers for inspiration. Similarly, Linda (Mary McCormack) seems to have no connection at all with the movies, but her job as a masseuse makes her take a fake name and a fake persona, and an awful encounter with Gus lands her in a hotel hallway in a slinky dress, mistaken for a hooker by the maid (who isn't exactly wrong)—the performance becomes the reality, the mask becomes your face.



Throughout Full Frontal, characters find themselves in situations where they have to perform at a person rather than talk to them—a job interview, a meeting with the boss, a journalist covering a celebrity, a pitch session, and so on. Carl's wife Lee (Catherine Keener) is a corporate VP tasked with interviewing a company's staff to decide who'll be downsized, and the pressure of testing people rather than interacting with them is pushing her to a crack-up—she's behaving in ways that break the scripted interactions of an interview, and threaten to make something real spill through the cracks. At one point she shocks an employee by asking "Do you find me attractive?" Asked "In what way?" she replies, "In a human sort of way." But much of what's maddening Lee is that there is no "human way"—there's no interaction that isn't the product of a network of expectations, and no way to get at the person under the performance.

Or maybe there is one way—as Carl says, "You can't pretend to be having sex with someone when you're actually having sex with them." Just before he says that, the screen fills with the words "A VOW by Carl Bright," like a husband's wedding vow to his wife. But the camera pulls back to reveal that the text was the headline of a fluffy celebrity profile, the conversation is an awkward flirtation with an uncomfortable co-worker, and the subject under discussion is porn movies, the ultimate in transforming the act of love into an image of itself.



But then, romantic comedies are equally guilty of transforming emotion into performance, as the Rendezvous scenes keep reminding us. Even within Rendezvous, the tension between a performance and a person keeps the characters from connecting: Nicholas' a cappella rap halfway through the film was lambasted by critics for its stiffness, but that's part of the point—we're seeing two people go from talking to each other to performing at each other, and it's a terrible thing to behold.

But the greater tension comes from the pull between love's unphotogenic reality and the demands of a visual medium. The final moments of Rendezvous dramatically objectify this tension, as Catherine and Nicholas go for their big kiss, but instead turn their full faces to the camera, their lips unable to touch because they're so busy giving themselves to its devouring eye. The love story is destroyed by the demands of the movies; Julia Roberts' superstar smile becomes the grin on a corpse.

Rendezvous starts realistically and gradually collapses. Full Frontal moves in the opposite direction: it starts with voice-overs, jump cuts, and strange visual non-sequiturs, but the alienating devices mostly drop away as we become more wrapped up in the characters and their stories. In the final scenes, when Linda and Ed meet, we're presented with the difference between a movie love, sealed with snappy dialogue in the world's most well-lit food court, and a real love, created with awkward jokes in a much less flattering airport.



And then, at the last moment, the rug is pulled out from under us one more time, as Soderbergh steps back from the happy couple to reveal that the airplane they're meeting on is every bit as artificial as the airplane where Rendezvous blows itself apart. Throughout Full Frontal, the movie teased the possibility of breaking through itself into our world, as when Francesca Davis (Julia Roberts), the actress playing Catherine in Rendezvous, starts a romance with a theater tech, a romance that mirrors the actual story of Julia Roberts familiar to any reader of People Magazine (Soderbergh seems to have a particular love of playing this sort of game with Roberts; the funniest moment in Oceans' Twelve is when the gang hatches a plan to have Julia Roberts' character help them with a robbery by pretending to be Julia Roberts, over her objection that "I don't look anything like her!"). Soderbergh's characters are all struggling to achieve a moment of connection—Carl's spiritual progress can be measured by comparing his creepy, manipulative flirtation near the beginning of a movie to his simple openness with another woman near the end—and like them, the movie keeps trying to break through the forest of images to the people on the other side.

But of course, that isn't possible. When the camera pulls back to reveal a movie set and Linda says that falling in love is "just like a movie," there's a trapped and touching sadness to the moment—the movie, like Linda, like anyone, is never free of the obligation to perform. Like James Spader in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a world is built around the idea that an image on a screen makes it possible to apprehend a person.

It doesn't.

The Man From London

The paradox of most feature films is that they are at once two contradictory things. They are, mostly, fictions---extravagantly untrue stories that thrive on glamour and bullshit. But, with the exception of animation, every film is also a documentary of the absolutely true---a photograph of this particular thing at this particular moment.

Much film style works to bring the latter in line with the former, using lights, camera position, and actorly charisma to turn ordinary sets and locations into fabulous facsimiles of themselves. But some films, like Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, make the authority of the real the thing that the fiction must rise to meet. A relentless insistence on the sheer is-ness of what's in front of the camera defines the film's style, and the defenses a person develops to protect themselves from even the most engaging lies are stripped away; the movie becomes convincing in the way Samuel Johnson's kickable stone is convincing, and the story is something experienced rather than watched.

This is a hell of an achievement, which is why Werckmeister Harmonies is one of the best films of the last decade. But it's also a hell of a responsibility, which is why his new film, The Man From London, is such a disappointment.


The plot of The Man From London is a pile of foofraw you've heard a thousand times before---Crime! Violence! Some schlub grabs a suitcase fulla cash money! Someone wants it! Pursuit! This standard-issue thriller plot overlays the domestic drama of Maloin, the aforementioned schlub who wants to use his accidentally-gotten gains to buy things for his daughter, a girl so unsparingly, uncomplainingly, and colorlessly oppressed by everyone in the movie that her treatment plays as a production design decision rather than an injustice.

Worse still, the conventional plot makes Tarr's grand style seem like so much huffing and puffing. Werckmeister's story-- -a small industrial town sinks into chaos under the influence of a demagogue's carnival---had an epic scope. It's expansive resonances imbued Tarr's cinematic gestures of patient-but-dramatic camera moves, long shots of people walking and eating, abrupt surges of music--- with metaphoric weight, and it helped, too, that the impeding apocalypse gave it a solid dramatic engine; the last half of the film plays like the climax of an action movie slowed down to realtime. Because The Man From London feels like a movie, rather than a myth, the attention-grabbing style degenerates into a series of tics---arbitrary rather than inevitable. Tarr's direction seems mannered and self-amused, and when he deploys audience-assaulting gestures, like the screen going black for a full minute while repetitive hammer-blows are heard, or a major plot point happening soundlessly behind a closed door, they seem bratty instead of affecting. In Werckmeister, the slow, strange shots seemed like the only way the story could possibly be properly honored. Here, they just feel like a director poking us with his own cleverness like an unwelcome erection at a prom---yes, I know you can do that, but why should I want you to?

The visual style, too, is enervated. Tarr's long (long, long, long) takes work best when the shot contains a wide range of elements, particularly textures. The presence of nature, especially, brings his shots to life, as our eye takes in the countless details of waves, leaves, and rocks, and our minds become conscious of all the detail in the world that we normally overlook. But in The Man From London, the featureless boat hulls and smoothly-paved streets that take up the frame just leave the eye bored. A long take is never dull if there's something to be looked at, but here, there's often nothing interesting to focus on, either for the eye or the brain.

For all its disappointment, the movie's not a total loss. Every so often, its restricted vocabulary of repetitive camera movements, and its eagerness to rest on unprotected faces, creates a genuinely affecting mood. By the end, the film rises to a real threnody of grief for a world where money can't buy dignity, but only sends waves of pain at everyone in its orbit. But if there's one thing made clear by Werckmeister Harmonies, a movie which spent great amounts of time watching people walk, it's that how you get to your destination is what gives you a right to be there. Up until its final moments, The Man From London feels like Tarr knows, deep down, that this movie isn't serious enough to command his belief, and I pretty much felt the same.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Inspired by The Belgian seeing it for the first time, I spent some time last night re-watching one of my favorite movies, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Originally, the plan was just to watch some key scenes, but of course, once I'm ten minutes in, I know I'm gonna make it all the way to that final travesty of a gunfight, and notice lots of things along the way that I'd never seen before.

A movie like this sort of makes for bad blog fodder, as I quickly lose the ability to say anything smart and can only stutter and gawp: Those performances! That cinematography! All those fantastic faces! So no attempt at a thesis here---just a few observations, and perhaps we'll get The Belgian to chime in at the comments.

When I first saw McCabe in college, the professor talked about the classic Western narrative of the guy who built the town being unable to live in it. But actually, the film's even crueler than that: McCabe really doesn't build the town at all. He shows up, buys up some property, and starts a business, but the one thing he brings that wasn't there before---a classy brothel which serves as the movie's ironic symbol of civilization---wasn't his idea at all; he just put up the capital that Mrs. Miller put to work. Ultimately, McCabe is a good-time irrelevance---not only can he not adjust to civilized life, he's not much use on the frontier either. Fortunately for Altman, he's got the immense charisma of Warren Beatty on his side; otherwise it'd be awfully hard to pay attention to what's ultimately the story of a great nonentity.


McCabe's uselessness is further highlighted by Altman's trademark generosity with minor characters. In the background of McCabe's bull sessions and drunken card games, we get glimpses of the people who are doing the real building of the town, and it's striking how different all of them are from the palefaces who would be the heroes, rogues, and general moral centers of a previous era's Westerns.

There's the Washingtons, a sedate African-American couple who mostly steer clear of the white folks' crazy fights. Instead, they do their jobs---they're the ones who actually bring in the ladies that are Mrs. Miller's capital---and keep their heads down. The most respectable citizens in town, they get the last "townspeople shot" in the movie, walking away from the celebration after the church fire has been put out; having done the work of preserving public order, they're visibly uninterested in the debauchery that keeps endangering it.



We only get a few glimpses into the Chinatown that's already taken root when the town's roads aren't even done, but they're terrifically suggestive, and the Chinese workers in Mrs. Miller's "gooseberry ranch" similarly remind the viewer who's actually building things in this outpost. I would love to see a whole feature Western set in one of these frontier Chinatowns, with the cowboys as the mysterious presence that keeps making trouble.



Meanwhile, the one member of the white-boy brigade who does try to build something resembling a real life, Bart (played by Bert Remsen, Altman stalwart and favorite of my estwhile co-blogger) can't keep his drunken temper and overinflated sense of honor (which would be a mark of virtue in many guy-flicks) under control, and gets himself killed in one of the dumbest streetfights in movie history. As a result, his mail-order bride (Shelly Duvall! Those eyes! Those lips!) immediately makes a beeline for Mrs. Miller in the hopes of some more lucrative work, which is, as Mrs. Miller declares in no uncertain terms, a much better deal than being Bart's wife ever was.

All this abnegation is especially appropriate considering the general mood of alienation from America-building that must have prevailed on set. McCabe was shot in Canada in 1971, and a significant number of crew and performers were draft-dodgers who'd settled in the Canadian wilderness, and could hardly have resisted the joke of playing the original American cowboys creating a land that the counterculture was increasingly giving up on.

On a completely other note (I warned you there wasn't going to be a big thesis...): I do so love the sheer muzziness of the visuals, appropriate for a movie whose protagonist is slobbering drunk most of the time, and regularly caught in the rain. This is often exaggerated beyond all reason, as in McCabe's big entrance at the end of the credits sequence, when Altman and his cinematographer decided that all the "flashed" shots just weren't fuzzy enough, and shoot McCabe's entrance through a pane of dirty glass.



It's also interesting to note how much of the movie's visual progression is built around the introduction of color. The early scenes of the movie are a thousand shades of brown, with a look that subtley evokes sepia-toning. We then get black and white for the journey down to Bearpaw, with color mostly visible on ties and houses, symbols of civilization that seem out of place in the vast wilderness.



But once Mrs. Miller enters the picture, a whole new palette of colors opens up. Her high-class establishment, while still somewhat desaturated, has a much wider range of colors and tones than Sheehan's murky bar, in keeping with the wide range of possibilities it offers as its main enticement.


Similarly, the thugs from the mining company bring with them a bright, hard light, very different from the diffuse glow we saw earlier. This unsparing brightness, like being born into a world McCabe's been in hiding from, reaches its apotheosis in the final snowbound gunfight, where we return to a limited pallete, but this time with a light that's sharp, clear, and merciless.




My final thought on McCabe: If it does nothing else, it really makes you realize how miserable it must have been to settle the Pacific Northwest. You're riding on horseback for days, living in shacks and tents, it's raining all the goddamn time! Unlike the majority of Westerns, which are set in the deserts of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, McCabe takes place is a world where nature is always asserting itself, not with spectacular flash-floods of disaster, but with a constant thudding of misery and muck.