Movie expeditions

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

I don’t think I’ll ever forget how I saw the first few minutes of Raising Victor Vargas. It was a Saturday matinee at the Varsity. They went straight from the trailers into the movie, without the “Feature Performance” logo that normally lets you know the preambles are over, and since the movie has no opening titles or credits, I initially thought it might just be another trailer. The film starts with a disembodied shot of the title character Victor Vargas, traveling up his body as it might in some kind of commercial, and then launches right into the middle of a scene, so you could almost think they’d omitted the start of the movie. On top of that, the sound was way too low, so you really had to strain to hear it, and there was a major distraction involving what looked like a couple of cops and other guys searching the theater (maybe on a manhunt, for someone who’d slipped past the ticket taker?) In total, there was none of the easy promise that normally accompanies the start of a new movie. Raising Victor Vargas seemed like hard work.

Raising Victor Vargas

But this was all exhilarating, because it caused you to approach the film as an expedition rather than as a glide, which was exactly the attitude it needed. The movie, a simple story of young love in New York’s Lower East Side, has some moments of observation that are just gorgeous, and I found myself utterly transported by them, in a way that might not usually have happened. In one scene Victor invites a girl to dinner with his family; just straightforward burgers, and nothing really happens for a while except the stilted conversation you’d expect. It’s captivating, to the point that it’s actually rather disappointing when something relatively dramatic then takes place.

The movie has great verisimilitude, but there’s no question that it’s somewhat sentimental at times, going for emotional effects that, however well disguised and hidden under a layer of urban grime, are fundamentally hokey. But I don’t know to what extent life in that community is pervasively shaped by that kind of outlook. Raising Victor Vargas doesn’t have the knowing irony and glibness common to other branches of the teen movie genre. The movie isn’t overly political, but the community’s apparent homogeneity and insularity suggests that access to America’s vaunted upward mobility is uncertain here.

The two main female characters start off mutually reinforcing their indifference to men, then both surrender over the course of the film. This could be read as a filmic convention, or as sheer sentiment, or as a shaking off of impractical youthful idealism. I think it’s all of these – but it’s also a depiction of the mechanisms that may keep the women’s lives, and perhaps those of their children and grandchildren, not far from the block where they started. Young love is terrific and inevitable, but it comes with a price tag visible only with hindsight.

Swimming Pool

So I obviously liked the film, but it’s the work of a young director, and not completely sure-footed at times. For me, circumstances definitely helped. Contrast this with Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, which could hardly be more assured. If you watched it projected onto a sardine can, it would still seem unbowed. Ozon’s a young director too, although already with five features and many shorts under his belt. A few years ago I wrote a mixed review here of his Water Falls on Burning Rocks. Since then Under the Sand and 8 Women have boosted his reputation considerably. I liked, but didn’t love, both of them. But Swimming Pool is the first of his films that I think will grow in my mind. After I saw it, I kept mentally turning it over, thinking with delight of more nuances, more complexities.

My initial reaction though, when the movie ended, was slight disappointment that such a poised, allusive work had turned out to be yet another “meta” movie with a surprise ending that amounts to a cheat. The film, Ozon’s first to be filmed substantially in English, has Charlotte Rampling as a prim English mystery novelist who, suffering from a deep malaise, goes to stay in her publisher’s French summerhouse. Her peace is shattered by the arrival of his 17-year-old daughter (Ludivine Sagnier), a force of nature who lounges around the house naked and brings home a different guy every night. The two women initially clash, but Rampling eventually realizes she’s being provided with a better narrative than the detective story she originally had in mind. So their relationship grows more complex, but is everything what it seems?

Well, you know the answer to that one already. But I don’t think it’s too productive to worry about that the film’s ending actually means, or whether it “works” in terms of tying everything up. Viewed as a whole, the film’s a superb depiction of repression (which the film pretty much seems to peg as a specifically British malaise) gradually loosening up under the French sun; of a woman slipping out from under the patriarchal thumb and reinventing herself. For sure, Rampling’s character is a bit too much of a device – an extreme of self-denial postulated only so she can be melted by the film’s machinations – and everything that follows has a resulting artificiality. You watch it as a clever piece of work. But Ozon’s mastery is so exquisite that the reservations normally attaching to such material are heavily muted here.

Open mind

Towards the end, it becomes reminiscent of Mulholland Drive as identities shift (the wizened dwarf woman in one scene certainly seems like a Lynchian touch): the film connotes the freeing of Rampling’s psyche by visibly breathing out, allowing coherence to fray. The symbolism is sometimes a bit heavy-handed, such as in the equation of writing with self-determination, or in how the film marks Rampling’s transformation by giving her a nude scene to blow all of Sagnier’s away. And if you think about it too much, you might conclude that the movie is more truly about nothing than Seinfeld ever was. So the trick is to think about it just enough and no more.

Which must be a measure of what Ozon has still to achieve. The Swimming Pool is the kind of film that barely seems to need a spectator. Although I have no doubt it’s a better film than Raising Victor Vargas, there’s something truly endearing about the latter movie’s cross of sentimentality and naturalism – it seems to acknowledge some sense (maybe, admittedly, a naïve one) of the viewer’s humanity. Of course, that train of thought could lead you to awarding points for mere pandering, which is why heart-tugging movies perhaps tend to be overvalued in middlebrow circles as long as they carry a minimum veneer of intelligence. But once in a while, I guess that’s not such a major crime.

Anything but movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

People keep accusing me of being movie-crazed. I deny it as a matter of policy, but it’s a shaky denial. I try to watch a movie a day on average – is that madness? It’s certainly tiring, and means a lot of other ambitions get squeezed to the margins. And sure, in an ideal world I’d be more well-rounded. But I do my best. Let’s take an inventory.

Books!

I have a feeling I’ve written at least twenty articles by now where, in the course of discussing a movie based on a book, I felt bound to admit it was something I hadn’t read. The fact of my pointing out these instances probably illustrates I feel a bit guilty about them – or at least regretful. There’s no question that (to name a few recent examples) About Schmidt, The Hours and Nicholas Nickleby would be fuller viewing experiences if, in addition to engaging with them on their own terms, I were able to critique them as adaptations. Not (I hope) in the dutiful way of merely noting similarities and differences, but as a way of identifying alternative portals into the work. I know that Chicago, derived from a stage musical that I’ve seen twice, seemed to me different (probably worse, actually) and more intriguing than it would have otherwise.

I used to read a lot, but it’s the old story – as your work gets more demanding and you pick up other commitments (walking the dog being a big one), something has to give. For many people, movies are the something that has to give, but I was never going to cut the cards that way. I still spend what seems like hours a day on newspapers, various internet websites and several magazine subscriptions including Variety and The New Yorker, but vacation reading aside it’s surprising if I finish even two books a year. Since the vacation reading is always non-fiction, it ended up that a decade went by without my reading a novel (except a few that I read in French as a learning exercise). Then last year, for reasons obscure even to me, I broke the drought by reading Jerzy Kosinski’s Blind Date. I thought it was pretty awful, so I guess that’ll be it for another ten years.

The irony is that I do read book reviews and I have a pretty good retention for titles and authors’ names, so I can fake my way through a conversation pretty well. My wife reads a lot, and I choose most of her books for her based on what I’ve picked up from reviews etc., but she doesn’t really care about names and titles, so I have better knowledge – in that superficial sense – of what she’s read than she does. Anyway, I’m thinking maybe I’ll catch up when I retire. Except by then I’ll have forgotten what most of the movies were like, so I’ll have to watch them all again. And that’ll be very time consuming.

Music!

Last Christmas, my wife gave me a Macintosh ipod. This is one of the cool-looking little gadgets which carry close to 1,000 songs, either downloaded off the Internet or from your own CDs converted into MP3 format (2016 note – that’s right, that’s how old this article is, it seemed necessary to explain what an ipod was). I’d often admired the ads (I think Apple is the only company whose advertising consistently works for me – I bought one of the ill-fated cubes as well) but frankly I didn’t think I’d ever use it enough, so I showed some restraint. But she got one for me anyway, and it turns out I use it all the time – walking the dog or to and from work, on the subway. At least one and a half hours a day, and that’s on a slow day. I absolutely love the thing. And it made me realize how long it’s been since I just listened to music. It’s always been in my life, sure, as I worked on the computer or read the paper, or whatever, but I never drive any more, and that wiped out a large block of pure listening time. With a few exceptions, I haven’t gotten to know the CDs I bought in the last ten years as intimately as those I bought earlier. I regretted it, but it just seemed like another one of those things.

But now, with my head full of music as I follow the dog round the park, I’m hearing subtleties I never knew about, and they’re just thrilling me. This really came to me when I was wandering around in the dark early one morning, listening to The Band’s recording of The Well, from The Last Waltz soundtrack. I must have heard it at least fifty times, but it had never struck me, as it did then, what a truly wonderful arrangement it has. I could make a similar point over and over again with different examples. My current ipod wandering-in-the-dark favourite is Joni Mitchell’s latest album Travelogue. Played at home on the stereo, it’s more interesting than actually good – a somewhat overblown symphonic reinterpretation of her own songs (and not generally the best ones either). But on the ipod, it sounds staggeringly haunting.

I guess my taste is pretty wide, although no more so than a lot of other people. I guess I just don’t look the type. I also have on there Barbra Streisand, The Sex Pistols, John Coltrane, Neil Young, Quincy Jones, the soundtracks to Will Rogers Follies and Sunday in the Park with George, Pink Floyd, Charles Mingus, Prefab Sprout, Bobby Womack – maybe you’ll concede me the point about the wide taste. My big blind spot is classical music. I know it’s a crazy generalization even to put it that way, but it’s simply not what I enjoy.

Plays!

Here’s another medium in which I easily manage to exceed average activity, even if that isn’t saying a lot. I probably see around five plays a year – about half of them here, the others in the course of a vacation to somewhere or other. But I’ve never been to the opera or to the ballet, and the best guess is I never will.

And once in a while I go to an art gallery or a photo exhibition. So what’s the big picture? Even if I say it myself, for someone who spends so much time on movies, I’m not a total wipeout in other areas. So recently there came a weekend with only one new film I wanted to see – usually it’s two or three. I love movies, but I actually thought this was great. I’ll have all this extra time, I thought to myself. So what did I end up doing? I watched three other movies on tape.

Zombie movie

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2003)

According to the Internet Movie Database, George Romero is making a new film next year, called The Ill. It would be only his second film since 1993 – the other was something called Bruiser, which I’ve never had a chance to see. I don’t know whether this glacial pace is a sign of artistic deliberation or just lack of economic opportunity, but it’s a sign of Romero’s odd status that either seems possible.

George Romero

Romero has almost always worked in the horror genre, most famously with the zombie trilogy that began with Night of the Living Dead, and his films show every sign of budgetary constraint (particularly the use of no-name actors) and capitulation to genre expectations. But he regularly renders it plausible to believe that he chooses the genre simply because it’s a fitting vehicle for his particular philosophical and thematic concerns. Not that I don’t think he enjoys spattering the ketchup around a bit.

I’ve also failed to see his 1978 film Martin, which many claim as his masterpiece, but of those I have seen, the pinnacle has to be Dawn of the Dead, which I have on DVD. I used to think of it as one of my “guilty pleasures,” but I guess I’m getting too old to be very guilty now. This second film in the trilogy opens on scenes of utter chaos as the zombie plague pushes civilization into the most tenuous of corners. It gradually focuses on a quartet who flee in a helicopter, arriving at a suburban mall where they seal themselves in and briefly settle into a life of parodic consumerist plenty, while the zombies clamour ineffectually outside the doors.

Romero's cinematography is crystal clear, almost gaudy; the zombies are so in our face that the film dares us to laugh at the absurdity of the premise. But they also take on an enormously specific identity, suspended in some godless limbo between what they were and what hell has made of them, shambling ineffectually until they catch a whiff of a live human, when they become crazed cannibals. You realize that the movie’s deadpan aesthetic reflects the dehumanization of the premise, and it becomes way more unsettling than seems possible from the raw ingredients.

Danny Boyle’s new zombie movie 28 Days Later obviously evokes Romero, and Boyle acknowledged that the film’s supermarket scene, where his own band of survivors ransacks a deserted store, is a nod to Dawn of the Dead. 28 Days Later is an effective film, but I guess it must be significant that it made me think about Romero’s film more than about 28 Days Later itself. Boyle’s opening certainly outdoes Romero though. After a prologue where a group of animal activists set free an infected chimp over the protests of a terrified research scientist, we jump via the “28 days later” caption to a man waking up in a hospital, finding himself alone, and then wandering outside into an utterly deserted London. He walks in solitude across Tower Bridge, through Trafalgar Square – only an apocalypse could generate a London like this.

28 Days Later

After some initial encounters with the demented population, he runs into a couple of fellow survivors who tell him that while he was in a coma (after a bicycle accident) a mysterious infection engulfed virtually the whole country. They later find a man holed up with his daughter in an apartment building, then pick up a radio broadcast about a survivor community to the north. They set out in a cab, finding a group of soldiers in a country house, planning how to start things over, but the soldiers’ ambitions conflict with theirs…

Boyle shoots the movie in an ultra-grainy, low-definition hand-held style that frequently plunges into incoherence – the encounters with the zombies are splashes of blood and shadow and movement, impressionistic bursts of darkness that reflect the unknown, overwhelming nature of the new world in which they find themselves. In one scene the taxicab drives past a field of flowers which look like blobs of super-imposed colour. The style is generally effective, but I think it buffers the audience from forging a visceral connection with events. The ads quote someone as saying it’s the scariest film since The Exorcist, but I didn’t detect much fear in the theatre when I saw it. It’s a chilling presence for sure, but the pseudo-documentary style is such a cliché by now that it actually emphasizes the film’s artificiality.

The big picture in 28 Days Later is a bit hard to figure out. The zombies seem to come out mainly at night, but even allowing for that, there aren’t many of them around, or many dead bodies. Since the infection takes hold in a mere twenty seconds, it seems that chaos must have descended with horrendous speed, but it left the streets remarkably clear of abandoned traffic, corpses, debris and suchlike. On the other hand, the movie makes a fair bit of behavioural sense, even if some of the characters might appear to have adapted rather too easily to their new circumstances. It seems particularly shrewd about the troublesome sexual politics of a world where ten men (worse, mostly macho soldier types) coexist with only two women.

On the whole, Boyle seems more cerebral than Romero, which would be an advantage in almost any genre, except maybe this one. 28 Days Later plays effectively on a multitude of fears, but the almost naïve sincerity of Romero’s film ultimately proves more intriguing.

Owning Mahowny

There’s another movie about a destructive zombie in a desolate wasteland – well, no, actually it’s about an embezzling assistant bank manager living in Toronto. Based on a true story, Owning Mahowny tracks the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as he embezzles and gambles away over ten million dollars. This kind of movie material is often rendered splashy and flamboyant, but that streak is largely confined here to John Hurt’s grinning-serpent performance as the manager of Mahowny’s favourite casino. The rest of the movie is deliberately drab, mostly confined to colourless interiors, befitting Hoffman’s extremely interiorized performance.

The gimmick is that he’s a world-class embezzler who never really benefits from his crimes – he rates the gambling experience, on a scale of 1 to 100, as a 100, but it sure doesn’t show. The casino and his bookie get rich, the bank manipulates him to better squeeze their clients, even his mistreated girlfriend seems to draw some kind of perverse satisfaction from his errant ways. Receding behind huge glasses and a barely changing expression, Mahowny becomes a virtual commodity, like the mounds of cash that change hands around him. It’s a simple premise really, and the film sometimes seems a bit threadbare and hokey, but it ultimately has substantial wherewithal. The immensely versatile Hoffman really seems like someone who could play any man alive, or dead.

Green man

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

It seems now that every mass-market comic book movie comes with a spin about how this particular movie represents a more cerebral take on the material (whether Batman, Spiderman, X-Men etc.) than we’ve ever seen before. And now we have Ang Lee’s Hulk, for which some of this commentary is more than usually persuasive. Here’s Roger Ebert:

Dealing with issues

“The movie brings up issues about genetic experimentation, the misuse of scientific research and our instinctive dislike of misfits, and actually talks about them. Remember that Ang Lee is the director of films such as The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility, as well as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; he is trying here to actually deal with the issues in the story of the Hulk, instead of simply cutting to brainless special effects…Lee has broadly taken the broad outlines of a comic book story and transformed them to his own purposes; this is a comic book movie for people who wouldn’t be caught dead at a comic book movie.”

The film stars Eric Bana as Bruce Banner, whose research into DNA takes an unexpected turn when he’s accidentally exposed to a huge dose of deadly radiation. It should kill him, but he doesn’t know that he inherited abnormal DNA from his presumed-dead father, also a scientist, who experimented on himself before Bruce was conceived. The DNA/radiation combination turns him into the Hulk, a raging green beast who emerges whenever Bruce loses his cool. Rival scientists duel with the military for the economic and strategic potential of this genetic breakthrough, but Bruce’s ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) is the only one who seems to care about him, including his father (Nick Nolte) who now reappears with his own crazy schemes in mind.

Remarkably for a film of this kind of breadth, Hulk has only five characters of any consequence: Banner father and son, Connelly and her father (Sam Elliott) who leads the military efforts, and a scheming scientist played by Josh Lucas: over 95% of the film’s dialogue goes to this quintet. Especially given the doubling of the parental estrangement theme (Connelly and Elliott have an icy relationship), this concentration of interaction lends the film a uniquely odd feeling: of an anguished chamber piece, almost a stage piece, played out on an absurdly vast canvas.

Full of talk

The film has a vague handle on a witty central metaphor: Banner’s relationship with Connelly was on the rocks because of his emotional inaccessibility; turning into the Hulk is the ultimate remedy to that problem…but of course introduces its own problems. In some relationships, you just can’t win! There’s almost no humour in the film though. Lee obviously understands the Hulk’s potential as metaphor – how could you not? – but seems to have no specific strategy for unlocking it, other than to have his camera stare somewhat plaintively at the characters.

As Ebert says, the film is full of talk, but it’s absurd to suggest it has anything significant to say on the subjects he lists. The loquaciousness seems to me more like a sign of frail self-confidence on Lee’s part, almost like a delaying tactic before he surrenders to the action. Throughout the opening section, Lee uses a dazzling array of techniques for transitioning from one scene to the next: all manners of wipes and dissolves and blends and split screens. It’s broadly reminiscent of comic book style, of the artist’s ability to control the tone by varying the size and placement of individual frames. Sometimes, the effect in the film is rather beautiful, but it’s an aesthetic approach that calls attention to itself, and to the movie as an artificiality. And all the talk, despite its superficial “depth,” can’t overcome the story’s perhaps insurmountable silliness.

Recent comic-book movies played up their protagonists’ sexiness by emphasizing their sleek, sexy muscularity. This option isn’t really available to the makers of the Hulk, who are stuck with an absurd, lumbering green monster. Even the film’s defenders have criticized, to varying degrees, the computer-generated character for not looking real enough. At worst, in long shot, it’s like watching a mere green blob moving across the landscape (“Toss a plastic toy figure across your yard,” said Glenn Lovell of the San Jose Mercury News, “and you’ll have a good approximation of what this film’s $140 million-plus budget bought its producers”). In close-up, the Hulk looks more convincing, but still inherently absurd.

The Abstract Hulk

Even so, the action scenes still often have a certain grace to them, although there’s nothing to match the duel above the treetops in Crouching Tiger. But they lack any sort of conviction. We’ve all become used to the trade-off entailed by computer-generated wonders: as the spectacle’s wow value goes up, our emotional involvement in it goes down. Watching action scenes now is more about grading the execution, measured against the ever-increasing stakes laid down by other big movies, than about visceral investment. One of the ultimate examples is the fight scene from Matrix Reloaded between Keanu Reeves and the dozens of Hugo Weaving clones. It’s hard to remember a more impressive display, both in conception and execution. But as many writers commented, it nevertheless leaves you flat, because there’s no sense of danger to it whatsoever. And how could there be? When you had Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine beating each other to a pulp on top of a moving train, then you felt some danger.

Lee compounds the abstraction of the action scenes by staging many of them in the desert, always a movie locale of such resonance that the most straightforward thing seems symbolic. The scenes seem underpopulated and stark – echoing the film’s lack of substantial people. It’s as though the film was a microscope, stripping away the usual action movie diversions to illuminate its central psychodrama. In this sense, Lee’s more contemplative “Eastern” side is amply evident in the film. But much as he indulges the characters to a point, he doesn’t invest them with the detail and rough edges that would make them into more than archetypes. Bana was apparently deliberately directed to be fairly bland, the better to support the contrast with the beast within him. It seems a simplistic strategy. The biggest disappointment is Nolte, who’s almost always compelling in his films, but not here.

When the concept of Ang Lee directing a Hulk movie was announced a couple of years ago, it was startling and exciting, and you had no idea how it would work. Now the movie’s out, and it’s a testimony to the concept that you almost want Lee to direct a sequel and get it right next time. But the artistic update’s too limited. He’s in the same spot now as Martin Scorsese after Gangs of New York – someone for whom going back to smaller movies wouldn’t be a limitation, but a liberation.

Strange places

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

Four movies from four very different and (to varying degrees) odd places

Whale Rider

Whale Rider, a film from New Zealand directed by Niki Caro, won the audience-voted people’s choice award at last year’s Toronto film festival. The most recent preceding winners were Life is Beautiful, American Beauty, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Amelie. It’s an unquestionably prestigious lineage, and a revealing one as to what kind of movie strikes the “people” as special: three out of the four were foreign films that achieved unusual acclaim through the accessibility and “universal” quality of their storytelling. Whale Rider falls directly into that category too: it shows us a self-contained culture following unfamiliar rules, but uses narrative and visual strategies that are solidly familiar and comfortable.

It’s about a young Maori girl, being brought up by her grandparents in a remote village; her mother and twin brother died in childbirth and her father is largely absent. Preoccupied by the community’s spiritual decline, her grandfather instructs the local boys in Maori myths and cultural traditions – key among them the search for the contemporary equivalent of an ancestor who rode in on a whale, heralding the community’s rebirth. Although the girl has more affinity for these traditions than any of the boys do, the grandfather chauvinistically excludes her from the group.

The film reminded me at several points of the recent Inuit film Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner, but not in a way that’s really complimentary to Whale Rider. Atanarjuat is much more difficult to watch, and not as much “fun,” but the unfamiliarity of its approach to storytelling seems to reflect the cultural tradition that’s central to the film. Whale Rider talks a lot about the uniqueness of the community it depicts, and that’s evident in the sense that (for example) they dress a bit differently and follow unfamiliar rituals, but the film’s relationship to this activity often seems like that of the tourist or sightseer.

Still, it achieves real grandeur in its closing passages, where the whales come into view and events attain the mythical pay-off that’s been broadly obvious from the start. Unfortunately, budget constraints (or so I assume) leave much of the key imagery off screen, and anyway the feel-good factor outweighs everything else. In terms of emotional impact, it’s basically like watching Bend it Like Beckham again.

Hollywood Homicide

Ron Shelton’s Hollywood Homicide has Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett as two LA cops who, like just about everyone else in Hollywood, really want to be something else. Ford moonlights as a real estate agent and Hartnett as an actor. They’re also both being investigated by Internal Affairs, which makes the film a close relative to Shelton’s last film Dark Blue, which just came out a few months ago. But where Dark Blue was angry and chronic, Hollywood Homicide is a breeze. In Shelton’s hands though, that doesn’t seem like a complete capitulation to the demands of summer box-office and bigger stars; rather, it seems like his commentary on Hollywood, the place and the attitude, and how it barely accommodates seriousness.

To this end, he gets Ford to relax more than he has in years, and constructs the movie as meticulously as a work of major intellect, while devoting it almost entirely to diversion and subversion. It’s a shame he didn’t have a larger final thematic pay-off up his sleeve, but his picture achieves more than you’d think likely from the raw materials. The reviews were mostly mediocre though, and the poor box office results make this another installment in the dimming of Ford’s long run at the top. But if he’s in as genial a mood as the movie suggests, he shouldn’t care too much.

The Safety of Objects

In The Safety of Objects, Rose Troche takes on a place even stranger than than Hollywood – suburbia. The film tracks four families, all evoked in the opening credits as benumbed, almost faceless figures; like game pieces carved in some synthetic material with a marble-like glaze. All four have major-league traumas of course, and as the title suggests, they all cope with these problems via various forms of displacement. Maybe the most striking is the pre-teenager who has a love affair – emotional and, insofar as such a thing is possible, physical – with one of his sister’s dolls. The movie also has Glenn Close as a woman whose son is in a coma after a car accident; she tries to redeem her relationship with her traumatized daughter by trying to win the girl an SUV in an endurance contest.

The material is a bit overwrought at times, and Troche’s direction is pitched to match, and yet the movie is highly effective, and finally moving. The structure sounds somewhat conventional, and the ending – with its flashback revelations, epiphanies and points of resolution – isn’t particularly radical in concept. But the movie illuminates its characters without becoming servant to them; it maintains a pervasive strangeness and sense of perversity. So that in the final scene, where the families all sit in the garden together on a fine summer day, it feels less like closure than like a mildly demented bulletin from an only superficially familiar galaxy.

The Wild Dogs

Finally a Canadian movie, Thom Fitzgerald’s The Wild Dogs. In many ways, it’s the most self-indulgent and even amateurish of the four – a loose scrapbook of odds and ends set in Budapest where a Canadian pornographer (played by Fitzgerald himself) comes in search of new women, but instead finds a social conscience. He hangs out with a British embassy official on the one hand and with various beggars and lowlifes on the other; meanwhile, the city streets are overrun by (we’re told) over 200,000 wild dogs, who generate various other plotlines.

The Wild Dogs can be faulted in so many different ways I don’t know where to start, but the overwhelming problem is a willful, solipsistic obscurity and perversity which doesn’t consistently seem like artistry. Despite that, it may actually be my favourite of the four films mentioned here. The raw elements are fascinating, and the movie ultimately comes to resemble a troubled, rough-edged sculpture where the personal and the political fuse into a semi-recognizable dream landscape.

It’s reminiscent at various times of Kusturica, Fellini, Egoyan, and often of Ken Loach, whose social conscience forms the movie’s last word. Actually, I would have preferred if the movie didn’t end on quite such a preachy note (with a montage of pictures of the disadvantaged kids Fitzgerald meets along the way) – it makes for a rather callow final note. Still, the bottom line: not a bad summer at the movies!

In love with movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2003)

I’ve written before about critic David Thomson, whose Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (first published in 1975) had a huge impact on me when I was growing up; I probably read the whole thing ten times over. I couldn’t believe someone could engage with cinema as fluently as Thomson seemed to. Even now, he influences my perception of filmmakers. If not for Thomson I’m sure I wouldn’t think as highly of Dreyer or Rivette (or Angie Dickinson for that matter) and I wouldn’t be as hard on Ford or Fellini.

It probably helped that Thomson was pretty close to what I fancied I might become – a young British guy from modest origins, engaged on a process of giddy, tireless discovery. He writes about the early 60s in London with his best friend, “busy charting the past of the medium we loved” and describes for illustration a week (one week!) in 1961 when they saw Les 400 coups, L’Avventura, Senso, Dark Victory, A Taste of Honey…and nine other films! Since no filmographies were available, they compiled their own, using the library of the British Film Institute. It almost makes you wish that we might lose much of cinema history, so we could have the thrill of excavating it all over again.

David Thomson

Thomson revised his book in 1994, and I eagerly purchased it. It was a huge disappointment – an obvious rush job, with flaccid updates pasted forlornly on top of the peerless original essays. He updated it again last year, and this time I haven’t bothered buying the book. The reviews seemed to confirm that Thomson, now a longtime resident of San Francisco, had become a lazy stylist, either unaware of or indifferent to the contemporary cutting-edge.

A recent issue of Film Comment carried a review of the book by Kent Jones. It’s a wonderfully written review that made me admire Jones almost as much as I once did Thomson. And Jones nails something in Thomson that had put me off, even though I think this too is something I absorbed into my own approach to cinema – a pervasive air of disappointment, if not disdain. Jones thinks Thomson expected too much of movies, and his love “turned cold because they didn’t deliver everything he expected of them when he was young.” Jones offers his prescription: “If you fall for the idea that cinema is any more or less powerful than any other art form, that movies are anything other than aesthetic objects that exist in reality, then you’re fooling yourself.” True enough, except if it were that simple, why would Jones spend so much of his own life writing about cinema?

The Movie Network recently screened a documentary called Cinemania, about five hardcore film buffs in New York. They mostly live on welfare or disability, skimping on meals, spending day after day after day engaged in an intricately planned swirl around the city, from one screening to the next (scheduling bathroom breaks is a major ongoing issue). None of the five have significant careers or, as far as one can see, meaningful relationships. I must admit I watched it with an air of snotty superiority.

Illusion of control

Saddest of all, although not really surprising, is that the five have relatively little to say about the movies themselves. One guy’s obsession is with memorizing running times. Another merely rattles off which stars he likes, and which he doesn’t. For this, they tie their lives into a knot?

Of course, we can’t pick and choose our obsessions. But cinema seems particularly susceptible to this kind of hopeless immersion. I always imagine it’s something to do with the grandeur of the experience – alone in the dark, visually and aurally overpowered, your senses and perceptions guided in a way you don’t even register. No matter how often you do it, it’s like a laboratory that never yields up its secrets. It’s an utterly passive experience, and yet the activity on the screen avoids the emptiness that (unless you have a real problem) eventually accrues to most other time-killing activity.

With the DVD boom, more and more viewers are conquering, or at least radically amending, this passivity. Extras, alternative endings, commentary tracks, features that allow you to reedit part of the movie – it all serves to make the film less a fixed artifact than a somewhat provisional item that can be endlessly probed and adjusted. In a recent New York Times magazine article, Terence Rafferty suggested the dangers of these developments: “The more ‘interactive’ we allow our experience of art – any art – to become – the less likely it is that future generations will appreciate the necessity of art at all. Interactivity is an illusion of control, but understanding a work of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a provisional surrender to someone else’s vision. To put it as simply as possible: If you have to be in total control of every experience, art is not for you. Life probably isn’t either. Hey, where’s the alternative ending?”

Alternative ending

Fine, but Rafferty’s examples are mostly the likes of X-Men, Lord of the Rings and E.T. Not to diminish those films, but does it really matter how much enthusiasts play around with them? How profound is the artistic experience to begin with? And for viewers who might have a tendency to end up like the geeks in Cinemania, isn’t this healthier – a way of avoiding complete submissiveness, of hanging onto some iota of self-determination?

Well, yes and no. Either way, you’re still spending too much time on a single movie. My problem with the DVD extras isn’t their impact on the artistic experience, but the underlying arrogance of the assumption that anyone should care that much (an arrogance that’s amply justified of course, judging by the format’s popularity). Rafferty’s “illusion of control” is a pale illusion indeed, if you exercise that power by spending twenty hours of your life, and fifty or sixty bucks, on last year’s sensation.

Still, whether it’s for the reasons Rafferty sets out, or whether because the movies used to be better, or because of a shift in the heavens, being in love with the movies isn’t what it used to be. It’s hard to imagine too many future film buffs retracing David Thomson’s arc from infatuation to disappointment, because they would never have shared his high to begin with. When Thomson was rushing around London cramming in movies, he was a geek no doubt, but he was also a pioneer. Today, he’d just be a geek. When art becomes too available, it runs the risk of conversion into kitsch. Maybe Thomson moved to the States, new technology came along, filmographies became as available as ice cream, and after a certain point, whether or not he still needed movies, it felt like they no longer needed him.

Shapes and spellings

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

As Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things starts, a woman stands in front of a sculpture of a nude male that she intends to deface – the figleaf, clumsily imposed after the artist’s death to satisfy someone’s sense of decency, offends her artistic sensibility. The attendant approaches; they strike up a conversation. He doesn’t talk her out of defacing the statue, but he gets a date out of the encounter, and then a relationship. And then she motivates him to lose weight, and to get a better haircut, and even a nose job. He feels great, but his two best friends watch the changes in him with suspicion.

LaBute’s debut was the acerbic The Company of Men. He followed it up with Your Friends and Neighbours, at which point he already had a reputation as a savage, disillusioned observer of contemporary relationships. I found the first film witty and only a little overrated, but the second seemed to me a pointless ‘plague on all your houses’ routine. LaBute then made two films from other people’s screenplays – Nurse Betty and Possession – both of which extended his range but achieved no particular impact. However, by now he was maintaining a dual career in the theater, where his work, distilled and stripped-down, revealed no softening. The Shape of Things began as a play, and the new film has the original four-person cast from London and New York (Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd as the couple; Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller as the friends).

The Shape of Things

It’s hard to discuss the film without giving away the ending, which I don’t want to do, so suffice to say that it’s about the twisted motives that shape human interaction, and it’s also about the perverse demands of art and creation. The revelation, delivered in a formal setting, looks like it would have been an effective piece of theater, and the movie doesn’t really try to disguise its origins. It’s divided into clearly demarcated scenes, with much of the key action happening off screen, and it’s lit as clearly and crisply as a stage, or a laboratory.

That said though, this is a film, and the way we apprehend LaBute’s theme surely shifts accordingly. Although I found it interesting, it seemed to me there’s an in-built redundancy here. Cinema always manipulates character and spectator alike – it’s always artifice masquerading as truth. The same is true in theater of course, but the manipulation of the spectator isn’t as complete, and the illusion of reality isn’t as gripping – the audience member participates more consciously in the creation of an imaginary space. In cinema, a revelation of deception is just another day at the office.

Which is why, rather weirdly, The Shape of Things is a cousin to The Matrix and Identity and that whole genre of “meta” movies I wrote about a few weeks ago. Things are not what they seem – a discovery that may or may not pack a philosophical punch. If, as I do, you go through life with the basic assumption that you’re always missing something, then it’s hard to be impressed with a film that merely confirms your suspicions and self-doubt.

Not that LaBute’s film, taken scene by scene, isn’t intriguing. But it lacks much spontaneity (perhaps inevitable given his and the actors’ familiarity with the material); it always feels that we’re being pushed along. Weisz’ performance, which is key to the success of the premise, sums up the tone: it’s interesting, not without nuance, but fearlessly efficient – the effect is more like a schoolteacher than a creator. Unexpectedly, Gretchen Mol creates the most intriguing character, simply because she’s the most recognizably vulnerable and tentative.

Spellbound

Still, The Shape of Things is a film of ideas, and even if you doubt how many dimensions its shape of things really has, you feel provoked and engaged. But LaBute’s film hasn’t been as well received as Jeff Blitz’ Spellbound, which was nominated this year for a best documentary Oscar. The film’s first hour introduces us to eight diverse children who are all headed for the national Spelling Bee championship in Washington; the last half-hour gives us the drama of the contest itself.

It’s an inherently appealing premise, and Blitz delivers it effectively. Still, the movie annoyed me more and more as it went along, because it’s less a paean to the Spelling Bee than to the greatness of the United States. The contest, as presented here, serves primarily as a stirring symbol of American diversity – proof that the humble and the privileged alike can stand shoulder to shoulder on the road to greatness. One of the fathers, a prosperous Indian immigrant, shows off the showcase home he built for himself, and says that America’s the only country in the world where you can achieve anything you want through hard work; the film makes variations on this same point time and time again.

At the same time, Spellbound does expose something of America’s complacent underbelly. One of the girls is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak English, and his employer tells the camera about how he’s one of the good Mexicans, proving they’re not all lazy and unreliable. One of the Indian kids has a teacher who speaks about how she’s always delighted to have Indian children in her class because they have such a good work ethic. I suppose these views have some kind of grounding in the speakers’ direct experience, but they show how the melting pot only melts so far. The most intriguing child to me, named Anna, is the most striking exception to both nurture- and nature-based theories. She’s a rather solemn kid with blue-collar parents that she compares to Archie and Edith Bunker, and seems to be growing up almost in her own self-contained space, demonstrating little of her parents’ direct influence.

Ideologically driven

The movie acknowledges lightly that the Spelling Bee may be creaky, nerdy, not the most relevant event in the whole world, but this seems simply like a ploy of anticipating criticism, the better to brush it aside. It’s an American Institution – who could carp? Well, actually, given the current shape of things, it’s tempting to see it as a manifestation of the country’s penchant for getting its priorities spectacularly wrong. This is obviously an ideologically driven criticism, but then the most striking thing about Spellbound is that it’s such an ideologically driven movie. The more I think about it, the more I think I’d like to deface it.

For the birds

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

I didn’t register one shot in F. Gary Gray’s remake of The Italian Job that seemed computer-generated. I know they’re there – for all I know, as pervasive as in X2 or Matrix Reloaded, but it doesn’t feel like it. This doesn’t mean that the film strives for realism exactly; just that its conception of the unreal is drawn a little tighter than we often see nowadays. The film’s iconic image – of souped-up Minis whizzing around Los Angeles – seems to sum up this intent: the cars are too plain cute and quirky to serve as the vessel for a calculating Hollywood machine.

Matrix Reloaded

Talking of which, a few belated words about Matrix Reloaded, which is indeed a calculating machine. Not a brainless one – there’s hardly a moment in the film that doesn’t feel deeply considered. But lightning didn’t strike twice. Strictly in the context of the film’s own universe, the sequel may hold some minor revelations, but that’s about it.

I enjoyed the fight between Keanu Reeves and the dozens of Hugo Weaving clones – I thought that was quite a dazzling creation (albeit too stylized). But the much-heralded chase on the freeway turned out to be vastly overdone, and much of the film felt surprisingly dour, as though the success of the first film constituted a prison rather than a liberation. With all the years of build-up about the Wachowski Brothers and their secretive mega-opus, I guess it had never occurred to anyone that they would have invested all the good ideas they had into the first film. Oh well, you live and learn.

The Italian Job is a happier event. I don’t remember the British original at all, but it’s fondly remembered for its chase sequences and (especially in Britain) for the Michael Caine line: “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” In the new version, Mark Wahlberg plays the leader of a motley gang that pulls off an intricate gold heist in Venice. The celebrations are cut abruptly short when gang member Edward Norton holds up the others, takes all the gold for himself and leaves them for dead. But they survive, except for Donald Sutherland, and a year later they track down Norton in LA where, with the help of Sutherland’s daughter Charlize Theron, they plan to take everything back.

The Italian Job

It’s the kind of action film that makes you appreciate the intricate choreography behind the illusion of seamlessness. The movie has just enough psychology not to seem soulless and utterly disposable, but not so much that a preoccupation with weightier affairs will seep into our enjoyment. At the end Norton meets what seems to be a rather horrible fate, but the movie presents it with a backdrop of jaunty music, as though he were off to a holiday camp. You register the reality of it, but lightly. And yet, The Italian Job avoids the smirky tone of something like Ocean’s Eleven, where the cast seemed to be having too good a time with each other to worry about the audience. And to prove just how radical a genre film it is, it avoids two major staples – the love scene between the hero and heroine, and the contrived twist ending where the villain returns from the dead or suchlike (I was especially surprised at the latter show of restraint).

I was in the middle of writing this article, and I’d drafted the following paragraph:

• It seems to me that an increasing number of star actors, capable of challenging and interesting work, choose to lose themselves in roles that surely can’t stretch them. Edward Norton, one of the most talented actors of his generation, is completely wasted in the villain’s role. Wearing a droopy moustache and ratty haircut, he’s a mean-spirited character with no redeeming features, with few scenes that go beyond the strictly functional. It’s truly hard to see what the appeal of the role was for him. Other than the money of course. Norton’s increasing capitulation to this kind of work (see also The Score) seems like a potent symbol of how the notion of being a serious actor has deteriorated. Robert de Niro has been on the same trail for a few years now, but at least he was artistically pure for the first fifteen years or so.

But then I read an article that claimed Norton was forced to do the movie because of a contractual commitment dating back to his debut, Primal Fear, and he only took the job grudgingly. Which, assuming that’s true, struck me as a useful lesson in the pitfalls of presuming to discern anyone’s motives for doing what they do. But either way, The Italian Job would be a somewhat better sell-out vehicle than most of them.

Winged Migration

The documentary Winged Migration is an entirely different kind of technical achievement. Director Jacques Perrin and a vast team spent four years filming birds all over the world (the closing credits basically read like a world atlas) – concentrating on migratory birds and their routes. The footage is, in a word, astonishing, capturing so many birds from so many angles and perspectives that it’s as if the world had become a camera, casting aside normal technical constraints.

The film’s in-built irony is that by getting closer to the birds than perhaps any film ever made, it communicates eloquently the proper role of mankind: to leave them alone. Humans appear only sparsely in the film, most often destructively, as poachers or hunters (the scene of a soaring aerial shot suddenly interrupted by gunfire and a sharp fall to earth is surely more shocking than anything in this year’s action/suspense crop), otherwise as merely superfluous. The film doesn’t try to anthropomorphize the birds, but anyone who watches the film will be convinced that they possess an emotional landscape similar at least in its outlines to our own. At various moments they appear pensive, frightened, engaged, content – you name it.

Maybe the movie suffers a little bit from its very breadth. At numerous times, I would have been content to spend more time with a particular sequence, but it always moves on quickly to another place, as if itself constantly seized by the need to move on. Much as you marvel at the mystery, you yearn to understand better. At one point, for example, the narrator says that the young birds memorize landmarks during their maiden migratory voyage, to help them retrace the journey. But it wasn’t clear to me whether that was meant as a literal statement that’s been in some way scientifically demonstrated, or whether it’s poetic licence.

Whatever the answer, that voice-over narration (which is fortunately used sparsely) is the film’s major flaw, along with some very lame songs (ditto). However, even these flaws have a silver lining: they help underline how humans can sometimes be crasser than birds would ever be.

Not The Matrix

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2003)

In most theatres it’s currently all The Matrix Reloaded all the time. But here are three worthy alternatives, by three new (or newish) directors.

People I Know

People I Know is more like a notebook of ideas and impressions than a finished, fully though out film, although I’m not necessarily saying that as a criticism. The film depicts a veteran New York publicist who’s on his last legs both professionally and personally, pulling together a benefit for an obscure cause. He hopes to unite the three pillars of media and cultural influence: an Al Sharpton-like minister and rabble-rouser, a powerful businessman from the Jewish establishment, and a tanned member of Hollywood royalty. By the time he pulls it off, it’s revealed as a hollow ambition, an empty flexing of muscles that don’t really exist (the people come not for him or his cause, but because of their own calculations). Intertwined with all this, and emphasizing the movie’s theme of paranoid impotence, is a murder that’s revealed as a conspiracy, perhaps involving some of these same pillars. A poster for Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, plainly visible behind Pacino in several scenes, signals part of the film’s intent at least.

It also signals the film’s weakness, for People I Know has none of the control and assurance of Pakula’s film. Director Dan Algrant (whose only previous film was Naked in New York) lets scenes run on too long; his visual style is pretty mundane; he doesn’t really pull it all together; and he doesn’t seem able to rein in the full-flight Pacino (as a hardcore Pacino fan, this doesn’t bother me too much, but objectively it’s probably not ideal). And yet, as I write this, it’s the first film this year that I’m seriously contemplating paying to see for a second time. It’s one of those movies where chaos proves more stimulating than coherence could ever be; where meaning seems to exist in the gaps. The theme of idealism reduced to mere hustle isn’t new, but Pacino (whose fatigue in some scenes is truly chilling) makes it poignant. The idea of mysterious cabals and circles (exemplified here by an opium den located in the bland surroundings of a Wall Street high rise) is even more familiar, but when will that ever be old hat?

People I Know was shot a couple of years ago, and sat on the shelf for a while (reportedly, it was the inflight movie last year on an Italian airline). It originally contained a shot of the World Trade Center, now removed. For a movie that aims to have its finger on some kind of contemporary pulse, I think the delay is noticeable. The movie already seems warmed over, desolate in a way that far exceeds any possible intention. But that’s a rather unusual quality for a movie now; enough so to amount to a recognizable political statement.

City of Ghosts

Conspiracy theories also lurk in the background of City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon’s directorial and writing debut. He stars in it as a scam artist who flees from the FBI after the collapse of the insurance fraud he’s been fronting, and turns up in Cambodia in search of his mentor (James Caan). In a way seemingly meant to evoke a Casablanca-like mélange of colourful characters, the film throws in a love interest (Natascha McElhone), an eccentric bar owner (Gerard Depardieu) and a shady operator (Stellan Skarsgard), among others. Actually, it all seems pretty random after a while.

The movie is apparently the first to have been shot in Cambodia for decades, but I can’t truly say it feels significantly more imposing than the usual combination of studio backlot and location footage. This is partly because Dillon doesn’t seem to have much of an eye, and partly because no matter how real it looks, it doesn’t feel real, what with all the Westerners, and the lack of much of a sense of local culture, politics etc. The underlying theory seem to be that if you set a movie in Cambodia, meaning and nuance will just flow from the screen – which struck me as a bit patronizing.

For all of that, the movie did grow on me. It’s very much like People I Know, and John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs too, in how a languid pacing (which may well be a sign of directorial timidity) ends up creating its own quirky reality (Dillon’s intention was probably pretty close to Robert Duvall’s in the recent Assassination Tango – to play at making a run-of-the-mill exotic thriller while simultaneously subverting it). City of Ghosts ends up being another intricate subterfuge – one with far less inherent resonance than People I Know – but it doesn’t seem imprisoned by genre momentum. And Dillon saves the best until last – after the movie’s essentially over, he allows himself a lengthy digression, following the local cyclo driver who’s helped his character along the way. For a while, the movie seems to have broken free of any commercial calculation, and to be merely existing and observing – and it’s so guileless that it’s actually exciting.

Blue Car

Karen Moncrieff’s directorial debut, Blue Car, stars the wonderful young actress Agnes Bruckner as a troubled teenager who finds escape in writing poetry, and in particular in her relationship with the poetry teacher, played by David Strathairn. One day he comforts her after the death of her sister and she tries to turn it into a romantic embrace; he recoils, and after that is wary around her, as he must be. But when they’re both in Florida for a poetry competition, he’s far less reticent.

The most unnerving aspect of Strathairn’s character is his complacent belief in his own virtue. When he makes his move on her he keeps asking over and over if she’s OK, and although she’s obviously lying when she says yes, his asking the question fulfils in his own mind any duty of care he might have. Even more than his physical violation of her, it’s the revelation of shallowness that’s so striking. Part of his mystique in her eyes has been the file he carries everywhere with him, supposedly containing his novel in progress, but this too turns out to be a sham. This is all obviously a bit of a contrivance – a contemporary story that relies this much on poetry would have to be a contrivance – but it works.

At times, Blue Car is a bit clichéd and predictable, and it’s resolutely a “small” movie, dealing with intimate concerns and changes. Moncrieff’s film isn’t as ambitious as either Algrant’s or Dillon’s, but it’s the most controlled, and probably the most successful overall in attaining its chosen mandate.

Heroes

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2003)

I wish I’d liked the X-Men sequel, X2, more than I did, because people make it sound both cool and smart. Here’s A. O. Scott in The New York Times: “One of the best things about the great old Marvel comic books – aside from their graphic flair and their strenuously exaggerated ideas of human anatomy – was the way they dramatized adolescent disaffection on an apocalyptic scale, connecting the private alienation of their heroes (and readers) with the primal struggle between good and evil. More than most film adaptations of comics, Bryan Singer’s film X-Men and its new episode, X2, try to honor both the allegorical grandiosity of their source and the moods and anxieties of the superpower-endowed individuals who inhabit its universe. The mutants from whose ranks the X-Men emerge are both a persecuted minority and a tribe of lonely children, shunned and feared by the ordinary humans who surround them.

Too old?

I keep thinking I should give up on writing about this kind of movie altogether, because I worry I’m not in tune enough with their ambitions, their nuances, their audiences, with anything about them. But I keep coming back, maybe out of unshakeable faith that I can forge my own psychic connection with the genre, maybe out of stubbornness and a kind of vanity. I’m 37, and I guess  I think of myself as a youngish 37 (who doesn’t?), but there’s no question that I’m not a kid. At 37, you should be past the point of being impressed by sheer spectacle and concept – shouldn’t you? That seems true to me when I write it, but I guess I don’t know why. What does it matter – who’s keeping score?

My problem is exactly that – I live as though someone is keeping score. I’ve written before about how my propensity for cramming in movies blunts the ability to savour any particular one. And I guess I tend to think of myself (to adapt Orson Welles’ metaphor) as a big Christmas tree, where every day has to constitute an additional decoration of some kind. For the time I spend watching a movie, “entertainment value” doesn’t tend to justify the investment (the precious commodity here being the time more than the money). So I’m usually ambivalent about big mainstream movies, but I end up going anyway, because the reviews usually sway me and, hell, because I enjoy the damn things once I stop agonizing about them.

X2

That’s me at 37. But it’s not as if I’ve never been grabbed by comic book culture. I remember, back in Wales, buying my first American comic books. They were usually crammed any which way into an inconspicuous corner of the store, afterthoughts to the homegrown product. I have no idea what the distribution setup was, but I could never find two issues in sequence. This hampered much engagement with their plotlines, but actually enhanced their status as sheer artifact. And I remember being especially fascinated by the reader mail – by its sheer depth of engagement. British comics, obviously, had nothing like this.

The novelty died off pretty quickly though. As a young adult I sometimes went into comic book stores, intrigued by the idea of them and perhaps a little jealous of the people who really got the subculture (Kevin Smith’s movies make them look like the best damn place anyone could be), but the reality merely bored me. I loved the idea of the Batman franchise – to reconnect with the darkness of the character, to reclaim his popular image from the camp TV show – but the movies were generally a bit of an ordeal, except maybe the Pfeiffer/DeVito second installment.

X2 might have seemed like one of the dumber franchises, just on the empirical basis that believing in ten or twelve superheroes, all with different superpowers, requires approximately ten times the suspension of disbelief required to believe in one of them. Maybe it doesn’t work that way. Anyway, the movie doesn’t feel too dumb. The director, Bryan Singer, made The Usual Suspects and Public Access, and he approaches the movie with a persuasive feel for character and overall coherence. The film never seems camped up, or preoccupied by special effects. The cast includes Shakespeareans Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Brian Cox – the three of whom seem to me to influence the overall tone more than the younger cast members – and Oscar-winners Halle Berry and Anna Paquin.

There’s that metaphor

And then there’s that allegorical grandiosity Scott talked about. Sometimes this is intriguing, even touching. Take the scene when Iceman comes out to his parents about his superpowers, and the family talk that follows sounds like a conversation about being gay, or taking drugs, or any other occasion when elders try, not too successfully, to say the right thing while covering up intuitive revulsion. Iceman has a tentative romance with Paquin’s Rouge, but her kiss and touch are deadly, entailing a sweet but embarrassed chastity. Actually, the movie barely has anything “heroic” for Paquin to do, and she thus best embodies the film’s potential for placing character over narrative.

But on the whole, I can’t see that the film’s deeper ambitions are realized. A metaphor isn’t inherently revealing – sometimes you just register the point and move on, none the wiser for it. X2 is full of points that you register as potentially, but not actually, illuminating. And by this point, the reader may be jumping up and down, declaring: fine, but is it entertaining? Well, there’s too much going on for the movie ever to be dull. But Singer’s seriousness of purpose comes at the expense of the zip and panache that Sam Raimi brought to Spider-Man (as for the other key contemporary reference point, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, X2 doesn’t aim for that kind of pictorial impact.

I must admit too that I found the number of characters rather overwhelming. There’s not an actor in the film who doesn’t feel like a guest star (I wasn’t doing a count of course, but it sure felt to me as if Cox, as one of the bad guys, had more dialogue than any of the heroes). And the final set piece in Cox’s underground headquarters seemed to go on and on. Maybe I registered such disappointments a little more keenly than I would have with a movie that aimed for less in the first place. But I guess that if I really “got” the X-Men, then I’d be writing a completely different review. Funny I should feel guilty about not succumbing more readily to a piece of popular culture – that’s the power of the mainstream machine for you. But I’ll get past it; I’ll cut out this kind of movie pretty soon now. But not yet, because The Matrix Reloaded is already out, and then comes Ang Lee’s The Hulk…

Stan Brakhage

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2004)

I’ve been writing in this space for over six years now, and I don’t think I’ve ever said a word about short films. I’ve written only a few times about documentaries, and never at all about experimental non-narrative cinema. And there’s hardly a critic in the country that could criticize me for this. Even for those of us who feel the limitations of watching one narrative film after the next, it’s difficult to cast off the paradigm. It’s too enveloping, too stridently present in our culture. We’re so aware of the money involved, the infrastructure, the dominant conception of the director as artist, that any other way of dealing with film seems like dabbling.

Happy accidents

And yet, some of my most memorable film-watching experiences from the past few years fell outside that mould. They’re often happy accidents. In a small town in the northern Netherlands last year, we wandered into the local museum out of curiosity and were transfixed by a particular exhibition. Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of the artist’s name, but she killed herself in New York several years ago. In one of the several film loops on display, she covered a female model in feathers, then had her roll around in the ocean, like some weird sea creature washed onto the shore. It was inexplicable, odd, captivating. Two years ago, the Gillian Wearing exhibit in Chicago was as fascinating. The Tate galleries in London and Liverpool have never failed to offer something unique and unprecedented (it’s sadly clear from all this that for me, visiting art galleries is an activity mainly confined to vacations). And I recall other encounters, all overtly less “complex” than the logistics entailed in a Hollywood film, yet so precise and brave as to occupy an indelible space in the memory.

A few years ago in the Cinematheque Ontario brochure, James Quandt described a scene in Jean-Luc Godard’ Nouvelle vague where a maid moves through a darkened house lighting a series of rooms. “The lighting sequence,” he said, “is worth more than the rest of the decade’s commercial cinema put together.” At the time, this struck me as a hilarious overstatement. Just drop him down on a desert island with nothing but movies for company, I thought, and we’ll see whether he chooses the two minutes of lamp lighting over the thousands of hours of commercial cinema. But hyperbole aside, I find the contention rather beguiling. Could a single sequence somehow capture something about cinema that would render everything else obsolete? And if so, what would it be? Is there some undiscovered equation of camera placement and lighting and editing (or lack thereof) and subject that amounts to an E=mc2 of cinema? If so, where did it come from – does God have a conception of cinema? And even if it exists, why wouldn’t we just memorize the lamp-lighting sequence and replay it in our heads? What is it that cinema demands of us?

Seeing with one’s own eyes

I was thinking along these lines primarily because I recently bought the Criterion Collection’s DVD By Brakhage, which contains 26 films by independent filmmaker Stan Brakhage. At this point your mind may rush to imagine a multi-disc extravaganza, like the complete Alien collection, requiring a week of viewing. Well, the total viewing time for these 26 films is just a bit over four hours. Brakhage’s audio commentaries – and this is the only DVD I own where I consider those an indispensable element of the package – might add another couple of hours on to that. The longest film on the set is 74 minutes long; the shortest lasts 9 seconds.

At the time of writing I’m not halfway through the set, because I’ve been deliberately rationing myself – watching one a week at the most, maybe watching it again, listening to the commentary, making notes. It’s an enthralling experience, which threatens to make my mainstream film viewing seem passive and lumbering by comparison. Brakhage generally worked alone, with tiny budgets. The films have no conventional narratives and no sound, but they have subject matter. His early Wedlock House: an Intercourse has brief shots of himself and his first wife making love, smoking, arguing. It’s an unsettling composition of shadow and eerie angles that almost anticipates David Lynch. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes films human autopsies, certainly recognizable as such, and yet becoming utterly strange and abstract – the film is a considerable challenge to one’s sense of one’s own substance.

But these are actually among Brakhage’s more conventional works. He uses jittery handheld cameras, applies scratches and paint directly onto film, imposes images over others. This is from Fred Camper’s liner notes. “Many of the techniques Brakhage developed or refined…can be seen as part of a larger exploration of human subjectivity in all its varieties. He answers the idea that photography is the impersonal recorder of ‘reality’ with the notion that reality itself is inseparable from human consciousness…Lovers of Brakhage’s work have found, in fact, that it can constitute a kind of eye-training, a way of helping one see the world more imaginatively in a variety of situations, ranging from moments of intense emotional crisis…to sitting, bored, in an airport.”

The Wold Shadow

In commentary to The Wold Shadow, he describes how a clearing in the woods struck him a certain way, and he set out a camera to try and capture it. He set up a transparent surface in front of the lens on which he started painting, and the film, which started as a relatively straightforward image, ends up examining pieces of paint in extreme close-up. It’s as if any image, pursued to the end, might reveal the secrets of its own creation; although at the same time we know the secret is Brakhage’s imposition. Brakhage describes the film as something of a wrong turn: he set out to find “the god of the forest” and ended up making a “documentary on the history of painting.” Camper says: “Brakhage was a master of filming human subjectivity, but every moment that appears to valorize the affections, the moods, is balanced by a sense that the work itself is in danger of coming apart, that its beauty and unity is fragile, that its making acknowledges its own destruction…Brakhage offers this alternative (to our normal limited way of thinking): that each of us can become an inner explorer, continually pushing toward some new frontier of consciousness.

For all my current excitement with Brakhage’s films, I doubt that this marks a seismic shift in the shape of my film watching. The conventional pleasures of mainstream cinema are just too firmly established. But I almost wish I were at a point where I’d be happy to give up the whole of Hollywood cinema for my Stan Brakhage DVD. Plus, of course, Vertigo, Rio Bravo, The King of Comedy and a few dozen others…