Best of 2006

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2006)

This is a really great list – the best in years I think. Apologies to any masterpieces released in late December. Happy holidays (and rent the DVDs)!

In no particular order:

The New World (Terrence Malick)

Malick’s first film since The Thin Red Line was a 2005 release for Oscar purposes but opened here on January 20 of this year. His telling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas is simply ravishing, and utterly surprising and bracing for virtually every single minute. It’s not just that Malick rejects the usual norms of narrative and editing – it’s as if he’s never known them, and intuitively replaces mainstream conventions with a sense of intense romanticism that cuts across time and space and inner and outer states. This makes the movie difficult at times, and there are plenty of moments when the prospect of becoming a chocolate box cover seems tangible, but overall the film provides you the consistent thrill of submitting to a simply breathtaking sensibility. I don’t know about its historical accuracy, but it certainly feels anthropologically fascinating as well.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)

This is a remarkable directorial debut for the 60-year-old icon, as assured as, and quite a bit more distinctive than, Clint Eastwood’s best late films. Jones plays an aging South Texas farmhand setting out to deliver his dead Mexican friend to his hometown. It has the overall arc of a great eccentric Western, true to the evocative power of the landscape and the stoic, taciturn hero, but bursting with oddities – character quirks, strange incidents and parallels, the sheer inexplicable. Most compelling is the way that Jones keeps the lid very tight on his own character, and yet in the end the power of his will and vision – although beyond our understanding – seems to transform the film’s physical and psychological elements alike: it’s one of those endings that simultaneously makes little sense, and yet as much as anyone should possibly need.

The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

After a long absence, Antonioni’s 1975 masterpiece resurfaced for some Cinematheque screenings and then at the Carlton. It’s famous for its enigmatic qualities, but I was equally as taken by its specificity and deliberation; it’s a thriller and a dream and an eloquent meditation on cinema. You never see anything nowadays forged with such calm intellectual confidence.

Cache (Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s film, about a family that receives a series of mysterious videos, was almost incalculably more satisfying than most other releases this year. It can be viewed as a satisfying, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller, but at the same time that it caters to our taste for narrative momentum, it rigorously deconstructs and critiques that very desire. Ultimately it’s a serious inquisition into the morality of cinematic pleasure – a project that could have been somewhat academic, but seems to me in this case almost transcendentally gripping.

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)

Taiwanese director Hou’s film is made up of three episodes, each starring the same two actors, set at different points in the twentieth century. It’s full of parallels and echoes, and is exquisitely constructed and manufactured; the overall trajectory of each story is clear, but each retains considerable mystery; each forms a mini social critique of the times. After this and his last film Cafe Lumiere, it seems possible that Hou is stripping down his film’s complexities and becoming more purely a humanist, albeit a very specifically Taiwanese one, and this should surely cause his audience and popular stature to increase, although to the extent that this ultimately renders him more conventional, there is something to regret in the evolution too.

Gabrielle (Patrice Cheareau)

Patrice Cheareau may quietly be making a case for himself as one of the world’s best directors, and Gabrielle, about the impact on an arid bourgeois marriage of the wife’s brief affair, is a major addition to that dossier. It depicts an age where marriage is as much a social as a private affair, a matter of contract and convention rather than of love, and the positions of the two main characters grow increasingly complex. It’s also distinctly brutal - the movie reminded me of Scorsese’s description of his Age of Innocence as his most violent film. Cheareau’s approach is masterfully analytical.

A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman)

81-year-old Altman keeps delivering one superb possible career endnote after another, and this may be the best of all. That’s what I wrote when I started drafting this article in mid-November, and then he went and died on us. Set around a live radio broadcast based on Garrison Keillor’s real-life radio show, it’s immensely rich, with Altman’s camera in constant elegant motion, showcasing his undiminished powers of composition and coordination. It’s also a wonderful, but realistic, evocation of the spiritual stakes inherent in art. Of all the fine films listed here, it’s probably the one I just plain loved watching the most.

The Proposition (John Hillcoat)

Hillcoat’s film is set in 1880’s Australia but otherwise resembles a classic Western – a story of revenge and murder in a faltering civilization, thick with blood and flies and heat and suffering. It’s thrillingly and exactingly specific about its time and place while tapping all the pleasures of the genre, with a resonant underlying theme about the making of a civilization. By its nature it holds you at a horrified distance, entailing I expect that it will be a film that’s intensely admired more than loved, but I don’t see how its particular project could have been much better executed.

The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry)

Gondry’s extremely personal film about a young Mexican man living in Paris, who habitually confuses the boundaries between dream and reality, is an utter delight. It’s the kind of film that’s so packed with invention and non-linear creativity that you wonder how any human mind ever arrived at it, but it never feels like a mere jaunt, partly because the complex romantic relationship at its centre is so scintillatingly conceived. Gondry’s last film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had greater scope perhaps, but this is the one where he really got to me.
 

Little Children (Todd Field)

Field’s second film (after his much admired debut, In the Bedroom, which I was a bit lukewarm about) displays dazzling overall skill and intelligence. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson play suburban stay at home caregivers, both in rather arid marriages, who connect at the swimming pool and start an affair. Meanwhile, the community obsesses about the presence of a freed sex offender, back at home with his frail but strong-willed mother. The film is quiet, immensely nuanced, with a prevailing tone of bewildered trauma; sometimes it’s satiric, sometimes outright scary, including many magnificent individual scenes and a wealth of surprising detail, all filtered through a perfect cast. It’s most daring in suggesting the spectrum that links the child molester to the merely unsettled male, creating huge ambiguity about real motivations and virtues.

May movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2006)

Here are some things I enjoyed about Mission: Impossible III. The pre-credits sequence, plunging us right into a traumatic high-point, as if afraid there was some possibility of bored walk-outs within the first minute; the high-class casting, with the likes of Laurence Fishburne and Billy Crudup and (especially) Philip Seymour Hoffman; (for a different reason) the female trio of Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell and Maggie Q, all delectable; the fact that the main motivator for the action – referred to as a “rabbit’s foot” is never identified (Hitchcock MacGuffin style); the set-pieces in Berlin and the Vatican and Shanghai; the fact that Monaghan has to save Tom Cruise’s ass at a crucial point; the (by today’s standards) high degree of narrative coherence; the relative lack of irony and digression, all sublimated to sheer momentum; Cruise’s kinetic, mega-focused immersion in events. Now, some of those are things that in other movies I might as equally criticize, or at least consider inconsequential. Which means I don’t have much basis for taking issue with critics who find MI3 utterly shallow and uninteresting (unforgivable gibberish, the British Guardian called it), although I do find the continued shots at Cruise rather tiresome (maybe this would be another opportune time to acknowledge that I also defended Gigli). The movie definitely works best if you regard it as a series of filigrees, skillfully grafted on an inherently rather mundane chassis. But I bet you won’t be bored.

Art School Confidential

Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential sends up one of the easiest targets on the shooting range – the pretensions of a New York art college and its environs. Max Minghella plays the naïve freshman, surrounded by weirdos, and talent has nothing to do with the pecking order; meanwhile, a strangler stalks the students at night. The movie has plenty of chuckles (it’s not really aiming for belly laughs), and at least one interesting and subtle characterization, from John Malkovich as a teacher stuck with rationalizing his own failure. It doesn’t have much overriding purpose though – by the end of it, no one has any remaining credibility, and the idea of aesthetic virtue or integrity is out the window, leaving a rather deadening effect. Zwigoff’s deadpan style is apt in a way, and yet a more analytical sensibility might have found some real profundities in here. Art is still capable of profundity, isn’t it?

I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and musing about the (depending on your viewpoint) perhaps frighteningly ascendant China, but here’s one point for the West at least – we can crow over the sad decline of formerly admired filmmaker Chen Kaige (best known for Farewell My Concubine). With The Promise, he tries to make the same transition as his countryman Zhang Yimou did with Hero and House of Flying Daggers, to lose himself in a big-budget digital-heavy martial-arts romance. It’s a substantial failure, weak and derivative in every respect, but the saddest thing about it is the relative lack of technical facility – compared to what we’re used to, the standard of the effects is often rather crummy, and Chen’s handling of it is all over the place. His world, it seems, is flat lining.

Akeelah and the Bee

Roger Ebert thinks that Akeelah and the Bee is one of the year’s best films so far. I find this a rather sad statement, for what it implies about the influential Ebert’s dwindling expectations for cinema. Not that this mellow drama (co-produced by Starbucks) – about a young black girl from a rough LA neighbourhood, who goes all the way at the National Spelling Bee – isn’t sublimely effective. I thought the current Broadway musical, The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, had thought up every possible spelling bee plot twist, but this movie has a few more, along with a nice conception of how Akeelah’s quest reinvigorates the community (even the local drug dealer puts in coaching time). It’s all enjoyable, but also patently antiseptic and clichéd, and you might hate yourself for succumbing to it. You know too, it’s dumb to pay that much for coffee. 

Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon is another of those weird contemporary artifacts where almost unimaginable amounts of money and logistical genius are applied on a lifeless framework, for an almost bewildering end result. The film’s opening shot, circling the circumference of the vast cruise ship while twice picking up lead actor Josh Lucas on the jogging track, immediately informs us both of the film’s virtuosity, and of the vacuous underlying scheme. As in the 1972 original, the ship of course goes belly-up, and a small band of passengers breaks off from the others to seek their way to the surface, as the water level slowly pursues them, fires break out, machinery plummets, and their number slowly dwindles. It’s a pretty concise movie by blockbuster standards, little more than an hour and a half, which shows you how it has little to offer beyond discharging the basic blueprint. Bland casting hardly helps – although it would admittedly have been difficult to match the original line-up (Hackman, Borgnine, Shelley Winters, etc.). All in all, an inevitable flop.

Down in the Valley

In Down in the Valley, Edward Norton plays a disturbed young man who casts himself as a modern-day cowboy – this in suburban L.A. He hooks up with disaffected teen Evan Rachel Wood, instantly attracting the suspicion of her father (and, in the movie’s scheme, local sheriff) David Morse. The film has a genuinely shocking scene around halfway through, but that’s also the point where its initial low-key appeal yields to contrivance and gunplay; the movie’s use of Western archetypes actually makes Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking look subtle. The main point of interest is Norton, channeling De Niro at times (practicing his poses in front of a mirror) and doing an aw shucks routine at others – the actor has always seemed basically unassuming, but when you think about his career you realize he’s increasingly incapable of playing a normal person, and his performance here starts to seem disconcertingly egotistical.
 

I didn’t much like Chan-wook Park’s Old Boy, despite its Tarantino-approved prize at Cannes, and his latest Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (this is the title on the screen – in the ads, it’s just called Lady Vengeance, eschewing the sympathy angle) starts off in much the same vein. A woman is released from prison after thirteen years, instantly adopts a hard-boiled veneer and goes in search of revenge on the guy who really did the crime. She catches him and hauls him off to a remote location, and then suddenly the movie switches into a more sociological take on the virtue and validity of revenge, while also taking on increasing undertones of ethereal sentimentality (if it went on for ten minutes longer, you almost suspect you’d be watching something like Amelie). It’s very gripping overall, and the portrayal of the woman is ultimately fuller than I would have imagined possible. So there’s more to Park than I thought, although I couldn’t really tell you what exactly that is.

A final batch of fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now follows the course of two Palestinian suicide bombers. The pair initially seem like aimless layabouts who sign up for their fate primarily for lack of an alternative, gullibly swallowing their recruiters’ claims for the paradise that awaits them in the afterlife. The mission quickly goes wrong, and as they run around seeking to regroup, the film constructs the situation more fully – on the one hand, they are merely pawns of a wasteful cycle of violence, in which each side fuels the retaliation of the other; on the other hand, the situation of the West Bank natives is so dire – a life imprisonment in which (as they see it) the occupiers are perpetually effective in painting themselves as victims – that the ultimate sacrifice is the only tenable course, personally and politically. The film often seems too linear and forced, and is certainly too reliant on theatrical monologues to make its point, but it can’t help but carry significant political and anthropological weight.

Last Year’s Rent

Chris Columbus’ filming of the long-running Broadway musical Rent may be a partly useful reference point for future generations; you know, in the same way we’re all so glad they filmed Mame. As a contemporary viewing experience, it’s sadly negligible. I only saw the musical in its Toronto production, which seemed to me raucous and barely coherent, although I’ve enjoyed listening to the soundtrack of the Broadway original. The music comes across well enough in the movie (with only a couple of exceptions, it retains the Broadway cast), but everything around it seems either weird or irrelevant. As many critics have pointed out, the material seems dated if not embalmed, and Columbus’ saccharine treatment of such issues as AIDS and drug taking contributes to the sense of a disembodied fantasy; there’s no tangible sense here of a real time or place. However effective the actors may have been on stage, they’re mostly bland on the screen, and mostly too old (it has the feeling of watching the tenth season of something like Friends, but deprived of the previous nine seasons’ easing effect).

The structure is bizarre, with a first half that dawdles its way around an ungainly plot involving a controversial performance art show, and a second half that’s so abbreviated and choppy that a major character develops full-blown AIDS, is hospitalized and dies all in the space of one song. And the choreography is mostly stilted or cluttered. Columbus seems to enjoy the actors, and there’s something vaguely admirable about his fidelity to the original concept, but it’s not as admirable as it is nutty. I’d guess that someone previously unfamiliar with the material would find this film merely bewildering.

High Anxiety

Harold Ramis’ The Ice Harvest is a low-key, claustrophobic movie set on Christmas Eve, as John Cusack, having stolen over two million dollars from the mob, wanders around Wichita Falls, Kansas, dodging potential hit men, anguishing about the trustworthiness of his partner in crime (Billy Bob Thornton) and plotting escape with his primary object of desire (Connie Nielsen). The backdrop is crammed with strippers and lowlifes, and Cusack is oddly compelling as someone who revels in these indicia of masculinity without ever really feeling at one with them; the theme of challenged potency is reinforced by a long interlude with Oliver Platt as his best friend (who’s married, devastatingly unhappily, to Cusack’s ex-wife), oozing drunken neediness all over the screen. The set-up belongs to film noir, with all the double-crossings and ambiguities and angst, and while it’s rather too flat to be a compelling thriller, it’s oddly affecting as a weird, displaced reflection on middle-aged male anxiety. Director Ramis usually works in a much more ingratiating vein, but I hope he continues down this icier road.

Protocols of Zion is a documentary by Marc Levin, who’s best known for Slam, rooted in his astonishment at Jewish conspiracy myths that circulated in the wake of 9/11. Levin quickly sources much of this in the ongoing Internet-driven popularity of a 19^th-century screed, and goes on from there to a ramshackle survey of contemporary anti-Semitism, relying rather too much on the blatherings of people he meets in the street and various fringe characters (he also brings his aging father along with him most of time, to no particular end). He also spends much time circling around Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, although never nails (sorry) that wretched work as effectively as he should. Overall, as an agitator Levin is no Michael Moore, and as an analyst he’s far below the level of (for example) Eugene Jarecki’s masterful analysis of the military-industrial complex Why we Fight (which I saw at the film festival and is due on PBS soon). The film’s overall thinness is a real shame, for it’s obviously well intended, and the resurgence of anti-Semitism is one of the most depressing signs of mankind’s pervasive neurotic cowardice. 

Syriana

From there it’s a natural segue to Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is an admirably ambitious journey across the spectrum of the oil business, from Washington to Beirut. It blends almost too many plotlines to count, and I can’t imagine anyone not missing some of the narrative points at a first viewing. Most prominent in the mix are George Clooney as a CIA agent and Matt Damon as an industry analyst; the film gradually coalesces on the power struggle in an oil-rich Middle Eastern country (in which the US blatantly, almost gleefully, meddles) and on the corporate-office machinations surrounding an industry takeover. For all its difficulties, it’s a fascinating film, although Gaghan (who won an Oscar for writing Traffic) seems at this point more of a strategist than an artist, and the movie – predominantly even-toned – lacks the muscularity that someone like Michael Mann might have brought to it.
 

This isn’t entirely inappropriate though, for the film’s general sobriety bolsters its despairing undertone. One of the last lines spoken in the film, left on tape by a suicide bomber, is that “The next world is the true life,” and the film renders it tempting to hope this is so, for the world of Syriana is barely worth saving. American institutions appear particularly corrupt and venal here (“Corruption is our protection,” says one power player), with idealism and justice depicted as mere tools of corporate power, and all foreign engagement as a cynical sham in the grip of (here it is again) the military-industrial complex. Personal relationships are equally untrustworthy, and all that’s good appears merely transient. I have no particular issue with any of this, but the film lacks the subtlety or overall eloquence to convince as advocacy; taken purely on its own terms, it could almost be dismissed as a paranoid fantasy born from too much time in the research library. Gaghan might not be completely unhappy with that assessment though, if the implication is that the film is a spur to further self-education and action.

Even more fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2005)

I loved George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, a highly disciplined account of how CBS News took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. The impeccably controlled David Straithairn is mesmerizing as Murrow, and as I listened to his various on-air monologues (presumably delivered largely if not entirely verbatim) I was astounded at the attention to language, at the confident assumption of a certain literary sensibility on the audience’s part. Of course, one might focus instead on the elitism underlying those times – no doubt television is in some sense more accessible and “democratic” now; and Clooney goes out of his way to show the limitations of the times (in particular through a couple of co-workers who must cover up the fact that they’re married). But on the whole, despite his film’s stripped down air – it focuses almost entirely on work processes (flawlessly fusing new and found footage), runs only an hour and a half and seldom moves outside the newsroom or a few other bland interiors – it’s distinctly romantic and even subtly mystic. Murrow’s customary sign-off, which contributes the film’s title, sums up its mood  - taut, but inherently (in the very suggestion of an immediate need for good luck) dark (even the title’s punctuation, with an unusual but very deliberate period inserted on screen after “Luck,” seems meaningful). Clooney’s handling is generally masterly, full of good decisions. Some have pointed out inaccuracies in the film…good night and good luck to them I guess.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’, starring 50 Cent and based on his own violent life story, plays like a rough amalgamation of 8 Mile, Hustle and Flow and whatever gangsta drug movie you care to name, and adds nothing new to the recipe. Fiddy is a dull central presence, and the intriguing cultural experiment of having such a project be directed by My Left Foot’s Jim Sheridan doesn’t pay off.

I've only read one of the Harry Potter books – Chamber of Secrets – and that was in French, as an exercise (it took me ages). I found it over-extended and messy, and these structural problems far outweighed its appeal to the imagination. I acknowledge though that this weakness may acquire undue weight when one labours over the book for months, rather than devouring it in a delighted rush (as per the images that news shows lazily and panderingly provide on each new J K Rowling release date). And of course, maybe it’s better in English. Still, I have remained immune. And while I’ve enjoyed all the films to some extent (counter to general opinion, my favourite remains the first, simply for the pleasure of discovery), I cannot see that the series is achieving much from a cinematic point of view. The latest, Goblet of Fire, has been widely regarded as the best, in part for its greater intensity and control of mood; and for the expanded emotional nuances allowed by the lead actors’ aging. This is fair enough, but it’s so limited; the conception of the characters remains extremely superficial, and in any event they’re swamped by the general mechanics of the film (among the many esteemed supporting actors, Brendan Gleeson is the only one allowed to make much impression).

The plot, involving a wizard contest manipulated by the evil Lord Vordemort, seems ungainly here, reliant on all sorts of arbitrariness and “rules” that the film – needing to answer to few externally-imposed constraints – sets down as it sees fit; maybe in the book it all has more context, but the skeleton looks pretty unsophisticated in a movie’s more compressed surroundings. It ends on a generalized feeling of foreboding, but on its own terms it’s primarily mystifying. New director Mike Newell maintains the mood well, but a lot of it has a businesslike kind of feeling - how much room for personal expression can there be within such a vast preestablished infrastructure?  Goblet of Fire has many engaging scenes – both of high drama and of intimate fumbling – and I cannot see myself abandoning the series now, but I think I am being driven there more by the canny positioning of the films as “events” than by their accumulated pay-off to date.

More film festival movies I caught up with later.

Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season is a new-age hodgepodge set around an eleven year old spelling prodigy gliding to the national championships, and the unfulfilled family around her; the movie has an alluring shimmer to it, but its triangulation of spelling mystique, Kabala, Hinduism and psychological trauma is utterly unconvincing. Its conception of the father, played by Richard Gere, as a subtle tyrant doesn’t work either. I was reminded of Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women, a much underrated film that allowed Gere his customary charm while still leaving no doubt about his underlying complacency and perniciousness; nothing about Bee Season exhibits such intuitive assurance.

I won't pretend to being well-read - my familiarity with the source material of Pride & Prejudice comes not from Jane Austen's novel but rather from Gurinder Chadra's recent Bollywoodization of it, Bride and Prejudice, which I now realize was much more faithful than I knew at the time. Chadra's film was a hopeless mess, but actually brought out some of the key points of interest (such as the best friend's marriage to a personally inadequate but economically viable man) more acutely than Joe Wright's new version of the original (albeit more through luck than skill). Wright's film has been criticized as a soft prettification of the novel, and although I'm in no position to judge, that rings true (the Richard Clayderman-like piano on the soundtrack is a key culprit). Still, Keira Knightley is a more gripping central presence here than I thought likely, and the movie delivers - although not at all distinctively - on the central love story; everything else feels short-changed. The pride, a matter of human foibles, is definitely more fully treated than the societally rooted prejudice.
 

James Mangold’s Walk the Line is the story of Johnny Cash, and many of its raw elements echo Taylor Hackford’s Ray, last year’s story of Ray Charles – despite the different musical genres, the two films play to much the same respectful middlebrow audience. Ray is the more cinematically fluid of the two, and it’s certainly more thorough in conveying a sense of the singer’s historical importance. Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning work as Charles is a more dazzling evocation than Joaquin Phoenix’s as Cash, although Phoenix’s more interiorized work slowly grows on you. Walk the Line’s trump card though is in the character of June Carter, who has a long and bumpy professional and personal relationship with Cash before they settle down to their 35-year marriage. Reese Witherspoon plays June, with great movie-stealing vivacity, and the picture is mostly an up and down chronicle of postponed destiny, with great music woven in throughout. It’s very smooth and highly enveloping , but if the gauge is serious history it might almost as well be about Kenny Rogers.

 

December movies, part two

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Ballets Russes is a documentary about the performing institution that popularized ballet in America from the 30’s to the 50’s, told through some wonderful archival footage and many interviews with the principal dancers (many of whom happily survived at least until recently), including a 2000 reunion. I am not any kind of ballet fan, but the film has great material – behind the scenes clashes, breakups, wartime turmoil, adventures in Hollywood, and so forth, and it’s so engaging that it’s only afterwards that its limitations really occur to you. For example, the old footage is seen (perhaps out of necessity) only in fragments, concentrating far more on providing glimpses of key figures than on illustrating technique, form or overall shape – our sense of the company’s artistry emerges in the telling much more than in the showing. There’s an intriguing social history there, of the popularization of the cultural form, but this too seems secondary to the film’s celebratory purpose and must be constructed in bits and pieces. And the brief anecdote of the company’s first black ballerina, who aroused such hostility in the South (including a backstage Klan visit) that she eventually had to leave the company, only points up the absence of such weight elsewhere in the film. To a certain (likely the larger) section of the audience, all of this will of course not matter at all, and as I say, it didn’t matter that much to me either as I watched it. The personalities are terrific, and if the movie’s techniques are conventional, they’re executed with much grace.

Three…Extremes

Three…Extremes is made up of three squirm-inducing stories directed by Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), Takashi Miike (mainstay of the film festival’s Midnight Madness section) and Fruit Chan. The first, by Chan, is called Dumplings – place your bets for what they’re made of. The second, by Park (a director whose work I’ve yet to warm to, despite the Tarantino-led accolades), is about a film director terrorized by an extra, and Miike’s third is the most dream-like and intriguing, as well as probably the cleverest. Like most compilation movies, the cumulative impact is relatively limited – no matter how well crafted the episodes are, they’re pretty much confined to putting across the premise and then getting off the stage. But variations across all three segments on the themes of self-disgust and macabre family dynamics lend it a broad feeling of coherence, and obviously it’s never dull.

By the way, I watched Ballets Russes and Three…Extremes on the same Sunday afternoon. Isn’t diversity a great thing?

I didn’t much enjoy the stage production of The Producers when I saw it in Toronto a couple of years ago, although many said it was hampered by weak casting of the two leads. There’s no question it felt dead at the centre, although it was difficult to imagine how high the tacky material could ever be elevated. The new film version, directed by Susan Stroman (who was also at the helm for the theatre – this is her first film), confirms all these doubts. Like the film of Rent, the movie suffers from woefully inadequate strategizing on what a meaningful cinematic version might actually consist of, but it’s not as facile as Rent in (to some degree) covering that up with superficial energy and glitz. The early scene where Nathan Lane’s crooked producer meets Matthew Broderick’s buttoned-down accountant and quickly starts to lead him astray is shockingly drab and lifeless (that stuff about the blue blanket is surpassingly lame), plunging the movie right into the hole.

It’s A Flop!

The main casting innovation, Uma Thurman as the Swedish bimbo actress, similarly strikes out – Thurman simply can’t lower herself into this with sufficient conviction (the only mystery is why she felt inclined to try). The less estimable performers do better. Will Ferrell’s genetic predisposition to shtick works fine here, and I must admit to getting my biggest laughs out of Gary Beach (who won a Tony for this) as the outrageously camp director, particularly during the Springtime for Hitler routine, which all these years later remains pretty surefire. But these are slim pickings indeed. My mind wandered to other musicals, not to the likes of Minnelli or Donen (which would be not so much wandering as inter-galactic leaping) but rather – I admit oddly – to Michael Ritchie’s filming of another Broadway mainstay, The Fantasticks. Ritchie’s movie was panned and never properly released, although I caught it once on late night TV. That one’s a choppy and often threadbare film (the Internet movie database has a long list of scenes that were cut from it), but it has some moments of beauty, perhaps all the sweeter for their obviously problematic context. It feels like a movie someone at least cared about making.

Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone is ultimately a little disappointing as only a very good film can be – it’s so very smart and accomplished that you’re frustrated at its failure to be a masterpiece. The elements of that failure are pretty clear. The film is about Christmas at a rambunctious liberal family, where the eldest son (Dermot Mulroney) brings home his girlfriend (Sarah Jessica Parker) for the first time; they’re loose and liberal; she’s neurotic and uptight…a disaster looms. The cast includes Diane Keaton, Claire Danes and Rachel McAdams, all excellent. I haven’t smiled or chuckled as much in any film this year (no laughs out loud though), and the sentiment got to me too. And a dinner scene where Parker puts her foot in her mouth all the way up to her thigh is just about the squirmiest thing I’ve seen all year, including those giant insects in King Kong.

Turbulent Blessings

And yet…even that fine scene seems a little contrived and overwritten, pushing Parker’s ineptitude way beyond the point where someone in her situation would have figured it out and shut it down (or else had someone step in to shut it down for her). The film ultimately succumbs to an extreme desire for tidiness, arranging for several unlikely and under-dramatized character pairings, and tacking on a sentimental one-year-later epilogue. And it doesn’t really have much to say about anything at all, except the same old stuff about the turbulent blessings of family. I thought as a counterpoint of one of my favourite films of the year, Agnes Jaoui’s Comme une image (Look At Me), which was similarly well-constructed and accessible and pleasant and unobtrusive in its style, but which (like Jaoui’s previous film The Taste Of Others) seemed continually philosophical and probing about the interaction of the social and the personal. Even Jaoui’s titles are beautifully resonant in a way that The Family Stone just isn’t. I see that I’ve laid out the film’s faults in much more detail than its virtues, but that’s my own evocation of family for you – always playing up the negative.

December movies, part one

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Ushpizin (The Guests) is an Israeli movie, directed by Giddi Dar. It’s a tightly knit tale of faith and tradition, built around a familiar structure of a disruptive guest; in this case two escaped convicts who turn up at the house of a former wastrel now turned (fallibly) devout, on the eve of a sacred festival. The film could have been almost unbearably self-righteous and stuffy, and sometimes shows signs of heading that way; it’s governed largely by idealism. But it’s truly deeply felt, and it accumulates a lushly earthy feeling (one has to admire any picture in which the climactic eating of a lemon carries a real emotional clout). The central character is a far more subtle creation than he initially appears, and the milieu is skillfully enough conveyed that even a distinctly secular viewer might be persuaded by the construct of God as participating equally in the action with the human characters. And as with many such films, I can’t help but cite the anthropological interest as a major attraction in itself. It’s a trite thing to say, but it’s all an education.

Karen Kusama hasn’t made a film since her promising debut Girlfight, and Aeon Flux is a surprising return vehicle – a big budget science fiction thriller with Charlize Theron; it’s set in the last city on 25^th century Earth, and she’s a rebel going up against the stifling leadership (it’s quite similar in many ways to the recent The Island). The film received attention mainly for canceling its press screenings – a notorious sign of a panicking studio – and indeed it's not very good; it’s monotonous, with poorly handled action sequences. Beyond the images of Theron in her skin-tight costumes, it blows any possibility of being a modern-day Modesty Blaise or Barbarella – it’s full of gimmicky stylistic ideas, but they don’t cohere into anything interesting, I suppose an action film reflecting a feminine sensibility is still a relatively rare item – the general tone here is much more nurturing, empathetic, and plain soft than you’ll get from most action packages, but in this context that seems as much a sign of resignation as subversion.

Good Night, and Good Luck became the only second movie this year that pulled me to a quick second visit (2046 was the first). It again struck me as impeccable in virtually every respect (although I'll admit that the second visit didn’t yield the additional layerings that one expects from the greatest of films). If there were an Oscar for overall contribution, George Clooney would surely be the winner for this year. On the one hand, Syriana communicates the corruption and bastardized idealism underlying global politics; knowingly complicated and sometimes impenetrable, it barely allows the faintest scope for optimism. Meanwhile, the Ed Murrow movie looks back fifty years, excavating some of the roots of our craven capitulation – our willingness to submit to easy gratification and insulation – and imprinting a profound sense of loss, but not without a romantic wistfulness that may leave the viewer with at least a fleeting sense of determination.

I can name only a handful of moments in Good Night, and Good Luck that I'd possibly want to change. One of those is the scene of Murrow asking the young Liberace (in real archival footage) if he hopes to get married one day, and the pianist’s carefully worded response about hoping to find “the right mate. “ Compared to the film’s overall subtleties it seems like an easy laugh, although even this has its place in establishing the era’s hypocrisy and repressiveness in personal matters, and thus in diluting any possibility of reading the movie as being largely unfiltered nostalgia.

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been closely pre-scrutinized in some circles, not because anyone needs another big-budget fantasy blockbuster, but for its adherence to the Christian subtext of C. S. Lewis’ source novel (which I haven’t read); if you don’t know, it’s about four children who tumble through a magical wardrobe into a wondrous realm of talking animals and strange creatures, where they are quickly greeted as the instruments of a prophecy that will defeat the evil ruling the land. As directed by Andrew Adamson (Shrek) it’s a very smooth creation with an even-handed and matter-of-fact tone, effortlessly blending the real and the digital: you suspend your own disbelief as effortlessly as the children do (for example, they adapt to the Cockney beavers within a couple of minutes). So what about that big issue? Well, sure, the subtext is there if you want it, and to my inexpert sensibility it seems pretty respectful. In particular, when the lion Aslan sacrifices himself for the forces of good and is later reborn, that’s kind of reminiscent of…well, you know. What the actual value of that recognition is, well, that’s beyond me. Maybe it’s just about reinforcement through repetition (I guess it’s also pretty exciting when the face of Jesus shows up on a potato chip). Although what big budget fantasy epic doesn’t lay on the higher power backdrop – from Star Wars’ Force through the Matrix and so on…

The film is too restrained, and in truth its young actors are a little too inexpert, for the themes of good and evil to carry much visceral weight. And the eagerness of the inhabitants of Narnia to idolize their human visitors seemed to me as plausible an allegory for an unelected monarchy as for anything less earthly. No matter. It’s a colourful, engaging, thankfully unportentous film.
 

If the chatter at my office is anything to go by, Memoirs of a Geisha, rather than Narnia or King Kong, was the season’s most anticipated release – looks like a lot of people (and yes, I mean women) loved that book. I haven’t read it, but I’m confident it would never have caught on as it did if it had been as affectless as Rob Marshall’s movie. Marshall seems at home with the easy spectacle, although even then his approach is conventional.  But he seems to hold his fine lead actors at arm’s length (Gong Li in particular seems game for something much more full-blooded) – not helped by the ill-fated decision to avoid subtitles and use English dialogue. The movie is overly discreet about the nature of being a geisha – one could easily come away with the impression that the requirement is to have sex just one time in a career, and to spend the rest of the time tiptoeing around serving tea. The portrayal of the protagonist’s decline during the war is rushed, robbing the thing of any overall dramatic shape. And her great romance – with a much older man she first meets at the age of 9 – merely seems creepy and distasteful. The movie has reasonable craft, but lousy instincts.

Best of 2005

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2005)

Several of my very favourite commercial releases this year barely qualify as that – they played at the 2004 film festival and then at the Cinematheque. And Head-On played only one or two nights at the Goethe Institute, before making a low-key one-week return later on. Still, you take your movies where you can. Apologies to any masterpieces released right at the end of the year. Here’s the list.

The World (Jia Zhang-ke)

This was my introduction to the work of Chinese auteur Jia - I didn’t see his acclaimed film Platform until later. The World - focusing on a young boyfriend and girlfriend, both working in a Beijing theme park filled with scaled-down replicas of world landmarks - is an engrossing work, illustrating a China in transition, touching on its persistent poverty (especially rurally), its abiding mystery and its banality. It’s a melancholy film, but it’s also filled with humour and incident and is a continuously fascinating work of anthropology – it’s particularly attuned toward women and the forces that drive them toward merely superficial advancement, ornamentation or even prostitution.

Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

What a pleasure that Café Lumiere (dedicated to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu) is the most narratively accessible of the Hou films I’ve seen. It follows a young woman, three months pregnant and just back from Taiwan, as she criss-crosses Tokyo, visiting parents or friends, working on a research project, but most often simply seen in transit. Both thematically and in its technique, the film seems to be about self-definition and its contingencies and choices. This subject might have entailed Hou’s most diverse, ambitious canvas yet, but he responds instead by honing down to his simplest, purest film.

Moolaade (Ousmane Sembene)

It’s amazing that this year brought a new film by Sembene, the pioneer of African cinema. His astonishing Moolaade, if it turns out to be his last film, will stand as a triumphant summation of his career. It’s simple in its technique, with the unadorned clarity and straightforward quality of a children’s story (although its subject is genital mutilation), but it exposes both the beauty and brutality of Africa with powerful eloquence.

Comme Une Image (Agnes Jaoui)

Jaoui’s follow-up to The Taste of Others revolves around an essentially monstrous author and publisher and a group of characters whose spiritual health lies in the distance they manage to put between themselves and him. The film understands that such monsters are created as much by the structures around them as by rampant pathology; the title suggests how identity is as much social as personal. The film always stays in familiar, easily assimilated territory, it’s unobtrusive in its style and acted in a pleasant register, but it’s entirely scintillating, examining in surprising detail a range of shifting tastes and possibilities.

2046 (Wong Kar-Wai)

Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046 is an astonishing work of cinematic design – one of those films that rapidly exhausts your powers of absorption on first viewing. The director reportedly reedited the film continually over a period of several years, and the result is an extraordinarily intricate tapestry of memory and association. It takes off from Wong’s In the Mood for Love, based around the same late 60’s Hong Kong setting, but the canvas now involves multiple women, multiple moments of loss and regret, and an occasional evocation of future worlds. The film uses time as an accordion, thrilling you with its structural sophistication; it’s also emotionally enthralling and immensely evocative. This was the only film this year that I felt demanded an almost immediate second viewing.

Junebug (Phil Morrison)

This is a low budget film about a North Carolina family when the eldest son, who long ago moved away to Chicago, returns to visit, with a sophisticated new wife. It’s an astoundingly subtle picture, spare but perfectly weighted, accumulating a remarkable series of implications. No recent film better portrays the “American heartland” so often referred to – George W. Bush isn’t mentioned in the movie, but it tells you everything you need to know about how he gets away with it – and it’s a borderline-horrific portrayal of family dynamics. The film is ambiguous enough that it could alternatively be read as a light, quirky semi-comedy (it works just fine as such) – as such it’s a masterful prism for prevailing complacency, and a great achievement by the unknown Morrison.

Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney)

I loved George Clooney’s highly disciplined account of how CBS News took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. The impeccably controlled David Straithairn is mesmerizing as Murrow, and despite the film’s stripped down air – it focuses almost entirely on work processes (flawlessly fusing new and found footage), runs only an hour and a half and seldom moves outside the newsroom or a few other bland interiors – it’s distinctly romantic and even subtly mystic. Between this and the gloomier Syriana, Clooney certainly deserves some kind of recognition for the year’s most striking overall contribution.

Head-On (Fatih Akin)

This is a fascinating, often fiery movie about the marriage and love affair (in that order) of two German Turks. It initially seems almost like a distended commentary on the impossibility of transcending one’s roots, but works an unpredictable way toward a universal poignancy that almost evokes Casablanca; sometimes it seems too simplistic in how it lays out various tensions for our examination, but few films have such constant feisty variation and vigour.

Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)

This laconic tale of so-laidback-he’s-hardly-there Bill Murray visiting a stream of old girlfriends has an easy sweetness, bolstered by wonderful performances from all concerned. For some of its length it’s a little underwhelming, with the director’s deadpan minimalism seeming like an affectation rather than a meaningful worldview. Ultimately though it all comes together, placing Murray at the centre of a significant perception shift, and allowing you to see the craft and nuance behind the movie’s every element.

The Family Stone (Thomas Bezucha)

Bezucha’s debut film - about Christmas at a rambunctious liberal family - is ultimately a little disappointing as only a very good movie can be – it’s so very smart and accomplished that you’re frustrated at its failure to be a masterpiece. Comme une image is a particularly useful reference point in demonstrating how The Family Stone is ultimately insufficiently philosophical and probing, and ultimately succumbs to an excessive desire for tidiness. But I haven’t smiled or chuckled as much in any film this year, and the sentiment got to me too. So it makes the cut.

Among others that might have made it:  Nobody Knows, Los Angeles Plays Itself, War of the Worlds, Saraband, Yes, Grizzly Man, A History Of Violence, Brokeback Mountain, King Kong (yes!) and lots of movies in the tier just below that. And now on to 2006, with Match Point and The New World already in our sights. Not to mention that Disney movie about the eight huskies that get stranded! Happy New Year!

Christmas movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in January 2008)

What kind of title is that - Christmas Movies? Wasn’t that a long time ago already? And Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages didn’t deliver much seasonal cheer. An old man’s long-time girlfriend dies and he’s suddenly homeless, with escalating dementia. His two middle-aged children, who he’s hardly talked to for years, need to sort out his future, even though they can hardly handle the basics of their own lives. Played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney (so, obviously, there’s no problem here on the acting front), they are both intellectuals with an interest in theatre, both up against a severe ceiling in their careers and emotional lives (someone pointed out that their names, John and Wendy, evoke Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up).

The Savages

The title refers to their surname, but also indicates the unusual chilliness of the approach. There’s no easy sentiment here, no last-minute making up for lost time. The father (played by Philip Bosco) is kept rather distant within the film’s scheme; John barely betrays a moment’s real emotion at the situation, and although Wendy is more demonstrative, she never seems to be engaging with the individuality of the old man before her. The movie isn’t static – they both move ahead, but just in the way that life incrementally nudges you forward.

It’s broadly classifiable as a comedy (Jenkins’ only previous film, the very good Slums of Beverly Hills, was more plainly that), but most of the laughs are of a low-key and rather desperate quality. The only conventionally “pretty” shots in the film come at the very start, portraying an Arizona retirement community, but that’s quickly revealed as an enclave of hypocrisy, having little to do with most people’s experience of old age and death (summed up by Hoffman in a stinging outburst). Almost everything else looks ugly and tawdry. Ultimately, the film’s depiction of old-age dilemmas is more convincing and wrenching than, say, that of Away From Her, but the toughest punch is one of indifference; even at his darkest hour, there’s never a sense that the old man’s plight matters more to his children than their own.

Enchanted

I eventually got round to seeing Kevin Lima’s Enchanted  - given my Grinch-like aversion to sitting among a bunch of happy kids, I needed to wait until the theatres had mostly cleared out. As it was, I’m sure I was as happy as any of the kids, although it may not have showed up on my face as much. This is the movie about a cartoon princess from a classic fairy tale kingdom, sent by a wicked witch through the vortex into modern-day Manhattan. It’s a culture shock, but her sunny attitude never wavers. She falls in with a single dad and his wide-eyed kid, while waiting for her handsome prince to come rescue her.

As G-rated movies go, this isn’t Ratatouille - it’s not thematically ambitious, and doesn’t have the superb overall shape of that animated marvel. But it’s still one of those creations that make you marvel at the current state of the medium. The technology and the coordination dazzle you, but it’s also on top of the basics –the script keeps things light and funny without getting crass, and everything’s primed to spread happiness. The scenes in the middle of Times Square, the arrival point from the other world, don’t seem quite integrated into the rest – they feel more like Letterman stunts – but it just adds to the charm.

Amy Adams, who was Oscar-nominated for Junebug, seems to me a little old for the princess role (she’s 33), but brings immense conviction to it. Even if the movie wasn’t as well executed, she’d go a long way to convincing you otherwise. Ultimately, Enchanted does a better job of making you believe in the power of true love’s kiss than, say, Michael Moore’s movies do on selling their various agendas. Doesn’t that sound like a Christmas movie, speaking secularly of course?

Charlie Wilson’s War

Adams also turns up in Mike Nichols’ new film Charlie Wilson’s War, trailing sunnily behind the eponymous congressman as he manoeuvres through the corridors of 1980’s Washington power, with side trips to the Middle East. Based on a true story, although who knows how closely, it’s the account of how Wilson, a congressman at the time better known for character flaws than leadership substance, spearheaded the effort to adequately arm the Afghan mujahedeen against their Russian occupiers (he saw a Dan Rather report on TV while hanging out naked in a hot-tub with some coke-snorting strippers, and it caught his imagination).

Nichols is as polished and smooth a craftsman as they come, and the film is written by Aaron Sorkin, who proved with West Wing that he can create a compelling, highly articulate illusion of how important things work. Remarkably for such a sprawling subject, it runs barely more than an hour and a half, and is cast with three major league Oscar winners: Tom Hanks as Wilson, Julia Roberts as a Texan society woman who attaches herself to such noble causes, and (most quirkily and indelibly) Philip Seymour Hoffman again, as a CIA operative. There’s obviously major compression going on here – even the most sensitive negotiations are dispensed with in a breezy five minutes – but one assumes we’re getting the story’s major arc at least.

What we’re ultimately looking at, of course, is the birth of the armed radical Moslem movement that led to the Taliban and beyond. This is acknowledged in the film, and after his military achievement we see Wilson trying to squeeze much smaller sums out of Congress for education and reconstruction, without success (by then everyone’s preoccupied with “restructuring Eastern Europe”): the movie ends on an unprintable version of the adage about winning the war and losing the peace. The ongoing relevance of this hardly needs to be underlined.
 

Still, Charlie Wilson’s War isn’t a movie that arouses anger. This leads to dismissals such as James Rocchi’s: “There’s subtlety, and then there’s invisibility…(the film) is timid where it should be reckless, clever where it should be cutting, funny where it should be fierce.” True enough, and Hanks, although very effective, would probably have given much the same performance if recreating the Dean Martin Variety Hour; indeed, the film’s best sequence, involving lots of frantic movement between one room and the next and intertwining conversations, is pure farce. One also wonders about the apparent use of real amputee children in the scene where Wilson visits a refugee camp; the sequence affects us as it does him, but Nichols hasn’t figured out how to fuse such raw stories of pain with Hollywood glamour without seeming rather gauche.

In other areas the film executes classic Hollywood velvet glove manoeuvres, such as in the gentle handling of Pakistan’s President Zia. It’s probably fair to conclude that one should approach the film with skepticism, but you’d miss out on a good time if you didn’t approach it at all. Kind of like Christmas!

Watching Welles

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2006)

Near the start of his 1973 documentary F for Fake, having already established the film’s preoccupation with charlatanism and trickery, the film’s director and narrator Orson Welles delivers a sober promise to the camera: that for the next hour, he will tell us only the truth. With this established, the viewer settles into the film’s discursive approach to its material, focusing on master art forger Emile de Hory and the author Clifford Irving (who wrote both a biography of de Hory and then an alleged autobiography of Howard Hughes, itself later revealed as a fraud) while digressing in multiple directions – back to memories of Citizen Kane and Welles’ famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, into scenes of Welles having dinner, and frequently into footage of Hungarian model Oja Kodar (Welles’ lover for the last twenty years of his life).

F for Fake

Eventually the film narrows into a single extended anecdote about Kodar, her grandfather (also an art forger) and Pablo Picasso – a strange story for sure, but no more than anything already laid before us. After its apparent conclusion, Welles suddenly starts to back pedal, disowning elements of what he’s just been telling us, and then he refers back to his promise about that hour of veracity. “That hour, ladies and gentlemen,” he then announces, “is over. For the last seventeen minutes I’ve been lying my head off.”

It’s the kind of thing that can only work once, and nowadays in a more skeptical, wised-up world, it might not work at all. But when I first saw F for Fake, at the age of sixteen or so, I remember being utterly stunned. It was a moment that fundamentally influenced my sense of cinema – maybe it was even the moment when I realized the passivity of how I’d been watching films, and the inadequacy of that. Over time one’s views of things evolve and shift of course, so that at the extreme Welles’ ruse might almost seem to unbalance the film – it says more about his self-dramatization than about the movie’s ostensible subject. But Welles’ obvious delight in the material is one of F for Fake’s great pleasures, and the degree to which the director may or may not reveal himself between the frames is the real issue on which a certificate of authenticity might be demanded. As a director who traveled the world with his editing table, and who created dazzling juxtapositions and leaps in F for Fake, Welles obviously knew in the first place that the concept of an “hour of truth” in cinema is hopelessly compromised.

In my 1,100 or so words here, I can say nothing of interest to those who know and value Welles’ work, but in casual conversations at work recently I’ve realized again how small that group is. I wrote about Welles some five years ago, but on that occasion I concentrated mainly on Citizen Kane. No apology necessary for that. As I wrote then, Citizen Kane tends to be a film that everyone knows about and knows to be great, but which few people have actually seen (or if they have seen it, they often seem not to know what the fuss is all about). And the later films have little prominence in the popular consciousness.

 

One Man Band

Five years ago I referred to “numerous unfinished Welles projects that have become more famous than other directors’ finished works. Most famous are Don Quixote, The Deep, and above all The Other Side of the Wind, a mid-70’s expose of Hollywood that sounds strange and twisted and utterly brilliant…and will probably never be seen. This odd shadow career is unprecedented in an art form that depends so much on logistical planning and having the money in place – you weep at a creative force so often thwarted.”
 

Well, I now see that a little bit differently. The Criterion Collection’s DVD of F for Fake has one of the most wonderful extras of any DVD I’ve ever come across – the documentary Orson Welles: One Man Band. This features two scenes from Other Side of the Wind (both stunning) and others from an unfinished Merchant of Venice and a barely started version of Isak Dinesen’s The Dreamers, among others. And then there are items I could never have imagined, such as some comedy skits filmed in Britain in the 60’s and 70’s that allow Welles to indulge his love of playacting for no great artistic purpose. Which merely makes them all the more endearing. Oh, and then there’s the talk show pilot he filmed with The Muppets.

The most common reason for this trove of loose ends is just that Welles didn’t have the money to finish the projects, or else only got raised from shady and unreliable sources (Other Side of the Wind was seized by its Iranian financiers, and remains tangled up in murky circumstances). There’s also some sheer bad luck – supposedly the negative of Merchant of Venice was stolen when nearly completed, and no one knows where it went. But it’s plain that Welles’ restless creative energy maximized the possibilities for such mishaps. While he was making F for Fake, he took on the strange side project of filming himself reading aloud from Moby Dick. Thankfully, F for Fake was finished nevertheless. But chronologies of his work reveal a strange pattern of overlaps and deferrals and fragmented involvement, not like that of any filmmaker I’ve ever known of.

Spontaneous Joy

It would be trite and foolish to say we’re better off this way, but One Man Band makes it joyously easy to make the best out of what we’ve got. Citizen Kane challenged preconceptions by deploying certain tools of Hollywood studio cinema more imaginatively and richly than anyone had before, and then misfortune immediately set in. Welles made The Magnificent Ambersons then was sent to Brazil under the umbrella of the wartime effort to make It’s All True. In his absence, the studio butchered Ambersons, and the legend of squandered talent was already seeded. Thirty years later, such incidents were endemic to Welles’  - I was going to say career, but that word has a sense of linearity that doesn’t seem right here. I suppose I should just say his life.
 

We have plenty of examples of great filmmakers who prepare meticulously and take years between projects, and who consequently make fewer films than we (and in at least some cases they) would have hoped – Kubrick, Malick, and so forth. In a way, Welles’ late career speaks to too much spontaneous joy in cinema, to an undimmed thrill at new ideas and possibilities. His glorious fragments make other directors seem confined by systems and expectations. Instead of weeping, as I suggested five years ago, I now think it’s a gorgeous legacy, with the loss of what might have been on screen outweighed by the challenge to our notions of what’s a full and successful career in cinema. All of this makes the F for Fake DVD one of the most amazing artifacts that I know of. I couldn’t recommend it to you more strongly.

A movie from Bhutan

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2005)

Travellers and Magicians is apparently the first feature film ever shot in Bhutan, and in my naive way, I wonder why this wouldn’t provide a reason for anyone – anyone at all – to choose to see this film over Hitch or Boogeyman or any of the other movies that kicked its ass, financially speaking, the weekend of its release. I mean, whatever one’s affinity for Will Smith or the horror genre (and I certainly bear neither of these any hostility), isn’t it somehow self-evident, for Chrissake,  that it would be more worthwhile seeing the first feature film ever shot in Bhutan!? Apparently not. When I say this kind of thing to people, they react as if I’ve veered into anthropology rather than cinema, and they’re not entirely wrong of course. I mean, I feel no urge to seek out the (presumably small) corpus of translated Bhutanese literature, so we all pick our poison. But still, Bhutan versus Boogeyman – it sure doesn’t seem like that close a call.

World Cinema

But you don’t always get the eye opening you expect. My personal emblematic recent experience of “Third World” cinema is Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaade, which played at last year’s film festival (and is coming to the Cinematheque). It’s a Senegalese film about female circumcision, and it’s a joy to watch, funny and accessible but driven by a completely different set of aesthetic considerations than we see in American or European film. I always hesitate to pronounce with confidence how much I’ve “learned” from a movie, but even if Moolaade were shown to be narratively and politically disingenuous (which I don’t think it is, but I don’t suppose it’s impossible), even the nature of the lie would be informative. The body of Iranian cinema falls into a similar category, and we’ve seen enough films from Iran now both to feel that we know something real about the country and to get a sense for the country’s cinematic conventions. If it’s only a “sense” on my part, that’s due to my lack of research and study; despite good intentions, I’m more of a tourist than a true traveller in these lands.

Rick Groen, in The Globe and Mail, cited Iranian cinema in his review of Travellers and Magicians, saying that director Khyentse Norbu “has clearly fallen under the influence of Iran’s neo-realist tradition – same theme, same casting” although he then notes Norbu’s greater visual opulence as an important difference. I would have said that that’s putting it mildly. Norbu studied politics and filmmaking in the US, and it shows. His film is about an “officer” in a remote mountain town who gets his chance to go to America, but only if he reaches a nearby town in three days’ time. He grabs his boom box and heads off, but when he misses the bus he’s forced to rely on hitched rides (this on roads that see maybe five vehicles a day). He meets up with other travellers along the way,  including a young woman who starts to grow profoundly on him, and a monk who tells a long, mystical (and vaguely parallel) story about a student magician falling under the spell of a mysterious woman. We see this story in episodes, shot in a gauzy style that contrasts with the main narrative’s sunlit exteriors.

The Grass Is Greener

Rather than Iranian cinema, the film that most came to my mind while watching this was Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai, another lush piece of filmmaking pivoting on a familiar theme of a skeptical outsider gradually assimilated into an age-old tradition. The fact that the official here merely dreams of America rather than coming from there makes little effective difference – at the start he’s hyperactive, chain-smoking and stand-offish,  going to extremes to demonstrate his difference from the locals, and at the end he’s serene, integrated into the group. Several reviews identify the film as a cautionary fable on the notion of the grass being greener, but this is frankly not a very enterprising game plan, if you’re the first feature film from Bhutan. Norbu has talked in interviews about how spirituality informed the film’s making, but I simply don’t think this is particularly evident in what he generated.

The Bhutanese landscapes are wonderful, and we pick up a few details about the society, but nothing here challenges us or educates us. We've seen many films (or at least had the chance to see them) set at the intersection of old and new worlds (to pick merely the first that comes to mind, The Story of the Weeping Camel was nominated for an Oscar this year) and by that standard Norbu’s film is less anthropologically illuminating than its peers. The film uses non-professionals – for example, the first man he meets, an old apple seller, was apparently played by a genuine apple seller who had trouble understanding the whole concept of movie making, multiple takes and so forth. The apple seller looks authentic enough in the few close-ups of him, but I can see no substantive way in which it matters whether it was an actor or not – he’s not called on to do anything going beyond the fictional and decorative.

A First Step

The film has an ambiguous ending that seems too knowingly so – it seems to withhold easy closure not because it’s reached a point of complexity that warrants this, but merely for the sake of withholding easy closure. By which I mean viewers will merely wonder what happened next, rather than pondering some broader theme or insight.

I’m well aware that by this time the reader may be on the verge of crumpling up the paper in disgust, for it seems that I’m merely beating up on the weakest and most defenseless of victims – rather than sticking the knife into Hitch, what kind of perversity leads one to attack the first feature film ever made in Bhutan? I suppose my defense would have to be that if Travellers and Magicians’s value ultimately lies in its universality and accessibility, then we’re entitled to judge it by universal and accessible criteria. From my brief reading, Bhutan may truly be one of the world’s most distinct societies, and it’s a real shame that the film provides so little sense of it. A few weeks ago I criticized Don McKellar’s Canadian film Childstar for seeming to define itself too much with regard to an American reference point, but at least Canada has the excuse of geographical proximity and cultural similarity. Maybe it took someone like Norbu, schooled in American logistical savvy as well as its aesthetics, to take the first step for Bhutanese cinema, and this seals him a place in film history - a fair-sized footnote at the very least.  But it’ll take a little more to justify my initial assumption about its relative superiority to the fare at the multiplex.