Standards of Value

Jim Emerson’s Scanners website recently addressed the question of whether superhero movies can be works of art, concluding “they should be subjected to the same standards of critical judgment you'd apply to any other kind of movie.” He expands: “Short-sighted people used to argue about whether genres as disreputable as horror or science-fiction could contain art -- even though F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu in 1922 and Fritz Lang made Metropolis in 1927. I don't believe in ghettoizing movies by genre, in pretending that a summer science-fiction release has to be judged on a different scale than a fall Oscar-bait biopic or a Romanian experimental theater drama. Any of them is capable of being a great film, worthy of active appreciation, or a dull and forgettable few hours of wasted time. It's not my place to speculate about how deep or superficial the filmmakers' "intentions" were and how well they may have met whatever standards I imagine they may have set for themselves. All I care about is what's on the screen -- and it's either exciting and engaging or it isn't.”

Looking for Greatness

It’s obviously a logical and decent view, and one that minimizes the likelihood of being labeled a stuck-up old fart. But I’ve increasingly come to think such liberalism is self-defeating. As the rest of his article makes clear, Emerson hasn’t been particularly impressed by most superhero movies, and indeed doesn’t seem to see that many of them. Although he holds out hope the genre may produce a great picture, you sense it’s not really an aspiration he feels is worth spending much time on. After all, greatness in his sense of “worthy of close scrutiny and in-depth study” isn’t necessary to Hollywood’s purpose in turning out these pictures. What is necessary is that audiences be bamboozled by the sense of the week’s big new spectacle as a cultural event, that they feel somehow excluded if they don’t see these movies (the mainstream media happily plays along with this, by giving more news coverage to box office scores than to a thousand other more important things), and that the movies are sufficiently bright and glib to meet consensus notions of success. Sure, once in a while someone might find a way of navigating all that in a way that generates greatness, but then some people saw greatness in The Dark Knight, which I found as meaningless as all the rest. They’re just opinions, sure, but at some point don’t you just have to say: life is already too short, you’ll never see everything that might be elevating and enhancing, and if you’re capable of learning anything at all, it should be that this all-consuming mainstream isn’t for you, it’s for them. So can superhero movies be art? The right answer is (a) probably not, but anyway (b) who cares?

On the way to or back from Iron Man 2 (or both) you may no doubt stop off at the fast food joint, just for something else that tastes good and is an inevitable aspect of living conventionally in the world we’re in, regardless that it represents pure evil. Without the resources and/or awareness to make better choices, people make themselves fat and sick on this stuff, constraining their capacity to eat anything more nutritious than the same old crap. The industry itself pays peanuts and generates mass pollution. And our willingness to accept factory farming – mass torture of sentient beings that we know to be capable of pain and distress – grievously undermines us as a race. I personally think until we have a collective conversation about what we’ve done to our food – which we surely ought to care more about than just about anything else – we’ll never get anywhere on addressing our bigger problems. Because it’s all connected. The moronic momentum that keeps us heading to Macdonald’s is intertwined with our debt-ridden consumerism and the ridiculous expectations we apply to our governments and our culture. There's no virtue in any of this, and only the hollowest form of unsustainable contentment.

Oceans

Is there a current mainstream movie out there, against this wretched backdrop, which deserves our greater indulgence? I’d make the case for the film Oceans, directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud (it has the same French origins as Winged Migration, and is released here under the Disney banner). This wasn’t covered at all by Emerson or by any “serious” critics as far as I’m aware, and you can see why – it seems to cater to something different than one’s primary interest in cinema. Filmed over four years in all five oceans, it’s a compendium of stunning footage from beaches and glaciers and from all depths of the water, ranging from the serene bulk of the blue whales to the scrappy interactions of the bottom-dwelling crabs and shrimp.

It’s easy to patronize this kind of thing – to say, well of course it’s amazing, but it’s still just for kids (Pierce Brosnan’s rather over-earnest narration for the English version doesn’t particularly help). That’s because, of course, fish and otters are inherently less culturally provocative than men in flying metal suits. But I can’t imagine anyone (or only the most far-gone of the culturally indoctrinated) not coming away from this with some kind of heightened awareness and sense of generosity. Time and time again, the movie depicts things no one would invent – I guess they’re the messy outcomes of evolution - but which (absent our egregious intervention) maintain a mystical balance. For example, we observe newly-hatched turtles emerging from under the sand and heading for the water, picked off as they go by the birds swirling overhead – the narration says only one in a thousand will make it, but that’s enough to maintain the species. This is the most vicious irony for mankind I think: the more we ratchet up the noble rhetoric about every life being precious, about saving every one of us turtles, we forget what it was all for in the first place.

Something Better

There’s a great deal of emotion in the film – it goes easy on ascribing human emotions to the creatures, but at various points their pleasure and fear and anxiety are self-evident. It’s also generally restrained about the environmental crisis that threatens to render large chunks of the ocean effectively dead within our lifetimes. It’s truly a positive film: it basically presents something beautiful and worthy and collectively enhancing, and then implicitly asks why we don’t value it more, but leaving it to us to connect all the dots. Obviously, my enthusiasm for the film comes from a somewhat different place than my enthusiasm for Howard Hawks or Eric Rohmer, but then if cinema doesn’t in some sense make better people of us, then what’s the point of any of it? And, you know, by that measure, cinema must be failing – most of us, frankly, are becoming worse. Through its simple appeal to our humility and whatever degraded sense we may maintain of our place in the ecosystem, Oceans is the one current film that evokes the possibility (albeit faint) of redemption.

Everything In Balance

The title of Nicole Holofcener’s new film, Please Give, perfectly sums up its preoccupations. A functional society depends (perhaps more than it should) on the charity of its better-off participants. Productive relationships and interactions demand we give of ourselves emotionally and intellectually. But more coldly and mundanely, just about everything depends on our continued willingness to spend, to carry out our moral duty as consumers – if this stops, everything stops. And if we simply ignore our own needs, and fail to feed our dreams and desires (however ill-founded they are), we’ll never carry out that consumerist duty as fully as we should. Self-indulgence and altruism, in other words, are hopelessly intermingled. If you find a workable place on the spectrum, so you’re warm at night and don’t cry yourself to sleep, then that might be the best you can hope for.

Please Give

Holofcener explores all this, and more, through an unusual and highly productive structure. A middle-aged couple (Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt) make a good living by scooping up furniture bargains from families of the recently deceased; they’ve also bought the apartment next door, but can’t proceed with their expansion plans while the cranky 91-year-old tenant keeps trucking along. Keener’s character becomes increasingly guilt-laden at this life, trying in part to compensate by small acts of charity (and not particularly focused ones) and then by stepping up to more committed volunteerism, at which she’s ineffective because of her excessive empathy with the problems of those she might help.

The old woman relies heavily on her two granddaughters – one of them sympathetic and tentative (Rebecca Hall), the other colder and seemingly more in control, but (of course) screwed up underneath (Amanda Peet). The set-up allows for almost boundless productive interaction, and it’s amazing how much Holofcener packs into a mere hour and a half. It’s not much of a spoiler to say the climactic scene turns on feeling happy about buying an expensive pair of jeans, which could easily be seen as a mere moral surrender, but in this context actually feels like a step forward. If we’re going to fall short of our higher ideals, as we probably are, at least we can tend to our family and localized happiness while we’re going about it.

This may not be the most challenging line of investigation ever launched, but compared to the pure drivel of most commentary on modern-day lifestyles, the film is the proverbial breath of fresh air. It lacks a certain spontaneity, carrying a calculated air about it, but it’s intelligently and organically funny throughout. It’s also very plainly a film about how all of this affects women, not men (Platt gives a good performance, but playing an essentially weak and opportunistic character), and Holofcener mischievously broadens the net by opening her film with a montage of breasts undergoing mammograms, and subsequently devoting considerable time to acne anxiety, dating woes and the like. Peter Howell in the Star, consequently, calls the film “thoroughly nasty,” adding it “could almost be a horror movie, given its emphasis on death and decay” – he records spending much of the time wondering who in the movie “wasn’t either thoroughly appalling or pathetic.” Which of those adjectives, I wonder, best applies to a grown man who’d counsel fellow adults to spend their money instead on Iron Man 2?

Nicole Holofcener

Please Give is Holofcener’s fourth film – they arrive at four or five year intervals. I can’t actually remember a thing about her first, Walking And Talking, except that I really liked it (there’s a review for you!) Lovely And Amazing, however, was a remarkably comprehensive chronicle of feminine issues and hang-ups, with an already legendary scene in which Emily Mortimer’s character stands naked to be critiqued by the Dermot Mulroney character. There’s a cringe-inducing melding there of actress and role – something even more pronounced in another key character: an overweight young black girl whose behavioural problems feel uncomfortably embedded. Lovely And Amazing often seems to be catering to psychotherapists more than to movie critics, but it’s certainly one of the most interesting edge-of-mainstream films about women.

Friends With Money was another structure of multiple female viewpoints, most prominently involving Jennifer Aniston, playing a woman who quit her teaching job to work as a maid. This opened up an important new investigative avenue for Holofcener – how poverty defines and limits the place of women. But overall, she seemed content to observe and very lightly parody, rather than to engage in any kind of diagnosis: the movie was a series of softballs, contriving a happy ending for Aniston that will be denied to 99.999% of the maid population.

Please Give is a much greater success I think. But I also think there’s a ceiling to how successful it could ever ultimately be. I may have over-praised Sunshine Cleaning last year, simply for being an honest portrayal of getting by in hard times of limited opportunity. It stood out because American movies seldom show domestic poverty, except as a breeding ground for drugs and murder, or as a springboard to some kind of turnaround narrative. Relative affluence, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be analyzed or explained: it’s the assumed default state, against which you can explore deeper preoccupations. It’s a bit of a tired paradigm – even if you’ve never set foot in an enormous New York apartment, you sometimes feel via the movies as if you’ve lived half your life in one. I’m not saying Holofcener should try to be someone she’s not – that would never work – but, even allowing for what’s fresh and distinctive in her work, her creative personality is in many ways overly conventional.

Drag Me To Hell

I also watched Sam Raimi’s horror thriller Drag Me To Hell, which came out last year. Here you have a young bank loan officer, focused on looking tough for her boss, who turns down a weird old woman’s pleas for more time on her mortgage. As moral transgressions go, this is even milder than what Keener’s character agonizes about in Please Give – it’s just a matter of contract, and the old crone already had two extensions – but the lesson is that even third-rate sins sometimes attract first-rate retribution. In no time at all, the poor girl is being terrorized by what Howell would call “thoroughly nasty” afflictions. It’s an enjoyable creation for sure, played at such lightning speed that the mythological claptrap doesn’t have an opportunity to get too portentous. It’s bad news for elderly ladies though. Even more decisively than Please Give, the movie can only be interpreted one way: have someone else deal with them, and if that doesn’t work, get the hell away from there.

Easing The Pain

When our dog Paso had cancer last year, the doctor said to us at one point that they never actually allow a dog to die from the disease – it’s just too painful an ending. It made sense to us. But talking afterwards, it turned out we’d both had the same thought: if we allow dogs that kindness, why not humans? At the very least, we don’t suffer pain any less than dogs do. We have free will. We have more rights than animals. So why are we denied that final element of dignity and control?

The End

I’m a believer in voluntary euthanasia. I might agree it somewhat undermines our higher ideals for human existence, by rendering life a commodity, susceptible to cold cost-benefit calculation. But that objection would carry more weight if we didn’t undermine those ideals much more grievously through our daily indifference to involuntary death and deprivation elsewhere. Once in a while you get one of these assisted suicide stories, and people trot out their think pieces, and we get to exercise our moral or utilitarian rhetoric, then the carnival moves on to the latest celebrity adultery, and life just keeps on getting worse for all but a lucky few.

Personally, I think voluntary euthanasia will pass the tipping point of mass acceptance in my lifetime. I think there’ll be too many people who don’t want to live a life heading any further downhill, and who have the will and resources to do something about it, and I think society will have too many and more urgent health-funding problems to fight against it. Sometimes, to be honest with you, I take comfort from thinking I’ll always have that choice, even if most of the other choices end up being extinguished.

Still, that view never quite translated into unambiguous support for Jack Kevorkian, the so-called Dr. Death, who was all over the media for a few years for assisting in a large number of suicides and consistently thwarting any attempts to shut him down. Inevitably, someone who becomes a quasi-celebrity in such a field can’t escape some queasiness about his motives. Kevorkian miscalculated in 1998 when, desiring to take the debate to the next level, he gave 60 Minutes a tape of himself directly administering (rather than facilitating) a lethal injection to a man with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He ended up convicted of second-degree murder, and served eight years.

Since then he’s refrained from any direct interaction with patients, although he still speaks publicly from time to time. Most recently, he was photographed with Al Pacino at the premiere of You Don’t Know Jack, the new HBO film about his life. It’s directed by Barry Levinson, who won an Oscar for Rain Man, and it’s generally absorbing, even though it doesn’t add much to what one already knew, or could glean from the Internet.

Al Pacino

Pacino is my favourite actor. It’s easy to focus on his excesses, and to reduce him to parody, but the body of work is stunning. When I think of him, my mind overflows with moments of astonishing impact – many of them based in his immense facility with dramatic dialogue, others simply silent. His transformation across the span of the Godfather films remains a milestone, but he constantly elevates much plainer films through his unique alchemy of precision and grand intuition. For sure, he has an affinity for a certain kind of singsong monologue, and I’ve often wondered whether he doesn’t write a lot of his own material – it seems so much richer than anything else in the movies around him. Time and again, he suggests brilliant abstraction tempered with meticulous personal detail. And he’s retained much more of his creative energy than many of his peers, frequently returning to the stage or working on various little-seen personal projects (The Local Stigmatic, available on DVD, is one of the stranger passion projects of any major star).

You Don’t Know Jack has one of Pacino’s most low-key performances, and it’s very effective, tempering Kevorkian’s undeniable conviction and persistence with a sense of his wayward whimsicality (he has any number of personal eccentricities, and turned up at one trial in 18th century costume). Kevorkian, during many of the events depicted in the film, was about the same age as Pacino is now, but given the doctor’s unprepossessing personal style, it’s a major exercise in deglamorization.

Kevorkian is also a painter, and the movie allows some extended looks at his work, all of it grotesque and suggesting some strange preoccupations. But it leaves little room to doubt the essential integrity of his devotion to his cause. We see him counsel patients away from suicide, on grounds that they’re clinically depressed or not sufficiently beyond all hope (he says he rejects 97 or 98% of those who come to him); all the patients who make the cut are plainly in unbearable pain with no hope of recovery, and are exercising their free will with the support of their families. Time and time again he speaks plainly but forcefully about the indignity of suffering and the barbarity of being denied this fundamental choice. The arguments of his antagonists, on the other hand, are an unformed mixture of religious dogma and knee-jerk revulsion. Kevorkian’s angriest moment in the film comes when a prosecuting attorney compares his actions to the Holocaust, simply equating all forms of accelerated death without regard to the underlying motives.

Lake Of Fire

As I said, it’s all interesting, but Levinson doesn’t seem to aspire to do much more than tell the story clearly. I thought at one point of Tony Kaye’s documentary about abortion in America, Lake Of Fire, which also seemed (if you had to guess) generally sympathetic toward abortion rights, but allocated plenty of time to illuminating the other side (and without any Michael Moore-type belittlement mechanisms). Kaye’s film tapped into why committed opponents of abortion can’t possibly see the issue in terms of choice: if abortion represents selective murder of society’s weakest citizens, then how could this ever be justified by notions of temporary domain over one’s own body (looked at that way, as someone points out, exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest are morally illogical). The problem though, as Noam Chomsky says in the film, is that many of those who obsess about abortion spend little time on children who die from poverty or homelessness: why should one form of preventable, officially tolerated death arouse so much more passion than the other, if not that the moral calculation is being enflamed by religious and visceral preoccupations?

Which precisely echoes my earlier point on You Don’t Know Jack. But if you view celebrity as the currency of Hollywood, it’s surely meaningful that Kevorkian’s friends and colleagues are played by Susan Sarandon and John Goodman, whereas the other side is made up of stuffy non-entities. Anyway, the movie may be a limited achievement, but at least it gets you thinking about something more important than whether some guy in a computer-generated super-body can save the world. Assuming, that is, the pain of those you love didn’t already have you thinking about it every day.

Bresson In Germany

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2005)

One of my favourite recent film-related moments came in watching the DVD of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent; specifically from an interview with Bresson included as an extra. At the very end, the interviewer asks Bresson about a rumour that he’d recently enjoyed a James Bond film, and the aging, massively distinguished director almost leaps to confirm this, saying that he took his two nieces to see For Your Eyes Only because they asked him to. “It filled me with wonder,” he says, “because of its cinematographic writing...if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have done.”

Bresson And Bond

Since L’Argent and For Your Eyes Only stand far apart at the opposing poles of filmmaking, this would seem bizarre, if not for Bresson’s earlier admission that he seldom goes to the cinema and his obvious childlike delight in the modern spectacle. He comments (this was in 1982) that he thinks the cinema has reached its limit in terms of technology but still has much to reveal artistically. The first part of that turned out to be significantly wrong of course – Bresson couldn’t have imagined the impact of digital technology, and I expect For Your Eyes Only looks primitive now by comparison. But for a director brought up in the silent era, who perhaps took himself less seriously than the legend suggests, it’s beguiling to think that even a humdrum action film might be divorced from its formulaic plotting (the sense of which of course is primarily rooted in our having seen too many of them) and superficial characterization and dubious moral underpinnings, and regarded solely as a show of light and movement and possibility.

I was especially receptive to this train of thinking because I watched L’Argent on my laptop in a hotel in Cottbus, Germany. Although I would claim not to be so film-obsessed that I need doses to get me through vacation, the laptop is a nice facility to have on long plane rides (where I replaced the drab airline fare with Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen) and in the occasional hotel interlude. Whenever we go to a new foreign city, we usually go to the cinema there once, just to sample the different nuances of the experience (which, like everything else, seem to become more conformed across countries with time), and in this way we’ve assembled a pleasantly bizarre collection of memories such as Arlington Road in Zurich, Liam in Madrid, Gaudi Afternoon in Oslo and Ripley’s Game in Amsterdam. But this streak ended in Berlin, because we couldn’t find anything worthwhile to see. The cinemas were full of Batman Begins and Star Wars and Monster In Law, and ads for War Of The Worlds. Just the same as home. Virtually no German films, except for something that seemed to be a crowd-pleasing comedy. There were only a few distinctive movies showing in the city, and it didn’t seem those would be playing in English, so that was that.

Cottbus Cinema

When we moved out of Berlin we traveled through a few smaller towns such as Cottbus, and it surprised us that each of these had its own movie theater. These were all showing, of course, Batman Begins and Star Wars and Monster In Law. But when you’re in a sleepy town square, at least superficially seeming to retain an idea of pace and balance that hasn’t completely succumbed to American consumerism, and you come across a poster for The Interpreter outside an old building that looks more like a town hall than a multiplex, you can dream that the locals might be better equipped than we are to take the movie on their own terms rather than Hollywood’s.

Best of all, we were walking down one of Cottbus’ dingier streets and we suddenly came across a faded poster for Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46. This turned out to be outside an art cinema – Kinsey had recently been on the schedule, among many European films. The establishment frankly looked slated for demolition, but I instantly loved the idea of some idealistic artisan, plugging away at bringing the citizens of Cottbus something more stimulating. I hope it works for him.

Still, in a certain strange way, I would rather be fighting the cause of cinema in Cottbus than in Berlin itself. Berlin is a city of such immense themes and resonances that you imagine a life there might be lived almost entirely as a vigil, and we were often taken by the city’s absence of a governing personality, by the sense of people stranded in too much space, trying quietly to go about their business. It’s a feast of development, with astonishing new buildings often surrounded on several sides by derelict or unused space – it’s too much to imagine what metropolis might result if and when these gaps are all filled in. Intertwined with all this, of course, is a history of staggering consequence. We visited the new Holocaust memorial, the Checkpoint Charlie museum and the Jewish museum, each one opening our minds to further complexity or emotional awareness. I’m sure it’s possible (and indeed standard) to live in the city while seldom thinking of the past, but it seemed to us that the prominence of these references would assign one’s life a greater weight, less dispensability.

Film In Berlin

Which of course could be too much to bear, and might render a Batman Begins necessary in the classic mode of escapism that Hollywood always talks about. But flattering myself to be on a more intellectual plane than usual, I found L’Argent to be the perfect film, and not merely for its extras. The film is about the chain of events that follows when a boy passes a counterfeit note, focusing on a workingman who is wrongly accused of passing the note and who gradually loses his life as a result. Everyone now seems to agree the film is a masterpiece, but why? On the DVD cover, Time’s Richard Corliss says: “Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be waking up on top of Mount Everest…the view is spectacularly disconcerting.” But this implies (if anything) some kind of lofty removal that seems at odds with the film’s clear interest (unusual for a 80-year old director) in youth and the fabric of contemporary life, as well as with what we know of his working methods.

Inside the box, Olivier Assayas sees the film as a depiction of “a cold material world, a desolate land where humanity wanders in bondage to diabolical evil.” It seems to me though that the world of the film is not completely desolate – it’s an intensely transactional environment that condemns many to blankness and others to self-destruction, but also allows possibilities for negotiation. Admittedly these possibilities appear grim and perhaps psychotic, but Bresson seems to me to speak in part to the prospects for small miracles and incremental transcendence. Which, if the viewer is suitably equipped (in this instance a matter primarily of discarding our usual attitudes) might even be found in a James Bond film.

The Last Game

I spent ten minutes or so of my life watching His Last Game, made in 1909, without a credited director. It’s the story of a native American, a star baseball player, wrongly sentenced to death for murder (“Western justice” says the caption), but allowed a reprieve to win one more for the team; afterwards, he faithfully delivers himself back to the firing squad, which finishes him off just moments before a pardon arrives from the judge. You couldn’t find a simpler piece of cinema. Scenes are framed simply, and play out in a single take, without editing or camera movement. The extremely condensed narrative gives it a melancholy matter-of-fact quality; at the end, when the reprieve arrives, they sadly acknowledge their error for a few seconds, and then walk away. It’s an exciting viewing experience because of the percolating ambition; at this point, the technical execution remains primitive (presumably audiences were sufficiently astonished though) but it’s already telling real stories. In less than a decade, the medium would already be generating epics, and everything else flowed from there.

Watchmen

A few days later I watched Watchmen, which I didn’t see when it came out. Although not what I usually call “my kind of movie,” it’s rather fascinating. Set in an alternative future wherein Richard Nixon remains President into the 1980’s, it examines a group of costumed crime-fighters, forcibly retired now, but perhaps more necessary than ever, especially as the world pushes itself to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Running around three hours, it’s an extraordinarily ambitious creation, cramming in multiple plot lines, flashbacks, shifts of tone and visual changes of tone. It’s often wantonly eccentric, following single characters for long periods of time, often in what might seem like disposable situations; it frequently succumbs to a dreamy romanticism or to open melancholy. It’s obsessed with its own genealogy, introducing survivors from a previous generation of crime-fighters, fussing over the details of how things got to where they are, often threatening virtually to disappear inside itself.

It might sound from that as if Arnaud Desplechin decided to make a genre movie. But the film also has a very high cheesiness quotient, lamely parodying such easy targets as the McLaughlin Group, and tiresomely conventional in its cartoon violence. Numerous actors look ridiculous in their costumes, even if that’s largely deliberate, to reflect the poignancy of the Watchmen’s diminished status. The rather obvious sense of reaching for pop culture melting pot greatness (playing Dylan’s The Times They Are A Changin’ under the opening titles for instance) is intermittently off-putting. I don’t know at all what to make of some of it. Billy Crudup plays the so-called Dr. Manhattan, a former nuclear scientist rendered by a freak accident into a being of almost God-like powers- he’s also bright blue. The character is rendered in endlessly pious and stuffy terms, and seems to belong way outside the internal rules governing the rest of the film. On the other hand, it certainly increases the headiness of the mix.

Watchmen shimmers with care and craft and enthusiasm. It wasn’t a great success though. It was based on a pre-existing comic book, and I’m sure for those who were familiar with and cared about that, it was an entirely different kind of viewing experience. Beyond that though, lots of people didn’t get it. It’s certainly a more intricate piece of story telling than Avatar – which has its own cheesiness problems galore – but it doesn’t offer such straightforward, enveloping pleasures. On the other hand, withholding those pleasures doesn’t lead to any intellectual or other pay-off; for me at least, Watchmen doesn’t seem to be about anything much, beyond its self-absorbed self. It’s as if the director Zach Snyder implicitly said, give me your three hours and your ticket price, and I’ll just give you back whatever I feel like.

Never Been To Vegas

Recently I was saying to someone I’ve never been to Las Vegas and never intend to, and he said even if I might not expect to like the glitz and the excess, it’s something everyone should see at least once. I asked why I should prioritize seeing Vegas – the pinnacle of a cultural strand I’m obviously familiar enough with (neon and glitz and excess, OK, I got it) - over somewhere that would actually be new and informative, like going to India for example. He didn’t really have an answer. But we’re not living in an age where knowledge and experimentation are particularly prized. If we’re talking about travel, at least you have to acknowledge financial constraints: Vegas is a more practical destination than India. But then, so are any number of natural and historic wonders that attract only a pittance of tourists by comparison.

I know a lot of intelligent people who profess an interest in seeing good movies, and they ask me for recommendations, but virtually never end up acting on them. Everyone’s time is carved up a hundred different ways: if they end up with two hours to watch a movie, they’re going to play it safe. I don’t mean the movie has to be good: actually, maybe it’s easier if it isn’t – it might be easier to invest the time on something of accessible and familiar badness. There’s something deeply corrosive about how even mainstream news shows assume we’re meant to know and care about the travails of disposable pop culture figures like the Gosselins. It’s deeply linked in my mind to the media’s excessive focus on disposable scandals, remote but easily understood risks, and political point scoring. We’re like laboratory mice, pushed this way and that by cunning stimuli, merely experiencing the illusion of progress and growth. Meanwhile, every meaningful indicator on the planet just gets worse.

The Last Game

Escapism is understandable, but subject to subtle rules. The failure of Watchmen speaks to the reluctance merely to be seen escaping – because that’s what geeks do. The movie is too much about itself and not enough about us. Avatar is ingratiating – it’s bright and bouncy and has lots of easy points of reference. Reality TV, to a lot of people it seems, is worthwhile by definition – it’s real, like terrorists and swine flu, so it validates you…however, happily, it’s not too real, in the way that makes your head hurt. Sports are real of course. Things that give the illusion of actual activity and accomplishment, like rock band games, are real. If you ever momentarily doubt any of this, the prevailing discourse rapidly puts you back in place.

I like to go back sometimes to the dawn of popular culture as we know it, and to watch something like His Last Game. It’s refreshing. It’s like, I’m told, when you hold your newborn baby, and you’re overwhelmed by the miracle of life and the specialness of the moment. If one could hold that thrill and live your life in its aura, things might turn out so much purer. But then you leave the hospital, and the logistics kick in, and your story again becomes like everyone else’s.

Political Statements

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2004)

I must admit that despite my clear sympathies with the film’s politics, I have only a half-hearted desire to write about Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. My general mixed feelings about it are shared, it seems, by the great majority of critics; like The Passion Of The Christ a few months ago, this is one example where it might be more interesting to review the press coverage than the film itself. But if you’re going to do a movie column, this is clearly a film you have to write about, so here it is.

Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw the film at 3:50 on the opening Saturday afternoon in one of the Paramount’s bigger theatres, and it was virtually sold out. The audience, apparently consisting mainly of people in their twenties or early thirties, had a film festival feel about it. Moore deserves huge credit for having raised the status of political documentary to such a commercial level; even if he’s lucky in his timing, you can’t fault him for taking his chances. Some see this a different way; Mark Kermode in The Guardian wrote: “in the area of shameless self-publicity, Moore remains unsurpassed, finding a way to turn every situation to his egotistical advantage.”

Bottom line: I don’t think the film has any insights as intriguing as Bowling For Columbine’s dissection of America’s self-fuelling culture of fear. It takes on an even larger subject, but even though Moore is more disciplined in limiting his trademark stunts (he’s seen on screen only a few times in the film), he barely seems in control of the material as a whole. His anger is so all-consuming that he can hardly let any target go, regardless of the consequences for overall coherence.

The film’s opening third, concentrating on Bush’s idiocy and his web of connections (in particular those between the Bush family and the Saudis) is a peppy feast of montage, operating on a “no smoke without fire” kind of basis (as Gwen Ifill pointed out on Meet The Press, Moore builds his case on much the same basis as the Bush administration pieced together the case for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al-Qaeda). The closing third concentrates on the blue collar soldiers who carry out the orders, and in particular on a grieving mother from Michigan, whose dead son deplored the war’s uselessness in his last letter home. The contrast between the two doesn’t break new ground but it effectively reinforces old notions of complacent, ignorant generals who barely spare a thought for the men they treat as cannon fodder.

In between he recounts how the Bushites seized on 9/11 to push through regressive, ill-considered anti-civil rights legislation. Moore seems to imply that this was a piece of rank opportunism, representing the realization of a long-held right-wing dream, but he doesn’t pursue the point – another potentially fascinating line of investigation that gets away from him.

Rallying Cry

Moore isn’t a simple pacifist – for example he seems to attack Bush for waiting as long as he did to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan. Although that position obviously doesn’t necessarily contradict his opposition to the aggressive stance on Iraq, it seems here more than a bit opportunistic and hindsight-driven. One could make similar comments about much else in the film. How much one cares about these things will probably depend on one’s preconceptions. But I doubt that a great documentary (such as the work of Frederick Wiseman or Marcel Ophuls) ought to lean so heavily on the indulgence of its audience.

A few writers have hypothesized that just as The Passion Of Christ was red meat for the right wing fundamental base, Fahrenheit 9/11 will be a rallying cry for the left. The movie is a staggering success, so in a close race Moore may well achieve his ambition of helping to kick Bush out of office. That’s fine with me, but there’s not much to be said for a society where a glib film might have such an impact. Even a cursory awareness of the media over the term of the Bush presidency renders the film’s information content minimal.

As for the film’s top award at Cannes, every juror stated specifically that they cast their vote because of the film’s artistic merit, not from political sympathy. Well, I flat out don’t believe them.

Baadasssss

In another kind of political statement, Mario van Peebles’ new film depicts the making of the 1971 black cinema classic Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Assss Song. The film, featuring the provocative adventures of an emblematic black protagonist sticking it to the Man, was written and directed by Mario’s father Melvin, who also starred in it after he couldn’t find anyone better, and it was a huge success. I haven’t seen the film for a while, but it’s probably more interesting now as a political statement than as a viewing experience. Many commentators on the Internet Movie Database (which, by the way, I find an increasingly useful source for taking the current cultural temperature on movies) dismiss it as poorly made soft porn. But as Baadasssss makes clear, Melvin van Peebles astutely realized that true black cinema had to reject all conventions of the well-made Hollywood film, including aesthetic standards as well as norms of standards and taste.

There’s nothing as radical about the new film, but it’s a very effective telling of the tale, starting out generally as broad comedy as Melvin scrounges around for money and assembles a wackily diverse crew, and gradually becoming more morose as his problems become profound and the whole thing nearly collapses on him. In a much-debated scene, Melvin used 12-year-old Mario for the scene where young Sweetback loses his virginity. Now grown up, Mario recreates the arguments surrounding that scene in much detail, but ultimately presents it as the springboard for a better relationship between the father and son. In this and other ways, Baadasssss could almost be intended as a love letter to the old man.

Sweetback broke the barrier – it’s said that Shaft, originally meant for a white actor, was only rewritten for a black man after Melvin Van Peebles’ success, and then everything else went on from there. But he wasn’t able to build much of a film career from it, and he now seems like a marginal, catalytic figure. Mario’s recent filmography (like that of Wesley Snipes, Eddie Murphy and most other black leading men you can think of) also consists of acres of crap, in which the new film stands as a lonely island of quality. I find this rather poignant, as though the original exclusion or belittlement of black culture, rather than being transformed, had now been replaced by another form of stereotyping and nullification, and the only way out was to grab again at past glories, in the hope that they might have more staying power the second time around.

Top Of The Heap

It’s time for my annual moan about the Oscar for best foreign film, an award almost mystically unaligned with the substantive achievements of world cinema. None of the films on the Cinematheque Ontario’s recent “best of the decade” list won the Oscar (unless I’m missing something, none of them was even nominated), although one of them, Pedro Almodovar’s Talk To Her, did win for its screenplay. Almodovar is perhaps the only foreign-language director who occupies an old time Fellini/Truffaut mode, respected by critics while consistently reaching a fairly broad audience. Beyond that, a comically wide gulf exists between the directors who matter, creating bodies of original, challenging work (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhang-ke, Arnaud Desplechin) and the random non-entities who’ve waltzed away with the award.

Lousy Award

In recent years, procedural changes have generated a somewhat more respectable list of nominees. Last year, they included the Cannes winner The Class and the Israeli Waltz With Bashir. But the winner was the Japanese film Departures, which everyone had effectively assumed was only on the list to make up the numbers. Departures had a refreshing clarity and focus, and I won’t deny I was in tears for a good half hour of it, but it shamelessly embraced clichés and soft choices. This year, people really thought things were going to change. Michael Haneke was nominated for The White Ribbon, another Cannes winner, which took the Golden Globe’s foreign film award (much as people mock the Globes, and not unjustly, they have a much better track record in this particular respect) and Jacques Audiard was up for Un prophete, the unofficial Cannes silver medalist. Virtually every fortuneteller went for one or the other, except the few who’d seen Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes, and knew Hollywood voters would see in it a kindred spirit. And so it went.

It’s surely revealing that a good chunk of those random non-entities I mentioned have subsequently ended up working in a more mainstream vein, with little distinction: Gavin Hood, who won for Tsotsi, directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine (I hope he has the Oscar turned so its eyes face the wall). No such migration is necessary for this year’s winner, because Campanella is already a king of prime-time TV, directing episodes of House, Law and Order: SVU, and the like. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I guess no one would expect such an accomplished craftsman to go home to Argentina and turn into Jacques Rivette. And indeed he didn’t. Dana Stevens in Slate basically summed up the movie as a really long episode of Law and Order. But also a highly accomplished one: “It's a cracking good murder mystery that, by the time the final twist kicks in, transforms into an moving meditation on memory and justice.” The movie received generally good reviews elsewhere too, in contrast to poor Departures, which was kicked from one end of the critical locker room to the other.

The Secret In Their Eyes

It says a lot that a cracking good episode of Law and Order would have no chance nowadays of competing for the Emmy, but apparently is considered just fine as a standard-bearer for world cinema. Sure, The Secret In Their Eyes is good viewing, but it’s also completely undistinguished and mostly undemanding. Set more or less in the present day but flashing back to twenty-five years earlier, it follows a federal agent (the Argentinean system being different from ours, he occupies a peculiar zone between district attorney and desk clerk) who puzzles for years over a particularly brutal murder, while all the time mooning over his direct superior, an attractive judge rendered unattainable by class and structure and his own reticence.

The details of the investigation are mostly contrived – for example, he makes a key leap by looking at old group photographs of the victim and noticing how frequently they contain another man who’s always looking at her. It’s a nice device, but if you or I were being lusted over by a potentially murderous admirer, how often would we find ourselves helpfully encapsulating the dynamic for a waiting camera? At another point they make a big leap when they realize (after long bafflement) that various mysterious names referred to in the suspect’s letters to his mother are all past players for the local soccer team, and therefore deduce he’s a diehard fan – as if such a compulsive fan wouldn’t ever refer to his passion more directly.

Of course, nowadays an investigator would simply type all the names into Google and discover the connection within seconds: the film’s evocation of a simpler age is certainly one of its charms. It also has some disturbing glimpses into institutional corruption, although they’re not central to the film’s purpose. But I’d like to know what Slate’s Stevens thinks the “meditation on memory and justice” actually amounts to. I’d sum it up as: wow, some people remember things for a really long time, and wow, justice takes strange turns sometimes.” None of which gives one much to meditate over.

What Might Have Been

Virtually all reviews of the film refer to its central set piece, a chase sequence where the camera travels from an aerial view of the soccer stadium right up to the protagonists, seemingly in a single shot. Whatever…it’s nicely done, but to no particular thematic or dramatic end – the scene itself is unconvincing and seems out of place with everything around it. At the end of the movie, we get a Hollywood-worthy degree of closure, and off we go. Stevens says it’s “substantial enough to go out to dinner after and discuss all the way through dessert.” Well, that’s not entirely wrong – we did go out to dinner after and talked about it a lot. But mostly just in the way I’m telling you about it now.

In contrast, Un prophete, although also full of conventional pleasures, constantly knocks you around with its startling choices and overflows with all kinds of implications for the new Europe. The White Ribbon brilliantly evokes the tangle of perspectives, from certainty (even if hypocritical and manufactured) to despairing, that underlie war, or indeed any national purpose. I think what annoys me about the Oscars is the whole idea of claiming to recognize the diversity and scope of foreign-language cinema and then screwing it up so badly: if they just dropped the award and acknowledged the whole thing’s just a big Hollywood party, it’d at least be honest. But ironically, the list of recent best director winners (the Coens, Scorsese, Bigelow, Polanski, Eastwood) is actually pretty respectable, even from an arthouse perspective. So it looks like the Academy really reserves the major shaft for the foreigners. No need to look too closely into those self-absorbed eyes to figure out that secret.

Yasujiro Ozu

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2008)

I first read about Yasujiro Ozu long before I had any hope of seeing his films. I liked the director Paul Schrader, and I was aware that Schrader had written a book called Transcendental Style In Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. I haven’t read the book to this day, and I don’t think it’s very highly regarded now, but I found it fascinating that Taxi Driver and American Gigolo could spring from the same mind that venerated a Japanese “transcendental style.” But this was in a pre-DVD age, and the films were completely inaccessible to me.

Forgetting Late Spring

I haven’t gone back through my notes to recall when I finally saw my first Ozu film, but something interesting happened a few years ago – I went to see Late Spring for the first time at the Cinematheque, enjoyed and admired it but not overwhelming so, but only towards the very end started to experience a strong feeling of déjà vu. I consulted my records and found out I’d seen it before, and most astonishingly, only a few years before (also at the Cinematheque). This is very unusual for me – usually I’d have remembered the fact of having seen it even if I hadn’t retained any of the substance. Late Spring must surely be the best film I’ve ever forgotten all about.

Well, after that I started watching Ozu’s films fairly regularly, and by now I might even say I would rather watch one of his on a given night than anyone else’s. One of my great movie joys is in now having fourteen of them on DVD, which I believe is everything that’s available without getting into the multi-region player thing. But I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned him in this column, other than in passing, whereas I’ve mentioned Schrader, to use the same example, probably a dozen times (even leaving aside actually reviewing his films). Because, when you come down to it, I’m not that elevated a thinker. Now, as it happens, most of what I’m writing about isn’t that elevated an art either. So like anyone else, I evolve my quirks and reference points and just hope it means something to someone. But it would be facetious to use Ozu as a reference point for all but a tiny portion of contemporary cinema.

That statement, though, risks perpetuating the continuing myth that Ozu is “difficult.” The truth is, “transcendental style” increasingly seems to me if not a wrong label, certainly not a helpful one, and I now think the mystification of Ozu helped crush my initial sense of him, thus contributing to my inability to process Late Spring. I’m sure other potential devotees remain equally misled. If you’ve heard anything about him at all, it’s probably something like this: he made small-scale family dramas, often using the same themes if not the same plots, the same actors, and virtually the same titles (Early Spring, Late Spring, Early Summer, etc.); he almost never moved the camera, which he generally kept close to the ground. Only one or two of his movies fails to contain at least one shot of a train. He regularly connects one scene to the next through the most mundane sights, such as clothes hanging outside to dry.

Changing Times

I have no space here (and insufficient ability) to even start on an explanation of why these unprepossessing raw elements constitute one of the most enchanting, overwhelming and instructive bodies of work in cinema. For that I might best refer you to Robin Wood’s essay in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. But even more than that to the films themselves – and really, all I want to do this week is to persuade you -any one of you would justify the effort – to rent or buy or borrow one of Ozu’s films (the most famous, and indeed perhaps the easiest point of entry, is Tokyo Story, increasingly commonly cited as one of the best films ever made.)

Ozu’s career goes back to the silent era, but his richest period, encompassing the most readily available films, starts in the late 40’s and stretches through the next decade (he died in 1962). World War Two and the bombing of Hiroshima are seldom mentioned in the films, but inevitably lurk in the background. The society is ordered and steeped in tradition. The men go off to work, mostly in anonymous offices; the women mainly stay at home. However, times are changing: Western and traditional dress intermingle, stars like Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn are mentioned from time to time. Transcendental or not, Ozu’s films could hardly be more precisely grounded, and the consistency of his themes means you can virtually chart the changing society from one film to the next.

In particular, he continuously reexamines the shifting expectations of the sexes for themselves and each other and the world around them. Marriage is the most common theme, as an institution that keeps reasserting itself and trapping successive generations, even as all involved sense its limitations. In the most famous example, Late Spring, a father essentially manipulates his stay-at-home daughter into a marriage, even though it only renders him lonely and her unhappy. Ozu’s most scintillating recurring character, embodied by actress Setsuko Hara, is a woman (often a widow) who chooses to resist this momentum. In Early Summer, in a neat reversal, she mystifies everyone (including the future groom) by suddenly deciding to marry someone who’s never even courted her, perhaps the subtlest (and of course self-defeating) of protests. Often, the woman disappears from the film after the wedding takes place, as if nothing more could be said about her.

Equinox Flower

These are wonderful stories, especially once you get to know Ozu a little. His films feel very even, non-judgmental, which is not the same as being passive. He exposes through sorrow rather than anger. But they’re also wonderfully funny at times. In the one I rewatched most recently, Equinox Flower (his first in colour), a father who publicly espouses romantic self-determination and a progressive view of female choice is much less able to apply those standards to his own daughter. It’s not Ozu’s best – it doesn’t flow and cohere as naturally as some others – but there’s a wonderful deadpan comedy to the father’s escalating powerlessness (actually, “deadpan” is a term that takes on a whole new meaning when considered relative to Ozu).

As in all his works, it’s all the richer for its proximity to tragedy. The gains of some generations confirm the losses of those that went before; people register small victories at the cost of much loneliness, repetition, distance. It’s tempting to see this as less wrenching in Japan than here – so much time, it appears, spent transcendentally meditating – but Ozu’s restraint shouldn’t be taken as a denial of real pain. His work is extremely specific, but – once you throw off your misconceptions – moving and comprehensible and, above all, continuingly relevant. Discover him tonight.

Hi Mom!

I was going to write about the South Korean film Mother, which may be the most generally praised of the films currently playing. But you know, now I approach the task, I don’t really have enough to say about it. I enjoyed watching it, and it’s full of fine moments, so, uh, there you are. Want me to elaborate? Well all right, since you twist my arm, I liked the bit where the mother (amateur sleuthing to prove her son didn’t commit the murder he’s being held for) has to hide in a closet while a couple make love; when they fall asleep afterwards, she tiptoes out, holding what she thinks is an incriminating blood-spattered golf club (which later turns out to be lipstick), and on her way to the door knocks over a bottle of water…we see the water spread slowly toward the man’s fingers, and then actually onto his fingers…

Mother

…and then there’s a cut to the outside, where we see her emerge with relief, shortly thereafter scurrying away as she hears the man getting up and coming to the door as well. What I like is the choice of where to cut. The more conventional approach would be to stay inside the room, showing us exactly how the mother’s escape synchronizes with his waking up. But who needs that? The scene’s not going to get any better, and the edit brings it a surprising, quirky energy. The film is full of things like this.

But they never amount to much more than the sum of their parts. Ultimately the narrative only adds another exhibit to the long line of movie mothers whose faith in their sons drives them into irrationality. It engineers some good twists, but in today’s cinema, it would be rarer to encounter a movie without a good twist. And I’m tired of the whole meta-reality thing. At one key point the son probes his buried memories of the night of the murder and recalls a previously overlooked witness, whom he unconsciously registered out of the corner of his eye in the darkness, and goes on to identify from a selection of photographs. I don’t know of any occasion when my memory or anyone else’s has ever operated with such Google Maps functionality, allowing you to rotate prior experiences through 360 degrees and extract previously unnoticed details, but that’s how it works in movies. The closing scene blends ambiguity, denial and release as we view her in silhouette, swaying to the music among other aging mothers on some kind of appreciation bus tour; being a mother, you feel, remains transcendently self-defining, even if one’s own children are almost inevitably disappointing; indeed the more disappointing they are, the more tenaciously one defines oneself as a mother, in all its abstract glory. Again, it’s certainly not an off the shelf ending, but I mostly found myself shrugging.

The Blind Side

It’s not so much of a leap (not if you need a segue anyway) to The Blind Side, one of last year’s Oscar-nominated best movies, and of course the winner for Sandra Bullock as best actress. I never had much desire to see it in theatres, but caught up with it recently on the pay for view. It’s another story (this one taken from real life) about a determined mother, but in this case the focus isn’t on her own two kids (who don’t seem to have a problem or a hang-up in the world) but rather on the big sad black kid she takes under her wing, all but single-handedly manoeuvring him from academic hopelessness to respectability, and to football stardom.

The film is smooth and entertaining, but I don’t know if it has a single moment, a single hint, of the kind of idiosyncrasy or eccentricity I was talking about. It’s so focused on getting from A to Z (admittedly not a short distance) that it often feels like a prototype, lacking a layer or two of ornamentation. This might reflect the presumably deliberate decision to go for a PG rating, no doubt a factor in its great popular success, but also a guarantee of blandness. Stray remarks and incidents inform us we’re in a rigidly Republican, church-going milieu, apparently still with a 50’s-era level of effective segregation, but nothing in the movie communicates this viscerally: its dominant tone flows from the generous spaces and plush furnishings of the family residence.

Against this backdrop, it sometimes feels we’re barely removed from the heyday of Sidney Poitier, when seeing a black man string two articulate sentences together was a novelty, and tailor-made for a middlebrow audience to congratulate itself on its liberalism (actually, it’s not even that advanced - the kid in The Blind Side never does string two articulate sentences together). Anyway, it’s Bullock’s movie, and Tim McGraw as her husband has little to do beyond gaze submissively in her direction and deliver variations on: “Here she goes again.” She’s pleasant to watch, although nothing about the performance seems like a stretch. But maybe lifting such an innocuous piece of material to near-blockbuster status is indeed, if not great acting in the classic sense, at least the most tangible achievement of any Hollywood actress last year.

Which might only be a bit like voting for the world’s most nutritious Twinkie bar. With the choices offered by new technologies and viewing platforms and modes of access, it’s never been as easy to see good films. But ironically, most of what dominates the cultural conversation has never been so flimsy and disposable. It’s as if, in an ocean of exotic and nutritious fish, we all just swim toward the big plastic shark with the goofy painted-on smile.

Orphan

Anyway, a year or so ago, some groups were up in arms about the movie Orphan, fearing it would damage the image of adoption. What crap, I thought at the time. Having now seen Orphan, I’m thinking they were basically right – no one who sees this depiction of a well-meaning family torn to bits by an adoptee from hell will ever let any child through the doors again – even on a visit, let alone to stay. Now I should acknowledge, the way the movie presents things, adopting an orphan involves somewhat less checking and paperwork than buying a watering can. But why take chances? Now that Obama’s passed his health care bill, I wonder if we’re any closer to being able to grow humans in test tubes and incubate them to adulthood in laboratories. Sure, such an upbringing might deprive them of social skills. But I expect their taste in movies would turn out much the same.

High Finance

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in October 2004)

I recently bought a copy of Sim City 4 and since then one of my main tests of self-discipline has been to avoid ever playing the game for more than half an hour a day (a tough assignment). It occurred to me one day that from the outset, I went at things like a Republican, slashing industrial taxes to virtually nothing, and residential taxes as much as I could get away with, and holding back on any kind of social amenities (hospitals, schools etc.) or other spending until the people started screaming (I did put in a church, but that didn’t cost me anything). This seems so far to be a winning strategy, but once it struck me, I was rather shocked at how easily I’d adopted right-wing orthodoxy. I mean, I’m officially a left-winger – I have an NDP membership. So why didn’t I even try to play the game in a more principled way?

Economic Assumptions

I could argue that I was intuitively banking on what I thought the game’s programmers would think – what are the chances that a cunning piece of modern technology would reject free market orthodoxy? That’d be disingenuous though. On reflection, I’m choosing to believe that my prescription for an emerging society might be different than my prescription for a mature one. If I can ever get one of my cities to grow above 20,000 people (the ceiling I’ve hit to date), I’ll try that out.

If movies are a mirror of society, as is often claimed, then their failure to reflect anything resembling economic debate tells you a lot. There are plenty of movies about rich financiers, often engaged in something unsavory, but merely to melodramatic effect. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, with its famous “Greed is good” speech, probes a bit more deeply, but was clearly built around exaggerated archetypes –Wall Streeters reportedly loved it. More recently Boiler Room revealed the tawdriness beneath the capitalist dream, but that was a pretty flat movie.

Hollywood’s most consistent statement about money might be the often-remarked-on phenomenon of characters living much more expensive lifestyles than their circumstances ought to allow. Although this no doubt reflects the filmmakers’ insularity and a fetishizing of consumerism, it’s also emblematic of a blind belief in the capitalist American dream – in America a grade school teacher can truly live in a penthouse apartment and wear Armani (I guess the message to the budget-challenged grade school teachers in the audience would be: any day now...)

Rollover

One of the very best films about money, and one of the most underappreciated masterpieces in American cinema, is Alan J Pakula’s Rollover, released in 1981 (the tagline – “The most erotic thing in their world was money.”) Pakula’s properly esteemed for his “Paranoia Trilogy” of Klute, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men, but Rollover was a colossal flop, and was quickly forgotten. Leonard Maltin’s movie guide calls it “barely comprehensible.” Of a handful of comments on the Internet Movie Database, this one is fairly typical; “The short side of the story is that this has to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Rhythm-wise, the movie is dead. It makes you feel like you are attending a lecture on economy at the university. And to think that I watched the movie because it was described as a ‘thriller!’”

Rollover, a deeply pessimistic film despite a final note of hope, posits that the interdependency of the financial system is unsustainable, and that even the slightest ripple of eroded confidence might bring it down. Jane Fonda plays the widow of a murdered oil exec, aspiring to take over his place as Chair of the board. Kris Kristofferson, at the helm of a bank that’s almost on the rocks, teams up with Fonda to finance a deal that’ll get her what she wants, and kick off a lucrative fee for his own shop. The deal leads them to the Saudis, awash in oil money, and for a while everything looks good, until they stumble on a secret bank account.

The film is gorgeously shot; a world of rich, glistening surfaces, where money and technology merge into a lavish but preoccupied playground. Pakula’s camera glides across endless party scenes, across facades of nighttime buildings and iconic faces. One of the film’s most criticized aspects – the casting of Kristofferson, then even more than now associated with his cowboy persona – is actually its most daring: Pakula revels in the Western archetype, to the point of framing as a quasi-shootout a key confrontation between Kristofferson and the Greenspan-like Hume Cronyn. Fonda, as a counterpoint, plays an ex-film star, and she’s exquisitely made up and shot throughout; in a couple of scenes, in tight close up with blood-red lipstick and gathered-up hair, she’s as vivid and sublimely dangerous as a Hitchcock heroine.

Expert Opinions

By using these two American archetypes – cowboy and film star – so knowingly, Pakula acknowledges Rollover as a fantasy, but one deeply rooted in the country’s own myth. A couple of comments on the imdb pegged the movie as racist in its demonizing of Saudi Arabia, but that makes the mistake of taking the film as realism. Trapped in their high-overhead sumptuousness, operating in a set of assumptions and customs so complex that even the best and the brightest have lost the thread (and still in the shadow of the 70’s oil crises), the characters have no hope of engaging with the Saudis as anything other than a mysterious, all-powerful Other.

There appears to be no chance that Rollover will ever be rehabilitated. Pakula died in a car accident a few years ago, after a series of formulaic films that dimmed the standing of his earlier great work. Still, the film’s mediocre reputation is a better tribute than a bland status as a minor classic would be. The debates about tax vs. spending vs. debt/deficit reduction have a very different complexion in the US than they do in Canada, but in each case our opinions are primarily impressionistic, because how they could be otherwise? Study the range of expert opinions on any economic matter, and the august roster of predictions that turned out to be catastrophically wrong, and you realize how we’re flying blind on this. Rollover bravely dared to grapple with that incoherence and to throw its looming consequences in our faces, and the world’s not ready for it yet.

The Passenger

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2006)

For as long as I can remember, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger has been central to my notion of serious cinema. I can no longer remember clearly how I came across the film. I suppose it must have been on a rental video, but if so, finding it on the shelf in the small Welsh town where I grew up would have been as great a miracle as the Criterion Collection opening up an outlet in Wawa. Either way, I watched it many times in fairly rapid succession, and when people ask me my favourite movie, I reply The Passenger more than any other. It’s never out of my top ten. This has been increasingly a matter of faith though, since I had not seen it for well over a decade. Apparently the film’s star, Jack Nicholson, bought up the rights and would then only allow it to be screened on rare occasions.

A Film Returned

Its absence is now over. The film reappeared at the Cinematheque this January, and then went on for a couple of weeks at the Carlton. It is finally out on DVD as well. And so the inevitable question arises – is it still my favourite film?

If you don’t know, Nicholson plays a journalist on assignment in Africa, staying in a remote hotel. The place has only one other Western guest, and when Nicholson enters that man’s room one night, he finds him dead on his bed. Without too much consideration, Nicholson swaps his own identity for that of the dead man (the film is from the era when you could peel off a passport photo and glue in a new one), and follows the other man’s course, based on entries in his appointment book. It transpires that the man was a gunrunner, making Nicholson’s project keenly dangerous; meanwhile, his wife and a colleague gradually realize that something is wrong, and come on his trail. The other lead actor is Maria Schneider, from Last Tango In Paris, as a wandering student who joins her path to his.

From its title (although the Italian original was Professione: Reporter) and that brief synopsis, you get the sense that the film is about identity, destiny, alienation, chance, the relationship of man to his environment – all Antonioni’s classic themes. It’s plotted as a chase thriller in many ways, but it’s deliberately paced and enigmatic, allowing only limited certainty over Nicholson’s motives, or the events that overtake him. And then there’s the famous closing shot, a masterpiece of technical precision and logistical flourish lasting over seven minutes– during which the camera travels between the bars of a hotel window. Certainly in the pre-digital age, that shot seemed barely tethered to physical realities, and supported a transcendental or mystical view of the film.

This World Or Another?

One of the biggest surprises for me on seeing it again though was how solid and grounded it generally felt. Events may be mysterious and confounding, but they’re also very precisely articulated and constructed. The film doesn’t feel fanciful or merely escapist – it seems utterly rational and psychologically grounded, even if we can’t completely articulate the nature of that grounding. The film has a certain quota of political content – through various video interviews recorded by the journalist, and the dead man’s connections. In one instance we see an African interviewee chide Nicholson for his approach and turn the camera on him, and the switch – while seemingly intended in part to release Nicholson from the tedious and hopeless pursuit of “truth” – actually has the effect of bringing him closer to the centre of causes he’s merely been toying with. I used to think this aspect was incidental, but this time it struck me differently. By their nature, these elements – grainy, committed (such as the real footage of a prisoner being executed), connoting violence rooted in real need and oppression – allow both a counterpoint to Nicholson’s more existential quest and a possible alternate key to it.

The film has always been luxuriated in, whereas it seems to be now that it exists to be dissected – Nicholson creates too specific a character, and the details visited on him are too precise, too rooted in real landscapes and events and consequences, for it to be otherwise. So I’m no longer much taken, for example, by David Thomson’s admiring but utterly fanciful tribute: “Melodrama and regret are replaced by the serene faith in a world of light, space and providence. The steady attempt of the camera to move away from people seems a truly mystical claim…(the final shot) inhales a warm, idle universe beyond intrigue, as if the movie were about space travel.”

Except that the film is all too obviously about the challenges of living on this planet, not another – it’s too fascinated by the workings of real things – like tape recorders and video machines and date books and car rental companies – that facilitate a privileged means of engaging with the world while at the same time trapping one within it. Nicholson has a screaming fit near the beginning that establishes the depth of his frustration; after that he’s remarkably self-contained, with emotional expression largely replaced by the propulsion of living. But this is very much a human quest rather than an otherworldly one.

Who Knows?

It is indeed in that final shot that you feel most liberated from the people in the film. But on this occasion, for me that was more a function of the very explicit assertion of cinema. As the camera moves slowly toward that window, the mechanics of shot-making, of the handling of the machinery, become palpable: it’s impossible (for me anyway) not to become divorced from the stated situation and to enter almost a new game, in which the famous shot looms before you like the course for a hundred meter track final. It still delivers, of course. But then Antonioni ends the film on a relatively innocuous note, with a lyrical closing shot of the hotel exterior at night. Wherever we may have felt ourselves travel, we are still here, and life goes on.

These are just a few almost random observations, of course, and they leave me uncertain where to rank the film now (plainly I will need to watch it again, perhaps resuming the regular relationship I used to have with it). Clearly the film now seems more approachable to me, but I can’t yet determine if that is ultimately a good thing. I will admit that although I was fascinated and gripped by it, I’m not sure I was carried away to the extent you might expect of your all-time favourite film. But maybe that says more about my own wear and tear than that of the movie?

On the same day I watched it I also watched (for a third time) Jacques Rivette’s admired but much less heralded Va Savoir, and actually found the Rivette film more truly stimulating in some respects. But choosing between such alternatives is hardly the definition of a problem. The Passenger is back in the game, to be experienced and mused over and (perhaps better for a film that lends itself too easily to musing) argued over. See it now!

The Sound Of Music

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2008)

I’m pretty sure the first film I ever saw in a movie theatre was The Sound Of Music. I think it was in 1970, when I was 4 – in those low-tech days, of course, a movie’s big-screen life didn’t necessarily end after a month or so. I don’t remember anything about the experience beyond the fact of it having happened. The second movie I saw was Disney’s The Aristocats, and that was really the start of my movie mania. I ran round for days singing “Everybody Wants To Be A Cat” and became an avid collector of all things Disney – in those low-tech days, of course, they hadn’t yet figured out how to squeeze you dry. I guess the Disney thing lasted five years or so and then morphed into a science-fiction mania, before broadening out into what you see paraded here every week.

Heston Of Musicals

I saw The Sound Of Music, or bits of it anyway, many more times on TV, as we all did. I guess that was courtesy of my parents, or maybe through some Manchurian Candidate kind of plot. I don’t think I’ve watched it for decades now, but I can unspool big chunks of it in my head. As a hard-bitten urban type never seen without a fedora and a cigarette, I guess you wouldn’t expect me to have it on my desert island list. I do like musicals, but my taste runs more to The Band Wagon and Funny Face - unashamed, elegant genre material. Julie Andrews has never been interesting to me except when used as a focus of her husband Blake Edwards’ passive-aggressive experiments (particularly in 10 and S.O.B.). I guess The Sound Of Music is kind of like the Charlton Heston of musicals, with the strengths and limitations that implies.

I’ve always had some lingering dissatisfaction with the material too, but never bothered to think about it in detail. And then I saw the new Mirvish stage production. I think I’ve said before that I’m happy being a movie guy, but I can’t deny I take away a greater number of specifically memorable experiences from live theatre than I do from cinema. But then, I don’t go anything like as often. Anyway, the musical works. An astonishing crowd-pleaser, it couldn’t be any smoother – wonderful design and coordination, immaculate performances, well-judged overall pace and handling of tone. My emotions went this way and that, exactly as they should.

This isn’t a criticism, it’s merely a personal reaction, but I’m not that susceptible to live theatre that attempts (seemingly) to emulate the impact of cinema. For example, the title song takes place on a stage-spanning, monumentally-crafted green hill: it’s stunning and eye-popping, but I couldn’t help finding it self-defeating. I mean, no one in the audience is going to forget they’re not actually on a mountain, and the literal-mindedness robs you of the pleasure of evocation, of how through lighting and movement and sheer belief an almost empty stage becomes the most complex of logistical and psychological spaces. But maybe, in this context, I’m like someone who moans about TV being inferior to radio as a stimulant of the imagination. (Although, I swear, as they start their climactic trek up the mountain to freedom, with the stage tilting to embody their climb, I was put in mind of a spaceship taking off. It can’t be just me – my wife said the same thing afterwards).

The Nun and I

All of that aside, I really enjoyed it. But I also realized something that’s always held me back. It’s the very title: The Sound Of Music. Obviously, it’s not very specific. But Rogers and Hammerstein titles almost always were: Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Carousel, The King And I. By that logic, the Von Trapp story should have been called Nazis In Austria! or The Nun and I.

Except that actually it is specific, because – as I perceived more clearly watching the stage show than I recall from the film – the true subject really is the redemptive and transformative power of music. The Mirvish production’s most moving moment I think, comes when Captain von Trapp, returning to his children and his gloomy house after a prolonged absence, furious at how they’ve loosened up under their new governess, melts on hearing them sing in unison (the title song again), eventually signaling his emotional reawakening by joining in (actor Burke Moses doesn’t have the fullest voice, but he’s often more poignantly expressive than the lead actress, Elicia MacKenzie). After that the house fills with music again; love follows, and a way to transcend the German occupiers (and, by the way, to this day is there anything that more immediately and intuitively chills a stage than a swastika?).

Although this moment “works,” it depends entirely on our comfort with the conventions at play. Of course we haven’t really just seen a dramatization of the power of music, because for the last hour plus, we’ve never gone more than five minutes without it. The kids are singing within five minutes of their first appearance; then in their next scene, they sing again. Of course we understand that some of these songs dramatize what are actually conversations (or perhaps inner reflections) within the world being represented (presumably the Mother Superior tells Maria to climb every mountain rather than sings it to her), while others are genuine performances (the family’s appearance at the Salzburg Festival). Others appear to lie somewhere in between (the “Do-Re-Mi” number).

Go See It!

That’s true of many putting-on-a-show musicals – my favourite The Band Wagon is exactly the same kind of mishmash. But The Band Wagon is in part about how personal and public personae dissolve in the joy of pure unpretentious performance: the lack of distinction is part of its point. The Sound Of Music, by contrast, is about the superiority of music over silence. But how can you dramatize that in a show that allows no silence?

Once I focused on this point, it brought home for me some of my other reservations, such as how the relationship between Maria and von Trapp is really too condensed to make their falling in love at all compelling (and I’m enough of a feminist to be underwhelmed by the prospect of a marriage in which decision- and concession-making will clearly not come close to being equally divided). Actually Maria surprisingly fades in the second act, being not that central to depicting how music works its ultimate magic.

I said I didn’t mean to criticize, and I meant it. I engaged with the stage production in a way I never have with the movie. I actually had thoughts about The Sound Of Music other than: Oh look, it’s on again. I realize this may not be the kind of endorsement to get the Mirvish organization – or you - excited. But I say - go see it!