Chick movie

One of the most surreptitiously meaningful moments in the hit comedy Bridesmaids (now out on DVD) comes during a tennis match sequence; it’s a doubles game, and the focus is on the competition between two of the film’s stars, played by Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne. The other two actresses have no dialogue; they’re just space-fillers. But Wiig’s partner, notable only for her grotesque facial expressions, is played by Melanie Hutsell, who was a regular on Saturday Night Live for several years in the early 90’s. Since then, as far as I can tell, she’s had little meaningful film or TV work. Of course, many males must also look back on their SNL years as a never-replicated highpoint, but I don’t think you ever see their subsequent estrangement from the spotlight summed up so starkly and unsentimentally.

Jill Clayburgh

And then the late Jill Clayburgh makes her last screen appearance in the film, as the mother of Wiig’s character. Clayburgh at least has an actual speaking part, but it’s one of those weirdo old person roles, as a fuss-bucket who obsessively attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings even though she’s never taken a drink. Clayburgh enjoyed a brief vogue as a leading star, with best actress Oscar nominations in both 1978 and 1979 (for An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over), but it petered out after a few years; in the context of her last two decades, the Bridesmaids role actually seems like a relative highlight. Again, it’s not that men don’t suffer similar reversals – just look at her Starting Over co-star Burt Reynolds – but if nothing else, it usually takes longer.

These twin reference points help you to appreciate the fragility at the centre of the movie. Wiig’s character Annie is on a downward slide - she lost all her money in a failed bakery venture, can’t pay her rent, her relationships are going nowhere. Her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph, gets engaged, enlisting Annie as matron of honour; she has the enthusiasm for it, but not the skill, and more seriously not the money. In contrast, another member of the wedding party, Helen, a best-friend-come-lately played by Byrne, virtually lives for such events, and has a bottomless supply of money. This can only lead to friction, embarrassment, gross-out screw-ups, and so forth.

Highs and lows

The movie, co-written by Wiig and directed by Paul Feig, ably blends contrasting comic styles and techniques into a pretty sturdy concoction. At times it’s pleasantly distinctive and naturalistic; a flirtation between Annie and a traffic cop doesn’t feel at all like off-the-shelf cuteness. At other times it’s about the high-concept set-pieces – my favourite was the ludicrously excessive wedding shower, where guests ride up to the house on white horses and then receive a Labrador puppy (in a pink beret) as a party favour. Melissa McCarthy, playing the groom’s sister, hangs out in her own surreal universe and wrestles everything within it into submission. Wiig seldom breaks out the scene-hogging qualities she sometimes displays on SNL, meaning that when she does, it makes sense as an expression of a largely stifled inner life momentarily busting loose.

Bridesmaids is good enough, scene to scene, to remind you how much you miss the mature, meaningful, expansive comedies of past decades. It doesn’t get there though, mainly because it doesn’t want to. A comedic classic like The Apartment might be considered almost laughless by contemporary standards, which intertwines with its effectiveness in evoking mood and character. Bridesmaids can’t take the chance of going more than a few minutes without tweaking the audience, and willingly pays the price for that. So for example, it leaves us in no doubt about Annie’s dire financial situation, but doesn’t bother to explain how she scrounges together the money for a trip to Vegas (albeit that she’s the only one of the group sitting in coach). She hits a bottom, and then a worse bottom, and no doubt you feel sorry for her, but you don’t feel her pain. This is probably the right calculation from a commercial perspective, but the movie’s highs might have been much more resonant if it hadn’t sugar-coated its lows. (I also can’t help wishing her passion was something other than baking. Not that there’s anything wrong with baking. But there’s nothing wrong with software development or engineering either.)

Relevance of feminism

It’s remarkable that a comedy built around women is still viewed as something of a novelty, if not a major commercial risk. The movie pounces on the opportunity as if it might never come again, setting out a dire gallery of maleness. The men on view – excepting of course the Irish cop who embodies all hope - are either mind-numbingly bland or ineffective, such as the fiancée, or nastily self-serving. Helen’s marriage is seemingly an emotional wasteland, with a husband who’s always away and two step-kids who ignore her; another of the bridesmaids paints a verbal picture of unbroken grinding misery, verging on abuse really; yet another, a newly-wed, eventually admits the aridity of her supposedly dream relationship. One might have surmised there’s little or nothing here for the male viewer, but the indictment doesn’t really bite very deeply; despite all the bumps, the closing sense of things is to keep persevering and holding on, because as Woody Allen put it, we need the eggs. The movie’s final scene, a coda running under the end credits, depicts McCarthy’s character and her new boyfriend preparing for an erotic experience; the specific details will be a turn-on to virtually no viewer (I assume so anyway), but somehow the scene manages to seem celebratory rather than (or maybe I should say as well as) squirm-inducing. See, there’s a perfect partner for all of us.

The day after seeing the film, I happened to see snippets of a recent interview with Gloria Steinem, touching on such issues as whether feminism is still a relevant concept. Even if that issue were in any sense settled, I suppose we’d keep resurrecting it periodically; sexual difference is probably too alluring and charged a commodity ever to be left alone. Sometimes a movie like Bridesmaids seems astonished anything might ever go right for a modern woman who isn’t a complete sell-out. One’s life experience seems to say this pessimism is overdone, which is partly why the movie can be categorized mostly as a fantasy. But then you think of Hutsell and Clayburgh. Maybe the broader story of their lives is that they put other things above their careers, I don’t know. But that would only take us to other familiar territory, about the difficulty of balancing legitimate professional ambitions and biological determinism.

Cool Miracles

There was a time when a disproportionate number of the foreign films I saw were by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, just because he made a lot of them, and they were fairly widely released. They’re generally fairly short, concise, deadpan, dealing with down-to-earth situations without a lot of over-emoting; movies you’d ideally watch while wearing sunglasses and smoking cigarettes. I don’t think any of them ever meant a lot to me really, but if you were into art cinema, it’s the kind of thing you got served and therefore ate. Anyway, he’s been much less productive in recent years, and it’s been a long time since I saw a Kaurismaki film. But he’s back with Le Havre, generally praised as one of the best entries at this year’s Cannes festival, and playing now at the Bell Lightbox.

Le Havre

The film revolves around an aging shoe-shine guy, Marcel, in the (as presented here anyway) highly unglamorous French port city, going through a highly minimal life in a highly minimal way, while his wife’s in the hospital with a seemingly incurable disease. Eating his lunch one day, he happens on an African kid, Idrissa, who’s on the run after the cops intercepted the container smuggling him and others into London; Idrissa later follows him home, and Marcel takes his cause on board; to hide him from the authorities and get him to his family.

The movie reminds you (if you needed to be reminded) of how disposable most movies are; of how even major events pass by in an inconsequential, affectless flurry. Marcel has a dog (played by Laika, who gets prominent billing in the opening titles), and when Kaurismaki gives us shots of Laika, which is quite often, he really gives us shots of Laika: usually nicely and fully presented in the middle of the frame, looking blissfully happy. Another example – Marcel’s wife asks him to stay away for two weeks while she’s undergoing her treatment, and then to bring her yellow dress, which she identifies as the one she wore on a particular occasion. Later on he opens her side of the closet, and we see two dresses, the yellow one and just one other one (his side contains just a single suit). Of course it’s a sad summary of their meager circumstances. But still, the yellow dress counts. The point is about the weight of moments and experiences. Sometimes the weight is crushing – we gain a tangible sense of the frustrations and humiliations of Marcel’s way of life (one of the movie’s first shots is of feet passing him by in the train station, none of them wearing anything that would need to be polished). Sometimes, life yields miracles. The tragedy for many of us is that by inoculating ourselves from the former, we fail to understand the latter.

The Weight of Moments

The movie’s not romantic or dreamy though – it’s pragmatic and tough-minded, and as always, Kaurismaki keeps overt displays of emotion to an absurdist minimum. It’s also a tribute to the classic notion of community, where you have the grocer and the baker and the bar owner, and they all realize they’re in it together (even the cop perceives this, regardless that in the past he’s put some of the locals in jail). And although Kaurismaki presents this in extremely localized terms, he also conveys how the community is potentially vast, easily taking on the plight of a lost African kid as its own (the film encompasses a compelling mini-portrait of his dispossessed family, with a grandfather stuck in a refugee centre and his mother living illegally in London, working in a “well-paid” job in a Chinese laundry), and including a mysterious rock icon called “Little Bob” - seemingly playing a version of himself - who lends himself to a “trendy charity concert” on the boy’s behalf. All in all, it’s a great little movie. It’s almost a shame though, because I have so much activity on my movie to-do list already, and now I’m thinking I might have to go back and watch some of those earlier films again.

I always tend to link Kaurismaki in my mind with the American director Jim Jarmusch, who started around the same time and had a quite similar reputation and prominence for a while; in fact, the two men are friends. I recently rewatched two of the films from Jarmusch’s heyday (I’m telling you, that movie to-do list really has no end), and it was a very satisfying exercise. Night on Earth, from 1991, depicts five different cab rides, happening simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. The first, with Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, depicts a casting agent trying to entice the driver into doing a screen test, but finding she prefers her life’s modest parameters to the instability, however lucrative and glamorous, of Hollywood stardom. Nice enough, but a minor irony at best.

Jim Jarmusch

As the film progresses though, Jarmusch subtly and masterfully increases the existential stakes; the second last episode deals with a passenger who dies (although in farcical circumstances) and the final sequence – in Helsinki, with a group of actors from Kaurismaki’s films – incorporates death into its very essence, constructing a character who’s come to be largely defined by it. In retrospect, the film’s scope is considerable, moving from an America where values are often indistinguishable from negotiations, to a Europe where the stakes, if materially smaller and quieter, are better understood. On top of all this, naturally, the film just overflows with Jarmusch’s trademark cool.

And then I rewatched the even more iconic Down by Law, where Tom Waits and John Lurie play two disaffected New Orleans guys, both set up and thrown into jail where they end up sharing a cell. After a while they’re joined by a third cellmate, a wacky Italian played by Roberto Benigni (who’s also in Night by Earth; Jarmusch uses the problematic actor so well that it almost compensates for Life is Beautiful). The three of them escape and wander through the swamps, from which they eventually emerge, with Benigni’s character finding a ridiculously convenient happy ending and the other two ending up at a literal fork in a road, un-signposted and with directions unknown, which nevertheless represents a more coherent life choice than they’ve ever possessed prior to that (of course, while you’re watching it, the movie doesn’t feel at all like a gravitation toward coherence – you only think of that afterwards). Neither Kaurismaki nor Jarmusch makes “realistic” films in the way we usually use the term; on the contrary, beneath their laconic personae, they share a sharp understanding of how supposed realism can just turn into clutter and convention. Strip all that away, and it’s astonishing what you find underneath.

Steps and Limits

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in June 2009)

I saw the famous musical A Chorus Line for the first time when it came here as part of last year’s Mirvish season. It was a proficient enough production, but left me rather cold; even more than with many touring productions, it seemed like a hologram of something stuck in a very different time, attitude and place. Of course I knew the climax would be the iconic “One” (one singular sensation, every little breath she takes…) but I was surprised how flat its impact was. The show is built around auditioning performers, who spill out their vulnerabilities and desires and fears as they try to establish themselves for the director, and I suppose it’s an irony that their pay-off is to become participants in a musical machine that disregards individuality for the sake of immaculate synchronity. Maybe it’s me, but I actually found it a bit depressing.

Every Little Step

Whenever I go to musical theatre, I’m always stunned at the technical skill and control of the performers, and it often crosses my mind how little separates the stars from the utility players. The new documentary Every Little Step reminds us how theatrical glory intertwines with tragedy; for every big break, there are a hundred thwarted dreams, and at least a few agonizingly near misses. The film documents the casting process for the 2006 Broadway Chorus Line revival (which spawned the recent touring production), from the initial open calls (attracting more than 3,000 people), whittled down over more than a year into ever-smaller groups and finally, for some roles, to one-on-one showdowns. It interweaves this with a potted history of the original production, including audio recordings of the original nightlong talk session during which creator Michael Bennett and a group of friends spawned the original concept.

If you have any taste at all for the genre, then Every Little Step is surefire entertainment – with such rich material it couldn’t be otherwise. The directors make pretty good choices overall, but you almost regret it couldn’t have been a multi-part TV series; so many alternative avenues necessarily go unexplored. Still, we should have such problems with every movie. I also found myself reflecting again on how little this kind of Broadway production, with its immense infrastructure and overhead, has in common with the immediacy of small-scale theatre; A Chorus Line may have been born in the everyday dreams and struggles of people low on the ladder, but on this scale (and absent any kind of rethinking for a new generation), what was once truthful within it now becomes the same kind of saccharine as a so-called reality show.

Afterwards, I googled some of the performers highlighted in the film. For all the painstaking selection process, many of them received rather underwhelming reviews, and I’m not sure any of them necessarily went on yet to bigger and better things. The world of Every Little Step might be a more brutal risk-reward arena than any stock market – huge risk, huge reward (viscerally at least), and then when the gig ends, essentially back to zero.

The Limits Of Control

It’s easy to maintain an image of Jim Jarmusch as the coolest enigma among directors, as a less preoccupied David Lynch maybe, but is he more than that? I think he might be, but I need to revisit the earlier films, and I never get round to it. Maybe that makes me a Jarmuschian character. His oeuvre has much deadpan contemplation, multicultural connection, mysterious interplay, hints of the beyond. They are unquestionably intelligent – the western Dead Man, perhaps his best film, might be one of the most fascinating deconstructions of American myths ever made – but it often feels Jarmusch is placing a brake on himself, as if it’s just not worth engaging us past a certain point. If only by implication anyway, his films suggest an extreme malaise in the governing pace and engorged complexity of mainstream culture.

His new film The Limits Of Control follows a contract killer on assignment in Spain, passing from one contact to the next, doing a lot of waiting and watching. The film hasn’t gone down very well with most reviewers, being generally regarded as a succession of pretty pictures and contrived scenes (actors like Tilda Swinton and John Hurt pop up briefly, delivering a few cryptic lines on the abstract nature of reality or suchlike before moving on), building up to nothing much. It’s easy to understand this view, and the film does have a rather academic air about it. Still, in the end it’s possible to see it as one of Jarmusch’s most direct expressions yet of his underlying worldview. That is, the killer’s quest is very symbolic of a challenge to latter-day American imperialism, as if representing a coalition of perceived opposing values (philosophy, contemplation, aesthetic appreciation, uncomplicated eroticism) asserting itself against Bush-era stridency and poison. The use of near magic at the end seems to suggest the untapped, liberating possibility within us, if we just change the conversation.

I have to admit that the above version of it, as it constructed itself in my mind afterwards, is a little more satisfying than the actual viewing experience. But it’s the measure of a major filmmaker that you’re willing to take this more as your limitation than his. I must definitely schedule that personal Jarmusch retrospective, but maybe I’ll just sit in the sun and think a while first, and order an espresso.

Goodbye Solo

In Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, the Senegalese Solo, now driving a cab in North Carolina, is offered $1,000 by William, an aging local guy, to drive him to a nearby windy peak in two weeks’ time, presumably so he can jump off it. This concept is too far outside Solo’s worldview – he tries to befriend William, to learn his troubles, certain he can persuade him out of it. This basic plot is obviously contrived, but the film’s value is in what it adds to the growing body of American cinema on the immigrant experience. Solo’s resourceful optimism guarantees him a foothold on the ladder (there’s a sad contrast with another, much more bewildered-seeming immigrant who cleans at William’s motel), but for now at least may also form his ceiling; at an interview for a flight attendant position, having to deal with the suits behind the desk, he seems lightweight, whereas William’s sadness, isolation, and piled-up skeletons are inherent to his authenticity. But it’s a changing world, with ever-reinforcing and multiplying diversity now occupying the bloodstream even of the red states – for example, Solo is married a Mexican woman - and the movie shows something of the quasi-shadow economy’s complex contours. At the end, Goodbye Solo is more optimistic than not, but leaves no doubt about how much remains to be processed, negotiated and fought over before the current creeping revolution attains its promise.

Scares and Shames

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in July 2007)

I think I make the mistake with Michael Moore of judging his work as though he were a documentarian, whereas he’s really more of a populist performance artist. I thought Bowling For Columbine had an intriguing angle on America’s self-fuelling culture of fear, but I barely got anything new out of Fahrenheit 911, and the messy opportunism turned me off. Nevertheless, it was a huge commercial success (which if the audience I saw it with was anything to go by, consisted entirely of preaching to the converted) and then won an Oscar for best documentary. Which added up to a lot of anticipation for his new film Sicko, focusing on the failings of the US health care system.

Sicko

The premise is again familiar. Some fifty million Americans are uninsured, and for those with some kind of coverage, it’s a hopeless David vs. Goliath struggle against venal insurance companies who pull every trick in the book to avoid ever cutting a cheque, denying treatment for the flimsiest and most bureaucratic of reasons. Consequently, the health and longevity of Americans drifts steadily down compared to the rest of the world, with no hope of redemption in sight from a lobbyist-swamped system. This all compares wretchedly to the single payer systems that operate in Canada, France and the U.K. Even the maligned Cuba, as Moore illustrates in his film’s most notorious stunt, shows more basic decency toward ailing 9/11 rescue workers than the homeland. Bottom line – America should do better.

I wouldn't argue with any of this. Neither would anyone in the film – there’s no one on screen who’s invited to. Although Moore emphasizes the volume of case studies he digested in developing Sicko, he doesn’t seem to have done much real research beyond accumulating a big bag of anecdotes and horror stories. By asking a British doctor how much he makes (it translates to around US$200K) and illustrating the comfortable – but not extravagant – life available on that, he seems to be advocating for more rigorous cost control of medical salaries within a centralized system, but he doesn’t even start to muse on how the transition to such a structure might be effected. And he doesn’t touch at all on the biggest issue of all – that technology, longevity and spiraling expectations places unsustainable strain on the systems of the countries he idolizes. In Canada, for instance, you can plausibly argue that the proportion of public spending siphoned into health care (particularly with so little emphasis on prevention and wellness) is not rational as a strategy for future survival. Even if, patient by patient, it’s the “right thing to do.”

Moore’s best sequence in the film, harking back to what worked well in Columbine, critiques the oppressive cycle of American life, in which debt and fear leave too many people pathetic and compliant, against the galvanizing French tradition of public action and protest. Likewise, the egregious US propaganda against “socialized medicine” would never fly in Britain, which more correctly understands its National Health Service as a triumph of democracy, forged from the ruins of the Second World War; the goodwill of 9/11, by contrast, was squandered on military fiascos and complacent or self-interested policies. You wish Moore would follow these trains of thought more fully. But I don’t think he can: I don’t think he’s got the intellectual goods to go any further, and in any event, for everything that’s staring him in the face, he’s still a patriotic American, and makes sure to pack the film with pointless tributes to the greatness of the country and its people.

If he really confronted the citizenship with the extent of their collective failure, his movie wouldn’t be able to sustain the decent, shambling, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone vital to the Moore persona. So Sicko is as probably as good as it gets from him – interesting in parts, inevitably affecting in others, but frankly not as useful a contribution to serious thinking as any day’s edition of a good newspaper. The fact that people don’t see this, and treat Moore as a serious (if imperfect) contributor to our public debate is merely a function of the same laziness that messes up the big issues in the first place.

1408

On now to different kinds of scary movies. In Mikhael Hafstrom’s 1408, John Cusack is a once-promising author now churning out various guides to America’s haunted hotspots, while believing in ghosts about as much as he does in anything else. He takes on the biggest challenge of them all, to spend a night in room 1408 of a boutique New York hotel, where dozens of people have perished over the years. And you know, it doesn’t work out to be a good night for him.

It’s based on a Stephen King story, and seems essentially like a reworking of The Shining. This prompts a somewhat unfair if inevitable comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s version of that book, which has a structural complexity and thematic intrigue lacking in Hafstrom’s film. 1408 is pretty gripping on its own terms though – it builds well and expertly controls its tone. Cusack is a very good centre, even if his character is conceived in rather clichéd terms, and Samuel L Jackson really nails his small role as the discouraging hotel manager.

Live Free or Die Hard

Maybe the prospect of another Bruce Willis action flick is frightening enough in itself, although Live Free or Die Hard is a return to the site of his greatest successes (I have to say though I’ve never previously heard the first Die Hard praised so consistently as it was by reviewers putting down the new flick). The film is an entertaining yarn, much more solidly written than many action flicks, with a focused, unfussy air about it.

The theme is cyber-terrorism: a group of computer whizzes plans to cripple America’s technology infrastructure, and in the process to empty most of its bank accounts. It’s all intriguingly depicted and, to my inexpert perspective at least, somewhat plausible. The master villain, played by Timothy Olyphant, is a former employee of the department of Homeland Security who fell out with his bosses and now exploits his inside knowledge for evil; better for him to be the exploiter, he says, than some foreigner. In this I couldn’t help detecting an echo of how the economy has been plundered by the Bush elite, all under the umbrella of patriotism and a free market. Willis is known to be a Republican though, so maybe I’m overreaching there. Or maybe it’s that the Bush elite has perfected mendacity in so many forms that almost any cartoon villainy will now suggest an easy metaphor.

Bad connections

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2007)

Barbet Schroeder’s documentary Terror’s Advocate is a rather frustrating movie, at least before you’ve thought about it for a while. It’s centered on Jacques Verges, the infamous French attorney, now in his 80’s, who at various times represented or advised Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal, and dozens of unsavoury others. In the film’s signature line, he says he’d even represent George W Bush, as long as Bush pleaded guilty. Most of us will agree that even the lowest of the low expect a fair trial, but we’re all defined by the choices we make and the company we keep, and Verges’ compulsive affinity for obvious murderers and despots seems to indicate bottomless personal cynicism or moral corruption. The man himself though seems serene, reasonable (if smug), largely free of any ideological baggage (or at least keeping it well to himself).

Terror’s Advocate

The main exception to that is at the film’s very beginning: Verges calmly explains, as the camera takes us over layers of excavated bones from the mass graves, how the death tolls in the Khmer Rouge genocide have always been overstated. It seems that we’re headed for classic Holocaust denier type territory. But the film never returns to that vein again, leaving his attitudes conspicuously under examined. For example, the treatment of the Barbie trial is mostly limited to an expose of where the money for the defense came from, and then to Verges’ obvious relish at having been a lone defense lawyer going up against 39 prosecutors. His perspective on his client is never probed, and the film never even tells us what the verdict was - a strange omission even if most of us can either remember or guess (answer: life imprisonment). At the end there’s a long series of photos of other Verges clients or connections not previously addressed in the film, many of who look like the basis for potentially more intriguing material than what we’ve actually been watching.

As a narrative, the film is most satisfying early on, setting out how the young Verges got involved with defending Algerian freedom fighters during the final stretch of French colonialism. Most of us will see this as a just cause, and so Verges at this point seems brave and principled – even better, he fell in love with and married the beautiful freedom fighter he was defending. Later on he got drawn into Palestinian issues, which may have led to an association with diehard (and well financed) Nazi sympathizers. For most of the 70’s, he simply disappeared, his whereabouts unknown (most of his acquaintances assumed he was in Cambodia, but the Pol Pot regime denies it). The film’s latter section focuses in most detail on his association with Carlos and other pioneering international terrorists (and another love interest, perhaps platonic though), including some of the first wave of radical Islamists.

Origins Of Terrorism

At times, Verges almost seems lost in an endless network of international intrigue, surveillance, allegations and connections, and Schroeder often fills his frame to bursting with captions and imbedded images (certainly the subtitler couldn’t always think of a way to keep up). The director set out his angle in a recent interview: “I approached the movie as I would have approached a work of fiction. The human material, the characters are so rich, that I had a tendency to approach it like that and not as a documentary piece. It ended up being a movie about the origin of modern terrorism, the history of it.” And so whatever Verges’ personal complicity, he’s primarily a cog in the wheel, maybe even a quasi Forrest Gump who happened to bear witness to one of the defining movements of our times.

It’s possible to be almost nostalgic about a time when the origins of terrorism lay closer to home. The 60’s and 70’s were often turbulent and traumatic, and great malaise set in toward the end of that period - no one would wish to turn the clock back to it – but it now looks like a necessary self-correction (self-flagellation, if you like), which facilitated the booms and renewals of the last two decades. The trouble is of course that we’ve collectively become horribly complacent, to the very brink of implosion. The Iraqi war – a criminally under-motivated endeavour, sold as a grand project of freedom and yet mostly implemented like a second-rate break-in – is a decadence that couldn’t have existed in previous decades (the horror exceeds Vietnam at least in conception if not in (American) body count, not least because Vietnam didn’t have Vietnam to learn from).

Schroeder certainly capitalizes on this historical flavour – his film feels ripe and engaged, radiating relative gusto where (for example) Charles Ferguson’s No End In Sight, an excellent recent dissection of the Iraq mess, must necessarily traffic in desolation. It’s a great subject for this most versatile of directors. Schroeder produced Eric Rohmer’s early films, and even plays the lead role in one of them; later he was associated with Jacques Rivette (and appears in Rivette’s most recent film too). He made quirky documentaries about Idi Amin and talking gorillas, and some provocative fictions, before getting into English language movies with the Mickey Rourke Barfly. He scored an Oscar nomination for Reversal Of Fortune, and then became a mainstream Hollywood director, turning in efficient but mostly boring action vehicles for David Caruso and Sandra Bullock.

I don’t think Schroeder has ever been as accomplished as the French masters he’s worked with, but at this point he represents a unique melting pot of sensibilities and experiences, and Terror’s Advocate might be an almost ideal vehicle for him. If one were overanalyzing the director in terms of his constituent strands, you might almost say that he finds something of the restraint of a Rohmer within this most frenetic of subjects. Instead of walking out of there brandishing easy (but, in terms of the world we inhabit now, largely pointless) condemnations of Verges, we come out with a nagging emptiness. How we choose to fill that is, of course, up to us.

Redacted

Terror’s Advocate eventually seems more relevant to our current climate, and to the war in Iraq in particular, than Brian De Palma’s Redacted, which is actually about the war. The movie’s conceit is that everything it contains is being intermediated –through the video camera of a young soldier, or that of a French documentary crew, through surveillance cameras, or webcams, or so forth. “Isn’t it ironic,” said De Palma recently, “that in order to tell the truth about Iraq, you have to create the truth?” (So much for documentary.) And what is this truth as the film presents it? It’s the cold-blooded, premeditated rape and murder by two soldiers of a young girl and her family, apparently based on a real incident, and yet surely hardly representative of the individual contribution of most soldiers (and not at all of the broader issues, except in the most crassly symbolic sense). It’s all well intentioned I suppose, and there are some effective moments, but it’s mostly stilted and juvenile and just not very useful.

Going Canadian

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in April 2009)

I didn’t have any intention of seeing One Week, but a friend and I wanted to see a movie, and since my friend is a great Canadian, I thought this was the way to go: One Week, as one of the advertising pull-quotes has it, is “a love letter to Canada.” Joshua Jackson plays a Toronto teacher in his 20’s, with a fetching fiancée (Liane Balaban) but something missing, suddenly diagnosed with one-in-ten-odds cancer, who can’t face going into treatment; a well-timed chance encounter suggests the perfect delaying tactic – to buy a classic motor bike, and head west.

One Week

He ends up making it all the way to the coast, after photographing every giant dinosaur, photo mosaic and whatnot along the way, ooh-ing and ah-ing at lots of glorious scenery, and scooping in various other well-timed chance encounters; all of which facilitates a better focus on his real priorities and desires than he’s ever had before. Obviously, the movie is a contrivance; it’s consistently handsome and smoothly put together, but it’s the kind of thing where the relative strengths are manifestations of its inherent limitations. If you think about the last few minutes of any episode of Grey’s Anatomy, where the narrator muses about some banal life lesson over a bittersweet montage set to coffeehouse music, and you add in assorted Canadiana, then that’s just about One Week for you.

But you know, it did make me wish I saw more Canadian films, because for all its limitations, I liked the idea of it. I love Canada and have no intention of ever leaving, but I wasn’t born here, and I’ve never lived outside Toronto, so there are big gaps in my cultural appreciation. One Week’s “love letter” aspect comes across pretty well, including a very fetching portrayal of this very city (I guess it helps that everything takes place on the brightest of summer days); whatever the character’s unfulfilled ambitions might be, they’re not the fault of his homeland.

It’s not like I don’t see any Canadian films. I see everything Egoyan, Arcand and Cronenberg do…but the first two almost inevitably disappoint me. I see the occasional smaller film – I liked Ed Gass-Donnelly’s This Beautiful City last year (Young People F***ing, not so much). But I know it’s dabbling. I always muse about spreading myself too thin, cinematically speaking. Maybe I should just retrench and become a flag-bearer for the home front. I’ll nurture that thought for a while and see if it percolates.

One aspect of One Week suggests the possible frustrations of such a path: the squandering of several fine performers in inadequate supporting parts. I’ve seen Fiona Reid and Caroline Cave, who play his mother and sister, many times on stage, and never not been dazzled by them; their use here is pretty insipid (particularly in a clunky set-up toward the end where they just stand there silently looking misty-eyed). If I drew a broader lesson from my own experience, it might be to put my faith in local theatre and treat Canadian cinema merely as an occasional dessert, with all the nutritional limitations that implies.

Pontypool

But there again, I’m extrapolating too much from an unrepresentative sample. The following week, inspired by these thoughts, I went to see Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool, which had already been playing for several weeks. McDonald deserves to be a bigger hero than he is – a proudly Canadian filmmaker who’s consistently pretty successful at getting to do his own thing, in between lots of TV directing work. I have to admit I’ve seen only one or two of his films, and have probably never mentioned him in the ten years I’ve been doing this column.

Well, better late than never. Pontypool is set in a small Ontario town, almost entirely inside a local radio station. Morning DJ Mike Mazzy, a laconic veteran with an urge to be more iconoclastic than the format allows, starts getting more material than he can handle – confused but horrifying reports of people flipping out; mass riots, attacks and worse. The stimulant, it seems, might in some way be the English language itself, rendering the radio station a possible source of contamination.

Speaking French (to the extent the protagonists know any) might be a better protection against such a plague than any assault weapon, from which you can see that McDonald’s film is a witty riff on the cracks in the melting pot. In other countries, the living dead is spawned from a space virus or mad scientists or what have you; in Canada, it’s as if they manifest a crack in our ideals. And even though we never see the besieged town and most of the action happens off-screen, it’s a remarkably evocative portrait of outer circle Ontario.

McDonald’s actors (only a few with speaking parts), especially the lead Stephen McHattie, seem to be having a blast too, and why wouldn’t they? If Joshua Jackson’s travels had brought him into the world of Pontypool, he’d be zombie food within seconds – he’d probably hand out napkins and lie down for them. Sure, Canada’s convivial, and we love that, but what kind of calling card is that for our challenged century? Pontypool is the smaller film by conventional measures, but with much stronger (and sure, more deranged, that’s what I mean) DNA.


Duplicity

Going back to the subject of nutritional limitations, I went to see my first big-budget crowd-pleaser in quite a while, Duplicity, won over by mostly good reviews, by a sudden flurry of interest in writer-director Tony Gilroy (full-blown New Yorker profile, either the stepping stone to glory or the beginning of the end), and not least by Julia Roberts’ radiant appearance on Letterman. All of this outweighed my feeling it might just turn out to be a soulless series of manipulations. So there you go, should have followed my instinct.

Duplicity has Roberts (only slightly less radiant than on Letterman) and Clive Owen (fine, but inherently a lesser star, what’s a man to do) playing former secret service professionals now in the private sector (working for rival Johnson and Johnson type companies, although she’s actually undercover for the other side), looking for a big scam opportunity. It arrives in the form of a secret formula, but how to get through the state-of-the-art security set-ups? And can they trust each other?

Gilroy’s intricate structure is impressively sound overall, and he’s quite an elegant filmmaker at times, but the film has less subtext than his last one, Michael Clayton; it’s all about the reversals and the twists and the mis-directions. Sometimes it’s so immaculate it seems to skirt profundity; it might have got there too if the implied indictment of corporate amorality had hit a little harder, but it’s all too abstract to chime against the headlines. And they visit just about everywhere in the G7 except Canada, so no joy there.

In his own skin

Pedro Almodóvar has never been one of my favourite filmmakers – the key evidence is that I’ve never felt much impulse to see any of his movies a second time - but it’s hard to resist his escalating status as a cinematic treasure, the Betty White of art cinema (although not quite that old, and a little taller). At his best, his films are gorgeous artifacts of visual and narrative design, scintillatingly alive and curious. The limitation is that you never take much away from them, beyond a general appreciation for life in all its variation. That’s not negligible of course. His early films, made with extremely limited resources, were regarded as scandalous and boundary-pushing, but Almodóvar was a highly attractive and proficient boundary-pusher (maybe my comparison above should have been with Ellen DeGeneres): essentially good-natured, in love with classical melodrama, personally affable, with a near-genius for crafting accessibly twisted narratives (he’s the king of the flashbacks). In 1999 he won the foreign film Oscar for All about my Mother, and won another one a few years later for the screenplay of Talk to Her. He’s now one of the few directors whose name represents a guarantee of sorts.

The Skin I Live In

Of course, that implies a degree of repetition, and Almodóvar represents an extreme case study in recycling. Writing in Slate recently after rewatching all his films, June Thomas said: “Experiencing the Almodóvar filmography is like stepping into one of those endlessly repeating M.C. Escher paintings. Some motifs recur so frequently that I feared for my sanity. You know how, in police procedurals, the cops search a conspiracy-crazed suspect’s home and find the walls obsessively covered in newspaper clippings and photographs? That was me, totting up the number of movies in which Almodóvar characters use aliases (12), visit pharmacies (4), or keep unusual pets (3).” It’s all part of his appeal of course, evoking the old days when the great European auteurs were also brand names. Woody Allen occupies a similar kind of spot on the American spectrum, although the two have little in common otherwise (Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem aside).

Almodóvar’s new film The Skin I Live In probably isn’t his best – unlike Thomas, I have no desire to go back and figure out where in the spectrum it should fall (she put it ninth out of the eighteen he’s made) – but it’s spectacularly Almodóvarian, while occupying somewhat novel territory for him. The nature of the new territory might be viewed as a bit unambitiously pulpy though – it’s the mad scientist, carrying out unethical experiments in his creepy castle (for this purpose, a wonderful looking villa in Toledo). Antonio Banderas (who made his name in Almodóvar’s earlier movies, but hadn’t worked with him for the past two decades) plays the gifted surgeon, and the movie starts off with a kick-ass iconic puzzle – he keeps a gorgeous young woman locked up in an upstairs room, wearing a figure-hugging body stocking (I guess that might count in the “unusual pets” category?). Early on, we figure out he’s operated on her, giving her the face of his dead wife, but who is she? Is she actually the wife, having somehow survived the disfiguring tragedy that officially killed her? Is she his daughter, who was grievously traumatized after witnessing her mother’s death? I wish I could tell you, just because I’d like to see how the explanation actually looks when you write it down. But that would be a spoiler among spoilers.

Maintaining identity

By any normal measure, the plot is nuts. But Almodóvar plays it very straight, with such sumptuous conviction that you just about buy it. The material is potentially lurid to say the least, but the tone is sober – Thomas based her mid-range ranking on finding the tone “unusually dour” with an absence of light relief. That’s true enough – I think the light relief would be in what goes through your head as you watch it. But the idea of making such a straight-faced movie around this topic, and then pulling it off, is rather stunning in itself. At one point, we learn the doctor’s housekeeper is actually his mother – her wealthy employers at the time couldn’t have their own child, so she gave then her illegitimate son to raise – and that her acknowledged son, a sleazeball who had an affair with the doctor’s deceased wife, is actually his brother. In previous Almodóvar movies, such revelations would be at the heart of the matter, but here it’s just a throwaway. The serious point, perhaps, is that we can either allow ourselves to be defined by past traumas and compromises, or we can focus on what’s true and lasting (the movie ends rather wistfully and sweetly, on a poignant reunion of sorts). The Skin I Live In is certainly a fairly extreme parable on what constitutes one’s core identity (although, again, discretion prevents me from expanding further).

The movie is very easy to criticize, on any number of fronts. But I feel less inclined to pick at it than I normally do at Almodóvar’s films, because…I may as well come clean, I just loved watching the thing. Next thing you know, I’ll be tuning into Hot in Cleveland.

The Illusionist

Jacques Tati is one of my favourite filmmakers, although he was only able to make six full-length films during his life. Sylvain Chomet, who previously made The Triplets of Bellville, took one of Tati’s old script ideas and used it as the basis of his animated film The Illusionist: it came out last year and is now on DVD and cable. The storyline follows a down-on-his-luck French magician, animated to resemble Tati himself, who comes to try his luck in Scotland; after he performs in a Highland village, a young woman latches onto him and accompanies him to Edinburgh, where they end up living in a cheap hotel. It’s a peculiar little film, because while the character looks like Tati and one can imagine him in many of the situations, Chomet’s overall approach doesn’t evoke Tati at all. Films like Playtime and Mon Oncle constantly evoke a sense of being stranded: in one way or another, his people have lost the thread of modernity and its innovations and rhythms. The films avoid easy identification or pay-offs, using very few close-ups and uniquely unconventional pacing. This only vaguely applies to The Illusionist – it’s certainly slow and low-key by the standards of a Pixar film say, but the effect is much more conventionally sentimental than the master would ever have allowed himself to be. It’s unclear why one would labour so lovingly and painstakingly to resurrect the ghost of Tati, and then force him to occupy skin that’s plainly not his own.

De Niro's Project

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2005)

So I’ll admit it, I’m unnaturally obsessed with Robert De Niro. I think I’ve written at least five times over the years about his career, most recently just a few months ago when I briefly reviewed Meet the Fockers. My thoughts at that time were perhaps excessively coloured by his then-recent Saturday Night Live appearance, which was pretty dire. But now Hide and Seek has me thinking about him all over again.

Why Do It?

Most reviews of Hide and Seek ponder on the same question: Why did De Niro do it? Bizarrely, he said in a recent interview that he wanted to work with director John Polson because he liked the performances in Polson’s previous film, Swimfan. But he’s never been particularly articulate in explaining himself. And I found myself thinking about Peter Sellers, and how by all accounts he stunned the makers of the 1967 would-be Bond spoof Casino Royale by deciding to play it straight. Tired of funny accents and make-up, he wanted to be like Cary Grant (or the simplified popular conception of Grant), to dazzle by being his suave self. But there was nothing Grant-like there – there was only a dull void (which, years later, Sellers finally understood and tapped into with Being There). The recent HBO movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers depicts this episode fairly successfully, although that film as a whole is far too choppy and hyperactive to be particularly illuminating.

It seems more and more that De Niro is drawn to a similar project, to rely on an inner essence, to function through nuanced but understated old-fashioned presence, rather than to make the great nervy leaps of earlier in his career. Note that he’s also recently sold himself to an American Express ad campaign, which is all about him as craggy New York icon. If you think about it a certain way, it’s as grand an experiment as anything he’s ever carried out. And since it’s brought him by far the greatest commercial success of his entire career, it can’t be counted a total failure. But it does feel that the experiment has gone on far too long, and that the run of easy entertainments could be alternated with more idiosyncratic work (a pattern evident in Al Pacino’s recent career). Maybe it’s for that reason that he recently accepted a small role in the independent film The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although early reviews suggest that project didn’t amount to very much.

Hide and Seek

If many critics are as preoccupied as I am by this, it’s only because of the magnitude of what De Niro accomplished early on. It’s hard to overestimate the accomplishment of his great run with Martin Scorsese. Not that the work didn’t have a distinctly mannered quality – the legend of his immersion in his characters was always a bit overstated. Whatever people may have thought they were responding to, it looks distinctly stylized now, but it’s a stylization rooted in a real understanding of neurosis and suppressed violence and intertwining light and dark, and apparently in some authentic personal demons. Of course, now we see the mechanism more clearly because everyone impersonates it (not least of all the man himself in the Analyze This movies). De Niro’s performances stand up nevertheless. But maybe he simply couldn’t absorb the demands of such extreme work indefinitely. The King of Comedy was his fifth film with Scorsese within ten years, and now we see with hindsight that it never got any better than that for him.

This year he’s directing for only the second time. Maybe that will prove itself a productive avenue for him. As for Hide and Seek, well, it could be worse. De Niro plays a psychologist who moves his young daughter from Manhattan to upstate New York after his wife kills herself. It’s meant to help the girl get over the trauma, but instead she acquires an “imaginary friend” called Charlie and gets rapidly creepier, parading around like Wednesday Addams. This is yet another of those “meta” movies, like Identity and Open Your Eyes and The Machinist and countless others, where you’re eventually forced to reinterpret much of what’s gone before as having been a dream or a parallel world or a fantasy in a damaged brain. God. I’m tired of that genre. I will admit that I didn’t foresee the revelation here, although that tells you more about how dumb I am than about the movie’s skill. When it comes, it’s revealed in an unusually maladroit fashion, and from then on it’s all standard stuff.

The set-up has distinct similarities to The Shining, which of course doesn’t work to Hide and Seek’s advantage one bit. The movie’s main quality is a low-key rustic contemplativeness, although maybe there I’m being too kind to what in fact is merely an overwhelming lack of rigour. But De Niro is quietly effective as the withdrawn, low-key father. At one point he accepts a bag of preserves from a neighbour and comments on the contents. It’s as normal a thing as he’s ever done, and for that reason struck me as utterly surreal.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon

Given what I said about The King of Comedy, it’s interesting how Sean Penn’s performance in Niels Mueller’s The Assassination of Richard Nixon carries echoes of De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin. Penn’s character, set in 1974, initially seems like a tragi-comic misfit - he tries to make it as an office furniture salesman and to reunite with his estranged wife, and his ineffectiveness is mostly amusing, but always with an ominous edge. Some scenes – like his ill-fated attempt to get a business development loan – could seem almost like direct transcriptions of De Niro’s oblivious hounding of Jerry Lewis. As events turn against him, he becomes unhinged, leading to his cooking up the scheme of the film’s title.

The film has some interesting elements – Penn’s sense of social justice, focusing on a mixed bag of issues from racial prejudice to excessive retail mark-ups, is fascinatingly original - but it always feels rather insular and distant, failing to imbue its precision with much passion. It’s much more intelligent and ambitious than Hide and Seek, but the sad truth is that even though it’s ten minutes shorter than that film, it feels considerably longer. The main attraction, of course, is Penn, who is as resourceful as ever. But the role is inherently a minor one for him. And then recently I’ve seen him in the trailer for Sydney Pollack’s forthcoming film The Interpreter, in which he plays a cop protecting Nicole Kidman as a UN employee caught up in some kind of peril. In the trailer Penn looks solid and dependable, but it’s clearly not a project of the kind he usually does. He’s the closest thing we have now to what De Niro used to be, he’s in his mid-40’s, and he has his Oscar. Should we fear for his artistic future?

James Bond

I don’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard of James Bond. I was born in the UK in the mid-60’s, when access to movies was of course constrained. Christmas was a big thing on TV there (that’s right, on all three channels) and there was always a Bond film at the centre of the schedule. I don’t think I was allowed to see them for a while though, and I recall being confused about who, or maybe what, this “James Bond” actually was. I think I knew he’d been played by different actors – at that point Sean Connery and Roger Moore swirled just about equally in the public consciousness - but I may have intuited from this that a James Bond was a generic job title, like a Lumber Jack, albeit probably more exciting (I don’t know though, lumberjacks would probably have seemed pretty cool too, if I’d ever heard of them). I vaguely remember seeing promos for some of the movies and not really understanding them – they bore so little resemblance to the drab, juvenile things I was used to watching.

Bond through the years

In the early 80’s, I remember going to a double bill of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker in a fleapit cinema. I think I enjoyed the former a lot, but was a bit bored by the latter, and I didn’t think much of Roger Moore (you can see this isn’t one of those articles where I venture out on a narrow limb). But Bond movies were unquestioned events – this was post Star Wars, but still before the age of the blockbuster as we now suffer through it – and from then on I went to them all, without thinking too much about it. I liked the short-lived Timothy Dalton era more than most people did, but I found several of the Pierce Brosnan entries unspeakably boring. And of course I caught up on the earlier Connery movies along the way. I know people regard those as the gold standard, but I’ve often thought that if they’re less dumb than what came subsequently, it’s mainly because they hadn’t had time to get there yet.

I suppose the most telling thing is that it’s been years since I had any desire to revisit a Bond film (the only one I’ve occasionally thought of watching again is George Lazenby’s one failed shot at it, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I remember relatively fondly, probably because of that very failure). I’ve written here before about the wonderful moment on the DVD of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent, where the old master praises For Your Eyes Only for its “cinematic writing,” an assessment seemingly only explicable by assuming Bresson had hardly ever seen a mainstream action movie, and was able to view it with a purity of spirit denied the rest of us. Lacking that purity myself, even this rarest of blurbs didn’t tempt me back to Bond.

The only exception is that in 2008 I watched Never Say Never Again, Connery’s 1983 return to the role, which was made outside the mainstream series. I’d remembered it as a grittier, more character-driven exercise, but it didn’t seem that way now; it was hokey and horribly dated, radiating a low expectation of its audience. Maybe the disappointment was all the greater because, again like most people, I did admire the 2006 Casino Royale reboot. In my review here, I said Daniel Craig’s Bond was “scarily intense, physical, and complex,” noting “there’s surely never been a Bond movie where the protagonist is so notably scratched, bloodied, belittled, horribly tortured and brutalized.”

Indifferent returns

“So of all things,” I said, “I occasionally found myself thinking of The Passion of The Christ, in that the committed sadism almost seems to be leaking someone’s underlying neurosis. Maybe it’s just expiation for so many decades of bad Bond movies. Either way, the film is unusually literate…grounded in plausible motivations, and anchored by underlying emotion.” Reading that again now, it sounds like I was a sure thing to return for the follow-up, Quantum of Solace. But actually, Casino Royale broke my streak of seeing Bond in the cinema. Maybe re-watching Never Say Never Again recast its achievements in a more mediocre light, reminding me it still represented a poor cumulative return on the time invested.

I mean, who cares about those qualities I listed? Maybe at some point, if you were there, Bond embodied something about Englishness, about the contradictions of the Empire with its mixture of external pomp and inner rot. Maybe the films – with their M and Q and Moneypenny and Pussy Galore and Blofeld and the rest – allowed the pleasures of contemporary mythology in an era before every other film was based on a Marvel comic. And once upon a time, I guess action sequences with boats and planes and spaceships were actually special events, no matter how thick the blue lines around the actors. And respectable titillation wasn’t as easy to come by either (or quasi-respectable; many of the Bond actresses found it an easy springboard into a subsequent career in cheap exploitation work). And since there was a time when even the performer of the theme song was a news-making choice, and the closing credits ended by telling you James Bond would return in (insert title), the sense of a unique event touched every part of the artifice. Even the producer’s name – Albert R Broccoli – sounded like something you had to be in on (it’s good for you!). But that was then!

Quantum of Solace

I didn’t end up seeing Quantum of Solace until the other week, on TV. And I was right the first time. As if acquiring ideas above its station after Casino Royale, the series engaged a director not primarily known for action, Marc Forster of Monster’s Ball. It was a disastrous choice: Forster proved incapable of or unwilling to deliver clarity of plot or action, rendering the movie incomprehensible at times and pretentious at others. Craig barely registers in the role this time, submerged by a grim revenge plot and an utter lack of humour. The movie basically trashes most of what might have made the Bond formula worthwhile, inserting nothing in its place. Ironically, despite everything I just said, it came as close as anything could have done to making me fleetingly nostalgic to revisit the real deal again.

But it soon passed. They’re now gearing up for Bond 23, as it’s currently labeled, doubling down on the great director stakes by hiring Oscar-winner Sam Mendes, with Javier Bardem reportedly playing the villain. Those collaborators seem smart enough to avoid a Forster-fashion screw-up, but perhaps too smart not to over think some aspect or other of it. Actually, now I think of it, it’s also true that as long as I’ve been aware of Bond movies, people have been complaining about them; they’re as persistent and enduring a disappointment as the weather. If they were always pristinely perfect, they couldn’t possibly have lasted this long.

Fashion Piece

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in November 2009)

For the last ten years at least, except when professional requirements or extremes of heat demand otherwise, I’ve almost invariably worn the same thing: a long-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, and a black jacket. I feel comfortable in this outfit, and the repetition eliminates any possibility of my making a bad clothing purchase. People sometimes tease me a bit on the lack of variation, but the way I look isn’t particularly striking in a big city like this. It gets more attention when I go home to Wales though - my young cousin recently said I looked like Dr. Who. This literally isn’t true, but suggests that once you break out of the sweater/open-necked shirt paradigm, one eccentric’s pretty much the same as another.

The September Issue

I suppose that even by thinking consciously about what I wear, even if the nature of the thought never changes, I do in some sense apply a fashion consciousness to myself; it’s obvious enough that many men simply don’t. But I’ve never had any interest in fashion or style beyond that. A Wikipedia article cites the opinion that “fashion is a group of people bouncing ideas off of one another, like any other form of art,” and there’s no doubt those ideas sometimes coalesce into aesthetic greatness, aligned with major societal or other change: the swinging sixties revolution is one I often wish I’d experienced (for numerous reasons). But whatever “ideas” drive the industry now are surely incremental at best. The fashion documentary I best remember is Wim Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes from twenty years ago, which focused on the Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto: it caught the relentless pace of the business pretty well, and Wenders was on to something in his musing about the parallels between the then-new digital technology and Yamamoto’s work, but didn’t take it anywhere too challenging.

The new documentary The September Issue, a behind the scenes look at the workings of Vogue magazine (focusing on the September 2007 edition, the biggest in its history), doesn’t spend much time musing on what it’s all about: by its very existence, it assumes our buy-in. I liked the movie more than I thought I would, simply because it does a pretty good job at evoking the sense of a workplace - something not that common in documentaries (reality-show distortions aside). It may be Vogue, but it’s still just a few floors in a high-rise building, and it functions on repetition and gruntwork more than abstract glamour. As in many environments, you get the sense of endless meetings, usually involving more people than strictly necessary, most of whom change their minds on a dime based on the views of who’s in charge. Contrary to what one might expect from The Devil Wears Prada and suchlike, it doesn’t even seem that stylish – most of the female staff seem to wear just any old thing.

Wintour/Coddington

As most reviewers have pointed out, the film’s primary entertainment comes from the dynamic between legendary editor Anna Wintour – who seems to be focusing mainly on making it through the movie unscathed, and certainly succeeds – and senior creative director Grace Coddington, a former model, now a veteran who’s seen it all and still has the best ideas. Several people in the film, including Coddington, recount how Wintour, earlier than anyone else, saw how celebrity and fashion would cross-pollinate; she put actresses on the cover before her competitors thought of it. But surely this is mixed progress at best, pulling fashion further in the direction of sheer disposability. Near the end of the film, Wintour says “fashion’s not about looking back, it’s always about looking forward,” and it shows in her constant insistence on something new, on avoiding repetition, but beyond that there’s never a sense of what aesthetic principles she’s applying.

With more time for reflection, she’d surely amend that statement anyway, because even I can see how fashion consistently revisits and renews past ideas and trends (this was explicit in the Wenders film, which showed Yamamoto consistently scouring old photographs for inspiration). Coddington seems more aware of this, spawning most of the magazine’s more elaborately staged and posed and accessorized – and objectively beautiful – photo shoots. The September issue’s cover girl is actress Sienna Miller, who no one involved frankly seems that excited about, and whose Rome photo shoot appears to leave everyone underwhelmed. The smartly laconic Coddington keeps her distance there, while doggedly delivering most of the issue’s actual high points (despite Wintour persistently scrapping some of her best work). The women have been working together for decades, and seem to have their mutual territory pretty well staked out, but it’s not clear whether they’re even lukewarm friends.

The Point Of It All

At the end, this leaves you with considerable affection for the institution and its ways. As with all documentaries, you keep thinking of other things it might profitably have covered, but hey, gotta look forward, no point looking back. I enjoyed the glimpses of Wintour’s strategic get-together with a group of retailers, at which one of the group asks if she can’t help with them with their supply chain problems. Nonplussed by the question’s sheer practicality, she deflects it into an abstraction on designers spreading themselves too thin, ending with a cryptic “less is more.” It’s one of the few moments that speaks to the consumer, the great unknown in all this; it’s virtually apocryphal that no normal people buy anything you see in the fashion magazines, and why would they, when an actress will be pilloried for being seen twice in the same outfit? It’s all fluffy fun of course as long as one’s just taking shots at over-exposed actresses, but one has to question an industry whose basic operating principles are so in conflict with notions of conservation, sustainability and rectitude.

I know the images in Vogue in a sense provide an escape from everyday calculations, but the problem is there’s increasingly nothing that isn’t an escape – the news is trashier, people’s grasp on their own finances and entitlements is frothier, political discourse is increasingly disconnected. If fashion were really useful, it would provide a form of counterpoint to all of this, and I know there are individual designers who work more ethically and provocatively, but on the whole, the industry just seems like an airheaded cheerleader for everything that’s gone wrong. And for all her immense focus and staying power, Wintour’s surely been a contributor to this slow decline. Through my own approach to this of course, I figured out the new paradigm some time ago..you know, I might even throw my hat in the ring for her job when she finally moves on.

Levels of reality

Writing about Christopher Nolan’s Inception last year, I said this: “… the fact of it being about dreams, ultimately, is arbitrary. With a few tweaks to the set-up, it could have been about parallel worlds, or a computer-generated matrix, or a fantasy taking place in the mind of a madman.” This came to mind recently as I watched, for the first time, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 World on a Wire, which has strong thematic similarities with Nolan’s film, and just about no other similarities with it whatsoever.

World on a Wire

Fassbinder’s film is set around a corporate “Simulacron” project, a computer-generated environment based closely on our own, but susceptible to manipulation of all kinds; it’s primarily intended as a purely scientific exercise for the common good, but rapidly becomes subject to potential misuse by a steel corporation seeking to improve its forecasts of future demand. The technology’s chief developer dies in mysterious circumstances; his unenthusiastic successor, Stiller, is plagued by odd events, such as a security chief who vanishes into thin air in front of his eyes, and who no one else then claims to remember. Even from the little I’ve said so far, genre fans could probably guess the direction of things: what if this is all a creation within another Simulacron, directed by a further level of reality up above?

World on a Wire was made for TV, and largely disappeared from view for a long time (the 1999 Hollywood flop The 13th Floor was based on the same material); it resurfaced last year, and is now on DVD. It received an enthusiastic welcome back, based in particular on being so clearly, as The New York Times put it: “an artifact of its moment. The clothes, the cars and the furniture are richly, even extravagantly, redolent of the Euro-’70s, as is the anxious tremor of political and sexual unease that vibrates (along with a sinister, Muzak-y score) underneath the opulent surface.” Even the most visionary science fiction, of course, betrays the aesthetic limitations of when it was created – try counting the number of movies in which the pilots of galaxy-spanning spaceships stare at poky little LED computer screens. As if anticipating this, Fassbinder as noted makes little attempt to disguise that this is 70’s Germany; the main indicia of “futurism” consist of items we’d now call (and maybe even then would have called) tacky – dig those orange telephones!

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

You might think this would limit the film’s impact, but actually it’s the opposite – the specificity is a guarantee of emotional investment; whereas Inception exists on generalized paranoia having little to do with real dreams, let alone one’s real waking life, World on a Wire is firmly rooted in the grim grind of trying to hack your way through a drab adulthood. Many of the characters are basically awful, smarmy hacks, trapped in their ugly niches. The Simulacron is an awesome game-changing technology, but also a largely redundant duplicate of what’s already known. In one scene, Stiller programs a duplicate of his boss into there, except that he has him at the centre of a goofy song-and-dance routine. It’s very cute, but obviously hardly indicative of top-flight scientific focus. In a couple of scenes, the film shows us a bar where the performer vamps and mimes to old Dietrich songs – a more low-grade application of the Simulacron concept, but also summing up how the country remains trapped in ancient ideology and iconography.

I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned Fassbinder in this space, but if so, it’s not because of lack of familiarity with him. When I was first seriously exploring movies in the UK in the early 80’s, he was one of the most easily accessible European directors, both in cinemas and on TV. A lot of this was due to sheer productivity – his career lasted only some sixteen years, from 1966 to 1982 (he died of a drug overdose, aged just 37), but in that time he generated over forty titles. I saw a good chunk of them back then (the most famous include The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Merchant of Four Seasons and Fear Eats The Soul), but I confess I’ve rarely gone back to them since. Fassbinder was a prodigious chronicler of his time and place, excavating multiple strands of hypocrisy, corruption and predatory behaviour, but also enormously tender at times; he loved and sometimes reveled in melodrama and kitsch, but could also be piercingly analytical and abstract. Whereas watching, say, Eric Rohmer (someone else I discovered around the same time, who’s been a much more consistent presence in my viewing since then) requires an acquired technique, watching Fassbinder feels more like an exercise in jumping on and not falling off, despite the beast’s constant efforts to throw you. Anyway, I think I encountered most of his films before I had the capacity to hold on to much of anything, and was consequently a bit overwhelmed.

Call to action

I might do better with Fassbinder now though. I’d also recently watched, more or less through random selection, his 1981 film Lola; it’s probably not generally ranked among his best, but I found it quite stunning. Largely set in the unpromising-sounding milieu of post-war building permits and reconstruction projects, it depicts the worlds of official deal-making and propriety and of underground vice merging and then intertwining, not so much anticipating a new Germany as one that learns how to lie more effectively about itself. The film has a remarkable dream-like quality at times, suggesting the country’s difficulty in pulling itself into some kind of modernity, or even reality.

A scene in Lola depicts an official buying a television in a stab at being more tuned-in, to be confronted with the reality of having just one channel, which doesn’t even start up until 8 pm. The Simulacron sounds like the other end of the technological spectrum, and yet in Fassbinder’s vision of it, it feels constricted in much the same way, like crumbs falling from a table you can sense or dream about, but were born too soon to access. One of the most surprising things about World on a Wire is its relatively optimistic ending, although it’s an optimism that depends on keeping us in the dark about a lot of things. Fassbinder was no denier of progress; anyone who worked that feverishly would have to have been an optimist of some kind. But comparing World on a Wire to Inception (or any of its high-concept big-budget cousins) underlines the vapidity of what passes today as visionary. Even if we were programmed from up above, we couldn’t be much more passive and ineffectual in the face of our escalating problems. If being aware of that possibility is good for anything, it ought to be as a call to action, not as a further excuse for veg-out fantasy. But maybe all we ever really wanted to achieve within our level of reality was to put those wretched 70’s fashions behind us.

Major League

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2009)

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about professional sports. I’ve been to a few games, mostly just for the experience. Hockey to me is just a monotone blur. I can grasp basketball marginally better (I guess it’s easier to follow a ball than a puck), but my appreciation remains entirely superficial. Sorry for succumbing to a cliché, but the two baseball games I attended remain the longest two weeks I ever daydreamed through. I was never a sports fan as a child in the UK either, but soccer’s relative flow, simplicity and integration chime more with me than (as I see it) the fragmented, weirdly arbitrary rhythms of North American team sports.

Sports Machine

Still, to each his own. The more objectively interesting question is whether the huge sports machine is at this point a net benefit. I mean, it’s a rallying point, a focus for conversation and camaraderie, a generator of economic activity (although I don’t know to what extent it actually generates new wealth rather than drastically reallocating it). But even true believers seem to think something got lost under the enormous weight of money, corporatization, mediatization, standardization. Really, if the whole major league infrastructure vanished into thin air, and had to be replaced with something more organic and simple and community-based, would anyone miss the old machine after a year or two?

More and more, I see celebrity gossip and scandal-of-the-day reporting and, yes, sports as potentially insidious, soaking up our (mostly limited) capacities for engagement, diluting our inclination for action, blunting our capacity of how the whole sorry ship is drifting off course. My purpose here isn’t to argue for a drab and joyless world; indeed, I wonder how much genuine pleasure we take from much of what preoccupies us. I mean, from what I’m told, being a big-time sports fan is time-consuming, potentially very expensive, and if you subscribe to the whole accompanying beer/chips/burgers culture, not much good for your health. The keepers of the faith might say, well, it’s no worse than sitting round watching movies, but to me that depends on the movies, and why you watch them. I’ll come back to that.

Sugar

Whatever one thinks of all this, major-league sports deserves some grudging, logistical admiration for the immense dynasties and structures and secular cathedrals built upon essentially banal activity. The new film Sugar begins in the Dominican Republic, within a local feeder organization for the Kansas City Knights (which I understand to be fictional, but you’d never know it). There’s little work or opportunity otherwise; these scouting centres create local heroes, with the possibility of huge wealth at the end of the road. At the same time, they’re ruthless, littering the landscape with any number of men who got a step or two up the ladder, but no further.

Miguel Santos, nicknamed Sugar, makes it onto the first step, into training in Arizona, and then onto the next, to a minor league team in Iowa, where he’s billeted on a farm with an elderly couple. Sugar speaks no English; he’s a strange representative for “America’s pastime,” even more so for supposed heartland centres like Iowa or Kansas. But that’s what it takes to feed the beast. The film expertly milks the situation’s inherent comedy: Sugar and his equally bemused fellow recruits eat French toast every day, because that’s the only thing they know how to order in English, and then he complains on the phone home that American food is really sweet. Gradually he finds his feet, picks up more English, makes moves on local girls, starts sensing the possibility of triumph. Meanwhile, other prospects lose their game and get sent home, sealing off the dream forever.

I won’t go further, but this is an engaging film. The co-writers and directors, Anna Fleck and Ryan Boden, previously made Half Nelson, about the relationship between a drug-addicted teacher and one of his pupils. It was less compelling to me than to many reviewers, but still had many virtues, such as Ryan Gosling’s resourceful performance (for which he won an Oscar nomination), and the intriguing attempt to portray his malaise as a response to thwarted liberal idealism. Sugar follows that film’s low-key, observational approach, but the geographic and thematic canvas is quite a bit wider. It’s more conventional in some ways: there’s not much that strikes you as distinctive about its technique or the perspective on the material. The virtues belong more to what I think of as cinema’s anthropological aspect: even if the view it portrays isn’t entirely accurate or balanced, the window is still valuable and provocative, and leaves your engagement with the world a little fuller when you go out than when you went in. This, I submit, could not be said for parking yourself before whatever’s on TSN tonight.

False Promise

The film can’t possibly resolve the overhanging question – is all of this for better or for worse? The system flows money into a poor country (although based on some numbers floated in the movie, it sounds like the Dominicans might do well to receive 10% of what a homegrown college prospect gets), and it does create possibilities. But most of it turns out a false promise, leaving a trail of disruption – people end up somewhere they wouldn’t be, away from the people they’d be with, carrying the weight of squandered possibilities. But then, better to have loved and lost…

Fleck and Boden don’t overstate the point, but the film evokes debates about whether foreign aid, no matter how well intentioned, tends to create structures of dependency, pushing away any possibility of self-sufficiency: Sugar’s sending money home to his family is a recurring image here. But these debates can’t help seeming theoretical when you look at the gaping needs. I know a man who says he supports 31 people back home in Zimbabwe. 31! And I’m not talking about someone who makes bank-chief money; I’m not even sure it’s bank-teller money.

Zimbabwe may be an extreme example, but when you focus on that kind of thing, the global economy is less about the mythical melting pot than about strange and inherently sad displacements. Sugar provides snapshots of how it’s possible to live, very basically and functionally, in the US shadow economy, barely ever needing a word of English, as long as you don’t hit anyone’s official radar. And ultimately, those shadow economies do more to support the frail communities back home than the unreliable dreams of the big time. If you ask me, major-league doesn’t do a whole lot for them, and I’m not sure it ultimately does a whole lot for any of us.