Walking dead

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in March 2008)

Martin McDonagh has written several acclaimed plays. I saw one of them, The Pillowman, here in its Canadian Stage production, and it was a scorcher. He made a short film, won an Oscar for it, and has moved on now to make a first feature, In Bruges. Rather like many of David Mamet’s films, it suggests McDonagh doesn’t view his cinema career as an extension of his theatre one particularly, but as a necessarily more lowbrow endeavour. To me it smells of condescension (although maybe we should withhold judgment, and view this as a set of training wheels).

Highly generic, although lively and more artful than it seems, it has Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of Irish hitmen sent by their evil boss (a miscast and over-compensating Ralph Fiennes) to cool off in the Belgian city and wait for orders. Gleeson gets to work lapping up the culture; Farrell’s more about the beer and babes. It’s a little bit violent all the way along, and then it gets really violent. As I’ve said before (and I apologize to regular readers for this), assassins are so over-represented in the annals of cinematic employment that any director taking on the subject all but disqualifies himself (is there a female example?) from serious consideration (and no, I’m not overlooking No Country for Old Men). Yep, In Bruges, for all its skills, need be considered about as seriously as boxer shorts on a dog.

Diary of the Dead

Which many might think still puts it comfortably ahead of Diary of the Dead, seriousness-wise. George Romero is at the very least a cult figure, and his zombie movies in particular have always had pockets of critical support, but how far can admiration for this stuff possibly stretch? Master filmwriter Robin Wood, for one, thinks pretty darn far – his article in the current Film Comment calls Romero a “great and audacious filmmaker” and finds brilliant elements in the new film.

I might be halfway there. The new film, forming a completely separate story rather than a continuation of the four previous works, focuses on a group of students, who take off in an RV, headed for their various homes or else just to take off, as reports start to circulate of the dead coming back to life and feasting on the living. They’re mostly film students, and Romero structures his picture as an assembly of material shot through a DV camera one of them perpetually wields, supplemented with footage from the Internet, security cameras, and so forth. It’s not Romero’s fault that as he worked on the film Brian De Palma was simultaneously applying a similar approach to the Iraq war in Redacted, nor that Cloverfield was doing almost the same thing as well; still, it inevitably undercuts the technique’s impact.

There’s a lot of conversation about the ethics of the student’s continual filming – arguments about whether this records reality or distorts it and suchlike – and this intersects with the film’s broader theme of unreliable media: we see how the official network version of one of the initial attacks differs from the full version (secretly uploaded onto the Internet). Information is withheld throughout – the film stays with the students on the road, with relatively few other people in sight; they download information or pick up news in bits and pieces, but neither they nor we ever really know how far things have gone.

Collapse of Everything

Even the zombies aren’t as visible as in the previous films, and the kids figure them out pretty quickly, so it’s hard to focus on them as being specifically threatening or “evil.” Instead it always feels – and this version perhaps is more clearly and eerily metaphorical than any of its predecessors– that we’re watching an embodiment of the big unknown future upheaval that will force a reinvention of everything. As Wood points out, the films have always systematically demolished central building blocks of our society and worldview: the nuclear family, consumerism (in Dawn of the Dead, my own favourite of the quintet), the military, capitalism. In Diary, it’s perhaps more generalized and thus more despairing than its predecessors – the whole damn thing, it seems, just can’t be sustained, and maybe shouldn’t be.

I do wish that Romero had a little more finesse in some respects. The new film has a lot of over-emphatic dialogue and a hackneyed approach to some of the characters. Some of the specific notions – such as a lame scene of a damsel in distress pursued by a mummy being played out twice, once within the student film they’re shooting at the start and later for real – are distractingly clunky. But you have to take the director for what he is – he’s not a minute craftsman but, rather, it seems, a brilliant mess of high and low impulses, serving as a conduit (maybe in large part unknowingly) for some of our great under-examined fault lines.

And as Manohla Dargis pointed out in her New York Times review, there’s a humane aspect to his work here. At the end of the film (which can’t deliver anything even half-approaching closure in the usual sense), a character asks if we’re worth saving, tying the question specifically to more Internet footage showing redneck abuse of the zombies. There’s a link there, perhaps, to the US’ mistreatment of enemy captives and terrorist suspects, and how that’s undermined the country’s place in the world. Do such atrocities and transgressions, step-by-step and drip-by-drip, erode our existential credit and prepare the way for the collapse of everything?

The Band’s Visit

I was careless on the day we went to see The Band’s Visit, and had it in my mind it started at 2.25 rather than 2.40, so that we missed the first couple of minutes. In the old days I would have called off the whole thing, but I’m much more philosophical now. After twenty minutes or so, I was thinking it was a shame not to have a beverage and a snack (once realizing our mistake, we’d swept past the concessions) so I ran out to get us something and of course, life being was it is, had to stand through a change-making process that took as long as some public company audits.

There will Be Blood, to cite one example, is an hour longer, but if I’d missed even half a minute, I would have (and should have) been bothered. I got lucky, because it seems to me that any random fifteen minutes of The Band’s Visit suffices to extrapolate almost perfectly to the whole. Not to the exact details of course, but to the overall aftertaste, which is pleasant but hardly rich. It’s about an Egyptian band inadvertently stranded in a deadly dull Israeli town. It’s nice, but I might have wished for someone to pull a gun, or get eaten.

Stung!

This year’s Oscars seemed mostly successful to me in one respect at least – they rewarded an unusual number of winners associated throughout their careers with enterprising or at least “different” films, nicely expanding the quirk factor of the “Oscar club.” I’m thinking in particular of Steve McQueen, Spike Jonze, Alfonso Cuaron, Matthew McConaughey, The Great Beauty’s director Paolo Sorrentino, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and, indeed, Brad Pitt – it sounds as much like the career tribute list from a prestigious mountain resort festival as a traditional roll-call of industry royalty. Sorrentino and McQueen aside (perhaps), I doubt any of these won for their best work; many of them didn’t even win in the “ideal” category given how we usually think of them (Pitt won as a producer rather than an actor; McQueen and Jonze won as producer and writer rather than as directors) but such caveats have applied since the early days of the awards (Orson Welles, for instance, won only for writing Citizen Kane rather than for directing and acting in it). Along with the (based on recent years) novelty of giving the top award to a serious film rather than a piece of fluff, and avoiding the much-anticipated blunder of over-awarding Jennifer Lawrence so early in her career, I’d say it hit most of the marks that will matter in the long run (and it’s hard to say none of it does, if only because the first line of the obituary for all the people I mentioned will now be amended to include the term “Oscar-winning”).

Seeing Sting

One of the less impressive winners was Twenty Feet from Stardom in the documentary category – it’s a very smooth and pleasant piece of work, but in the great scheme of reality-based filmmaking, pretty fluffy. Still, ever since I saw the film, some reason keeps popping up to think back to it. The night before the Oscars, we went to the Paul Simon/Sting concert at the Air Canada Centre, and one of the documentary’s participants Jo Lawry was in his back-up band, often to very powerful effect. Later that week, we watched a PBS recording of a performance he did in New York last year of songs from his forthcoming musical The Last Ship, and she was in that too.

It must seem from this that I’m a big Sting fan, but that’s not really true – the main draw of the concert was Paul Simon (or at least the two-for-one aspect), and The Last Ship was just a coincidence. I mean, I own some Police albums, and one of his solo releases, but that’s not so much among the 38 days of music on the iPod. And I know what my friend Pete meant when, in response to a message I sent him after the concert, he said: “I may be a 46 year old office clerk but I’m still too punk for Sting.” I mean, he is. And it sort of makes me feel bad I’m not.

The Last Ship

Only sort of though, because I guess I’m less interested now in Sting’s deficiencies than in his longevity and the diversity of his biography. For one thing, he used to be, if not punk, then at least someone highly compatible with the cool end of the classroom, at least when I was there in the Regatta de Blanc days. It was widely known he’d been a teacher for a few years, so his image benefited from such close association with, and transcendence of, the mundanity we were living day to day; he was also prominently featured around that time in the movie of Quadrophenia, another iconic expression of rebellion, and in some other edgy cinema. I think the Police probably became less interesting as they became more famous though, and although his solo career has exhibited plenty of craft, he’s never had the intuitive grace of, well, Paul Simon. As he settled into the typical elder statesman groove of tours, reunions, benefits, cameos and so forth, he’s been like the well-preserved wallpaper in the part of the room no one ever visits.

The Last Ship is set in the declining days of the shipbuilding industry in the Newcastle area, and if not autobiographical in its narrative, draws heavily on his memories of growing up in that environment, with its surrounding culture and rituals and dialects. On the PBS broadcast he talks several times about how his main motivation when growing up was just to get out of that life, but since he achieved that about as fully as anyone’s ever achieved anything, it seems he can now afford to be magnanimous, even affectionate about it. Of the songs he performed, some are instantly forgettable, but a handful are potential crowd-pleasers, with the right defiant swagger. Whether they’ll be enough to sustain a whole Broadway show, who can tell.

Novak and Minnelli

In the Air Canada concert, he performed songs from the span of his career, and interacted beautifully with Paul Simon; it was the kind of show where everything feels impeccably worked out and well-rehearsed, yielding a very high quality of musicianship. As I already conceded, Simon has much the stronger catalogue, but that didn’t seem to matter so much on this particular night. A woman behind me, who seemed to be a fan of Simon more than of Sting, consistently and loudly identified songs like Diamonds on the Souls of her Shoes within about two bars (not so tough actually), telling her companion (and everyone else in range) how much she loved the song, and then continuing either to talk about her love of it or else to ill-advisedly sing along for its entire duration. This seemed to me a prime example of the affliction that’s often identified now, the chronic inability to submit to experiencing the moment. This was prominent at the Oscars where, on the one hand, presenters gushed the usual waffle about the magic of cinema, its life changing quality and so on, and yet the main preoccupation of the ceremony seemed to be selfies and other disposable bits of celebrity interaction. I guess if Hollywood can’t live fully in its own prime moment, why should anyone else?

Another aspect of this was the mockery (on the show itself) of Liza Minnelli and (everywhere else it seemed) of Kim Novak, sad in several respects, not least for how you know for sure that most of those doing the mocking have little sense of what the two of them achieved; we may all be relative office clerks, but we’re too punk to dig up some basic empathy and interest. The life story ought to be worth infinitely more than the funny tweet, but I guess that takes too long, when you’re living twenty feet from absolute banality.

Movie diary

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2005)

For me, watching movies is a matter of considerable planning and strategy. I have an ongoing aspiration to be someone who can comment at least semi-articulately at any given time on almost any notable film, as though the encyclopedia of world cinema were lodged prominently in my cortex. Given the number of pages in the encyclopedia, this is an impossible object, involving not only seeing the major new releases (I’m using “major” here to denote artistic interest rather than commercial prominence) but also constantly visiting and revisiting films from the past. One could easily watch three or four films a day and barely crack the surface of this task; since I have a full time job and a wife and a dog, such a commitment is clearly impossible. So as a compromise, I’ve long aimed to watch a film a day on average, from all sources.

Movies all the time

As I write, I’m doing rather well on this year’s target – I’m actually ten or so films ahead. I can’t fully explain how this happened, although it helped that I acquired a laptop that plays DVD’s and I thus have additional flexibility in cramming movies into otherwise unproductive time. For example, on a recent trip to my parents’ house in Wales, I watched The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in bed across a succession of early mornings. That aside, the average week might take in two or three new films in the major chains, a couple at the Cinematheque or other repertory venues, with the balance coming on DVD or video, usually in fifteen minute or half hour chunks here and there. Some people can’t watch films this way, and I wouldn’t say it’s ideal either, but for me it’s a matter of logistical necessity.

It’s a little puzzling that I’m watching so many movies this year, because I’ve been spreading myself potentially a bit thin. Work takes up nine or ten hours a day. I do these weekly columns of course, and I also wrote an article in the current issue of CineAction. I’ve also been writing a novel (you’ll probably never hear of it again) which is nearly at 50,000 words. I spend half an hour a day studying French and have been exercising diligently. My wife and I eat out at least twice a week. I’ve been socializing more than in years, in some weeks scheduling something for virtually ever night. I’ve read more books so far this year than I usually do (albeit mostly books about cinema, which I was trying for a while to avoid), as well as numerous magazines and papers and the ever-growing roster of websites I visit regularly. And I did all my share of the dog walking and my other designated household duties. And much else. Before you ask, no, I don’t sleep a lot, and it’s getting to be less.

Money in the Bank

You can probably see from this that I don’t spend much time doing what people term “nothing.” Of course, some might say that seven movies a week is a big investment in doing nothing, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. Most of my days are like relays, the baton constantly being passed from one activity to the next. But I don’t think (not that it’s completely in my power to judge) this makes me one of those highly-strung perpetual motion types. I walk fast, sure, and I make decisions fast, but most of the time I feel pretty laidback. In the middle of this hurricane of activities, I like to claim there’s a peaceful eye.

And not the least of the reasons for this is that I’m on a real movie high this year. I think I may have seen a better quality of films this year than I ever have before. Virtually everything I watch is just thrilling. In the last few weeks alone, for instance, I’ve watched films by Bunuel, Dreyer, Resnais, Kurosawa, Antonioni and (courtesy of MoviePix) seven by Hitchcock. This is all like money in the bank. Many of the new movies have been good and diverting – the six hour The Best of Youth, the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, the German Head-On caught at the Goethe Institute (unfortunately that one didn’t get a wider release).

Just as you sometimes appreciate simpler food as a contrast to a series of high-end meals, I’m also finding heightened pleasure in the second-tier films I’ve been watching. For example, I watched Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan for the first time in twenty years. The film looks cumbersome and rather laborious now, and the progressiveness of its sexual politics is certainly compromised. But the central axis of a bored housewife breaking out of her prison through identification with another more self-defined woman still seems fresh and exciting. It’s a film in which every element seems culturally and politically intriguing.

I actually went to see Monster in Law, for Jane Fonda of course, and although I could certainly see all the weaknesses and idiocies that some critics were so vituperative about, I regarded the movie with general goodwill (any review I might have written would have been somewhat wet and bloodless, which is why I didn’t bother with it). Fortunately for my future prospects in this space, I found there is a limit to this wellbeing, and I reached it with Paul Haggis’ Crash. The film received some terrific reviews (The New Yorker thought it the best American movie since Mystic River) and some damning ones that saw it as an absurd preachy fake (albeit well-orchestrated). That’s pretty much my own view.

Valid Investment

And yet, watching Crash was a scintillating experience, and my wife and I discussed it solidly for at least half an hour afterwards. With so much to choose from, there’s no excuse for anyone watching a movie that’s at least stimulating and interesting. And the network of decisions and inputs and compromises and tensions underlying a failed or unsatisfying movie can be at least as interesting (and often more so) as those underlying  a conventionally successful one of limited ambition. It seems to me that everyone would acknowledge that on some level, and yet given the choice, I’m always surprised and dismayed how people choose to opt for something simple and reassuring, without concern for how this marks them as puppets of mass commerce.

When I was growing up in Wales, I latched on to films fairly early as a central means of self-definition – I desperately wanted to transcend my surroundings, to be the kind of person who could get out, and cinema helped me acquire the expanded parameters to accomplish that. I suppose I feel more settled and fully defined now, and yet every time I watch a movie, or rewatch a good one, I feel something meaningful is added. Chasing movies may sometimes be arduous, but I’ve never seriously doubted the validity of the investment. I wish more people realized the richness of what’s available to them, but I also know how much I’m ignorant of in areas I don’t pursue. I wonder, truly, if I could expand my range of activities a bit, if I could get by on half an hour less sleep a day...

Surviving the plague

Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club (still in theatres after several months, and also available now in other formats) is up for several Oscars this year, including for best picture, and by the time this article appears may have won at least two of them, most likely for best actor and supporting actor. I didn’t get round to watching the film until last week, having felt it had “wait for cable” written all over it. Basically, I think that was right. The film’s not dull or irritating, but there’s little advantage to actually watching it over just reading about what it depicts; quite the opposite, because the approximately two hour running time would allow you to absorb a much wider slab of history than the film provides. Put another way, on this occasion the film’s pictures aren’t in any way worth a well-chosen thousand words.

Dallas Buyers Club

Set in the late eighties, it’s a portrayal of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), a heterosexual who becomes ill with AIDS at a time when it’s barely understood except as a gay disease. Given thirty days to live, he bets everything on AZT, still in highly controlled trials at the time but perceived as a potential wonder drug, and bribes a hospital employee to smuggle it out to him; instead of curing him, the drug nearly overwhelms his metabolism. A renegade doctor in Mexico brings him back from the brink, opening his eyes both to better treatment options, and to the money-making potential of smuggling unapproved drugs into the US; later on, this leads to founding the buyers’ club, an attempt to finesse the law by selling monthly memberships rather than directly dealing in drugs. Business booms for a while, but the authorities are soon climbing all over him, in what you might see as a typically bureaucratic obsession with saving desperate and dying people from acting on their own risk assessments.

As it happened, it worked out well that I’d delayed watching Dallas Buyers Club for a while, because I ended up seeing it in the same week as the recent documentary How to Survive a Plague, which is currently showing on SuperChannel. Constructed mainly from archival footage, that film covers much the same period and concerns, depicting the evolving fight against a slow-moving Food & Drug Administration for access to treatments. Although it highlights some pivotal individuals, How to Survive a Plague is most distinguished by its portrait of a community, united in unimaginable loss and fear, but also at times deeply divided about strategy and tactics.

The broader story

In contrast, Dallas Buyers Club is very much the story of one man, and even if it’s a broadly true one (as usual, people have raised various quibbles about accuracy), the narrative barely touches on the broader story of AIDS in America. That is to say, just as a film like Cry Freedom chose to tell the story of apartheid by concentrating on the travails of a white liberal, and relegating Steve Biko to a supporting character in his own story, Dallas Buyers Club barely has a gay person in sight, except as background extras and bit players. The main exception is Rayon, a transgender woman played by Jared Leto, who becomes his business partner, using her contacts to help him drum up business. Leto is said to be a near-lock for the Oscar, which I don’t really understand; it may be a capable physical transformation (for one thing, both actors lost a significant amount of weight) but Rayon always seems like a collection of traits rather than a fully realized person. Still, it’s not as if the film is any more artful in its heterosexual characters, primarily embodied by a thuddingly rendered opposition between a good doctor (Jennifer Garner) and her FDA tool of a superior.

The conception of Rayon seems like a throwback to a time, not so long ago, when a straight actor wouldn’t play a gay person without heavy coding and signposting to avoid any confusion about fact and fiction. One of the film’s more interesting aspects is its depiction of a Texas subculture where homophobia isn’t just prevalent, but seems to be a key component of social discourse. Ron becomes estranged from his former crowd, and later runs into a former buddy in a grocery store; the friend seems inclined to take a stab at burying the hatchet, but the way he chooses to do it is by throwing a random slur at the nearest deviant in sight (who happens to be Rayon). As with the seemingly rampant sex, drugs, drink and gambling that seems to define the group, it’s not a stretch to wonder what underlying emptiness and identity confusion underlies such obsessions (according to Wikipedia, the real life Woodroof may have been bisexual, which if so seems like a regrettable omission, and hard to justify except as an instance of running away from complexity).

Radical treatments

The film is most appealing when it’s being wayward and hard-headed – and it does a relatively good job of avoiding sentimentality: Woodroof’s initial antipathy to homosexuals (whereby the writers allow themselves to lay out a mini encyclopedia of colourful euphemisms) dissipates somewhat, but it remains more about the money and his own survival than about altruism. There are moments when you might think you glimpse the chaotic darkness of a 70’s movie, but they never last very long (in one of the best moments, Woodroof perks up at the sight of a girl among his typically all-male clientele, because it’s a chance for mutual beyond-risk sex). McConaughey’s performance is strong and unfussy, but seems well within the comfort zone he’s established with his recent performances (which admittedly is a pretty electrified zone). But already I find I’m running out of things to say here; the film, basically, just isn’t very stimulating.

It seems to me that radical subjects demand at least somewhat radical treatments. As How to Survive a Plague passionately depicts, for some communities, AIDS comprehensively rewrote everything. Our society has an entirely decadent approach to death and suffering – some theoretical losses of life, such as those that might result from vaguely foreseeable terrorist attacks, are worth any amount of money and energy to prevent; other infinitely more foreseeable ones, like the toll of daily poverty and malnutrition, aren’t judged as a practical matter to be worth caring about at all. Given that health care is perpetually afflicted by ridiculous bureaucracy and, basically, executive theft, there’s no reason to think the next public wellness crisis will be addressed any more humanely and flexibly than previous ones (we should likely view obesity and general slothfulness as such a crisis, which isn’t being addressed at all). In all of this, you can always find individual stories of virtue, but they’re as likely to distract and distort as they are to illuminate.

May movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 2007)

In Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, a husband must put his wife into a residential facility after 44 years together, when she starts to develop Alzheimer’s; she’s initially too lucid for her new surroundings, but finds a way of adapting that only seems to accelerate her decline, and widens the gulf between them, until he sees the inevitability of things. Julie Christie is utterly luminous as Fiona, conveying the jagged contours of her disintegrating consciousness so precisely that it’s as if she were drawing a map; Gordon Pinsent as her husband is almost as moving. The film is, by its nature, depressing, but in a way that’s emotionally true and eloquent. It’s based on a short story by Alice Munro, and always feels distinctly literary – living in usually snow-bound isolation, the couple read poetry to each other and each scene is precisely investigated and crafted. At times, given the ugliness of the disease and its consequences, I found it a little too pristine - for example, we hardly sense the full misery of the facility’s dreaded second floor, where patients are moved after a certain stage of decline. In particular perhaps, the ending – turning on what would have to be an incredibly wrenching, turbulent compromise, overemphasizes structural tidiness, irony and perseverance. But it’s difficult to blame a director as young and enterprising as Polley for retaining a certain measure of idealism in this.

The Valet

At the other end of the directorial spectrum, in so many senses, is Francis Veber, who turns 70 this year. Over the years he’s perfected his M.O. – dreadful, garish comedies that seem lost in time. The latest of these, The Valet, is about a wealthy businessman who’s sleeping with a gorgeous supermodel; when his wife gets suspicious, he pays a lowly parking valet to move in with his girlfriend. No pesky nuances and shadings in Veber-land – each character is allowed a couple of traits at the most, and a scene doesn’t so much lead into the next as collapse into it. And Veber’s handling of actors resembles some kind of perverse laboratory – on this occasion drawing out the worst-ever performance from the great Daniel Auteuil. Like several other Veber movies, it’ll probably be remade by Hollywood within a few years, and then it’ll be even worse!    

I may have had a bit of a crush on Adrienne Shelly after her first two films, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust, both directed by Hal Hartley. Hartley seemed uniquely weird and promising at the time, and Shelly was a spiky, accessible local goddess. Well, Hal Hartley lost his inspiration in a big way – his new movie Fay Grim is a sad spectacle. And Adrienne Shelly is dead – murdered in her building last November by a construction worker, reportedly after an argument about keeping the noise down. She’d been barely visible for the last fifteen years, taking lesser roles in lesser films. But she was working on becoming a director, and when she died she’d just completed her first feature film, Waitress. She also wrote it and plays a supporting role (treating herself quite unflatteringly). 

Waitress

This background makes an inherently quite poignant film even more so; it’s surprisingly successful, and would no doubt have opened up further possibilities for Shelly. Keri Russell plays a waitress and ace baker of pies, stuck in a lousy marriage to a self-absorbed control freak, secretly hoarding away money to plan her escape. She finds herself pregnant, then falls in love with her gynecologist. Meanwhile, her two colleagues at the diner tinker with their own lives.

Sounds pretty hokey, and I didn’t even mention Andy Griffith, playing the owner of the diner, a curmudgeon with a heart of, well, you know. The movie is studiedly mild – nothing in it bites as much as it might have – but there’s a lot of grit and clear thinking baked in there too. The movie focuses on the circumscribed choices of normal working women, leading them to make decisions which even their best friends might view as settling for less, or morally questionable; but when you’re stuck in the same place with the same people, how much room for manoeuvre do you have? (no doubt there’s something here of a transplanted metaphor for Shelly’s own experience). The movie treats its men generously – even Jeremy Sisto’s portrayal of the wretched husband is unusually subtle – while remaining resolute that this isn’t their story. And the ending feels about right, if you can look past the tragic fact that the two-year old girl in the last scene is played by Shelly’s own daughter. Her ending was too freakish to constitute much of an emblem for the continuing challenges of women, and yet the echoes are awfully unsettling.

Spider-Man 3

It’s hard to write a review of Spider-Man 3 that doesn’t simply recycle dozens of past reviews of underwhelming Hollywood blockbusters – the movie doesn’t even have the panache to fail with any great distinction. At least it’s not one of those mechanical, cold creations where you doze from one explosion to the next; in fact the film’s greater failing is that it’s so determined to continue the emphasis of its two predecessors on Peter Parker’s character, on the emotional contours of being Spiderman. In practice though this only means that we go through yet another round with his girlfriend, his former best friend who now hates him, his wise old aunt, and his ever-present obsession with the death of his wise old uncle, all without generating anything new. The set-up of the villains is laboured, and here too the movie seems to be suffering from an imagination deficit. And finally, it’s yet another big-budget movie that pushes digital technology into the realm of counter-productivity – the sense of artificiality is pervasive, if only because it’s so clear how none of the actors are sweating, or suffering, or straining (it’s largely the commitment to these qualities that made Casino Royale so relatively effective). Naturally, it enjoyed the biggest opening weekend of all time.

Jindabyne, directed by Ray Lawrence, is an intriguing Australian drama, treating some familiar family dynamics very deftly, and then ventilating the film’s texture with a highly specific sense of place. It’s a small, mostly barren looking New South Wales town, built on the haunting shores of a former settlement that’s now submerged beneath a lake. It’s initially odd that the film’s main focus is a couple played by Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, neither attempting Australian accents, but their obvious (largely unexplained) otherness generates some useful resonances. Byrne’s character goes away with some buddies on a weekend fishing trip; they find a dead body floating in a river, but keep fishing for a few days before reporting it; when this comes out, the men are pilloried in their community, and the couple’s fragile marriage almost collapses. The film weaves a very diverse tapestry, and might have generated greater overall complexity and after-effect with less tidy resolutions to some of its strands, but it’s alluringly dense with instability, foreboding and danger.

High Life

Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is the favourite to win this year’s foreign language film Oscar, and as many have mentioned, such an award would be a happy throwback to the days when the mega-auteur Fellini was a frequent contender and winner (he took it home four times). The film places us in the world of Jep Gambardella, a journalist and long-ago novelist who lives in the heart of Rome (in a gorgeous apartment overlooking the Colosseum), even in his mid-sixties still getting up in the afternoon and partying until dawn (it’s unclear how he funds his lifestyle, as he seems to work very little). It’s a dazzling life, filled with heightened experiences and encounters, and an abundance of sex, in one of the world’s most privileged and overwhelming settings; at the same time, it’s the same places, same people, same variations on what he’s been doing for decades, while the possibilities for greater achievements fall away.

The Great Beauty

There’s a lot of death in the film, literally and figuratively, but then there’s a lot of everything in it – it runs nearly two and a half hours (and on this occasion it’s hard to leave during the closing credits too), and it would take nearly that long to disentangle everything Sorrentino crams in there. Sometimes, he embraces the whip-cracking ringmaster tradition, opening up the city’s secret places, orchestrating frenzied parties with copious side orders of debauchery, plopping down giraffes and flamingoes, staging absurd conceptual art pieces, and peppering his cast with extremely short or extremely old people, or befuddled representatives of the cloth. At several points, Jep evokes the concept of writing a novel about nothing, whereby Sorrentino tempts the audience to label his film as such while actually making it a richer and more tangible something than any other work you’re likely to encounter.

But, as in Fellini films like La Strada and 8 ½, there’s also the gorgeously outfitted boredom of it all, the existential angst, pivoting here on the magnificently resonant actor Toni Servillo, with his inherent ability to project depths and unexpressed calculations. The character is an unashamed artificiality – I can imagine lots of people watching the film and finding no way into it, and Sorrentino virtually dares us to judge him an elitist, even condescending filmmaker. At one point, Jep visits the widowed husband of an old girlfriend, finding him now happy with a new woman (pointedly depicted as the kind of woman Jep himself never encounters), with no plans for the evening other than to iron, have a glass of wine and watch TV. With measured passive-aggressiveness (there’s a lot of that in the film too) Jep describes how in contrast he’ll be spending the night in controlled revellment, going to bed when they’re getting up. It’s the contrast between a large, visible life and a small one, but begging the question of which best serves underlying needs (Jep’s only there in the first place because of unresolved anxiety about the dead woman). One of Jep’s friends, one of the sadder characters in recent cinema, ends up essentially writing off forty years of his life in Rome as a misconceived disappointment.

The Great Trick

Time and again in The Great Beauty, Sorrentino arrives at something that might be the thematic or emotional high point of a lesser film, only to move on. He presents the death of one major character so subtly, almost subliminally, that you might literally blink and miss it; the film teems with glimpses down other roads it might have followed. After a couple of hours or so, I actually thought it was over, only to have it crank up again with one of its most brilliant sustained strands, involving a visiting Mother Theresa-type and the surrounding hoopla (the actual ending, when it arrives, is satisfying, but doesn’t by any means embody classic narrative closure). The film shows up the claustrophobic calculations of a film like Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, which I wrote about last week; Sorrentino elevates every scene with some elegance of camera movement or dialogue, or human mystery. Of course, it’s a performance (“a trick,” in the words of the film), as much as that of the magician who says he’ll make the giraffe disappear. There’s not enough room in the cultural world for that many films like this. Maybe it’s a miracle there’s even enough room for one.

Sorrentino’s auteur status, insofar as such a thing is available now, has been steadily building for a decade. He’s probably previously best known in this country for his 2008 Il Divo, a study of Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. It’s not the best introduction to him though, at least not for those who, like me, have only a vague knowledge of post-war Italian politics (as in, it’s really dysfunctional, and a lot of people got blown up) – even the opening explanatory screen-scroll is barely penetrable. Still, it’s an interesting, silkily menacing portrait of advanced inscrutability (we see Andreotti rip a page out of a mystery novel because he doesn’t want to know the killer). A better starting point might be his earlier The Consequences of Love, possibly the least likely film one can imagine having that title. Yet another portrait of a human enigma (both this and Il Divo also starred Servillo), it seems for a long while like a collection of elements that can’t possibly be explained, until Sorrentino immaculately does exactly that (albeit with some recourse to melodramatic extremity). 

This Must be the Place

More recently, he made the English language This Must be the Place, starring Sean Penn as a reclusive rock singer living in Ireland, who embarks on a very strange trip across America. The film was barely seen here, but it’s another fascinating exercise in creating a character and situation lying outside any familiar reference point, while somehow remaining coherent. Views might differ on how well Sorrentino succeeded on the latter point, but it’s a fascinating performance by actor and director alike (it seems right here to apply the term to both): the title speaks to a desire for anchoring and closure, but the film itself is a constant exercise in displacement and in the fusion of extremes. Characteristically of Sorrentino’s work, I could attempt to describe it here in great detail while still failing entirely to convey what you should actually expect to see.

In the end, The Great Beauty may be at its core an elevated expression of the same human mess we’ve seen many times before – it has some similarities to Wolf of Wall Street for instance. But the magic is in the elevation.

Fall movies

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in December 2004)

While I was running off my film festival articles, it feels like a thousand movies came and went, and the one I heard about from most people was (of all things) What the Bleep do we Know. Based on a flashily off-putting trailer and mediocre reviews, I’d initially decided to give it a pass. But then people kept mentioning it to me - my friend Irene even saw it three times. So I went too.

What the Bleep...

The film is notionally about quantum physics but actually has about as much hard science as an old episode of Star Trek – it merely establishes a general notion of all things being connected, then extrapolates this into a rambling meditation on the power of positive thinking (suggested daily affirmation: “I’m taking this time to create my day and I’m affecting my quantum field.”) Interviews with scientists and commentators intertwine with lots of computer-generated gimmickry and a bizarre narrative with Marlee Matlin as a preoccupied photographer, whose personal regeneration illustrates the film’s themes. Judged as documentary, the film seems completely woolly. But I have to admit it caught me at a moment when I was predisposed to its thesis, so I basically lapped it up.

It’s surprisingly outspoken in its denunciation of organized religion – given its premise of individual possibility, it dismisses the image of a controlling God as the “height of arrogance” on the part of those who perpetrate this image. Which confirms this as a liberal “blue state” movie. A brief aside at this point. Since I was writing about film festival movies through November, I wasn’t tempted to digress onto the US election. Whatever I might have said, it wouldn’t have been pretty. But now, with two months’ buffer, I’ll just quote What the Bleep: “The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.” I think Bush’s victory might have succeeded in putting all of us there.

Fall Documentaries

At the other end of the documentary spectrum, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein’s The Take zoomed in on a small beacon of progressivity in Argentina, where worker collectives are taking back control of factories brought to their knees by Carlos Menem’s reckless free-market policies. It’s a shame the movie couldn’t have provided a bit more context, but it was good reporting, missing Michael Moore’s agitprop exuberance and the analytical edge of The Corporation, but also lacking the occasional pretensions of both. Lurking as the villain in the film’s background was the International Monetary Fund, an organization that came in for further bashing in the one-of-a-kind The Yes Men. This follows a couple of guys who carry out a sort of global performance art, wrangling speech and TV invitations in the guise of IMF representatives, and then delivering monstrous pronouncements with a straight-faced reasonability that reels in their audiences. I also went to Team America: World Police in the hope of further pointed political satire, but came away severely disappointed.

The fall had its usual quota of feel good movies, and I’ll confess to getting distinctly teary at the death of Tinkerbell (presaging that of Kate Winslet) in Finding Neverland. On the whole the film was distinctly familiar, albeit pleasant, boosted by yet another remarkable Johnny Depp performance. Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason had to strenuously break the happy ending established at the end of the first movie before equally strenuously reinstating it, but Renee Zellweger’s dedication (however misplaced) gave it more verisimilitude than it deserved. Shall we Dance had little reason for existing, and the remake of Alfie even less than that.

I didn't like The Motorcycle Diaries as much as most reviewers – it was pictorial and gently intriguing but the character of Che Guevara was utterly idealized, and the film’s frail attempts to signal his future development seemed pasted-on. Another overpraised film, Enduring Love, seemed to me no more than standard stalker-slasher stuff with a pretentious coating of gush.

Friday Night Lights was quite a bit more intriguing. I saw it in a mall in Calgary, where the movie’s painstaking excavation of a small football-obsessed town seemed (to these unschooled Eastern eyes) to carry mysterious resonance. Birth was an accomplished but ultimately minor exercise in style over content. Saw was bewildering and off-putting.

The fall’s big epic, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, was a real mixed bag. There’s an intriguing 90-minute picture buried in there, carrying considerable contemporary resonance, about a radical imperialist ambition. Unfortunately, what with all the padding, the film lasts twice that long, and much of it is dire. Like Martin Scorsese with Gangs of New York, it feels as if the film’s logistical demands simply defeated Stone’s energy and ability to control the material.

The season’s biggest hit, The Incredibles, impressed me for its visuals and for its surprising subtlety, although I found the plot itself somewhat tedious. As no particular fan of animation, I didn’t yield to the movie as completely as I did to The Triplets of Belleville or Spirited Away. I have to confess that I didn’t see The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

The Season’s Best

Best of all, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. It may be slightly less philosophically exhilarating than his Topsy-Turvy, but otherwise stands at the peak of his amazing body of work. The film’s first hour, with amazing fluency and almost supernatural attention to time and place, sketches a cross section of activities and encounters that fully convey the limited parameters of 1920’s working-class Britain, revolving around a housewife who among a plethora of good deeds “helps out girls in trouble” – she performs abortions for them. When the police apprehend her, her world collapses – she becomes all but catatonic, and we see how fragile is the definition of a woman in such limited environs.

The film is a remarkable depiction of sexuality. Vera, despite her transgressive behaviour, seems effectively sexless, and every character around her represents a slightly different perspective on sex and its conditioning by class. It’s unspeakably sad and remarkably contoured; once in a while, looking at some of Leigh’s sad sack characters, you can see why some detect a note of condescension in his approach, but who else immerses himself in this world with such tenacity?

All that, as well as a great season of Maurice Pialat movies and the extended The Big Red One and Queimada at the Cinematheque, and the John Cassavetes DVD boxed set to watch at home. And I didn’t see National Treasure, The Polar Express and dozens of others. So that’s the fall season taken care of...and now on to winter...

Looking back

France has always been a lighthouse to foreign filmmakers looking for different shores. Of course, any number of American directors have found their way there, to Paris in particular, but there’s also an intriguing if somewhat cautionary list of one-off French films made by non-Westerners. Twenty-five years ago, Nagisa Oshima made Max mon amour, about a diplomat’s wife in love with a chimp; no one liked the film, and he achieved little thereafter. More recently, Iranian Abbas Kiarostami made the rather academic Certified Copy before moving on to Japan and the scintillating Like Someone in Love. In 2007, the gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon seemed to mark a new direction for the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but he hasn’t managed to release a film since then. Of course, it’s fanciful to extract any impression from such a light sample, but it suggests it’s not so easy to transform oneself into a French filmmaker, to channel that classic allure without losing something of your creative soul. This wouldn’t be out of step with what people say about France in general – there’s a whole mini literary category of bemused memoirs by outsiders who’ve tried to break the societal code.

The Past

Asghar Farhadi’s The Past is a highly assured addition to the category, perhaps reflecting that the Iranian director has spent extended periods of time in the city. It starts as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) arrives there from his home in Tehran, to finalize his divorce from his French wife Marie (Berenice Bejo). She’s now living with Sahir, and expecting a child by him (she also has two from the man she married before Ahmad); he’s also married, but his wife is in a coma, non-responsive, after a suicide attempt some months previously. The film could best be summed up as a series of questions, only some of which are ultimately answered. What are Marie’s real feelings for Sahir (their relationship seems fraught, and her teenage daughter Lucie claims his primary appeal to her is simply in looking somewhat like Ahmad)? What did Sahir’s wife know about the relationship he and Marie were having behind her back, and how much did it push her to do what she did? More broadly, what’s the viability of such a messy family unit, with bonds and living arrangements perpetually shifting, and ongoing ties with previous partners perpetually getting in the way of present ones?

Farhadi won the best foreign film Oscar for his previous film A Separation, which he made in Iran. When I wrote about the film here, I cited how Sight and Sound (in a typical assessment) called it “a film that pays us the compliment of letting us make up our own minds,” and I added: “I find this more persuasive in some senses than others. To the extent that we have to make up our own minds about the facts of the depicted events, it’s largely just the result of a cinematic contrivance, not inherently more sophisticated than any he said/she said police procedural.” Warming to the theme, I added: “I don’t know if being allowed to ‘make up our own minds’ is really such a big deal. I mean, we spend a big chunk of our lives making up our own minds, not necessarily with such stellar results. I think we could use more artists who are actually out to change our minds, and who are passionate about it.”

Old-style art-house

Much the same kind of praise and counter-praise might be directed at The Past, although it’s not attracting a fraction of the attention its predecessor did (Bejo did win the best actress award at last year’s Cannes festival though). But in a way, the new film’s smaller canvas and relative artistic modesty make the criticism less compelling. The Past is an old-style art-house film, a work that feels calculated more than felt, designed for audiences with a penchant for sinking into extended conversations and anguish and the kinds of ambiguities I mentioned (and, as a not un-meaningful aside, a tolerance for a film where a pregnant woman smokes frequently, with the fact barely remarked on by others). It’s most distinguished by Farhadi’s eye for small details and elaborations. This isn’t the Paris of Breathless and Funny Face, but that of the margins, of the daily grind (in an interview, Farhadi said: “The pitfall for filmmakers working in an unknown setting is to highlight in the film the first things that catch their eye. I tried to do the opposite.”). Much of the film is set in Marie’s house, a superbly envisaged, rickety structure where everything is either actively falling apart or else needs work, heavy with memories and traces. It’s strongly cast too: Mosaffa has a patiently searching affect to him that inherently expands almost everything he does or says, and Bejo’s beauty seems authentically strained here in a way that her best known role, in The Artist, kept artificially masked.

I also thought of a French film that goes in the opposite direction to the one I mentioned – Agnes Varda’s 1977 One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, a chronicle of two decades or so in the life of two women. One of them falls in love with an Iranian man and visits there with him, later getting married and staying on; the looseness he displayed in France starts to fall away, showing him as another perpetrator of the patriarchy, and she ends up leaving him. It’s a strength of sorts that Farhadi – even given all the present-day neurosis about Iran’s place in the world – doesn’t come close to such territory: there’s no suggestion that such issues played any part in Marie and Ahmad’s break-up (unless I missed something, we never even know what Ahmad does for a living).

Not just anywhere

But at the same time, it emphasizes the artificiality of his construct. Perhaps somewhat contradicting the remarks I quoted about avoiding an obvious take on Paris, he said in the same interview: “When you want to tell a story dealing with the past, you need to set it in a city like Paris that exudes the past. This story couldn’t have taken place just anywhere.” But you could easily argue that any human story built on a certain amount of structural and sexual messiness “deals with the past” even as it deals with the present and future, and if this one couldn’t have taken place elsewhere, that seems to say more about Farhadi’s abstract conception of it than about the inherent benefits of the city’s skeleton-channelling qualities. After all, Paris, and France in general, have a whole lot of economic problems, increasingly resembling a super-charged version of everyone else’s, and its societal focus on the past is a big part of why it never gets anywhere in solving them. At some point, the country, like the director, will have to find a way of moving on.

Hurt and hurter

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2009)

Quite a few of the highly positive reviews for Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker come across as expressions of relief. Take Roger Ebert, who calls it: “a film shot clearly so that we know exactly who everybody is and where they are and what they're doing and why. The camera work is at the service of the story. Bigelow knows that you can't build suspense with shots lasting one or two seconds.” Now, on its own terms, this seems rather strange doesn’t it? What’s so amazing about filming things clearly – isn’t that kind of, you know, basic? Whoever said you could build suspense with one or two second shots?

The Hurt Locker

Now, he doesn’t mention Transformers 2 in there, having thrown it a brief one-star dismissal elsewhere, but that film really rubbed critics up the wrong way. They almost all thought it was long and boring and stupid and poorly made, and they told the world so, and then it became a mega-hit anyway. If you were a salesman, and customers kept spitting in your face, you’d probably go and sell something else; film critics don’t have that kind of mobility, so they just sit there and seethe (since I occupy a more enviable niche as far as film reviewing goes at least, I just didn’t see Transformers 2, and thus need have no angst about it.)

 The Hurt Locker isn’t quite a way of sending the spit back, but it’s been brandished at least as a suitably eloquent retort. It actually screened originally at last year’s Toronto festival, almost a year ago, and was well enough received, but not in a way that separated it from the pack. Cut to ten months later and it’s greeted as the answer to all our problems. This is probably just more proof of how quickly the world is getting worse.

The movie is set in Iraq, focusing on a bomb defusing unit; the leader is blown up in the film’s first scene, and we focus from there on his replacement, Sgt James, played by Jeremy Renner. The opening quotation tells us “war is a drug,” and after over eight hundred successful missions, James has become somewhat dislodged from the normal procedures and protections, disregarding convention in a way that might be foolhardy, might be his only remaining way of feeling alive, might evidence the extent of his honed intuition, or all of the above. There’s not much analysis or “bigger picture” in the film: one mission follows the next, each life threatening by definition, each testing soul and stamina in its own way.

It’s certainly gripping viewing, and it’s not that I disagree with the rapturous reviews as such; it’s just that I’d grade the achievement inherently a little lower. As I suggested, I’m not sure others wouldn’t too, if mainstream Hollywood movies were inherently better. The action sequences are marvelously done, but hardly revelatory, and James’ form of addiction to the “drug” certainly fits comfortably with a long history of taciturn movie mavericks. As presented, actually, the drug isn’t war as such, but more its capacity for allowing extreme personalities to craft themselves a suitably stylized persona: watching James do his stuff, usually watched from doorways and windows and rooftops by numerous local civilian spectators (sometimes likely including the people who planted the bombs in the first place), the term “theater of war” comes to mind. Popular culture responds with gusto to such displays – why, for example, is the highly implausible Kilgore (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”) the best-remembered element of Apocalypse Now? But these displays surely take place in war’s colourful margins, rather than its degrading, deadening heart.

Bruno

Bruno, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a gay nincompoop out to attain celebrity, is actually a more stimulating movie to me than The Hurt Locker, in the sense of leaving more to think about afterwards, and greater uncertainty about what it all amounts to. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone says the film is “Swiftian — crude, profane, fearless in using ridicule to bite hypocrisy on the ass.” Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle counters: “Cohen's strategy is to make audiences laugh at homosexuality itself, or perhaps at his outrageous lampoon of homosexuality - and then think less of the unsuspecting people who take his act at face value..(but it) can't succeed as satire, because it has no moral grounding or honest point of view.” Nearly everyone who’s written about the film seems to evaluate it slightly differently, which may in fact be its primary achievement. Oh, plus that it’s as funny as hell in places.

I’m more on the LaSalle side of the spectrum. The film deserves points for sheer pace and variety – Bruno’s project takes him from Hollywood to the Middle East, from swingers to preachers, from politicians to cage fights, and as in Cohen’s Borat (directed like this one by Larry Charles), many of the set-ups use real (and presumably unsuspecting) people, manipulated by Cohen usually into either meltdowns or incoherence. These generally involve Cohen flouting all accepted standards of behaviour, or private space or social convention, for example getting himself into a private situation with a straight guy and then starting to take his clothes off; whatever messy, spontaneous reaction the other might have to that, I’m not sure it’s fair to label the set-up as “biting hypocrisy on the ass.”

Actually, a lot of people either get the joke and play along or else demonstrate a sometimes-admirable pragmatism (sometimes it’s almost poignant, suggesting people are just trying in their unsophisticated ways to keep going). But however you score the individual scenes, it’s hard not to think the whole enterprise is conducted – again – in the margins of things. There’s nothing here about mainstream industry or business, nothing that’s relevant to the core question of what discrimination gay people trying to live an honest and equal life might suffer. But then, I just don’t think the movie’s about that. To be honest with you, I don’t really think it’s about anything: it’s like a lowbrow conceptual performance art creation, cleverly designed to facilitate opposing readings, and thus (perhaps) to illustrate what a crock these readings all are. Certainly you feel the audience reaction is as much part of the show as anything on the screen – the whole thing has a loose-leaf kind of feeling, as if inviting annotation. But if it is about anything, then it’s about how a really talented and largely fearless straight guy can rake in laughs from behaving like a moronic, sex-obsessed homosexual. Almost Swiftian, no question.

Time of wonder

In the most recent issue of Cineaste magazine, Dina Iordanova writes about how the Internet has changed the world for lovers and students of classic films. She notes: “we now deal with a profoundly transformed landscape of availability for rare cinematic texts, an environment that has never existed before, not even a year ago, and that is getting richer by the day, evolving in an extraordinarily accelerated manner through both paid and free channels.” She observes that whereas it was probably only plausible to study the full range of cinema in the past by living in a major city, it can now be done from anywhere (Iordanova herself says she lives “in a remote Scottish fishing village”). The abundance and opportunity is thrilling, but not without caveats: the online material is often chaotic, disappearing as quickly as it appeared, and this aspect of the Internet calls out for greater curation and guidance for the uninitiated. Still, she concludes, “the future holds more promise than our present hopes and imaginings can foretell.”

Plugging holes

I know entirely what she means – in the last few years, I’ve plugged most of the holes in my mental list of films I wanted to see, some of which had been there for thirty years. A film like Josef von Sternberg’s 1953 Anatahan – which I cite more or less at random just because it’s the most recent thing I found on there – isn’t available on DVD and never shows up on TV; to my knowledge, it hasn’t played at the Bell Lightbox or its predecessor during the last twenty years (although of course there’s always the chance of overlooking some stray screening, which sort of underlines the point). To all practical purposes, for “normal” people with no privileged connections, Anatahan has been a lost film. I’d tried in the past to download it from online, but for some reason it froze at 87% (an example of the recurring bumps in the road of access). But when I tried again the other week, it downloaded within a few hours, and I watched it the next day. No matter how many times I experience things like this, it still seems like an unimaginable wonder.

Iordanova specifically excludes considerations of copyright and remuneration from her article. I’ve generally tried to download things only when there seems to be no way of paying for them even if I wanted to (although my record in this respect isn’t perfect). YouTube poses a problem because as a huge visible archive operated by a major corporation, it seems reasonable to assume as a base premise that one isn’t abetting illegal activity by accessing whatever you find on there. I proceeded on this basis for a while, absorbing all sorts of rare treasures. But a few months ago, when I came to the end of Georges Franju’s Thomas the Impostor, I got a message saying the film – and other wonderful material posted by the same source -  had been removed due to repeated complaints by copyright holders. Counting myself lucky that the removal had happened in such a way that I’d still been able to see the end, I assumed that was that.

Keeping it legal

But I’ve subsequently noticed that the film, and the rest of the related archive, turned up on YouTube again, so I guess it’s not easy to thwart a determined apostle of art cinema. It’s usually impossible to know then whether films like this are there “legally” or not, and even when it seems they’re not, is the virtue of staying away always clear? Put another way, should we respect the rights of the legal owner of an inaccessible film such as Thomas, if the owner’s only plan for it is seemingly to keep the film from ever being seen?

Trying to keep things legal can be wearying. I subscribe to Mubi.com, which offers a rotating selection of thirty mostly somewhat obscure films at any one time. I was excited that one of these, recently, was the Korean film Oasis, until it transpired that the film came only with Norwegian subtitles, an unbelievable idiocy for a service being marketed in Canada. This then raised a further moral question – would I be justified in downloading a useable version of Oasis, since I’d sort of paid for it already? Similar questions arise in my mind when I try to PVR something that’s on cable (for which I pay for many, many channels), and the recording doesn’t work, usually because the Rogers Nextbox often seems to reboot around 3 am on Tuesday morning. To me, such questions are considerably greyer than the ethics of downloading, say, the current Hollywood blockbuster, which I don’t see any justification for at all. But I guess I wouldn’t raise the issue unless I had some doubts.

Still, this is all just to say it’s a work in progress, and incidental to the main point, which as Iordonova describes is simply the immense richness of what’s available. Time and time again, I find myself thinking back to my teenage years, when I’d read about magical-sounding directors like Bunuel or Ozu, with no immediate hope of seeing anything they’d made. This had its positive aspects of course – when I did somehow manage to view even one of their films, it was a supremely exciting event. It’s also true, no doubt, that billionaires can find reasons to speak warmly of the years they spent cold and hungry. It’s a continuing amazement to me that, decades later, I have fifteen Ozu films on my shelf now; several others are on YouTube as I write, and several others again can be located elsewhere.

Shifting constraints

So the constraint has dramatically shifted, from access to time and capacity. More and more, I deal with this regressively, by playing within my teenage wishlist, ticking off unseen works and revisiting core ones. I know this limits the time I might spend opening up new frontiers, but at least it’s a somewhat informed choice; others would and should make it differently. If I were a teenager now, given how much more sprawling the body of great work is now compared to thirty years ago, I don’t think I’d know where to start. (In the Lightbox bookstore recently I saw a book seemingly intended to help with this problem, titled 1001 Movies You Must See before You Die, but as the cover consisted of a still from Life of Pi, and my random opening of it landed on The Muppet Movie, it may be most effective at enhancing the relative appeal of death).

Obviously, no one with access to a modem should ever have to complain again about having nothing to watch. But that’s a paltry way of expressing the richness of the opportunity available to us. Without ever leaving our remote fishing village or equivalent, we can be educated and stimulated and thrilled and nurtured beyond all measure. The challenges I’ve noted will presumably dwindle with time, but the gift will endure forever.