Me and You and Everyone We know

After asking about six random people in various areas of the theater if the seat next to them was taken, and after seeing all my fellow unseated indie feminists (most well above the age of 70) fall into place in seats that just a minute ago I would have considered undesirable, I finally arrived at the opposite corner from the one through which I entered - second row from the back, halfway in, empty seat.
"Is that seat taken?" I asked anyone for the 7th time that evening.
"No!" exclaimed the youngish woman next to the youngish man next to my once and future seat, as if she were just as surprised as I was.
"Oh boy!" said I, "I thought I was never going to get one."
"Our row is complete!" proclaimed the woman.
"At last," nodded the man, who sounded rather indie and feminine himself.
"Man," I said, "this is the greatest row ever."
"Sure is," said the man, who was applying lipstick, "though we had a hell of a time getting in here. We had to have at least four people screaming at us 'You're cutting,' 'don't cut!' 'who's cutting!'...This one old woman said [wagging finger in time] 'You can't cut here.' "
"What'd you say to that?"
"I laughed."
"Did you laugh while shaking your finger, like you were laughing at her - [in imitation] ahaha!"
"[laughing a bit more gently] No, but we should have."
"Why were you cutting?" I offered.
"I'm not really into rules," explained the woman.
"Rules just don't work out for you?"
"Yeah-"
"Was there even a line at all?" I asked. "It seemed more like a mosh pit."
"Exactly!" the man wagged his finger at me, "There was a line, but it all jumbled together, I mean, it was impossible to know where to go."
"There was a line," declared the old lady next to me. "I waited in it for 45 minutes."

And so on - and then the movie started - and so on.

In short, it's cute. The characters all speak in the playful precociousness that you'd expect from someone named Miranda July who has called her movie "Me and You and Everyone We Know," often coming out with lines that may sound profound, but may not be, but get away with it because they weren't meant to be. This is to also say that everyone in the movie speaks in different permutations with different intonations all of the same voice - which July gladly admitted in the Q&A session afterwards, saying that it was probably due to a lack of discipline on her part. Probably, but it works perfectly for a movie in which everyone is connected (hence the title). It is also worth noting that unlike in, say, Magnolia, the characters get caught connected not so much by the metaphysical impositions of the writer, but by their own fun little contrivances (a method which Garden State would have done well to have stuck to), which naturally go on to contrive bigger things than they could have anticipated - as David Edelstein puts it perfectly, the movie is "set in an increasingly privatized culture, in which face-to-face encounters are extraordinarily fraught and people reach out through online chat rooms, performance art, or, failing at the above, retreat into fantasy." The human contact that evolves from such retreats is what gives the film its little punch; meanwhile, the obviously digital cinematography gives us final comfort that we are not quite in reality, and nor are we supposed to be.

This is quite a comfortable (at the very least "gentle") little movie, and if it isn't really likely to be the best movie this year, it's probably because despite the characters' constant daring, there isn't much of an edge to grab the viewer, or even for the viewer to grab onto. The children try to play at being adults, the adults try to play at being children, the teenagers (best of all) try to play at both, and meek hilarity ensues as all do a terrible job at it, but get along fine anyhow. In short, it's cute.

But July is onto something here, too. As she said herself, during the filming the poop joke delivered by the 6 year-old was right on his level - but with a bit of self-conscious sexual backstory, it was right on my, probably yours, and certainly everyone-who-was-in-the-theater-with-me's level as well. July is smart enough not to ever try to be too smart, and she has a knack for humanist humor, which works well enough to allow us to consider her characters' stabs at pretentiousness, preciousness, and profundity, without ever having to accept them ourselves. To paraphrase The Incredibles: when everyone is pretentious, precious, and profound, well, nobody is - but the reverse is true as well, and July knows it, and shows it off in the first good comedy I've seen from this year.

Also, for anyone who reads this - which, I suspect, includes nobody - I will hopefully be starting my own film blog rather soon to establish some webcred, or something, perhaps on blogspot, perhaps on typepad, in any case, with promising capsule reviews of Star Wars III and Kings and Queen to ensue, as well, perhaps, as some of the stuff on this site. So, uh...look out? I don't know.

Edit Note: I just discovered that Variety carried basically the same comment as I did about children trying to be adults and adults trying to be children. I'm not really sure whether to be proud that I came up with the same comment as an all-powerful movie critic did, or distraught that I'm not an all-powerful movie reviewer too, but I'm not really either, since I haven't reach much of Variety, since it used to cost money to look at their reviews online. 

Sin City

Well, I says, jazz is when you’re pushing and tumbling from heavy stumbling and calling against it all, and I don’t give a damn when life has ceased to be, but I do care when it’s releasing me. Death is an easy man’s way out. Dying is where it’s at.

A good man’s badass snappin’ cracklin’ hippin’ and hoppin’ pop art poetry, Sin City is a movie (and oh is it a movie!) that I, needless to say, love. (First movie since Kill Bill 1 I can remember leaving the theater and wanting to go right back in.) And not “love” like the superlative form of “like” – oh no, man, I have a fuckin crush on this one. Label it. This is my sort of porn.

Sin City has been derided by some excellent critics - Anthony Lane saying this isn’t film noir; Nick Antosca agreeing and noting, perfectly, that it’s not even film; and best of all, J. Hoberman declaring that “Rodriguez loves his material so much that he embalmed it” – for being, let us say, soulless. For the most part they’re not wrong (though fuck, my heart tumbled etc. a couple times), but they’re getting the point and then discarding it. It’s noteworthy that the special thanks at the end make no mention of the fathers of noir like Chandler, Welles, and Lang, but do thank folks like Will Eisner and Jack Kirby – comic book guys. If Sin City doesn’t quiver with celluloid’s life, then that’s the point. It’s lifeless, animation that is, for 12-year olds and dead men, a story that breaks it back down to basics (which is not necessarily to say nihilism). There’s only two ways to live in Sin City – through love, or through dying, and neither of them is going to last for very long. (As that appropriately and intentionally immature piece I wrote a year ago and quoted from above eerily demonstrates, death itself almost doesn’t matter, especially for the people experiencing it). Love is sex, and dying isn’t any pansy-ass notion of a man’s life and memories finally coming together in his mind – dying is a man’s limbs and blood finally coming apart, usually with the aid of some sharpened tool. So it’s a movie about, and dedicated to, the sensual life. The body, after all, is the only thing you can risk in Sin City. After that, you might start getting hurt.

As Hoberman indicates, the whole thing is much closer to an impression of film noir than the actual thing; above all else, I was reminded of a commercial Cartoon Network used to run in which a gravelly voice-over muttered about the station’s tough-minded city, while rapid dissolves closed in on cool, undaunted toons, and moved on just as quickly. In the background, there’s a slightly muted saxophone you notice blowing (above all else, Sin City is a masterpiece of offhand, amazing, sound design). I’ve never seen anything like that commercial in actual film noir, which tends to leave its stylization for the set pieces instead of the editing. Sin City is closer to the commercial (I also had to suppress my expectation at the beginning to suddenly see a close-up of a spinning colored diamond with a tagline, so commercialized is this), or even a music video. I think Jim Jarmusch said something once about not liking music videos, because they just feed you images and stories, without you getting involved. In Sin City at it’s best, you’re involved. You’re taking it up the ass, and as much as you’d like to turn around, you got to admit it, man. It feels pretty fucking good. 

Palindromes

Like a palindrome, the same forward and back, nothing ever changes, goes the rather obvious message of Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, in which the protagonist Aviva is played by a whole bevy of actors of various shapes, sizes, and colors - although things, then, can take rather different forms to express themselves. Personally I’m not entirely inclined to agree with this hypothesis, but no matter; this theory certainly holds true for Solondz, who has made a movie whose treatment of characters, narrative, and filmmaking is nothing like anything he’s done before this, even while it expresses basically the exact same issues and concerns as ever. In his prior films, Solondz has taken cunning cuts straight through his characters, mocking them so severely that it becomes impossible to reproach their flaws as being even their own individual faults – for Solondz, his protagonists aren’t laughable losers except in the context of a hopelessly cruel world, and it is that world that is the butt of all of his own belated bullying. The same more or less holds true in Palindromes, except maybe for the “laughable” part.

I laughed once or twice throughout 100 minutes (compare to Happiness, one of the funniest movies ever made), although there were a couple scenes that I probably would have found a bit more humorous in the context of another Solondz movie. The best of these is a boy-band-style pop song about Jesus sung by deformed, disabled children with earnest verve (these follow a Brady Bunchish dinner sequence with the kids that includes lines to the effect of “But I don’t know how to microwave,” followed by “Well with Jesus’ help you’ll learn in no time,” followed by great happy laughter to be alive and in such a swell family). The scene, of course, has a horrific hilarity to it, the real verve coming from Solondz’ audacity and whatnot, and Solondz’ detractors would probably claim he’s mocking the disabled kids. That’s hardly the case – Solondz’ real target, I would have previously thought, is the cheesy earnestness of family sitcoms and boy bands, whose nauseous hammering of “values” only holds for the audience as long as the its messengers are blue-eyed, blonde-haired, and buff. Solondz is also slyly indicating that the values themselves are just as superficial as the reasons America tunes in to hear them.

Yet the scene is, somewhat surprisingly, not that funny (well, a bit), and the reason is the context, which made me wonder if Solondz was trying to “target” anything at all. Most of what Solondz writes deals with the conflict between children and adults, which is, for him anyway, a conflict between unsupported sincerity and utter phoniness. One of the key moments in the film comes at the end – after Welcome to the Dollhouse’s Mark Wiener gives a roundabout explanation to explain why he’s not a pedophile, in which he bluntly states the perhaps already obvious and certainly already dour thesis of the film (the world and its inhabitants are hopeless because everything is programmed so that nothing ever changes) that Solondz himself has repeatedly explained in similar words in press releases and in obscure interviews, Aviva replies smartly and somewhat shockingly, “You’re not a pedophile. Pedophiles love children.” Getting over the clever little joke that shows Aviva to be just as naïve in her understanding of the world as ever, there’s a strong point to be made here. Mark’s comments, says Solondz, are the comments that only an adult could make, even if he is right, which is why Aviva responds so indignantly. The difference between a child and an adult is, of course, the difference between happiness and despair (a recurring theme), but the reason isn’t that the child is objectively any better off, but only that a child, unlike an adult, can have the hope that things will improve. Either way, life itself still sucks. In the end, nothing ever actually changes.

Solondz’ previous films have all clearly been the work of an adult who has gotten past the confusion of his characters and can look back with mockery and sympathy alike. Palindromes is a fuzzier matter, both visually and thematically. Solondz cinematography (flat and drab), writing (almost entirely generic and drab) direction (overly earnest and drab) look like the work of an amateur eager to make his points through occasional gimmicks, even if he’s not sure how to do so with much imagination. The sense of storytelling so pervasive in Happiness and, um, Storytelling, is gone here, with the basic premise (Aviva wants to have lots and lots of babies!) more or less an excuse to introduce riffs on Solondz’ message. Emotions, even, despite the vast amounts of sympathy, don’t make much of an appearance (also despite the somewhat haunting lullabies that float in and out over grubby shots of Kingston’s malls, parking lots, and billboards). Palindromes is closer to an essay, and in serving up a wholly unpleasant examination of mankind’s two-sidedness (child and adult) it rather closely aligns itself to the equally maligned Dogville of last year. But Dogville was also the work of a mocking adult, and Palindromes – here, finally, is my point – Palindromes is, for the first time in Todd Solondz’ professional career, the work of a child.

A cruel child, perhaps, but so is Aviva, who exactly like her cousin Dawn immaturely doesn’t mind seeing a happy daughter from a happy family she can’t belong to knocked off. This moment, it can and should be claimed, creates an entirely different Aviva than the usual whimpering tender little thing we’re used to, but the point isn’t as much that she’s changed as that she’s revealed yet another part of her family-wanting personality. This Freudian insight that sweet affection and cruel lust are different, but ultimately irreconcilable and polarized forms of the same thing, love, isn’t entirely new for Solondz – in the most celebrated scenes of Happiness, for example, a father gleefully displayed his love for children as both caring father and crafty pedophile, but the two personas operate only as mutually exclusive manifestations of the same body.

But in Palindromes, it’s not even the same body – that, Solondz says, as only a child could (look at the way Dawn’s treated for her looks in Dollhouse), doesn’t matter for him. In the end, we’re just different pieces at different points of the same personality, and that, for better or for worse, is all there is. Naïve? Perhaps. Harsh? Probably. But in some sense that is as perverse as anything Solondz has done to this point, it is a moral that can inexplicably be proven equally charming just the same. For whatever reason, Palindromes is proof. I think. 

Aliens

Spoiler alert. Entertainment Weekly put this as the 42nd greatest movie of all time, citing it as “the greatest pure action movie of all time.” As directed by James Cameron, after the first third or so, the movie sure is pretty purely action, and if his goal was to make the viewer feel the ugly alien attacks right alongside Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), well, then, job well done, I guess. But the whole thing is 2 ½ hours of shock-scare-shock, and, not so shockingly (I had the bad fortune to watch this right after Cameron’s The Terminator - much worse), there isn’t much suspense to make Cameron’s rampages pay off. After all, suspense (and better imagery, better (if equally broad) characters, and, well, a sense of originality, among other things) is what makes Alien so great - and, for that matter, greater.

And yet there are some fascinating, if unintentional, social politics wondering through this thing. The idea of a bunch of colonizing Americans going in to attack a bunch of super-intelligent killer species the Americans don’t understand, right in their very own homes may have seemed cool in the 80s, but it adds a much-needed chilling level of allegory to the story today. Which group, I’m left wondering – the humans or the creatures – does the title refer to? Consider (if my memory of Alien serves me correctly): What’s the difference between an “alien” and a human? The two groups are equally intelligent, and about as strong. Difference is, all the aliens want to do is kill and reproduce. A listen to the admittedly hilarious dialogue of the marines in the 1st act establishes how big a difference this is. In all fairness, Cameron does make those guys the first ones to die, but it’s telling that in the very final struggle of Aliens, Weaver wins only because she has a stronger physical grip. Feelings & humanity got nothin here.

Not that Cameron doesn’t try. A subplot (is there a main plot?) involving Weaver’s adoption of the kid she never had is the standard yawn-jerker stuff (though there is an awesome moment in the beginning where Weaver sees her 66 year old daughter, now dead, played by Weaver’s mother), but while I’m not a feminist (whatever that means), and at the risk of sounding as ridiculous as my subject, the gender politics of Aliens (I know, I know) are, well, rather insulting. The key moments to which the entire movie builds are based around two badass mothers (Weaver and an alien “bitch”) feeling the full threat of each other to their children, and thereby fighting each other. This may sound plenty female-empowering, but it's note-worthy that to fight each other, each has to lose her sense of maternity. The alien rips off her egg ducts, and Weaver sends off her adopted child, and having lost, I feel, all traces of femininity, they fight mano-a-mano, man-to-man. So why the hell do they abandon the things they should be defending? Well no, probably not so much misogyny, as that it makes for an easier (and yes, ever masculine) fight sequence. It was Cameron’s misfortune that his hero had to be female. I suppose this route is perhaps politically better than following Weaver’s request that she not use weapons, make love to an alien, and die – but what unsettles me the most about Cameron’s gender reversal is that he completely deflates the premise and promise of his hero. In any case, give me that striptease fight at the end of Alien any day – for feminists, it should be truly empowering: a girl, oh so fully female, is superior to any guy around (hell, except for the alien, they aren’t even around anymore); and for men – well, it’s more sexy (and beautiful, original, and thus, most of all, scary) than anything in Aliens.
 

Birth

I have a problem with “realistic” stories that introduce an entirely impossible element and then play out to see if the audience and its characters fall for it. To me, this is cinema gimmicking in order to neglect some of its most central duties – to establish and/or explore a world, realistic or not (these duties need not be mutually exclusive). Not that movies can’t increasingly reveal their little universe throughout, but to establish a film under the pretense of reality, only to have something totally unrealistic happen just once in the beginning, and then to ask us to treat the film like the characters – that is, from a realistic point of view – is, for me anyway, impossible. It’s pretty cheap to make us accept something we’d never actually accept in reality, only to pull the rug out from under us, or even just to ask us to be angry at all those in the picture who are acting just as we actually would. Especially frustrating is the mandatory scene in which the hero hopelessly explains to disbelievers that the impossible really is possible. The scene is meant to be frustrating to the hero, but which is actually even more frustrating to us, since it really isn’t possible. But perhaps the worst thing about these inventions is that they are the prologue’s equivalent of deus-ex-machina – for the most part, they exist solely to incite the frustrating story.

Compare this sort of movie to the Charlie Kaufman films, for example, in which characters accept the unfeasible impetus like we’d accept any old scientific breakthrough, and the device serves to establish that world the characters will explore for most of the rest of the movie. There, there is no pretense of the reality that will be falsely disrupted. But Birth has a new solution – it more or less relieves the story of any significant set-up, so we’re never led to believe that we’re actually in some sort of reality, and we are never led to share in the frustration and disbelief of the central characters. This is also Birth’s primary problem.

What set-up there is goes something like this: A scientist jokes about his wife being reincarnated in a voice-over, goes running through Central Park, and dies. Ten years pass, some boy sees some lady burying something, and then some boy, probably the same one, shows up at the dead guy’s wife’s place (she’s Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, about to get married to some new guy) claiming he is no longer his parents’ child, but is in fact her ex-wife reincarnated (end of set-up). Everyone laughs it off, but the kid sure seems to know an awful lot. It is hard not to think of Rosemary’s Baby – the anxious wife confined almost entirely to interiors of very nice New York Apartments as she questions if her husband is honest, or perhaps human – but the movie, even with its ably twisting tracking shots, is not played for suspense. In fact, it’s not really played for much of any quality, really, except maybe prettiness.

Now 1st acts aren’t always necessary, even in traditionally arching stories, to introduce the audience to the characters. A lot of great movies have used stories as means to discover its personalities – think of all the (noir) stories out there about the washed-up heroes who get caught up in something that will reveal who they really are. But it’s hard to avoid establishing characters if the story is going to be an exploration of how those characters can be significantly changed, since there’s little reference point that allows with us to relate to them in the first place, or to track their change (I’m thinking Requiem for a Dream). Birth is also concerned with obsession - even after ten years Anna is still deeply in love with Sean - but unlike Requiem, it’s not even able to come up with much insight into what these characters are like while changing, or once changed (granted, Requiem had a pretty simplistic view of its altered characters, but then again, it was a rather shallow, if tyrannical physical addiction that was changing them). Nicole Kidman is a great actress, and she does a wonderful job making very emotional faces to the camera, which itself glides frequently to superbly expressive classical music – but to what effect? It’s all nicely done, but Birth is ultimate proof that in a classically constructed film, the script reigns supreme. And the script here sucks.

Really, I should have been desperate to my own dismay to know if this kid was a reincarnation or an imitation, not merely curious. On the one hand, the kid is so dour and serious, so foreign from any kid we’ve ever seen (although he evidently has gained friends, probably from before his body was overtaken by the dead guy), that he instantly seems to be sent from another world, he is so clearly the reincarnation. But then again, he’s so dour and serious, that it’s impossible to mistake him for the former Sean , who in just the couple seconds we hear him in the film emerges as quite a playful guy. None of the characters (who for the most part are probably slightly less intelligent than the average audience member for this movie) gain this second insight, and any sympathy they had with the child, whether he really was the ex-husband or not, made me unsympathetic to them, because this stupid kid was so totally unlikable. Whether or not he was real was one of the last concerns I had about the movie.
Birth completely lacks the charm needed to get through its genre. Maybe seemingly impossible things can happen, but it’s better seen as whimsy, and even in a movie like Miracle on 34 Street, (or most other Christmas movies) which has just about all the problems I mentioned earlier, delight and capriciousness really is enough to carry the film to greatness, or to become a crowd-pleasing classic, anyway.

But Birth is stagnant, despite its attempts at enormous expressionism, and is off-putting - the embarrassing bathtub scene, like the best parts of Rosemary’s Baby, should raise some laughs and gasps, though I have a feeling these are far, far less intentional here, and act to a far more detrimental effect. Stuck with an interesting and dumb enough premise and conclusion, the movie has no idea what to do with the time in between, resulting in the lack of character development or anything really to engage the audience besides some nice craftsmanship. At one point I thought there could have been an interesting question of whether remarriage is a sort of extramarital affair, but the notion, like the beauty Birth is so obsessed with generating, is squandered as the movie sinks into its oddness.
 

October Movie Previews

So we possibly forgot to do a September movie preview. But, uh, forget that, and embrace the month of October--just think, one month to go before the barrage of Oscar bait and holiday fare begins to aim for your heart- and your purse-strings.

October 1: I Heart Huckabees. One of the few movies opening this month that I truly want to see, Huckabees seems to be at once a delight of slapstick comedy and a mess of psycho-drama. And come now, it's directed by brilliant Three Kings director David O. Russell, has Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Mark Wahlberg, and Max Fischer, uh, Jason Schwartzman--what more could you ask for? Perhaps that it open in more than limited release, but, as the good Mr. Jagger once told us, you can't always get what you want.

October 5: Tanner '88. This isn't a theatrical release. In fact, it's a Criterion one. But that's irrelevant. In 1988, Robert Altman and Gary Trudeau teamed up to make a television mockumentary miniseries focusing on an imaginary Senator running in the election of that year. Head to the video store, rent it, and then ruminate on the American electoral process and the dread of November 2.

October 8: Taxi. Just think. Someone thought this movie was a good idea. Someone looked at a script, cast Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah as the leads, put model Gisele Bundchen as a criminal, and then gave an entire team of people millions of dollars to make this. Just stop and think about the travesty. Thought about it? Okay, good, now wait til it comes out on video and we'll mock it together while secretly enjoying the car chases.

October 15: P.S.. I think that some part of Laura Linney thinks that so long as a movie is moderately small, it will be good, and thus, she will maintain "serious actress" integrity. Problem being, what was the last good movie you saw Laura Linney in? The romantic weepy of the month seems to be this film, where she finds her high school love reincarnated as Topher Grace. The Lifetime channel is calling.

October 22: Alfie. Jude Law fall movie #3. Clearly the man is on some sort of quest to be in every single release ever. But, hey, if you looked like Jude Law, you'd be trying the same thing. It's a remake of the Michael Caine fluffy classic, it's probably not very good (just because he's ubiquitous, doesn't make dear Jude that great), but you know you wanna watch a good sex farce about now.
 

The Cranes are Flying

It would be easy to mistake the opening sequence of Mikhail Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying for any scene from any typical fluffy fifties' romance. The young couple frolics blissfully along the banks of a river, accordion music fills the soundtrack. The movie could, by all appearances, involve Audrey Hepburn and, say, Gregory Peck prancing along the embankment of the Seine or the Thames or whatnot. But, well, this movie is not fluffy, it's frankly not a romance, and it's one of the more visually stunning movies I've seen in some time.

The Cranes are Flying opens in Moscow, immediately before Germany's swift and brutal attack on the city. Veronica (or Squirrel) and Boris are madly in love. He writes little poems when not doing hard manual labor at the factory, she sings said little poems and flitters about happily. Then, unbeknownst to his dearest Squirrel, Boris voluntarily enlists in the Soviet army to fight off the German advance. Good and all for the country, but, well, not so good for Moose and Squirrel. He leaves for war, neither Veronica nor Boris' family (with whom she now lives) hears from him. In the midst of all of this, Moscow is brutally attacked, Boris' cousin Mark ("exempt" from the war) desperately tries to gain Veronica's affections, and eventually the whole family retreats with the rest of the city to the middle of Siberia.

Needless to say, it's all very melodramatic (which, admittedly, I'm always a sucker for), and there's plenty of swelling war music, a handful of explosions, and some awesome face-slapping to fill the film's very swift 95 minutes. It's not really the basic plot, however, that makes the movie; there are, after all, more movies about war-torn love affairs than I care to recount. Perhaps the most compelling elements of the plot remain those that were so shocking in the initial release. The film, which eventually won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1958, was one of the first of Soviet film's so-called "Thaw" period, where the tight grip of Stalin over culture product was relaxed, and where criticism of war and culture could finally be expressed. There are numerous asides in The Cranes are Flying that had to have been risque for their time (for example, Fyodor, Boris' father, rather harshly mocks the rote sympathies and patriotism of two representatives from the Young Communists League early in the film). When the family ends up in Siberia, Kalatozov shows us overcrowded hospitals, dying soldiers turned away, and those inside reduced to angry, bitter wrecks. And more importantly, he shows the very harsh reality of the betrayals people make in times of war.

The most outstanding elements of the film are, by far, the cinematography and editing. I sadly had to see this on DVD, but the good people at Criterion (and Mosfilm) have, as would be expected, turned out a beautiful crystal clear print. There are some truly splendid moments of cinematography here: in at least several scenes, a handheld camera is being used, once to track Squirrel as she runs through the crowds in Moscow; later, to track her feet along the jagged ground as she runs through the desolate Siberian snow. There are arguably moments when the otherwise perfect editing becomes a bit too fade-happy and psychologically overwrought, but it's largely visually stunning (certainly helped along by a high contrast black and white, also beautifully lit).

Veronica is an interesting heroine--she largely sulks for the majority of the movie, but somehow remains both feisty and sympathetic. There are some fairly problematic jumps in the timeline of her character; this doesn't pose a problem in comprehension so much as it does in the potential for character development. The audience is left to assume a number of things about her psychological state in the second half of the movie, and while I will forever appreciate a director who doesn't condescend to his audience by explaining everything, her development probably could have benefited from an additional scene at about the mid-way point. But that's nitpicking--it doesn't fundamentally flaw the narrative.

As an aside, I think the highlight of this movie may come early on in what could arguably be considered a thinly veiled rape scene. I mean, it's not a rape scene, but thirty years later it probably would have been (think the scene in Imitation of Life where Sarah Jane is beaten by her white boyfriend). It shows everything and nothing at the same time (hmm, how production codes perhaps actually benefited action). The lighting effects (Moscow is being bombed) combined with the sound (piano over explosions) combined with the frenzied action of Mark chasing down Veronica while he repeatedly yells "I love you" and she screams "Nyet"...Uh, yeah, just watch it. Scary and awesome.

This is the sort of movie making I always hope for. Classic verging on modern. Ye traditional melodrama storyline, plus subversion, plus brilliant camera work. I think people my age often ignore a good deal of Russian/Soviet film, probably as some lingering result of Cold War prejudices (or a laziness to read subtitles). But, you know, in the end, movies like this, like The Cranes are Flying, they're really just about a guy, a girl, and a whole lot of war. And, um, perhaps also about the Khrushchevian plan to make his country welcome his regime and forget about old Stalin...but enjoy it as fine cinema first, propoganda second.
 

More August Movie Previews

Well, uh. August. There are...a number of new releases. Not good releases, mind you, but at least the theaters are air conditioned.

August 6: Collateral. Tom Cruise has gray hair. And he's playing a crizazy criminal who takes cabbie Jamie Foxx on a Los Angeles crime spree. Oooh, bucking type yet again. Tom's a bad guy! La di da. Bet it looks cool while sucking though. Ahh, L.A. crime movies.

August 11: The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. I'm not even kidding when I say that I've seen the first movie at least three times. I mean, it gives me hope for a few minutes that my grandmother is really the queen of a made-up European kingdom. It could happen, right? Right?? My sad fantasies aside, TPD2:RE looks really bad from the trailer, has a stupid premise, and has no makeover plot (which, let's face it, is really the glue of the first movie). There's always a mattress surfing Julie Andrews, though.

August 13: We Don't Live Here Anymore. This looks Lifetime movie bad--if only Lifetime could afford indie stalwarts Naomi Watts, Peter Krause, Mark Ruffalo, and Laura Dern. And, if only to confirm that image, its original title was Adultery. But hey, all the good trailers this summer have turned out to be total bombs in their feature length forms, so maybe this will be just super.

August 27: Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. Oh god how the studio system has failed us all. 

Imitation of Life

A B-list 80s popstar introduced the movie: "It's fabulous...But...Someone should just slap Sandra Dee." And how.

Douglas Sirk's 1959 masterpiece, Imitation of Life, the only one of his films to make significant money, is the melodrama to end all melodramas. But wait! It is not just a melodrama--that would be far too easy. It's a melodrama with the extra special Sirk bonus of biting social commentary: Race and Money and Sex, oh my! Perhaps the most interesting element of the commentary is the very meta commentary on the nature of cinema, especially in context of race (see Lana Turner's Scarlett O'Hara comment towards the end of the movie, for example).

The plot? Very broadly, it concerns a rising star (Turner), her daughter, her black maid, and the maid's light-skinned daughter. Lora, the Turner character, of course does all of the things that any rising star must do in the movies; her maid, Annie, looks after 'Miss Lora'; Sarah-Jane, the maid's daughter, rebels, pretends to be white, becomes a burlesque dancer; Sandra Dee whines a lot and wears ugly clothes. And it's brilliant.

Furthermore, vicious fight scenes overwhelmed by sinister jazz scores and funerals with casts of hundreds really must make a comeback.
 

The Return

Dear Filmmakers of Russia: Is it impossible for Russia to produce a non-symbolic film? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm as big a slavophile as the next girl, but people, lighten up on the overbearing "mysterious" symbolism. It's alright to move on from Tarkovsky, really it is. I wouldn't judge you if you just wanted to make a little romantic comedy, a cheesy romp through Petersburg. It could have your bad Russian pop songs, and a culminating romantic episode at, say, a park along the Neva. It could be about a boy falling in love with a girl, and there would be no drawn out metaphors for the state, or intense psychoanalytic character studies. Wouldn't it be nice to see the fun side of Russia once in awhile?

Apparently not so much. I fear that it is actually impossible for any Russian film, at least those released in the United States, to not be metaphorical in every imaginable sense. Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return, which opened stateside months ago, is no exception to this rule. The movie concerns a father, missing for twelve years, who suddenly comes back to take his two children with him on a "fishing" excursion through the Russian countryside. Gee, this doesn't seem like it will inevitably end in disaster at all.

There is limited dialogue in the movie, and very limited character development--it's largely about watching the interactions of confined characters (an interesting setup, certainly). Visually, the film is lovely, its palette largely composed of tones of slate blue, dark greens, and slightly overexposed film. I'm unclear on whether or not it was shot on DV, but it has a spectacularly grainy quality to the film that, at least in this circumstance, I very much appreciate.

The problem? The movie makes no sense. It's one of those movies that seems enamored with its ability to drop red herrings (or possibly even real clues) and not pick them up again later. Why not pick them up again later? It's because nothing matters in this movie; the actions are fairly inconsequential because the movie is little more than a veiled allegory told as a simplistic fairy tale. Despite the fact that I know virtually nothing about this movie, I remain convinced that the entire plot is an allegory for the Russian state post-Communism. This is why the film cares so little about piecing together its clues--it is about a mood thrown over the country, not about minute details.

More problematic, perhaps, is the composition of the film. It becomes at times overcomposed to the extreme. Incredibly long, lingering, perfectly aligned shots dominate the film. They're beautiful to look at it, but they do little to further the plot, and at their worst, prove to be distracting to the overall mood. And for a movie set in the chaos of the lonely wildnerness, the composition is too formal and mannered to truly work as it should.

I have no problem with the symbolic, or the making of allegorical films. It just seems as though the director of The Return had a beautiful vision (and very talented cinematographer) and decided it would be convenient for him to make it super duper mysterious while he was at it. That I find annoying; that is my problem with the film. It tries far too hard to place itself in some sort of national cinematic tradition, and in doing so , creates a very stilted vision of what it attempts to show (whether that is actually Russia, or simply the story of a father and his sons).  

Fahrenheit 9/11

Sitting in England, on the 4th of July, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. "Let's go to an advance screening of Fahrenheit 9/11," I say to my hapless companions. Cut to three hours later. We stand outside of a large (and packed) movie house, looking forlorn. "Huh. Well, that was...uh...ill advised." Nothing says celebration of patriotism like a good anti-government polemic, right? Right.

There is little for me to say about Moore's Palme d'Or winning documentary that hasn't already been said. He's a far better polemicist than an actual filmmaker; he too often goes for the cheap shot--god forbid he actually piece together a subtle sequence. Of course, this serves a purpose of its own; it is, after all, easier to win over an audience when you've been tugging on their heart strings. He has overly overt, often ill-chosen music sequences. He burdens the film with too many misplaced montages (i.e. the entirely inappropriate mocking of the small world nations composing the "Coalition of the Willing"--right, they smoke pot in Holland and have natives in Iceland, the point being?). Worse, he is an entirely poor interviewer, simpering to those he likes, abrupt to those he doesn't.

It is interesting that Moore mentions very little about the Democratic party. They owe him for that. He easily could have snuck in cruel jabs at the incompetence of Democratic leadership, or their submission to the whims of the ruling party. Instead, he sharpens the focus on key administration officials and the everyday people who are faced with the consequences of government decisions regarding the war in Iraq. Besides, the sheer mortifying picture he paints of White House incompetence overshadows most mentions of Congress altogether.

The movie's best sequences are those where Moore fades away, where the viewer is left simply with moments of sorrow (or, as is more often the case, sheer stupidity on the part of Bush administration officials). These are the moments where Moore most succeeds, and their cumulative impact is literally like being punched.

I don't know that the movie is particularly good--as a movie. The decision to reward it the Palme d'Or at Cannes remains vaguely questionable to me, without having seen the other contending films. Still, in all honesty, I have not been this moved by a movie in ages. It made me so humiliated and angry, but propelled me to want to fight, even more so than I had felt before, and, most surprisingly, was the entirely appropriate way to spend Independence Day. I mean, where else in the world could you so harshly attack the government and still have the number one movie in the country?

Also? I've said it before, but the Weinsteins are marketing and distributing geniuses. I idolize them.  

July Movie Preview

So I really only saw two new releases in June, which makes me vaguely sad...vaguely. But ta da! It's July! A whole new month of movies to get excited about, to go run off with your little friends to see. Maybe you'll even get popcorn. And maybe, at the very end of the month, I'll get to catch up on everything you saw before me. But until then, a preview.

July 2: Before Sunset. Richard Linklater's sequel to Before Sunrise, starring the original's Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and ostensibly about the same characters ten years later. The trailer makes it look largely the same as the first movie except Ethan Hawke looks haggard, which seems problematic, given that the first movie was largely based on the attractiveness of its two stars. Alas. The ravages of cheating on Uma, I suppose.

July 9: Anchorman. Will Ferrell is a god. If you think that I say this in jest, you have not yet experienced the Anchorman trailer (or Zoolander for that matter). Red polyester suits and hairsprayed hair galore! And it has Paul Rudd! Still not convinced? The trailer also has an anchorman knife fight complete with Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson. Genius!

July 16: A Cinderella Story. MK Olsen is in rehab for an eating disorder (riiight...that's what it is), Lindsay Lohan has fake boobs (I mean, uh, sure they're real Lindsay) and skin the color of an Oompa Loompa, and Mandy Moore is too old. Where do we go for our fill of teen queens??!! Clearly the only options are the fat Olsen or back to good ol' saccharine sweet Hilary Duff. Remember: When you go to see this movie, you are supporting Hilary Duff, and allowing her to usurp the Lindsay quotient. Do with that what you will, but I think I may just learn to live with an orange teen queen.

July 23: Catwoman. It was thought that the Batman series could not get any worse after the last two (poor Chris O'Donnell...where did you go), but the makers of Catwoman apparently decided to take this statement as a challenge. Judging by the trailer, they can get worse! Admittedly this movie is not about the Dark Knight himself, but close enough. It's not like I particularly like Halle Berry to begin with, but couldn't she do better than this? And the costumes? What exactly were they thinking? Catwoman: The S&M years.

July 30: The Village. For the record, I thought Signs sucked. Actually, in retrospect, I largely think that all of M. Night Shyamalan's movies are a bit lackluster. So, am I looking forward to this one? Nope, not at all, except because of the damn trailer, I now feel compelled to see it. What's beyond the village, huh??? I need to know. Maybe I can just find out on Google. But if not, I'll have been suckered in by the insufferable advertising. Grrr. But for all of you rabid connoisseurs of all things Yale, Fran Kranz does appear in this film--or at the least, has an IMDb listing for it.  

Last Year at Marienbad

I sat on the Tube for almost an hour (two, both ways), listened to some angry old men bitterly discuss RAF WWII squadrons, and had to endure two different sets of couples making out (not just a little, tongue and all). And I got soaked in the rain. For what? To see Alain Resnais' 1961 Last Year at Marienbad. After all of that (plenty of time to think about it), I still have little idea what the movie was actually about.

Ostensibly, the plot concerns a man X who finds a woman A at an elaborate resort hotel and tries to convince her that one year ago they were lovers; he has returned to rendez-vous with her as planned. She , however, does not (or does) believe him (and she has a scary vampire-y husband/lover who must be accounted for). This is not what the movie is about.

Resnais apparently once said that the film had no meaning--it's an interesting statement because it makes the film nothing more than an exercise in formalism and modernist aesthetics. It's a carefully constructed "clever" puzzle piece, like something you may have found in the Surrealist circles of the first half of the twentieth century, no more. If you look at it from this point of view, it does make an interesting study--the camera angles are beautiful and smooth, the B&W lush, the editing snappy and brilliant. It makes you question reality in just the right way; it is l'art pour l'art. And if this is the case, I guess that's alright. I'm more of a narrative girl myself, but hey, a little Chris Marker or, in this case, M. Resnais is a welcome diversion once in a while.

Not surprisingly, it appears the movie spawned a bit of a cottage industry of theorists. Apparently the original idea for the movie comes from a novel by a colleague of Borges; it is the low-brow Fantastic at its best, or at least at its most Spanish. Resnais fails to credit this source material at all (I suppose it would have, you know, made the movie reference something outside of itself--and we couldn't have that, could we), but its suggestion of the world as a virtual reality, a world made of holograms essentially, makes the movie slightly more compelling for me and seems to place it as some sort of weird precursor to the glut of alternate reality sci-fi fests that have come along in recent years. But, uh, this is all theorizing, and involved outside resources, and there's not a chance in hell that you would have inferred an obscure mid-century sci-fi novel, en espanol, from the film's text.

I love the film visually, and assuredly it makes an interesting discussion piece, but it lacks any compelling characters (or characters at all, frankly--they're largely hollow stand-ins for reality (but this is, of course, the point)) and in all honesty, any compelling narrative (or lack thereof). Structurally, formally it is a feat to be admired. Oh--and organ music? Super creepy.  

Bad Education, pt. 2

Almodóvar, trannies, Gael García Bernal--you couldn't ask for more in a foreign film, could you? Well, or okay, maybe I could--I still have some reservations with Mr. Bernal, but beyond that, the component parts (uh, clearly there are those beyond the aforementioned) should suggest that Bad Education is a great movie. My problem is that, ever since seeing it, I've been alternating between thinking it is brilliant and really disliking it.

I can feel the reader's wrath. Be decisive, you shout. But I'm not, so deal and bear with me for a moment here.

The story of Bad Education is fairly straight-forward. Enrique (Fele Martinez) is a film director who is suddenly approached by an old schoolmate Ignacio (Bernal), now an actor, who offers him a story that recounts their childhood in strict Catholic school. It is at this Catholic school where Enrique and Ignacio fell in love, only to be pulled apart by Father Manolo, the school's principal, who is also in love with Ignacio. Following so far? Good. Enrique decides to film the story, and two decades of secrecy and abuse start to unravel. The catch, of course, is that it would be too straightforward to film it like this; thus, the movie appears to recount something like four separate stories (the fictionalized reality of the boy's school, the fictionalized falsity of the adult Ignacio, the real adulthood of Ignacio, and the real present day of the film). Okay, boring plot summary sort of covered.

Given the subject matter, it's not possible for the movie to be anything but political. To discuss molestation in the Catholic Church without claiming some sort of strong political position is clearly impossible; Almodóvar wants his audience (maybe there was someone somewhere who was oblivious to the recent molestation scandals...eh...maybe) to recognize that yes, sexual abuse=bad results in adulthood. But more interestingly, perhaps, he doesn't make the villainous priests into completely black and white monsters. They're sinister, yes (especially the scary fat one), and horrible people, but especially with the actor playing Father Manolo there's something more beneath the surface than pure eeeeeeevil. And the regular people are perhaps just as frightening as the fallen clergy.

Gael García Bernal is very good in what amounts to, essentially, three roles. I suppose I haven't liked him that much in the past because I'm vaguely threatened by him. There's something perpetually...insidious...about him, and certainly that characteristic is well used by Almodóvar in this film. And for those Bernal lovers amongst you, there's certainly a good deal of gay Bernal sex. Or rather, there's a whole lot of gay sex in the movie just in general.

The sheer amount of homosexuality in the movie (there are only like two speaking roles that are not gay) is certainly bold, and is somehow not suprising, given the relative homoeroticism of previous Almodóvar outings. It's interesting, though, how little of the sex is portrayed in any positive light. Sex, in Bad Education, is secretive and manipulative; it is entirely about power play or about the act itself, (almost) no affection here.

The movie is very typical Almodóvar visually, with a sun-drenched Spanish color palette (visuals that should be used to more effect by other filmmakers--they look great) and always always a bit of grit. My sole reservation with the film (and I don't think it makes it less good) is the sheer harshness of the storytelling. The movie shows the worst of human nature, the worst possible things that people do to each other, and how they so easily get away with it all. It makes it a bit hard to watch at points, and a bit hard to reflect on, and not to be all Miss Cynical but Almodóvar's bleak worldview in this movie is probably a lot closer to reality than you would think at first glance (the movie is about a drag queen and sexual molestation after all...and it's a Spanish soap opera...). I'll probably see it again when it opens in America, and probably I'll hate it, but for now, while I can't say at all that I liked it, I think it's a very good movie indeed. 

Bad Education, pt. 1

Huh. This is the movie for all of you (and you know who you are) wondering what it would be like if Douglas Sirk had made politically-minded, narrative-twisted gay porn in Spanish. Just saying.