Oblivion, etc.

Remember when we started NotThatCritical and we meant to write briefly and quickly, with no pressure, because no one would be reading it? I think it was supposed to be: 1) no more than five hundred words per movie, and 2) write something every single day. We never really kept up with every single day part, but, you know, like Maude said, consistency is not really a human trait.

I saw Oblivion a couple weeks ago. Well, "saw" is probably overstating it. I was present for it, although I might have fallen asleep once or twice. I did gather that it was about killer drones (topical!), and I can report that during the time I was awake, Tom Cruise occupied probably about 85% of the screen time. Maybe 90%. I remember just one scene he was not in, where stoned-eyed Andrea Riseborough (who seems familiar but imdb reveals nothing I remember seeing her in) talked with Melissa Leo, but I think their conversation was mainly about the Tom Cruise character, so it does not pass the Bechdel Test.

Speaking of Tom Cruise, I read this Vulture article a month or so ago, and I just saw Lindy West's response to it, which is, as usual, pretty much spot on. The only thing I need to add is that when they say "analyzed the data" they really mean, "made up a bunch of data points and wrote down some ideas about them." Which is cool, that's mostly what we want from Vulture, right? But this actual data exists--you can get all of imdb's data, for money--so is someone doing an actual analysis of actual data? Because that could be really interesting.

This research on gender and the movies was released recently from the Annenberg School: http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication%20and%20Journalism/~/media/5DB47326757B416FBE2CB5E6F1B5CBE4.ashx
This paper interests me, but this sort of analysis is necessarily so very subjective, despite best efforts. See for instance, from page 11:

All characters were evaluated for attractiveness. This measure ascertained whether one or more characters in the plot verbally (e.g., “You are so hot!”) and/or nonverbally (e.g., cat call, whistling, gapping mouth) indicated the physical desirousness of another character. Self references did not count. Characters were coded as not attractive (i.e., no verbal or non verbal references), attractive (i.e., one reference), or very attractive (i.e., two or more references). These latter two levels were collapsed prior to analysis.

Makes me a little dizzy, trying to think of ways to make an objective character attractiveness criteria.

I feel pretty certain that are fewer leading women in the movies now than there used to be, and fewer of those leading women are tough. But I have no real idea of how to objectively assess that statement.

Ripley: tough
(wikimedia.org)

Katniss: also tough
(www.fanpop.com/)

My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?

Curious after my last post I watched My Son, My Son, What Have You Done?, which is streaming on Netflix. By "I watched" I supposes I mean "I am Watching." It's pretty much what you expect--a study of someone with a serious problems, loosely based on reality, and existential at great length. It has some weird acting and some even weirder dialog. I wasn't surprised to find that there was not a lot of time invested in writing the film: "Herzog became convinced that they could make a film and that they could write it quickly. They went to a house in the Austrian countryside: Herzog set a week's deadline and within 4½ days they had their screenplay."

You can really feel the extra half a day's effort--especially in the scenes where Herzog has the actors freeze the scene for a long still shot. Sevigny does a fairly good job of staying still.

There aren't any albino crocodiles, but there is a too-long conversation about ostriches.

I can't guarantee I will finish this.

[photo: I didn't]

Coco Before Chanel

I watched Coco Before Chanel last night largely because I watched Amelie a few weeks ago and wanted more French eye candy, which seems like a long-standing a genre of movie in need of a proper name. I would like to propose something like "glaçage d'oeil," which I believe could translate loosely to "eye frosting," but there's definitely no way I can remember that exact phrase, or how to spell it. But honestly, FEAST:

Green and red. I love these colors.

Coco Before Chanel is a radically different palette, but if anything is more lovely than Audrey Tautou, it is Audrey Tautou in slightly mannish clothing. You should see her in men's pajamas, which effective next paycheck will be my exclusive sleeping attire. Behold:


I know right? Almost as perfect as this:

So, to bring us back to the movie, it was lovely to watch but less lovely to think much about. The movie is too wrapped up in Chanel's love life to give much consideration to her fashion, and I ended up feeling the whole thing was a little disappointing. Several moments were like Mad Men, in that they test my ability to sit and watch historically-approximate sexism. But again, like Mad Men oh how pretty it is to watch. Watching a movie and wishing to own or make the wardrobe prompted me to wander over to Design*Sponge to see if they have any new posts in the "Living In" category. Indeed they do, one of which is Coco Before Chanel. Here are the highlights:

Bonnie and Clyde
The Big Lebowski
An Education (my favorite style movie this last year)
Breathless (Oh summer haircut!)
Paper Moon
Oh Brother Where Art Thou?**

In honor of movies and pretty things, I bought a bunch of tomato-red fabric this morning and hope to make a dress out of it. I realize this flies in the face of the heart of the movie, and of timeless evidence that the best thing I could do for my wardrobe would be to remake all of my clothing out of men's business attire, but it's summer, and it's Virginia, and there is no way on earth I'm wearing pants or a tie.


**If you think it's tacky to do a fashion summary of a movie in which the aesthetic is largely that of poverty, you should see The Last of the Mohicans post. I know. I know.

Also: I still plan to blog on movies and poverty-chic. Maybe it's also a nice time for an old-fashioned Indians post to go along with our Westerns/genres posts? We could use Umbert Eco's equivalent of the Bechdel test for Native Americans in cinema.

[photos, 1: SUBMIT to the awesome power of red and green, without looking like a Christmas card. The key, I believe, is to wear read in a green environment. 2: oh my god, 3: ohmygod, 4: OHMYGOD! 5: If I make this dress and wear it with doc martins maybe, just maybe, I will look awesome]

The Joneses. And also some other stuff.

Recently I wasn’t feeling well, and I stayed home while Thad went out. While he was gone I did something I’ve been meaning to do: I watched The Joneses.

You read that correctly. I had been meaning to watch The Joneses. Somewhere, months back, I saw a preview for it, and I thought to myself “I will watch that.” And I did. And yes, the movie is exactly what you’re thinking, so there’s no point in writing a full review. There is a beautiful moment in the conclusion that I will relate, perfect in its superficiality, in which Mr. Jones realizes that he does not need a life mired in material possessions, that he has bought the American dream at the cost of the happiness and lives of the people around him, that there can be dignity and joy in living in reality instead of a glossy catalog fantasy. In this moment he manifests this decision by nobly giving away the keys to his limited release Audi to drive away in a humble Toyota Sequoia, pristine, black, and (shame) this year’s standard model.

The movie is petty amazing. I initially wanted to see it because I just can’t help but believe that any movie in which David Duchovny goes to live in an idyllic gated community full of picture perfect people must, just absolutely must, be a reference to my favorite X Files episode,"Arcadia." This extreme and probably irrational certainty was only confirmed by a particularly strange scene in which Mr. Jones sees Mrs. in a face mask and immediately initiates a makeout session. This:

Simply has to be a reference to this:

I just can’t live in a world where it isn’t, because in that world I have wasted two hours of my life. Utterly.

So, this brings me to the other thing about this movie, which is that it’s about a world in which branding is almost gloriously inescapable. I say “gloriously” because, though the movie dutifully frowns on the pursuit of a name brand persona, it is completely, totally, wholly and unabashedly, branded. Without a doubt, the brands are the stars of this film, and they shine. Everyone looks wonderful. Everything looks desirable. It made me, during a week I had been denouncing cell phones as dated and unnecessary junk, certain android was certainly the way to go. This movie made me want sweaters and hair extensions. It made me want to golf.

So that’s the thing about this movie. It’s a film about how we all would be best served by purchasing name brands, and by recognizing that we are not truly brand people. The brands, in fact, confirm that about us. I think this is not only the thing about this movie, but this is just the thing these days. We love to participate in branding that affirms we are not branded people.

No doubt you’re saying this is nothing new. It isn’t. It might be more accurate to say “this is just the thing…still.” But we are newly excited about it somehow. Mad Men is an incredible example of how branding is a very trendy part of our history, and "historical" is its own brand. Or take Morgan Spurlock. This guy has made a career of consuming what he criticizes, and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is no exception. Spurlock’s TED talk does a great job of illustrating some ways in which he’s better at branding than the ad agents he tries to woo for his film. Spurlock plays it off as satire, but that’s disingenuous. Or, perhaps that is the satire. He’s just good at this, frankly because he’s one of the best ad agents in the “documentary” media business. He’s not an author, he’s not a filmmaker, he’s not a journalist; he’s Realty brand, and he’s saturating our media. He’s getting the name out. In fact, the more I think about marketing, buy ins, brand names and brand exclusivity, I can’t think of a better sale then 18 minutes on TED. TED itself is one of the most successful brands in the academic business, and it’s a pricey one. TED is fame for fortune, no different from any marketing ploy in the clothing, food, media, or automobile industries.

Like I said, none of this is really new, it's just newly interesting to me. It is late, it feels later, so I’m off to bed. But I’ve finally posted something (woot!), and this particular post may have inspired me to finally write that hipster/tramp chic post Lydia and I talked about several years back. I’m also, still, working up to an X Files post.

On Education.

In the past week I've watched An Education, The King's Speech, and read Never Let Me Go. Anglophilia, or education obsession? It's hard to separate the two. In fact, in reading Never Let Me Go, I came to realize how deeply I believe in the Myth of the English Boarding School, with no head for the fact of it. I absolutely believe that every English person is bundled from babyhood straight into a towering hall of learning, all tea, kneesocks, Latin, and tweed. I believe they are veritable cradles where the infants quote shakespeare (the proper parts, not the bawdy stuff), and that at any graduation a wandering citizen might find there twenty or thirty graduates (for no class would ever be larger), all wide eyed and ready to embrace the world. I've been to England; I know well enough that it's grown to the twenty-first century with the rest of us, but forget that. My way is so much better.

Both of these movies and this novel are about education, and I've thought a lot about the subject lately, in part because I've returned to work, and in part because there seems to be no stopping The Internet and Media from fear-mongering the generally dismal state of the American educational system. Where you have education panic, laments about The Uselessness of the Humanities never follows far behind. Normally I try not to say much when it comes up, largely because someone always implicitly points out that my own station in life is proof of the failure of my field, and no one likes much to be proof of failure, especially when they're generally quite satisfied. But these three texts all brought up a different sort of question: why educate us at all, when so much of adulthood is just terminal misery? This is less explicitly the topic of The King's Speech, but I tell you: it's there.

It's a good question. Why education? Like the humanities, there's no defending it without either insulting it or sounding like its pitiful orphaned offspring. So, I think I'll just say this: though the movie moralizes against it quite a bit, I'd like to side with Jenny in An Education, the Jenny who behaves badly and sleeps with older criminals. "Why not?" I think we'd both say. We're all to die soon anyway, and we must spend our time doing something. Why not jazz, why not smoking, and why not the arts? I'd like to take her philosophy farther, and give similar support to all the things she hates: studying, being bored, feeling generally miserable. Maybe it's all the Kierkegaard I've been reading this last week but I say "why not?" to all of it: drinking and working, dancing and shuffling about miserably, reading, eating, quitting, over working, staring uselessly at art and thinking "yes. that's exactly it," donating all our organs and be done with it. Let's pit extreme highs against extreme lows and in the end we can call it a zero sum game.

I might start blogging again regularly, but I won't make any promises. I might also watch a few good movies now and then, mixed in with all the trash for a little color. I'm still thinking about a post about tramp movies and hipsters, as well as a post about what happened, exactly, in the last two seasons of The X Files. So, if anyone still actually reads this blog (unlikely), you might want to sign off before that second post. If you don't want to sign off, maybe you'll post something you've been thinking, but not writing, about. It's fun, posting, though I'm not sure why.

As I reread this, I can see that all this British media has made me sound way too British, but it will be better once Thad comes home and I have someone normal to talk to.

It's been a while

There are a lot of red faces around here. I may just start posting again. Tonight, though, I'm just posting quick and dirty, something I found today and love. Design*Sponge has a category called "living in," which functions as a purchasing guide for movies with a great aesthetic. Here are the movies I'd like to live in:

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Annie Hall

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Amelie

Grey Gardens

Rear Window

Two for the Road

And here's one for Thad.

Titles III

For the sexiness.

Another snowday: nerdy documentaries

Frontrunners

I thought I’d love this because I enjoyed Spellbound. I am starting to sound like Netflix, or Pandora. The fact is, subject matter isn’t always a great predictor. I did love looking into the lives of Stuyvesant, perhaps New York City’s most prestigious high school, students. But the documentary, which follows 2 candidate’s run for Student Union President, fails to create the driving anticipation I hoped to feel. It clearly thinks it’s suspenseful—it invests a lot of time in dragging out the results with emotional and contemplative shots of the candidates. In the end, however, the race is at every point a total landslide. There’s no question who will win, and the movie fails to make me feel like a high school presidential campaign is important. Isn’t that what these movies are supposed to do? Help us see, for two hours, why something so inconsequential is of such great consequence to a small and loveable motley crew of Very Human characters? It was nice enough, but it didn’t.

Helvetica



The movie about typeface! I loved it. I loved having a whole two hours dedicated to how typeface changed advertising, and to how advertising followed the advent of high modernism and facilitated the establishment of one unified voice for the commercial language of countless corporations and at least two nations. It’s a great introduction to modern design trends and a wonderful survey of some of the contemporary artists who work primarily with commercial media—products we all use every day.

The true success of the film is its ability to make wholly compelling arguments both for and against Helvetica. As much as I love design I have always considered it the art of aesthetic choice, of selection and revision, not (because design and content can be isolated from one another) of social, political, or personal consequence. This film convinced me, at least to some degree, that the question is not so simple.

My favorite moment in the movie, without a doubt, occurs when a design artist is tasked with choosing the font for a book on his work and, because he finds the text boring and badly written, selects zap dingbats.

Title screens

I've shared this already on Google reader, but I'm on an NTC posting binge, so why not? The movie titles collection that this graphic designer has posted is a wonderful way to lose hours of your life. The real beauty of this site is that many of these titles, on mouse over, give you the end screen of the movie. It's fantastic. Point A to point B in one mouse shift. I can't get enough of it. I now find titles so *meaningful*. I never realized how overdone white text on black screen is. I have finally confirmed my sense that font is so important.


So, because I don't want to work today, I'm going to post some of my favorite title shots from this afternoon's browsing. I tried to group them thematically below, but had tons of trouble with formatting. So I'll post them throughout the next day or so, as I feel like it.

First:

Billy Elliot and Elephant because they are beautiful.

Cactus Flower

The plot: a dentist who is defensive of his freedom has fallen in love with a young girl who works at a local record store. The movie opens on her failed suicide attempt, a response to the dentist's claim that he cannot leave his wife and three children. The dentist, in truth, is unmarried. His story is simply to keep all of his lovers at bay. The suicide attempt convinces the dentist to marry the young girl, and then the plot unfolds as he asks his stodgy nurse to play stand in for his wife. Cactus Flower has a Breakfast At Tiffany's backdrop: a young girl about town lives next door to a young playwright who comes in and out of her window. The young man, however, is mostly a wry backdrop to Toni's machinations as she tries to be sure her fiance does right by his current wife. From the beginning it's pretty clear the four characters will eventually pair off by age--the two young neighbors together and the dentist with his nurse and assistant.


[photo: meh]

If I were to have one movie wish for this movie it would be to see this remade in the style of The Proposal, with all the roles switched. The problem is that Walter Matthau and Goldie Hawn are no where near as charming Ingrid Bergman and Rick Lenz (so fabulously named Igor!). Matthau especially is more a grumpy grandpa than a womanizing bachelor. Bergman, on the other hand, would make a wonderful independent dentist and Lenz an oh-so-charming record store clerk. Matthau is perfect for the judgmental desk attendant and Hawn was made to play the occasional jokester. In my movie dentist Bergman would, after much slap-stick hilarity, come clean to her young lover and they could run off together, leaving Matthau and Hawn to eye one another in the waiting room.


[photo: yeah!]

I am hoping this movie can kick off a new theme for me for November: women in comedy. I wanted to start by getting a sense of what Hawn did before the 80s. Cactus Flower is her first big movie. Also: Bergman in comedy--what?! That's like a grilled cheese with mayonnaise on it. Note to self: rent Indiscreet.

Zombieland (pre-review semi-rant)

I've been trying to decide if I want to see Zombieland or if I want to be a zombie-snob and insist that the golden age of the undead is behind us (by "golden age" I mean "time of troubles"). Last week Tor.com ran an interview with the director, praising the movie more than I had anticipated, and quoting him as saying "Well, I really think the thing that informed it most was my music video background." Hm. I have yet to decide how I feel about that. We can all name some directors who do have done innovative work in both music videos and feature length films: Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, etc. I wasn't sure, however, what Ruben Fleisher's "background" entails. So, in the spirit of research, If found the following:

1. Fleisher is responsible for a number of commercials, including one of those creepy Burger King ads in which a plastic-faced king delivers someone a whopper on a silver platter. Probably a good history for someone interested in the consumer culture tendency to slap -land to the end of something and start selling tee shirts. Also, I think the title Zombieland is funnier than I gave it credit for. It seems to me a little bit more honest than Land of the Dead. As much as Romero may have wanted to slam consumer culture, zombies are the new franchise, and, frankly, Romero's cultural critique is about as plastic and marketable as counter-culture thinking gets.*

2. Fleisher's music videos are extremely concerned with vintage and kitsch, drawing extensively on American pop culture. "Vintage" here especially means old AV technology (hand-held cameras, manual focus, boom boxes etc.), and pulp media (print ad culture, the formulaic music videos of the 60s, cartoon-y reinterpretations of late-80s/early 90s street culture):




3. Fleisher has some short videos that seem to be in response to army ads, and which are pretty sarcastic about the military. That seems good for mocking the extreme survivalist bent of a lot of zombie movies. Bad for those sort of serious about post-apocalyptic survival. Which, I mean, isn't us obviously.

4. He says he grew up in DC, but I'd bet $10 he grew up in northern Virginia.

5. He's uses a lot of color. I like that.

So I think he's the perfect person to make a movie like Zombieland, I'm just not sure I'm the perfect person to like it. I like the meta-media stuff he does in his videos, but I don't always like how clever his videos think they are. I'm afraid Zombieland will be the sensory-overload answer to Shaun of the Dead--less funny and less watchable. I fear Fleisher will become another director to overlook the lesson of Romero: the yammering, shopping masses are funny until they vote you their beloved leader.

All that said, I don't normally pre-review, and I'm looking forward to seeing how solid my predictions are. I will see it, and trusting Tor I've decided to see it in good faith.

*I concede, there are some possible exceptions.

Parents

I really thought Parents was going to be about cannibalism, but mostly it was just about how a kid feels when his parents have sex. There's probably a lot I could say about the weird relationship between pre-adolescents and their parents, but I feel Liz Lemon said it best:

"I don't have a lot of personal life experience, but if I have learned anything from my Sims family, when a child doesn't see his father enough, he starts to jump up and down and then his mood level will drop till he pees himself."

The exciting news is that as I pack I'm watching everything that looks even barely decent on Hulu. I may just start updating this blog again.

Let the Right One In

Reviewers for The Gaurdian have been examining Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In so frequently that I’ve felt redundant contributing when I know at least some of you are readers of their horror archives. However, I’ve finally begun to disagree with their reviews enough to post something argumentative here. Actually, I don’t completely disagree with their reviewers---I also loved the movie very much, and am struck with utter dismay to hear that “A wholly unnecessary American remake is in pre-production.”* Each of their writers has enthusiastically embraced Alfredson’s film as the newest in a fresh wave of Scandinavian horror, citing it repeatedly as the mindful alternative to the American Twilight. They are right—Let the Right One In succeeds in ways Twilight most definitely fails; it’s a thoughtful, tender, and somewhat emotion-rending study of the agony that is adolescence. It is, however, in no way a horror film, and unlike Twilight, it’s quite aware of the limits adolescence places on any love story. Comparisons to George Romero and Abel Ferrara are painfully mistaken attempts to comprehend the film through the often-reductive lens of a genre—something that simply overlooks everything valuable about the movie. Comparisons to J.K. Rowling’s writing are simply too absurd to address.

The movie is rather a self-aware revision of Twlight: it’s a love story with a refreshing understanding that seeking love as an antidote to profound isolation courts relationships framed with violence and abuse. Oskar and Eli’s interaction is far more compelling than that of Edward and Bella. It’s tender, hasty, and mutually abusive; it’s the kind of dynamic we find when we don’t characterize children as ideals, or pretend they can love with the consideration that only comes with maturity. Eli and Oskar are first and foremost children: sweet, selfish, and extremely unpredictable. Any romantic belief that a child vampire can possess an immortal love bought by perpetual youth overlooks the film’s most heartbreaking character: Eli’s caretaker and (presumably) former childhood sweetheart, who, with age, increasing senility, and incompetence, fails to care for her or fulfill the goals of his own affection. His fall and replacement are simply tragic, and though every phase of Eli and Oskar’s romance is so touching, it is also reasonably pessimistic. Claims that the director and writer have “sacrificed the value of narrative in favour of horror and fear” are almost shameful misreadings of a film that is all narrative, and no horror, save that felt when watching children struggle to face a fundamentally hostile world. The horror of reality is so great that a young girl childishly indifferent to the coagulate glutting her teeth and staining her clothes is an attractive alternative, and I am somewhat inclined to read Oskar’s beloved Eli as a fantasy, a psychological escape from one violence to another (this is my tentative reading of Eli’s unexplained scar). Whichever way you read the narrative, the fantasy feels deeply real, and the film seems an apt overture to our misguided fascination with young love.

*This article cites the possible location of the remake as Littleton, CO, the place of the Columbine shootings. I am not sure I need to say so, but for the director of Cloverfield to make a vampire movie about school bullying in which the heroine brutally slaughters the bullies seems to me to be the least tactful of all possible courses of action.

W. (2008)

Oliver Stone's habit of mining the recent and familiar for his fictionalized histories requires a leap from his audience. I think that the strengths of W. become clearer if it's viewed as an alternate history, if we pretend for a couple of hours that we're from a calmer, saner universe where George W. Bush was only ever the son of a President, a semi-public figure of fun, instead of a world-historical fuckup. Imagine, we say, just imagine what would have happened if Dan Quayle had become President! Or Jesse Ventura! Or worst of all George W. Bush! Someone that feckless and callow and lazy—what dystopia would reign!

Stone presents Bush (Josh Brolin) in scenes from throughout his adult life, moving back and forth through time as we see how his formative experiences and demons and flaws shape his actions. These scenes, mostly, are intensely personal: and, while they present Bush, especially younger Bush, as a grotesque, they are careful not to damn him for that; Brolin plays him with such confidence that he becomes a preternatural charmer even through the slouching and loudness and mouthfuls of food. Two scenes at the beginning neatly lay out the Bush dynamic: one, a golden moment on a baseball diamond where Bush receives full and absolute adoration from the crowd before he throws out the first pitch as President; the second a fraternity hazing where Bush is seen to be a peculiar interpersonal genius. Bush craves love but will accept deference; and if he cannot compete in the world of ideas and reason he will resituate all his problems from there to the realm of personal connection where he is nigh unrivaled. Bush's struggle for the respect of his father (James Cromwell in a nice performance of some heavy-handed scenes) is the key to this dynamic: GHWB seems to be the only person who both refuses W. affection and does not fall for his charms; in Stone's telling, it is approval from this distant father that motivates the striving of an unfit man for office but is not enough to overcome shallowness and incompetence.

Of course W. would not be an Oliver Stone film without a little wackadoodle read on l'affaire Bush, one he here situates within the national security apparatus of the administration. These scenes are where the feel of alternate history comes in; the odd impressions and recontextualized quotes identify this as parodic; the murderous absurdities calmly dropping from the mouths of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz reminded me of nothing as much as Dr. Strangelove. Most of these criminals don't come off well, of course: Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) gets the best treatment, with his Iraq war arc being presented as tragedy-lite; Condi Rice is shown as less conspirator than enabler, though Thandie Newton's distracting impression makes her thoroughly a figure of ridicule. Karl Rove, wow: Rove is not only a villain, he is a malevolent corrupt elf; casting Toby Jones here is one of Stone's most interesting choices in the whole film.

Throughout the film, we come, as we expect, to feel sympathy for W. He's a man wholly out of his depth, whose personal psychodrama became treasonous only because of the family into which he was born. His interpersonal instincts are so right that he cannot realize that his intellectual instincts are so wrong; in manipulating those around him to give him love (or deference, that Splenda to his soul), he opens himself up to their manipulation to war. But those very scenes with his advisers and cabinet pull us back out of any sympathy. The jarring satire reignites our anger at regular intervals. Nixon was part tragedy, part Grand Guignol, but the character was given an amoral macabre dignity. Bush's dignity, hinted at in the sympathy Stone give to his rise through life, is utterly undercut by the clowns by which he is undone; and we in our alternate universe laugh at the criminals and cringe at Bush, thinking What a bullet we dodged, then, didn't we?

Modern Architecture in film

I logged into my rss feeds today to find a fun documentary clip about the role of Los Angeles's prolific modern architectural landscape in film. The below youtube clip quality is poor and the narration couldn't be more wooden, but the tour of some of film's most prominent homes is fun, and the reflection on how we associate modernity and moral corruption is very interesting. Enjoy!

The Green Berets

Roger Ebert criticized this film for being "heavy handed and old fashioned." Considering the movie's egregious glorification of a widely unpopular war, its simple vilification of the media for speaking out against the conflict, and its deeply racist representations of the Vietnamese people, history, culture, and political context, I'd say it's a fair critique. I also would place this movie on my list of most hated, but mostly because it's loud and sort of uninteresting. Normally I would try to comment more extensively on the film's plot, characters, etc., but I feel much more compelled to comment that my Christmas break was pretty hectic, that I disappointingly left my knitting needles at home, but that happily my step-mom made corn casserole, so things pretty much evened out. George Takei is in this, and the new Star Trek movie is going to be so unspeakably cool. Also, you wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I have really low blood pressure.

In theory I'd like to be interested in The Green Berets. I watched the National Geographic documentary with attention, and expected to do the same here. The most I got out of this, however, was another wow level and a downloaded mp3 of the green berets theme song to set as my brother's ring tone. Since my brother is the only special forces member I know I trust his evaluation of the film: "This movie is to other movies as the Vietnam war was to other wars." He's right, it's long, convoluted, and (judging from my family's experience) popular mostly with patriarchs. [photo: yawn]

Nazis!

Which of This Fall’s Oscar-Baiting Holocaust Movies Is Right for You? (from Vulture). Please post your decisions below so we can arrange rides to the theater.

Paprika

Paprika is set in a future where technology, the "DC mini," has enabled psychologist to share dream space with their patients, witnessing and participating in their dreams firsthand. Atsuko Chiba practices legally under her given name, and illegally with unofficial patients under the persona of "Paprika," a sort of rogue dream handyman (not unlike Robert DeNiro's rogue electrician in Brazil?). When the technology is stolen, her lab must attack directly what they dub "dream terrorism," a chaotic world in which anyone can invade another's mind and dreams function like bacteria--infecting anyone who is exposed. The movie is strange--not because of the surreal dream sequences (I liked the parade of household appliances and felt it didn't clearly constitute terrorism), but because it was fun but somehow didn't grab me at all. Attempting to classify it is extremely fun--my best stab is something like psycho-cyber-noir, not quite cyber punk, but not...not if you know what I mean. Noir is usually a genre that's really interested in psychology as it relates to stock characters--jungian archetypes in psychological terms. This movie expands the tendency a bit, exploring the notion of fractured selves and contradictory impulses as what makes us fundamentally human. It also raises some interesting questions about what aspects of our identity might be sacred, a common and compelling question in science fiction. In spite of these fun tendencies, all of which are exactly the sort of thing I love, I just never felt quite attached to the movie itself. It feels like something fun but not really engaging, the sort of movie that might later be shot live action with Keanu Reeves, woodenly fretting about seemingly innocuous childhood experiences and looking about intensely at yet another dystopian future set. I loved the music and a few aesthetic moments, but in the end it just didn't take me in. I'm meeting with the friend who lent me the movie for dinner tomorrow--she will certainly be horrified to see me so non-commital. [Photo: Why didn't I like this movie more?]

del Toro Double Feature

Last night at Bears the attending audience (and by that I mean Raina, Chris, the projectionist and myself) were treated to a Guillermo del Toro double feature: Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage. It was an excellent excuse to drink hot toddies and eat cheese fries, but it was also an excellent pairing of two of the director's best films. In a fairly significant lapse of attentiveness on my part, I had failed to notice previously how intricately these two movies overlap one another. Both tales of motherhood, madness, and murder, Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage are films that continue to amaze me in their ability to affect the feeling of total peaceful resolution with endings that cannot be read as anything but profoundly tragic. We watched Pan's Labyrnith first, for which I was grateful as without it fresh in my mind I don't think I could have left The Orphanage with the same level of satisfaction that I had last night. The protagonist, Ofelia, is so name not solely to frame each scene with the inevitability of the young girls death (the visual with which del Toro frames the film); it seems rather that the whole film is a re-staging of Hamlet in Franco's Spain. The film has all the elements of Hamlet (the clear the usurpation of a rightful father by an ambitious political criminal), but retold from Ophelia's perspective. Ofelia is young, virginal, plagued by coming sexual maturity, and driven by external pressures to retreat into a fantasy world, a kind of madness. Pan is the film's Hamlet, the eponymous hero whose half-love, half-cruelties, and gaming half-truths contribute to the overwhelming instability of the world Ofelia inhabits. Pan is the perfect figure to stand in as Hamlet; his relationship with Selene in classical literature is one of seduction, as we read in some texts he's know not only for bedding shepherdesses, but for mercilessly hunting those who rejected him. The shift of the narrative to Ophelia's perspective is an interesting choice on del Toro's part, and sets the stage for what appears to be the dominant theme of the movie: the systematic victimization of women. Pan's Labyrinth is very clear: women are uniformly abused, by structures domestic and political, biological and narratological. Examples of this are inescapable; at home women suffer under the boot of a domestic tyrant, in war women are unable to fight openly, and in narrative action is centered around female sacrifice, of a woman to madness, love, or politics, of mothers at the hands of their children (the film offers us two examples: both Ophelia and her mother die to save her brother). The art direction brilliantly reflects these themes in Ofelia's book, where the intricate appearance of forest figures and Pan's face always follow the same pattern as the later painting of her mother's blood soaked ovaries and uterus.

This ongoing exploration of women and sacrifice is inverted in The Orphanage, where a mother sacrifices her son and seek to redeem themselves for their wrongdoing. For all its beautiful cultivation of a horror aesthetic, The Orphanage is the same tale as Pan's Labyrinth: a woman's retreat from the horrors of reality into her own fantasy world. I know many would argue that it is not until the very final conclusion that Laura is confronted with the knowledge that she locked her son in a basement to die. I wholeheartedly disagree. After discovering the truth about Tomas, Laura watches a film of the young boy drawing in his basement cell. She sees living footage that proves the house has a level she has never seen--that the basement in which Tomas lived, the place her son begged her to visit just before his disappearance, exists just below her. Never once does she attempt to find its entrance in an effort to seek out her son. Even after finding the doorknob to the basement, a doorknob that perfectly matches the first floor closet, she explores every door and space in the house except the closet. Laura knows, but isn't yet ready to confront what she's done. Instead, Laura adopts Beninga's clothing (thus identifying herself with a murderer who locked her son in the basement) and Simon's coping mechanism (she retreats into a world of imaginary friends, eventually writing herself in to the novel her son reads upon their first arrival at their new home). The Orphanage is only the story of a haunting in as much as Laura is haunted by her conscience, in every other way it's like Pan's Labyrinth--a story of the fragile line that divides fantasy and madness.

I love both of these movies, though I left the double feature feeling that del Toro's project fell short of what it could have done. Much of Pan's Labyrinth feels to me as though it's interested in critiquing from a feminist perspective the role women play in myth and classical literature. But ultimately, in both films the moral that women must sacrifice or be sacrificed prevails. Their deaths are tragic, but they're also beautiful, satisfactory, and deeply necessary. Watching them back to back was a little like reading Poe's short stories and poems all in one go--after a while you suspect the author lives in a world where all the beautiful women are dead and the landscape is just brimming with ominous aged hags and young men dedicated to the full time occupation of calculating and lamenting their losses. With both of these movies del Toro participates in a grand tradition of mythic story-telling, and he does it very very well. His critiques of the genre, however, unravel slightly in his deeply traditional endings. Tradition is what carries the pieces. Like the original Grimm tales, both movies are terrifying. Like most folkloric traditions, both are extremely beautiful. [Photo: I don't want to claim that Pan's Labyrinth is full of visual ovarian metaphors, but once it occurs to you it's impossible to see anything else.]

Puppy

Puppy is a weird movie in that it wasn't great, but I wanted to write about it. The narrative wasn't particularly compelling, but I'm compelled to give it more consideration than I felt it warranted after my first viewing. In its heavy handed attempt to defy expectation, the plot unfolds fairly predictably. A young woman taken hostage, Liz, finally seizes her freedom only to linger around her kidnapper's home for a while, making friends with his dogs and rummaging through his CDs. Soon she is manipulating him and everyone in his life--pushing his guilt such that he automatically trusts her, and blames everything that seems amiss on his own psychosis. By the film's conclusion, Liz is the raving lunatic--murdering her abductor's wife so that she might take her place, and forcing herself on Aiden emotionally just as he once forced himself on her physically. This shift can be seen coming early on--Liz is needy, suicidal, and Aiden is too young and good looking to be cast as a committed villain. What surprised me about Puppy is the total moral ambiguity of the film's conclusion--an ambiguity brought about by something more than a simple reversal of roles. In her final assessment of Aiden's life, Liz is correct. His wife did not love him, and most likely did abandon him hoping that his inevitable breakdown would allow her to inherit his home. Both Helen and Liz abuse and take advantage of Aiden, but unlike Helen, Liz is willing to share the space she steals, and in her desperate attempts to blame her own actions on Aiden's illness, she all but shines with the virtual of incidental forgiveness. I should have hated Liz by the film's conclusion, in which it's made clear that she is the perhaps the highest functioning form of parasite known to innocent and unsuspecting kidnappers, but by the credits I had only just grown to love her and her utterly irrational behavior. There is absolutely no need to blame Aiden for the car she crashed, the dog she murdered, or the dead doctor she's buried in the yard. Honesty about the circumstances in which she came to live with him would completely absolve her of these actions, for they were committed in her many attempts to escape. She is, however, totally uninterested in blaming or even mentioning to Aiden the time he held her hostage. Rather, her focus is entirely on nesting into her new environment and explaining away wounds that are visible rather than those that are actually significant. What anger she does express for Aiden's treatment of her is directed not at his actions but at his inability to be honest about the total lack of love between them. Ultimately, Liz can't be read as a victim--not because she herself is a criminal, but simply because she has no expectations of innocence in others.

Much has been made comparing this film to Black Snake Moan, though the only parallel I can see is the basic outline of the plot--the abduction of a young woman by a man who will quickly be revealed to possess depth and complexity that exceed our expectations for a psychopath or common criminal. But assuming two films to be linked based on their plot outlines is kind of like comparing Solaris to Solaris. It just isn't a great idea. I much prefer the comparison that Chris suggested: to Audition. As he put it: Audition begins with an intolerably trite love story, and ends with the lover shackled and fed like a dog. Puppy takes the exact opposite arc: it begins with dog collars and debasement and evolves into a love story. Despite the inverse narrative structures, Puppy brought to mind the uneasiness with which i first watched Audition and realized that something, not love, but a kind of kinship is established through violence and degradation. Puppy is, if nothing else, very well titled.
[Photo: Like Audition, Puppy has a few weird moments with feet.]