floating eye

ÍGY JÖTTEM / MY WAY HOME (1965) Dir: Miklos Jancso Hungary,...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:30:00 -0400

ÍGY JÖTTEM / MY WAY HOME (1965)

Dir: Miklos Jancso

Hungary, 108m

FLOATING EYE

I cherish Jancso.

Jancso was part of a group of filmmakers, who around the same time in different places, largely influenced by one another and the tide they set forth, sat down to examine in their work issues of perception—asymmetric memory, abstract representation of self and feelings, how seeing shapes narrative. Now that it has settled, we can see that they weren’t all of the same make. We can see for example that Bergman was much more old-fashioned than Antonioni. A lot of Godard’s novelty is just not a big deal anymore.

Jancso seems more advanced in retrospect.

Most of his films from this period are about war, they are fine as such, better than most anything by anyone else; and war (usually WWII) did after all loom large in the consciousness of people who lived through it as impressionable youngsters, so it was a much more personal experience than it is for us now, distantly desensitized to it by TV footage of war coverage and atrocity. And they are so purely about war, it seems a lot of viewers have rested upon watching his films on a certain abstraction of war.

But let’s see something else. Nevermind war for a moment. We can know it is WWII somewhere in Hungary, but there are no battles, no two armies on opposite sides to clearly define conflict. We know as much about it as we do about the protagonist, nothing beyond that he’s a boy of 17 tossed by forces beyond understanding. There is no broader story to define who he is versus what he is up against, nothing beyond the fact that there he is, strange people arrest him, he breaks free, is arrested again, and there’s the vague hum of violence hanging over the prairie.

It is all so clear when you see through Jancso’s eyes, no clutter here.

Where most filmmakers try to get the whole image, he lightly sketches edges only—the air around the thing.

Here, the image is of the boy rushing from one stage of life to the next, always moved because the gears of the world move. Others pass through the outpost, soldiers, civilians, wary, bored, some of them small-minded fools doing what they were told to do. Always with the violence, because who knows what part of what story those people live in.

The first half of this is sublime, there is no story (later there will be some), only glimpses from transient life as the boy’s taken around, what the Japanese had a century before perfected in their art of woodblock carving. Buddhist-inspired in its original context, the images reinforced a worldview of fleeting sorrows, impermanence, sweet reminder of the emptiness of all things.

So it is with Jancso, who (unlike most filmmakers of war) does not dwell on suffering, presents atrocity as fleeting as everything else. Whose camera is the Japanese floating eye, always gliding at arm’s length (never fixed, theatric) as though self-less consciousness hovers in and off itself, broken up by bird’s eye views of abstract landscape.

Want another clue? More purely about seeing, the boy has found in captivity binoculars that he uses to look at things, so far we thought he was in the middle of nowhere, but looking out with these things he observes (creates by seeing?) a quiet town, which suddenly, illusory, seems close enough. The association is with cinema, memory, remote vision.

The boys frolic in the ruins of ancient statues, forming temporary connections in a perishable world.

The film is the wonderful blueprint of this Buddhist world, of things coming to be and vanishing again.

I recommend this. Sure there is boredom and dead time, it can’t be helped. Life has this asymmetry.

Something to meditate upon.

★★★★☆

SE, JIE / LUST, CAUTION (2007) Dir: Ang Lee China | Taiwan |...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:22:35 -0400

SE, JIE / LUST, CAUTION (2007)

Dir: Ang Lee

China | Taiwan | Hong Kong, 157m

DESIRE, AS CINEMATIC MEMORY THAT BENDS THE SHAPE OF THINGS

The exercise here seems to be the layered portrait of a woman (an actress) unsure of herself. There is a lot of other stuff thrown in with Hong Kong and Shanghai in the grip of war, spying and politics, that is basically broadening the canvas with enough life to make the main image more lush and lifelike as opposed to a dry examination, bring clarity to it as something we unearth from a busy world. It is what Wong Kar Wai does in his films when stretching time, though not exactly the same.

That image is actually an image of her, shown twice.

That is where she’s talking on the phone in the cafe, more sensually memorable when moments later she puts on perfume. The first time it happens we know close to nothing of her, except an implied affair with Mr. Lee, stolen from glances like in a Wong Kar Wai film. The second time near the end we know everything, again she talks on the phone and puts on perfume but now everything’s changed, we know who both are and what is to be done.

In between this mirrored image is the bulk of the film, all that fleshing out of the world and her as memory that shifts our position in the story by shifting what we know of the situation. It drags for me but there’s a payoff in the end.

Here’s very clearly how it works in the film, it’s clever stuff. If you have seen just the first part leading up to the phonecall, and the last part resuming from the phonecall until the end, in that part of the story after she has fallen in love, her actions make sense.

In that part, Mr. Lee is just a sweet, taciturn man, not unlike the husband Tony Leung played in Mood for Love. Why’d she do it?

But you have seen everything else, known him with more depth as an unpleasant man and can’t unknow him, unless that is if you excuse the film as erotic. So you question her judgment of allowing herself to be seduced, as do her puzzled comrades in the firing squad line.

She an actress, he a watcher.

Her initially acting in the theater, later having to act in life, in the mahjong games with rich bored housewives, as the mistress. He watches, cautious at first but steadily drawn in. She is drawn by him watching, later forcing his way into her performance.

It’s not far from Wong Kar Wai’s later films, which go back to Bertollucci’s Last Tango to Vertigo (better yet, Nabokov’s Lolita), where a man and woman, he is usually older and experienced, create between them a space of obsessive passion, where names and identity dissolve.

Lee has done it halfway between Kar Wai and Bertolluci, shifting from coy glances to lots and lots of sex—but if you are fooled by it, you are fooled as she is, seduced because it’s erotic.

The point in all cases? That space ruled by nameless desire which may seem more pure and sometimes we covet in life, where we won’t have to be who we are, is in fact more illusory, desire bents the shape of things into what is desired of them to be. As in a film noir, where desire (coded in the femme fatale) fools with the narrator’s reality.

On all this topics as well as main story, Lee inserts Hitchcock’s film noir Suspicion which our heroine sees in the theater—a film where a young girl wonders whether her charming man may not be a murderer, and a studio tacked-on (meaning false) ending puts her mind at ease.

Linked in all cases with memory as the untrustworthy desire to bend the life we choose to recall, it is a purely cinematic subject, where again there’s the escape into something more pure than just life, but it’s an illusory ecstacy, light poured on canvas. Enchanting for a while, but the lights have to come back on again.

So why’d she do it? Because all that she knows about him is abstract when he touches her, the touch is real.

So Lee has compromised, in this as in others of his films, it is half a great film in a rather ordinary package. You can kid yourself with the story, whereas not in 2046. But if it leads even one person into likeminded filmmakers who work outside producer constraints, it was all worth it.

★★★☆☆

LIFE OF PI (2012) Dir: Ang Lee US | Taiwan, 127m THE STORY WITH...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:18:50 -0400

LIFE OF PI (2012)

Dir: Ang Lee

US | Taiwan, 127m

THE STORY WITH GOD IN THE MACHINE

Films usually work upon the same mechanisms, it is what religion in old times simply used to warn against. In more typical dramas, the sin is acted out as some part of life, the more recognizable the better. This was fine for centuries, but the invention of the camera opened it up in great ways. More ambitious films visualize the experience or feeling as it arises, more or less vividly render the hell of it (think Lynch), usually with some the ambiguity and mystery it happens in real life.

This is midway between the two ways.

Framed with religion and the search for answers, the story here is of a young boy on a spiritual journey with his animal self. The boy has previously adopted religion, several in fact, and this deeper perspective he cultivates is the film we see. On a simple level, it is a story of survival, but so extraordinary that you know there’s more to it, hidden depths. Visualized around him, we have a series of meditations inspired by the elements—in tempestuous seas, in the whale magnificent to behold but wrecks everything, in the magical, by day, inter- connected nature of the island but turns deadly by night.

Visually, the experience has been more evocatively done in Tropical Malady, which is on the same journey to inner self (once more a tiger) and clarity. Greenaway has more puzzling symmetries. But it’s a nice film to have, perhaps too clean and cutesy, but clean for a reason.

Here’s the caveat. The idea so simplified in the end, is that we can’t know one way or the other, but here we are, loved ones perish, we continue to be tossed in an ocean of suffering, and that god is perhaps the more attractive story to grim reality, it provides purpose and color, soothes the soul on her journey. This explains the Disney cleanliness, as his mind not dwelling on death.

The sentiment makes sense of course, but suddenly reduces.

Going back, you will see this reductive logic in places, reductive because it IS logic. The most telling spot for me is the following, it is the one that should be the most emotionally powerful, the most purely visual because it is directly of the boy’s soul. Among the meditations, there is one of him being submerged in the sea to the quantum level of soul where images bubble up and form everything else, he goes past the animals, past the symbols, and settles on the face of his loved one, all of it illusory.

It is of course the feeling that has arisen in him, but see how it is rendered. Schematic isn’t it?

Not unlike its notion of god as constructed imagination, which reduces in retrospect by too simple sense. So keep this film to heart, it has its heart in the right place, but imagine how you would do the swim. Zen starry waters without the Disney luminescence maybe?

The magic in it being what it is, not constructed, revelatory as it is.

★★★☆☆

LINCOLN (2012) Dir: Steven Spielberg US, 150m MISS...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 10:10:58 -0400

LINCOLN (2012)

Dir: Steven Spielberg

US, 150m

MISS RAVENEL’S CONVERSION FROM SECESSION TO LOYALTY

In the 1867 Civil War novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, a Union captain is assigned at the end of the war, to complete the muster-out rolls cataloging his regiment dead and missing over four years of fighting; to get a sense of the insurmountable task ahead of him, these ‘rolls’ were indeed supplied after Appomattox by the War Department in the form of sheets that measured a yard square.

In the book, the captain is chosen because he is the only one who has been there since the start and made it through, the only one who has the memory to write the chronicle, jot down the history. Though not a masterwork, the novel nicely suggests that there is the killing and dying, but there is a relative truth to it, there is both the struggle and the struggle for this to be a story, one with some invented sense in its mechanism.

Spielberg has no notion of this, never had.

It’s all about what kind of world you think this is. From his perspective, it is all too clean, clearly-defined, closed instead of open-ended, you can see that in the story he chooses to tell of Lincoln, the people as he shines his light on them. Oh, I’m fine with the facts they put in, they could have put more, could have put less. They could have made a fuss for example of Copperhead activities of the previous summer, to make Democrats look worse. More astutely, they could have said that Lincoln’s re-election was at all possible because of costly military victory. Anyway, they have very cleanly managed to convey a complex political situation, the issues at stake.

But again it is a simple-minded effect.

Again with the moral platitudes, again with the flaccid narrative and speechifying, with the good guys on one side, noble in the eye of history if not constitutional law, and bad on the other, malicious fools or at best doddering pawns. It reminds me of the few instances we saw Germans in his Warhorse, flatly inhuman, cruelly whipping horses. Again having the subject be safely self-evident, because what would be those who abolished slavery if not great heroes, villains those who opposed it?

And you can see the same dull unambiguity in his visual iconography of Lincoln—Lincoln as mythic shadow, as weary traveler, Lincoln in the candleflame of legend, popular, pedantic perceptions of the man. How else would you do it?

The one great scene for me is where the passing of the Amendment is given to us as Lincoln waiting in his office, startled by the sudden joyous ringing of bells—there it is, the gap away from ceremony and heated fact, the waiting as gears snap into place, the man alone wondering.

It’s just not for me, overall. Because in Spielberg’s world it cannot be just an army camp the president is visiting, not just life with its clamor and filth, it has to be so that four soldiers, two of them black, recite to him his Gettysburg Address—no soul here, only the sentimental schooling.

But this is why it troubles to speak of it, because as you watch it, the doubt and inner turmoil is there, the morally fickle North and hostility to negro equality is there, the bartering of half-truths for necessity is there, the radical galvanizing as a byproduct of bloody war.

So I’d ask anyone who likes this to more carefully differentiate solid scholarship in Goodwin’s book, the historic legend of the man, some narrative complexity in the script, versus insights in the film and cinematic dimension in the presentation of people whose life is not in any book. Historic persons or not, the life you have to imagine.

The difference is between researched history, and bringing it alive as fiction, which is what all filmmakers do, and why Spielberg so often fails when he tries to portray life. You could get the hats and wardrobe historically right, the correct type of wood in the benches, the words and gaslight, but still make a cartoon.

So this is why I blame Spielberg. Film is a matter of representation, of creating the illusion of a world that moves. So the facts are here, but making it alive is a matter of erudition on the part of the filmmaker, a feel for either people or cinematic devices.

Spielberg has taken some narrative complexity, and as he shouts action and we should have the flow of what is real life to his characters, he can’t help but reduce, some truthful moments in Lincoln reduced by juvenile moments elsewhere, the same juvenile handling of people I find in all his other films.

So this is everything he would most like to be thought of as, versus who he can’t help but be. It’s a silly film.

★★☆☆☆

L’HUMANITE (1999) Dir: Bruno Dumont France, 148m THE FAINT...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:51:00 -0400

L’HUMANITE (1999)

Dir: Bruno Dumont

France, 148m

THE FAINT HUM OF SOMETHING WRONG

This is one half of a great film, which makes it all the more frustrating in the end.

In Bruno Dumont’s second film, a Jury Prize winner at Cannes, life is interminable and drab, faces are sullen, love is carnal touch, work is thankless routine, and there is something inexplicably wrong with the world, a shadow that moves and covers the sun. The film begins with a man lying down in the fields as if to die and transcend, but something calls him back, a horrible crime has been committed. (he is, as we find, the police superintendent of a small town)

The notion, as the film begins to weave it, is that something is wrong with the man, a good-natured but childlike individual. We go on to find that he had a woman and baby, and lost both—we never know how. So there is just the loss. The violence. The memory of an earlier, brighter life. The crime has been committed against a young girl, raped and killed in the fields. More. The memory of the girl (both girls lost) is carried in the paintings of his painter grandfather, in particular one that depicts a young girl in the countryside.

As in Haneke, at the core of it is the faint hum of something wrong in the cosmic mechanism, something broken.

There is a pretty great scene that explains this. The superintendent has crossed the channel to England to question passengers of a train who may have seen something that day, sure enough, he finds an old couple. They did see a man and girl that day, which only confirms what we know. But nothing of actual help beyond that, the train was moving too fast, they can’t be sure. And that is followed by our guy peering down below in the airport parking lot, where a fight has broken out—again the puzzling violence, but helpless to know or do anything about it.

And isn’t this in some way the broader experience of things?

But that is all—relatively simple. Oh, there is a lot of wandering about and idly lounging on front steps, there is pretentious provocation in exposed vaginal shots, some coarse, everyday sex, all that is neither here nor there. There are the scenes of him watering plants and looking out to the fields, cultivating life as he bides his time. It’s a fine film, but dangerously close at times to affectation, it is composed after all as something between spontaneous sketches of life, and self-enclosed painterly reduction.

Dumont does it better than most, to be sure. But as the case nears completion, and more and more time flows like a painter pours his paints, simply because there is room left for it, it becomes apparent that this could have been more.

★★★☆☆

I HEART HUCKABEES (2004) Dir: David O. Russell US, 107m SEMINARS...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:46:37 -0400

I HEART HUCKABEES (2004)

Dir: David O. Russell

US, 107m

SEMINARS FOR SELF-AWARENESS

It is amazing how much storytelling noise we have in our heads ,just close your eyes and see how many useless thoughts you have in a minute. And it’s amazing that films which are about this activity of the mind, and how it obscures the world, and creates illusory images, Buddhist- inspired films from The Matrix and Cloud Atlas, to Cosmopolis, to now this, are always so bent to talk and talk and clutter us more.

So I was recently impressed by Silver Linings Playbook, so eager for more, I asked around and was pointed to this as more intelligent, more personal work of this guy. It probably is both.

So, you have a protagonist in existential crisis who is told about infinity and inter-connectedness of being, taught the retreat to the cocoon of self where images come to being. And you have it, broken narrative, come alive in layers as the film we watch.

It is essentially the same character splintered in Schwartzman, Wahlberg, Jude Law, so that each runs into some conundrum that comprises a broader view. But it all come back to a self that clings to itself and can’t let go, in his poems that have to be on pamphlets and who gets to lead, in corporate success, in having to save the environment, and so forth.

You have despair at the happy spirituality of ‘safe places’, and the flipside in French deconstructionism, in seductively dark Isabelle Huppert and muddy, animal sex. The childhood trauma. And the middle path that reconciles purity with stained life.

All that is fine, some notion of this or other will be at the heart of most good films. Not to take anything from Russell, he has crafted something that is attractive on the surface, witty if not intelligent. And I appreciate the earnestness of putting it all out there as a search for meaning in modern life.

But if your film is to have any actual power, you have to forget all you know as you make it, forget the idea and visualize the insight. Because none of it is really submerged here, and it gets progressively worse as it goes on until the cloying finale, which I also found in Playbook.

Russell explains how it’s done, but can’t do it in the film.

Not to be misconstrued. I am not saying the film has to be like meditation. I am saying the way it is lacks power, because instead of using its insights as sculpting matter, it is more and more about explaining. Oh, it is fun for about an hour more or less as it sets the situation, from then on you need a connecting tissue, something that reaches in and peels layers of you instead of just lesson-learning.

You will know it is schematic, if you perhaps look at what is visualized of the protagonist’s consciousness, in what I call the quantum level where images bubble up in the first place, when story-layers have been peeled and films are usually at their most pure; in that level you have what? the schematic cartoon with the tree and floating heads.

Constructed cuteness.

★★☆☆☆

THE MASTER (2012) Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson US, 144m HOOCH OF...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:22:51 -0400

THE MASTER (2012)

Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

US, 144m

HOOCH OF MEMORY, PAST SELF EMPTIES THE GLASS

I know I will like this more when I see it again, because I’m already sifting through and discarding the useless bits, those bits that have to be there but aren’t of the soul of the story. I’m also discarding Anderson’s habit of a dialogue-based story, because all there is to appreciate here should be visual. But right now, all I can say is that all the stuff about Scientology hurts this as much as Eli’s petulant god hurts Anderson’s previous film. It is neither here nor there that this man is a thinly veiled Ron Hubbard.

Let me just say, it’s a marvelous film deep down.

But writing Hubbard in there, and making sure that we know, means you have to have all sorts of extraneous scenes—the scene where a sensible outsider challenges him for proof, the scenes where we infer he is a swindler, the scenes of kooky ‘processing’ nonsense, the duped, servile drones, and so forth. The thing is Scientology does all its own ‘outing’, it doesn’t merit a film exposing them as fools. And without Scientology in the thing, the notion of stored past lives could come to the fore with actual clarity.

No matter. The story here is of a man who came back from the war a shattered being, or maybe he was shattered from the start, and the war merely shuffled the broken bits some more. All the Scientology stuff starting when he meets Hubbard on a ship, that is to illustrate that without the certainty of killing, the beach reverie of loose instincts, back in waking life it is all anxious and fluid, you have to be your own master. That is postwar noir in its essence—Woman on the Beach, Crossfire, Deadline at Dawn, wonderful films. But again, in the context of a devious cult, it is all a bit hard, notation where should be music.

What is music?

The letter he received, and us at the time doubting him. His memories of a girl back home, and us again being unsure of improvised answers, embellished truth like the happy pictures of couples he takes—a startlingly effective motif that is sorely abandoned. The notion of a fresher previous self in the waiting summer girl, the semiconscious shift from memory to making it all up, to vanishing in your desert. The talk of bringing it all back intact, and living in it, and coming from Scientologist lips, us knowing that is all disastrous distortion.

The (imaginary) phonecall in the cinema that ‘ties up’ the story, where he is still needed in life.

It will hit home if you are past a certain age, this notion that you can look back at a certain time, this is not abstract, maybe for you it was the end of summer of that year after finishing highschool, when life could be everything, and you hadn’t yet time to think about all the ways to screw it up.

And it is powerful but could have gone either way.. Hoffman is adequate, but the film is what it is because of Phoenix. He tops Day- Lewis as far as I’m concerned, he has gone madder than his required role to wipe off the actor going mad. Truly masterful stuff.

He makes up for Anderson lacking in visual invention, what Anderson isn’t able to show in images, Phoenix pumps in his veins. Some of the filmmaking craft is impeccable, stately and brings the 1950’s alive, but he needed to cut off from talk and drift as the man does through currents of life. Still, when all’s settled, I’m sure this will be one of the year’s best.

★★★★☆

DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012) Dir; Quentin Tarantino US, 165m UNCLE...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:16:31 -0400

DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

Dir; Quentin Tarantino

US, 165m

UNCLE TOM’S DAY OF ANGER

Tarantino at his most epic (as said by some) defeats for me the whole point.

Overlong and sloppily put together, the film mainly suffers from Tarantino’s specific philosophy, or lack of one. He is a writer first, writes frothy scenes of some tension but never pays mind to the submerged undercurrents of soul, the actual life that give rise to the tension, and then separately pulls visual skin from several places to dress his short sketches, films, music, cool tidbits of pop culture. At its best, this can create a narrative energy that carries you along, it’s infectious in short spurts.

This time, he has delivered the sketches in the form of the western he has long threatened to make, in this case Italian. I have seen most of the spaghetti westerns he takes from, probably all. These differed from their American counterparts in a key way—the stories were not about a clean sweep of destiny from one coast to the other, because Italians wouldn’t know Kansas City from Santa Fe, which liberated them to do a sort of abstract comic opera of the West.

Films like Django were all about the visual sketch and archetype, entirely about the image of the man dragging the coffin. The sensibility goes back to centuries of comedia dell’arte, an appreciation for mannered masked life, episodic gaffe and irony, countered in the films with the rustic simplicity of the western. Being a writer first, few of Tarantino’s episodes are visually thought out, the effect is nothing like Good Bad Ugly or Grand Silencio, where wry humor or absurd violence is chiseled to rise out of silence with the cicadas.

In tandem with this is my main complaint.

By all means, have the frothy patter, it’s Tarantino’s staple and one he is good at. But he is simply unable to visually integrate his wordplay with images, just can’t do it, probably he doesn’t even think it is an issue, or it’s how movies work. In the film, you have individual scenes anchored on the spot in some kind of bartering going on, and wholly separate visual interludes, usually a montage of cool music video shots played over to music of his choosing.

These are entirely independent of anything, sloppily slathered from the outside; blood spraying on cotton, slow-motion riding and shooting. It’s such a sloppy way to make a film, sloppy like the man we see in interviews. There is not a single image here I will carry with me. Which wastes Waltz and Jackson putting on an excellent show, and to a lesser extent Foxx.

And of course, all filmmakers reach out and borrow, Tarantino’s problem is that he borrows fashions and what is incidentally attached to it, never the inner logic, the notion of life a certain way that on the outer level is the image we see.

Let me illustrate this in the film. Django being a slave, in order to freely go about in the slaveholding South he has to be in disguise, Dr. Schultz tells him to pick out his costume and character. The rough-hewn ex-slave picks a frilly Little Lord Fauntleroy costume, and we get the silly image of him on horseback.

How about instead of Fauntleroy for a quick snicker, Don Quixote? And borrow with the costume the logic of self-deception, and patiently mold and weave this through the film. Foxx in his pointy beard, and sculpted intense face does look the part, a black Quixote on heroic adventure. Schultz as his Pancha, an educated Pancha who ‘writes’ him into the story.

I’m just throwing ideas. Instead of simple scattershot amusement, something that more deeply involves. And take this in a million directions. And visually distort truth, and fool with Southern chivalry and have us question the heroism. How about a Broomhilda as Dulcinea who doesn’t know anything about him, but goes along because it means freedom?

I’m not saying this will be deep because in itself the theme is something, or it references a respectable work. It can be deep, in the sense that you more deeply involve more of us in the viewing. Tarantino has grown, but only the size of his canvas—a small view stretched to epic length.

★★☆☆☆

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011) Dir: Andrea Arnold UK, 128m WUTHERING,...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:10:51 -0400

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (2011)

Dir: Andrea Arnold

UK, 128m

WUTHERING, EMPTY WATCHING

I quite like the approach here—’realistic’, first- person camera, and abstract interpretation of Bronte’s classic text as vague glimpses from memory. The idea is that the film would center not on sharp emotion, but in walking away from it in confusion and bewilderment. And I like the emphasis placed on weather as extension of soul. It should all work in theory.

I do mind however, that it omits the framework of relative truth and the latter segment of the story with the grown Haretone, where Heathcliff fully brings to life his shattered inner world, both of which are crucial to what this is. Without these, we have an overlong blur of obsessive memory, too dry and vague to be of consequence. Which is a bit of a puzzle to me, because I should like this.

I like Malick, who is all about visual soliloquy. This is more in the vein of Haneke, which I think explains it. Arnold likes Haneke, many of the same things as he does. Her Red Road was a Cache of sorts. And she does frame her Heathcliff as a wild man out in the wilderness, always outside looking in through windows at life that plays out in the Grange, usually at night, a spectator to a sort of film within the film like the CCTV woman in Road. Again visual excerpts, memories. It is all being recalled.

That is at the quantum storylevel which I describe in other posts, the film being shaped by what the character watches of himself watching, which goes back from Cache to Blowup, to Rear Window. All sorts of wonderful things could be shown through the windows, small things of life as it rushes back to him. But they aren’t, so it drags and tires.

So this is a miss, but I have hopes for Arnold.

★★☆☆☆

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992) Dir: Peter Kosminsky UK, 105m DEMIGOD...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:07:12 -0400

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992)

Dir: Peter Kosminsky

UK, 105m

DEMIGOD OF HIDDEN WEATHERS

Unrequited passions, haunted minds.. Bronte’s story is stark, stark, stsark.

Famously, this portrays for the first time the whole of the story in the book, it is captivating and moves fast, and Fiennes deserves superlatives as the diabolical Heathcliff, menacing but with the eyes of a wounded animal.

I would overall do this a bit different. I would have more of nature and the weather. I would make more of the abrupt advances in the story, like Heathcliff’s mysterious reinvention as a man of means, the spying into the Lindon home and dog accident that changes Cathy, the mirrored deaths, the identity of the returning son.

But in spite of some novelistic dialogue, the film gets the main portion right. That is the love story with love that was not consummated, not allowed to because they were from different worlds, because even though they connect in a deep way, the rules of the game say otherwise. Different times, but you can assume that it used to be so at Bronte’s time, as it was later in Tolstoy’s.

So they part, but they have grown roots so deep in each other, they cannot be parted, and distance only tears at them, distorts who they are, the distortion as memory. In the prisonworld Heathcliff creates in the end as punishing demigod of sorts, without which the story is incomplete, we can see the stark reflection of both the broader unjust world responsible for Heathcliff, and his private hell of vengeful recurring thoughts, both that stifle the soul.

All that is good enough in the film.

We get to puzzle about the name of Heathcliffe’s adopted son being inscribed in a stone epigraph, on the door of a manor that was built centuries ago. I love Bronte for just this small detail.

What hasn’t been very satisfactorily preserved, is how we arrive at the story. The character who it is being narrated to, arrives at the manor, pores over books and images of Catherine, is captivated enough to dream of her, which leads to the housemaid’s narration of the events. Instead of a dream, the visitor here sees Catherine’s ghost, which sets a supernatural tone that is too obvious.

Too obvious because though even Bronte suggested ghosts, her main narrative gambit was layered dreaming, the notion that the hidden life of images and urges shapes the narrator’s choosing of the story he tells about himself and things, some of which we externalize as destiny or demons, which is what we all do each time we remember, we dream of a story around a fictitious self.

But it’s wonderful and moving as it is.

★★★★☆

THE CLAIM (2000) Dir: Michael Winterbottom UK | France | Canada,...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:02:15 -0400

THE CLAIM (2000)

Dir: Michael Winterbottom

UK | France | Canada, 120m

THE GAP

This is ultimately a letdown, which is a shame.

Because when you go through it all, there is a great film somewhere in there. In 1840’s Missouri, the launching pad for manifest destiny, they used to say about people preparing to go West when it was most of it unsettled wilderness, that they were “jumping off”. The film is about several such people who have made the jump from faraway homes, some are Irish come West with the famine, others Polish-born or from Lisbon.

“Jumping off”, the phrase connotes the vastness of no man’s land, a kind of cosmic gap.

Ford’s western wrote the legend, but left out those gaps of muddled life, which had to wait until around the time of Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The filmmaker shoots in this mode, so muddled life, drifting gaze, lingering shots of ordinary nothing. Vast mountain nature.

But he also wants this to be an elegy to the passing of the West in that reflective vein of recent westerns, and some questionable acting, soporific drama and overly-emotive Nyman score, negate the unobtrusive lightness of just life. So this was probably ruined on a technical level, but there is something to recommend it.

One of those who jumped off is a man, who in a log cabin one night with snow-blizzards raging outside, bartered everything he would need to be whole as an old man for what he would eventually have too much of to have any use for. He has built a town with his gold, but that night of years ago which has left a gap in him comes back one day.

The notion is that you wake up one day and life has gone, and so long as it settles on this in a visual way, the film has spark. There is a great shot worthy of Herzog, where he has a two-story frame house hauled by horses across the snow, a home for his loved one— this is how deeply he regrets that night.

This will be later mirrored in the whole town relocating to where the new railroad is going to pass through—which leaves him stubbornly alone in his empty town. This is followed by a great finale of madness and ruin.

But there is too much doodling in the snow with second-rate romance and elegy, it never takes off from the edge.

★★★☆☆

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012) Dir: David O. Russell US,...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:53:00 -0400

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012)

Dir: David O. Russell

US, 122m

PARADOX, DELUSIONAL NARRATOR COMMITS TO DANCE

The Oscars are famously fuddy in a cinematic sense. So, having earlier this week murmured at the snubbing of Moonrise Kingdom, I am now pleased to see this film take its place in the lineup. Part of me is not convinced by some of it, for instance that we should be shown in films the achievement of a perfect happiness as the ending depicts here, if you will a happiness that is happiness because it is perfect. In reality, things rarely fall into place but that shouldn’t preclude happiness of the present moment, being whole now with just this whatever it is, in a Buddhist sort of way.

But on with the film.

I come to this as a viewer steeped in narrative dissonance, paradox and asymmetry, these are all things I value in the films I see, in particular when those are carried in a visual way—the Japanese are masters of this, try and track down the seldom-seen All About Lily Chou Chou.

The story here is that we follow a distressed group of more or less delusional people who suffer the usual social frictions with an unusual acuteness, precisely the fact that things are not into place but broken, and through the film overcome their damaged selves to come out on the other end, still more or less damaged but whole. In truth, we all walk through life with delusional expectations of the ideal life, this is just comically exaggerated in this group.

This is most clear in the football-obsessed father, who outgrows his compulsive disorder that in order for his team to win, things or people have to be in a certain place, in a certain order. They don’t, life fluctuates. It can go either way. The acceptance of this fundamental truth is what in my eyes sets this apart from something like The Descendants, a touristy film that mistakes manufactured beauty (linked to memory as a Hawaiin postcard) for purity.

The beauty is all in the recognition that things are damaged, dissonant, incomplete. Which brings me to my main point—all of this is wholly carried in the narrative in a visual manner.

The obvious first. The narrator is clearly delusional—to that effect throughout the film the camera is tightly screwed at eye-level, intensely prowls as he does and bursts into views. The narrative has a bipolar energy, with mood swings all over the place. In that vein, I would have liked more swings in the mood, in the ‘color’ of the camera, together with more visual narration, but so be it, the film is dialogue-driven first, plot-focused.

This type of first-person camera I have elsewhere remarked that can achieve the literary effect of stream-of-consciousness, of consciousness hovering in and off itself, where what we see is not necessarily ‘real’, but as Malick exemplifies and Herzog before him, can lead to ecstatic perceptions but of ‘real’ intensity.

The filmmaker is aware of something along those lines, you will see in the scene where the man attacks his father in the wedding video scene, that suddenly images from the earlier assault that was the breaking point burst into view.

In line with bursting views, mood swings, and the acceptance of a dissonant life is the dancefloor climax—things fall into place when you commit to the dance together, the dance as love, but this doesn’t have to be the ideal dance as you’d normally expect, a 5.0 will do.

And in the actual dance, we have abrupt swings from ballroom jazz to rock’n’roll, from normalcy to how these people experience feelings. The dance reflects who these people are together, a little sloppy but committed.

That’s all more than enough. What makes it so enjoyable though, and ultimately exhilarates, is that the whole is continuously stitched with paradoxical behavior. I only recently discovered Lubitsch, whose famed ‘touch’ was about exactly this.

The finale still bothers, but I can write it out of my mind. This is good stuff.

★★★★☆

DEAD MAN’S WALK (1996) Dir: Yves Simoneau US, 272m RENT...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:49:51 -0400

DEAD MAN’S WALK (1996)

Dir: Yves Simoneau

US, 272m

RENT TEXAS, LIVE IN HELL

Can we talk of this independently of Lonesome Dove? Sure, it is intermittently watchable and mostly stands alone, but at 4 hours of slogging through southwestern vistas it is all a bit much to little purpose. In truth though, the real reason this was made at all and secured such a broad canvas, was that we were eager to see the story of young Gus and Woodrow.

The story is that they join up with a hopeless filibustering expedition to annex Santa Fe, the film mirrors the exhaustion, aimlessness, dashed dreams on no man’s land. So far so good. The tone is darker—there is scalping, torture, lepers. Young Gus and Woodrow are narrowly reduced to caricature, which is bound to disappoint, but they are mostly side-characters on the journey.

But see, Lonesome didn’t just have the endless expanses of sky and prairie, the riding and shooting. The journey was also one of meditation on dying and memory, rarely accomplished so well in a western before or after. What’s more, it was the true article of myth, the eulogy a mid-19th century woman like Clara would seek in the poems of Walt Whitman.

This is to Lonesome, what the laborious effort to describe a journey is to the memory of the journey. You tell it as faithfully as you remember. You show pictures. But you can tell by the unmoved looks of your listener that your dry recitation cannot convey what it meant being there, the rich vision.

I’m only saying this to warn you of what the film is not. In Lonesome, we revisited lives haunted by the vision of women. Here, we just drag our feet through the desert, and the women (the same women) are tacked on in the beginning and end.

For practical reasons, this couldn’t be anything else, Gus and Woodrow are young here, they don’t have any hidden life for us to fall back on. Which is to say, that some things are best left imagined.

★★☆☆☆

ARGO (2012) Dir: Ben Affleck US, 120m OPERATION: DUNCES WITH...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:46:31 -0400

ARGO (2012)

Dir: Ben Affleck

US, 120m

OPERATION: DUNCES WITH WOLVES

Is there anything worse than competent mediocrity? Because, surely this is competent, perhaps more than competent, professional, well shot. I will put aside for the moment that there is no characterization to speak of here, that it is flimsy as procedural, that its politics are unnecessarily uncomplicated (good CIA battles evil Islam), its tone uncertain, with all the goofy movie-making stuff sticking out like a sore thumb. The film is soulless, painting by numbers.

The movie was fake after all, but the mission was real.

In Affleck’s case, there is something worse. Because you see, he does not attempt to ‘write history with lightning’, as was said about Birth of a Nation a century ago. He softly rewrites the thing. The Canadian stuff has (rightfully) received the most backlash. Imagine this—the CIA analyst who advised Affleck, there had to be one, thought it would be a good idea to end this insinuating the CIA did all the job, but graciously let Canada reap the publicity.

But this was too blunt and it backfired, bringing to the fore the more subtle marginalization of Canadian intelligence work all through the film, which otherwise would have perhaps passed with little notice. The film after all establishes that the Canadian ambassador has taken the six in, even though in his fleeting screen time, he hovers about as a ‘kindly concierge’, as another reviewer put it.

You will see a more insidious version of this mentality in the opening few minutes of the film, sketching past US intervention in Iran—the film admits US backing of the Shah and his oppressive regime into power, human rights abuses and so on, but curiously, this part is mainly animated in the form of storyboards, mirroring those we see later of the fake film, as something near- mythical that happened in another time and world. Smart.

So, why the heck are we celebrating Affleck? The film shows him to be a blockhead who can put the camera sometimes in the right place.

★★☆☆☆

THE DICTATOR (2012) Dir: Larry Charles US, 99m SCRIPTED COHEN IS...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:42:36 -0500

THE DICTATOR (2012)

Dir: Larry Charles

US, 99m

SCRIPTED COHEN IS A MISS

Cohen has lost it.

I used to like the guy in the days of his TV Borat. His various personas are of course ridiculous, but you laughed because the people and dumbfounded reactions seemed genuine, the situations real and exposed prejudice that you know to exist in the real world. But it had to seem like he was sketching as he went, exploiting ordinary foolishness.

With each new movie, he has diluted this. Borat partially managed the spontaneity, but only in spots. Bruno messed this, because he was himself coarse and homophobic there, and despite the faux documentary format, you could no longer kid yourself that it simply happened.

This is an ordinary movie, closer to his Ali G. There is a romantic involvement.

But very few of it works, at least in that spontaneous vein that set him apart from Sandler and like comedians. It’s not funny if it’s scripted.

★★☆☆☆

LOLITA (1962) Dir: Stanley Kubrick UK | US, 152m HOODWINKED...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:39:35 -0500

LOLITA (1962)

Dir: Stanley Kubrick

UK | US, 152m

HOODWINKED NARRATOR

In order to fully do justice to Lolita as a film, you have to keep in mind a few things. There is sex promised early on, and when that is midway abandoned, some readers lose interest. The nature of that sex is heinous, but the narrator is a silver-tongued deviant in the throes of a dreamy adoration, which altogether has popularized a reading of the book as dark comedy.

It really seems to be the only way we can safely accept Lolita, outside those tediously pedagogical dissertations taught in college classrooms which you may have had inflicted upon you. My copy of the book makes sure anyone reaching it for in a bookstore shelf knows upfront it is meant to be a comedy, critics are quoted front and back saying so. The book is hilarious of course, and no film adaptation can afford to miss that humor, but there is more.

(the keys to Nabokov’s work can be said to be in Anna Karenina)

The peculiar beauty of the book is in the way it is presented. A helpful hint of Nabokov’s main stratagem, is that the narrator has burnt his ‘diaries’ and sets out to reinvent from scratch the story in the book—as he tells it again he embellishes, obsesses, possibly reinvents himself and situations, and the more he does, an allusive narrative haze begins to swallow the author, as it has previously done the reader.

Most powerful for me is this notion—recurring in a dozen different stratagems scattered through the book—that the narrator should have ‘known’ the story all along or has written it before, but because of his uncommon fixations, it eludes him, and the loss of that story manifests around him in an absurd, evil manner.

Kubrick has not outright missed any of these aspects; the film is a comedy, the sex is implicit enough, there is paranoid tension with something ‘amiss’ in the story, to that effect the film begins with someone driving through a haze. But he has sacrificed subtler shades in almost everything.

The narrator is presented as a hapless square—James Mason was probably the worst possible choice. Gone is his desire to capriciously invent and digress. The mother has been reduced to a shrill religious freak. There is nary hint at Lolita’s mental disintegration save for a temper tantrum. Worst of all is the treatment of the narrator’s nemesis, the ubiquitous Quilty.

In the book, Quilty is presented as something of a literary genius, a worthy intellectual opponent who continuously hoodwinks the narrator. But here’s the kick—we never know who Quilty is until the end, and when that happens, he conspicuously mirrors the narrator, pleading, unpredictable, faking his stupor but sometimes lucid.

In the film, he is the first person we meet. He is, as we go on to find, a goofy TV scribe in disguise a number of times. This is meant to emphasize that the narrator should be aware he is being toyed with and the story slipping him, but somehow isn’t. But, the obvious disguises and blabbing Sellers completely ruin the ambiguous effect.

The latenight phonecall in the motel is a much better device, to my recollection not in the book and quite possibly one of the few items in Nabokov’s film script that Kubrick retained (most of it is Kubrick’s work with an associate). It is an excellent device, because it wakes up the narrator in the middle of the night and he cannot make head or tails of what is going on.

But see, in order for it to work, we have to not be able to spot out Sellers’ prankish voice.

★★☆☆☆

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012) Dir: Mark Tonderai US,...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:34:27 -0500

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET (2012)

Dir: Mark Tonderai

US, 101m

DUPED

This is the worst movie I have seen in some time.

In Texas Chainsaw and assorted slasher movies,—you may gleam the broken once human face behind the mask, a sharp flash of wounded animal instinct, or even nothing but purely automatic evil—which is fine, we have a territorial monster who is out to kill, to recreate past trauma, what have you. The movies can be good or bad, that is something else. I’m talking here of our situating in relation to evil.

Something like Manhunter is much more complicated. There is once more a human monster, we see why he deserves to be put down, but we go on to have an anchor in his world, and that world is revealed one of desires and urges fundamentally no different than our own, perhaps more magical. The result is both the thriller and the real shocking thing, a softer understanding of fluid self.

This is bad in all the parts, but in particular this: here, we are made to feel that the ‘monster’ is only the horrible product of cruel, small- minded prejudice, and then we are violently yanked from that sensitive position. It was all as whispered. We do not have, as we shift to his world, some understanding of soul, but suddenly calculated malice. We were duped, but in such a way as to side with dopes.

No, on principle.

★☆☆☆☆

THE EAGLE (2011) Dir; Kevin Macdonald UK | US, 114m WE ARE THE...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:31:10 -0500

THE EAGLE (2011)

Dir; Kevin Macdonald

UK | US, 114m

WE ARE THE ROMANS

The good news first. This is more Aguirre than it is Gladiator. The premise is a cleansing journey of sorts past the walls of the known world into uncharted, savage soul. (the time is the Roman conquest of Britain)

That is on paper. In the actual film, you have cliché action and a crushingly obvious story of personal redemption against republican hypocrisy, which in conjunction with an awful Channing Tatum effectively kills the film.. Recently, Valhalla Rising did this type of film better, but was elsewhere constrained for my taste by ornate, desperate posing. Anyway, that is that.

The really bad news? The film is more Apocalypto than it is even a bland Aguirre.

Let’s see a bit closely. In the film, a young army commander has a recurring vision, that is an imagined vision of his dishonored father in combat, and the pursuit of that vision brings him to the edge of the world and creates the story we see, which is about looking past the parapet into innermost soul. From that point on, you have more battlevisions, the encounter with the Painted People and the hallucinative tribal dance that ensues, and the ‘dead’ coming back to rally under his banner for a last stand against mystical savages. And you will see in connection with both nature and glimpsed memories, the frequent usage of Malick’s camera, which has been getting a lot of Hollywood traction.

All of this culminates with an image that is indicative of the overall sensibility. The tribal opponent is defeated in the end, and as he drowns, the warpaint is washed away and we see a human face—cleansed in death of savagery?

Oh, I’m sure the filmmaker would explain that was not his intention, or that it’s from the protagonist’s pov, but it’s off for me. We’re just not in sensitive hands here.

★★☆☆☆

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) Dir: Genndy Tartakovsky US,...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:28:06 -0500

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012)

Dir: Genndy Tartakovsky

US, 91m

OBNOXIOUS DUDE-ISMS

I don’t know if Sandler helped sink this by mere association or what. The humor is broad. The message against prejudice is as heavyhanded as in Brave, but simply blurted out to us. The computer animation is typical, nothing to see—both horror-themed stop motion films of this year trump it with ease. The horror sketchbook feel is much better captured in Frankenweenie, by a filmmaker who actually loves the stuff. ParaNorman has the fancy characters and dazzle for the kids, but offers us a richer, more visual experience on the same subject.

By contrast to those other films that show creators immersed in at least some aspect of their work, this gives the feel of a mass-marketed product—never more obvious than in the songs performed, ranging from punk rock to club music.

The logic here is something for everyone.

★☆☆☆☆

THE MECHANIC (2011) Dir: Simon West US, 93m MANIC MECHANIC IN...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:25:23 -0500

THE MECHANIC (2011)

Dir: Simon West

US, 93m

MANIC MECHANIC IN HALF-DECENT ACTION

I haven’t followed Statham’s exploits, but expected this to be much worse.

It isn’t very good even in its milieu, but why it was passable for me is because there is a pretty loose structure, the film is simply not bogged down to an ‘epic’ trajectory—a superspy guy (a ‘mechanic’) trains a younger one as possible replacement, there are two preparatory missions, the ‘big job’ which is not that big in the end, and it goes on to a fatalistic confrontation between the two.

The whole background of the killing business is pretty ridiculous, but the action is half-decent and Statham looks pensive.

★★☆☆☆