Happy/Merry 25th of December!

In the spirit of the day, here are two old posts from last year--two movies that, every December, find a way into both my DVD player and my heart. Enjoy.



THE SNOWMAN (Raymond Briggs/Dianne Jackson, 1982)



One settles in to watch this short as a lighthearted holiday short, a 26-minute piece of children's fluff which will allow parents a moment of respite from the squalor that is the anticipation of Christmas. But The Snowman is not so ordinary. Its animation is coarse and rough-hewn, imitative of Raymond Brigg's illustrative style in his eponymous book. It's pantomimed, the music taking on a Prokofiev-like character. All of this is certainly intriguing, but in the grand picture, these qualities do not set it apart all that drastically.

What makes The Snowman one of the most (if not the most) devastating children's films ever is composer Howard Blake's central theme, used in three strategic locations: over the opening credits, the middle sequence when the boy and the snowman are flying over the northern hemisphere, and the closing credits. The film's first shot--a man walks across a barren clearing, narrating about a particularly snowy day in his childhood, and then melts into an animated crane shot over a snowy landscape--is bleak, but alluring. The music haunts and engages, but does not overpower; it merely suggests. In the middle sequence, a boy sings the song "Walking in the Air" as flight over the world marks the first transformative steps of the boy into adulthood. The theme is now rapturous, full of passion and possibility.

But the circle of the boy's mature awakening comes to a close in the final moments, when the boy leaves his house the next morning to see the snowman. What he discovers, however, is but a pile of snow and tattered clothing. He has witnessed death first-hand; he is no longer a child. Jackson doesn't leave any room for sentiment or tenderness. The film cuts away from the boy immediately after his discovery, cranes up, and fades into the all-consuming whiteness of the ground. The theme re-enters. This time, it is the harbinger of death, the melody of a heart discovering that it can be broken. Innocence is lost, experience remains. It is brutal, honest, terrifying, full of pathos, and beautiful. Death's inevitability and the loss of innocence has rarely been rendered so powerfully.





Home Alone: The Wondrous Terror of the Forbidden


What creatures haunt the inner recesses of the Child’s subconscious? Are we to believe that the agony and the ecstasy of freedom from the chains of the womb are truly one and the same? Is a freed tarantula the most poetic expression of vagina dentata the cinema has yet to produce? John Hughes and Chris Columbus dared to pose these questions, and found heart-breaking triumph in the face of Innocence itself: Macaulay Culkin.

Home Alone may be the most frightening and euphoric film about the awakening of adulthood because it refuses to shy away from manifesting those fears and joys in the external, always impressing upon us that demons lurk among us, and if one looks hard enough, you will always find them. For life is joy and terror, agony and ecstasy; the two are always coupled, and can emerge from the same source. Young Kevin McAllister, in being abandoned inside the cavern that is his suburban home, is ripped from the uterus of his overbearing mother for the first time, and must finally come to grips with life. The Munchian scream he utters while applying aftershave is his awakening of the Other in the Mirror. He goes grocery shopping; he eats ice cream for dinner; he battles criminals. All of these are fantastic expressions of the banal, symbols for Kevin’s transformation, his becoming.

And then there is Candy. O Candy, where be your gibes now, your gambols? You are the angel that awakens the transformation in the Mother, the recognition of a similar transformation, that the womb must no longer be a prison. Only then can the Mother and the Child reconcile themselves to each other. And it is the long quest, the night drive from Scranton to Chicago with the Polka Kings of the Midwest, which allows this to occur. Candy, you are Rilke’s spirit of Duino, facilitating but never participating, awakening the inner spirit but never actively engaging.

And what of the demons which emerge from the comforting shadows of police officers to be the terrors of the McMansions of suburban Chicago? Pesci and Stern are failed men, men of frustration and desperation, lashing out at the very forces which have smothered their hopes and dreams. Of course, they are the things which have emerged from Kevin’s soul, making one wonder: are these the secret manifestations of Kevin’s true fear, oppression of the spirit in the face of the modern capitalist system?

From every pore, the world of fear and displacement teems with life: the curmudgeonly Uncle Frank; the evil brother Buzz; the understanding father, the introduction of Big Pete to the rest of the world. And when what Kevin believed to be the true evil–Old Man Marley–is revealed to be his angel of awakening, then the climax of euphoria, the violent purge of the real demons, can commence. And Kevin is thus freed to rejoin Life. It never ceases to take the breath away, and electrify one with the wondrous terror of the Forbidden.

Film Critics Might Know Something.

This is a response to Richard Corliss's recent piece in TIME Magazine, Do Film Critics Know Anything?





Now having read Richard Corliss’s piece on the state of film critics’ awards ceremonies twice over, I am even more baffled than the first time I parsed through the thing. Corliss, one of TIME Magazine’s two film critics and a former editor for Film Comment, laments the fact that time and again, film critics associations declare very obscure, very little-seen films as the very best of the year. Case in point: as of today, the film critics associations of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and the National Board of Review have all declared either the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men or Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood to be the best film of the year. (The New York Online Film Critics split their vote between Blood and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but more on that film later.) No Country has only grossed $28 million in 5 weeks of release, and There Will Be Blood hasn’t even opened yet. Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone and Sarah Polley’s Away from Her have cornered the acting awards (for Amy Ryan and Julie Christie, respectively), and Daniel Day-Lewis has cleaned up for his turn in Blood. Neither Affleck or Polley’s films have made too much bank, either. Corliss laments that critical and popular success of 2007–films like Knocked Up, Superbad, and Ratatouille–have gone virtually unmentioned in critics’ awards ceremonies. Late-year coming-of-age comedies like Juno and animated films like Persepolis are getting most of the attention instead, and will most likely not be box-office Goliaths. Ditto the Best Foreign Film giants, Diving Bell and the German espionage thriller, The Lives of Others. The most important barometer for giving out awards, according to Corliss, is popular taste.

In case you missed the dripping scorn with which the last sentence was imbued, don’t worry, it was there. Corliss is a fine critic; when he was editor of Film Comment in the 1970s, he helped shape the discourse of film history and aesthetics as we now understand it. Paul Schrader’s landmark piece on film noir and Donald Richie’s revelatory overview of Yasujiro Ozu’s career were encased in the pages of that magazine under Corliss’s leadership. But now, as the mouthpiece for film criticism in 2007 for much of the American public, he is lost in the morass of a rather typical schizophrenia for men and women in his profession. Critics often lament the fact that the movies they love so dearly go unseen. Many critics take the position that this is their own fault, however, that the movies which should be recognized are the ones people actually see. Indeed, Corliss takes this position, at least mostly, in his piece: “Gee, you're wondering, did The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the French story of a man totally immobilized by a stroke, beat out the German spy drama The Lives of Others? (Three out of five critics groups say yes.) If you're getting restless, movie lovers, too bad. You'll be hearing the same obscure names at the Golden Globes and on Oscar night.” Later, he observes, “[i]n the old Golden Age days, most contenders for the top Oscars were popular movies that had a little art. Now they're art films that have a little, very little, popularity.” If Corliss had his way, it seems, Ratatouille would win Best Picture, beating out Knocked Up and Enchanted.

Except there’s a wrinkle in the fabric: Corliss just recently published his list for the 10 best movies of the year, and there’s only one bona fide hit among them: Beowulf. (And that is certainly not a film which has reached popular and critical consensus.) In fact, No Country for Old Men was #1, and whose win at the New York Film Critics Circle Corliss certainly helped bring about. #3 was a movie that only played in major metropolitan areas and grossed next to nothing, and #s 4, 5 and 6 haven’t even been released yet, another ailment Corliss diagnoses in the critics’ awards distribution. (“Maybe the critical establishment has A.D.D.”) Corliss even openly disses his #6 choice, Persepolis, for consistently beating out Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie, Bee Movie, and Beowulf in the animated film category. (“An art-house film beat out movies that have already grossed nearly $1.5 billion dollars (or about 47 euros) worldwide.”) This all seems more than a little bit contradictory, non?

Of course, Corliss defuses the bomb a tad, remarking that critics “obviously...should pick their favorites.” But then he says that this is just critics’ way of “contribut[ing] to the art-industrial complex,” that these critics awards are the steam needed to hurtle films to Oscar nominations. Which is certainly a no-no, since Oscars should be reserved for the high-grossing critical faves.

So which is it? Critics awards are bad for not recognizing popular taste and for steamrolling certain films to Oscar glory. But critics awards are good because they recognize the films you love. Can we have the cake and eat it too? Let’s not forget that Corliss completely ignores the economic fabric which causes films like No Country or Diving Bell to never eclipse $50 million (the vagaries of specialized distribution, multiplex exhibition strategies, etc). And let’s also not forget that a large collection of films which many critics love very dearly are legitimate victims to the art-industrial complex and never make it out of the art-house ghetto. (After all, No Country and Diving Bell are both Miramax products, a studio with a substantial cash flow, whereas my 3 faves of the year, I’m Not There, Colossal Youth, and Syndromes and a Century, have grossed roughly zilch among the three of them.) Corliss, in all of his incarnations, also doesn’t seem to care a whit for any films not made in the English language, barring two exceptions whose high profiles and mainstream aesthetic agendas seem to prove the rule.

At the end of the day, a critic’s responsibility is to him- or herself. When it comes to awards, they must vote for the film they believe deserves it. And isn’t it the essential job of a critic to make the public aware of the films that they love in order for the public to go see them? And did every single ticket-buying customer of Knocked Up actually like the film? Isn’t Corliss playing into the hands of the art-industrial complex by placing a film’s value on its box office draw? C’mon, he’s gotta be smarter than that.

Corliss is being quite pandering and condescending to his audience. By not wishing to look elitist and snobby, he overcorrects and sells himself out in order to seem populist. Truth is, all awards tend to be rather limited in their scope, and do lay down a red carpet toward Oscar night. But what’re you gonna do but try and be true to you? Maybe I’m a little more fiery this year because I like No Country so much, and am quivering in anticipation for There Will Be Blood. (By contrast, I didn’t much care for Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, or Sideways, to name a few awards-mongers of recent years.) But he really should know by now that he’s never going to be in tune with the populace Hollywood likes to create if he keeps liking the things that he does.

In case you’re keeping score, here’s Corliss’s Top 10:

1. No Country for Old Men
2. The Lives of Others
3. Killer of Sheep
4. Atonement
5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
6. Persepolis
7. No End in Sight
8. In the Valley of Elah
9. Waitress
10. Beowulf

Live From Pawleys Island: Movie Journal, 12/3-12/10

I'm beginning my year-end DVD whirlwind a few weeks early this year, and here are the discoveries of the week:





Zoo (Robinson Devor, 2007)

On the surface, Zoo is a documentary about men who like to have sex with male horses. This is like saying that War and Peace is about the Battle of Borodino. Robinson Devor has created the closest successor to Errol Morris’s lyrical, meditative documentaries, juxtaposing actual interviews with dramatic reconstructions of the events described. Devor refuses to judge or exoticize the community of men in rural Washington who come together to have sex with these horses, but he does present their world as a dreamy, haunting and alien universe. It is extremely difficult for a non-zoophile to completely understand and totally identify with the lifestyle of a zoophile, but the notion of considering them any less acceptable in their sexual practices becomes essentially moot. Their world may be strange, but it contains the same quality of beauty that any other world might contain.






Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

Jonathan Rosenbaum said it best when he declared Jafar Panahi’s latest political entertainment “so accessible and entertaining that some discerning viewers are suspicious of it.” Offside is a blast, a warm, humanist comedy that is immensely watchable, but suspicious of it I am. Not for any subversive political message: the story of several young women arrested for attempting to watch the 2005 World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain is as direct as they come. (In Iran, women are not allowed to attend soccer matches, so many attempt to disguise themselves as boys in order to gain access to the stadium.) Its tricky balance between toughness and sentimentality, however, often lapses from one side to the other. Certainly the film’s most enjoyable moments are when the girls engage in pure ecstasy at outwitting their captors, and their captors’ eventual giving up at trying to control them. But then there are moments when Offside veers into cuteness, a tendency to let the personal cloud the political. The ending purports to close the gap between the soldiers and the girls by using the game as a nexus of community rather than division, but Panahi’s tone betrays him. At the end of the day, however, so many of these quibbles are those of a spurned lover wanting the film to be something it is not and does not want to be. As Roger Ebert did at the end of Almost Famous, I gave myself a big hug at the conclusion of Offside.






Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)

Philippe Garrel’s love letter to his youth and his stern rebuttal to Bernardo Bertolucci’s facile The Dreamers, Regular Lovers is a haunting portrait of the aftermath of May ’68. Shot in sumptuous but also charmingly tossed-off black and white, Garrel’s chamber epic follows a young poet, Francois (Louis Garrel, the director’s son and also one of the stars of The Dreamers), as he negotiates how to exist after his and his friends’ moment of triumph evaporates. Regular Lovers is intoxicated by the quotidian, the casual atmosphere of young people unsure of where to go or what to do. It also does not demonize all figures of authority, nor does it sanctify the behavior of Francois and his friends. (The scene where some cops enter Francois and his friend’s apartment is hilarious in the way the cops admire the art on the walls.) The centerpiece, a communal dance to The Kinks’ “This Time Tomorrow,” is a gorgeously rapturous and melancholy ode to trying to establish a community in a world that has rejected you.





In Between Days (So Yong Kim, 2006)

Although it is set in a Canadian metropolis, In Between Days could be set anywhere. The cold and isolating atmosphere in which the protagonist, Aimie (Ji-seon Kim) finds herself is emblematic of the isolation she isn’t even aware of within herself. Haunting pillow shots where she recites letters to her father remind us just how distant her reality is from her perception of it. She falls in love with the only person with whom she can communicate, drops out of a class in order to buy him a bracelet, and holds a typically adolescent insouciance toward the larger universe. After Tran (Taegu Andy Kang) rejects her affections, she begins to understand how alone she really is. Kim films these intimate moments in tossed off, handheld takes, using quiet, effortless dialogue. In Between Days is a delicate and sad slice of life.





The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007)

I really wanted The Golden Compass to be good. It would mean that the meaty portions of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, could be brought to cinematic life with all of their dark, beautiful nuances intact. Instead, The Golden Compass is a loud, CG-stuffed piece of fantasy ephemera, lacking in spiritual or philosophical depth. Certainly the notion of religion as the ultimate force of evil in the world hasn’t been completely sanitized–the leaders of the evil Magisterium have a certain clerical look and feel to them–but any weight or toughness of Pullman’s ideas are pretty much absent. Even Lyra Belaqua (a competent Dakota Blue Richards) is missing her edge. And the ultimate punch pulled is leaving the film on a note of hope, whereas the book’s conclusion is Lyra’s first major step away from innocence and toward experience. One can feebly hope for improvements in The Subtle Knife.


Holiday in Handcuffs (Ron Underwood/Sara Endsley, 2007)

I hate TV Christmas specials. Most Christmas movies are bad enough, but the massive churning out of feel-good, 2-hour pieces of sentimentality on the tube just about kill me. But ABC Family’s Holiday in Handcuffs is so deliciously absurd that I couldn’t help but plow through the sappy ending. There’s nothing family-friendly about this tableau of grotesques. Melissa Joan Hart is depicted as a PMS-raging psychobitch, her parents the ultimate suburban perfectionists, her brother a closeted golden boy, her grandmother a hard-drinking, tough-talking, all-around bawdy broad. Downright kinky sexual innuendos abound, and by the end of the first 90 minutes, I thought I’d walked into a John Waters movie. The plot is completely preposterous: Hart is dumped by her boyfriend, and she believes she must impress her parents by bringing somebody home for Christmas, so she kidnaps loveable rich boy Mario Lopez. Of course, the jig is eventually up, Lopez and Hart fall in love, and everybody learns a lesson. But for about an hour-and-a-half, the movie is so damned out of its mind I couldn’t help but love it. Please go to http://www.abcfamily.com to find out the next showtime!





Away from Her (Sarah Polley, 2006)

Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent) have the sort of wealthy-liberal marriage most of us could only dream about. But the fairy tale ends when Fiona is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and is placed in a treatment center. The great sadness of having to cope with such a loss informs every single frame of this beautiful, graceful film, one which neither sentimentalizes nor trivializes the effect of Alzheimer’s disease on a marriage. Grant watches as the woman he knew vanishes, as she finds it difficult to remember him, and even takes up with a fellow patient. Grant was once unfaithful, many decades ago, and perhaps this is Fiona punishing him. Or perhaps it is an inevitable byproduct of Fiona desperately attempting to find something which makes sense to her. Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” in its original version and a new, instrumental version, haunts the backdoors of the film, where Grant realizes that he and Fiona must invent new lives for themselves, and performs the ultimate sacrifice–which is also the ultimate act of love. Polley’s direction and camerawork is so understated, so quiet, so assured, that we can only marvel at the beautifully sad thing she has created, and wonder what true love ultimately means.





Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006)

I have been mulling over Paul Verhoeven’s first Dutch film in 22 years for a couple of days, and still can’t decide how I feel about it. Verhoeven’s career is certainly a peculiar one, one which has seen him fashioning gaudy blockbusters that contain a nastily satirical edge to them. This is a more muted work, but only barely: after all, this is a film which features a woman dyeing her pubic hair blonde to match her new coiffure, and later getting a bucket of shit dumped on her. Verhoeven’s direction is raunchily propulsive, pulp disguised as art. (Or is it the other way around?) What’s so maddening/fascinating is the way he shifts our sympathies around. There are anti-Semitic Dutch Resistance fighters, sympathetic Gestapo commanders, Dutch collaborators and subversive Nazis. The only one behind whom we firmly stand is Rachel (Carice van Houten), a force of nature who uses her body to do battle with anyone who may stand in her way. The film’s most haunting image is Rachel watching her parents mowed down by a Nazi gun boat, and she seeming to float away, an apparition no longer connected to the corporeal world. That soon changes, as she infiltrates the Gestapo by screwing her way to precious information. But it seems too convenient that she’d start schtupping the one nice Nazi in Amsterdam, while the rest are monsters. And the ending, with all of its twists and revelations, feels too clean in a bizarre way. And what of Ronnie, Rachel’s freewheeling friend who fucks Nazis and Canadian soldiers alike, and has a rip-roaring good time while doing it all? She lacks any political conscience, and is consistently rewarded for it. Is Verhoeven being salaciously subversive in these ambiguities, or is he simply morally backward? I still can’t tell.

"And I Mean Any Swingin' Dick."

(I understand that this is a rather peculiar way to announce that I've returned to blogging, but that's just me, freewheelin' and always keepin' you on your toes.)




Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

PREFACE: The following piece must be considered as a completely subjective, rather phenomenological experience. I went into this movie this afternoon completely expecting not to enjoy it. I was also thinking about Tim Burton, since Sweeney Todd's trailer played before the movie started. Also, I don't like agreeing with my grandparents about movies; call it a rather snobby, contrarian reaction I seem to have when we see movies together. (They hated the film, by the way.)

Beowulf certainly bears little resemblance in visual style to the literary form of the oldest known work of English literature. While the plot of the first two sections of the poem are more or less intact, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman's script veers toward the level of trashy camp throughout. The most blatant and controversial shift is in the characterization of Grendel's mother: from gross old hag Beowulf battles and beheads to sleek golden Angelina Jolie who corrupts the hero and poisons his future, this is certainly not your momma's Beowulf.

Beowulf's most unconscionable sin is its images. Director Robert Zemeckis retreads his 2004 hit The Polar Express, using motion capture technology to render the actors completely lifeless. What's more, the movie never uses this technology organically; as one reviewer has pointed out, the movie feels like a vehicle for showing off what movies are going to look like in 5-10 years. This terrifies me. Any technology that attempts to monopolize film aesthetics must be taken extremely seriously for the danger that it poses. Nothing of interest comes from motion capture in Beowulf; it is another excuse for Zemeckis to be a lazy, kid-in-a-candy-store kind of filmmaker. (A recent re-viewing of Forrest Gump only confirms this feeling.)

The conflict which runs counter to Zemeckis's technological indulgences is the script by Avary and Gaiman. (They apparently wrote it in the late 1990's, and envisioned it as a small-budget, gritty action piece; Zemeckis subsequently talked them out of it once the project exited development hell in 2005.) The dialogue is nothing less than hilarious camp, pulpy trash that the two men are clearly having fun with. The scene in which Beowulf (Ray Winstone) removes all of his clothing and armor to sleep and fight naked is one of the most homoerotically ridiculous things I have seen in a long while. But their most interesting triumph is the revamping of the poem's third act.

Beowulf is a poem of heroism and male love, but lacking in any psychological complexity. Ever the mythical revisionist, Gaiman, along with Avary, transform the story to give as much sympathy toward Grendel as they would Beowulf. Crispin Glover--who may be America's most bizarre actor--gives a very sweet, anguished performance as the flesh-eating troll. His actions can be seen as righteous vengeance against the father who abandoned him. Similarly, making Beowulf procreate with Grendel's mother, rather than kill her, turns him into an arrogant, petty fortune-hunter, whose entire legacy is called into question. The final moments of Beowulf's life call to mind the famous dictum of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

At the end of the day, Beowulf is a strange film, filled with authorial tension: repugnant for Zemeckis's fetishization of technology and his sex-and-gore-for-sex-and-gore's-sake visual treatment, and fascinating for the revisionist weirdness of Avary & Gaiman's script, along with the strength of the performances. (Seeing pudgy, middle-aged Ray Winstone as a muscly badass is almost worth the price of admission alone.) If this is the future of movies, we can only hope the CG-mongers of Hollywood continue to use scripts like this one.