Ten minutes into New in Town, sitting in a heated (thankfully) auditorium in Leominster on Friday afternoon, I began to ask myself the question: "Why exactly does this movie suck so bad? Is it the direction, or is it the editing?"
After watching carefully for a couple more scenes, it hit me that it was definitely the direction, by Jonas Elmer, directing his first Hollywood movie. Every scene was awkward. You could see it on the actors faces as they stood next to each other, almost if they didn't know what exactly to express to each other, or what exactly to do. It must have been painful at times for them.
The story is about a high-powered Miami-based corporate executive (Renee Zellweger) who winds up having to manage a food plant in New Ulm, Minnesota. When she first flies up there, it is the dead of winter and she is defeated repeatedly by the bitter cold and snow.
Actually it wasn't the dead of winter, but early November. Nevertheless southern Minnesota was frozen like mid-January, with the lakes solid enough to drive on. I remember some chilly Halloweens in northwestern Iowa, but nothing like that. Go figure. This is probably why the movie had to be shot in Manitoba.
The Fargo-like cornball cultural references---the Minnesota Vikings, glockenspiels, braunschweig, etc---came rolling a mile a minute, almost in every line of dialogue in the first twenty minutes. I felt like I was being force fed from a church picnic potluck of jello salad and cole slaw.
But then something started to happen---the movie started to develop a story. The young high-powered woman is single, and this being a romantic comedy, we know she will meet a nice young man (Harry Connick Jr.) who will be the love or her life. Falling in love will take the edge off her bitchy personality and allow her to relate to other people in ways that transcend market-speak and cut-throat ambition. Likewise her hatred for Minnesota and its chilly winters will be turned to appreciation as she falls in love.
This being 2009, the two characters start off hating each other. These days, we know that such animosity is a sign that they are meant for each other. The framing story involves the fate of the food plant. She has been sent there to downsize it, and eventually she learns that the corporate suits want to shut the whole thing down altogether.
She has to figure out a way to save the plant. We know she will, and the resolution to the corporate drama will arrive with the resolution to the love story. Suitably she will need to make a sacrifice in order to achieve the result that will be happy not only for her, but for everyone (such sacrifice is a very classical element).
What surprised me was how much I began to enjoy the corporate story, which included many interesting topical issues for 2009. The Minnesota cornball jokes having subsided, I began to actually start rooting for the movie to succeed.
In economic terms, it was definitely an "underdog vs. greedy scum" movie, with a dash of healthy class warfare. It began to remind me a little bit of the kind of movies that Preston Sturges made during the Great Depression, at least in terms of its storyline. We didn't have to swallow an ending where the workers and the suits all get to shake hands and triumph, since in 2009 we know that means that the suits really won, and will shaft the workers at some later date. There was even a bit of Marxist flavor to how it all ended. I hope Hollywood starts making a lot more movies like this. It's about time.
As a whole, the flawed movie was a great demonstration of the power of narrative. That is, even if a movie has a sub-par screenplay and clumsy direction (which this one did), if it nevertheless has an interesting and compelling story (and good acting, which this also did) than it will still be watchable.
Another little tidbit I liked about New in Town was the appearance of one of my favorite long-standing movie phenomena, which I call the Magic Cow of Happiness. Among other things, the Magic Cow often shows up in romantic comedies in order to point the hero or heroine in the direction of his or her true love. I could write a dissertation on that, if I ever went to film school. Moooooooo!
Friday, January 30, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
My Bloody Valentine
The Entertainment 10 in Leominster is a strange place. Not only has the heat been out in two auditoriums since December's ice storm, but they have some strange security rule involving credit card purchases.
I found this out while standing outside in the freezing cold after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I had decided to stick around for a second show, partly because I didn't want to get inside my frozen car yet. Moreover, Tuesday is bargain day in Leominster, when they charge matinee prices all day long.
Shivering, I asked for a ticket to My Bloody Valentine and pushed my debit card through the little hole in the glass. After about two minutes, the teenage cashier handed it back to me. "Sorry, I swiped it, and tried to punch the numbers in by hand, but it was declined."
Knowing there was no hope of arguing, I nevertheless protested, "But I just used it two hours ago her to buy another ticket."
It turns out that it pays to complain. "Oh," she said. "that explains it. We have a security rule that doesn't allow us to make the same charge in a certain amount of time. Don't ask me why." She had a remedy which she quickly engaged, charging me for a five dollar gift card instead, and comping me the extra twenty-five cents.
I would not have been too terribly disappointed to have missed the movie that evening, not because it's a horror movie remake, but because, as the sign on the glass announced, Leominster was showing the 2-D version of the film, rather the 3-D version.
After several 3-D movies last summer (Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fly Me to the Moon), I had come to conclusion that the technology was a waste of time. For the first twenty minutes, it mostly gave me a headache. Eventually I got used to the whole thing and barely noticed the effect. I had resolved to see the 2-D versions whenever possible.
But something about My Bloody Valentine called for the 3-D version. If you're going to pay to see a miner's pick axe hurled straight at the screen, why wouldn't you want it to be three-dimensional?
So it was with mixed feelings that I took a seat in a (nicely heated) auditorium for the flat version of the movie. By the end of the movie I was glad I had saved my money, since it felt 3-D enough for me without the glasses.
The main conclusion I drew from this movie was to buttress my impression of the bankruptcy of the American horror genre, which has been reduced to remaking Asian movies and its own crummy releases from two decades ago.
To my mind, the genre bottomed out with last year's remake, Prom Night, which was told with virtually no plot twists or decent red herrings. The story seemed to revert to the primitive level of early silent films, before the basic techniques of narrative were established. To wit, an escaped killer returns to his hometown and butchers some teens during a high school dance. That is virtually all there is to the movie. Given that it is assumed that all teens hook up, there was none of the lurid sexuality morality (sex equals death) upon which the slashers have always feasted for emotional impact. Even for a slasher movie, Prom Night felt more like the set-up to a movie than the actual plot.
For much of the story, My Bloody Valentine felt nearly on the same level. During the last act, however, it managed to scrape together the semblance of a red herring. Moreover, there was plenty of the "sex equals death" theme to give it the heft of morality horror to which we are familiar. There were also plenty of visual parlor tricks with the pick-axe, intended for 3-D effects, that kept my interest from wandering too much.
But it still felt bankrupt. The demise of American horror has been steep and sudden, and speaks intimately to the denialism of the Bush years. The 1990s was bookended by two horror movies winning the Best Picture Oscar (the horror revivalist The Silence of the Lambs and the mixed-genre American Beauty).
Now our horror is outsourced to Asia, or is served to us as prefabricated pablum stripped of its narrative (and thus cultural) impact. This makes perfect sense if one views horror as the outward manifestation of our shared cultural nightmares, a necessary airing of the dark parts of our common soul. When our newscasters openly cheer for the use of torture, we are living the horror directly, and thus our on-screen nightmares are used to put us further to sleep, rather than to wake us up.
I suspect true horror is going to make a comeback over the next couple years, as we start to become conscious of the nightmare we have been living through. Of course, some of us are already conscious of it, but big studio executives and their minions probably are not among this group. The horror revival will not come with fifty million dollar budgets, or even ten millon dollar budgets, but will come bubbling up from the masses, which are living the reality that is being denied by Hollywood as we speak.
I found this out while standing outside in the freezing cold after Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I had decided to stick around for a second show, partly because I didn't want to get inside my frozen car yet. Moreover, Tuesday is bargain day in Leominster, when they charge matinee prices all day long.
Shivering, I asked for a ticket to My Bloody Valentine and pushed my debit card through the little hole in the glass. After about two minutes, the teenage cashier handed it back to me. "Sorry, I swiped it, and tried to punch the numbers in by hand, but it was declined."
Knowing there was no hope of arguing, I nevertheless protested, "But I just used it two hours ago her to buy another ticket."
It turns out that it pays to complain. "Oh," she said. "that explains it. We have a security rule that doesn't allow us to make the same charge in a certain amount of time. Don't ask me why." She had a remedy which she quickly engaged, charging me for a five dollar gift card instead, and comping me the extra twenty-five cents.
I would not have been too terribly disappointed to have missed the movie that evening, not because it's a horror movie remake, but because, as the sign on the glass announced, Leominster was showing the 2-D version of the film, rather the 3-D version.
After several 3-D movies last summer (Journey to the Center of the Earth and Fly Me to the Moon), I had come to conclusion that the technology was a waste of time. For the first twenty minutes, it mostly gave me a headache. Eventually I got used to the whole thing and barely noticed the effect. I had resolved to see the 2-D versions whenever possible.
But something about My Bloody Valentine called for the 3-D version. If you're going to pay to see a miner's pick axe hurled straight at the screen, why wouldn't you want it to be three-dimensional?
So it was with mixed feelings that I took a seat in a (nicely heated) auditorium for the flat version of the movie. By the end of the movie I was glad I had saved my money, since it felt 3-D enough for me without the glasses.
The main conclusion I drew from this movie was to buttress my impression of the bankruptcy of the American horror genre, which has been reduced to remaking Asian movies and its own crummy releases from two decades ago.
To my mind, the genre bottomed out with last year's remake, Prom Night, which was told with virtually no plot twists or decent red herrings. The story seemed to revert to the primitive level of early silent films, before the basic techniques of narrative were established. To wit, an escaped killer returns to his hometown and butchers some teens during a high school dance. That is virtually all there is to the movie. Given that it is assumed that all teens hook up, there was none of the lurid sexuality morality (sex equals death) upon which the slashers have always feasted for emotional impact. Even for a slasher movie, Prom Night felt more like the set-up to a movie than the actual plot.
For much of the story, My Bloody Valentine felt nearly on the same level. During the last act, however, it managed to scrape together the semblance of a red herring. Moreover, there was plenty of the "sex equals death" theme to give it the heft of morality horror to which we are familiar. There were also plenty of visual parlor tricks with the pick-axe, intended for 3-D effects, that kept my interest from wandering too much.
But it still felt bankrupt. The demise of American horror has been steep and sudden, and speaks intimately to the denialism of the Bush years. The 1990s was bookended by two horror movies winning the Best Picture Oscar (the horror revivalist The Silence of the Lambs and the mixed-genre American Beauty).
Now our horror is outsourced to Asia, or is served to us as prefabricated pablum stripped of its narrative (and thus cultural) impact. This makes perfect sense if one views horror as the outward manifestation of our shared cultural nightmares, a necessary airing of the dark parts of our common soul. When our newscasters openly cheer for the use of torture, we are living the horror directly, and thus our on-screen nightmares are used to put us further to sleep, rather than to wake us up.
I suspect true horror is going to make a comeback over the next couple years, as we start to become conscious of the nightmare we have been living through. Of course, some of us are already conscious of it, but big studio executives and their minions probably are not among this group. The horror revival will not come with fifty million dollar budgets, or even ten millon dollar budgets, but will come bubbling up from the masses, which are living the reality that is being denied by Hollywood as we speak.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
On Monday the weather reports were ominous. A storm was bearing down on New England and was expected on Wednesday to dump up to a foot of snow across northern Massachusetts. On the heels of yet another Arctic blast, this felt like outright cruelty from nature.
On Tuesday I decided I had better use the opportunity to squeeze in a couple movies before the storm hit, given that I'd probably be cooped up inside for at least a day. By late afternoon, I settled on a quick jaunt over to Leominster to see Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. It didn't seem like a movie that would be in theaters very long.
When I got to the steps of the multiplex, I was informed by a printed sign that I had lost the lottery, in that my movie was showing in one of the auditoriums with no heat. In December I'd seen Delgo in the same conditions, so I figured it would be fine. But when I walked into Auditorium 10, I immediately felt a cold blast like I was walking into a freezer.
Throughout the movie I sat nearly alone in the huge four-hundred person auditorium, completely bundled up with my hat and gloves on. Even this wasn't enough, in that halfway through the movie I had to retract my fingers from my gloves and keep my toes curled in my shoes for warmth. Mercifully the movie was short, only slightly over ninety minutes.
I have not yet seen the other two movies in the Underworld series, so I wasn't sure how I'd like this one. But since it was a prequel, it seemed like it was as good as any place to start.
The story takes place in the Middle Ages in the Balkans. Besides humans, there is a race of (intelligent, humanlike) vampires and a race of (animal-like) werewolves. The two races are at war with each other. Certain half-human werewolves are used by the vampires as slaves to guard them in their citadel during the daylight hours. The story revolves around the leader of the half-human werewolf slaves (Michael Sheen, in quite a switch from Frost/Nixon) and his clandestine romance with the daughter of the leader of the vampires.
For a movie with such overt fantasy to work for me, there must be an obvious subtext involving contemporary socioeconomic conditions. In this case, the movie did not let me down, in that the vampire-werewolf war seemed like a thinly disguised parable about the enormous divisions of wealth between the globalized corporate billionaire overclass and the rest of us. The vampire leader even speaks about "increasing his holdings" like a hedge fund manager.
In fact the movie was quite pleasing in this regard. One of the features of classic Hollywood movies that has completely disappeared in contemporary cinema is an open consciousness of class divisions. The disparity between the "rich" and the "rest of us" appeared repeatedly in movies from the 1920s through the 1950s, but then it slowly began to disappear in the more "egalitarian" culture that emerged.
But it now seems as if discussion of class issues has become taboo in Hollywood, where rich people are portrayed as normal and middle-class. Everyone always has money, or recourse to it, in order to get by. The fact that every (white) character in New York movies has an oversized apartment is a manifestation of this denialism, which has fed our blindness during the building of the phony bank-created megawealth over the last few decades.
In a previous era, the class issues of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans would have been told in a more straight-forward fashion, at least using humans and not supernatural creatures. Seeing the movie made me glad that such stories can still be told, even if they have to go to such great lengths of fantasy cloaking.
The story is violent and very guy-oriented, but it held together well, even in such a chilly auditorium. I really had no complaints about the plot, although at times I sensed a brief disorientation based on the fact that I had not seen the other two movies. But this sensation was fleeting. All in all, the movie stood on its own well enough, and made me look forward to seeing the others in the series.
On Tuesday I decided I had better use the opportunity to squeeze in a couple movies before the storm hit, given that I'd probably be cooped up inside for at least a day. By late afternoon, I settled on a quick jaunt over to Leominster to see Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. It didn't seem like a movie that would be in theaters very long.
When I got to the steps of the multiplex, I was informed by a printed sign that I had lost the lottery, in that my movie was showing in one of the auditoriums with no heat. In December I'd seen Delgo in the same conditions, so I figured it would be fine. But when I walked into Auditorium 10, I immediately felt a cold blast like I was walking into a freezer.
Throughout the movie I sat nearly alone in the huge four-hundred person auditorium, completely bundled up with my hat and gloves on. Even this wasn't enough, in that halfway through the movie I had to retract my fingers from my gloves and keep my toes curled in my shoes for warmth. Mercifully the movie was short, only slightly over ninety minutes.
I have not yet seen the other two movies in the Underworld series, so I wasn't sure how I'd like this one. But since it was a prequel, it seemed like it was as good as any place to start.
The story takes place in the Middle Ages in the Balkans. Besides humans, there is a race of (intelligent, humanlike) vampires and a race of (animal-like) werewolves. The two races are at war with each other. Certain half-human werewolves are used by the vampires as slaves to guard them in their citadel during the daylight hours. The story revolves around the leader of the half-human werewolf slaves (Michael Sheen, in quite a switch from Frost/Nixon) and his clandestine romance with the daughter of the leader of the vampires.
For a movie with such overt fantasy to work for me, there must be an obvious subtext involving contemporary socioeconomic conditions. In this case, the movie did not let me down, in that the vampire-werewolf war seemed like a thinly disguised parable about the enormous divisions of wealth between the globalized corporate billionaire overclass and the rest of us. The vampire leader even speaks about "increasing his holdings" like a hedge fund manager.
In fact the movie was quite pleasing in this regard. One of the features of classic Hollywood movies that has completely disappeared in contemporary cinema is an open consciousness of class divisions. The disparity between the "rich" and the "rest of us" appeared repeatedly in movies from the 1920s through the 1950s, but then it slowly began to disappear in the more "egalitarian" culture that emerged.
But it now seems as if discussion of class issues has become taboo in Hollywood, where rich people are portrayed as normal and middle-class. Everyone always has money, or recourse to it, in order to get by. The fact that every (white) character in New York movies has an oversized apartment is a manifestation of this denialism, which has fed our blindness during the building of the phony bank-created megawealth over the last few decades.
In a previous era, the class issues of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans would have been told in a more straight-forward fashion, at least using humans and not supernatural creatures. Seeing the movie made me glad that such stories can still be told, even if they have to go to such great lengths of fantasy cloaking.
The story is violent and very guy-oriented, but it held together well, even in such a chilly auditorium. I really had no complaints about the plot, although at times I sensed a brief disorientation based on the fact that I had not seen the other two movies. But this sensation was fleeting. All in all, the movie stood on its own well enough, and made me look forward to seeing the others in the series.
Hotel for Dogs
Seeing a movie at the Fine Arts in Maynard was so fun on a Sunday afternoon, I decided to stick around for a second matinee. There was an hour break between the shows, and in the bitter cold, I killed time in the only place available, a McDonalds. I sat in the sunlight and eavesdropped as a older woman ate lunch with her grandson.
They had just seen Hotel for Dogs, and she asked me which dog he liked best. Then she slipped into reminiscence: "When your daddy was young, we used to eat in a booth that was over in that corner, before they renovated it. You know what a booth is, right?"
After I finished my coffee, I walked back to the Fine Arts and bought a ticket for the movie the woman and her grandson had just seen. The early show of Hotel for Dogs had been in the giant main auditorium, and I went inside and took a seat, pleased to have the experience of the being in the larger hall. Before the trailers, I examined the large Chinese prints on the wall, the remnants of the late 1940's decor.
I noticed the crowd was much thinner, and mostly older folks. When the movie started, I realized that it was Gran Torino, and so I quickly slipped out of the theater. Much to my chagrin, the late afternoon show of Hotel for Dogs was in the same narrow little auditorium where I'd just Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
The movie hadn't started yet, but the theater was cram-packed of families with very loud kids. All the back rows were already taken, and I found myself way up front in one of the last empty rows. I took a seat next to the wall, so as to allow another family to use the seats by the aisle. It felt awkward being the only solo middle-aged guy in attendance in such a small auditorium. But I was just glad that the family behind me seemed to be decently behaved. Moreover the popcorn here was in cups and tubs, instead of the infernal crinkly plastic bags at the AMC outlets.
I'd been seeing the trailer to this movie for almost six months. For some reason they had started showing it last summer at the second-run theater in Fort Collins, and I thought it was coming out soon. I was glad to finally cross it off my list.
It was, moreover, the fourth canine movie in as many months, following Beverly Hills Chihuahua (real dogs with human voice over), Bolt (animation), and Marley and Me (real dog that doesn't talk). Hotel for Dogs fell into the last of those three genres, in that the dogs, while displaying unusual intelligence are nevertheless "normal" and do not speak in voice overs.
The basic set-up of the story is the "orphaned child(ren) with mean step-parents" paradigm from fairy tales. The resolution to the story must eventually involve the children finding a suitable set of loving parents.
The canine-level of the story functions as a mirror of the human-level fairy tale. The dogs are themselves orphaned, taken from the streets or liberated from the city pound (which is not a no-kill shelter). Thus the story must bring about a suitable resolution to the dogs' plight as well as the children.
The movie turned out to be far more in the fantasy realm than I anticipated from the trailer. One of these premises is the "abandoned building" fantasy, one I've seen several times in the last year, and which has long been a Hollywood staple. In this incarnation we have a long-abandoned inner city hotel, boarded up and left intact for many decades with all its furnishings undisturbed, like a giant e-bay treasure trove, just waiting for two young children to discover it.
It reminds me of the the kind of thing I used to think actually existed in cities, while I was growing up in a small town in the Midwest.
The second fantasy premise is that of the whiz-kid child inventor (a nine-year-old boy), who is able to construct any manner of elaborate Rube Goldberg inventions, most of which will be used to serve the needs of the many dogs in the "hotel."
The third fantasy premise involves the intelligence of the dogs, who are able to understand and follow the rules of the "hotel," including the patient use of all the aforementioned Rube Goldberg devices.
At first the whole scheme of saving the dogs in the abandoned building works, and they even get the help of a few underage collaborators, all of whom are cool with the idea (making this a nice children vs. adult fantasy as well).
The story demands a complication, however, a threat not only to the children's foster-family status, but also to the hotel. In fact, the hotel scheme must be exposed to eventually clear the way for a stable, above-board solution to the dogs' plight.
All of this plays out in due course during the first seventy minutes of the movie. It all worked fairly well for me. Being a Kevin Dillon fan, I enjoyed his performance as the immature foster dad alongside Lisa Kudrow, functioning as the gentle comic foils to the childrens' dog-saving scheme.
Where I felt the movie let me down was in the conclusion. For a movie with this much fantasy to work, we eventually need to come down at least partially from the fantasy level, back into the normal world. This allows the audience to walk out of the theater having experienced the fantasy roller coaster ride, while sensing a suitable sense of emotional resolution back to the "normal" world, where the characters can live forever in stable fashion.
In Hotel for Dogs, however, the resolution takes us to an even higher level of fantasy, one that outdoes the previous layers in a rather outrageous fashion. It's a fun resolution, to be sure, but it felt too unreal to me to be the proper resolution of the orphaned children fairy tale. The fact that the children are allowed to openly break the law without consequence also did not help.
Specifically the ending didn't work because the fantasy resolution to the dog story makes the adoption of the children by a real family seem similarly unrealistic. In this way the movie comes off, on a deep emotional level, as a cynical commentary that the children in the movie were, in fact, unadoptable, and could be so only in a world of outrageous open-ended fantasy.
After the movie ended, as a consequence for missing out on the main auditorium, I slipped in and watched the last five minutes of Gran Torino again, including the Clint Eastwood song over the closing credits along Lake St. Clair. Now that's a nice resolution to a fantasy.
They had just seen Hotel for Dogs, and she asked me which dog he liked best. Then she slipped into reminiscence: "When your daddy was young, we used to eat in a booth that was over in that corner, before they renovated it. You know what a booth is, right?"
After I finished my coffee, I walked back to the Fine Arts and bought a ticket for the movie the woman and her grandson had just seen. The early show of Hotel for Dogs had been in the giant main auditorium, and I went inside and took a seat, pleased to have the experience of the being in the larger hall. Before the trailers, I examined the large Chinese prints on the wall, the remnants of the late 1940's decor.
I noticed the crowd was much thinner, and mostly older folks. When the movie started, I realized that it was Gran Torino, and so I quickly slipped out of the theater. Much to my chagrin, the late afternoon show of Hotel for Dogs was in the same narrow little auditorium where I'd just Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
The movie hadn't started yet, but the theater was cram-packed of families with very loud kids. All the back rows were already taken, and I found myself way up front in one of the last empty rows. I took a seat next to the wall, so as to allow another family to use the seats by the aisle. It felt awkward being the only solo middle-aged guy in attendance in such a small auditorium. But I was just glad that the family behind me seemed to be decently behaved. Moreover the popcorn here was in cups and tubs, instead of the infernal crinkly plastic bags at the AMC outlets.
I'd been seeing the trailer to this movie for almost six months. For some reason they had started showing it last summer at the second-run theater in Fort Collins, and I thought it was coming out soon. I was glad to finally cross it off my list.
It was, moreover, the fourth canine movie in as many months, following Beverly Hills Chihuahua (real dogs with human voice over), Bolt (animation), and Marley and Me (real dog that doesn't talk). Hotel for Dogs fell into the last of those three genres, in that the dogs, while displaying unusual intelligence are nevertheless "normal" and do not speak in voice overs.
The basic set-up of the story is the "orphaned child(ren) with mean step-parents" paradigm from fairy tales. The resolution to the story must eventually involve the children finding a suitable set of loving parents.
The canine-level of the story functions as a mirror of the human-level fairy tale. The dogs are themselves orphaned, taken from the streets or liberated from the city pound (which is not a no-kill shelter). Thus the story must bring about a suitable resolution to the dogs' plight as well as the children.
The movie turned out to be far more in the fantasy realm than I anticipated from the trailer. One of these premises is the "abandoned building" fantasy, one I've seen several times in the last year, and which has long been a Hollywood staple. In this incarnation we have a long-abandoned inner city hotel, boarded up and left intact for many decades with all its furnishings undisturbed, like a giant e-bay treasure trove, just waiting for two young children to discover it.
It reminds me of the the kind of thing I used to think actually existed in cities, while I was growing up in a small town in the Midwest.
The second fantasy premise is that of the whiz-kid child inventor (a nine-year-old boy), who is able to construct any manner of elaborate Rube Goldberg inventions, most of which will be used to serve the needs of the many dogs in the "hotel."
The third fantasy premise involves the intelligence of the dogs, who are able to understand and follow the rules of the "hotel," including the patient use of all the aforementioned Rube Goldberg devices.
At first the whole scheme of saving the dogs in the abandoned building works, and they even get the help of a few underage collaborators, all of whom are cool with the idea (making this a nice children vs. adult fantasy as well).
The story demands a complication, however, a threat not only to the children's foster-family status, but also to the hotel. In fact, the hotel scheme must be exposed to eventually clear the way for a stable, above-board solution to the dogs' plight.
All of this plays out in due course during the first seventy minutes of the movie. It all worked fairly well for me. Being a Kevin Dillon fan, I enjoyed his performance as the immature foster dad alongside Lisa Kudrow, functioning as the gentle comic foils to the childrens' dog-saving scheme.
Where I felt the movie let me down was in the conclusion. For a movie with this much fantasy to work, we eventually need to come down at least partially from the fantasy level, back into the normal world. This allows the audience to walk out of the theater having experienced the fantasy roller coaster ride, while sensing a suitable sense of emotional resolution back to the "normal" world, where the characters can live forever in stable fashion.
In Hotel for Dogs, however, the resolution takes us to an even higher level of fantasy, one that outdoes the previous layers in a rather outrageous fashion. It's a fun resolution, to be sure, but it felt too unreal to me to be the proper resolution of the orphaned children fairy tale. The fact that the children are allowed to openly break the law without consequence also did not help.
Specifically the ending didn't work because the fantasy resolution to the dog story makes the adoption of the children by a real family seem similarly unrealistic. In this way the movie comes off, on a deep emotional level, as a cynical commentary that the children in the movie were, in fact, unadoptable, and could be so only in a world of outrageous open-ended fantasy.
After the movie ended, as a consequence for missing out on the main auditorium, I slipped in and watched the last five minutes of Gran Torino again, including the Clint Eastwood song over the closing credits along Lake St. Clair. Now that's a nice resolution to a fantasy.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
On Sunday afternoon I decided to treat myself and finally drive over to the nearby town of Maynard to attend a movie at the Fine Arts Theater there. It was a bitter cold afternoon, and I got there just in time for a one o'clock showing. The minute I pulled into the parking lot across the street, I knew I had made the right choice.
From the outside, it has a classic post-war look, with a script neon sign from that era. As I learned from newspaper clippings inside, it was built right after World War II inside an old Lincoln-Mercury dealership from the 1920s. In 1947 it became the site of the first public exhibition of television in New England, with a free showing of the Louis-Walcott fight. Originally it had a single 400-person auditorium, based on a Chinese theme. Eventually the theater added a second auditorium. It fell into hard times, became an art theater for a while, but was renovated in 1989, when the second auditorium was split into two smaller ones. Now it shows first run movies. From the crowds I saw, it is fairly popular.
I bought a ticket for Paul Blart: Mall Cop at the classic outdoor glass ticket booth and entered the teeny-tiny lobby, where I had to snake around the people at the concession stand just to get to the hallway leading to the auditoriums. The mens room is a bit worse for wear and looked like it needed another renovation, but I can forgive such things of an old theater like this.
Unfortunately Paul Blart: Mall Cop wasn't showing in the big main auditorium, but in one of the smaller ones, which was very narrow and a bit claustrophic compared to the wide open expanse of the main one.
The movie itself was harmless. I was expecting to be revolted, given that it was an Adam Sandler production, but it turns out that so long as Sandler stays out of his own movies, they might actually be watchable.
But I certainly was not revolted. In fact something about the movie rather pleased me, in that almost all the characters, with the exception of the female love interest (Jayma Mays), were rather lumpen, as my friend Thor would say. This was not a movie about beautiful people, but ordinary-looking Americans in various unflattering shapes and sizes---quite appropriate given that most of the story takes place in a shopping mall. I felt like I wanted to root for the movie because of the fact that it didn't portray ordinary people as looking like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
The story is rather goofy and full of plot holes. The caper part of the story needs to be taken with a grain of salt if you want to enjoy this at all. An honorable character switches to dishonorable at the end with no set-up of the betrayal.
What interested me most was the lumpen male hero (Kevin James). As the typical American adult in 2008, he is portrayed as completely terrified of talking to women. In this day and age, only cads are capable of "making love," as they used to call it. Ordinary nice guys cower in fear. As far as romance goes, the hero's plight is hopeless. He can't even get dates online. That this is so taken for granted as normal now shows just how far we have come down the postmodern pike. For a normal guy to wind up dating an attractive woman in this era requires some kind of extraordinary event.
The movie has a little bit of classical sauce in it, however, in that in the classical era, Hollywood movies endorsed the idea that when a man desired a woman, he initially needed to disrupt her body-space or life routine a little in such a way that made her, at least momentarily, a little bit uncomfortable to his advance. Cads did this kind of thing in a whimsical way, without honorable intention, but honorable men were supposed to do it when they truly fancied a woman with the intent of real courtship.
In fact, it was considered incumbent upon a man to do this, to push slightly past the bounds of the normal comfort zone with a woman, in order to demonstrate his sincere desire. The trick was that he was not supposed to be put off by the initial reaction from her, which was normally assumed to be one of pushing him away, or outward annoyance with his advance. The honorable man was supposed to persist with the confidence that she was his true love. Of course, honorable men were supposed to know when to back off as well. This kind of gray-area social nuance is what has been completely lost to us in the postmodern era.
In Paul Blart: Mall Cop, we have a remnant of this principle during a scene in which the hero gets unintentionally drunk. Up until this point, he has been earning the trust of his love interest in a "nice friendly" way, but he seems to spoil it all by getting too "fresh" in a verbal way with her. We see the look of disgust and avoidance on her face. To the American male of 2008, this means he has "blown it."
Yet classically this is exactly what he must do, in some form at least, to break out of his cowering nice guy self, to demonstrate his sincerity in taking an emotional risk with her, and to win her away from the overly-ambitious cad rival who has no compunction about claiming her as his woman.
Eventually he will need to do more than that, however, and to win her hand in this instance, he will need to become a true public hero by thwarting a robbery and kidnapping plot, and saving her and other hostages. A classical hero would not have needed such fantasy derring-do, but the audience of 2008 needs to see such surface "heroism" to believe that she would love him, and that he would think himself "worthy" of her.
Thus we have a perfect x-ray of the dysfunctional nice-guy American male of 2008. He is utterly weak and helpless and no ability to approach or talk to women. Getting a date or hooking up with a desirable woman is like winning the lottery. His courtship ability comes out only when he is smashed drunk, and to win a woman's hand, he has to capture a whole ring of bad guys with machine guns.
None of this made me dislike the movie. In fact it made me like it all the more, that it spelled everything out so clearly. That it was under ninety minutes certainly helped as well. The story didn't linger on anything very long.
It reminded once again of how Myra Breckenridge had it all figured out back in 1970, when Raquel Welch uttered that wonderful line, "American manhood died with Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz." But in 2008, a lumpenly obese mall cop gets to live the dream for a day, if given the chance to really be a hero.
From the outside, it has a classic post-war look, with a script neon sign from that era. As I learned from newspaper clippings inside, it was built right after World War II inside an old Lincoln-Mercury dealership from the 1920s. In 1947 it became the site of the first public exhibition of television in New England, with a free showing of the Louis-Walcott fight. Originally it had a single 400-person auditorium, based on a Chinese theme. Eventually the theater added a second auditorium. It fell into hard times, became an art theater for a while, but was renovated in 1989, when the second auditorium was split into two smaller ones. Now it shows first run movies. From the crowds I saw, it is fairly popular.
I bought a ticket for Paul Blart: Mall Cop at the classic outdoor glass ticket booth and entered the teeny-tiny lobby, where I had to snake around the people at the concession stand just to get to the hallway leading to the auditoriums. The mens room is a bit worse for wear and looked like it needed another renovation, but I can forgive such things of an old theater like this.
Unfortunately Paul Blart: Mall Cop wasn't showing in the big main auditorium, but in one of the smaller ones, which was very narrow and a bit claustrophic compared to the wide open expanse of the main one.
The movie itself was harmless. I was expecting to be revolted, given that it was an Adam Sandler production, but it turns out that so long as Sandler stays out of his own movies, they might actually be watchable.
But I certainly was not revolted. In fact something about the movie rather pleased me, in that almost all the characters, with the exception of the female love interest (Jayma Mays), were rather lumpen, as my friend Thor would say. This was not a movie about beautiful people, but ordinary-looking Americans in various unflattering shapes and sizes---quite appropriate given that most of the story takes place in a shopping mall. I felt like I wanted to root for the movie because of the fact that it didn't portray ordinary people as looking like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
The story is rather goofy and full of plot holes. The caper part of the story needs to be taken with a grain of salt if you want to enjoy this at all. An honorable character switches to dishonorable at the end with no set-up of the betrayal.
What interested me most was the lumpen male hero (Kevin James). As the typical American adult in 2008, he is portrayed as completely terrified of talking to women. In this day and age, only cads are capable of "making love," as they used to call it. Ordinary nice guys cower in fear. As far as romance goes, the hero's plight is hopeless. He can't even get dates online. That this is so taken for granted as normal now shows just how far we have come down the postmodern pike. For a normal guy to wind up dating an attractive woman in this era requires some kind of extraordinary event.
The movie has a little bit of classical sauce in it, however, in that in the classical era, Hollywood movies endorsed the idea that when a man desired a woman, he initially needed to disrupt her body-space or life routine a little in such a way that made her, at least momentarily, a little bit uncomfortable to his advance. Cads did this kind of thing in a whimsical way, without honorable intention, but honorable men were supposed to do it when they truly fancied a woman with the intent of real courtship.
In fact, it was considered incumbent upon a man to do this, to push slightly past the bounds of the normal comfort zone with a woman, in order to demonstrate his sincere desire. The trick was that he was not supposed to be put off by the initial reaction from her, which was normally assumed to be one of pushing him away, or outward annoyance with his advance. The honorable man was supposed to persist with the confidence that she was his true love. Of course, honorable men were supposed to know when to back off as well. This kind of gray-area social nuance is what has been completely lost to us in the postmodern era.
In Paul Blart: Mall Cop, we have a remnant of this principle during a scene in which the hero gets unintentionally drunk. Up until this point, he has been earning the trust of his love interest in a "nice friendly" way, but he seems to spoil it all by getting too "fresh" in a verbal way with her. We see the look of disgust and avoidance on her face. To the American male of 2008, this means he has "blown it."
Yet classically this is exactly what he must do, in some form at least, to break out of his cowering nice guy self, to demonstrate his sincerity in taking an emotional risk with her, and to win her away from the overly-ambitious cad rival who has no compunction about claiming her as his woman.
Eventually he will need to do more than that, however, and to win her hand in this instance, he will need to become a true public hero by thwarting a robbery and kidnapping plot, and saving her and other hostages. A classical hero would not have needed such fantasy derring-do, but the audience of 2008 needs to see such surface "heroism" to believe that she would love him, and that he would think himself "worthy" of her.
Thus we have a perfect x-ray of the dysfunctional nice-guy American male of 2008. He is utterly weak and helpless and no ability to approach or talk to women. Getting a date or hooking up with a desirable woman is like winning the lottery. His courtship ability comes out only when he is smashed drunk, and to win a woman's hand, he has to capture a whole ring of bad guys with machine guns.
None of this made me dislike the movie. In fact it made me like it all the more, that it spelled everything out so clearly. That it was under ninety minutes certainly helped as well. The story didn't linger on anything very long.
It reminded once again of how Myra Breckenridge had it all figured out back in 1970, when Raquel Welch uttered that wonderful line, "American manhood died with Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz." But in 2008, a lumpenly obese mall cop gets to live the dream for a day, if given the chance to really be a hero.
Notorious
Back in the Nineties when I heard about the so-called Hip Hop War between the East Coast and the West Coast rappers, I thought it was about the dumbest and most pointless thing I had ever heard. Thanks to Notorious, the new biopic about the Christopher Smalls Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G., I now know that, at least according to the film, the rappers themselves had the same reaction as I did.
My absolute ignorance of hip hop is evident by the fact that I had no idea who the Notorious B.I.G. was. His significance in music history, I learned, was that he was the first "street" artist from Brooklyn to make it in the industry. Sean "Puffy" Combs was very instrumental in his success. He made friends with Tupac Shakur, a west coast rapper, but somehow Shakur went nuts, got involved with thugs, and eventually both Shakur and Smalls wound up dead.
The fact that I learned so much about hip hop history during two hours is a testament to the soundness of the screenplay of this movie. In a lot of ways, this movie could well have been a sequel to Cadillac Records, in that both were highly informative in a historical fashion, and both followed a collection of artists working together in a common studio. The plotline in both follows not only one artist, but charts the rise of several, and of the studio itself.
In many ways this felt like a very old fashioned movie, reminding me not just of the old classical Hollywood movie biopics, but of, say, The Public Enemy (1931). In this latter movie, Cagney is a gangster who is nevertheless a "momma's boy," and his downfall is played for sentimentality, and as a cautionary tale. There is more than a little bit of this flavor in Notorious.
It makes for an interesting hybrid: on the one hand, there is constant profanity, degradation of women (who nevertheless fight back on their own terms), and plenty of dope smoking. On the other hand, the hero (Wallace) is played as a "nice boy" who managed to fall into the wrong crowd.
What the movie didn't do was turn me into a fan of Wallace. I have never been a hip hop fan, and I didn't quite "get" what made his actual rapping so good, although I understood it from the reaction of other characters to him.
One of the strengths of the movie was the "period" aspects of its portrayal of the Nineties. It is good for Hollywood to make many movies about the Nineties while it is still fresh in our minds, and Notorious reminded me a lot of The Wackness from last summer, which is set in Brooklyn in 1994 and overlaps much of the cultural setting of Notorious.
The most potent image in the movie was when I first saw Wallace standing on a Brooklyn street wearing a black down jacket and a black Oakland Raiders stocking cap. I was instantly catapulted back fifteen years, looking at the graffiti on the buildings visible from the Gowanus Freeway. I don't miss those Raiders hats.
Notorious was the second movie I saw at the Cinemaworld in Fitchburg, which is located inside a strip mall. I love movie theaters like that. The tickets were cheap, and the marquee was in a typography from the 1980s. There is something beautiful about the resiliency of such places.
My absolute ignorance of hip hop is evident by the fact that I had no idea who the Notorious B.I.G. was. His significance in music history, I learned, was that he was the first "street" artist from Brooklyn to make it in the industry. Sean "Puffy" Combs was very instrumental in his success. He made friends with Tupac Shakur, a west coast rapper, but somehow Shakur went nuts, got involved with thugs, and eventually both Shakur and Smalls wound up dead.
The fact that I learned so much about hip hop history during two hours is a testament to the soundness of the screenplay of this movie. In a lot of ways, this movie could well have been a sequel to Cadillac Records, in that both were highly informative in a historical fashion, and both followed a collection of artists working together in a common studio. The plotline in both follows not only one artist, but charts the rise of several, and of the studio itself.
In many ways this felt like a very old fashioned movie, reminding me not just of the old classical Hollywood movie biopics, but of, say, The Public Enemy (1931). In this latter movie, Cagney is a gangster who is nevertheless a "momma's boy," and his downfall is played for sentimentality, and as a cautionary tale. There is more than a little bit of this flavor in Notorious.
It makes for an interesting hybrid: on the one hand, there is constant profanity, degradation of women (who nevertheless fight back on their own terms), and plenty of dope smoking. On the other hand, the hero (Wallace) is played as a "nice boy" who managed to fall into the wrong crowd.
What the movie didn't do was turn me into a fan of Wallace. I have never been a hip hop fan, and I didn't quite "get" what made his actual rapping so good, although I understood it from the reaction of other characters to him.
One of the strengths of the movie was the "period" aspects of its portrayal of the Nineties. It is good for Hollywood to make many movies about the Nineties while it is still fresh in our minds, and Notorious reminded me a lot of The Wackness from last summer, which is set in Brooklyn in 1994 and overlaps much of the cultural setting of Notorious.
The most potent image in the movie was when I first saw Wallace standing on a Brooklyn street wearing a black down jacket and a black Oakland Raiders stocking cap. I was instantly catapulted back fifteen years, looking at the graffiti on the buildings visible from the Gowanus Freeway. I don't miss those Raiders hats.
Notorious was the second movie I saw at the Cinemaworld in Fitchburg, which is located inside a strip mall. I love movie theaters like that. The tickets were cheap, and the marquee was in a typography from the 1980s. There is something beautiful about the resiliency of such places.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Defiance
By Thursday afternoon it had been nearly eighteen hours since I had seen a Holocaust-related movie, and I was seriously jonesing for another fix. There was only one option to feed my habit, and with that in mind I headed off to Leominster for the late matinee of Defiance.
Fortunately it was not among the movies in the unheated auditoriums at Leominster. Among the unfortunate losers were those going to see Notorious, for which the printed sign at the box office said "Sorry 4 the inconvenience." A little hip-hop-ese to ease the pain, I suppose.
The auditorium for Defiance was empty, but just as the house lights went down, two women in their seventies or eighties came in, and sat near the back. They talked all the way through the previews, but fortunately they quieted down once the movie started. This lasted until about fifteen minutes before the end of the movie, at which time they decided it was OK to talk outloud again. Even though I was down in the third row, the raspy sound of their s's made it hard to follow the dialogue. I thought about clearing my throat really loudly, but decided just to tough it out. My hardship seemed like small potatoes compared to the characters in the movie.
Despite my "jonesing" comment, I had actually been dreading seeing this movie. I kept thinking about the rally in Manhattan a couple weeks ago, the one in support of Israel in this Youtube video, where several of the people being interviewed talk about wanting to wipe out the Palestinians, and even making unashamed comparisons of themselves to the Nazis. In my mind, I imagined these people walking over to see Defiance, and celebrating it as evidence of the righteousness and necessity of Israel's actions.
But like so many preconceptions I have before seeing a movie, this one turned out to be off-the-mark. If anything, by the end of the movie I felt like this was not a story that would be welcome among hard-core supporters of Israel and its current policies versus the Arabs.
The story itself was well-paced and well-told. Although it definitely includes the death camps as a tangential phenomenon, it is really more about the in situ genocidal policies of the Nazis in Belorussia during 1941-1944, and about a group of Jews who became guerilla fighters to defend themselves. One learns at the end that it was based on a true story, and that several of the leaders of the revolt later emigrated to the United States.
This by itself runs somewhat counter to the mythology of Israeli history, in which Irgun, the self-proclaimed Jewish "terrorist" organization in Palestine, were the only defenders of the Jews, and the legitimate champions of their people. The Irgun, as it happens, received training from the Nazis themselves, who openly championed Zionism as a way of removing the Jews from northern Europe. Compared to this dirty history, the Bielski fighters in Defiance seem like the real deal, untainted by the compromises made by the early founders of Israel.
There's a very potent line about two-thirds of the way through the movie, where Zus (Liev Schreiber) and his brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig) are attempting to raid a police station to obtain medicine to treat a typhus outbreak among the forest dwellers. Zus says to Tuvia, "Nazism, Zionism, Communism---what's the difference when you're out to get antibiotics?" I nearly fell out of my chair.
The movie had a strong rough-and-tumble feel, like an old-time World War II war movie, upholding my theory that when you're attempting to tell revisionist stories (as this one was), it is best to rely heavily on classical technique.
The main plot (the survival of the refugees in the forest) has a strong underpinning from the individual human-level story, which is basically a brother-versus-brother rivalry. At first they are united, then they split up, and eventually they must reunite in order to save the forest dwellers. Their interactions essentially drive the story.
The tragic fatality of their conflict emerges in a very classical scene. In full view of all the other people, Tuvia (Craig) somewhat accidently impugns the honor of the woman that Zus (Schreiber) has taken as his "forest wife." That such a situation has arisen at all is a consequence of the attempt to remain human (and to love) amidst the loss of the containing vessel of institutions that would sanctify marraige.
In classical terms, to defend his woman's honor, Zus must strike Tuvia. Normally, Tuvia should accept that the blow was righteous. But in this case, to fail to respond would be to place his leadership status in jeopardy, which might itself lead to disaster. Thus he must not only fight back against his brother, but subdue him with the threat of bashing in his brains with a rock. The conflict thus arises from the "no-win" situation as in Greek tragedy. All of it can be traced back to the evil of the war itself.
The movie that this most reminded me of was not other Holocaust movies, but rather Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), a movie I would rank as one of the most underappreciated Hollywood classics of all time (Hemingway essentially wrote the book as a story for the eventual movie, and intended Gary Cooper to play the lead).
There's a great shot at the climax of Defiance, during a tank battle, when Zus (Schreiber) makes his re-entrance into the story. It's almost as awesome as Cooper firing his machine gun at the end of Wood's movie.
It was a very good movie, enjoyable to watch and with a lot of emotional impact. Among other things, it was by far the best performance I have seen by Daniel Craig. It also totally kicked the ass of The Reader, but I'm not surprised at all that in 2008 the latter wound up among the Best Picture nominees rather than Defiance. The Reader is a movie that those protesters in Manhattan could really sink their teeth into.
Fortunately it was not among the movies in the unheated auditoriums at Leominster. Among the unfortunate losers were those going to see Notorious, for which the printed sign at the box office said "Sorry 4 the inconvenience." A little hip-hop-ese to ease the pain, I suppose.
The auditorium for Defiance was empty, but just as the house lights went down, two women in their seventies or eighties came in, and sat near the back. They talked all the way through the previews, but fortunately they quieted down once the movie started. This lasted until about fifteen minutes before the end of the movie, at which time they decided it was OK to talk outloud again. Even though I was down in the third row, the raspy sound of their s's made it hard to follow the dialogue. I thought about clearing my throat really loudly, but decided just to tough it out. My hardship seemed like small potatoes compared to the characters in the movie.
Despite my "jonesing" comment, I had actually been dreading seeing this movie. I kept thinking about the rally in Manhattan a couple weeks ago, the one in support of Israel in this Youtube video, where several of the people being interviewed talk about wanting to wipe out the Palestinians, and even making unashamed comparisons of themselves to the Nazis. In my mind, I imagined these people walking over to see Defiance, and celebrating it as evidence of the righteousness and necessity of Israel's actions.
But like so many preconceptions I have before seeing a movie, this one turned out to be off-the-mark. If anything, by the end of the movie I felt like this was not a story that would be welcome among hard-core supporters of Israel and its current policies versus the Arabs.
The story itself was well-paced and well-told. Although it definitely includes the death camps as a tangential phenomenon, it is really more about the in situ genocidal policies of the Nazis in Belorussia during 1941-1944, and about a group of Jews who became guerilla fighters to defend themselves. One learns at the end that it was based on a true story, and that several of the leaders of the revolt later emigrated to the United States.
This by itself runs somewhat counter to the mythology of Israeli history, in which Irgun, the self-proclaimed Jewish "terrorist" organization in Palestine, were the only defenders of the Jews, and the legitimate champions of their people. The Irgun, as it happens, received training from the Nazis themselves, who openly championed Zionism as a way of removing the Jews from northern Europe. Compared to this dirty history, the Bielski fighters in Defiance seem like the real deal, untainted by the compromises made by the early founders of Israel.
There's a very potent line about two-thirds of the way through the movie, where Zus (Liev Schreiber) and his brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig) are attempting to raid a police station to obtain medicine to treat a typhus outbreak among the forest dwellers. Zus says to Tuvia, "Nazism, Zionism, Communism---what's the difference when you're out to get antibiotics?" I nearly fell out of my chair.
The movie had a strong rough-and-tumble feel, like an old-time World War II war movie, upholding my theory that when you're attempting to tell revisionist stories (as this one was), it is best to rely heavily on classical technique.
The main plot (the survival of the refugees in the forest) has a strong underpinning from the individual human-level story, which is basically a brother-versus-brother rivalry. At first they are united, then they split up, and eventually they must reunite in order to save the forest dwellers. Their interactions essentially drive the story.
The tragic fatality of their conflict emerges in a very classical scene. In full view of all the other people, Tuvia (Craig) somewhat accidently impugns the honor of the woman that Zus (Schreiber) has taken as his "forest wife." That such a situation has arisen at all is a consequence of the attempt to remain human (and to love) amidst the loss of the containing vessel of institutions that would sanctify marraige.
In classical terms, to defend his woman's honor, Zus must strike Tuvia. Normally, Tuvia should accept that the blow was righteous. But in this case, to fail to respond would be to place his leadership status in jeopardy, which might itself lead to disaster. Thus he must not only fight back against his brother, but subdue him with the threat of bashing in his brains with a rock. The conflict thus arises from the "no-win" situation as in Greek tragedy. All of it can be traced back to the evil of the war itself.
The movie that this most reminded me of was not other Holocaust movies, but rather Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), a movie I would rank as one of the most underappreciated Hollywood classics of all time (Hemingway essentially wrote the book as a story for the eventual movie, and intended Gary Cooper to play the lead).
There's a great shot at the climax of Defiance, during a tank battle, when Zus (Schreiber) makes his re-entrance into the story. It's almost as awesome as Cooper firing his machine gun at the end of Wood's movie.
It was a very good movie, enjoyable to watch and with a lot of emotional impact. Among other things, it was by far the best performance I have seen by Daniel Craig. It also totally kicked the ass of The Reader, but I'm not surprised at all that in 2008 the latter wound up among the Best Picture nominees rather than Defiance. The Reader is a movie that those protesters in Manhattan could really sink their teeth into.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
My reaction to the Best Picture Oscar nominees
1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button --- I liked it OK when I saw it, but no way this is the best film of the year, mainly because it's a remake of Forest Gump, written by the same guy, with the added "bonus" of having supernatural plot influences.
2. The Reader --- I'm flabbergasted this was nominated. Not a bad movie, but I can think of twenty, no, make that thirty, movies over the last year that were better than this. No way this would have been nominated if were not about the Holocaust, but instead were about other war atrocities. Self-righteous, sentimental ending. If this wins, I'm gonna puke.
3. Milk --- This is absolutely the best movie of these five. Probably not number one on my own list, but I can very much live with this one winning the Oscar.
4. Slumdog Millionaire --- It was a fun movie, and it will be the sentimental favorite, but I felt it was too lightweight to really be the best movie of the year. On the other hand, if it were up for Best-feeling Movie of the Year, I'd vote for it.
5. Frost/Nixon --- This is the second best of the five. It felt a little stage-play-ish to really be the best motion picture of the year. By the way, just so you know, Nixon was framed for Watergate---both the burglary and the cover-up. Now that would be motion pictah!
A better-but-still-Hollywood-oriented list would have swapped Revolutionary Road in place of the The Reader, and Gran Torino in place of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I have a few more 2008 movies to see before I make out my own "best" list.
2. The Reader --- I'm flabbergasted this was nominated. Not a bad movie, but I can think of twenty, no, make that thirty, movies over the last year that were better than this. No way this would have been nominated if were not about the Holocaust, but instead were about other war atrocities. Self-righteous, sentimental ending. If this wins, I'm gonna puke.
3. Milk --- This is absolutely the best movie of these five. Probably not number one on my own list, but I can very much live with this one winning the Oscar.
4. Slumdog Millionaire --- It was a fun movie, and it will be the sentimental favorite, but I felt it was too lightweight to really be the best movie of the year. On the other hand, if it were up for Best-feeling Movie of the Year, I'd vote for it.
5. Frost/Nixon --- This is the second best of the five. It felt a little stage-play-ish to really be the best motion picture of the year. By the way, just so you know, Nixon was framed for Watergate---both the burglary and the cover-up. Now that would be motion pictah!
A better-but-still-Hollywood-oriented list would have swapped Revolutionary Road in place of the The Reader, and Gran Torino in place of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
I have a few more 2008 movies to see before I make out my own "best" list.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
A Secret (Un Secret)
The welcome signs at the New Hampshire border are bilingual---in both English and French. It took me half a dozen times of going there before I got used to being greeted with "bienvenue." It seems perfectly fitting therefore that I was back in the Granite State for my third French-language movie there in the last week.
It was not only another French-language movie, but moreover yet another Holocaust movie. All the trends in movie-watching habit seem to be converging.
To be honest, what interested me most about this outing was the theater itself. For the first time ever, I was on my way up to Concord, the capital, to attend a screening at the Red River Theaters, an independent movie house that I had seen featured on television a couple months ago when I first arrived in Massachusetts (map).
Unlike many independent houses, most of which are renovated establishments, this one was built entirely new and opened in October 2007. I had been waiting months for just the right opportunity to head up there and check the place out. Un secret had been showing in Boston for a while in December, and I thought I had missed the opportunity to see it, so when it showed up in Concord last week, it seemed like it my cue to head up there.
I left in mid afternoon so that I would get to Concord before sunset. I wanted to see the capitol dome in the bright sunlight. It is the oldest statehouse in continued use in the United States, and it was still open when I got there. I grabbed a brochure at the entrance and gave myself the self-guided tour, getting to kibbitz on a session-in-progress of the state assembly. Visiting statehouses is one of my hobbies, and New Hampshire's had been missing from list until today.
After a couple hours of wandering around the quaint but tiny little capital city in the bitter cold, I scooted over to the Red River, which is embedded inside a postmodern concrete plaza, enmeshed with a modern parking garage. From the entrance, one goes down a ramp into the ticketing area, which has cafe-style seating as well. The ticket for Un secret was only five bucks, and it came printed out in a concert-style format, as if I were going to see Coldplay. It will make a unique addition to my collection.
The downside, as the ticket attendant informed me, was that the movie was not showing in either of the two main auditoriums, but in the screening room. When I went inside, I learned that it meant a small room with four semi-arcs of straight-back chairs facing a DVD projector screen. "All this way to see a DVD," I muttered. "No wonder it was only five bucks."
Somewhat disappointed, I took a seat in the back row, but then had to move several times as people sat in front of me. It was simply impossible to see much of the screen with anyone in front of me, and for a movie with subtitles, this was unacceptable.
The projector apparatus meant the quality of the picture was a little washed out, and I think the aspect ratio was not quite correct. But the sound from the speakers was very good. I got used to everything after about fifteen minutes.
The movie stood up very well against the other Holocaust-themed movies I've seen recently, perhaps because it did not make the Holocaust the central theme of the movie. Rather it used the Holocaust as a context on which a more basic human-themed story takes place, specifically a love triangle in the middle of a destructive war.
I couldn't help notice how much story-technique overlap there was between this movie and the other Holocaust movies I've seen realized. I found myself getting deja vu on several instances, and not just when I saw the canonical shot of the piles of shoes at the concentration camp (a mandatory inclusion).
The story jumps around in time, ranging from 1955 to 1985, then back to 1936 and 1942, and so on. This reminded me a lot of The Reader. Moreover, the ending sequence with a father and his daughter is almost exactly the same as The Reader. The scenes of the Jewish refugees cutting down trees in the forest reminded me of the Defiance, which I haven't yet seen. The young boy protagonist has to learn the truth about the death camps in a way that is reminiscent of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas But most startling was the fact that young boy protagonist imagines he sees a ghostly presence of another boy, one who turns out to have been killed in the camps. This reminded me a lot of The Unborn.
It seems to be evidence for the thesis that narrative technique goes through phases, and that at any given time, one will find a lot of commonality in the imagery and plot devices between movies that share similar themes.
The movie zipped along fairly fast and did not tax my subtitle-reading skills, as did Un conte de Noel. One of my favorite parts of the film was that amongst the French, there was lots of spoken Yiddish, which is rarely heard in any movie, and (amazingly) was not heard at all in any of the other Holocaust movies I've seen recently.
To my relief, the straight-back chairs were comfortable enough to sit in for an hour and half. Like Un conte de Noel, Un secret had a strong supporting role by Mathieu Almaric, who was the bad-guy in the latest James Bond flick.
After the final credits, I slipped down the side hallway and snuck into the main auditoriums, where Slumdog Millionaire and Doubt were showing. I lingered for a few moments in each, just to get a feeling of the viewing experience. They were steep stadium-style, with the entrances at the top of the auditorium and the stairs going down toward the screen. All in all, a very nice configuration. My friend RS, who is an new urbanist architect, would have been pleased at it all.
I wished I had gotten a chance to enjoy these auditoriums. Maybe on my next trip to Concord. Parking the nearby garage turned out to be free in the evening. Magnifique!
It was not only another French-language movie, but moreover yet another Holocaust movie. All the trends in movie-watching habit seem to be converging.
To be honest, what interested me most about this outing was the theater itself. For the first time ever, I was on my way up to Concord, the capital, to attend a screening at the Red River Theaters, an independent movie house that I had seen featured on television a couple months ago when I first arrived in Massachusetts (map).
Unlike many independent houses, most of which are renovated establishments, this one was built entirely new and opened in October 2007. I had been waiting months for just the right opportunity to head up there and check the place out. Un secret had been showing in Boston for a while in December, and I thought I had missed the opportunity to see it, so when it showed up in Concord last week, it seemed like it my cue to head up there.
I left in mid afternoon so that I would get to Concord before sunset. I wanted to see the capitol dome in the bright sunlight. It is the oldest statehouse in continued use in the United States, and it was still open when I got there. I grabbed a brochure at the entrance and gave myself the self-guided tour, getting to kibbitz on a session-in-progress of the state assembly. Visiting statehouses is one of my hobbies, and New Hampshire's had been missing from list until today.
After a couple hours of wandering around the quaint but tiny little capital city in the bitter cold, I scooted over to the Red River, which is embedded inside a postmodern concrete plaza, enmeshed with a modern parking garage. From the entrance, one goes down a ramp into the ticketing area, which has cafe-style seating as well. The ticket for Un secret was only five bucks, and it came printed out in a concert-style format, as if I were going to see Coldplay. It will make a unique addition to my collection.
The downside, as the ticket attendant informed me, was that the movie was not showing in either of the two main auditoriums, but in the screening room. When I went inside, I learned that it meant a small room with four semi-arcs of straight-back chairs facing a DVD projector screen. "All this way to see a DVD," I muttered. "No wonder it was only five bucks."
Somewhat disappointed, I took a seat in the back row, but then had to move several times as people sat in front of me. It was simply impossible to see much of the screen with anyone in front of me, and for a movie with subtitles, this was unacceptable.
The projector apparatus meant the quality of the picture was a little washed out, and I think the aspect ratio was not quite correct. But the sound from the speakers was very good. I got used to everything after about fifteen minutes.
The movie stood up very well against the other Holocaust-themed movies I've seen recently, perhaps because it did not make the Holocaust the central theme of the movie. Rather it used the Holocaust as a context on which a more basic human-themed story takes place, specifically a love triangle in the middle of a destructive war.
I couldn't help notice how much story-technique overlap there was between this movie and the other Holocaust movies I've seen realized. I found myself getting deja vu on several instances, and not just when I saw the canonical shot of the piles of shoes at the concentration camp (a mandatory inclusion).
The story jumps around in time, ranging from 1955 to 1985, then back to 1936 and 1942, and so on. This reminded me a lot of The Reader. Moreover, the ending sequence with a father and his daughter is almost exactly the same as The Reader. The scenes of the Jewish refugees cutting down trees in the forest reminded me of the Defiance, which I haven't yet seen. The young boy protagonist has to learn the truth about the death camps in a way that is reminiscent of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas But most startling was the fact that young boy protagonist imagines he sees a ghostly presence of another boy, one who turns out to have been killed in the camps. This reminded me a lot of The Unborn.
It seems to be evidence for the thesis that narrative technique goes through phases, and that at any given time, one will find a lot of commonality in the imagery and plot devices between movies that share similar themes.
The movie zipped along fairly fast and did not tax my subtitle-reading skills, as did Un conte de Noel. One of my favorite parts of the film was that amongst the French, there was lots of spoken Yiddish, which is rarely heard in any movie, and (amazingly) was not heard at all in any of the other Holocaust movies I've seen recently.
To my relief, the straight-back chairs were comfortable enough to sit in for an hour and half. Like Un conte de Noel, Un secret had a strong supporting role by Mathieu Almaric, who was the bad-guy in the latest James Bond flick.
After the final credits, I slipped down the side hallway and snuck into the main auditoriums, where Slumdog Millionaire and Doubt were showing. I lingered for a few moments in each, just to get a feeling of the viewing experience. They were steep stadium-style, with the entrances at the top of the auditorium and the stairs going down toward the screen. All in all, a very nice configuration. My friend RS, who is an new urbanist architect, would have been pleased at it all.
I wished I had gotten a chance to enjoy these auditoriums. Maybe on my next trip to Concord. Parking the nearby garage turned out to be free in the evening. Magnifique!
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel)
After The Unborn, I drove a half mile north across the New Hampshire line, where I spent a couple hours at the Barnes and Noble taking notes from a book about the JFK assassination. As I did so, I realized that it was the very last evening of the Bush presidency.
Afterward I drove westward through the dark to Wilton, back to the Town Cinema there that I've come to enjoy so much. This time I didn't have time to eat at the Greek diner on Main Street, but unlike last time, the cinema had popcorn, which was nice and cheap, albeit a little over-buttered.
It was my second visit to Wilton in a week to see a French movie. There were only five other people in the audience---all older women---to see the Monday evening showing of Un conte de Noel.
The movie is about a dysfunctional family in Roubaix in northern France. The mother (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with a fatal cancer for which she needs a bone marrow transplant. She shows no symptoms yet and seems not to care about her fate. We learn that her odds of surviving Graft-Versus-Host disease are less than 50-50.
Will she find a compatible and willing donor from among her family? Can her children get along with each other in a civil manner, as they gather for Christmas at the family house? Will the estranged siblings even talk to each other?
I had known nothing about the film before I got to Wilton, so I had expected it to be about, well, Christmas. But it reminded me more of a darker version of The Royal Tennenbaums, a comment I saw echoed on a blog after I saw the movie.
The movie has a scatter-shot method of storytelling that is at times confusing. There is lots of dialogue, and thus many subtitles, and at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it fully taxed my concentration to follow it all, especially as the second movie of the day.
This is not the heartwarming Christmas movie you might be expecting. If anything, it's an anti-Christmas movie. In fact, the dominant theme is one of inversion, reflected by the repetition of references to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie, the musical composition, and the play).
We have a mother who literally feels no love for her son, yet he must give his bone marrow to save her. Love is thwarted at every turn. Jesus, the little children are told, never existed. The Christianity of the movie is vacant and dead.
By the end of the movie, I couldn't help thinking that this was essentially the same movie as Nothing Like the Holidays, which is also about a dysfunctional family celebrating (anti-)Christmas in vacant fashion. One of the parallels is the presence of a Jewish girlfriend of one of the family sons. The contrast between her vibrant Judaism and the family's empty Christianity is highlighted. Rather than spend any more time there, she leaves on Christmas eve to go spend a "non-holiday" with her own family.
It was also the third movie in a year (along with No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight) to employ a coin-flip as a metaphor for the randomness of fate, and of life and death.
By the end, it had just wore me out, and yet I was not happy when it was over, since it left so many of the emotional threads of the movie unresolved.
Fortunately the Wilton Town Cinema had posted the synopsis of the movie on a bulletin board outside in the lobby. I usually don't read those, but in this case I was dazed and just plain needed a little more context to wrap things up. I suppose it's a weakness. All these Hollywood movies have enfeebled me.
Afterward I drove westward through the dark to Wilton, back to the Town Cinema there that I've come to enjoy so much. This time I didn't have time to eat at the Greek diner on Main Street, but unlike last time, the cinema had popcorn, which was nice and cheap, albeit a little over-buttered.
It was my second visit to Wilton in a week to see a French movie. There were only five other people in the audience---all older women---to see the Monday evening showing of Un conte de Noel.
The movie is about a dysfunctional family in Roubaix in northern France. The mother (Catherine Deneuve) has been diagnosed with a fatal cancer for which she needs a bone marrow transplant. She shows no symptoms yet and seems not to care about her fate. We learn that her odds of surviving Graft-Versus-Host disease are less than 50-50.
Will she find a compatible and willing donor from among her family? Can her children get along with each other in a civil manner, as they gather for Christmas at the family house? Will the estranged siblings even talk to each other?
I had known nothing about the film before I got to Wilton, so I had expected it to be about, well, Christmas. But it reminded me more of a darker version of The Royal Tennenbaums, a comment I saw echoed on a blog after I saw the movie.
The movie has a scatter-shot method of storytelling that is at times confusing. There is lots of dialogue, and thus many subtitles, and at 2 hours and 37 minutes, it fully taxed my concentration to follow it all, especially as the second movie of the day.
This is not the heartwarming Christmas movie you might be expecting. If anything, it's an anti-Christmas movie. In fact, the dominant theme is one of inversion, reflected by the repetition of references to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (the movie, the musical composition, and the play).
We have a mother who literally feels no love for her son, yet he must give his bone marrow to save her. Love is thwarted at every turn. Jesus, the little children are told, never existed. The Christianity of the movie is vacant and dead.
By the end of the movie, I couldn't help thinking that this was essentially the same movie as Nothing Like the Holidays, which is also about a dysfunctional family celebrating (anti-)Christmas in vacant fashion. One of the parallels is the presence of a Jewish girlfriend of one of the family sons. The contrast between her vibrant Judaism and the family's empty Christianity is highlighted. Rather than spend any more time there, she leaves on Christmas eve to go spend a "non-holiday" with her own family.
It was also the third movie in a year (along with No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight) to employ a coin-flip as a metaphor for the randomness of fate, and of life and death.
By the end, it had just wore me out, and yet I was not happy when it was over, since it left so many of the emotional threads of the movie unresolved.
Fortunately the Wilton Town Cinema had posted the synopsis of the movie on a bulletin board outside in the lobby. I usually don't read those, but in this case I was dazed and just plain needed a little more context to wrap things up. I suppose it's a weakness. All these Hollywood movies have enfeebled me.
The Unborn
The snow just kept falling and falling on Sunday. On Monday, I couldn't even move the car and spent the early afternoon waiting for the snowplow to arrive. In rural Massachusetts, everyone gets their driveways plowed. The hardware stores are always stocked with the little reflector poles that people use to mark the driveway path in deep snow.
Fortunately the snowplow arrived in time for me to get on the road for the 2:50 showing of The Unborn at Tyngsboro. Before I left, I spent a frustrating hour trying to print out my new insurance card from the Internet. What a nightmare. A horror movie seemed like just the ticket, especially after the long two-month hiatus of the holidays, when no horror movies are released. January is a great horror month.
The Unborn is a Michael Bay production, so I knew not to expect anything too intellectually challenging. Like I said, I was actually in the mood for this kind of throw-away entertainment.
In the opening shots, we are high above the winter cityscape of Chicago. Eventually we float down to a young woman jogging all by herself in snowy park by the lake. This frames the base-layer source context of the horror as the existential isolation of modern urban life.
Later we are introduced the additional layers of source context of the horror: the young woman is left on her own by her father (parental neglect). Moreover she is sexually active without being married (premarital sexuality). This last layer actually turns out to be the most potent, since the surface-level horror arises from her nightmares concerning an unborn child. In social narrative terms, the horror thus arises from sexuality without reproduction---the stoppage of the flow of life and the denial of childbearing by the sexually active woman. This will culminate the final "gotcha" horror twist at the end of the movie.
The story of the movie is mostly a Jewish version of The Exorcist, down to some outright ripping off the exorcism scenes involving Max Von Sydow, except in this case it is Gary Oldman as rabbi, chanting away the devil in his presence.
Halfway through the movie, I realized I had miscounted. I had thought there were three Holocaust movies out this season, but it turns out there were four, since the historical source of the horror in the story is an event that occurred among the prisoners at Auschwitz.
The interesting twist was that the horror-creation incident occurs within the Jewish prisoners at the camp, and the supernatural influence is an evil demon from Jewish folklore who is attempting to reborn through a Jewish woman. The demon has the power to possess Christians as well.
It was quite an interesting movie to come out in the context of the Israeli-Gaza War. As it happens, Israel has a more complex history than many people realize. Just look up The Transfer Agreement, or read this article for background information that you will not hear in the U.S. media, one that sheds light on how evil can propagate. There is a reason why things have turned out the way they did.
All this from a Michael Bay movie!
Fortunately the snowplow arrived in time for me to get on the road for the 2:50 showing of The Unborn at Tyngsboro. Before I left, I spent a frustrating hour trying to print out my new insurance card from the Internet. What a nightmare. A horror movie seemed like just the ticket, especially after the long two-month hiatus of the holidays, when no horror movies are released. January is a great horror month.
The Unborn is a Michael Bay production, so I knew not to expect anything too intellectually challenging. Like I said, I was actually in the mood for this kind of throw-away entertainment.
In the opening shots, we are high above the winter cityscape of Chicago. Eventually we float down to a young woman jogging all by herself in snowy park by the lake. This frames the base-layer source context of the horror as the existential isolation of modern urban life.
Later we are introduced the additional layers of source context of the horror: the young woman is left on her own by her father (parental neglect). Moreover she is sexually active without being married (premarital sexuality). This last layer actually turns out to be the most potent, since the surface-level horror arises from her nightmares concerning an unborn child. In social narrative terms, the horror thus arises from sexuality without reproduction---the stoppage of the flow of life and the denial of childbearing by the sexually active woman. This will culminate the final "gotcha" horror twist at the end of the movie.
The story of the movie is mostly a Jewish version of The Exorcist, down to some outright ripping off the exorcism scenes involving Max Von Sydow, except in this case it is Gary Oldman as rabbi, chanting away the devil in his presence.
Halfway through the movie, I realized I had miscounted. I had thought there were three Holocaust movies out this season, but it turns out there were four, since the historical source of the horror in the story is an event that occurred among the prisoners at Auschwitz.
The interesting twist was that the horror-creation incident occurs within the Jewish prisoners at the camp, and the supernatural influence is an evil demon from Jewish folklore who is attempting to reborn through a Jewish woman. The demon has the power to possess Christians as well.
It was quite an interesting movie to come out in the context of the Israeli-Gaza War. As it happens, Israel has a more complex history than many people realize. Just look up The Transfer Agreement, or read this article for background information that you will not hear in the U.S. media, one that sheds light on how evil can propagate. There is a reason why things have turned out the way they did.
All this from a Michael Bay movie!
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Last Chance Harvey
Yet another snowstorm came through New England on Saturday night. One would think it would be normal for Massachusetts to get this much powder, but there have already been so many snow days this winter that my sisters' son may have to go to school on Saturdays to make up the lost days.
My big plans for an early pre-noon movie were seemingly spoiled, as I didn't want to go out in the stuff while it was still coming down hard. But when I went inside from the guest quarters for coffee, my sister informed me that their real estate agent had called, and that a couple from Westford was coming over in two hours for a showing of the house. It was a good sign in this market. My sister and her husband had signed the papers putting their property on the market only the day before.
But this news had the effect of sending everyone out in the snowstorm, to empty the house for the showing. After quickly tidying up my quarters and stowing away the futon back into sofa-form, I hopped in the car and headed off to Lowell, intending to catch a showing of whatever was playing when I arrived.
The back roads were treacherous, and my car slid sideways on the ice three times even before I got to the Interstate. I wondered what kind of sadist sends people out into a storm to look at a house on a day like this.
On the freeway, my stress level soared as I cursed the idiots who insisted on tailgating me even as we all tried to creep along in the one available lane. It was quite a relief to finally pull into the parking lot of the Showcase Cinemas, right in time to buy a ticket for Last Chance Harvey.
The auditorium was broiling hot---just the opposite of Leominster, where the heat is forever broken. That's what you get for the extra two bucks in Lowell.
The first scene of the movie introduces Dustin Hoffman's character, Harvey, who turns out to be a divorced commercial musician who writes jingles for television commercials. In the first shot, his hands are at the keyboard of a piano while he is attempting to play a jazz melody. But he keeps stumbling over a certain passage. Then he relaxes and changes his tune, literally, to a lighter piece, one that turns out to be one of his own compositions.
In story terms, this first scene must set up the life journey of the character, and the voyage he will undertake in the narrative. It turns out he once wanted to be a jazz pianist. The alteration from one melody to another is symbolic of his meeting Emma Thompson's character, Kate, which has not yet happened. She will interrupt his life and cause him to begin playing his own joyful tune, literally, at a later point in the story.
The first thirty minutes of the film follow a type of storytelling in which we go back and forth between the two romantic principals before they have met, following them as they draw closer together, propelled by fate to meet other.
Each glimpse of them is done through classical anti-symmetry---that is, whatever action one character is doing, the other character must somehow be doing an analogous but somehow opposite action. This works both for the romantic contrast, and also for creating a dynamic story.
For example, we meet Harvey while he is sitting alone in a studio. Another person comes into the studio and talks to him. On the other hand we meet Kate while she is walking outside, and talking to other people. She enters a house and meets another person. She goes upstairs in a house. He goes down the ramp of a parking garage to his car.
They travel---she goes by train, while he goes by plane. She sits alone, silently looking out a window at the scenery. He is a middle seat on the plane, attempting unsuccessfully to chat up the woman next to him. She keeps getting phone calls from her mother. He keeps trying make phone calls to his business associate.
The antisymmetry of the characters must continue in this fashion until eventually the two romantic leads become aligned, both physically and emotionally. In Last Chance Harvey, this alignment does not occur when they first meet, an incident which comes and goes as part of the antisymmetric progression, seemingly just a blip within both of their lives.
One could call this missed opportunity "failed serendipidity," an apparent thwarting of fate that arose as a reaction to Harvey's failure with the woman on the plane. For the romantic tension to succeed, there must be as many obstacles as possible to the two characters getting together.
Both have troubled relationships they must deal with. For Kate, it is her relationship with her mother. For Harvey, it is his relationship with his daughter, who is getting married. He has not been a part of her life for a long time, and he learns that she wants her step-father (James Brolin) to give her away at the wedding.
The eventual real encounter of the characters only partially resolves the antisymmetry, indicated by their body positions at the table while they are eating lunch. Only later, when they are walking together side-by-side do they become symmetric, and their energies begin flowing together.
At this particular moment, they are walking along the Thames in London with the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral fuzzy in the background. It is an old movie trick, the introduction of a church to indicate that a romantic union has blessing of the Almighty.
The characters then walk through an open air book market, where they talk about books and stories in general. Thus the movie enters the rarefied postmodern zone of "narrative about narrative." They spend the scene weaving a common story that includes them both, instigated by the man (he must be the active one, in classical terms).
After their story-weaving, we see them beside the same river railing as before, with Saint Paul's in the background once again, but much clearer than the first time. The verdict of the Almighty concerning their union is obvious.
The story was very well crafted in this way for the first hour of the movie. I was very impressed with the screenplay and the direction, both by Joel Hopkins.
But after an hour, the story did such a good job of resolving the antisymmetric tension to bring the characters together, that it boxed itself in. The quality of the narrative just disintegrated into cliche. There was nowhere to go, so instead we had to sit through a phony plot twist to create another round of tension that keeps the characters apart, just so they can come back together for the final resolution.
It was a nice try, all in all, but ultimately the movie just couldn't figure out a way to bring everything together in a way that lived up to the first hour. The resolution felt forced and contrived. At only 92 minutes, the movie felt like it just ended a little too soon, as if it ran out of steam.
Hoffman and Thompson both received Golden Globe nominations for this. Although they did a fine job, and are both superb actors, I really couldn't see anything spectacular about their performances, as the roles seemed rather undemanding of their talents. The superior aspects of the movie were mostly on the screenplay level, as were its deficiencies.
The story touched only lightly on the obvious theme of inter-generational love, which I wrote about in my write-up of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It didn't seem like a very important part of this story, but they had to throw a pro forma mention of it in.
It wasn't the worst way to spend a snowy afternoon. The roads were better coming home, but I still kept thinking, "If I get killed because of this, those people from Westford better damn well make a good offer on the house."
My big plans for an early pre-noon movie were seemingly spoiled, as I didn't want to go out in the stuff while it was still coming down hard. But when I went inside from the guest quarters for coffee, my sister informed me that their real estate agent had called, and that a couple from Westford was coming over in two hours for a showing of the house. It was a good sign in this market. My sister and her husband had signed the papers putting their property on the market only the day before.
But this news had the effect of sending everyone out in the snowstorm, to empty the house for the showing. After quickly tidying up my quarters and stowing away the futon back into sofa-form, I hopped in the car and headed off to Lowell, intending to catch a showing of whatever was playing when I arrived.
The back roads were treacherous, and my car slid sideways on the ice three times even before I got to the Interstate. I wondered what kind of sadist sends people out into a storm to look at a house on a day like this.
On the freeway, my stress level soared as I cursed the idiots who insisted on tailgating me even as we all tried to creep along in the one available lane. It was quite a relief to finally pull into the parking lot of the Showcase Cinemas, right in time to buy a ticket for Last Chance Harvey.
The auditorium was broiling hot---just the opposite of Leominster, where the heat is forever broken. That's what you get for the extra two bucks in Lowell.
The first scene of the movie introduces Dustin Hoffman's character, Harvey, who turns out to be a divorced commercial musician who writes jingles for television commercials. In the first shot, his hands are at the keyboard of a piano while he is attempting to play a jazz melody. But he keeps stumbling over a certain passage. Then he relaxes and changes his tune, literally, to a lighter piece, one that turns out to be one of his own compositions.
In story terms, this first scene must set up the life journey of the character, and the voyage he will undertake in the narrative. It turns out he once wanted to be a jazz pianist. The alteration from one melody to another is symbolic of his meeting Emma Thompson's character, Kate, which has not yet happened. She will interrupt his life and cause him to begin playing his own joyful tune, literally, at a later point in the story.
The first thirty minutes of the film follow a type of storytelling in which we go back and forth between the two romantic principals before they have met, following them as they draw closer together, propelled by fate to meet other.
Each glimpse of them is done through classical anti-symmetry---that is, whatever action one character is doing, the other character must somehow be doing an analogous but somehow opposite action. This works both for the romantic contrast, and also for creating a dynamic story.
For example, we meet Harvey while he is sitting alone in a studio. Another person comes into the studio and talks to him. On the other hand we meet Kate while she is walking outside, and talking to other people. She enters a house and meets another person. She goes upstairs in a house. He goes down the ramp of a parking garage to his car.
They travel---she goes by train, while he goes by plane. She sits alone, silently looking out a window at the scenery. He is a middle seat on the plane, attempting unsuccessfully to chat up the woman next to him. She keeps getting phone calls from her mother. He keeps trying make phone calls to his business associate.
The antisymmetry of the characters must continue in this fashion until eventually the two romantic leads become aligned, both physically and emotionally. In Last Chance Harvey, this alignment does not occur when they first meet, an incident which comes and goes as part of the antisymmetric progression, seemingly just a blip within both of their lives.
One could call this missed opportunity "failed serendipidity," an apparent thwarting of fate that arose as a reaction to Harvey's failure with the woman on the plane. For the romantic tension to succeed, there must be as many obstacles as possible to the two characters getting together.
Both have troubled relationships they must deal with. For Kate, it is her relationship with her mother. For Harvey, it is his relationship with his daughter, who is getting married. He has not been a part of her life for a long time, and he learns that she wants her step-father (James Brolin) to give her away at the wedding.
The eventual real encounter of the characters only partially resolves the antisymmetry, indicated by their body positions at the table while they are eating lunch. Only later, when they are walking together side-by-side do they become symmetric, and their energies begin flowing together.
At this particular moment, they are walking along the Thames in London with the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral fuzzy in the background. It is an old movie trick, the introduction of a church to indicate that a romantic union has blessing of the Almighty.
The characters then walk through an open air book market, where they talk about books and stories in general. Thus the movie enters the rarefied postmodern zone of "narrative about narrative." They spend the scene weaving a common story that includes them both, instigated by the man (he must be the active one, in classical terms).
After their story-weaving, we see them beside the same river railing as before, with Saint Paul's in the background once again, but much clearer than the first time. The verdict of the Almighty concerning their union is obvious.
The story was very well crafted in this way for the first hour of the movie. I was very impressed with the screenplay and the direction, both by Joel Hopkins.
But after an hour, the story did such a good job of resolving the antisymmetric tension to bring the characters together, that it boxed itself in. The quality of the narrative just disintegrated into cliche. There was nowhere to go, so instead we had to sit through a phony plot twist to create another round of tension that keeps the characters apart, just so they can come back together for the final resolution.
It was a nice try, all in all, but ultimately the movie just couldn't figure out a way to bring everything together in a way that lived up to the first hour. The resolution felt forced and contrived. At only 92 minutes, the movie felt like it just ended a little too soon, as if it ran out of steam.
Hoffman and Thompson both received Golden Globe nominations for this. Although they did a fine job, and are both superb actors, I really couldn't see anything spectacular about their performances, as the roles seemed rather undemanding of their talents. The superior aspects of the movie were mostly on the screenplay level, as were its deficiencies.
The story touched only lightly on the obvious theme of inter-generational love, which I wrote about in my write-up of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It didn't seem like a very important part of this story, but they had to throw a pro forma mention of it in.
It wasn't the worst way to spend a snowy afternoon. The roads were better coming home, but I still kept thinking, "If I get killed because of this, those people from Westford better damn well make a good offer on the house."
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Bride Wars
And thus begins 2009...
I haven't yet finished with the 2008 movies---not only the ones I missed during their run, but the ones that are still in theaters. There are a few left of the latter type to cross off my list, including a few that premiered in December but didn't go into wide release until after the New Year (Defiance and Last Chance Harvey). This a trick that allows them to compete for the 2008 awards while surfing the buzz of their release at the last possible moment. Sort of cheating, if you ask me.
Today, however, I wasn't in the mood for either of those. Instead I felt like crossing off my very first genuine Copyright 2009 movie. The trickle of '09 movies started last week, and accelerated with five new releases this week. Today I figured I better get moving, so I drove over to Leominster today---on a very chilly afternoon---with an open mind about which film I would see.
The theater hadn't yet opened their box office, and I had to stand in line with twenty other people for about ten minutes in the cold. I made a note never to come early to the first weekend showing at Leominster anymore. I swear they were toying with us, the way they kept almost pantomiming opening the cash drawer on several occasions.
By the time I got to the front, I had settled on Bride Wars. It came out last week and got horrible reviews, so I figured it might be gone soon. Besides it seemed to be the kind of lightweight movie that would be good for an early Saturday afternoon.
Leominster had already stuck it in their tiniest of auditoriums, which nevertheless filled up quite well. For a while I thought I would be the only adult male in attendance, but several couples wandered in during the previews.
It seems nobody likes this movie, even Anne Hathaway, who refused to do talk show appearances about it, for fear that it might put people off from her performance in Rachel Getting Married in the lead-up to the Oscar nominations.
Nobody liked it...except, well, yours truly.
In the first scene of the movie, we meet the two principals (Hathaway and Kate Hudson) as young girls. They are in the attic of one of their houses, dressed as bride and groom and fantasizing about their future weddings. One of the girls (the brunette future Hathaway) is dressed as the groom, whereas the other (the blonde future Hudson) is the bride.
For the story to be fully successful, this initial portrayal of them must be significant as a foreshadowing of what will happen later. Having noticed this from the trailer, I spent much of the movie calculating how this initial shot prefigures what will happen later in the story.
In fact this set-up is a nice framing of how the story indeed develops, both on a thematic level, and on narrative level during the action of the climax.
Thematically, Hathaway's character starts off as meek and submissive. She must learn the "masculine" side of personality---to be assertive and go after the things she really wants. Hudson's character starts off as hyper-assertive. She must learn to connect with the feminine softer side of her personality.
If you've seen the trailer, you know that the story conflict arises when both women, who grow up as best friends, wind up booking their weddings (by accident) on the same date and at the same time at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Neither will back down, and their friendship turns to rancor and all-out warfare.
Since this is a light-hearted comedy, and not a black comedy, for the movie to work, the story must be resolved and the friends must get back together. How will they be able to do this? I thought the original concept of the movie was well handled in this regard, through a skillful application of believable levels of misapprehension.
As far as the weddings, we know that eventually both women will wind up married somehow. But as far as the specific original date, there are obviously three possible resolutions: both will get married, only one will get married, or neither will get married. The particular resolution of the movie turns out to be quite in line with the original shot of them as young girls. Is that too much of a spoiler?
There is a lot of good old fashioned plot-stitching in the movie that I liked, down to the fact that Anne Hathaway picks up the wrong Chinese fortune cookie at a fateful moment. The script was well-crafted on a subtle level.
The most postmodern aspect of the movie was its complete denial of the permanence of marriage. The movie seemed to embrace the idea that whereas husbands come and go, your girlfriends are for life.
There is nothing particularly deep about this movie. It was perfect for a January afternoon. I've heard this movie described as anti-feminist. I guess everyone has to have a complaint.
I haven't yet finished with the 2008 movies---not only the ones I missed during their run, but the ones that are still in theaters. There are a few left of the latter type to cross off my list, including a few that premiered in December but didn't go into wide release until after the New Year (Defiance and Last Chance Harvey). This a trick that allows them to compete for the 2008 awards while surfing the buzz of their release at the last possible moment. Sort of cheating, if you ask me.
Today, however, I wasn't in the mood for either of those. Instead I felt like crossing off my very first genuine Copyright 2009 movie. The trickle of '09 movies started last week, and accelerated with five new releases this week. Today I figured I better get moving, so I drove over to Leominster today---on a very chilly afternoon---with an open mind about which film I would see.
The theater hadn't yet opened their box office, and I had to stand in line with twenty other people for about ten minutes in the cold. I made a note never to come early to the first weekend showing at Leominster anymore. I swear they were toying with us, the way they kept almost pantomiming opening the cash drawer on several occasions.
By the time I got to the front, I had settled on Bride Wars. It came out last week and got horrible reviews, so I figured it might be gone soon. Besides it seemed to be the kind of lightweight movie that would be good for an early Saturday afternoon.
Leominster had already stuck it in their tiniest of auditoriums, which nevertheless filled up quite well. For a while I thought I would be the only adult male in attendance, but several couples wandered in during the previews.
It seems nobody likes this movie, even Anne Hathaway, who refused to do talk show appearances about it, for fear that it might put people off from her performance in Rachel Getting Married in the lead-up to the Oscar nominations.
Nobody liked it...except, well, yours truly.
In the first scene of the movie, we meet the two principals (Hathaway and Kate Hudson) as young girls. They are in the attic of one of their houses, dressed as bride and groom and fantasizing about their future weddings. One of the girls (the brunette future Hathaway) is dressed as the groom, whereas the other (the blonde future Hudson) is the bride.
For the story to be fully successful, this initial portrayal of them must be significant as a foreshadowing of what will happen later. Having noticed this from the trailer, I spent much of the movie calculating how this initial shot prefigures what will happen later in the story.
In fact this set-up is a nice framing of how the story indeed develops, both on a thematic level, and on narrative level during the action of the climax.
Thematically, Hathaway's character starts off as meek and submissive. She must learn the "masculine" side of personality---to be assertive and go after the things she really wants. Hudson's character starts off as hyper-assertive. She must learn to connect with the feminine softer side of her personality.
If you've seen the trailer, you know that the story conflict arises when both women, who grow up as best friends, wind up booking their weddings (by accident) on the same date and at the same time at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Neither will back down, and their friendship turns to rancor and all-out warfare.
Since this is a light-hearted comedy, and not a black comedy, for the movie to work, the story must be resolved and the friends must get back together. How will they be able to do this? I thought the original concept of the movie was well handled in this regard, through a skillful application of believable levels of misapprehension.
As far as the weddings, we know that eventually both women will wind up married somehow. But as far as the specific original date, there are obviously three possible resolutions: both will get married, only one will get married, or neither will get married. The particular resolution of the movie turns out to be quite in line with the original shot of them as young girls. Is that too much of a spoiler?
There is a lot of good old fashioned plot-stitching in the movie that I liked, down to the fact that Anne Hathaway picks up the wrong Chinese fortune cookie at a fateful moment. The script was well-crafted on a subtle level.
The most postmodern aspect of the movie was its complete denial of the permanence of marriage. The movie seemed to embrace the idea that whereas husbands come and go, your girlfriends are for life.
There is nothing particularly deep about this movie. It was perfect for a January afternoon. I've heard this movie described as anti-feminist. I guess everyone has to have a complaint.
I've Loved You So Long (Il ya longtemps que je t'aime)
For my third movie of the day, I drove about thirty miles in the dark back to the tiny town of Wilton, to the town cinema where I've been twice previously. Since I was coming from a different direction this time, I didn't wind up driving along the same spooky road across the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.
This time I was on my way to see I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), a French movie that had come through theaters in November, but was playing for a week in Wilton. Thursday night was the last opportunity to see it.
Being hungry from having just see two other movies, I wanted to get some popcorn in Wilton, but I got there a half hour early and wound up eating a cheeseburger at the same Greek diner across the street. I was glad I did, because it turns out the theater was out of popcorn, because their machine broke. Sometimes things work out.
I wound up sitting in nearly the same seat as last time. I get pretty habit bound like that. Unlike last time, when I was surrounded by teenagers, the audience was mostly older women. The entire row behind me was a church group.
Kristin Scott Thomas was up for a Golden Globe for this role. She speaks French with an English accent, which is explained away in the story. Mostly what she does is look very, very sad.
We learn that she has been released from prison. Slowly we learn the crime---murder---and eventually who the victim was. The essential tension of the movie surrounds the details of the crime. What exactly happened? Why did she do it? We as the audience in the same position of ignorance as the family of the paroled woman. The revelation of the details of the crime are what will drive the plot.
As it happens, we don't learn the details of the crime until the very end of the movie---at the climax of the story. There is virtually no denouement. The movie just ends, leaving us with this revelation as the credits roll.
It is the kind of story that could only have been made in Europe. A Hollywood movie would have had this revelation as Plot Point Two, at about the hour and twenty minute mark. If this movie were remade in the United States, it would need an additional third act that resolved the narrative so as to make the character's journey more dynamic.
This lack of resolution makes the movie more of a character sketch than a cinematic story. We don't really get to see what happens to the main character, only a glimpse inside her soul, a view that is somewhat static in the aftermath of her prison release. The upside of this is that the movie can indulge in a portrait of her extended solitude and loneliness. That her situation is somewhat akin to anyone in modern society makes it universal. Her condition as a released prisoner is the existential condition.
After the movie was over, during the drive home, I tried to come up with a theme that united the three disparate movies I'd seen that day. It occurred to me that the theme was release/escape in various stages. In High School Musical 3, the characters are anticipating their upcoming release from school into the world as adults. In Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the animal characters are in the midst of attempting to escape an island exile back to their home. They make it only part of the way by the end of the film, leaving room for the next installment. In Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, the character is in the aftermath of release, with the physical journey completed.
Playing these kind of mental games is sometimes one of the best parts of seeing lots of films.
This time I was on my way to see I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), a French movie that had come through theaters in November, but was playing for a week in Wilton. Thursday night was the last opportunity to see it.
Being hungry from having just see two other movies, I wanted to get some popcorn in Wilton, but I got there a half hour early and wound up eating a cheeseburger at the same Greek diner across the street. I was glad I did, because it turns out the theater was out of popcorn, because their machine broke. Sometimes things work out.
I wound up sitting in nearly the same seat as last time. I get pretty habit bound like that. Unlike last time, when I was surrounded by teenagers, the audience was mostly older women. The entire row behind me was a church group.
Kristin Scott Thomas was up for a Golden Globe for this role. She speaks French with an English accent, which is explained away in the story. Mostly what she does is look very, very sad.
We learn that she has been released from prison. Slowly we learn the crime---murder---and eventually who the victim was. The essential tension of the movie surrounds the details of the crime. What exactly happened? Why did she do it? We as the audience in the same position of ignorance as the family of the paroled woman. The revelation of the details of the crime are what will drive the plot.
As it happens, we don't learn the details of the crime until the very end of the movie---at the climax of the story. There is virtually no denouement. The movie just ends, leaving us with this revelation as the credits roll.
It is the kind of story that could only have been made in Europe. A Hollywood movie would have had this revelation as Plot Point Two, at about the hour and twenty minute mark. If this movie were remade in the United States, it would need an additional third act that resolved the narrative so as to make the character's journey more dynamic.
This lack of resolution makes the movie more of a character sketch than a cinematic story. We don't really get to see what happens to the main character, only a glimpse inside her soul, a view that is somewhat static in the aftermath of her prison release. The upside of this is that the movie can indulge in a portrait of her extended solitude and loneliness. That her situation is somewhat akin to anyone in modern society makes it universal. Her condition as a released prisoner is the existential condition.
After the movie was over, during the drive home, I tried to come up with a theme that united the three disparate movies I'd seen that day. It occurred to me that the theme was release/escape in various stages. In High School Musical 3, the characters are anticipating their upcoming release from school into the world as adults. In Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the animal characters are in the midst of attempting to escape an island exile back to their home. They make it only part of the way by the end of the film, leaving room for the next installment. In Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, the character is in the aftermath of release, with the physical journey completed.
Playing these kind of mental games is sometimes one of the best parts of seeing lots of films.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
It seemed like a day to clean out the slate of movies that had been on my list for a while. So for my second feature of the day, I headed down I-93 on the north side of Manchester, then up US-3 through Hookset to the Cinemagic complex (map).
Cinemagic is a small New England based chain of theaters. The complex in Hookset was very nice---a huge parking lot frozen on a very cold day in New Hampshire, and, as the marquee blared, an IMAX auditorium. I'm always intrigued by the amenities in these new complexes, and since this was my first visit to this particular chain, I lingered in the lobby to appreciate the cafe-style seating. I particularly liked the innovation of the main concession, which faced two directions, allowing sales to both the lobby and to the auditorium-access corridor on the other side of the ticket collection stand.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was still showing at about half a dozen locations around Boston, but I figured I needed to take care of it today before it got any scarcer. After all the heavy dramas I'd seen lately, it seemed appropriate to relax for an hour and half to watch a cartoon.
I'd seen the original Madagascar, having rented it last August in anticipation of the release of the sequel. I thought the first one was nice, light entertainment with a fun original premise. I expected the sequel would give the same impression.
The plotline was somewhat degraded from the fresh story of the original, relying on sabotage from a false ally, but this kind of thing always happens in sequels.
But something really struck me as odd about the whole thing, in a way I didn't notice about the first movie. I think it hit me about half-way through, at the moment when the animals in the wildlife park in Africa notice that their water hole has run dry.
A drought? We all know that such things happen in Africa. It is part of the brutal conditions of life and death in the wild. But that is not what has occurred. Instead we learn that the water supply to the refuge has been shut off. Uh...right.
All the animals were standing around nice and friendly---a community of lions amidst zebras, giraffes and other prey. It suddenly struck me that there was something extremely un-natural about the whole thing, even for a movie about anthropomorphic talking animals.
"Of course," I said later, ruminating about it. "It's the principle of maximum antireality. In 2008, we have gotten as far away from the underlying reality of the world as possible, where everything we know or learn from the news is the opposite of what it really is."
How could I have been so blind? Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was the perfect movie for the Year of Antireality. It was obvious: the penguins who can't fly but who fly the plane. The higher primate chimpanzees who serve as the menial labor at the behest of the birds. The humans who hunt like savages, led by a rabid Jewish grandmother from New York, while the animals rationally build helicopters. It is a world turned upside-down.
The main exhibit of this topsy-turvy world of the movie is the love story between the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith). The female hippo is being courted by a studly popular male hippo, who is after her for her body. The giraffe is a timid soul who can't express his feelings. But he wins her away from the studly creature of her own species by telling her his timid feelings of love, and by proclaiming how we will wait on her hand and foot, and bring her flowers every day.
Not only is this romance cross-species (how would that work, really?), but the nice guy wins the girl from the bad boy by cranking up his enfeebled niceness until she finally notices how sweet he is.
Like I said, we have reached the Point of Maximum Antireality.
Cinemagic is a small New England based chain of theaters. The complex in Hookset was very nice---a huge parking lot frozen on a very cold day in New Hampshire, and, as the marquee blared, an IMAX auditorium. I'm always intrigued by the amenities in these new complexes, and since this was my first visit to this particular chain, I lingered in the lobby to appreciate the cafe-style seating. I particularly liked the innovation of the main concession, which faced two directions, allowing sales to both the lobby and to the auditorium-access corridor on the other side of the ticket collection stand.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was still showing at about half a dozen locations around Boston, but I figured I needed to take care of it today before it got any scarcer. After all the heavy dramas I'd seen lately, it seemed appropriate to relax for an hour and half to watch a cartoon.
I'd seen the original Madagascar, having rented it last August in anticipation of the release of the sequel. I thought the first one was nice, light entertainment with a fun original premise. I expected the sequel would give the same impression.
The plotline was somewhat degraded from the fresh story of the original, relying on sabotage from a false ally, but this kind of thing always happens in sequels.
But something really struck me as odd about the whole thing, in a way I didn't notice about the first movie. I think it hit me about half-way through, at the moment when the animals in the wildlife park in Africa notice that their water hole has run dry.
A drought? We all know that such things happen in Africa. It is part of the brutal conditions of life and death in the wild. But that is not what has occurred. Instead we learn that the water supply to the refuge has been shut off. Uh...right.
All the animals were standing around nice and friendly---a community of lions amidst zebras, giraffes and other prey. It suddenly struck me that there was something extremely un-natural about the whole thing, even for a movie about anthropomorphic talking animals.
"Of course," I said later, ruminating about it. "It's the principle of maximum antireality. In 2008, we have gotten as far away from the underlying reality of the world as possible, where everything we know or learn from the news is the opposite of what it really is."
How could I have been so blind? Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was the perfect movie for the Year of Antireality. It was obvious: the penguins who can't fly but who fly the plane. The higher primate chimpanzees who serve as the menial labor at the behest of the birds. The humans who hunt like savages, led by a rabid Jewish grandmother from New York, while the animals rationally build helicopters. It is a world turned upside-down.
The main exhibit of this topsy-turvy world of the movie is the love story between the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and the hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith). The female hippo is being courted by a studly popular male hippo, who is after her for her body. The giraffe is a timid soul who can't express his feelings. But he wins her away from the studly creature of her own species by telling her his timid feelings of love, and by proclaiming how we will wait on her hand and foot, and bring her flowers every day.
Not only is this romance cross-species (how would that work, really?), but the nice guy wins the girl from the bad boy by cranking up his enfeebled niceness until she finally notices how sweet he is.
Like I said, we have reached the Point of Maximum Antireality.
Friday, January 16, 2009
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
In the last couple days, I've read several articles about how the younger generation is running smack into their first recession, a phenomenon they have never experienced in their lives. There's a bit of schaudenfreude in these pieces, but I can't help feeling sorry for the youngsters. They didn't make this mess of a world into which they have been thrust.
They were fed all the phony fruits of the consumer cornucopialand, and told they could "be anything." It's all the potential, baby. Just dream, and you can do it. The world is waiting for you to spread your wings.
I thought about these sad things while watching High School Musical 3: Senior Year at the discount cinema just north of Manchester. It was the first movie of three I saw on Thursday on a one-day viewing sprint.
I should have seen this movie two months ago. On election eve, I had the utterly perfect opportunity to see it in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the real location of Our Town (those who know me will understand why). But I decided instead that I just had to get home for the first wave of election returns. I should have known: always take the obvious opportunity. Impatience defeats me time and again. Because I didn't grab that chance, the movie stayed on my "to see" list for weeks and weeks, until it finally dwindled down to a single discount theater in New Hampshire.
A bit of disclosure: I saw the first one of this series on Netflix, but missed the second installment (so far). So I'll offer abbreviated commentary.
To wit, I loved the musical numbers, but I'm a fan of that kind of stuff. The best number in the first movie was the one on the basketball court, and this movie has two such numbers. The most spectacular ones in this installment, however, were "fantasy" numbers in which we depart from the "reality" of the high school itself, and then weave back into it. Busby Berkeley might not have been on the edge of his seat, but he would have been at least tapping his toe.
At times there was even a beautiful postmodern twist of having the musical numbers begin as fantasy but end up blending back into a reality of the high school drama club's stage show. It almost reminded me of Synecdoche, New York a couple of times. I loved it.
As for plot, it dispenses with the phony suspense right away in the first scene, when the basketball team wins its second state championship. This leaves the movie somewhat without a solid premise on which to build tension. What we get instead is a high school adaptation of A Chorus Line, both in a literal (on-stage) sense, and in the figurative reality of the movie world. Very clever indeed.
What do the characters want? They seemingly want to enjoy their last days of high school, and also to be in charge of their own destinies, to make their own choices. The sweetness and the sorrow, one could almost hear them singing.
The only plot tension in the traditional sense is competition over a scholarship to Julliard. I couldn't help rooting for Sharpay (the brilliant Ashley Tisdale), the misunderstood foil to the protagonist Troy, simply because she wants it the most. Troy gets to have it all. Why does he need this particular victory? The joke is that Tisdale is actually the most talented performer in the cast. Sharpay really is all that. Uh huh.
But those kids---they are so sweet, with their dreams. The world is waiting for them, waiting with a big open mouth...to swallow them whole. Kiss 2008 Good-bye!
They were fed all the phony fruits of the consumer cornucopialand, and told they could "be anything." It's all the potential, baby. Just dream, and you can do it. The world is waiting for you to spread your wings.
I thought about these sad things while watching High School Musical 3: Senior Year at the discount cinema just north of Manchester. It was the first movie of three I saw on Thursday on a one-day viewing sprint.
I should have seen this movie two months ago. On election eve, I had the utterly perfect opportunity to see it in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the real location of Our Town (those who know me will understand why). But I decided instead that I just had to get home for the first wave of election returns. I should have known: always take the obvious opportunity. Impatience defeats me time and again. Because I didn't grab that chance, the movie stayed on my "to see" list for weeks and weeks, until it finally dwindled down to a single discount theater in New Hampshire.
A bit of disclosure: I saw the first one of this series on Netflix, but missed the second installment (so far). So I'll offer abbreviated commentary.
To wit, I loved the musical numbers, but I'm a fan of that kind of stuff. The best number in the first movie was the one on the basketball court, and this movie has two such numbers. The most spectacular ones in this installment, however, were "fantasy" numbers in which we depart from the "reality" of the high school itself, and then weave back into it. Busby Berkeley might not have been on the edge of his seat, but he would have been at least tapping his toe.
At times there was even a beautiful postmodern twist of having the musical numbers begin as fantasy but end up blending back into a reality of the high school drama club's stage show. It almost reminded me of Synecdoche, New York a couple of times. I loved it.
As for plot, it dispenses with the phony suspense right away in the first scene, when the basketball team wins its second state championship. This leaves the movie somewhat without a solid premise on which to build tension. What we get instead is a high school adaptation of A Chorus Line, both in a literal (on-stage) sense, and in the figurative reality of the movie world. Very clever indeed.
What do the characters want? They seemingly want to enjoy their last days of high school, and also to be in charge of their own destinies, to make their own choices. The sweetness and the sorrow, one could almost hear them singing.
The only plot tension in the traditional sense is competition over a scholarship to Julliard. I couldn't help rooting for Sharpay (the brilliant Ashley Tisdale), the misunderstood foil to the protagonist Troy, simply because she wants it the most. Troy gets to have it all. Why does he need this particular victory? The joke is that Tisdale is actually the most talented performer in the cast. Sharpay really is all that. Uh huh.
But those kids---they are so sweet, with their dreams. The world is waiting for them, waiting with a big open mouth...to swallow them whole. Kiss 2008 Good-bye!
The Wrestler
Once upon a time there was a country known as America. On the strength of its noble ideals, and its diverse people, it rose to greatness and became the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.
But powerful forces, jealous forces, both inside and outside of it, sought to bring it down, to dismantle and plunder it. The country found itself faltering, and losing faith in itself.
By the middle 1970s, this dismantling was in full swing. It seemed the best days of the country were behind it. All its greatness was in the past. American movies reflected this downbeat message, and the uncertainty over this frightening future.
But the reservoir of strength within the people and their ideals was too strong. Out of this wreckage, America would rebound and stand up again as a beacon of hope to humanity.
A movie came along in 1976 that perfectly captured this lurking strength, and the rebound that was just around the corner. Fittingly it was made by an unknown actor who had peddled his screenplay unsuccessfully to dozens of producers, all of whom turned him down.
Finally he got a movie deal, but hardly any money to make it. Many on the cast and crew barely took the project seriously.
It was about a down-and-out boxer in Philadelphia. The protagonist is not only washed up, but is reduced to working for the mob, reluctantly breaking thumbs to collect petty debts. He doesn't believe in himself anymore. But through fate, he gets a second chance---and he takes it.
In the spring of 1977, the movie won the Best Picture Oscar. The unknown star who had written the screenplay went on to become one of the best known actors in the history of cinema.
In the years after that, America too seemed to come back, and surge to even greater heights of prestige, wealth and power, just as the down-and-out boxer in the movie went on to win the championship.
But something went wrong. The dismantlers of America were themselves not down and out. They were always very clever, and most of all, they knew how to harness the energy of the people back towards their own purposes.
And thus the rise of America in the 1980s, with all its flag-waving, was co-opted right from the beginning. The energy of the people was not used to build real value, but phoniness, a chimera of lewdness that served the hidden masters while handing out flagpin trinkets and toys to the people.
By 2008, it had all collapsed again. It was like the early 1970s again, but drained of that reservoir of strength of the people. The ideals of America are all gone. In 1971, a young energetic Clint Eastwood had fought to turn back the tide of filth in Dirty Harry. In 2008, he is an old man brandishing a pistol to keep neighbor kids off his lawn in Gran Torino.
And Rocky has become The Wrestler, a movie that blew me away so much that I can barely begin to write about, even four days after seeing it, as the second of two movies I saw in Waltham, right after Revolutionary Road.
Near the beginning of the movie, we learn that the title character, Randy the Ram, real name Robin (Mickey Rourke), once wrestled at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the very arena where the climax of Rocky takes place, and which has fittingly since been renamed after one of the tribe of looters once known as "banks". The venues in the movie are largely in New Jersey, literally on the other side of the river. It is a perfect metaphor for everything that has happened since 1976.
It is not 1975 anymore. We are not a down-and-out people of repressed energy, ready to spring back. We are a tired out people, played like slaves for our last ounces of energy. Rocky punched out sides of beef. Randy the Ram is literally, in his own words, "a broken down piece of meat." He is no longer the puncher, but the punchee.
Rocky's girlfriend was Adrian, quiet and full of virtue. Her own brother all but tries to pimp her out, but Rocky will have none of it. The world may be upside down, but he will restore order to it, one person at a time. The most spectacular part of the movie is how in his rise, he brings all the other characters with him, turns them from darkness to light one at a time, not by force, but by his example.
Randy the Ram is on the way down. There is no one he can bring up. He can only take them down with him. There is a beautiful and perfect anti-symmetry of the meat packing scene in Rocky when Randy, now reduced to working in a deli counter, punches out a meat-slicing machine and bloodies up his hand.
He attempts to woo a woman---an aging stripper, the quintessential female occupation of 2008. She is no Adrian, and she will prove it in the climax of the movie. Rocky is fallen Christ who will rise. Randy is Christ on the cross, ready to breathe his last breath.
Rocky fights a black man with American-flag trunks. Randy stage-fights a brown-skinned man waving an Iraqi flag. He is America pantomiming its death throes as a caricature of the nation it once was, having used up all of its options, snorted up its last hopes like cocaine, and with nowhere left to go.
At the climax, Randy makes his grand soliloquy to the crowd, proclaiming that only they, the People, can tell him when he is done. But it is a beautiful lie. In 2008 the people have no such power of resurrection anymore.
Last night, at a different movie, I saw the trailer to The Wrestler again, and I am still finding significance in lines I have heard several times. "This could be my ticket back on top," says Randy, before his big match. How true.
I'm going to be thinking about this movie a long time. There is so much more to say about the story, things I will think of after posting this. As a statement of where this nation is in 2008, this is definitely the powerful movie I have seen this year, surpassing even its magnificent rivals in that category: Gran Torino, Frozen River, and Stop-Loss.
I will be seeing this movie again---at least once, perhaps many times like Rocky, each time seeing new things. I will also be pointing it out in years to come if anyone wants to see what America had become at the end of the Bush era, at the threshold of the Great Dismantling of 2009. The Spectrum, as it happens, is being demolished in September.
Cut to black.
But powerful forces, jealous forces, both inside and outside of it, sought to bring it down, to dismantle and plunder it. The country found itself faltering, and losing faith in itself.
By the middle 1970s, this dismantling was in full swing. It seemed the best days of the country were behind it. All its greatness was in the past. American movies reflected this downbeat message, and the uncertainty over this frightening future.
But the reservoir of strength within the people and their ideals was too strong. Out of this wreckage, America would rebound and stand up again as a beacon of hope to humanity.
A movie came along in 1976 that perfectly captured this lurking strength, and the rebound that was just around the corner. Fittingly it was made by an unknown actor who had peddled his screenplay unsuccessfully to dozens of producers, all of whom turned him down.
Finally he got a movie deal, but hardly any money to make it. Many on the cast and crew barely took the project seriously.
It was about a down-and-out boxer in Philadelphia. The protagonist is not only washed up, but is reduced to working for the mob, reluctantly breaking thumbs to collect petty debts. He doesn't believe in himself anymore. But through fate, he gets a second chance---and he takes it.
In the spring of 1977, the movie won the Best Picture Oscar. The unknown star who had written the screenplay went on to become one of the best known actors in the history of cinema.
In the years after that, America too seemed to come back, and surge to even greater heights of prestige, wealth and power, just as the down-and-out boxer in the movie went on to win the championship.
But something went wrong. The dismantlers of America were themselves not down and out. They were always very clever, and most of all, they knew how to harness the energy of the people back towards their own purposes.
And thus the rise of America in the 1980s, with all its flag-waving, was co-opted right from the beginning. The energy of the people was not used to build real value, but phoniness, a chimera of lewdness that served the hidden masters while handing out flagpin trinkets and toys to the people.
By 2008, it had all collapsed again. It was like the early 1970s again, but drained of that reservoir of strength of the people. The ideals of America are all gone. In 1971, a young energetic Clint Eastwood had fought to turn back the tide of filth in Dirty Harry. In 2008, he is an old man brandishing a pistol to keep neighbor kids off his lawn in Gran Torino.
And Rocky has become The Wrestler, a movie that blew me away so much that I can barely begin to write about, even four days after seeing it, as the second of two movies I saw in Waltham, right after Revolutionary Road.
Near the beginning of the movie, we learn that the title character, Randy the Ram, real name Robin (Mickey Rourke), once wrestled at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, the very arena where the climax of Rocky takes place, and which has fittingly since been renamed after one of the tribe of looters once known as "banks". The venues in the movie are largely in New Jersey, literally on the other side of the river. It is a perfect metaphor for everything that has happened since 1976.
It is not 1975 anymore. We are not a down-and-out people of repressed energy, ready to spring back. We are a tired out people, played like slaves for our last ounces of energy. Rocky punched out sides of beef. Randy the Ram is literally, in his own words, "a broken down piece of meat." He is no longer the puncher, but the punchee.
Rocky's girlfriend was Adrian, quiet and full of virtue. Her own brother all but tries to pimp her out, but Rocky will have none of it. The world may be upside down, but he will restore order to it, one person at a time. The most spectacular part of the movie is how in his rise, he brings all the other characters with him, turns them from darkness to light one at a time, not by force, but by his example.
Randy the Ram is on the way down. There is no one he can bring up. He can only take them down with him. There is a beautiful and perfect anti-symmetry of the meat packing scene in Rocky when Randy, now reduced to working in a deli counter, punches out a meat-slicing machine and bloodies up his hand.
He attempts to woo a woman---an aging stripper, the quintessential female occupation of 2008. She is no Adrian, and she will prove it in the climax of the movie. Rocky is fallen Christ who will rise. Randy is Christ on the cross, ready to breathe his last breath.
Rocky fights a black man with American-flag trunks. Randy stage-fights a brown-skinned man waving an Iraqi flag. He is America pantomiming its death throes as a caricature of the nation it once was, having used up all of its options, snorted up its last hopes like cocaine, and with nowhere left to go.
At the climax, Randy makes his grand soliloquy to the crowd, proclaiming that only they, the People, can tell him when he is done. But it is a beautiful lie. In 2008 the people have no such power of resurrection anymore.
Last night, at a different movie, I saw the trailer to The Wrestler again, and I am still finding significance in lines I have heard several times. "This could be my ticket back on top," says Randy, before his big match. How true.
I'm going to be thinking about this movie a long time. There is so much more to say about the story, things I will think of after posting this. As a statement of where this nation is in 2008, this is definitely the powerful movie I have seen this year, surpassing even its magnificent rivals in that category: Gran Torino, Frozen River, and Stop-Loss.
I will be seeing this movie again---at least once, perhaps many times like Rocky, each time seeing new things. I will also be pointing it out in years to come if anyone wants to see what America had become at the end of the Bush era, at the threshold of the Great Dismantling of 2009. The Spectrum, as it happens, is being demolished in September.
Cut to black.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Revolutionary Road
"Shut up!!" I hissed loudly in the darkness of the auditorium.
Immediately nearly everyone in theater pivoted their head in bewilderment. I couldn't believe what I had just done. For the first time in years, I was actually telling someone to shut up in a movie theater during the movie.
It was Monday afternoon. I was in Waltham once again, in the Landmark Embassy Theater, a place I have come to love, since I only see good movies there. It is worth the forty-five minute drive, through all the stoplights along Route 2 in Concord.
But the pair in the back row were just driving me, and the other twenty-odd patrons in the theater, crazy. Somebody had to do it.
It wasn't their loudness so much as the soft constant drone of the s-sound, up and down in volume as they whispered, commenting on nearly every action and line. Teenagers? No. Women in their sixities. Teenagers generally stay quiet during the movie (although they like text). They just don't want to attract attention, and moreover they can be shamed into silence. But certain older women just don't give a fuck. They come in groups with the idea of sharing their opinions with each other outloud in real time, and they just don't give a fuck.
Usually I would just change my seat, but there was no escaping here. One of the pair was in a high-seated motorized wheelchair. It was as if she was in a pulpit behind us, so we could all hear her whisper every syllable.
I might have been able to cope with it, but for the fact that the three older women in front of me kept pivoting their heads back to look at them each time the whispering commenced anew.
Then the scene arrived, the languid slow one where both DiCaprio and Winslet are alone at night, contemplating their solitude and apartness in the Third Act of the movie. It was the part of the film that most reminded of Mendes' previous masterpiece, American Beauty (1999), the creepy sequence leading to the climax where the Neil Young song "Don't Let it Bring You Down" serves as the soundtrack.
But that infernal whispering, and all the heads swiveling---I just couldn't take it anymore.
Afterwards I immediately felt like an ass, for having further broken the spell of the movie, especially at such a critical time, when the emotions and thoughts of the characters are to be read in close concentration on their faces, reflecting the actions that each is about to take. Why did I have to be the bad guy?
To top it off, my little outburst did no good. It had absolutely no effect. The two whisperers didn't even break stride. It is perhaps a law that those most likely to spoil a movie are the least likely to think that such verbal missives are directed at them.
The scene is question, the parallel nighttime contemplation by the two principals, is where I most felt Revolutionary Road to be a retread of American Beauty, albeit set in the 1950s. Thankfully I did not feel that way for most of the movie, although I feared I would.
Few things are more annoying than someone who refuses to like a movie "because it isn't like book." Wah wah wah. Who says the movie has to be anything like the book? Books and movies are different artistic genres, ones that are in large part incompatible. There is simply no way to adapt most novels to film in a way that does not leave out substantial chunks of the print narrative.
But Revolutionary Road, you see, is no ordinary book for me. It is one of my all-time favorite postwar American novels. My friend H-man handed it to me about seven years ago when I went to visit him in Washington, D.C. After I read it, we compared notes, and we both agreed that we had crushes on the April Wheeler character. The very phrase "April Wheeler," said in overly luscious appreciation, like Homer Simpson savoring a donut, became a humorous joke between us.
When I first read that Mendes had picked his wife Kate Winslet to play that role, I was bitterly disappointed. Winslet? But I was thinking of the chubby chick from Titanic (1998). Evidently she had been replaced by a different actress of the same name who was perfect for this part.
My big test for the movie would be: would they include the subplot involving John, the emotionally disturbed Ph.D. mathematician who is allowed brief visits outside the looney bin to visit his relatives, and who sees into the Wheelers' troubled marriage as if reading an emotional x-ray? Of all the characters in the book, it was John with whom I found the most identification. Yet it seemed like exactly the kind of side plot that would be left out.
But they didn't do it, screenwriter Justin Haythe and Sam Mendes. They kept him in. John had a huge role, as played brilliantly by Michael Shannon. It was everything I could have hoped for and more.
I also feared that they would kill the spirit of Richard Yates' 1961 novel. The reason I had loved it so much was that it had changed completely my view of American literature from that time, especially novels about the suburban nightmare. I had been used to John Updike, John Cheever, and all that kind of New Yorker-style turgid wandering that pooh-poohs too much coherent external narrative as some form of artistic cheat. When I read Yates, it just blew me away. Not only was it possible to tell real stories about suburbia, but ones that were simple, entertaining and deeply meaningful.
But if Yates described the emotional hell of characters, he did so in a way that felt lighthearted and buoyant throughout much of the story. It was so damn fun to follow his characters, a fact that makes the horrific climax of the story all that more, well, horrific. Yates sucker punches you in a way that brings the nightmare of 1950s America right into your soul.
Would the movie capture that buoyancy in the narrative? I had really doubted that it could. But Mendes was probably exactly the right choice for the director, because he nailed it, at least for me, as much as I could hope for. I didn't mind that he put his auteur stamp on it. Also Kathy Bates was certainly a big reason why it all worked for me.
There are things I could criticize about the movie. DiCaprio had to work a lot to make me believe him as a 1950s era salesman, but I did, in the end, believe him. I read one review that panned the movie because Winslet and DiCaprio "spend the entire movie screaming the subtext at each other." I suppose you might look it at that way. But I chose not to. Admittedly I'm prejudiced. I wanted to like the movie, because I didn't want one of my favorite books to be made into a sucky movie.
In some ways I think it's a superior movie to American Beauty, in that it doesn't suffer from the latter film's plot hole, i.e. the ridiculous premise of Lester's purchase of marijuana from a neighbor kid in front of an open lit window in a garage at night, in full view of his nosy neighbor, without bothering to close the blinds (nobody has ever done that in the history of the world). Also it is narrated by a dead person, which is sort of gag after Sunset Boulevard (1951). But I still think it's a masterpiece of comedic horror, and one of the best movies of the 1990s, a perfect portrait of America on the verge of the 2000 Presidential election.
Perhaps only thing that makes Revolutionary Road a less powerful film, in my opinion, is that whereas American Beauty was about the dysfunctional American suburbia of 1999, Revolutionary Road is a period piece, lending it a slight reserve in its artistic impact for the present day.
Also, what the hell is it with Thomas Newman, who wrote the soundtrack. As many have noticed, the soundtrack was exactly the same slow progression of piano chords as in American Beauty. Did Newman just recycle the same music? It was definitely a weakness of the film, not because it was inappropriate, but because it stuck out.
Yes, I wanted to like the movie, so I did. It was almost a perfect viewing experience. Curse those darned women in the back row, not just for annoying the hell out of all of us in theater, but making me feel like a heel for being the bad guy in the movie theater. Did I mention that I drove forty-five minutes to get there?
Immediately nearly everyone in theater pivoted their head in bewilderment. I couldn't believe what I had just done. For the first time in years, I was actually telling someone to shut up in a movie theater during the movie.
It was Monday afternoon. I was in Waltham once again, in the Landmark Embassy Theater, a place I have come to love, since I only see good movies there. It is worth the forty-five minute drive, through all the stoplights along Route 2 in Concord.
But the pair in the back row were just driving me, and the other twenty-odd patrons in the theater, crazy. Somebody had to do it.
It wasn't their loudness so much as the soft constant drone of the s-sound, up and down in volume as they whispered, commenting on nearly every action and line. Teenagers? No. Women in their sixities. Teenagers generally stay quiet during the movie (although they like text). They just don't want to attract attention, and moreover they can be shamed into silence. But certain older women just don't give a fuck. They come in groups with the idea of sharing their opinions with each other outloud in real time, and they just don't give a fuck.
Usually I would just change my seat, but there was no escaping here. One of the pair was in a high-seated motorized wheelchair. It was as if she was in a pulpit behind us, so we could all hear her whisper every syllable.
I might have been able to cope with it, but for the fact that the three older women in front of me kept pivoting their heads back to look at them each time the whispering commenced anew.
Then the scene arrived, the languid slow one where both DiCaprio and Winslet are alone at night, contemplating their solitude and apartness in the Third Act of the movie. It was the part of the film that most reminded of Mendes' previous masterpiece, American Beauty (1999), the creepy sequence leading to the climax where the Neil Young song "Don't Let it Bring You Down" serves as the soundtrack.
But that infernal whispering, and all the heads swiveling---I just couldn't take it anymore.
Afterwards I immediately felt like an ass, for having further broken the spell of the movie, especially at such a critical time, when the emotions and thoughts of the characters are to be read in close concentration on their faces, reflecting the actions that each is about to take. Why did I have to be the bad guy?
To top it off, my little outburst did no good. It had absolutely no effect. The two whisperers didn't even break stride. It is perhaps a law that those most likely to spoil a movie are the least likely to think that such verbal missives are directed at them.
The scene is question, the parallel nighttime contemplation by the two principals, is where I most felt Revolutionary Road to be a retread of American Beauty, albeit set in the 1950s. Thankfully I did not feel that way for most of the movie, although I feared I would.
Few things are more annoying than someone who refuses to like a movie "because it isn't like book." Wah wah wah. Who says the movie has to be anything like the book? Books and movies are different artistic genres, ones that are in large part incompatible. There is simply no way to adapt most novels to film in a way that does not leave out substantial chunks of the print narrative.
But Revolutionary Road, you see, is no ordinary book for me. It is one of my all-time favorite postwar American novels. My friend H-man handed it to me about seven years ago when I went to visit him in Washington, D.C. After I read it, we compared notes, and we both agreed that we had crushes on the April Wheeler character. The very phrase "April Wheeler," said in overly luscious appreciation, like Homer Simpson savoring a donut, became a humorous joke between us.
When I first read that Mendes had picked his wife Kate Winslet to play that role, I was bitterly disappointed. Winslet? But I was thinking of the chubby chick from Titanic (1998). Evidently she had been replaced by a different actress of the same name who was perfect for this part.
My big test for the movie would be: would they include the subplot involving John, the emotionally disturbed Ph.D. mathematician who is allowed brief visits outside the looney bin to visit his relatives, and who sees into the Wheelers' troubled marriage as if reading an emotional x-ray? Of all the characters in the book, it was John with whom I found the most identification. Yet it seemed like exactly the kind of side plot that would be left out.
But they didn't do it, screenwriter Justin Haythe and Sam Mendes. They kept him in. John had a huge role, as played brilliantly by Michael Shannon. It was everything I could have hoped for and more.
I also feared that they would kill the spirit of Richard Yates' 1961 novel. The reason I had loved it so much was that it had changed completely my view of American literature from that time, especially novels about the suburban nightmare. I had been used to John Updike, John Cheever, and all that kind of New Yorker-style turgid wandering that pooh-poohs too much coherent external narrative as some form of artistic cheat. When I read Yates, it just blew me away. Not only was it possible to tell real stories about suburbia, but ones that were simple, entertaining and deeply meaningful.
But if Yates described the emotional hell of characters, he did so in a way that felt lighthearted and buoyant throughout much of the story. It was so damn fun to follow his characters, a fact that makes the horrific climax of the story all that more, well, horrific. Yates sucker punches you in a way that brings the nightmare of 1950s America right into your soul.
Would the movie capture that buoyancy in the narrative? I had really doubted that it could. But Mendes was probably exactly the right choice for the director, because he nailed it, at least for me, as much as I could hope for. I didn't mind that he put his auteur stamp on it. Also Kathy Bates was certainly a big reason why it all worked for me.
There are things I could criticize about the movie. DiCaprio had to work a lot to make me believe him as a 1950s era salesman, but I did, in the end, believe him. I read one review that panned the movie because Winslet and DiCaprio "spend the entire movie screaming the subtext at each other." I suppose you might look it at that way. But I chose not to. Admittedly I'm prejudiced. I wanted to like the movie, because I didn't want one of my favorite books to be made into a sucky movie.
In some ways I think it's a superior movie to American Beauty, in that it doesn't suffer from the latter film's plot hole, i.e. the ridiculous premise of Lester's purchase of marijuana from a neighbor kid in front of an open lit window in a garage at night, in full view of his nosy neighbor, without bothering to close the blinds (nobody has ever done that in the history of the world). Also it is narrated by a dead person, which is sort of gag after Sunset Boulevard (1951). But I still think it's a masterpiece of comedic horror, and one of the best movies of the 1990s, a perfect portrait of America on the verge of the 2000 Presidential election.
Perhaps only thing that makes Revolutionary Road a less powerful film, in my opinion, is that whereas American Beauty was about the dysfunctional American suburbia of 1999, Revolutionary Road is a period piece, lending it a slight reserve in its artistic impact for the present day.
Also, what the hell is it with Thomas Newman, who wrote the soundtrack. As many have noticed, the soundtrack was exactly the same slow progression of piano chords as in American Beauty. Did Newman just recycle the same music? It was definitely a weakness of the film, not because it was inappropriate, but because it stuck out.
Yes, I wanted to like the movie, so I did. It was almost a perfect viewing experience. Curse those darned women in the back row, not just for annoying the hell out of all of us in theater, but making me feel like a heel for being the bad guy in the movie theater. Did I mention that I drove forty-five minutes to get there?
Gran Torino
To my mind, one of the indicators of a superior motion picture is the final shot of the movie. If the last thing you see turns out to be not only informative, but essential to the narrative in a way that illuminates everything before it, then it is a sign that the writer, director, and cinematographer were all collaborating in the right way to tell the story.
I thought about this while driving home on Sunday afternoon from Leominster, having just seen Gran Torino. The last shot shows one of the characters at the wheel of the automobile to which the title of the movie refers. It is the character who must be at the wheel, according to the Aristotlean dictates of narrative.
Moreover it was a scene I personally recognized, as would many people in the Detroit area, where the film was set. The car is moving north on Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan (map). It is a sunny day, and the blue waters of Lake Saint Clair are glistening beside the shore. In the distance, we can see the outline of the Grosse Pointe Shores Yacht Club.
This is the wealthiest part of the entire Detroit Metropolitan area. The significance is that it is a completely different world from every other scene in the movie. To place this particular character there, driving that car, at the end of the movie speaks of a transformation at the heart of the theme of the movie. It is arguably the same genre of transformation as at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, but one that is, I believe, more artistically powerful because of its subtlety and its narrative necessity.
The exact image of that final scene had been burned into my brain a little over four years ago, when I drove up that same road, on a cloudier afternoon. It was in the midst of the 2004 election, and I was on my way west across the country, taking my time exploring places I had never seen. I was not, however, at the wheel of a mint condition Gran Torino but an aging but still decent Dodge Dynasty that had once belonged to my ex-wife's parents. Along the way I was stopping many times a day to take digital photographs that I would later upload into Wikipedia. At the time many places in the U.S. had no photographs in their articles, and I felt like the Johnny Appleseed of photo uploading. It is understatement to say that it became somewhat of an obsession.
I had just spent a rainy, dreary morning in downtown Detroit trying to get decent shots of the skyline there. Photographically, it was one of the low points of the trip, especially since I had to pay for parking in a garage. Things had brightened up a little bit by the time I got to the middle class suburb of Grosse Pointe (not be confused with Grosse Pointe Shores or Grosse Pointe Woods), where I took this photograph that I put in the Wikipedia article for Swing State.
My plan for that afternoon was simple: to get a decent shot of Lake St. Clair, the little "sixth" great lake, that is just north of Detroit. I figured it would be a piece of cake, since the map indicated that the road ran right along the lake shore.
Boy, was I ever wrong. Indeed the road ran where the map said it did, but getting a shot of the lake turned out to be a mighty challenge. This was because not only were there no places to park along the road---none at all that were not right in the flow of traffic---but there were multiple signs forbidding one from even contemplating the idea of parking anywhere near there, unless you were a resident. I couldn't even take a shot out the window, since the lake was on the passenger side.
The shot at the end of Gran Torino was where I experienced maximum frustration. It would have been so beautiful to get a shot of the pier of that yacht club in the distance, but it was just impossible. It stuck in my craw as one of the big disappointments of the trip.
I was finally able to get a shot of the lake in St.Clair Shores, which is a middle class town north of the yacht club. There was a little lakeside park, called Memorial Park where I could pull over and walk one block down the to lake shore (map). There was a sign indicating that the beach park was for residents only, but it was deserted and I ignored it for a few minutes, snapping this shot of an empty lifeguard chair that became part of the Wikipedia article for the lake. With my prize in hand, I turned my car west across the lower peninsula of Michigan.
The whole experience left in me an impression of Lake St. Clair as a huge restricted zone. Its waters were reserved for residents in a way that spoke of the entrenched divisions of class and wealth in American society. Of course much of this restriction was based on historical racism. The white folk along the shore did not want the black people in Detroit to be hanging out on their lake beaches. Even in 2004, the fact that I could trespass for a few moments without fear was because I was white.
The idea of Lake St. Clair as a zone of privilege is consciously invoked in Gran Torino, not only in the final shot, but throughout the movie. Inside his basement, Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), the aging retired auto worker, has a framed map of the lake, which we see in the background in multiple scenes. The basement is actually a sacred space in many ways, since it is where Walt keeps his treasures and trophies, one of which he will bestow upon a younger character at a crucial moment. It is this younger character who will driving along the lake in the final shot. Thus the map on the wall turns out to be, in a sense, a type of treasure map that the character will eventually follow.
Thinking about this on the way home from the movie on Sunday made me realize that whether the filmmakers intended it or not, the movie had a strong subtext involving freemasonry. Back in 2004, I thought it was ironic that the street where I finally stopped in St. Clair Shores was called Masonic Boulevard. One of the impressions I had of Detroit, as well as all of northern Ohio and southern Michigan, was of the heavy influence of Freemasonry in the early white settlement of the region. The first American governor of the Northwest Territory, ironically named Arthur St. Clair, was perhaps the greatest proponent in early America of building a government based on freemasonry. In every city I visited, there seemed to be some historical marker that spoke of the early Masonic settlers. Detroit, as it happens, is home to the largest masonic temple in the world.
The more I thought about it, the more the Masonic subtext of the movie emerged to me. Walt is the master craftsman. His garage is full of tools acquired over his lifetime, as if in the stages of progress of his craft. His mint-condition car is one that he helped build with his own hands.
But there is a problem: he has not been able to transfer his knowledge and his craft on to a new generation. The Masonic civilization of the old Northwest Territories in crumbling and in decay. Here we have the essential problem of America today, woven deeply into our culture: we are in danger of losing everything that has been built, because of the failure of the older generation to pass their knowledge on to the new, and the failure of the new to appreciate and learn from the old. Walt is classicism incarnate---there is a way to do things, and to accomplish anything meaningful in life, one must be learn those rules.
Part of Walt's barrier to transferring his craft is partly due to his racism. Yet it is not a deep racism, but a lingering one of habit, and also one that is an encoded form of male bonding. Just as Freemasonry is supposedly open to all men of any race, so Walt must make the leap to overcome his lingering racism to bring a dark-skinned youth into the fraternity of his craft. It is his only option to continuing the line of his craft.
What he offers to the youth is an essential male initiation, one that can only be given by a older man, who is wholly American, as one of the female Hmong characters states. He must literally be granted the tools, starting with the measuring tape and a belt (highly Masonic in symbolism here), and be taken in as an apprentice at a construction site. He must be taught the encrypted lingo that allows one to enter the door of the foreman's trailer. Just as Masonic must learn the secret rituals and oaths, so the young man in Gran Torino must learn how to speak the correct phrases as he walks in the door of a barber shop, another vestibule of the impromptu Masonic lodge.
That Walt is finally able to initiate an apprentice to take his place is what allows him, in narrative terms, to understand Divinity, and to make his peace with God. It allows him to achieve the state of transcendence of the personal ego, which he finally does at the end of the movie. What happens at the end of the movie is exactly what needs to happen, what must happen, to resolve the conflicts. Yet it is obvious only afterward. This is what makes for great storytelling.
To say this was a superior movie is a gross understatement. I had never really embraced Unforgiven (1992) as much as other folk, and after seeing Mystic River (2005), I had come to discount Eastwood as overly indulgent in sentimental storytelling, but Gran Torino is a flatout masterpiece. It may not be the best movie of the year (I haven't decided yet), but if there is one single movie that captures a defining portrait of America in the year 2008, it is this one.
It made me glad that I never got that photograph of the yacht club from the angle along Lake Shore Road, because otherwise the frustration of the emotional experience would not have been burned into my brain so fiercely, and the last shot of the movie would probably not have been such a revelation.
I thought about this while driving home on Sunday afternoon from Leominster, having just seen Gran Torino. The last shot shows one of the characters at the wheel of the automobile to which the title of the movie refers. It is the character who must be at the wheel, according to the Aristotlean dictates of narrative.
Moreover it was a scene I personally recognized, as would many people in the Detroit area, where the film was set. The car is moving north on Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan (map). It is a sunny day, and the blue waters of Lake Saint Clair are glistening beside the shore. In the distance, we can see the outline of the Grosse Pointe Shores Yacht Club.
This is the wealthiest part of the entire Detroit Metropolitan area. The significance is that it is a completely different world from every other scene in the movie. To place this particular character there, driving that car, at the end of the movie speaks of a transformation at the heart of the theme of the movie. It is arguably the same genre of transformation as at the end of Slumdog Millionaire, but one that is, I believe, more artistically powerful because of its subtlety and its narrative necessity.
The exact image of that final scene had been burned into my brain a little over four years ago, when I drove up that same road, on a cloudier afternoon. It was in the midst of the 2004 election, and I was on my way west across the country, taking my time exploring places I had never seen. I was not, however, at the wheel of a mint condition Gran Torino but an aging but still decent Dodge Dynasty that had once belonged to my ex-wife's parents. Along the way I was stopping many times a day to take digital photographs that I would later upload into Wikipedia. At the time many places in the U.S. had no photographs in their articles, and I felt like the Johnny Appleseed of photo uploading. It is understatement to say that it became somewhat of an obsession.
I had just spent a rainy, dreary morning in downtown Detroit trying to get decent shots of the skyline there. Photographically, it was one of the low points of the trip, especially since I had to pay for parking in a garage. Things had brightened up a little bit by the time I got to the middle class suburb of Grosse Pointe (not be confused with Grosse Pointe Shores or Grosse Pointe Woods), where I took this photograph that I put in the Wikipedia article for Swing State.
My plan for that afternoon was simple: to get a decent shot of Lake St. Clair, the little "sixth" great lake, that is just north of Detroit. I figured it would be a piece of cake, since the map indicated that the road ran right along the lake shore.
Boy, was I ever wrong. Indeed the road ran where the map said it did, but getting a shot of the lake turned out to be a mighty challenge. This was because not only were there no places to park along the road---none at all that were not right in the flow of traffic---but there were multiple signs forbidding one from even contemplating the idea of parking anywhere near there, unless you were a resident. I couldn't even take a shot out the window, since the lake was on the passenger side.
The shot at the end of Gran Torino was where I experienced maximum frustration. It would have been so beautiful to get a shot of the pier of that yacht club in the distance, but it was just impossible. It stuck in my craw as one of the big disappointments of the trip.
I was finally able to get a shot of the lake in St.Clair Shores, which is a middle class town north of the yacht club. There was a little lakeside park, called Memorial Park where I could pull over and walk one block down the to lake shore (map). There was a sign indicating that the beach park was for residents only, but it was deserted and I ignored it for a few minutes, snapping this shot of an empty lifeguard chair that became part of the Wikipedia article for the lake. With my prize in hand, I turned my car west across the lower peninsula of Michigan.
The whole experience left in me an impression of Lake St. Clair as a huge restricted zone. Its waters were reserved for residents in a way that spoke of the entrenched divisions of class and wealth in American society. Of course much of this restriction was based on historical racism. The white folk along the shore did not want the black people in Detroit to be hanging out on their lake beaches. Even in 2004, the fact that I could trespass for a few moments without fear was because I was white.
The idea of Lake St. Clair as a zone of privilege is consciously invoked in Gran Torino, not only in the final shot, but throughout the movie. Inside his basement, Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood), the aging retired auto worker, has a framed map of the lake, which we see in the background in multiple scenes. The basement is actually a sacred space in many ways, since it is where Walt keeps his treasures and trophies, one of which he will bestow upon a younger character at a crucial moment. It is this younger character who will driving along the lake in the final shot. Thus the map on the wall turns out to be, in a sense, a type of treasure map that the character will eventually follow.
Thinking about this on the way home from the movie on Sunday made me realize that whether the filmmakers intended it or not, the movie had a strong subtext involving freemasonry. Back in 2004, I thought it was ironic that the street where I finally stopped in St. Clair Shores was called Masonic Boulevard. One of the impressions I had of Detroit, as well as all of northern Ohio and southern Michigan, was of the heavy influence of Freemasonry in the early white settlement of the region. The first American governor of the Northwest Territory, ironically named Arthur St. Clair, was perhaps the greatest proponent in early America of building a government based on freemasonry. In every city I visited, there seemed to be some historical marker that spoke of the early Masonic settlers. Detroit, as it happens, is home to the largest masonic temple in the world.
The more I thought about it, the more the Masonic subtext of the movie emerged to me. Walt is the master craftsman. His garage is full of tools acquired over his lifetime, as if in the stages of progress of his craft. His mint-condition car is one that he helped build with his own hands.
But there is a problem: he has not been able to transfer his knowledge and his craft on to a new generation. The Masonic civilization of the old Northwest Territories in crumbling and in decay. Here we have the essential problem of America today, woven deeply into our culture: we are in danger of losing everything that has been built, because of the failure of the older generation to pass their knowledge on to the new, and the failure of the new to appreciate and learn from the old. Walt is classicism incarnate---there is a way to do things, and to accomplish anything meaningful in life, one must be learn those rules.
Part of Walt's barrier to transferring his craft is partly due to his racism. Yet it is not a deep racism, but a lingering one of habit, and also one that is an encoded form of male bonding. Just as Freemasonry is supposedly open to all men of any race, so Walt must make the leap to overcome his lingering racism to bring a dark-skinned youth into the fraternity of his craft. It is his only option to continuing the line of his craft.
What he offers to the youth is an essential male initiation, one that can only be given by a older man, who is wholly American, as one of the female Hmong characters states. He must literally be granted the tools, starting with the measuring tape and a belt (highly Masonic in symbolism here), and be taken in as an apprentice at a construction site. He must be taught the encrypted lingo that allows one to enter the door of the foreman's trailer. Just as Masonic must learn the secret rituals and oaths, so the young man in Gran Torino must learn how to speak the correct phrases as he walks in the door of a barber shop, another vestibule of the impromptu Masonic lodge.
That Walt is finally able to initiate an apprentice to take his place is what allows him, in narrative terms, to understand Divinity, and to make his peace with God. It allows him to achieve the state of transcendence of the personal ego, which he finally does at the end of the movie. What happens at the end of the movie is exactly what needs to happen, what must happen, to resolve the conflicts. Yet it is obvious only afterward. This is what makes for great storytelling.
To say this was a superior movie is a gross understatement. I had never really embraced Unforgiven (1992) as much as other folk, and after seeing Mystic River (2005), I had come to discount Eastwood as overly indulgent in sentimental storytelling, but Gran Torino is a flatout masterpiece. It may not be the best movie of the year (I haven't decided yet), but if there is one single movie that captures a defining portrait of America in the year 2008, it is this one.
It made me glad that I never got that photograph of the yacht club from the angle along Lake Shore Road, because otherwise the frustration of the emotional experience would not have been burned into my brain so fiercely, and the last shot of the movie would probably not have been such a revelation.
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