When I woke up on Friday morning I was in a particularly foul mood. It probably had a lot to do with what I was reading the night before, in my Brookline book. I had thought I could absorb what was in it, that the worst of it all was over, but sometimes I lose track of the narrative---the real narrative---of all the pieces put together, and I temporarily despair that I will ever glimpse any form of wholeness again.
Hoping to distract myself, I flipped on the tube to watch the local Boston news. There was a report about a female schoolteacher who was being charged for having an affair with one of her students, between the time he was thirteen and the time was sixteen. The people being interviewed were expressing their moral outrage about it all. How terrible it was for the parents of the boy. The damage she has caused him...
Damage? I snorted. It just ain't the same as if the reverse situation, the older male teacher and the young female student. Everyone knows this, yet we've all got to pretend that it's the same. We can't say that the two situations are different, because that would be to admit that men and women are different in a way that our culture is not prepared to address. Who knows where such a question could lead?
Yes, I suppose you could argue the boy has been damaged. He might now be too experienced with women, and he'll wind up knocking up one of his many girlfriends in college, instead of bumbling through in an inexperienced fashion as he might have otherwise. Yes, it could, in the end, really screw up his life.
Yet there was everyone on t.v., morally posturing in their outrage about it all. It was a far more disgusting spectacle to me than the crime itself, because it revealed something ugly inside the people on t.v., as if they were regurgitating their own slimy souls with their comments.
I thought about this all again later in the evening when I was sitting watching the first few moments of The Reader at the Regal-Anchutz-Bennet Solomon Pond Cinema. It was my second visit back there in a week.
The set-up of the movie involves the start of an affair between a 36-year-old woman (Kate Winslet) and a 15-year-old schoolboy. The affair takes place in 1958 in postwar West Germany. Later this episode will be used in the context of a larger story.
What immediately struck me as funny was that the movie seemed to make absolutely no moral judgment about the sexual encounters between the two characters. It wasn't at all the point of the movie. The narrative would be reserved for other judgments. Instead it was presented in terms of a coming-of-age experience for the boy, one that would later haunt him, but for reasons having nothing to do with sexual aspect of the affair.
Here we all were in theater, a bunch of fine Massachusetts folk watching the movie, the same audience for that telecast earlier today. The relativeness of the moral outrage seemed beautifully ironic.
The Reader is told through several layers of narrative, happening at different times in the life of the male protagonist, over the course of the years between 1958 and 1995 (by which time he has grown up to become Ralph Fiennes). The main story (the one that begins in 1958) involves the act of one character reading stories to another, an activity that will take on deeper meaning later in the movie.
Thus we have a narrative about narrative, and thus a movie about movies (that tell stories). When this situation arises, I tend to play close attention to what the subtext of the movie involving the narrative process itself.
On a literal level, the narrative is about the process of Germans discovering the truth about the Holocaust, and about coping with the guilt over it, both on a personal and societal level.
For most of the movie, I enjoyed where it was going (using its multi-layered style of narrative). But in the end, it all seemed to break apart. The threads of the narrative were supposedly tied together, but it felt emotionally incomplete and unsatisfying. Was that the point of the movie, that I should feel this way at the end?
I don't think it was. I don't think the movie was that self-aware.
The basic problem that stood out in glaring fashion was this was a Holocaust movie. We have come to the point in our culture that when you make a movie about the Holocaust, you must absolutely say certain things about it. You must make certain specific judgments about it and the people involved in it. There is absolutely no wiggle room at all.
The movie put itself in this constraint right from the beginning. We are not allowed to see too deeply into the souls of certain characters, nor develop sympathy for them beyond the surface, because that would violate the code. No matter how valid this may be in real life, in movie terms it now creates great difficulties in telling an interesting story. We know in advance exactly where will be led. There can be no emotional surprises.
All the layers of storytelling in the movie thus became like a mathematical equation that cannot be solved, because it contains too many constraints. It is example of how far we've come, deep into post-postmodernity. The downfall of classical cinema was due in part to the over-prescribed restrictions on narrative. Certain things had to happen, given x, y, and z in the story. In some cases this meant characters having to go to jail, when you wouldn't otherwise want them to. I call this the Classical Prison. This is one of the main reasons that postmodernity felt initially like a breath of fresh air. like freedom and escape.
But the lack of structure ultimately led to the gutter, the Postmodern Sewer as I call it. Yet it is mistake to think that we don't have rules now. We have plenty of rules in narrative, just different ones from the classical era. The problem is that we think we have no rules. In a sense, we are back in prison again, just one constructed in an ad hoc fashion from the rules of the sewer.
The restriction on Holocaust narrative are part of this new code. We don't even have to see the Holocaust portrayed in a movie, in order to know how to feel about it. The Reader was a prime example of this. The movie seemed to be saying, "remember the Holocaust, as you have seen it in all the other movies about it, and summon those feelings again for the story you are seeing."
In a way, I can sympathize with the plight of those who make these movies, based on the idea that "to forget the Holocaust is to let the Nazis win." This has become translated into "to stop making movies about the Holocaust is to let the Nazis win." The hardness of this prescription seemed perfectly reflected in the encounter at the end of the movie between Fiennes' grown-up character and a Holocaust survivor in New York.
Its a prescription for tired out movies, with unsatisfying emotional endings, which is how The Reader felt (despite an incredibly strong performance from Winslet). In a way, it feels like we are back in 1958, in the waning days of the era of classical cinema, when M-G-M was running on fumes. There is, from my point of view, an incredible dearth of historical movies that come out lately. Can we ever breathe free again, and turn our narrative attention elsewhere, without letting the Nazis win?
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Frost/Nixon
"All right," I said to myself, "back to basics. What do the characters want?"
I was at the wheel of my car, heading west on the Massachusetts Pike. Fifteen minutes earlier I'd pulled out of the parking lot of the sprawling AMC movie palace in Framingham. The complex was wedged between the giant consumer meccas known as Shoppers World and the Natick Mall, the latter being the most elaborate and opulent monument to American purchasing power that I had ever seen (map). It had been a long drive to get there, but it was the nearest theater showing Frost/Nixon I could find that day.
On the outside of the multiplex, the neon sign for the "AMC Grille" had announced that this was no ordinary theater complex, but one with amenities. On the inside the most obvious feature was the extra-long concession counter that seemed to go on forever in either direction. The "Grille" turned out to be a set of restaurant-like tables off to the side with its own concession area, which was closed at this hour of the late afternoon on a weekday.
The biggest surprise was that the auditoriums were not stadium-seating. They must have just missed this innovation when the complex was built. Instead the seats were the normal fold-up types on a shallow pitch. It felt almost like a let-down, given the outward appearance of the complex.
The two-hour movie had flown by. I had enjoyed it at nearly every turn, especially the acting of the two principals. Yet driving home in the dark, as I began to contemplate what I might write about it, I could hardly muster any intelligent thoughts beyond saying that it was a good movie. I suppose it may have been fatigue, being in the middle of my late season run of the Oscar contenders. David Carr of The New York Times recently noticed that the glut was even 'gluttier' this year. I wasn't the only one suffering from this abundance of cinematic riches.
But what to say about the movie I had just seen? When in doubt, simply ask the right questions. What do the characters want? We are complex human beings, each and every one of us, and the great actors of history can have particularly complex souls, but in the context of a motion picture, the narrative must address a specific subset of motivations in order to create a story.
The metaphor of the confrontation between the two principals---the t.v. journalist and the ex-president---was that of a boxing match, invoked by several of the characters at various times. Boxing is perhaps the oldest and most repeated metaphor of confrontation in cinema. The filming of it goes back to some of Edison's earliest test films in the mid 1890s. It is the sport best suited to the movie camera, both for its visual presentation and its metaphorical implications.
Both characters want to win this boxing match, of course, but what do they really want? Why is winning so important? For Frost, the motivation is transparent and revealed from the earliest moments of the movie. His career has been on the skids. After reaching the pinnacle of fame in New York with his own talk show, he washed out of American t.v. and was exiled to Australia. He wants back in the limelight. He is terrified that his moment has passed, and he will never reach the top again.
Nixon knows this about Frost, which is one of his great advantages. But what does Nixon want? It is tempting to say he wants the same kind of redemption as Frost---a return to the prominence he once held---but this a misdirection, a feint. Nixon knows that his time in politics has passed. There is no redemption in that particular sense.
His motivations are thus more cloudy and less obvious than those of Frost. They are not worn on the surface of his soul, but revealed slowly over the course of the movie, selectively and intimately.
Yet what should be an advantage for Nixon turns out to be his weakness. The reason is that this is television, and on television, the straightforward obviousness of Frost will triumph over the inscrutable byzantine complexities of Nixon. Nixon can win all of the initial "rounds" of the boxing match---which he does---yet it is not enough. All it takes is a single question, and a single camera angle, to knock out the champ.
The power of Frost/Nixon as a movie is arguably limited by the fact that it is such a close adaption of the stage play, and feels that way so much of the time. This doesn't make it an inferior movie, of course, just one that feels constrained slightly by the genre.
Yet the movie excels---a movie based on a stage play about television, directed by a childhood t.v. star. That it does so is mainly due to the principal actors who are impeccable in every scene (this is the corresponding advantage of being stage play adaptation). This sets up the actual knockout punch of the metaphorical boxing match---a specific lingering close-up of Nixon's face, silent as he contemplates the words he has just spoken. The facial close-up, a shot that is made for boxing matches---is what television is all about, and why Frost triumphs.
Yet driving home I still found myself contemplating what did Nixon want? Part of his redemption was his public confession, which both he and Frost knew he needed to make, in order to live out the rest of his exile in peace. But that was only the public part of his motivation. A man like Nixon still has deeper motives, ones that never surfaced in the interview.
The key scene of the movie, upon which the entire narrative hangs, turns out to be a late night phone conversation in which the drunken emotional ex-president makes his real confession to a bewildered Frost.
As I contemplated this scene in my car, I couldn't help think of how much more sympathy I had for Richard Nixon than I once did. He was the westerner, from a small college. He went East, to try to be among the elite and the powerful. He thought they had let him inside, but they never really did.
I now know how much we were all misled about him, and what the source of the lies were. Even Nixon was not completely aware of what was happening to him, and who his real enemies were.
Later that evening I pulled out the book I had recently bought in Brookline and read from some of the middle chapters:
The pieces were falling into place at last.
I was at the wheel of my car, heading west on the Massachusetts Pike. Fifteen minutes earlier I'd pulled out of the parking lot of the sprawling AMC movie palace in Framingham. The complex was wedged between the giant consumer meccas known as Shoppers World and the Natick Mall, the latter being the most elaborate and opulent monument to American purchasing power that I had ever seen (map). It had been a long drive to get there, but it was the nearest theater showing Frost/Nixon I could find that day.
On the outside of the multiplex, the neon sign for the "AMC Grille" had announced that this was no ordinary theater complex, but one with amenities. On the inside the most obvious feature was the extra-long concession counter that seemed to go on forever in either direction. The "Grille" turned out to be a set of restaurant-like tables off to the side with its own concession area, which was closed at this hour of the late afternoon on a weekday.
The biggest surprise was that the auditoriums were not stadium-seating. They must have just missed this innovation when the complex was built. Instead the seats were the normal fold-up types on a shallow pitch. It felt almost like a let-down, given the outward appearance of the complex.
The two-hour movie had flown by. I had enjoyed it at nearly every turn, especially the acting of the two principals. Yet driving home in the dark, as I began to contemplate what I might write about it, I could hardly muster any intelligent thoughts beyond saying that it was a good movie. I suppose it may have been fatigue, being in the middle of my late season run of the Oscar contenders. David Carr of The New York Times recently noticed that the glut was even 'gluttier' this year. I wasn't the only one suffering from this abundance of cinematic riches.
But what to say about the movie I had just seen? When in doubt, simply ask the right questions. What do the characters want? We are complex human beings, each and every one of us, and the great actors of history can have particularly complex souls, but in the context of a motion picture, the narrative must address a specific subset of motivations in order to create a story.
The metaphor of the confrontation between the two principals---the t.v. journalist and the ex-president---was that of a boxing match, invoked by several of the characters at various times. Boxing is perhaps the oldest and most repeated metaphor of confrontation in cinema. The filming of it goes back to some of Edison's earliest test films in the mid 1890s. It is the sport best suited to the movie camera, both for its visual presentation and its metaphorical implications.
Both characters want to win this boxing match, of course, but what do they really want? Why is winning so important? For Frost, the motivation is transparent and revealed from the earliest moments of the movie. His career has been on the skids. After reaching the pinnacle of fame in New York with his own talk show, he washed out of American t.v. and was exiled to Australia. He wants back in the limelight. He is terrified that his moment has passed, and he will never reach the top again.
Nixon knows this about Frost, which is one of his great advantages. But what does Nixon want? It is tempting to say he wants the same kind of redemption as Frost---a return to the prominence he once held---but this a misdirection, a feint. Nixon knows that his time in politics has passed. There is no redemption in that particular sense.
His motivations are thus more cloudy and less obvious than those of Frost. They are not worn on the surface of his soul, but revealed slowly over the course of the movie, selectively and intimately.
Yet what should be an advantage for Nixon turns out to be his weakness. The reason is that this is television, and on television, the straightforward obviousness of Frost will triumph over the inscrutable byzantine complexities of Nixon. Nixon can win all of the initial "rounds" of the boxing match---which he does---yet it is not enough. All it takes is a single question, and a single camera angle, to knock out the champ.
The power of Frost/Nixon as a movie is arguably limited by the fact that it is such a close adaption of the stage play, and feels that way so much of the time. This doesn't make it an inferior movie, of course, just one that feels constrained slightly by the genre.
Yet the movie excels---a movie based on a stage play about television, directed by a childhood t.v. star. That it does so is mainly due to the principal actors who are impeccable in every scene (this is the corresponding advantage of being stage play adaptation). This sets up the actual knockout punch of the metaphorical boxing match---a specific lingering close-up of Nixon's face, silent as he contemplates the words he has just spoken. The facial close-up, a shot that is made for boxing matches---is what television is all about, and why Frost triumphs.
Yet driving home I still found myself contemplating what did Nixon want? Part of his redemption was his public confession, which both he and Frost knew he needed to make, in order to live out the rest of his exile in peace. But that was only the public part of his motivation. A man like Nixon still has deeper motives, ones that never surfaced in the interview.
The key scene of the movie, upon which the entire narrative hangs, turns out to be a late night phone conversation in which the drunken emotional ex-president makes his real confession to a bewildered Frost.
As I contemplated this scene in my car, I couldn't help think of how much more sympathy I had for Richard Nixon than I once did. He was the westerner, from a small college. He went East, to try to be among the elite and the powerful. He thought they had let him inside, but they never really did.
I now know how much we were all misled about him, and what the source of the lies were. Even Nixon was not completely aware of what was happening to him, and who his real enemies were.
Later that evening I pulled out the book I had recently bought in Brookline and read from some of the middle chapters:
But beyond political expediency, Prescott may have had good reason to expect Nixon to follow "suggestions" from the GOP establishment---a reason rooted in the earliest days of Nixon's political career.
The pieces were falling into place at last.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
On Tuesday afternoon I took the two-lane back roads through the towns of Harvard and Bolton, then jumped on the Interstate for a couple miles until I got to the Solomon Pond Mall just west of Marlboro.
Being the anti-fascist type, I strive to go to as many independent movie houses as possible. One benefit is that they tend to be quirky, unique in their own particular way. Corporate multiplexes in a mall have their own variations, but you have to make a specific attempt to appreciate them.
The cineplex at Solomon Pond Mall is owned by Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the nation. Over the weekend I had been reading about Regal in connection with the brand new appointed U.S. Senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. Among other things, he had put together the deal that created Regal from several other debt-swamped chains owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. Many liberal bloggers were scratching their heads over Bennet's appointment, calling him a "millionaire's candidate." But I guess there weren't enough Yale law school graduates in the Senate right now, so they needed another one to speak for the Centennial State, one who has lived there for only a decade. Welcome to 2009.
Bennet is nearly my same age. I couldn't help think that in some alternative universe, this appointment would have gone to a friend and high school classmate of mine, one who we all thought we be governor or senator, but who has cut most of the people out of his life who once knew him and believed in him.
The Solomon Pond Mall is quite a consumer mecca in this part of Massachusetts. I'd been there just before Christmas with my sister and her family, when we'd seen Bolt. Needless to say, there were quite a few more empty spots in the parking lot this time. I left my car amidst a sea of asphalt surrounded by towering ranges of plowed snow and walked into the lobby of the Anschutz movie palace. I plunked down seven dollars and seventy-five cents in cash for the matinee. If the billionaire wants my personal data, he needs to give me a bigger afternoon discount.
There was a smattering of people in the auditorium---one of those stadium types with a steep pitch. To my annoyance, a trio of high school girls decided to sit in my row, only one seat away from me. Have I not cultivated the grumpy old man image well enough?
When Slumdog Millionaire finally started, I settled in for what I figured to be two hours of fun entertainment. I was a bit skeptical, however, from all the hyper-glowing reviews about how this was one of the best, if not the best, movie of the year. Such publicity makes me defensive in a slightly passive-aggressive sort of way.
For the most part, I enjoyed the movie and had a fun time watching the story unfold. As you probably know, even if you haven't seen the movie, the story involves a young orphaned man who grew up in the slums and streets of Bombay/Mumbai, and who gets to appear as a contestant on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." At the movie opens, he is one question away from the grand prize, and he is being interrogated by the police on charges of possible fraud. As he explains himself to police, we get to see his entire life story up to the moment he goes on the show.
About halfway through I began to wrestle in my mind with the various story-related issues. The question that most intrigued me was: how would the same biographical story work without the framing story of the game show? That is, if you just told the story of his life in linear time, what kind of movie would it be?
It occurred to me that in such a case, the movie would become a standard and somewhat bland retelling of the same kind of deprived third world childhood stories we have seen since the days of Italian postwar neorealism. It would be one of those quiet sentimental foreign movies that "touches your heart" and that comes and goes from art theaters in a week.
This realization made me suspect the gag of the game show framing plot as being too much of a superficial gloss. This realization itself was not necessarily a bad thing, since the plot itself is driven by a similar suspicion, namely that the young man is cheating. Thus we have a narrative-level mirror to the question of whether or not the movie itself is a cheat.
Slumdog is obviously meant to be a parable about the rise of contemporary India. The character goes from scrounging in a garbage dump to working in a modern call center. Was the movie suggesting that this new incarnation of India was itself somehow phony?
In the end, I do not think it was clever enough to grapple with an answer to this half-intended question. Or if it was, it threw in the towel, completely wrapping itself in the fantasy premise of the framing story and its fairy-tale climax. There's nothing inherently wrong with that from a story point-of-view, but it makes the movie significantly less powerful as a social statement than it could have been. The thematic level of the movie, which could have stayed on the high level of the nation itself, seemed to degrade in the end to "the power of true love, faith, and destiny."
The biggest flaw in the movie is the essential passiveness of the main character, who makes few critical decisions in his life, but simply floats through much of the story as if observing it. As a protagonist, he is a weak symbol of the nation.
One can argue that the actual hidden protagonist of the movie is the main character's older brother, Salim, who lives out a more reality-based version of what happens to children who grow up in the garbage heaps of Mumbai. His narrative is the real narrative of the movie, and his fate is the real climax, one that we unfortunately hardly notice, as it plays out soundlessly as a sideshow to climax of the game show framing story and its Bollywood epilogue.
I won't deny that this movie made me think about India deeply, but its lack of narrative power based on its indulgence in the fairy tale aspect, the passiveness of the main character, and its whitewash of the actual underlying narrative, all rendered it less than fully aware of its own artistic messages. It's still a good film in many ways, to be sure, and it was great fun to watch it. I wouldn't discourage anyone from going to see it, so long as you like fairy tales. But best movie of 2008? My final answer is no way.
Being the anti-fascist type, I strive to go to as many independent movie houses as possible. One benefit is that they tend to be quirky, unique in their own particular way. Corporate multiplexes in a mall have their own variations, but you have to make a specific attempt to appreciate them.
The cineplex at Solomon Pond Mall is owned by Regal Entertainment Group, the largest theater chain in the nation. Over the weekend I had been reading about Regal in connection with the brand new appointed U.S. Senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet. Among other things, he had put together the deal that created Regal from several other debt-swamped chains owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. Many liberal bloggers were scratching their heads over Bennet's appointment, calling him a "millionaire's candidate." But I guess there weren't enough Yale law school graduates in the Senate right now, so they needed another one to speak for the Centennial State, one who has lived there for only a decade. Welcome to 2009.
Bennet is nearly my same age. I couldn't help think that in some alternative universe, this appointment would have gone to a friend and high school classmate of mine, one who we all thought we be governor or senator, but who has cut most of the people out of his life who once knew him and believed in him.
The Solomon Pond Mall is quite a consumer mecca in this part of Massachusetts. I'd been there just before Christmas with my sister and her family, when we'd seen Bolt. Needless to say, there were quite a few more empty spots in the parking lot this time. I left my car amidst a sea of asphalt surrounded by towering ranges of plowed snow and walked into the lobby of the Anschutz movie palace. I plunked down seven dollars and seventy-five cents in cash for the matinee. If the billionaire wants my personal data, he needs to give me a bigger afternoon discount.
There was a smattering of people in the auditorium---one of those stadium types with a steep pitch. To my annoyance, a trio of high school girls decided to sit in my row, only one seat away from me. Have I not cultivated the grumpy old man image well enough?
When Slumdog Millionaire finally started, I settled in for what I figured to be two hours of fun entertainment. I was a bit skeptical, however, from all the hyper-glowing reviews about how this was one of the best, if not the best, movie of the year. Such publicity makes me defensive in a slightly passive-aggressive sort of way.
For the most part, I enjoyed the movie and had a fun time watching the story unfold. As you probably know, even if you haven't seen the movie, the story involves a young orphaned man who grew up in the slums and streets of Bombay/Mumbai, and who gets to appear as a contestant on India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." At the movie opens, he is one question away from the grand prize, and he is being interrogated by the police on charges of possible fraud. As he explains himself to police, we get to see his entire life story up to the moment he goes on the show.
About halfway through I began to wrestle in my mind with the various story-related issues. The question that most intrigued me was: how would the same biographical story work without the framing story of the game show? That is, if you just told the story of his life in linear time, what kind of movie would it be?
It occurred to me that in such a case, the movie would become a standard and somewhat bland retelling of the same kind of deprived third world childhood stories we have seen since the days of Italian postwar neorealism. It would be one of those quiet sentimental foreign movies that "touches your heart" and that comes and goes from art theaters in a week.
This realization made me suspect the gag of the game show framing plot as being too much of a superficial gloss. This realization itself was not necessarily a bad thing, since the plot itself is driven by a similar suspicion, namely that the young man is cheating. Thus we have a narrative-level mirror to the question of whether or not the movie itself is a cheat.
Slumdog is obviously meant to be a parable about the rise of contemporary India. The character goes from scrounging in a garbage dump to working in a modern call center. Was the movie suggesting that this new incarnation of India was itself somehow phony?
In the end, I do not think it was clever enough to grapple with an answer to this half-intended question. Or if it was, it threw in the towel, completely wrapping itself in the fantasy premise of the framing story and its fairy-tale climax. There's nothing inherently wrong with that from a story point-of-view, but it makes the movie significantly less powerful as a social statement than it could have been. The thematic level of the movie, which could have stayed on the high level of the nation itself, seemed to degrade in the end to "the power of true love, faith, and destiny."
The biggest flaw in the movie is the essential passiveness of the main character, who makes few critical decisions in his life, but simply floats through much of the story as if observing it. As a protagonist, he is a weak symbol of the nation.
One can argue that the actual hidden protagonist of the movie is the main character's older brother, Salim, who lives out a more reality-based version of what happens to children who grow up in the garbage heaps of Mumbai. His narrative is the real narrative of the movie, and his fate is the real climax, one that we unfortunately hardly notice, as it plays out soundlessly as a sideshow to climax of the game show framing story and its Bollywood epilogue.
I won't deny that this movie made me think about India deeply, but its lack of narrative power based on its indulgence in the fairy tale aspect, the passiveness of the main character, and its whitewash of the actual underlying narrative, all rendered it less than fully aware of its own artistic messages. It's still a good film in many ways, to be sure, and it was great fun to watch it. I wouldn't discourage anyone from going to see it, so long as you like fairy tales. But best movie of 2008? My final answer is no way.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Milk
One of the pet cinematic theories I've been working on is the following: the more postmodern the subject of a movie is, the more it can employ classical narrative techniques and structures.
Milk seems to be a perfect test of this argument. The subject here is the struggle for homosexual civil rights in San Francisco in 1970s, led by the title character. You can hardly get farther away from the pre-1960s subject matter than that.
Consequently, one might expect Gus Van Sant's biopic to fall back on classical forms, and indeed it does, to a such a heavy degree that I have not seen anything like it in a long time.
Certainly it employs classical Hollywood structure. For example, when Dan White, the assassin, makes his first appearance on screen, I looked down at my watch and noted that it was precisely at the forty-five minute mark, exactly where you'd expect it.
But the movie goes back farther, to classical operatic tragedy (specifically by invoking Tosca as a metaphor), and by extension, to classical Greek tragedy. The main character is truly a tragic hero is the Aristotlean sense. He is a "great man" whose flaw, a blindness of his character, leads to his downfall.
What is the source of his tragic downfall? It is obviously not that he is a homosexual in a time of repression. This is not a "flaw" that springs from hubris. Rather the flaw, as I read it, was Milk's intolerance of his former closeted self.
In his fight against the repressive Proposition 6 in 1978, Milk became the prophet of "coming out," urging all gays to tell their family members and co-workers of their orientation on the grounds that if a straight person personally knew a gay person, they would never vote to take away gay rights.
Milk sees Dan White (the eventual assassin, played by Josh Brolin) as possibly closeted, and suggests it is very reason for White's conservative intolerance. White is no Iago, however, and Brolin makes him highly sympathetic. White tries repeatedly to reach out to Milk, attempting to find common ground both politically and personally, and each time Milk rejects him with increasing intolerance. At first it is only jovial, as Milk makes arguably inappropriate remarks at the christening of White's son. As time goes on, Milk's rejection of White becomes increasingly angry and obstinate.
The key scene is at Milk's forty-eighth birthday party, where a drunken White attempts to tell Milk how much he has learned from the gay supervisor (about what specifically, we never learn). Milk's rejection of White in this moment is an exact parallel to the scene at the beginning of the film, in the New York Subway on Milk's fortieth birthday, which effectively was Milk's own coming out as he kisses his future partner Scotty (James Franco) in public.
Milk is thus repressing his own former repression, and because of this, he can extend White no sympathy at all, even as he jovially debates with the conservative fundamentalists who are behind Proposition 6. That particular ballot initiative was about depriving gays of their livelihood, yet when it comes to White's own salary, Milk will not take a harmless political risk to help White support his family. In his taped monologue made shortly before his death, Milk states "you have to give them hope," yet he denies all such hope to White in regard to getting back his job as supervisor.
The cement that makes this tragedy is the linking of this flaw to the actual "greatness" of the man as an actor on the stage of history. One can hardly imagine Milk to achieved what he did, without having had this particular flaw. This makes his downfall an inevitable consequence of his rise, once the hand of fickle fate is introduced to put White on the supervisor board beside him.
In some ways, this felt like it could have been written by Shakespeare. I have no idea if this is really what happened between these men, but that's not the point. It was an absolutely brilliant way to tell a story about the downfall of a great man, while also telling an entertaining story about an important episode of history.
I saw Milk in Worcester at the Showcase Cinema and it was completely packed, mostly with older couples. I wonder if this movie will ever get to break out in a larger release. I've read that at least one of the major theater chains is refusing to show it because of its subject matter. I guess classical tragedy is still potent in 2008.
One final note: Anita Bryant appears in the movie as her actual self, in film footage from the time. This was a wise move by Van Sant, since there is not an actress alive today who could possibly capture the malevolent psychopathic gleam in Bryant's eyes as she speaks about God's laws and homosexuality.
Milk seems to be a perfect test of this argument. The subject here is the struggle for homosexual civil rights in San Francisco in 1970s, led by the title character. You can hardly get farther away from the pre-1960s subject matter than that.
Consequently, one might expect Gus Van Sant's biopic to fall back on classical forms, and indeed it does, to a such a heavy degree that I have not seen anything like it in a long time.
Certainly it employs classical Hollywood structure. For example, when Dan White, the assassin, makes his first appearance on screen, I looked down at my watch and noted that it was precisely at the forty-five minute mark, exactly where you'd expect it.
But the movie goes back farther, to classical operatic tragedy (specifically by invoking Tosca as a metaphor), and by extension, to classical Greek tragedy. The main character is truly a tragic hero is the Aristotlean sense. He is a "great man" whose flaw, a blindness of his character, leads to his downfall.
What is the source of his tragic downfall? It is obviously not that he is a homosexual in a time of repression. This is not a "flaw" that springs from hubris. Rather the flaw, as I read it, was Milk's intolerance of his former closeted self.
In his fight against the repressive Proposition 6 in 1978, Milk became the prophet of "coming out," urging all gays to tell their family members and co-workers of their orientation on the grounds that if a straight person personally knew a gay person, they would never vote to take away gay rights.
Milk sees Dan White (the eventual assassin, played by Josh Brolin) as possibly closeted, and suggests it is very reason for White's conservative intolerance. White is no Iago, however, and Brolin makes him highly sympathetic. White tries repeatedly to reach out to Milk, attempting to find common ground both politically and personally, and each time Milk rejects him with increasing intolerance. At first it is only jovial, as Milk makes arguably inappropriate remarks at the christening of White's son. As time goes on, Milk's rejection of White becomes increasingly angry and obstinate.
The key scene is at Milk's forty-eighth birthday party, where a drunken White attempts to tell Milk how much he has learned from the gay supervisor (about what specifically, we never learn). Milk's rejection of White in this moment is an exact parallel to the scene at the beginning of the film, in the New York Subway on Milk's fortieth birthday, which effectively was Milk's own coming out as he kisses his future partner Scotty (James Franco) in public.
Milk is thus repressing his own former repression, and because of this, he can extend White no sympathy at all, even as he jovially debates with the conservative fundamentalists who are behind Proposition 6. That particular ballot initiative was about depriving gays of their livelihood, yet when it comes to White's own salary, Milk will not take a harmless political risk to help White support his family. In his taped monologue made shortly before his death, Milk states "you have to give them hope," yet he denies all such hope to White in regard to getting back his job as supervisor.
The cement that makes this tragedy is the linking of this flaw to the actual "greatness" of the man as an actor on the stage of history. One can hardly imagine Milk to achieved what he did, without having had this particular flaw. This makes his downfall an inevitable consequence of his rise, once the hand of fickle fate is introduced to put White on the supervisor board beside him.
In some ways, this felt like it could have been written by Shakespeare. I have no idea if this is really what happened between these men, but that's not the point. It was an absolutely brilliant way to tell a story about the downfall of a great man, while also telling an entertaining story about an important episode of history.
I saw Milk in Worcester at the Showcase Cinema and it was completely packed, mostly with older couples. I wonder if this movie will ever get to break out in a larger release. I've read that at least one of the major theater chains is refusing to show it because of its subject matter. I guess classical tragedy is still potent in 2008.
One final note: Anita Bryant appears in the movie as her actual self, in film footage from the time. This was a wise move by Van Sant, since there is not an actress alive today who could possibly capture the malevolent psychopathic gleam in Bryant's eyes as she speaks about God's laws and homosexuality.
Friday, January 2, 2009
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
As I drove home from Leominster in the dark this evening, I meditated on the film I just saw. I couldn't quite put it together yet. Was it a great film? It would take time to figure it out, to let the emotions sink in. Maybe by next week, or next month, I could decide. Was my very hesitation on this issue a sign of the power of the film, despite its obvious gag-based plot?
First things first: the special effects and make-up (not sure where one left off and the other began) were amazing. Oscars will be flowing in these categories come February.
In some ways the movie just blew my mind. What did it most was the framing story. Something happened to the United States in World War I---the war that never ended. History was altered, and time was warped into some kind of antithetical flow of itself. It was finally stopped when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Amazing. Just amazing. It spoke directly to me, like a private laser beam, almost making me sputter in disbelief at the power of art to broadcast the lurking hidden truths that are swirling out there in the collectivity of our souls.
The most powerful themes of the movie seemed to be about the universality of loneliness, and the denial of its existence within our culture. I've come to believe this is the most repressed cultural issue, and any movie that tackles it head-on gets an automatic upgrade in my book.
But it went beyond a simple analysis to link this theme to another hidden issue of our time, one that I've seen crop up in movies repeatedly over the last decade in almost cryptic form, namely the issue of intergenerational love, both in platonic and erotic form.
It is perhaps the great hidden taboo, and perhaps the source of great loneliness around us---the utter stratification of our society by age. It is so pervasive that we have come to see it as completely natural. Yet by historical standards it is very un-natural. It is arguably the reason that aging has become the greatest source of terror to many of us, since it automatically condemns us to increased removal and isolation from the things that once seemed to be the source of life and joy to us.
It's worth pointing out that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the second cryptic presentation of intergenerational romantic relationships to emerge in the last months of this year. In many ways, Twilight was based on the same theme. How so? Because the story, if taken literally, is about a romance between a 17-year-old girl and a 104-year-old man (or man-like entity at least). Before you say that it doesn't matter, consider this: would the story have worked as well if he weren't that old, if he were, say, an immature vampire? Moreover, would it have been the same if it were the other way around: a 17-year-old boy and a 104-year-old-but-still-beautiful female vampire?
The power of the gag of the Benjamin Button is that allows an examination of the issue of age-definition from multiple facets and angles. The film took full advantage of it to create a powerful dissertation on how age defines us and limits us, at times so arbitrarily, making every era of our life needlessly more tragic than it could be.
In that respect, the most poignant moment in the movie is when Benjamin (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), are both in their early forties, nearly the same age. For a few brief years, the barriers of circumstance that have kept them apart are lifted. They are happy, and she is able to conceive a child.
I couldn't help but thinking of how this has become such a dominant image in our culture---the idea that when husband and wife both must give full time to their careers, there is but a small window when it all must come together, in one's late Thirties or early Forties, when one finally has a limited autonomy, when fading youth is still in living memory, when one must seize the last opportunity for happiness, to make a mad scramble for fertility before the clock runs out. It is millennial America in a nutshell.
There were a few historical anachronisms in Benjamin Button that rattled me. First was the idea that the war in Europe began with Pearl Harbor. In Russia? WTF? What a stupid dumbing down of history for American audiences to digest. Can't they give us the real thing anymore? Also the racial relationships in the movie seemed to strain credibility even under the license of revisionism. The movie's escape valve in this respect is that it is set in New Orleans, which operated by its own set of rules to a certain degree. But in any case I forgive the film for these slight failings.
When I bought my ticket this evening, there were signs indicating the heat was off in several of the auditoriums. I was afraid that the movie would drag out and be unbearable, but the story keep my attention the whole time. If nothing else, it was simply good storytelling.
Literature fans will note that the movie really is nothing like the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I read a couple weeks ago. In this case at least, this is a very good thing, since the short story is fairly vacuous. I really couldn't figure out what they were going to do with it, but they sure did make something. The screenplay used only the barest premise of the story around which to construct entirely new layers of plot and character.
When I first saw the trailer to this movie last summer, I was sure it was going to be a sentimental wreck. I'd even taken to calling it The Curious Case of Beavis and Butthead. I take it all back...for now...I think.
First things first: the special effects and make-up (not sure where one left off and the other began) were amazing. Oscars will be flowing in these categories come February.
In some ways the movie just blew my mind. What did it most was the framing story. Something happened to the United States in World War I---the war that never ended. History was altered, and time was warped into some kind of antithetical flow of itself. It was finally stopped when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. Amazing. Just amazing. It spoke directly to me, like a private laser beam, almost making me sputter in disbelief at the power of art to broadcast the lurking hidden truths that are swirling out there in the collectivity of our souls.
The most powerful themes of the movie seemed to be about the universality of loneliness, and the denial of its existence within our culture. I've come to believe this is the most repressed cultural issue, and any movie that tackles it head-on gets an automatic upgrade in my book.
But it went beyond a simple analysis to link this theme to another hidden issue of our time, one that I've seen crop up in movies repeatedly over the last decade in almost cryptic form, namely the issue of intergenerational love, both in platonic and erotic form.
It is perhaps the great hidden taboo, and perhaps the source of great loneliness around us---the utter stratification of our society by age. It is so pervasive that we have come to see it as completely natural. Yet by historical standards it is very un-natural. It is arguably the reason that aging has become the greatest source of terror to many of us, since it automatically condemns us to increased removal and isolation from the things that once seemed to be the source of life and joy to us.
It's worth pointing out that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is the second cryptic presentation of intergenerational romantic relationships to emerge in the last months of this year. In many ways, Twilight was based on the same theme. How so? Because the story, if taken literally, is about a romance between a 17-year-old girl and a 104-year-old man (or man-like entity at least). Before you say that it doesn't matter, consider this: would the story have worked as well if he weren't that old, if he were, say, an immature vampire? Moreover, would it have been the same if it were the other way around: a 17-year-old boy and a 104-year-old-but-still-beautiful female vampire?
The power of the gag of the Benjamin Button is that allows an examination of the issue of age-definition from multiple facets and angles. The film took full advantage of it to create a powerful dissertation on how age defines us and limits us, at times so arbitrarily, making every era of our life needlessly more tragic than it could be.
In that respect, the most poignant moment in the movie is when Benjamin (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), are both in their early forties, nearly the same age. For a few brief years, the barriers of circumstance that have kept them apart are lifted. They are happy, and she is able to conceive a child.
I couldn't help but thinking of how this has become such a dominant image in our culture---the idea that when husband and wife both must give full time to their careers, there is but a small window when it all must come together, in one's late Thirties or early Forties, when one finally has a limited autonomy, when fading youth is still in living memory, when one must seize the last opportunity for happiness, to make a mad scramble for fertility before the clock runs out. It is millennial America in a nutshell.
There were a few historical anachronisms in Benjamin Button that rattled me. First was the idea that the war in Europe began with Pearl Harbor. In Russia? WTF? What a stupid dumbing down of history for American audiences to digest. Can't they give us the real thing anymore? Also the racial relationships in the movie seemed to strain credibility even under the license of revisionism. The movie's escape valve in this respect is that it is set in New Orleans, which operated by its own set of rules to a certain degree. But in any case I forgive the film for these slight failings.
When I bought my ticket this evening, there were signs indicating the heat was off in several of the auditoriums. I was afraid that the movie would drag out and be unbearable, but the story keep my attention the whole time. If nothing else, it was simply good storytelling.
Literature fans will note that the movie really is nothing like the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I read a couple weeks ago. In this case at least, this is a very good thing, since the short story is fairly vacuous. I really couldn't figure out what they were going to do with it, but they sure did make something. The screenplay used only the barest premise of the story around which to construct entirely new layers of plot and character.
When I first saw the trailer to this movie last summer, I was sure it was going to be a sentimental wreck. I'd even taken to calling it The Curious Case of Beavis and Butthead. I take it all back...for now...I think.
A Magnificent Week Ahead?
My post-Christmas scramble to see all the late December movies, and to catch up on lingering releases, has put me in marvelous position for the week ahead. Actually the broadcast of the Golden Globes is on January 9th, leaving with eight days to see the following eight movies that now remain on my list of ones showing in the Boston area.
1. Milk
2. Frost/Nixon
3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. The Wrestler
6. The Reader
7. Gran Torino
8. Revolutionary Road
What an amazing list---some of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2008. This should be some fun. I feel incredibly lucky and rich like a king.
1. Milk
2. Frost/Nixon
3. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
4. Slumdog Millionaire
5. The Wrestler
6. The Reader
7. Gran Torino
8. Revolutionary Road
What an amazing list---some of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2008. This should be some fun. I feel incredibly lucky and rich like a king.
Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in)
"Vampires!" I said, almost shouting in the din of the train.
The man sitting next to me looked at me with a blank expression. I tried to repeat myself, "It's about vampires."
He half-nodded. Maybe he hadn't understood me and was just being polite.
I had been minding my own business as the train rumbled through Cambridge when he had turned to me and opened the conversation. "So you all set for New Year's Eve?"
He was short, aged, with unkempt hair and wearing a parka jacket. He looked to have but a few teeth remaining in his mouth. He spoke with a thick Boston accent.
The old me would have avoided making any conversation, but I had resolved to be less grumpy and more friendly. What would Poppy do? (I mean, of course, the character from Happy-Go-Lucky. You thought I meant someone else?).
He asked if I was going to First Night, and I told him no, since I was living out in the countryside. When I didn't get off at Porter Square, he got concerned that I had missed my stop. I told him I was going to Davis Square instead. Why? To see a movie, I replied patiently. He asked which one. I told him: Let the Right one.
"Is that a Christmas movie?" He asked. I told him no. "It's about vampires," I said. He didn't seem to understand, so I had to repeat myself twice until I was almost shouting.
It was dark by the time I popped up above ground in Sommerville at Davis Square (map). The marquee for the Sommerville Theater was sparkling bright and obvious just outside the front door of subway station---my second easy find of the day. It's always easy on foot.
It was getting even colder, so wasted no time but went inside and bought a ticket. Like the Coolidge Corner, it was a hip renovated multiplex in a hip youth-driven neighborhood not far from Tufts University. But it was in a completely different style, the walls and staircases decorated with metal cut in oblique postmodern angles. The auditorium for my movie was down in the basement.
Most of the things I had read about this movie online had centered on a basic premise: Twilight was a teenage vampire movie for stupid losers, whereas Let the Right One Come In was a teenage vampire movie for sophisticated hipsters (like this). The latter was just such a superior movie, the orthodoxy went, that there could be no bridging the gap.
I detest this kind of pre-ordained rigidity of taste, and so I went into the theater with the intention of finding a way to appreciate it without it being at the expense of Twilight. By the end of the movie, I had discovered how to do it.
As a vampire movie, Let the Right One is certainly superior in many levels, but it is simply a different genre of movie in many ways. Yet both are vampire movies. What makes them similar?
I pondered this and arrived at a theory of narrative in vampire movies that suited me, namely that one can interpret vampires as a a projective fantasy of power which springs from an inherent weakness in the human protagonist. The vampires are, in a sense, an external manifestation of that fantasy, their characteristics being defined in opposition to the particular weaknesses of the human.
In Twilight, the weakness of the female teenage high schooler is her awkward loneliness at being thrust into a new school in a new town. The fantasy, externalized as an attractive male of the same age, embodies the seductive social aspects of vampirism, that of being "super cool," having one's own secret clique of beautiful people and being beyond the need to be popular. It is the ability to have all this and still remained an unspotted virgin.
In Let the Right One In, the weakness of the young male protagonist comes from being a victim of school bullies, and being ignored and neglected by his parents. The fantasy of power, manifest by a young woman of exactly the same age, shows up in the brutal and violent aspects of vampirism. It is a fantasy of blood-filled revenge, in the human protagonist learns to "acquire a taste for blood" that is mirrored by the literalness of the hunger of his vampire playmate.
If anything, this movie reminded me most not of other vampire movies, but of Taxi Driver, which embodies similar violent revenge fantasies by a helpless and weak individual. There's even a "You talking to me?" kind of scene involving a pocket knife instead of a pistol.
I once read that Roger Ebert viewed the entire epilogue of Scorcese's film as possibly the dying fantasy of the Travis Bickle character, who in his mind is redeemed for his actions. One could interpret the final scenes of Let the Right One In with the same eye, as the vengeance fantasies of a child being brutally murdered by children his own age.
Or you could look at it as a cool Swedish vampire movie. Take your pick. It works well in both cases.
The man sitting next to me looked at me with a blank expression. I tried to repeat myself, "It's about vampires."
He half-nodded. Maybe he hadn't understood me and was just being polite.
I had been minding my own business as the train rumbled through Cambridge when he had turned to me and opened the conversation. "So you all set for New Year's Eve?"
He was short, aged, with unkempt hair and wearing a parka jacket. He looked to have but a few teeth remaining in his mouth. He spoke with a thick Boston accent.
The old me would have avoided making any conversation, but I had resolved to be less grumpy and more friendly. What would Poppy do? (I mean, of course, the character from Happy-Go-Lucky. You thought I meant someone else?).
He asked if I was going to First Night, and I told him no, since I was living out in the countryside. When I didn't get off at Porter Square, he got concerned that I had missed my stop. I told him I was going to Davis Square instead. Why? To see a movie, I replied patiently. He asked which one. I told him: Let the Right one.
"Is that a Christmas movie?" He asked. I told him no. "It's about vampires," I said. He didn't seem to understand, so I had to repeat myself twice until I was almost shouting.
It was dark by the time I popped up above ground in Sommerville at Davis Square (map). The marquee for the Sommerville Theater was sparkling bright and obvious just outside the front door of subway station---my second easy find of the day. It's always easy on foot.
It was getting even colder, so wasted no time but went inside and bought a ticket. Like the Coolidge Corner, it was a hip renovated multiplex in a hip youth-driven neighborhood not far from Tufts University. But it was in a completely different style, the walls and staircases decorated with metal cut in oblique postmodern angles. The auditorium for my movie was down in the basement.
Most of the things I had read about this movie online had centered on a basic premise: Twilight was a teenage vampire movie for stupid losers, whereas Let the Right One Come In was a teenage vampire movie for sophisticated hipsters (like this). The latter was just such a superior movie, the orthodoxy went, that there could be no bridging the gap.
I detest this kind of pre-ordained rigidity of taste, and so I went into the theater with the intention of finding a way to appreciate it without it being at the expense of Twilight. By the end of the movie, I had discovered how to do it.
As a vampire movie, Let the Right One is certainly superior in many levels, but it is simply a different genre of movie in many ways. Yet both are vampire movies. What makes them similar?
I pondered this and arrived at a theory of narrative in vampire movies that suited me, namely that one can interpret vampires as a a projective fantasy of power which springs from an inherent weakness in the human protagonist. The vampires are, in a sense, an external manifestation of that fantasy, their characteristics being defined in opposition to the particular weaknesses of the human.
In Twilight, the weakness of the female teenage high schooler is her awkward loneliness at being thrust into a new school in a new town. The fantasy, externalized as an attractive male of the same age, embodies the seductive social aspects of vampirism, that of being "super cool," having one's own secret clique of beautiful people and being beyond the need to be popular. It is the ability to have all this and still remained an unspotted virgin.
In Let the Right One In, the weakness of the young male protagonist comes from being a victim of school bullies, and being ignored and neglected by his parents. The fantasy of power, manifest by a young woman of exactly the same age, shows up in the brutal and violent aspects of vampirism. It is a fantasy of blood-filled revenge, in the human protagonist learns to "acquire a taste for blood" that is mirrored by the literalness of the hunger of his vampire playmate.
If anything, this movie reminded me most not of other vampire movies, but of Taxi Driver, which embodies similar violent revenge fantasies by a helpless and weak individual. There's even a "You talking to me?" kind of scene involving a pocket knife instead of a pistol.
I once read that Roger Ebert viewed the entire epilogue of Scorcese's film as possibly the dying fantasy of the Travis Bickle character, who in his mind is redeemed for his actions. One could interpret the final scenes of Let the Right One In with the same eye, as the vengeance fantasies of a child being brutally murdered by children his own age.
Or you could look at it as a cool Swedish vampire movie. Take your pick. It works well in both cases.
Man on Wire
As the train pulled into the station just east of Concord, I felt an awkward flush of familiarity envelop me, as if catapulted back in time. The high concrete walls along the platforms, the station sign, the stairs leading up to grade level---they all took me back instantaneously to a different train station, in a different city, eight years ago.
It was a different commute too, with a different purpose. So much had changed, not only on the outside of my life, but inside my mind, spirit and soul. I looked at that other person, that other me, as some kind of blind wanderer, stumbling in a kaleidoscope glaze through a world of illusions. Back then I could only naively suspect things that I now knew.
It was Tuesday morning, the day before New Year's Eve. I had left the farmstead that morning at 10:26, driving the short five miles to downtown Ayer. I parked in a free commuter lot and walked two blocks to the train station behind the post office. I waited about ten minutes with a small group of other commuters, and at 10:46 A.M., precisely on schedule, the train arrived with loud clanging. I boarded and took an aisle seat. Within a few minutes, the conductor arrived and I paid the seven dollars and seventy-five cents for a one-way fare into the city, receiving a pink punched receipt in return.
Within a few minutes I took a paperback book out of my pocket and began to read. I had bought it a few weeks ago for fifty cents at a used book sale at the middle school in Groton, a highly appropriate place to find such a book. It was called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published in 1974 after a long court battle with the federal government. My edition had the expurgated passages removed, indicating the number of lines that the CIA had censored by court order. In the introduction by Melvin L. Wulf, Legal Director of the ACLU, I read:
The book itself opens with this passage:
I smiled to think of how in my youth I had once thought I was aware of what all this meant, and had filtered it out of my calculus about American politics as a relic of the 1960s, before Watergate exposed it all. I cringed now thinking that this very attitude had itself become the greatest gift of all to the people that Marchetti was describing. That's what put us back to sleep, that delusion.
It was while I was reading this book that the train pulled into that station east of Concord, and I had that potent flashback I described above. I had anticipated this very thing would happen, which is probably why I had avoided taking the train into the city for almost two months after arriving here. Once upon a time, I would have made it my very first priority.
At 11:43, the train reached Porter Square (map), where I disembarked with many other passengers. I climbed the stairs to lobby of the subway station, where I fumbled to buy a four-dollar fare card, having to force the dollar bills twice into the machine to get it to work. After finally succeeding, I fed my card into the turnstile, then took the long escalators deep underground. At 11:55, the inbound Red Line train from Alewife arrived, and I boarded it headed into downtown Boston.
I had been on the Washington Metro a couple months ago, but it has its own unique aesthetic. The Boston train felt like the old kind---a real subway---familiar once again, bringing back a second round of the same awkward nostalgia and time-confusion.
At 12:08, the train arrived in Park Center, where I climbed the dirty concrete stairs to transfer to the Green Line, catching the trolley-like C line towards Cleveland Circle. It slid westward through the underground stations while I stood in the steps of the door well until a seat opened up. I cradled my paperback book in my pocket without reading it.
After a few stops, the trolley emerged up into the daylight in the town of Brookline, crawling along the middle of Beacon Street, which I remembered from my dark foray into the city to see Religulous the month before. The train glided into each stop while I examined the apartment buildings and busy businesses along the street. At 12:19, we arrived at Coolidge Corner, where I disembarked at last, and crossed the street northward by the famous S.S. Pierce Building at the corner of Harvard Street.
With plenty of time to spare, my first order of business was to check out the theater location, and to verify the showtime. In the company of other pedestrians, I picked my way across the street at a zebra stripe crossing and found the marquee at the proper address. The ticket window was closed, but the showtime was correct. It was too cold to walk around much, even with the sunlight, so I figured I would duck into a coffee shop and read my paperback book.
This being Brookline, there was no shortage of coffee shops, but each was crammed with customers. As I walked down Harvard Street, I passed a bookstore, The Brookline Booksmith. It looked inviting, so I ducked inside to warm myself. It was an independent bookstore, with a mix of new and old books. At the back of the store, I found a rack of maps and decided to invest five bucks in a street map of Boston, given that I had finally made my way into the city by train.
I perused postcards from swiveling metal rack, selecting two identical ones showing the S.S.Pierce building. It was just after that when I turned and my eyes fell upon a book that made my eyes grow large with excitement.
It was a hardcover book, just out in print. I recognized the title from online reviews. I pulled it off the shelf and immediately began reading the dust jacket, then flipped it open to begin reading the introduction.
I could barely keep my hands from trembling. I had dared not hope that the book could be what it was---so thoroughly researched and documented. It looked to be everything I hoped it could be. Here at last was the missing pieces of the puzzle.
For three years Thor and I had poured over every piece of evidence we could get our hands on. Everywhere we poked and prodded we ran into the same names, the same small cast of characters, as we put the story together, as if solving a mystery, a huge one, to reveal what the true history of the United States had been over the last century. It became almost a running joke, how easy it all came together, how obvious the clues were, once you started looking for them.
But there were gaps, mainly centered on a single individual during a certain time span. He had been so good at hiding his tracks. In these gaps we could only suspect without the kind of evidence we needed, even though the circumstantial clues seemed so obvious. There were "conspiratorial" sources to be sure, books written in flush of excitement by "fringe" authors without the heft of journalistic solidity. But we had needed more.
The very first page of the book blew my mind.
A country we have barely begun to comprehend. It summed up in a few beautiful words so much of what I had been fumbling to express.
Holding this new book in my hand, I felt as if the author had cribbed our notes. But I did not feel anger or jealously, only overwhelming joy. It was as if all along, he had been working on filling in those very gaps, bringing all the pertinent evidence to the surface, and spelling out the best case possible. He had saved us years of having to do the same thing. Yet like so many others he himself seemed to stop short of solving the entire puzzle. It was as if it were still left to us to put it all together. To do so had become my ultimate reason for living, to become aware, to find out the truth, as best I could, and to tell the tale of what happened in a way that others could understand.
I wasted no time. There was no question but that I had to buy this book immediately. I would be able to think of nothing else until I read it. I walked swiftly up to the front of the store with my postcards and the map in hand. At 12:46 PM, I bought the whole lot for just under forty bucks. It felt like a bargain.
Not wishing to be picky, I ducked into the first eating establishment with open tables, which was a bagel shop next door. At 12:52, I purchased a small coffee and plain bagel with strawberry cream cheese, then settled into a small sunlit table by the window. After wolfing down the bagel, I spent nearly an hour straight pouring through the book, skimming to pick out passages as if I were selecting delicious bon-bons from a sampler box.
At one point I got out the two postcards and wrote nearly identical messages by copying a particularly funny passage from the book, one that I knew would be understood by those receiving the cards.
At 1:56 PM, I put everything back into the bookstore sack, bundled up and headed back into the street. Three minutes later I was across the street in the lobby of the Coolidge Corner Theatre purchasing a ticket for Man on Wire.
It was a movie I very much wanted to see---an independent documentary financed by funds from the BBC about Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who in 1974 became the first and only person to wire-walk between the tops of the World Trade Center towers.
It had been showing in Fort Collins at the Lyric Cinema the week I left on my cross-country trip in Septemeber. I had intended to see it the night before I left, but had gotten caught up in last minute activities. I figured I had missed my chance, but two weeks ago, to my absolute delight, it showed up in the listings for the Coolidge Corner. Now I was glad I had waited. It seemed like the perfect event, to come into Brookline to see it on the next-to-last day of 2008.
The theater itself was magnificent. Unlike the other indy multiplexes in Boston I had visited (The West Newton Cinema and the Capitol in Arlington), the Coolidge Corner Theater was fully renovated in a hip and cozy art deco style. In addition to popcorn, there were coffee and treats for sale at the concession. Posters on the wall advertised the upcoming special events, including one hosted by the guys from Car Talk.
The ticket seller directed me upstairs. The auditorium for the movie turned out to be tiny, only a small room no more than 150 square feet. There were less than two dozen seats in five rows, all sitting on a flat floor. It felt eerily similar to being in the first class cabin of a passenger airliner. I moved my seat in order to keep the heads of several other people in front of me from blocking too much of the screen. This was especially important, given that much of the movie would be in subtitles.
I knew about Petit's famous walk from having seen the eighth and final episode of Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film when it originally aired back in August 2003. At the time, it was almost too excruciating to watch the photographs of Petit in mid-air. But that was a different person who had watched that. Fittingly Man on Wire would delve into Petit's walk from different angles, revealing much that was not in Burns' documentary.
It opens in media res, on the evening before the "coup," as they called it. As if revealing a dire secret conspiracy, we follow the plotters minute-by-minute---Petit as his henchmen---as they infiltrate both of the towers for the last time. Petit, who is still alive and well, narrates much of it while wearing a St. John the Divine t-shirt. How fitting!
The movie then skips back in time, to when Petit first learns of the existence of the towers as a young man in France and resolves to walk between them. We follow his career as he walks between the towers of Notre-Dame in Paris, and across the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
What we learn that was not in Burns' short piece was how detailed the planning was for the operation. One does not do something as complex as wire-walking between the World Trade Center towers without a lot of expert preparation. It was also necessary to draft the support of insiders who worked in the tower and helped them to gain the proper access. It also took amazing luck to pull it off.
Another thing that the documentary revealed, almost as an epilogue, was how the event changed Petit's life in unforeseen ways. He lost his girlfriend and many of his friends in the aftermath that rendered him famous for a while.
But unlike the case with Burns documentary, I suffered no vertigo this time while watching the footage of Petit on the wire walk. Maybe it was because I had already seen it, so it was not as novel. But part of me would like to think that it's because I don't fear things that I used to fear---not in the same way I did back then.
At 3:52 PM the final credits ended and I left the theater in Brookline. There was so much yet to do.
It was a different commute too, with a different purpose. So much had changed, not only on the outside of my life, but inside my mind, spirit and soul. I looked at that other person, that other me, as some kind of blind wanderer, stumbling in a kaleidoscope glaze through a world of illusions. Back then I could only naively suspect things that I now knew.
It was Tuesday morning, the day before New Year's Eve. I had left the farmstead that morning at 10:26, driving the short five miles to downtown Ayer. I parked in a free commuter lot and walked two blocks to the train station behind the post office. I waited about ten minutes with a small group of other commuters, and at 10:46 A.M., precisely on schedule, the train arrived with loud clanging. I boarded and took an aisle seat. Within a few minutes, the conductor arrived and I paid the seven dollars and seventy-five cents for a one-way fare into the city, receiving a pink punched receipt in return.
Within a few minutes I took a paperback book out of my pocket and began to read. I had bought it a few weeks ago for fifty cents at a used book sale at the middle school in Groton, a highly appropriate place to find such a book. It was called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, published in 1974 after a long court battle with the federal government. My edition had the expurgated passages removed, indicating the number of lines that the CIA had censored by court order. In the introduction by Melvin L. Wulf, Legal Director of the ACLU, I read:
On April 18, 1972, Victor Marchetti became the first American writer to be served with an official censorship order by a court of the United States. The order prohibited him from "disclosing in any manner (1) any information relating to intelligence activities, (2) any information concerning intelligence sources and methods, or (3) any intelligence information."
The book itself opens with this passage:
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult---the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership extending far beyond government circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence---the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.
I smiled to think of how in my youth I had once thought I was aware of what all this meant, and had filtered it out of my calculus about American politics as a relic of the 1960s, before Watergate exposed it all. I cringed now thinking that this very attitude had itself become the greatest gift of all to the people that Marchetti was describing. That's what put us back to sleep, that delusion.
It was while I was reading this book that the train pulled into that station east of Concord, and I had that potent flashback I described above. I had anticipated this very thing would happen, which is probably why I had avoided taking the train into the city for almost two months after arriving here. Once upon a time, I would have made it my very first priority.
At 11:43, the train reached Porter Square (map), where I disembarked with many other passengers. I climbed the stairs to lobby of the subway station, where I fumbled to buy a four-dollar fare card, having to force the dollar bills twice into the machine to get it to work. After finally succeeding, I fed my card into the turnstile, then took the long escalators deep underground. At 11:55, the inbound Red Line train from Alewife arrived, and I boarded it headed into downtown Boston.
I had been on the Washington Metro a couple months ago, but it has its own unique aesthetic. The Boston train felt like the old kind---a real subway---familiar once again, bringing back a second round of the same awkward nostalgia and time-confusion.
At 12:08, the train arrived in Park Center, where I climbed the dirty concrete stairs to transfer to the Green Line, catching the trolley-like C line towards Cleveland Circle. It slid westward through the underground stations while I stood in the steps of the door well until a seat opened up. I cradled my paperback book in my pocket without reading it.
After a few stops, the trolley emerged up into the daylight in the town of Brookline, crawling along the middle of Beacon Street, which I remembered from my dark foray into the city to see Religulous the month before. The train glided into each stop while I examined the apartment buildings and busy businesses along the street. At 12:19, we arrived at Coolidge Corner, where I disembarked at last, and crossed the street northward by the famous S.S. Pierce Building at the corner of Harvard Street.
With plenty of time to spare, my first order of business was to check out the theater location, and to verify the showtime. In the company of other pedestrians, I picked my way across the street at a zebra stripe crossing and found the marquee at the proper address. The ticket window was closed, but the showtime was correct. It was too cold to walk around much, even with the sunlight, so I figured I would duck into a coffee shop and read my paperback book.
This being Brookline, there was no shortage of coffee shops, but each was crammed with customers. As I walked down Harvard Street, I passed a bookstore, The Brookline Booksmith. It looked inviting, so I ducked inside to warm myself. It was an independent bookstore, with a mix of new and old books. At the back of the store, I found a rack of maps and decided to invest five bucks in a street map of Boston, given that I had finally made my way into the city by train.
I perused postcards from swiveling metal rack, selecting two identical ones showing the S.S.Pierce building. It was just after that when I turned and my eyes fell upon a book that made my eyes grow large with excitement.
It was a hardcover book, just out in print. I recognized the title from online reviews. I pulled it off the shelf and immediately began reading the dust jacket, then flipped it open to begin reading the introduction.
I could barely keep my hands from trembling. I had dared not hope that the book could be what it was---so thoroughly researched and documented. It looked to be everything I hoped it could be. Here at last was the missing pieces of the puzzle.
For three years Thor and I had poured over every piece of evidence we could get our hands on. Everywhere we poked and prodded we ran into the same names, the same small cast of characters, as we put the story together, as if solving a mystery, a huge one, to reveal what the true history of the United States had been over the last century. It became almost a running joke, how easy it all came together, how obvious the clues were, once you started looking for them.
But there were gaps, mainly centered on a single individual during a certain time span. He had been so good at hiding his tracks. In these gaps we could only suspect without the kind of evidence we needed, even though the circumstantial clues seemed so obvious. There were "conspiratorial" sources to be sure, books written in flush of excitement by "fringe" authors without the heft of journalistic solidity. But we had needed more.
The very first page of the book blew my mind.
This is the story of a family we thought we knew---and a country we have barely begun to comprehend.
A country we have barely begun to comprehend. It summed up in a few beautiful words so much of what I had been fumbling to express.
Holding this new book in my hand, I felt as if the author had cribbed our notes. But I did not feel anger or jealously, only overwhelming joy. It was as if all along, he had been working on filling in those very gaps, bringing all the pertinent evidence to the surface, and spelling out the best case possible. He had saved us years of having to do the same thing. Yet like so many others he himself seemed to stop short of solving the entire puzzle. It was as if it were still left to us to put it all together. To do so had become my ultimate reason for living, to become aware, to find out the truth, as best I could, and to tell the tale of what happened in a way that others could understand.
I wasted no time. There was no question but that I had to buy this book immediately. I would be able to think of nothing else until I read it. I walked swiftly up to the front of the store with my postcards and the map in hand. At 12:46 PM, I bought the whole lot for just under forty bucks. It felt like a bargain.
Not wishing to be picky, I ducked into the first eating establishment with open tables, which was a bagel shop next door. At 12:52, I purchased a small coffee and plain bagel with strawberry cream cheese, then settled into a small sunlit table by the window. After wolfing down the bagel, I spent nearly an hour straight pouring through the book, skimming to pick out passages as if I were selecting delicious bon-bons from a sampler box.
At one point I got out the two postcards and wrote nearly identical messages by copying a particularly funny passage from the book, one that I knew would be understood by those receiving the cards.
At 1:56 PM, I put everything back into the bookstore sack, bundled up and headed back into the street. Three minutes later I was across the street in the lobby of the Coolidge Corner Theatre purchasing a ticket for Man on Wire.
It was a movie I very much wanted to see---an independent documentary financed by funds from the BBC about Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who in 1974 became the first and only person to wire-walk between the tops of the World Trade Center towers.
It had been showing in Fort Collins at the Lyric Cinema the week I left on my cross-country trip in Septemeber. I had intended to see it the night before I left, but had gotten caught up in last minute activities. I figured I had missed my chance, but two weeks ago, to my absolute delight, it showed up in the listings for the Coolidge Corner. Now I was glad I had waited. It seemed like the perfect event, to come into Brookline to see it on the next-to-last day of 2008.
The theater itself was magnificent. Unlike the other indy multiplexes in Boston I had visited (The West Newton Cinema and the Capitol in Arlington), the Coolidge Corner Theater was fully renovated in a hip and cozy art deco style. In addition to popcorn, there were coffee and treats for sale at the concession. Posters on the wall advertised the upcoming special events, including one hosted by the guys from Car Talk.
The ticket seller directed me upstairs. The auditorium for the movie turned out to be tiny, only a small room no more than 150 square feet. There were less than two dozen seats in five rows, all sitting on a flat floor. It felt eerily similar to being in the first class cabin of a passenger airliner. I moved my seat in order to keep the heads of several other people in front of me from blocking too much of the screen. This was especially important, given that much of the movie would be in subtitles.
I knew about Petit's famous walk from having seen the eighth and final episode of Ric Burns' New York: A Documentary Film when it originally aired back in August 2003. At the time, it was almost too excruciating to watch the photographs of Petit in mid-air. But that was a different person who had watched that. Fittingly Man on Wire would delve into Petit's walk from different angles, revealing much that was not in Burns' documentary.
It opens in media res, on the evening before the "coup," as they called it. As if revealing a dire secret conspiracy, we follow the plotters minute-by-minute---Petit as his henchmen---as they infiltrate both of the towers for the last time. Petit, who is still alive and well, narrates much of it while wearing a St. John the Divine t-shirt. How fitting!
The movie then skips back in time, to when Petit first learns of the existence of the towers as a young man in France and resolves to walk between them. We follow his career as he walks between the towers of Notre-Dame in Paris, and across the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
What we learn that was not in Burns' short piece was how detailed the planning was for the operation. One does not do something as complex as wire-walking between the World Trade Center towers without a lot of expert preparation. It was also necessary to draft the support of insiders who worked in the tower and helped them to gain the proper access. It also took amazing luck to pull it off.
Another thing that the documentary revealed, almost as an epilogue, was how the event changed Petit's life in unforeseen ways. He lost his girlfriend and many of his friends in the aftermath that rendered him famous for a while.
But unlike the case with Burns documentary, I suffered no vertigo this time while watching the footage of Petit on the wire walk. Maybe it was because I had already seen it, so it was not as novel. But part of me would like to think that it's because I don't fear things that I used to fear---not in the same way I did back then.
At 3:52 PM the final credits ended and I left the theater in Brookline. There was so much yet to do.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
With a few days left remaining in 2008, I wanted to get a few more movies under my belt, especially ones that had been out for a while. I wanted to start the year with a slate of recent releases instead of ones that had been hanging around in the theater for a month. I had made so much progress, and I was almost there.
Sunday was miraculously nice---over sixty degrees and sunny in Massachusetts. I just didn't have the gumption to spend any of it in a blackened indoor auditorium. Monday saw me with grand plans to see a pair of movies, but in the end, I decided to take it easy and limit myself to one.
It was to be another trip up to the tiny town of Wilton, New Hampshire, to their funky Town Cinema in the old Town Hall where I had seen The Secret Life of Bees at the beginning of the month.
The trip wasn't very far---less than thirty miles driving, but the road across the state line felt dark and spooky when I drove it last time, and that was before winter really set in. As I set out this time, I remembered that last time, coming home in the dark, I had hit a large animal in the dark, probably a raccoon or a fox, and later fishtailed a little on the ice that formed on a bridge after the huge rain that night. No wonder I had been less than enthusiastic.
To make it easier, I left extra early andthus had over half hour to kill when I reached Wilton. I grabbed a cheeseburger in a Greek diner that was open on Main Street. When I went inside the Town Hall, a little before showtime I was stunned to the see place was packed, both for the big auditorium where they were showing Marley and Me, as well as the smaller room, familiar from last time, that was showing the movie I came to see, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It seemed like everyone in town was there on a Monday night.
Almost every seat was taken, and the crowd was much younger than when I saw The Secret Life of Bees. I was scrunched by a window surrounded by teenagers, including the high schooler next to me who checked his text messages at least a dozen times during the show.
One of the quirks about the Town Cinema, at least in the small auditorium, is that the rows of fold-down seats are not bolted to the floor. Whenever I changed position, it warped the entire row near me. It wasn't uncomfortable, just quirky, like I said.
The movie---well, I guess if it's December, it must be Holocaust season, because there are three movies about it in theaters right now. This would be the first one of the three to be crossed off my list. I wonder which one will be the best.
I wasn't really looking forward to this film, not because it was a Holocaust movie, but because it was about children. There is always a danger of making this kind of movie just too damn precious. That was definitely the biggest weakness of Australia in my opinion: even though I enjoyed the movie, I got somewhat tired of the kiddie plot after a while. Children a simply less interesting inherently than adults as main characters, and if there is too much sentimentality surrounding the story line, it just begins to stink.
But Boy in the Striped Pajamas turned out to be exactly the right kind of movie for a child protagonist, because it used him to tell a story that was original concept, which was how he himself naively interpreted the war and the concentration camps. In other words, the story needed to be told from the child's perspective. We as the audience know more than the protagonist, not only because we can see the future, but because we know what is really going on at the nearby "farm" where the people wearing "pajamas" live and work.
The boy's father is the SS Commandant of the camp, played by David Thewlis of the Harry Potter series. It was great casting. Unlike the case in Valkyrie, he is the perfect Nazi mix of loving family man mixed with the cold psychopathy of the men who signed orders for mass executions. I couldn't help but be reminded of these photos of the laughing guards at Auschwitz that surfaced last year.
One of the criticisms I heard about Valkyrie that I was thought was entirely unwarranted was that Tom Cruise and the other actors didn't speak in a German accent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having actors speak in our vernacular without accents, so long as it is historical to some degree (or anachronistic on purpose). It is a perfectly legitimate directorial decision, one with long tradition in Hollywood going back to World War II itself. In the case of Boy, since this was a BBC production, that actors were all British and we got to experience the casual intimacy of mass cultural psychopathy through the disturbing accents of the English countryside. I thought it worked brilliantly.
The story revolves around the friendship that springs up between the German boy and Jewish boy of similar age who is inside the camp. They meet regularly at the barbed wire to talk and play, and through the meetings, the German boy becomes aware of what is actually going on.
From a narrative point-of-view, the critical story question becomes what will happen to the two boys. The possibilities are obviously that both will live, one will live while the other dies, or that both will die. I won't reveal which path the story takes, because the suspense of it was definitely part of the fun of watching the movie (especially given that we were automatically relieved of the character's "inner" suspense over the discover of the nature of the camps).
Of course the fate of the German child protagonist will depend of the critical decisions he makes as a character, ones that spring from both his naive nature and from his sincere and innocent desire to be friends with the Jewish boy. But since he is a child, in classical terms his fate must also rest with decisions made by his parents, especially by his father. The actions of one generation must affect the others. The success of this type of story depends to a large degree on the carefulness of this cross-generational stitching.
The best kind of connection is one that feels barely noticeable to the audience while it is happening. In this case the relationship between the father and one of his younger lieutenants (a form of a surrogate son) provides the parallel storyline in which the critical character flaw of the father arises, revealing his disrespect from the true nature of the family relationship, and his entire chilling lack of compassion. From the viewpoint of classical tragedy, one can argue that this is exactly the seed of character flaw that propels the movie to its final conclusion.
For the most part, the movie wound up avoiding the sentimental traps it could have fallen into. I found it to be utterly brilliant.
As for me, I managed to make it back home this time without hitting any animals, or sliding on the ice. But along the same stretch of road, there was another weird thing that happened: right after I turned off of Route 101A to head towards Massachusetts, I looked up and saw a meteorite streak across the sky. Except it was no ordinary meteorite. The tail was thick and brilliant, and the fireball itself glowed in a bright blue as it burned up. It looked like a comet falling to earth. I've never seen anything like it.
Sunday was miraculously nice---over sixty degrees and sunny in Massachusetts. I just didn't have the gumption to spend any of it in a blackened indoor auditorium. Monday saw me with grand plans to see a pair of movies, but in the end, I decided to take it easy and limit myself to one.
It was to be another trip up to the tiny town of Wilton, New Hampshire, to their funky Town Cinema in the old Town Hall where I had seen The Secret Life of Bees at the beginning of the month.
The trip wasn't very far---less than thirty miles driving, but the road across the state line felt dark and spooky when I drove it last time, and that was before winter really set in. As I set out this time, I remembered that last time, coming home in the dark, I had hit a large animal in the dark, probably a raccoon or a fox, and later fishtailed a little on the ice that formed on a bridge after the huge rain that night. No wonder I had been less than enthusiastic.
To make it easier, I left extra early andthus had over half hour to kill when I reached Wilton. I grabbed a cheeseburger in a Greek diner that was open on Main Street. When I went inside the Town Hall, a little before showtime I was stunned to the see place was packed, both for the big auditorium where they were showing Marley and Me, as well as the smaller room, familiar from last time, that was showing the movie I came to see, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It seemed like everyone in town was there on a Monday night.
Almost every seat was taken, and the crowd was much younger than when I saw The Secret Life of Bees. I was scrunched by a window surrounded by teenagers, including the high schooler next to me who checked his text messages at least a dozen times during the show.
One of the quirks about the Town Cinema, at least in the small auditorium, is that the rows of fold-down seats are not bolted to the floor. Whenever I changed position, it warped the entire row near me. It wasn't uncomfortable, just quirky, like I said.
The movie---well, I guess if it's December, it must be Holocaust season, because there are three movies about it in theaters right now. This would be the first one of the three to be crossed off my list. I wonder which one will be the best.
I wasn't really looking forward to this film, not because it was a Holocaust movie, but because it was about children. There is always a danger of making this kind of movie just too damn precious. That was definitely the biggest weakness of Australia in my opinion: even though I enjoyed the movie, I got somewhat tired of the kiddie plot after a while. Children a simply less interesting inherently than adults as main characters, and if there is too much sentimentality surrounding the story line, it just begins to stink.
But Boy in the Striped Pajamas turned out to be exactly the right kind of movie for a child protagonist, because it used him to tell a story that was original concept, which was how he himself naively interpreted the war and the concentration camps. In other words, the story needed to be told from the child's perspective. We as the audience know more than the protagonist, not only because we can see the future, but because we know what is really going on at the nearby "farm" where the people wearing "pajamas" live and work.
The boy's father is the SS Commandant of the camp, played by David Thewlis of the Harry Potter series. It was great casting. Unlike the case in Valkyrie, he is the perfect Nazi mix of loving family man mixed with the cold psychopathy of the men who signed orders for mass executions. I couldn't help but be reminded of these photos of the laughing guards at Auschwitz that surfaced last year.
One of the criticisms I heard about Valkyrie that I was thought was entirely unwarranted was that Tom Cruise and the other actors didn't speak in a German accent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having actors speak in our vernacular without accents, so long as it is historical to some degree (or anachronistic on purpose). It is a perfectly legitimate directorial decision, one with long tradition in Hollywood going back to World War II itself. In the case of Boy, since this was a BBC production, that actors were all British and we got to experience the casual intimacy of mass cultural psychopathy through the disturbing accents of the English countryside. I thought it worked brilliantly.
The story revolves around the friendship that springs up between the German boy and Jewish boy of similar age who is inside the camp. They meet regularly at the barbed wire to talk and play, and through the meetings, the German boy becomes aware of what is actually going on.
From a narrative point-of-view, the critical story question becomes what will happen to the two boys. The possibilities are obviously that both will live, one will live while the other dies, or that both will die. I won't reveal which path the story takes, because the suspense of it was definitely part of the fun of watching the movie (especially given that we were automatically relieved of the character's "inner" suspense over the discover of the nature of the camps).
Of course the fate of the German child protagonist will depend of the critical decisions he makes as a character, ones that spring from both his naive nature and from his sincere and innocent desire to be friends with the Jewish boy. But since he is a child, in classical terms his fate must also rest with decisions made by his parents, especially by his father. The actions of one generation must affect the others. The success of this type of story depends to a large degree on the carefulness of this cross-generational stitching.
The best kind of connection is one that feels barely noticeable to the audience while it is happening. In this case the relationship between the father and one of his younger lieutenants (a form of a surrogate son) provides the parallel storyline in which the critical character flaw of the father arises, revealing his disrespect from the true nature of the family relationship, and his entire chilling lack of compassion. From the viewpoint of classical tragedy, one can argue that this is exactly the seed of character flaw that propels the movie to its final conclusion.
For the most part, the movie wound up avoiding the sentimental traps it could have fallen into. I found it to be utterly brilliant.
As for me, I managed to make it back home this time without hitting any animals, or sliding on the ice. But along the same stretch of road, there was another weird thing that happened: right after I turned off of Route 101A to head towards Massachusetts, I looked up and saw a meteorite streak across the sky. Except it was no ordinary meteorite. The tail was thick and brilliant, and the fireball itself glowed in a bright blue as it burned up. It looked like a comet falling to earth. I've never seen anything like it.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The Spirit
Oy. In retrospect this was probably the wrong movie to be the sixth one I'd sat through during a thirty-two hour stretch. My mind grows numb just trying to write about ut. That probably would have happened anyway, no matter when I saw this movie, but it makes it extra hard.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the animation of the The Spirit is superb. If you like this type of eye candy, or are a fan of animation in general, then seeing this movie may well be worth your while. Go for it.
But twenty minutes into it, I felt a glaze over my eyes that made it hard to digest it all. Why the hell don't I care about these characters?
Here are some possibilities: it's the same retread story about the (phony) problem of "crime run wild on the streets" and a shadowy hero who fights it because the cops can't, and in which the hero and the villain are "twin" manifestations of each other (The Dark Knight, Max Payne, Punisher: War Zone). This particular storyline is like the Spirit himself: you just can't kill the son-of-a-bitch. The best we can hope for is to cut up the pieces and mail them far away from each other.
The movie wasn't so much a story, as the story of a story. To wit: "one upon a time there a movie plot. The movie plot had a superhero and supervillain. You get the idea, because you've seen this before, so I don't need to explain much further. The hero of the story was very, very noble and good. The villain of the story was angry and bad. They fought each other fiercely and eventually, at the end of the movie plot, the hero triumphed. The end (of the story of the story)."
But I tried, dammit, giving it my all to dig up a bit of salvation from this movie that didn't depend on visual effects. I guess I was just too tapped out. Moreover, I just couldn't help cracking up every time the Spirit launched into a soliloquy about "his city," each one of which seemed like a parody of the lyrics of "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The hollow fragmentation of the story and the characters is perhaps the real message of this movie. Maybe that's what it was really about---how degraded we are in 2008, not in a real street-level crime sense, but in a paucity-of-narrative sense. The hero was created by the villain just for amusement. Even the archvillain's henchmen are literally just clones, comic and moronic carbon copies who blithely follow robotic killing instructions, and who differ from each other only by the name on their t-shirts.
We have no real stories left, and thus we are dead in our souls like the hero, forcibly resurrected over and over against our will to watch the same meaningless plots over and over again. The only color in our world comes from our atrocious villains who have no motivation other the naked psychopathy, which itself is the last remaining thing we can understand as cultural coin.
In that sense, the best line of the movie comes from the archvillain, Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus (isn't that name ripped off from Spiderman?). Clad in an outrageous Nazi SS uniform, he tortures the unkillable hero. As he does so, he blurts out his motivation-of-the-moment: "I'm going to take over the world...and then everything WILL FINALLY MAKE SENSE!"
Indeed. I finally got it. And with that, I stumbled out of the theater, as if dug up from a grave, and drove my trusty black car into the night. My Christmas gift card was finally used up, and in doing so I'd seen all but one of the new releases that week. Three for three, two days in a row. My completely arbitrary victory was complete.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the animation of the The Spirit is superb. If you like this type of eye candy, or are a fan of animation in general, then seeing this movie may well be worth your while. Go for it.
But twenty minutes into it, I felt a glaze over my eyes that made it hard to digest it all. Why the hell don't I care about these characters?
Here are some possibilities: it's the same retread story about the (phony) problem of "crime run wild on the streets" and a shadowy hero who fights it because the cops can't, and in which the hero and the villain are "twin" manifestations of each other (The Dark Knight, Max Payne, Punisher: War Zone). This particular storyline is like the Spirit himself: you just can't kill the son-of-a-bitch. The best we can hope for is to cut up the pieces and mail them far away from each other.
The movie wasn't so much a story, as the story of a story. To wit: "one upon a time there a movie plot. The movie plot had a superhero and supervillain. You get the idea, because you've seen this before, so I don't need to explain much further. The hero of the story was very, very noble and good. The villain of the story was angry and bad. They fought each other fiercely and eventually, at the end of the movie plot, the hero triumphed. The end (of the story of the story)."
But I tried, dammit, giving it my all to dig up a bit of salvation from this movie that didn't depend on visual effects. I guess I was just too tapped out. Moreover, I just couldn't help cracking up every time the Spirit launched into a soliloquy about "his city," each one of which seemed like a parody of the lyrics of "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The hollow fragmentation of the story and the characters is perhaps the real message of this movie. Maybe that's what it was really about---how degraded we are in 2008, not in a real street-level crime sense, but in a paucity-of-narrative sense. The hero was created by the villain just for amusement. Even the archvillain's henchmen are literally just clones, comic and moronic carbon copies who blithely follow robotic killing instructions, and who differ from each other only by the name on their t-shirts.
We have no real stories left, and thus we are dead in our souls like the hero, forcibly resurrected over and over against our will to watch the same meaningless plots over and over again. The only color in our world comes from our atrocious villains who have no motivation other the naked psychopathy, which itself is the last remaining thing we can understand as cultural coin.
In that sense, the best line of the movie comes from the archvillain, Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus (isn't that name ripped off from Spiderman?). Clad in an outrageous Nazi SS uniform, he tortures the unkillable hero. As he does so, he blurts out his motivation-of-the-moment: "I'm going to take over the world...and then everything WILL FINALLY MAKE SENSE!"
Indeed. I finally got it. And with that, I stumbled out of the theater, as if dug up from a grave, and drove my trusty black car into the night. My Christmas gift card was finally used up, and in doing so I'd seen all but one of the new releases that week. Three for three, two days in a row. My completely arbitrary victory was complete.
Marley and Me
As I walked out into the midday winter sun after Doubt, I faced a dilemma. On the one hand, there was a reason why I rarely see more than one movie in a day. It is that I very much like to give each movie its own "breathing space" for that day, to let the emotional residue sink in, and to let the story play out in my head. This is especially true for masterpieces like Doubt. On the other hand, I really wanted to go for another three-movie day.
I went for the best compromise I could muster, which was to spend the hour-or-so break until the next round of shows to take a walk, and to linger in Dunkin' Donuts drinking coffee and meditating about what I had just seen. Still it felt like too short of a time when I was back in the ticket line of the lobby of the AMC multiplex, purchasing a ticket for Marley and Me. Perhaps the switch to comedy would be less injurious to the post-movie meditation phase than a drama.
This is the movie I had called "the dog movie" to my sister, while advising her that perhaps it was not as much a family movie as a romantic comedy. In doing so, I spoiled the movie for her, since I already knew the ending from clicking on this link (warning spoiler, but I'm going to spoil it below anyway, so go ahead, it's funny).
My hunch about the movie would turn about to be correct, but you couldn't tell that from the crowd. Marley and Me had turned out to be the biggest grossing release of Christmas Day, and the auditorium---the largest in the entire multiplex and the same one where I had seen Four Christmases all by my lonesome---was crammed full of families with young children, all toting popcorn and treats and filling up the aisles all the way down to the front.
I found a seat along the aisle halfway up the lefthand section, but like the day before, I found myself moving, and for exactly the same reason: the slow torturous crinkling of the paper sack as the children behind me fished out every last nugget of popcorn. When they started talking to each other as well, I leapt out of my seat and slinked into the fifth row, with the great big mugs of Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston looming above. Happy Holidays!
As I said, the movie sort of masquerades as a family movie about a dog. Really it's the tale of a contemporary man-boy in his attempt to finally grow up as he turns forty years old. Yes, that story, the one that's in half the romantic comedies made these days. The dog story serves as a platform on which to tell this other story.
The man-boy, like all postmodern men, has no direction in his life. He is being led through his life by his wife, who is the one with "the plan," which he dutifully follows, asking her what each next step is. Even in his career, he is adrift, being pushed and pulled in various directions by his wife and his grumpy-but-lovable boss (Alan Arkin brightens up any movie).
His lack of (classical) direction, even despite the passing years and the birth of three (gasp) children, will result in mounting frustration and anger from his wife. One of the best lines of the movie occurs when she is trying to get him to pick out a color for the paint in their son's room. "I could use a little help in making a decision here!" she screams. Such is the anguish of the postmodern woman, summed up in one sentence.
The dog (Marley) functions as a symbolic manifestation of his lack of manhood. The animal is undisciplined and unable to be disciplined. We learn that the wife is the true "master." The husband plays second fiddle, and is not even the Alpha Male in his own home. When it comes time to neuter the dog, it is of course the wife who must make the decision to "cut his balls off."
The dog even fades out for much of Act Two, while the movie focuses on the increasingly troubled marraige. The animal returns to prominence in Act Three, when the husband, having reached the Doomsday Age of 40 and feels his best gettin' laid years are behind him, begins to contemplate actually following through on something resembling a life plan. He actually makes a proactive career move, and the dog springs back into importance as he totes his family off to Pennsylvania to live in a giant suburban house with a sprawling yard. The man-boy is finally growing up.
But be warned: the price of seeing this movie is to be exposed to a horrible and hideous truth which may damage your soul forever (spoilers follow here).
Let me explain. As I sat below the big wide screen, I was right in front of a twenty-something young man with his date. At every sight gag involving the dog, he made a little braindead stoner chuckle, occasionally mumbling something like, "that reminds me of my dog, heh, heh." Believe me, this was a lot better than the crinkling popcorn sack.
As the credits rolled, I began to recap my thoughts. Here we had a movie, ostensibly about a Golden Retriever who has the great fortune of getting adopted by a loving couple who raise him with all the pleasures any dog could want, including getting fed, getting to run free, and being adored by children. He spends many years in the company of this family, with no real hardships. Eventually he grows old, very old, and his fur turns white.
As it happens (brace yourself), dogs do not live forever. They are mortal creatures, and eventually old dogs will pass away. Some, like the dog in this film, may be so lucky as to be taken care of, get second chances from the vet, and when the time finally comes, be put down painlessly with loving gentle care.
Shocking, I know. Well, it was too much for the twenty something behind me. As he scooted out into the aisle during the credits, he just repeating to his date, "That's the saddest movie I've ever seen in my whole life."
I went for the best compromise I could muster, which was to spend the hour-or-so break until the next round of shows to take a walk, and to linger in Dunkin' Donuts drinking coffee and meditating about what I had just seen. Still it felt like too short of a time when I was back in the ticket line of the lobby of the AMC multiplex, purchasing a ticket for Marley and Me. Perhaps the switch to comedy would be less injurious to the post-movie meditation phase than a drama.
This is the movie I had called "the dog movie" to my sister, while advising her that perhaps it was not as much a family movie as a romantic comedy. In doing so, I spoiled the movie for her, since I already knew the ending from clicking on this link (warning spoiler, but I'm going to spoil it below anyway, so go ahead, it's funny).
My hunch about the movie would turn about to be correct, but you couldn't tell that from the crowd. Marley and Me had turned out to be the biggest grossing release of Christmas Day, and the auditorium---the largest in the entire multiplex and the same one where I had seen Four Christmases all by my lonesome---was crammed full of families with young children, all toting popcorn and treats and filling up the aisles all the way down to the front.
I found a seat along the aisle halfway up the lefthand section, but like the day before, I found myself moving, and for exactly the same reason: the slow torturous crinkling of the paper sack as the children behind me fished out every last nugget of popcorn. When they started talking to each other as well, I leapt out of my seat and slinked into the fifth row, with the great big mugs of Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston looming above. Happy Holidays!
As I said, the movie sort of masquerades as a family movie about a dog. Really it's the tale of a contemporary man-boy in his attempt to finally grow up as he turns forty years old. Yes, that story, the one that's in half the romantic comedies made these days. The dog story serves as a platform on which to tell this other story.
The man-boy, like all postmodern men, has no direction in his life. He is being led through his life by his wife, who is the one with "the plan," which he dutifully follows, asking her what each next step is. Even in his career, he is adrift, being pushed and pulled in various directions by his wife and his grumpy-but-lovable boss (Alan Arkin brightens up any movie).
His lack of (classical) direction, even despite the passing years and the birth of three (gasp) children, will result in mounting frustration and anger from his wife. One of the best lines of the movie occurs when she is trying to get him to pick out a color for the paint in their son's room. "I could use a little help in making a decision here!" she screams. Such is the anguish of the postmodern woman, summed up in one sentence.
The dog (Marley) functions as a symbolic manifestation of his lack of manhood. The animal is undisciplined and unable to be disciplined. We learn that the wife is the true "master." The husband plays second fiddle, and is not even the Alpha Male in his own home. When it comes time to neuter the dog, it is of course the wife who must make the decision to "cut his balls off."
The dog even fades out for much of Act Two, while the movie focuses on the increasingly troubled marraige. The animal returns to prominence in Act Three, when the husband, having reached the Doomsday Age of 40 and feels his best gettin' laid years are behind him, begins to contemplate actually following through on something resembling a life plan. He actually makes a proactive career move, and the dog springs back into importance as he totes his family off to Pennsylvania to live in a giant suburban house with a sprawling yard. The man-boy is finally growing up.
But be warned: the price of seeing this movie is to be exposed to a horrible and hideous truth which may damage your soul forever (spoilers follow here).
Let me explain. As I sat below the big wide screen, I was right in front of a twenty-something young man with his date. At every sight gag involving the dog, he made a little braindead stoner chuckle, occasionally mumbling something like, "that reminds me of my dog, heh, heh." Believe me, this was a lot better than the crinkling popcorn sack.
As the credits rolled, I began to recap my thoughts. Here we had a movie, ostensibly about a Golden Retriever who has the great fortune of getting adopted by a loving couple who raise him with all the pleasures any dog could want, including getting fed, getting to run free, and being adored by children. He spends many years in the company of this family, with no real hardships. Eventually he grows old, very old, and his fur turns white.
As it happens (brace yourself), dogs do not live forever. They are mortal creatures, and eventually old dogs will pass away. Some, like the dog in this film, may be so lucky as to be taken care of, get second chances from the vet, and when the time finally comes, be put down painlessly with loving gentle care.
Shocking, I know. Well, it was too much for the twenty something behind me. As he scooted out into the aisle during the credits, he just repeating to his date, "That's the saddest movie I've ever seen in my whole life."
Doubt
When I pulled up in front of the Tyngsboro multiplex, it was still the flush of the bright sunny morning. I felt as if I were arriving at work. But heck, I wasn't going to see Tom Cruise or Will Smith or Adam Sandler. going to see a good movie now, with Philip Seymour Fucking Hoffman! Could it get any better than this?
Doubt---here's a movie that speaks my language. The setting is fall of 1964, in the wake of the Ur moment of American change---the Kennedy assassination, an event that is explicitly invoked by Hoffman's priest character in the opening minutes. Moreover, it is the very hinge of the changeover from the classical to postmodern in our culture, during the critical two-year span 1964-65 when broadcast color television debuted (see Chernus).
The pivotal nature of this moment is embodied in the lead character, a principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx, a hardened nun played by Meryl Streep. She is intolerant and mean, but perhaps with a purpose. She sees the world disintegrating around her and unshamedly fights to sustain it, even though she knows it makes her despised by her pupils. I can't root against her. She hates ballpoint pens, because they force the writer to press down on the paper like monkeys. As someone who can write only with Sanford Uniball 0.2mm Ultrafine pens, I completely understand this position. She knows that the easiness of technology will turn us into postmodern subhumans. It's a losing battle, and her soul burns from the torment of it.
Yet at the same time she is actually what she hates. The basic tenet of the classical paradigm is the Code of Honor. It not only a personal, individual code, but it is also an outward societal agreement. In the first respect, it governs what an individual will or won't do. In the second societal sense, it commands that we accept others (adults, at least) as honorable to their word unless proven otherwise. Her tragedy arises from the fact that she has lost sight of this, even as she claims to uphold the old order. She applies the prisonlike rules of the schoolroom to her fellow adults. She accuses without evidence, based solely on suspicion. The new era has truly begun, one in which we lost our collective presumption of adult honor.
But is the leap worth it? Do we deserve this loss? Is there something horrible going on which demands that we toss aside evidence and act upon suspicion alone? Which is the greater good, especially when the welfare of children are at stake? These are the 1964 questions that the movie raises, and which refuses to answer, because there is no easy answer, unless you are firmly committed to one camp or another.
This is not about how "truth is relative" or any postmodern crap like that. It's about (in part) the appropriate way in which we determine truth, and how that can depend on the character of the era in which we find ourselves.
I loved this movie. At an hour and forty-five minutes, it absolutely flew by. I had read the play by John Patrick Shanley last week, and was pleased to see how well he had expanded his own creation as director of the film, filling out the minor characters which are only mentioned in the play, but which do not appear. It was a both a perfect period piece of the mid-1960s, and a movie about the present day.
The only anachronistic touch seemed to be the utter rapidity with which Streep's character concludes that Seymour's priest has been sexually abusing the black child Donald. In the 1960s, such "shameful" ideas would probably been arrived at slightly more reluctantly, which perhaps was part of the problem, given what we know now. This treatment differed from the play script, and seemed more 2004 than 1964, but it is forgivable considering the need to communicate to contemporary audiences in such a short running time (On a side note, consider watching Samuel Fuller's brutal masterpiece The Naked Kiss, ironically from October 1964, for one of the few frank discussions of this topic from that era).
The acting was first rate. Hoffman is a national treasure, and Streep---my God!---gave perhaps her best performance of her career (although I haven't seen all her movies, so I can't say). Amy Adams is one of my favorites, being that she's a Colorado girl who got her start acting in high school there. Among the principals, she has perhaps the easiest role of the film, but does everything she is supposed to do. Viola Davis, as the boy's mother, has landed a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination.
Doubt---here's a movie that speaks my language. The setting is fall of 1964, in the wake of the Ur moment of American change---the Kennedy assassination, an event that is explicitly invoked by Hoffman's priest character in the opening minutes. Moreover, it is the very hinge of the changeover from the classical to postmodern in our culture, during the critical two-year span 1964-65 when broadcast color television debuted (see Chernus).
The pivotal nature of this moment is embodied in the lead character, a principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx, a hardened nun played by Meryl Streep. She is intolerant and mean, but perhaps with a purpose. She sees the world disintegrating around her and unshamedly fights to sustain it, even though she knows it makes her despised by her pupils. I can't root against her. She hates ballpoint pens, because they force the writer to press down on the paper like monkeys. As someone who can write only with Sanford Uniball 0.2mm Ultrafine pens, I completely understand this position. She knows that the easiness of technology will turn us into postmodern subhumans. It's a losing battle, and her soul burns from the torment of it.
Yet at the same time she is actually what she hates. The basic tenet of the classical paradigm is the Code of Honor. It not only a personal, individual code, but it is also an outward societal agreement. In the first respect, it governs what an individual will or won't do. In the second societal sense, it commands that we accept others (adults, at least) as honorable to their word unless proven otherwise. Her tragedy arises from the fact that she has lost sight of this, even as she claims to uphold the old order. She applies the prisonlike rules of the schoolroom to her fellow adults. She accuses without evidence, based solely on suspicion. The new era has truly begun, one in which we lost our collective presumption of adult honor.
But is the leap worth it? Do we deserve this loss? Is there something horrible going on which demands that we toss aside evidence and act upon suspicion alone? Which is the greater good, especially when the welfare of children are at stake? These are the 1964 questions that the movie raises, and which refuses to answer, because there is no easy answer, unless you are firmly committed to one camp or another.
This is not about how "truth is relative" or any postmodern crap like that. It's about (in part) the appropriate way in which we determine truth, and how that can depend on the character of the era in which we find ourselves.
I loved this movie. At an hour and forty-five minutes, it absolutely flew by. I had read the play by John Patrick Shanley last week, and was pleased to see how well he had expanded his own creation as director of the film, filling out the minor characters which are only mentioned in the play, but which do not appear. It was a both a perfect period piece of the mid-1960s, and a movie about the present day.
The only anachronistic touch seemed to be the utter rapidity with which Streep's character concludes that Seymour's priest has been sexually abusing the black child Donald. In the 1960s, such "shameful" ideas would probably been arrived at slightly more reluctantly, which perhaps was part of the problem, given what we know now. This treatment differed from the play script, and seemed more 2004 than 1964, but it is forgivable considering the need to communicate to contemporary audiences in such a short running time (On a side note, consider watching Samuel Fuller's brutal masterpiece The Naked Kiss, ironically from October 1964, for one of the few frank discussions of this topic from that era).
The acting was first rate. Hoffman is a national treasure, and Streep---my God!---gave perhaps her best performance of her career (although I haven't seen all her movies, so I can't say). Amy Adams is one of my favorites, being that she's a Colorado girl who got her start acting in high school there. Among the principals, she has perhaps the easiest role of the film, but does everything she is supposed to do. Viola Davis, as the boy's mother, has landed a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination.
Back-to-back Threepeats?
Friday was such an awesome day, allowing me to cut into the list of new releases. But there were so many new ones that I felt I had only made a small dent. Could I possibly do it again? Could I see three movies again, for the second day in a row? I even had a few bucks left on the gift certificate card my sister gave me.
On Friday evening I figured the idea would seem foolish in the morning, but when I woke up on Saturday morning, I had plenty of energy and decided to head back up to Tyngsboro again. Maybe I'd only see one. Maybe two. Who knows? I'd take it as it went.
At least I wanted to get there for the pre-noon showing again. Paying four bucks for a first run movie is just so sweet. After coffee, I put on my jacket and my three-year-old niece asked me "What movie are you going to see, Uncle Matt?"
"I'm going to see Doubt," I told her.
"Dow-ow-out?" she replied, quizically.
"Exactly," I said.
On Friday evening I figured the idea would seem foolish in the morning, but when I woke up on Saturday morning, I had plenty of energy and decided to head back up to Tyngsboro again. Maybe I'd only see one. Maybe two. Who knows? I'd take it as it went.
At least I wanted to get there for the pre-noon showing again. Paying four bucks for a first run movie is just so sweet. After coffee, I put on my jacket and my three-year-old niece asked me "What movie are you going to see, Uncle Matt?"
"I'm going to see Doubt," I told her.
"Dow-ow-out?" she replied, quizically.
"Exactly," I said.
Bedtime Stories
After the second movie of the day, I took stock of myself. Could I really make it a three-movie day? I had charged only ten dollars and fifty cents off the AMC gift certificate card from my sister. But another? I was in uncharted waters, but the answer was "yes."
After a heavy meal of back-to-back two hour dramas, I thought I needed a comedy for desert. There were several choices, but after Will Smith and Tom Cruise, it was just too tempting: I just had to finish up with Adam Sandler. It seemed perfect in a masochistic "I survived this" kind of way.
With an hour and a half break until the late afternoon show, I foolishly decided to drive up a half mile to the Barnes and Noble on the New Hampshire side of the state line. In the hellish post-Christmas traffic, I spent the next twenty minutes getting there, but unable to turn left into the parking lot, so I abandoned and turned around. By the time I got back to the multiplex parking lot, I had just enough time to grab a bite to eat and buy my ticket.
I was looking forward to Bedtime Stories like a crucifixion. Sandler is one of my all-time least favorite actors. If I weren't going to see every movie, there is no way you would catch me in the theater paying money for this, even with a gift certificate card.
Making it worse, the auditorium was crammed full of families with kids, making it hard to find a decent seat. "Serves me right for going to see a family comedy on the opening weekend." I settled for a seat close-in along the left-hand side. It took a few minutes to adjust to the angle.
After the previews, the Disney logo came up and the movie started. What happened after that can only be described as...magic. It must have been the Christmas seasonal spirit at work, because not only did I begin to enjoy this movie, but by the end of it, I downright embraced it.
Huh? Am I actually writing this? What happened inside that auditorium that could turn this Sandler-hating Grinch into a fan of this movie?
The story is about a young boy, the son of a Los Angeles motel owner from the old days, who grows up to be a handyman (Sandler) in the hotel which was built on the grounds of the previous motel. Already we have a wonderful metaphor for the transition from the classical era of Hollywood (old motel) to the postmodern (new high-rise hotel). But that's just the beginning.
When Sandler's character was a boy, his father (Jonathan Pryce) told him bedtime stories in which the boy was the protagonist. This is trick I learned ironically the last time I was in Los Angeles, helping some friends move. One of their sons fell and cut his forehead open. We wound up in the emergency room of the Pasadena hospital, and I was drafted to keep their injured son preoccupied with an impromptu story about pirates. Since I'm a horrible storyteller, I succeeded by making him and his younger brother the main characters, and letting him help create the story on-the-fly by repeatedly asking him: "So what do you think happened next?" Anyone with kids probably knows the same trick.
Anyway, in the movie, the grown boy (Sandler) is called upon by fate to babysit his sister's young children for a week, and circumstances (lack of television, i.e. absence of the postmodern) force him to tell them bedtime stories. Unlike his father, however, Sandler's character puts himself as the main character, and his stories suck.
Thus in narrative terms, Sandler represents the degraded contemporary man, who has not outgrown his childish egocentric nature. That he has been demoted from owner/manager (his father) to lowly handyman is a perfect outward expression of this.
The story will demand, of course, that he outgrow his latent boyhood and discover the principles of classical manhood as embodied in his deceased motel-owner father (who fittingly continues to serve as the disembodied narrator of the framing story). Likewise we know that in doing so, he will rise to become the manager of the sparkling postmodern hotel and restore justice to it. Moreover, since this is a romantic comedy, his newfound manhood and sense of honor will result in his finding the love of his life.
How will get there? Through the use of narrative, of course. Over the course of the week he spends with his niece and nephew, he discovers that whenever the children tell part of the bedtime story, those parts of the story find a way of coming true the next day. At first, being the inferior man, he attempts to exploit this for egocentric gain, but every such attempt backfires. But despite himself, his resolution to let the children tell the story eventually will win the day.
The "coming true" part of the story was where I felt danger approaching. From the trailers, it seemed like this movie would be crammed with willy-nilly magic, such as an improbable torrent of gumballs from the sky. I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that the movie remained within the naturalistic world, and that everything happens through the "magic of coincidence." Nothing wrong with that. The only truly goofy part of the movie are sight gags involving the CGI'd pet guinea pig, who may or may not be the actual source of the "magic." Leaving things up to doubt like that is very classical, by the way.
Thus the story is not only about the classical-postmodern duality (motel paradigm and decline of the son), but is explicitly about the power of narrative to restore the classical order in reborn form. Moreover it suggests that such narrative power is inherent in the human spirit (contained in the souls of children), and that humans yearn for storytelling as way not only to understand the world, but to shape their own lives in ways that seem like magic. The key is to let go of the idea of oneself as the lead character in the epic of the world. As a result, you can have the best of both the classical and postmodern worlds.
At the end of the movie, I couldn't help think that Sandler was the perfect choice for the role. Inside the strait jacket of Disney, he flourished. He should consider working only with Disney from now on.
When I got back to the farmstead, just in time for dinner, I told my sister and her kids about the movies I'd seen. My sister thought maybe they'd all go see a movie the next day, maybe "the dog movie." I set them straight with a better suggestion.
After a heavy meal of back-to-back two hour dramas, I thought I needed a comedy for desert. There were several choices, but after Will Smith and Tom Cruise, it was just too tempting: I just had to finish up with Adam Sandler. It seemed perfect in a masochistic "I survived this" kind of way.
With an hour and a half break until the late afternoon show, I foolishly decided to drive up a half mile to the Barnes and Noble on the New Hampshire side of the state line. In the hellish post-Christmas traffic, I spent the next twenty minutes getting there, but unable to turn left into the parking lot, so I abandoned and turned around. By the time I got back to the multiplex parking lot, I had just enough time to grab a bite to eat and buy my ticket.
I was looking forward to Bedtime Stories like a crucifixion. Sandler is one of my all-time least favorite actors. If I weren't going to see every movie, there is no way you would catch me in the theater paying money for this, even with a gift certificate card.
Making it worse, the auditorium was crammed full of families with kids, making it hard to find a decent seat. "Serves me right for going to see a family comedy on the opening weekend." I settled for a seat close-in along the left-hand side. It took a few minutes to adjust to the angle.
After the previews, the Disney logo came up and the movie started. What happened after that can only be described as...magic. It must have been the Christmas seasonal spirit at work, because not only did I begin to enjoy this movie, but by the end of it, I downright embraced it.
Huh? Am I actually writing this? What happened inside that auditorium that could turn this Sandler-hating Grinch into a fan of this movie?
The story is about a young boy, the son of a Los Angeles motel owner from the old days, who grows up to be a handyman (Sandler) in the hotel which was built on the grounds of the previous motel. Already we have a wonderful metaphor for the transition from the classical era of Hollywood (old motel) to the postmodern (new high-rise hotel). But that's just the beginning.
When Sandler's character was a boy, his father (Jonathan Pryce) told him bedtime stories in which the boy was the protagonist. This is trick I learned ironically the last time I was in Los Angeles, helping some friends move. One of their sons fell and cut his forehead open. We wound up in the emergency room of the Pasadena hospital, and I was drafted to keep their injured son preoccupied with an impromptu story about pirates. Since I'm a horrible storyteller, I succeeded by making him and his younger brother the main characters, and letting him help create the story on-the-fly by repeatedly asking him: "So what do you think happened next?" Anyone with kids probably knows the same trick.
Anyway, in the movie, the grown boy (Sandler) is called upon by fate to babysit his sister's young children for a week, and circumstances (lack of television, i.e. absence of the postmodern) force him to tell them bedtime stories. Unlike his father, however, Sandler's character puts himself as the main character, and his stories suck.
Thus in narrative terms, Sandler represents the degraded contemporary man, who has not outgrown his childish egocentric nature. That he has been demoted from owner/manager (his father) to lowly handyman is a perfect outward expression of this.
The story will demand, of course, that he outgrow his latent boyhood and discover the principles of classical manhood as embodied in his deceased motel-owner father (who fittingly continues to serve as the disembodied narrator of the framing story). Likewise we know that in doing so, he will rise to become the manager of the sparkling postmodern hotel and restore justice to it. Moreover, since this is a romantic comedy, his newfound manhood and sense of honor will result in his finding the love of his life.
How will get there? Through the use of narrative, of course. Over the course of the week he spends with his niece and nephew, he discovers that whenever the children tell part of the bedtime story, those parts of the story find a way of coming true the next day. At first, being the inferior man, he attempts to exploit this for egocentric gain, but every such attempt backfires. But despite himself, his resolution to let the children tell the story eventually will win the day.
The "coming true" part of the story was where I felt danger approaching. From the trailers, it seemed like this movie would be crammed with willy-nilly magic, such as an improbable torrent of gumballs from the sky. I was more than pleasantly surprised to find that the movie remained within the naturalistic world, and that everything happens through the "magic of coincidence." Nothing wrong with that. The only truly goofy part of the movie are sight gags involving the CGI'd pet guinea pig, who may or may not be the actual source of the "magic." Leaving things up to doubt like that is very classical, by the way.
Thus the story is not only about the classical-postmodern duality (motel paradigm and decline of the son), but is explicitly about the power of narrative to restore the classical order in reborn form. Moreover it suggests that such narrative power is inherent in the human spirit (contained in the souls of children), and that humans yearn for storytelling as way not only to understand the world, but to shape their own lives in ways that seem like magic. The key is to let go of the idea of oneself as the lead character in the epic of the world. As a result, you can have the best of both the classical and postmodern worlds.
At the end of the movie, I couldn't help think that Sandler was the perfect choice for the role. Inside the strait jacket of Disney, he flourished. He should consider working only with Disney from now on.
When I got back to the farmstead, just in time for dinner, I told my sister and her kids about the movies I'd seen. My sister thought maybe they'd all go see a movie the next day, maybe "the dog movie." I set them straight with a better suggestion.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Valkyrie
Crossing that godawful Will Smith movie off my list before the clock had struck 1:00 p.m. really put some wind in my sails. I was definitely ready for round two, and now I could begin cutting into the brand new releases that had come out the day before.
What to see now? I took a break by hiking a short distance across the parking lot through the heaps of melting ice to a Dunkin' Donuts, where I sampled their egg-and-cheese croissant. At under three bucks, it seemed like a really good deal.
By the time I got back to the theater, I had made up my mind. With so much energy and enthusiasm, and having weathered the worst of it, I figured I'd make it two-for-two with scientologists that day by seeing Valkyrie, the new Tom Cruise movie. How bad could it be really?
The only thing that turned me off was the idea of the inevitable atmosphere of the plot. I figured it would be two hours of on-the-edge-of-my-seat stomach-in-knots tension. It was something I had to be in the mood for, but it was just too tempting a target to cross off my list. So I waited in line again and bought a ticket.
The large-bodied woman taking tickets remembered me. "Making it a two movie day?" she asked. "So far," I replied.
It was showing in one of the bigger auditoriums, half-full by time I took my seat. About halfway through the movie, I had to relocate because the guy behind me was fishing out kernels of popcorn one-by-one from the paper bag, taking about thirty seconds each time with loud crinkling right behind my ears. In those cases, I always just give up and move. Well, at least it wasn't as bad as what happened in Philadelphia the day before.
As for the movie, well it was just damn amazing! Absolutely astounding! In two hours it managed to completely change the way I look at Nazis and World War II.
Before I yesterday, I had long been under the impression that Nazi Germany was a society filled with enormous fear and tension that the secret police would have you executed for the slightest demonstration of dissent. Among the sources of that foolish misapprehension were the dozens and dozens of wartime American movies I've seen, all of which were no doubt propaganda. For example, Hotel Berlin (1945) from Warner Brothers was about Germans in Germany during the war. Raymond Massey, one the great "heavy" character actors of all time, plays the dissenting "good" German. Until Valkyrie, it was one of my favorite movies.
Now I know the truth, that all that stuff about the Gestapo hauling people away for even the suspicion of dissent was all clap-trap. As Mr. Cruise thankfully points out, Germans were quite willing to express opinions against Hitler and the Nazi government. Sure, if they were planting a bomb inside Hitler's plane, they might get a little nervous, but if they are simply in the plot-hatching stage, there was no need to take any extra precautions other than closing the drapes when you were having conspiratorial meetings.
It makes me wander just how the Germans could have gone along with Hitler, given their officer corps in the 1940s was staffed with swaggering postmodern swashbucklers like Tom Cruise, willing to express their in-yer-face opinions about the Nazis to their superiors right on the battlefield. But then, the movie seems to indicate that other than the Jewish thing, the worst thing about Hitler was that he was a bad military commander.
He really wasn't much to be feared, all in all. Heck, all that stuff about Prussian stiffness was just soooo wrong. Forget about all those spiffy Nazi uniforms. His officers didn't even bother to stand at attention on the tarmack for him, but just stood with hunched shoulders like lazy high school students in rumpled poorly fitting wool clothes.
As for tension, this movie had about as much as The Apple Dumpling Gang. It seems that if not for a few missed screw-ups, the whole plot against Hitler would have succeeded on a grand scale, because so many people were willing to stand up to him. The ones that did never really were in much danger, that is, until they were being shot or hanged from meat hooks. What a surprise twist! Didn't see that coming at all. You'd think Hitler could have been a little more chill about it all.
In all seriousness, it really tears me up inside to savage a movie like this, since I wish Hollywood would make a lot more historical dramas than it does. Among other things, the story itself was decent. The script probably was OK. It was just seasoned with all the wrong flavor, pouring sugar where there should have been salt. Take a look at director Bryan Singer's filmography and you may sense why he was a poor choice, especially with out-of-control Mr. Operating Thetan Cruise chewing up the scenery. Despite Cruise's strutting, however, there were a few good performances that actually felt like they could have been German officers, including Tom Wilkinson. But god damn---that eyepatch!
Maybe I just missed the point of the movie. At the very beginning, the titles are all in German, and then are transformed into English. Likewise Cruise begins speaking in German as he writes his journal, then switches to English. Maybe this movie was intended as a "translation" of the Nazis into contemporary vernacular that Americans of 2008 can relate to. After all, we're the Nazis now, right?
What to see now? I took a break by hiking a short distance across the parking lot through the heaps of melting ice to a Dunkin' Donuts, where I sampled their egg-and-cheese croissant. At under three bucks, it seemed like a really good deal.
By the time I got back to the theater, I had made up my mind. With so much energy and enthusiasm, and having weathered the worst of it, I figured I'd make it two-for-two with scientologists that day by seeing Valkyrie, the new Tom Cruise movie. How bad could it be really?
The only thing that turned me off was the idea of the inevitable atmosphere of the plot. I figured it would be two hours of on-the-edge-of-my-seat stomach-in-knots tension. It was something I had to be in the mood for, but it was just too tempting a target to cross off my list. So I waited in line again and bought a ticket.
The large-bodied woman taking tickets remembered me. "Making it a two movie day?" she asked. "So far," I replied.
It was showing in one of the bigger auditoriums, half-full by time I took my seat. About halfway through the movie, I had to relocate because the guy behind me was fishing out kernels of popcorn one-by-one from the paper bag, taking about thirty seconds each time with loud crinkling right behind my ears. In those cases, I always just give up and move. Well, at least it wasn't as bad as what happened in Philadelphia the day before.
As for the movie, well it was just damn amazing! Absolutely astounding! In two hours it managed to completely change the way I look at Nazis and World War II.
Before I yesterday, I had long been under the impression that Nazi Germany was a society filled with enormous fear and tension that the secret police would have you executed for the slightest demonstration of dissent. Among the sources of that foolish misapprehension were the dozens and dozens of wartime American movies I've seen, all of which were no doubt propaganda. For example, Hotel Berlin (1945) from Warner Brothers was about Germans in Germany during the war. Raymond Massey, one the great "heavy" character actors of all time, plays the dissenting "good" German. Until Valkyrie, it was one of my favorite movies.
Now I know the truth, that all that stuff about the Gestapo hauling people away for even the suspicion of dissent was all clap-trap. As Mr. Cruise thankfully points out, Germans were quite willing to express opinions against Hitler and the Nazi government. Sure, if they were planting a bomb inside Hitler's plane, they might get a little nervous, but if they are simply in the plot-hatching stage, there was no need to take any extra precautions other than closing the drapes when you were having conspiratorial meetings.
It makes me wander just how the Germans could have gone along with Hitler, given their officer corps in the 1940s was staffed with swaggering postmodern swashbucklers like Tom Cruise, willing to express their in-yer-face opinions about the Nazis to their superiors right on the battlefield. But then, the movie seems to indicate that other than the Jewish thing, the worst thing about Hitler was that he was a bad military commander.
He really wasn't much to be feared, all in all. Heck, all that stuff about Prussian stiffness was just soooo wrong. Forget about all those spiffy Nazi uniforms. His officers didn't even bother to stand at attention on the tarmack for him, but just stood with hunched shoulders like lazy high school students in rumpled poorly fitting wool clothes.
As for tension, this movie had about as much as The Apple Dumpling Gang. It seems that if not for a few missed screw-ups, the whole plot against Hitler would have succeeded on a grand scale, because so many people were willing to stand up to him. The ones that did never really were in much danger, that is, until they were being shot or hanged from meat hooks. What a surprise twist! Didn't see that coming at all. You'd think Hitler could have been a little more chill about it all.
In all seriousness, it really tears me up inside to savage a movie like this, since I wish Hollywood would make a lot more historical dramas than it does. Among other things, the story itself was decent. The script probably was OK. It was just seasoned with all the wrong flavor, pouring sugar where there should have been salt. Take a look at director Bryan Singer's filmography and you may sense why he was a poor choice, especially with out-of-control Mr. Operating Thetan Cruise chewing up the scenery. Despite Cruise's strutting, however, there were a few good performances that actually felt like they could have been German officers, including Tom Wilkinson. But god damn---that eyepatch!
Maybe I just missed the point of the movie. At the very beginning, the titles are all in German, and then are transformed into English. Likewise Cruise begins speaking in German as he writes his journal, then switches to English. Maybe this movie was intended as a "translation" of the Nazis into contemporary vernacular that Americans of 2008 can relate to. After all, we're the Nazis now, right?
Seven Pounds
If I was going to see three movies in one day, I had to get started early.
The AMC in Tyngsboro had Friday matinees starting at 10:30 a.m. (only four bucks before noon!), so I hotfooted out of the driveway of the farmstead while the morning was still fresh. A half hour later I was in the parking lot of the multiplex. The traffic on Middlesex Road had been even worse than before Christmas.
First up: a release left over from last week, the one I had been dreading most: Seven Pounds.
Have you seen this yet? Has the ending been spoiled for you yet? Do you not care if it is spoiled? I'm assuming you said yes to at least one of those questions, because I have to talk about the story itself.
There is a scene towards the end of the movie in which Will Smith is in a bathtub full of ice while being stung repeatedly by a deadly jellyfish. He is writhing in extreme pain and agony as he dies. This pretty much describes how I felt for two hours fidgeting back and forth in my seat as I watched this movie.
Not that discomfort is necessary bad in a movie. It can be a good thing, if that is what is intended. But my discomfort was due to the fact that this movie is as close to being unwatchable as anything I have seen in a long time.
I won't go into every detail about why it sucks, because frankly, I don't want to waste so much time typing. Just go ahead and read A. O. Scott's review in the New York Times. To wit:
But I think it behooves me to discuss ways that the movie might have actually worked.
From a narrative point of view, the most glaring and hideous fault of the movie is that there is no particular reason why Smith's character has to kill himself when he does. Why was it necessary in the Aristotlean sense for him to take his life at that particular moment? Where was the urgency? There was, in fact, none.
What should have happened? The most important thing that should have happened in the movie, but didn't, was that Ben Thomas (Will Smith) should have been transformed by his falling in love with Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson). He should have begun to experience joy in life again. He would have begun to question his whole scheme of committing suicide and donating his organs to others in order to make amends for the car accident he caused.
He would have come to the point of realizing that he could help others better by living instead of dying. Perhaps blind Ezra (Woody Harrelson) could have had his sight healed by other means, or could have told Thomas that he preferred to stay as he is.
Just when we think that Thomas has decided to keep living, something would happen that would force him, with absolutely no other option, to follow through on his plan, probably to save Emily, because no other option was available to him.
None of that happened. Smith's character doesn't really experience anything. He isn't transformed by giving his house away. He isn't transformed by "falling in love." He isn't transformed by any of the people he meets. He is one of the most static protagonists that I have seen in a long time.
From a thematic point of view, the most cloying aspect of this film is its endorsement that we can and should judge the "worthiness" of others to receive life-changing gifts. This is very anticlassical, by the way, since in the old paradigm, it was assumed that only the Almighty can make such judgments. It was not for nothing that Oprah really loved this movie. Are you nauseated yet?
This was a stupid and horrible movie, living up to every negative thing I have heard about it. Another point of agreement between A.O. Scott and me: this movie is actually a horror movie, but doesn't realize it.
So there you have it, a ghastly horror tale masquerading as a feel-good holiday story about the power of giving to others. I can't think of a better metaphor for the United States of America at the end of 2008. Could this be the Movie of the Year?
The AMC in Tyngsboro had Friday matinees starting at 10:30 a.m. (only four bucks before noon!), so I hotfooted out of the driveway of the farmstead while the morning was still fresh. A half hour later I was in the parking lot of the multiplex. The traffic on Middlesex Road had been even worse than before Christmas.
First up: a release left over from last week, the one I had been dreading most: Seven Pounds.
Have you seen this yet? Has the ending been spoiled for you yet? Do you not care if it is spoiled? I'm assuming you said yes to at least one of those questions, because I have to talk about the story itself.
There is a scene towards the end of the movie in which Will Smith is in a bathtub full of ice while being stung repeatedly by a deadly jellyfish. He is writhing in extreme pain and agony as he dies. This pretty much describes how I felt for two hours fidgeting back and forth in my seat as I watched this movie.
Not that discomfort is necessary bad in a movie. It can be a good thing, if that is what is intended. But my discomfort was due to the fact that this movie is as close to being unwatchable as anything I have seen in a long time.
I won't go into every detail about why it sucks, because frankly, I don't want to waste so much time typing. Just go ahead and read A. O. Scott's review in the New York Times. To wit:
Frankly, though, I don’t see how any review could really spoil what may be among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.
But I think it behooves me to discuss ways that the movie might have actually worked.
From a narrative point of view, the most glaring and hideous fault of the movie is that there is no particular reason why Smith's character has to kill himself when he does. Why was it necessary in the Aristotlean sense for him to take his life at that particular moment? Where was the urgency? There was, in fact, none.
What should have happened? The most important thing that should have happened in the movie, but didn't, was that Ben Thomas (Will Smith) should have been transformed by his falling in love with Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson). He should have begun to experience joy in life again. He would have begun to question his whole scheme of committing suicide and donating his organs to others in order to make amends for the car accident he caused.
He would have come to the point of realizing that he could help others better by living instead of dying. Perhaps blind Ezra (Woody Harrelson) could have had his sight healed by other means, or could have told Thomas that he preferred to stay as he is.
Just when we think that Thomas has decided to keep living, something would happen that would force him, with absolutely no other option, to follow through on his plan, probably to save Emily, because no other option was available to him.
None of that happened. Smith's character doesn't really experience anything. He isn't transformed by giving his house away. He isn't transformed by "falling in love." He isn't transformed by any of the people he meets. He is one of the most static protagonists that I have seen in a long time.
From a thematic point of view, the most cloying aspect of this film is its endorsement that we can and should judge the "worthiness" of others to receive life-changing gifts. This is very anticlassical, by the way, since in the old paradigm, it was assumed that only the Almighty can make such judgments. It was not for nothing that Oprah really loved this movie. Are you nauseated yet?
This was a stupid and horrible movie, living up to every negative thing I have heard about it. Another point of agreement between A.O. Scott and me: this movie is actually a horror movie, but doesn't realize it.
So there you have it, a ghastly horror tale masquerading as a feel-good holiday story about the power of giving to others. I can't think of a better metaphor for the United States of America at the end of 2008. Could this be the Movie of the Year?
A Three-Movie Day?
By the day after Christmas, it had been three full days since I had seen Australia in Tyngsboro. Meanwhile six, count 'em six, new releases had rolled into the multiplexes around here, filling up my slate again just as I was beginning to finally catch up.
The day before the candy in my Christmas stocking had been augmented by my favorite present of the day---a twenty-five dollar AMC gift certificate card from my younger sister in Colorado. I decided on Friday to put the card to use, and attempt to spend the entire day up in Tyngsboro using it up, and making a dent in the list of new releases. Could I possibly see three movies in one day? I was going to find out if I could.
The day before the candy in my Christmas stocking had been augmented by my favorite present of the day---a twenty-five dollar AMC gift certificate card from my younger sister in Colorado. I decided on Friday to put the card to use, and attempt to spend the entire day up in Tyngsboro using it up, and making a dent in the list of new releases. Could I possibly see three movies in one day? I was going to find out if I could.
Australia
On Tuesday, with two days to spare, I finally got around to doing my Christmas shopping, which meant a trip to New Hampshire. Around this part of Massachusetts, everyone heads up to the Granite State for a simple reason: there is no sales tax. Just across the state line, the outskirts of Nashua are slathered with a huge shopping mall and string of big box retailers that include every national chain that you can imagine. Not surprisingly, on Tuesday it was an utter madhouse.
The mid-afternoon traffic was a nightmare, and it was all I could do to get into the parking lot of my destination. But I managed to get things done quicker than I expected, and with energy to spare, I decided to reward myself by crossing another movie off my holiday wish list.
The choice seemed obvious: with the Christmas rush of releases only a few days away, I needed to cross off the last lingering November releases. That meant finally braving the theaters to see one I had put off for nearly a month: the big-budget epic romance Australia, which had had a good run, but which would surely not survive in multiplexes after this week.
My putting it off was not because I objected to the movie itself, only its running time. At two hours and forty-eight minutes, it would tax my woeful attention span, unless I was in the right mood. But today I was in the right mood. No excuses.
The AMC multiplex was actually a half mile south, on the Massachusetts side of the line in the town of Tyngsboro (map). Waiting through multiple rounds at each stop light, I fought my way back into the Bay State until, after twenty minutes of frustration, I slipped into the ample parking lot and came to a rest. At this point, spending three hours in a darkened auditorium seemed like a very appealing option. A few minutes later, the snarling chaos on Middlesex Road seemed like a faraway nightmare.
Twenty minutes into the movie I was completely ashamed of myself. I was loving every minute of it.
This is definitely one of the most classical stories of the entire year---not surprisingly it was written, directed, and produced outside of the United States. There are two major storylines: the first hour and half is largely in the format of a classic cattle drive Hollywood western such as Red River (1948). The last hour is largely a wartime drama. There are several unifying themes that cover both parts, including the romance between Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and her drover (Hugh Jackman). Brian Brown plays a very suitable villain. It all went by very quickly.
Unlike many period pieces of late, the 1940s actually felt like, well, the 1940s. One of the principal reasons was that not only did Jackman turn in a sturdy Clark Gable-type performance worthy of the outback, but Kidman declined to play the heroine as a contemporary supercharged version of Katherine Hepburn (i.e., the way women "should have been" back then, dammit) but with a soft vulnerability in the vernacular of leading ladies from that era. There was plenty of Hepburn in Kidman, to be sure, but of all the actresses of that era, she reminded most of Rita Hayworth, who had her own brand of sturdy brashness mixed with at-times-fragile beauty.
If the movie felt classical, it was for a reason: to tell a story based on theme that was out-of-bounds in the 1940s, namely the theft of aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government, and by extension, the issue of race in Australian society.
In that respect, the movie has a nice, healthy postmodern consciousness of its own purpose. Storytelling is explictly presented as a core feature of aboriginal culture, and the aboriginal child must be with his own people so as to "live his story." That story is, of course, the very movie we are watching. That the movie is explicitly aware of its own power and duty to do this is beautifully spelled out in another layer, namely the repeated references to, and the explicit watching of, The Wizard of Oz (1939), which furthermore exploits the homophonic use of "Oz" to mean Australia itself.
That the movie can pull all of this off without being too clever is a testimony not only to the strength of the underlying classical paradigm itself, but the masterful art of writer and director Baz Luhrmann.
If you enjoyed Luhrmann's previous work in Moulin Rouge (2001) and Strictly Ballroomn (1992), you won't be at all disappointed by this movie. I think it's his best work yet. If you didn't, you still might like it. But if big-scale romantic epics set in the 1940s with touches of sentimentality and nostalgia aren't your thing, then none of this will matter.
The movie is probably not artistically daring enough to reap major award nominations, but if it does, I won't be objecting.
The mid-afternoon traffic was a nightmare, and it was all I could do to get into the parking lot of my destination. But I managed to get things done quicker than I expected, and with energy to spare, I decided to reward myself by crossing another movie off my holiday wish list.
The choice seemed obvious: with the Christmas rush of releases only a few days away, I needed to cross off the last lingering November releases. That meant finally braving the theaters to see one I had put off for nearly a month: the big-budget epic romance Australia, which had had a good run, but which would surely not survive in multiplexes after this week.
My putting it off was not because I objected to the movie itself, only its running time. At two hours and forty-eight minutes, it would tax my woeful attention span, unless I was in the right mood. But today I was in the right mood. No excuses.
The AMC multiplex was actually a half mile south, on the Massachusetts side of the line in the town of Tyngsboro (map). Waiting through multiple rounds at each stop light, I fought my way back into the Bay State until, after twenty minutes of frustration, I slipped into the ample parking lot and came to a rest. At this point, spending three hours in a darkened auditorium seemed like a very appealing option. A few minutes later, the snarling chaos on Middlesex Road seemed like a faraway nightmare.
Twenty minutes into the movie I was completely ashamed of myself. I was loving every minute of it.
This is definitely one of the most classical stories of the entire year---not surprisingly it was written, directed, and produced outside of the United States. There are two major storylines: the first hour and half is largely in the format of a classic cattle drive Hollywood western such as Red River (1948). The last hour is largely a wartime drama. There are several unifying themes that cover both parts, including the romance between Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and her drover (Hugh Jackman). Brian Brown plays a very suitable villain. It all went by very quickly.
Unlike many period pieces of late, the 1940s actually felt like, well, the 1940s. One of the principal reasons was that not only did Jackman turn in a sturdy Clark Gable-type performance worthy of the outback, but Kidman declined to play the heroine as a contemporary supercharged version of Katherine Hepburn (i.e., the way women "should have been" back then, dammit) but with a soft vulnerability in the vernacular of leading ladies from that era. There was plenty of Hepburn in Kidman, to be sure, but of all the actresses of that era, she reminded most of Rita Hayworth, who had her own brand of sturdy brashness mixed with at-times-fragile beauty.
If the movie felt classical, it was for a reason: to tell a story based on theme that was out-of-bounds in the 1940s, namely the theft of aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government, and by extension, the issue of race in Australian society.
In that respect, the movie has a nice, healthy postmodern consciousness of its own purpose. Storytelling is explictly presented as a core feature of aboriginal culture, and the aboriginal child must be with his own people so as to "live his story." That story is, of course, the very movie we are watching. That the movie is explicitly aware of its own power and duty to do this is beautifully spelled out in another layer, namely the repeated references to, and the explicit watching of, The Wizard of Oz (1939), which furthermore exploits the homophonic use of "Oz" to mean Australia itself.
That the movie can pull all of this off without being too clever is a testimony not only to the strength of the underlying classical paradigm itself, but the masterful art of writer and director Baz Luhrmann.
If you enjoyed Luhrmann's previous work in Moulin Rouge (2001) and Strictly Ballroomn (1992), you won't be at all disappointed by this movie. I think it's his best work yet. If you didn't, you still might like it. But if big-scale romantic epics set in the 1940s with touches of sentimentality and nostalgia aren't your thing, then none of this will matter.
The movie is probably not artistically daring enough to reap major award nominations, but if it does, I won't be objecting.
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