Greenlief on Film

Examining the Umpire - Deconstructing Waves of Illusion and Reality in David Lynch's Inland Empire

2007-02-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers: this piece of writing is a work-in-progress...I'll make a formal statement when it is "done"...I'm working on it for a publication, but wanted folks to be able to access it in the meantime. When it is published, I'll send a notice - and keep a copy of the final draft here as well.

PG

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Introduction

I believe David Lynch to be one of the very finest (read: challenging) directors working in American cinema today and he deserves an audience for this film. It seems he has been unable to find a distributor for the movie, which is more a symptom of America's lack of intellectual curiosity rather than the film's merits. So, like many of DIY artists today, he has taken the responsiblilty of ditributing the film himself. It is rare that a film-maker would show so much faith in his audience. He expects a lot from us, but he gives a lot in return.

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Some intital comments

No film-maker has represented the labyrinth of the unconscious in cinematic terms more successfully than David Lynch. In his newest effort, Inland Empire (IE), Mr. Lynch has taken his own personal evolution of film narrative a step further than in his previous work. In IE, Lynch calls on and surpasses the surrealists' attempts to register the many fleeting fragments of image and thought that influence and construct our consciousness.

Inspired by the critical and financial success of Mulholland Drive (MD), Lynch seems to have gained the confidence to pursue the furthering development of a narrative structure that he has been working on for over 20 years. The films from his oeuvre most concerned with this development starts with Blue Velvet (BV) and include Lost Highway (LH) and MD. All those narrative roads seem to lead logically to Inland Empire. While the other films (Eraserhead, Elephant Man, etc.) link his thematic interests as a whole, I will be focusing primarily on structural concerns in this discussion.

For the moment, I'm going to refrain from commenting on the early works at length and get to the point at hand - trying to make sense of IE (I'll save the larger overview for the final draft). Since MD is most closely related to the new film, I may reference it from time to time.

In MD, Lynch presented a very clear delineation of the dream world (the first two hours) and "reality" (the last 20 minutes). Everything leading up to the final set of sequences, where Naomi Watts awakens from her Hollywood fantasy was the stuff of dreams - a dream charged with the guilt of having hired an assassin to kill her lover out of jealousy and rage.

In IE, you don't have the clear delineation of waking and dreaming consciousness – the narrative doesn't read as "now she's dreaming, now she's awake". Instead audiences find themselves constantly working through the labyrinth of a woman's consciousness in pursuit of liberation.

In IE, Lynch is primarily wrestling with a question that vexed the existentialists: "what motivates us into action?" – In IE, this question drives the film from beginning to end. IE explores the ways that television, movies, pop-song mythology, memories, dreams, family members, friends, and the fantasies and illusions we project in and out of our states of consciousness, all come together to help the individual negotiate how best to act in the present tense. As individual human beings with experiences unique to our own personal mythologies, we are always assembling a mass of information that comes from these sources (both personal and societal) in order to be who we are (which is not unlike acting in a movie based on what you know about your character).

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Narrative Summary

As usual, the set up (the movie you think is being made) is pure illusion – all the power and wealth are pure projection and fantasy. Laura Dern appears to be married to a man who is wealthy and has powerful connections. Her journey throughout the film is to uncover the artifice of her dreams, break free from the abusive man she is living with, and strike out against her neighbor in order to free a young woman who has been held captive in a prostitution ring under his supervision.

Laura Dern's character serves as a guardian for Caroline, the victim described above. She seems to have psychic abilities, and may be using those powers to project the action on to a screen (a film within a film), which moves through the labyrinth of her unconscious in order to free her.

In this case, the action is murder as liberation. This is expressed in the film through the "action" of a movie that is being made. This young woman is watching a film that is being made in order to determine whether or not she will be liberated from her spiritual prison. She is often crying while viewing the action on screen, for she is never certain, even until the last fatal moments of the movie, how the "film" will turn out.

Who is really directing this film? - The young girl? - The film director played by Jeremy Irons? - David Lynch? - Is the "film" really the narrative of her consciousness? - Are the parallel story lines that Laura Dern navigates merely the projection of this woman's hopes? How is the character played by Laura Dern aware of Caroline? When exactly does she become aware of her? If she is aware of her, how is she aware of her? Or better yet, when does she truly become aware of her and decide to take action into her own hands? - These seem important questions to consider when viewing the movie.

Unlike some of the critics and friends who have claimed that the new film is merely a meandering wash of nonsense, there is a strong narrative at play here - its structure is that of a labyrinth of the unconscious (IE is Lynch's most Jungian effort). The numerous dark hallways that Laura Dern moves through represent that labyrinth. Consequently, there is no excess - every image, every sequence is part of the puzzle and must be taken into consideration. Since the film runs a little over three hours, there is a lot of information to digest, perhaps too much information for viewers who are used to being hand-held by traditional beginning-middle-end (problem-development-resolution) film structures.

Lynch provides all the information the viewer needs to piece together the meaning of the story but the viewer has to pay close attention to assemble it. The opening image is one of a recording - an old school turntable that is playing a recording of a "radio broadcast". This image could represent that what is to follow is a recording, or a document of something that happened in reality, that occured in real time. The image of the record player fades into a bright light, which will guide the characters and the viewers to the film's final destination.

The first scene with actual characters could be seen as superfluous. For the next hour, there isn't much to connect them to - so it seems irrelevant. But this scene sets up the central problem that drives the action. In this first short episode, a man and a woman who are speaking Polish (their faces are obscured from view) are about to enter a hotel room. Once inside the room, it appears the man has hired the woman for sex. The woman asks what the man wants, and he responds by telling her to take her clothes off, and that she will find out soon enough. The silent male domination of this female (and others like her) is the central problem of the film. There is both meaning in this duality; in telling her to shut up and do what's she's told, and also in that he doesn't express directly what she is to do.

There are a few scenes that take place in a room with characters who are wearing rabbit costumes. Apart from the humor that plays in these scenes (and the reference to TV sitcoms and how they inform the cultural landscape, the message of these episodes is important. A family (the central family of the story) is disguised: we don't know who they are and we do not learn who they are until the ending sequence when they are reunited after the mother's liberation. The room they occupy is connected to a large palatial space (left over from the days of the Russian "Empire"). This setting is important: it informs us that the family is connected to the old world/empire (Poland, in this case, not Russia).

The pimps that import the empire to America are also disguised. We are told in one scene (by the man we assume is Laura Dern's husband), that they are circus performers. This lie is kept in place to disguise the whereabouts of the young woman who has been kidnapped and to obscure the truth that these men are criminals (all you have to do is look at them to know what they're up to). Later in the film we see the main pimp confront the young woman on the street one cold wintry evening (this scene is a predecessor to the opening hotel sequence described above).

David Lynch is dealing with a very real problem in this new film, despite the mass of illusions he has piled on his subject. For over a decade, many young eastern European and Russian women have been lured to America with the promise of honest work, only to find that the employment in store for them once they arrive is "the oldest profession in the world". Given that many of these ladies come from strong families and have old-world pride and cultural conditioning, they are often too ashamed to write home and tell their families the truth of their situation. So they remain enslaved in these rings, occasionally sending money home to their families, while furthering the impossibility of escaping their fate.

Now that the principal plot line has been charted, let us examine the surrounding artifice. The film jumps from the room occupied with the rabbit-people to southern California. A strange woman with an eastern European accent calls on Nikki (Laura Dern's fantasy projecting of her "true" self) in order to introduce herself ("one should know one's neighbors" - an important statement, as we will see later).

The dialogue, as goofy and Lynchian as it can get, is important: she tells a little fable about a boy who crosses the threshold and enters a world of evil. In the second part of the fable, a young girl "enters the marketplace" (as a commodity, as it turns out). She askes the young actress that a murder is part of the story, and despite Dern's refusal that murder is a part of the film, still in its planning stages, she informs her that "oh yes, brutal fucking murder" is a part of the story that will unfold.

As it so often happens in Lynch films (MD, LH), the set-up, or the movie you think you are watching, is all illusion. Laura Dern's "real" character is not an actress. She is not married to a overtly wealthy and powerful man. She is not even married, but rather, she is living with a man that is connected to an empire, but it is a dark and illegal empire that occupies the distinctly non-glamorous landscape of Pomona (not Beverly Hills or Bel Air, as one might imagine from these opening sequences).

Lynch continues by creating the illusion that Laura Dern has been offered a very important part in a movie - a role that could "save" her career (in reality, it will save a young woman's life, her sanity, and her family). Jeremy Irons and Harry Dean Stanton are making the film, along with a stable of producers that hover in order to protect their interests (a mirror-image of the strong arms who protect and camouflage the central pimp). You can tell by the flippant way that Lynch handles these two characters that they are mere cardboard cut-outs. The assistant director played by Stanton is constantly borrowing money from the cast and crew (just as in "reality", Dern's imaginary wealthy husband is actually a poor and desperate man willing to do anything to get his wife back). The director of the film, played by Irons is always about to do something to get things going, but that something never really happens.

From the start, suspicion abounds that Laura Dern and Justin Theroux (the two principal actors that are in the film that is being made within the confines of Lynch's movie) will transit from actors who are making a film about a couple that is having an affair, to married adults having an affair. The adultery seems to have taken place between Dern and Theroux in the film's reality, which motivates Susan Lynch (Theroux's wife) to stab Dern with a screwdriver in one of the ending sequences.

Adultery serves as a sinister plot device, but it also serves as a central metaphor: the allegiance to family and the destruction of the family through the act of "errant sex" is especially important in IE. The cinematic family has its doppleganger in the "family" that runs the prostitution ring, as well as the Polish family that is being torn apart by that same squad of hustlers (is there such a word as triple-ganger??? - my German is clearly over-taxed here...).

In the central section of the film, Laura Dern is led by a mysterious chalk-drawn symbol to a house - this is when the empire proper begins to be revealed. In chalk, the letters: ax xon are scrawled. The phonetic realization of those letters could spell "action"...

She meets other women there - women who have been duped by a man who controls them. It is assumed that this man is either Justin Theroux, or the husband of the actress played by Laura Dern (as in MD, Lynch uses one actress to play two different roles - a reversal of the technique Luis Bunuel used in That Obscure Object of Desire). There are some funny and heartbreaking scenes in the house as Laura Dern (and the audience) begins to see what is really going on there...

Once she meets the girls, the film begins to focus more on the central problem and less on the artifice of movie-making. After talking to the girls and discovering that she may also have been deceived by "him", she arrives disoriented at the home of affluent Justin Theroux, and confesses her love for him in front of his family. This is one of the defining moments of the true relationship between Theroux and Dern.

After finding herself stranded on the streets and in fear that she is being stalked (by Theroux's revenge-seeking wife), she makes her way into a strip-joint, where she moves upstairs to tell all to a silent confessor. This nameless man, who may be the manager of the strip-joint, is connected to the prostitution ring; he reports to an unseen caller that, "yes, she's here now". Dern's confession reveals some of the plot and allows viewers some much-welcomed narrative clarity: we learn that she isn't really an actress at all, but really the victim of an abusive husband who seems to be carrying on with some shady characters. She doesn't know what exactly they are up to, but she knows murder may be linked to their intrigue. Several people around her talk about a murder - the viewer is held in suspence for long stretches of time because you assume the murder is going to happen any moment. She reveals that "he" has beat her, and she is frightened, but is ready (and capable) to castrate him if necessary to free herself from this dark bondage.

She ends back on the streets with the prostitutes, but Theroux's wife finds her this time and stabs her on the sidewalk. While she lay dying on the sidewalk, a few street urchins examine her. One of the homeless women that watches over her tells of a friend that works in a whorehouse in Pomona. Dern loses consciousness and dies and the "film" that is being made and at this point that movie comes to a close.

Dern gets up disoriented and wanders into the final labyrinth, where she confronts her nemesis and kills him. As in other sections of the film, Lynch uses music from the closing murderous sequences in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining when Jack Nicholson goes on the rampage with an axe. Lynch pays homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey in a similar fashion. This is yet another way that Lynch accesses movies to inform the viewer of the importance, or meaning of a sequence in his film.

As a result of the murder Laura Dern has committed, like the killing of some errant warlock who has psychic control over a village of peasants in a fairy tale, the young woman becomes freed and is able to leave her confinement and join her family. The screen fades to black, but the film isn't over yet. There are other themes to resolve in the final moments of the movie.

That's it for now. I'm going to see the film again in the next few days to iron out some of the other plot lines in order to develop this piece further. If you are interested in seeing the film, just know it is not one of those movies where you can digest everything in one sitting. There is so much information operating here, that viewers with a taste for mainstream cinema will likely be overwhelmed by the onslaught of cross-stories and plots.

Top 10 Films of 2006

2006-12-24T01:09:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Films of 2006

1) Brick
2) Science of Sleep
3) Bobby
4) Little Children
5) The Queen
6) The Notorious Bettie Page
7) A Scanner Darkly
8) Quinceanera
9) Fast Food Nation
10) An Inconvenient Truth

Re:Honorable Mentions
Thank You for Smoking, Children of Men, V for Vendetta, Inside Man, The Departed, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Little Miss Sunshine, Half Nelson, Curse of the Golden Flower, l'enfant

Re:Re-Release
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows steals the re-mastered honors for 2007.

Re:Discoveries
Rebel Sammurai at the Balboa; Janus’ 50th Anniversary, Mizoguchi, Ousame Sembene, Mother Russia at PFA; 70mm Festival at The Castro Movie Palace

Re:DVD
Top 5 classic films re-released this year on DVD

Re:Great Directors 2007
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock – Seven films discussed

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Top 10 Films of 2006

1. Brick
Cast from the die of The Maltese Falcon and transformed into a post-noir gem set in the vicinity of San Clemente, Brick casts Joseph Gordon-Levitt (evoking Humphrey Bogart/Sam Spade) as Brendon, a high-school student who discovers his ex-girlfriend’s corpse and must infiltrate a swarm of shadows to uncover her killer’s identity. Miles Archer (Spade’s partner who meets an early end) is re-imagined as Emily Kostich, Brendon’s unrequited love and femme fatale. The lightning rod guiding viewers to the heart of the crime is not a jewel-encrusted falcon, but a tainted brick of heroin. The script inhabits a dreamtime particular to Southern California that is riddled with heroin pushers, muscle-boys, jock-strap junkies, parking-lot slackers, aspiring actresses and an over-accommodating mom wielding corn flakes and Orange Tang. One of the film’s finer achievements is director Rian Johnson’s re-imagining of snappy noir dialogue, transposed into a contemporary youth-speak that takes effort to decode but eventually yields to a marvelous wit. Destined to be a cult classic in the tradition of River’s Edge, Brick is a clever whodunit staged in the terrifying country of drug-addled teens.

2. Science of Sleep
Gael Garcia Bernal leads this dizzying fable about a young man who has difficulty negotiating the boundary between his dream world and his everyday existence while Charlotte Gainsbourg lures him in and out of these states with muted playfulness and curiosity. Fantasy and lucidity are further explored in the two main characters (Stephan and Stephanie), played by Bernal and Gainsbourg, respectively. As Stephan slips further into dreams, Stephanie seems to have the keys to the door that divides the two states of consciousness. Writer/director Michael Gondry has fun dramatizing the giddy states people occupy when contemplating love while revealing that much of what we court when we are attracted to someone is often the projections that emerge from our unconscious. The Silence of Sleep is a comic blush of a film that explores the revolving door of adoration, fantasy and affection.

3. Quinceanera
This coming of age journal presents a girl preparing for her Quinceanera, a traditional Mexican celebration that announces a young woman is ready to enter into society. Along the road to this anticipated ceremony, Magdalena (played by Emily Rios) will discover her emerging sexuality, be forced out of her home and come to terms with her brother’s lifestyle while learning how death can tear a family apart but also reconstruct it. While not a perfect movie (some of the opening scenes feel awkward), the film slips into a natural narrative and the characters and their struggles will likely linger with audiences long after departing the theater. Quinceanera is as much about East Los Angeles and its gentrification as it is about the people that live there and must find their own humanity and humility in the face of the loss of innocence and a rare miracle.

4. Little Children
Little Children was an excellent suburban journal by Todd Hanes (In the Bedroom), a director who has delivered real depth of human emotion to the drama genre over the past few years. Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson (Hard Candy) lead the excellent performances, exploring the possibility of adultery to alleviate their internal strife. Little Children is a sober-eyed view at varying stages of decay in today’s current edition of the American dream.

5. The Queen
This British import managed to get me really interested in the scandal surrounding Princess Diana’s death – a subject that has rarely occupied my thoughts in any meaningful way. Helen Mirren and her cushy lot at Buckingham Palace held me breathless for the two-hour teeter-totter act that plays out between Queen Victoria, her public, the Royal Family and newly appointed Prime Minister Tony Blair. See the film for Mirren’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth, which should stand as one of the great performances by an actor in the history of film. The Queen balances a juxtaposition of class and cultural values in the midst of a crisis while managing to display the foibles and glories of its characters with humanity and grace.

6. The Notorious Bettie Page
Decades after the sexual revolution, Americans still find themselves minding the gap on what constitutes pornography and the boundaries of appropriate/inappropriate sexual behavior. In The Notorious Bettie Page, filmmaker Mary Herron examines America’s politic on sex and bondage in the midst of the McCarthy era trials while enabling Gretchen Moll to occupy the soul of Bettie Page; a young woman who, in spite of her fervent belief in Christianity, became one of the most widely photographed S&M pin-up girls of the 1950’s.

It is fascinating to watch Moll bring a distinct air of innocence to what was once and still is considered inappropriate sexual behavior. Page’s power to seduce came from her unique ability to make sexual deviance taste like mom’s home cooking – a spell that continues to ignite the deep-seated fear of the patriarchy who remains largely in charge of setting laws for sexual conduct, both in the bedroom and in the photographer/filmmaker’s studio. The Notorious Bettie Page is a look at one woman’s courageous attempt to express the natural beauty of creation with the image of her body and the search to find her own sexual identity in a highly-repressed culture.

7. Fast Food Nation
Many critics failed to see the beauty of Richard Linklater’s recent gem, Fast Food Nation by expecting him to accurately reveal the mass of information in Eric Schlosser’s excellent book. To do so would have taken 16 hours of documentary footage, but Linklater (w/Schlosser as screen writer) chose to take the central theme of the book: failure – and course it through a few of the socio-political problems illustrated in the best-selling paperback.

If you’ve read Schlosser’s unforgettable rant you know how powerful the meat industry is and how much lobbying influence it has in Washington D.C. and beyond. With that in mind, it seems astounding that the film could be made in the America we live in today. Depictions of corporate cover-ups, toxic food manufacturing, the meat industry’s blatant disregard for the lives and safety of their employees (the same “illegal” immigrants that politicians and the bigoted citizenry love to hate), questionable slaughter-house practices, and the deep apathy that has cast a hypnotic spell on today’s corporate-driven suburban landscapes all populate the crowded world of Fast Food Nation.

Mr. Linklater’s film (like the book it is based on) reflects just how far we have fallen from the American Dream that ushered in drive-up service and neatly packaged suburban charm. If Americans find FFN hard to digest it is because they are getting a close look at not only what is in the beef, but also the willing subject devouring it. Far more complex than a mere poke at flesh as food, Fast Food Nation presents contrasting viewpoints on what it is to be an American in our culture of rapid convenience.

8. Bobby
It may be the result of being a child of the 1960’s, but I felt this film did an excellent job of evoking a moment in time when one politician in particular seemed deeply sincere in his quest to represent the feelings and values of progressive people in America. Bobby is the final chapter in the assassinations of three individuals that dared to address toxic levels of racism in America and our participation in the war in Vietnam. Robert F. Kennedy’s death came at the end of a string of assassinations that included Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and his older brother JFK - four tragic acts that heralded a decline in American ethics and morality - a condition that right-wing Christians and other over-zealous moralists seem to have failed to successfully address with Just Say No rhetoric and an ever-increasing brutality. The film takes place at a tipping point in our history, a moment when optimism was not yet considered passé or naïve; a time when peaceful negotiations and compassionate debate seemed not only possible but the reasonable thing to ask.

Bobby uses a Grand Hotel approach (surely it is a tribute of sorts to Grand Hotel) to display a microcosm of the era. Respect to Emilio Estevez (!!!) for his powerful script and finely-tuned direction. Estevez juggles multiple thematic threads and weaves them together to make a powerful statement about the loss of innocence of an entire generation through the death of one of its finest sons. Election politics aside, Bobby is a film about people who are passionately in pursuit of their existential goals, an act which seems revolutionary by today’s standards.

9. A Scanner Darkly
A Scanner Darkly is a tribute from filmmaker Richard Linklater to Philip K. Dick, author of the largely autobiographical sci-fi novel on drug addiction, paranoia, mental illness, the loss the self and the loss of personal freedom. Scanner starts with a premise devised by Samuel Beckett in his novel Molloy: a detective goes in search of himself – although Linklater’s agent winds his way through jangled passageways of surveillance, mind control, high-tech drug enforcement, deteriorating relationships, and betrayal - all while cruising doped out in a meta-being costume. As in Beckett’s meandering existentialist yarn, it is possible to discover the detective was not acting on his own free will; other beings close at hand (and carefully disguised) may have been the real operators at the controls.

Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder are perfectly acceptable thanks to Linklater’s technique of painting animated images on digital film (the same process he used in his meta-philosophical romp Waking Life). Rory Cochrane, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson steal the side-show with unbridled comic routines. A Scanner Darkly captures the disassociation of the psyche that occurs in the sleep-deprived world of speed freaks and is an excellent portrayal of the Nixon era (the book is set in this period) while predicting questions of our right to privacy raised by Homeland Security and The Patriot Act.

10. An Inconvenient Truth
I kept wondering how it was that this film played for so long in so many theaters. I kept wondering if it would have happened that way if someone beside Al Gore had made the film. I kept wondering when I would finally get around to seeing this film. I kept wondering if Al Gore was going to run for President in 2008. Once I did get around to seeing it, I was most thankful to Mr. Gore for making it and for making sure it was available to Americans. Mr. Gore has had his eye on critical evidence that charts the decline in the Earth’s icecaps, and has traced the evidence that our globe is warming at an alarming rate. In addition to doing an excellent job of presenting the information in a clear and concise way that anyone could understand, Mr. Gore offers us hope that we can make real changes before we destroy the future of the planet’s natural resources. An Inconvenient Truth offers ways that we can address these much-needed changes. Kudos to the man who was once “the next President of the United States”; it’s a real shame we ended up with the other guy.

Re: Honorable Mentions – 2006
1) Thank You for Smoking
2) V for Vendetta
3) Little Miss Sunshine
4) Inside Man
5) Half Nelson
6) Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,
7) Babel
8) Curse of the Golden Flower
9) Children of Men
10)l'enfant

2006 seemed like a year with an abundance of films that were good but it offered no real masterpieces – there were lots of decent movies in fact – it’s a little hard to discern which films belong in the top 10 and which may have occupied the second-string selection that you are about to peruse – I never mean to imply the numeric ordering as “good, better, best” – it’s all just tossed out there for you to check out – so here comes a quick blast on the rest of the lot…

Thank You for Smoking was a deftly funny yarn about corporate spin politics that flowed down as easy as two dry martinis – V for Vendetta deserves a nod for bringing a good revolution flick to the screen in a time of mind-numbing apathy and for giving Natalie Portman a chance to remind us what a talented actor she is when she has something to work with – Little Miss Sunshine made us laugh uncontrollably at things long left for dead – Inside Man was a solid Spike Lee caper with fine performances from Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster – Half Nelson posed some questions about the rhetoric of education but got too comfy in the stoned-out heroin sequences, which tended to bore rather than intoxicate - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was another surprisingly funny and fresh post-noir flick with a performance that will rock Robert Downey Jr fans – Babel was much better than previews led us to believe, it had some real depth in spite of the overly detached atmosphere – Xian Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower was a perfect film (astounding visuals!) until the last 10 minutes dove into what the movie had so successfully avoided up until then: an over-abundance of spectacle – Children of Men offered great performances and a chilling look at the future, but failed to fully flush out the clever ideas that drove the story - l’enfant was the newest effort by the Dardem brothers, a sober yet harrowing film about a young man whose existential decline (and eventual reckoning) occurs when he sells his newborn baby.

Re: Re-Release - Top Lost Treasure of 2006
Army of Shadows, by Jean-Pierre Melville
Melville’s taught masterpiece of suspense and intrigue during the Nazi occupation of Paris is a perilous journal through the final days of the French Resistance.

Re: Discoveries
Rebel Sammurai at the Balboa; Janus’ 50th Anniversary, Ousame Sembene, Mizoguchi, and Mother Russia at PFA; 70mm Festival at The Castro Movie Palace

Re: DVD
The Top 5 classic films re-released this year on DVD are all from the Criterion Collection. The films range from an early silent masterpiece by the great director G.W. Pabst to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s meditation on identity.

1) Pandora’s Box (G.W. Pabst – 1929)
2) Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle – 1957)
3) Viridiana (Luis Bunuel – 1961)
4) Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okomoto – 1966)
5) Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski – 1991)

Pandora’s Box is silent screen siren Louise Brooks’ greatest roles/performance, the Criterion Box set features a great booklet, rare interviews, and four soundtrack options – Elevator to the Gallows is Louis Malle’s remarkable debut as director and features Jean Moreau in one of her early roles along with Miles Davis’ haunting soundtrack – Viridiana is Luis Bunuel’s reckless tale of a nun that leaves the church to visit her uncle; a journey that ends in disaster (the film was banned by the Catholic Church, creating the usual scandal for Don Luis) – of the recent samurai classics released by Criterion, Sword of the Beast is the most relentless in its depiction of a man mysteriously possessed by his sword and features a knock-out performance by Mikijiro Hira – Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Vernonique is the first feature film by Poland’s great poet of fate and offers us a one of a kind performance by cinematic angel Irene Jacob.

Phillip Greenlief
Oakland, CA

Re: Great Directors - The Films of Alfred Hitchcock

2006-09-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

Re: Great Directors
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock - Seven masterpieces discussed
The 39 Steps
Notorious
Lifeboat
Strangers on a Train
I Confess
The Wrong Man
Psycho

It’s hard to know where to start when it comes time to write about Alfred Hitchcock. So much has already been written on his work, not to mention his often misunderstood (and often bizarre) personal life. Nevertheless, it is hard to overlook a director that found time to make 66 feature films and invent many innovative camera movements still associated with contemporary film narrative, all while mulling over countless scripts and novels in search of the next idea to bring to light. It was difficult to determine which films to discuss so I neglected a few of the widely-praised Universal films like North by Northwest, Rear Window and Vertigo in order to spout off on a few overlooked gems. The movies cited below tend to focus more on Hitchcock’s quieter psychological obsessions as opposed to his more opulent visual spectacles.

Hitchcock’s first film was Number 13 (1922) and his last film was Family Plot (1972). Along his 50-year journey as filmmaker he forged a bold visual style that had the admitted influence of Sergei Eisenstein. The director’s first jobs consisted largely of visual design work (for film), so it is clear he had already begun to train his eye in early apprenticeship. His famous sketchbooks reveal that he drew every image that would be seen in a film before he started shooting. His technical understanding of all aspects of the craft of filmmaking was rarely rivaled and many great cinematographers of the 1940s and 1950s acknowledged their debt to him. He was a different director with every actor and technician that he worked with – seeming to be able to zero in on any personality and know how to use it to serve his purposes.

One thing not commonly known is how much Alma Reville (Hitchcock’s wife, who collaborated with her husband on nearly all of his films) was responsible for the consistency and eye for detail in Hitch’s films. Hitchcock met Ms. Reville while working on some of the first films he served on as art director and she served as camera assistant. Her contribution was an essential element of the realization of all of his films up until 1962 when she passed away. She read and praised or declined scripts (Hitchcock never veered from his high opinion of her ability to visualize whether or not a script could be well-realized on film) consulted on all aspects of “continuity” (from pre-shooting to post-production) a title that she is most commonly credited with in his films. Hitchcock’s other greatest collaborator was Joan Harrison, who began working with the British émigré shortly after his arrival in 1940 and continued on with him until his death. Hitchcock put most of the responsibility of producing his popular TV series in the hands of Ms. Harrison, who also worked closely with Ms. Reville and Mr. Hitchcock on developing treatments of novels that would eventually be handed over to screenwriters (Rebecca, Spellbound, Lifeboat, The Birds, and many others). It seems ironic considering the flack that Alfred Hitchcock has received over the years from feminists when it turns out that two of his two most steadfast collaborators were women. Of course feminists could easily retort that those women were probably happy to be working (in such well-paying and prestigious positions), even if it meant propping up an old misogynist’s ideas.

The 39 Steps
It is perhaps fitting that The 39 Steps is Hitchcock’s first masterpiece. It presents an essential theme that drives several of Hitchcock’s successive films: a wrong man is unjustly accused of a serious crime (usually murder) and must go to great lengths to prove his innocence. Mr. Richard Hannay (played by Robert Donat) learns from a dying secret agent that an important government secret is about to be handed over to enemy hands and is wrongly accused of her murder in the process. Like other successive Hitchcock narratives (the sappier Saboteur, the intelligent but patriotic to the point of operatic Foreign Correspondent, but eventually realized to perfection in North by Northwest), our hero must find the source of intrigue and travel cross country to bring it to light. Along the way, the director presents a host of comic routines, innovative camera moves, fast-paced chases and narrow escapes to entertain and fascinate his viewers. Donat rustles up sexual tension with Madeline Carroll, who adds comic appeal to the film and the two learn that they must join forces to stop the spy network for a happily ever-after. Deftly balancing humor, romance, and suspense, The 39 Steps illustrates one of Hitchcock’s great formulas for entertainment at a snappy pace that set the standard for numerous imitations.

Notorious
Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant ignite one of Hitchcock’s greatest achievements as they criss-cross two of the director’s favorite themes: romance and suspense. Bergman’s intelligence and vulnerability make her a prime suspect to infiltrate a Nazi organization in South America led by Claude Rains and enters enemy waters with the keys of romance, much to the chagrin of co-operative Grant. Beautifully photographed and as finely balanced as a troupe of high-wire acrobats, Notorious is a baroque masterpiece with high marks for erotic and psychological tension.

Lifeboat
Shot entirely in the confines of a lifeboat, this experimental gem is a taught psychological study of war. Talulah Bankhead is the centerpiece of this small ensemble of actors that serve as a microcosm of the conflict between the Allied and German forces during WWII. Hitchcock originally worked with John Steinbeck on the script but was unsatisfied with the finished product and hired two successive writers to strengthen the narrative before retrieving the reins and polishing the script to meet his needs. The goal of Lifeboat was to enable Hitchcock to make a statement about the contrast between the philosophies and work ethics of the Allied forces and their Nazi counterparts. After several survivors make their way to a lifeboat after being bombed by a German U-Boat, they pull an enemy soldier out of the water and offer him refuge. The script illustrates the lack of direction and listless ideals contrasted with the enemy’s ability to point the boat in the direction of a German supply ship and fool his hosts.

Today’s audiences may see a distinct parallel to the constructs of today’s bi-partisan shuffle between right-wing Republicans, who seem very adept at articulating and realizing their agenda, and the House-dominating Democrats, who talk a lot about political reform, but don’t seem to have be able to articulate a clear agenda on how to actualize their liberal platform.

Strangers on a Train
This film begins with one of the more memorable sequences ever filmed: the opening credits roll as we watch two cars pull up to a train station. Two separate pairs of shoes step out of the cabs and make their way through the station, onto the train and into a passenger car, where they bump into each other as their subjects are seated. A ridiculous plot is hatched between the two strangers to swap murders, so ridiculous that one of the subjects goes along despite the absurdity. A few days later, after a murder occurs in an amusement park, the killer comes to call on his partner to fulfill the completion of the plan. From that point onward, a dizzying game of cat and mouse ensues, leading to one of the great climactic moments in the history of cinema: a dazzling sequence on a merry-go-round that spins out of control while populated with children, courting teenagers and the two suspects that battle desperately to prove their innocence. Strangers on a Train is vintage Hitchcock with an unusually clouded psychological texture and riveting suspense.

I Confess
Montgomery Clift plays a priest who overhears a confession of a murderer and must keep his vow of silence even if it means assuming guilt for the crime. Known for his thoughtfulness regarding locations and how they best serve the film’s narrative, provincial Quebec seems the perfect place to create a claustrophobic urban atmosphere set in place with narrow streets and towering gothic cathedrals. Montgomery Clift offers one of his best performances in I Confess, his clipped emotional range and brooding silence seems perfectly suited for the role of a priest. The original script followed the play by Paul Anthelme, which had the priest hung for the murder only to later discover his innocence. Studio executives balked, and the director changed the script to have the priest proven innocence after the court case was settled (he was acquitted, but when faced with a hostile public, the wife of the killer spills the beans). Mr. Hitchcock was obviously free to comment on the church, but not the death penalty. Regarded by director Peter Bogdonovich as one of the great director’s most personal films, I Confess is an examination of the ethics of faith.

The Wrong Man
Alfred Hitchcock casts Henry Fonda in one of his greatest (and perhaps most overlooked) performances as a musician who is wrongly accused of a bank robbery and almost loses his family and his sanity in the process of proving his innocence. Hitch’s well oiled plot device of cornering an innocent man is wholly reconceived in this calm depiction of the disintegration of a post-war nuclear family. Hitchcock’s ability to hold the film just this side of controlled hysteria is only mildly derailed by Vera Miles, who loses her balance in a few scenes and pushes her character over the top. Regardless of a minor mishap in an otherwise fine performance by Ms. Miles, The Wrong Man is a fine example of one of Hitchcock's principal themes delivered in an unusually restrained direction in order to portray a greater sense of tragedy in the collapse of one man’s family due to mistaken identity.

Psycho
Set in the American West, Alfred Hitchcock tore the covers off the murderous undercurrent of our country’s new-found suburban veneer and in the process posited one of the most influential classics of the horror genre in this portrayal of a man who murders in order to calm his tortured inner matriarchal voices. Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates, an icon of cinematic terror and killer transvestite if there ever was one. Janet Leigh’s performance as Marion Crane captures our desperate desire to flee the 9 to 5 once and for all, but fails to realize the potential of her sex-appeal on unsuspecting motel merchants. Ms. Leigh’s murder in the shower remains one of the all-time terrifying moments of cinematic history; the impact of the camera spiraling out of her open eye delivers a lasting nightmarish image that overwhelms the viewer with death’s ineluctable ability to put an end to all our desires and maneuvers. Vera Miles and John Gavin march on to uncover the trail of Marion’s killer and sacrifice Martin Balsam to mark a path of breadcrumbs that leads to the wicked old witch who dwells silently in the blueprint for Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

Mr. Hitchcock used a standard television crew to shoot Psycho for about $400,000, allowing Universal Pictures to make a lot of money over the years while earning him a great deal of creative control for future projects. Psycho is a murderous shout of a movie that ushered decades of imitations and tributes; a desperate scream for help that continues to echo long after the director’s death.

Re:A Closer Look - Hitchcock Top 20
1) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
2) The 39 Steps (1935)
3) The Lady Vanishes (1938)
4) Rebecca (1st film in America 1940)
5) Foreign Correspondent (1940)
6) Saboteur (1942)
7) Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
8) Lifeboat (1944)
9) Spellbound (1945)
10) Notorious (1946)
11) Rope (1948)
12) Strangers on a Train (1951)
13) I Confess (1953)
14) Rear Window (1954)
15) To Catch a Thief (1955)
16) The Wrong Man (1956)
17) Vertigo (1958)
18) North by Northwest (1959)
19) Psycho (1960)
20) Frenzy (1972)

Phillip Greenlief
Oakland, CA

Paradise Found - Paradise Lost - The Heartbreak of The Boys of Baraka

2006-02-23T13:52:00.000-08:00

The Boys of Baraka is a documentary about a dozen boys that are invited to leave a crime-ridden neighborhood in Baltimore and spend a year at a special school in Kenya. The boys and their families are interviewed throughou film and they discuss the lack of resources and the inability to conceive of a healthy future given the options and the overwhelming statistics at hand. One of the principal claims that drives the film is that only 25% of African American males in the neighborhood graduate from high school.

The boys travel to the Baraka School, which is located in an environment that defies most Americans' definition of rural. Their living quarters have no televisions, no electricity during certain hours, limited running water, no local "conveniences", etc. The boys can walk short distances from their living quarters to observe zebras, hippos and other forms of wildlife. After an initial adjustment the boys begin to flourish, and many reach honor roll status by the end of the year. The film shows certain conflict resolution the Baraka School uses that are familiar to programs like Outward Bound, which place inner-city kids in nature in order to have them manage their feelings and behaviors against rugged natural elements and tough physical challenges. Many of the boys lose their desire to fight - since they themselves are nearly all they have to remind them of home - and many begin to cherish each other's friendships and develop new-found respect for others and themselves.

The film does an excellent job of not forcing an obvious point: that once removed from the perils of their inner-city environmnet, the majority of their negative behaviors change and they acheive a variety of success in a relatively short period of time (one year). Viewers are left with some tough questions on how we can change the dynamics of the urban jungle - or the dynamics of the urban classrooms that have failed so many of our children. What is painfully clear is that we are failing the children of improverished neighborhoods when we offer them so little and expect so much in return.

The close of the film ushers a new wave of frustration over the problems that plague the children. When the escalating war in Kenya threatened the security and safety of the boys, and after the closing of the U.S. Embassy, the Baraka School was forced to shut down and the boys were not allowed to return. The families who were offered a glimmer of hope that they might have found a way out of the ghetto for their children were left to their own devices to carry on. While the disappointment was considerable, some of the boys carried on with newfound inner discipline and strength while others fell prey to the usual suspects: drugs, violence, and the self hatred and self destruction that so often accompanies abject poverty.

The Boys of Baraka is a wakeup call for anyone who believes schools have all the money they need and that we as a nation are meeting the challenges of educating ALL of our children. It seems fairly clear that the kids we ignore every day who fall prey to circumstances beyond their control are so often the children who long to be challenged and inspired and who rize to the occasion when they are given the opportunity. Viewing the film may inspire viewers to hold our local, state and federal governments accounable for educating our children, and that it is not a privilege to receive a decent education in a safe environment, but an inalienable right that all children deserve.

The Boys of Baraka is playing in Berkeley at The Act 1 & 2 (I believe), and in San Francisco at the Lumiere. There weren’t too many people in the theater when I saw it and that usually means that with independent documentaries like this, it will probably leave theaters soon.

Deserted, but Overflowing

2006-01-31T00:52:00.000-08:00

Somehow I must have missed Ali Reza Raisian's hauntingly beautiful Deserted Station, which was released in its native Iran in 2002, but was only recently distributed in America. If it played in theaters it must have been a short run, which is a shame because it is one of those rare films that stays with you for days after you've seen it.

Deserted Station is available on DVD at some of the local video stores, which is cause for celebration. The story was written by acclaimed director Abbass Kiarostami (Ten, A Taste of Cherry, etc.), and tells the story of a married couple who get stranded in the desert while the husband is searching for landscapes to photograph. While he goes off with a man that promises to help fix their vehicle, the woman is left behind in a village that is mainly populated by children who have been abandoned by parents who have gone to work in the big cities. Since the mechanic is also the teacher in the small village, the woman takes his place and forges an unforgettable relationship with her students that evolves through the course of a single day.

The film starts slowly but gathers its narrative steam naturally until it leaves viewers breathless with its final heartbreaking sequences. Shot in a natural style and filled with the stark beauty of simple human kindness and compassion, Deserted Station is a charming oasis captured on film.

IN FARSI WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES

Top 10 Films of 2005

2006-01-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

Due to a severe lack of free time this year, I have minimalized my descriptions and refused an introduction. Having said that, and realizing that this could easily be misconstrued for an introduction, I will step up and list ten films that caught my attention this year. Are they really "in order"? I never know. I do know that Downfall resides firmly at the top.

1) Downfall
2) Broken Flowers
3) Saraband
4) Grizzly Man
5) El Crimen Perfecto
6) Pretty Persuasion
7) Nobody Knows
8) Kung Fu Hustle
9) I (heart) Huckabees
10) Ballet Russe

1) Downfall (Der Untergang)
For a more complete view of this modern masterpiece, go to "previous posts" and locate Going Down with Der Untergang.

This is one of the finest films to be made in years, so if you missed it on the big screen, try to catch it at home on the box. Bruno Ganz leads an impressive stable of actors through the course of Hitler’s last days in the bunker during the fall of Berlin in 1945. Rather than portay Hitler as a mad-dog, as other efforts have portrayed him in earlier films, Der Untergang achieves greater depth and pathos through establishing Der Fuhrer as a complex and even sympathetic human being. You’ll look long and hard to find a film that boasts better direction, and the palpable performances throughout descend the viewer into the decaying world of one of history’s most powerful individuals.

2)Broken Flowers
Bill Murray offers one of his most satisfying minimalist efforts as a man who is encouraged to take a long look at his romantic past. Critics have stated that the stars of the film are really the women that surround him, but to insist solely on the pace and thematic summersaults that the women lend the film would be to lose the pristine balancing act that Murray manages on the other end of the scale. Broken Flowers is a highly satisfying, albeit sad film about a man searching the course of his folly by meeting face to face several women he has disregarded for greener pastures. Jim Jarmusch continues to refine his vision while remaining steady on the trail he has been blazing since his opening gambit, Permanent Vacation(1980). The pace may read too slow for many American audiences, but if that's your only consideration then you're missing the point. (Think on it: you can't rush a good long look at yourself...)

3) Saraband
After retiring from cinema some 25 years ago (in order to focus on writing and direction for the theater), Ingmar Bergman has released another of his probing chamber dramas based on characters from his monumental Scenes from a Marriage (a 5-hour series made for Swedish television in the 1970’s and later released in a 3-hour theatrical version). While you won’t find a glut of material that is new from Bergman in this rewarding return, Saraband nonetheless rests firmly alongside some of his earlier outstanding character studies: Persona; Through a Glass, Darkly; or Winter Light. The switch here is that the focus is turned on characters who are dealing with Bergman’s familiar existential queries while isolated in the introspective landscape of old age (while charting different themes than his earlier masterpiece Wild Strawberries).

For Bergman lovers, Saraband is essential viewing; for the uninitiated wanting to better know his work, this entry may not be the best place to start – the depth of inquiry into madness, incest and existential decline may seem overly harsh and unflinching to the point of excess. Instead, go back to some of the earlier classics (Summer with Monika, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, or his epic masterpiece, Fanny & Alexander). All critical concerns aside, there have been few filmmakers who can match Bergman’s intensity without approaching the country of the absurd or declining into overwrought melodrama. Somehow that chilly Swedish homeboy knows how to keep it real…

Finally, to rediscover Marianne and Joseph (principal actors from Scenes from a Marriage, played to perfection by Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson) in this late stage of life, and to learn of Marianne’s mastery of her self in this closing chapter, Saraband perhaps offers his more faithful viewers a note of resolution at the close of a long career of fierce psychological inquiry.

4) Grizzly Man
Werner Herzog has had an illustrious and celebrated career dodging the stylistic and narrative concerns posited by his fellow colleagues of the New German Cinema. In Grizzly Man, he uses found footage from the home movies of Timothy Treadwell to launch his documentary on an individual that tried to exist in harmony with grizzly bears in the Arctic Wilderness (along with a ghost partner that anonymously photographed the bulk of the experiences). See this remarkable film by one of cinema’s greatest madmen about one of America’s most unlikely protagonists – Grizzly Manis the 2005 wild card of the year that you won't want to miss.

5) El Crimen Perfecto
This unexpected Spanish chucklefest broadcasts the story of a department store manager who loves to woo women on the job. Eventually greed outweighs his libido and leads him to move beyond passion and into some rather messy crimal activity. When a downtrodden female employee discovers a resultant secret, the tables turn and a thin veil of patriarchal order collapses. Perfecto is riddled with original sight gags, comically absurd situations (ala Amaldovar), clever plot twists, and an unbridled humor that could urge some of our more jaded viewers to gush with laughter.

6)Pretty Persuasion
Evan Rachel Wood’s performance knocks it out of the park with her portrayal of a young girl who, while not finding the proper inroads to Hollywood stardom, decides to enlist a few friends to bring sexual harassment charges against one of their teachers in order to gain fame and popularity. Pretty Persuasion has the wit of earlier teen-satires like Election, but is a much darker portrait of the cynicism of today’s privileged youth and they price they pay when convenience offers everything at a moment’s notice.

7) Nobody Knows
This sober portrait of three siblings living in Tokyo after their unreliable mother disappears will likely take audiences by surprise. Try as they might to retain a sense of normalcy, the children's closed society caves in on itself, all without a hint of moralizing by way of filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu. Viewers are offered a close look at the effects on the psyches of unwanted children and the social and emotional perils that accompanies the abandoned youth of today. Based on a true story, the film, which took 15 years to make, has a universal message that may leave viewers haunted long after the final credits have faded to black.

8) I (heart) Huckabees
Could existentialism, or the search for it, be considered quintessentially comedic? This absurd comedy on a theme of figuring it all out faces off with strange bedfellows – an ecology advocate and an advertising executive – and strips them of some of their socio-economic trappings to reveal similar truths that lurk beneath their wildly divergent surfaces. Remnant of the brand of humor that exists in films like Being John Malkovich, Huckabees plays with the ridiculous notion of putting the search for self in the hands of “existential detectives” (played to delirious perfection by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman). The perfectly cast company moves effortlessly through this modern farce and blends in with the landscape of Los Angeles to reveal a sublime resonance for anyone that has spent time in that city of swollen dreams.

9) Kung Fu Hustle
The blurb on the DVD label for Kung Fu Hustle reads: “Kill Bill meets Wile E. Coyote”. While that gives an inkling of the physical pyrotechnics of Stephen Chow’s newest work, it doesn’t nearly reveal the originality of the direction and stylistic brilliance, nor does it hint at the desire to waylay evil western influences with (post)modern-day communist zeal. Power to the people!

10) Ballet Russe
The Ballet Russe, a band of mostly Russian refugees stranded in Paris after their exodus from Russia after the October Revolution, is the center attraction in this breathtaking documentary that traces the further development of one the greatest artistic expressions of human movement. Far from a stuffy documentary about what many may feel is a snobbish artform aimed at the cultural elite, Ballet Russe is a treasure chest of fascinating characters (many of the original members of the company are not only still alive, but have never realized that they have slipped into old age), a bird's eye view of the evolution of contemporary ballet, an intriguing story of how several bold individuals fought to stand at the helm, and a poignant look at a moment in time when art was a vital aspect of everyday society (take a look at the thousands of fans lined up in NY city, Paris, or London to catch a performance). See it if for no other reason than to witness the achingly beautiful archival footage of the great artists of ballet working their magic (Danilova, Markova, Toumanova, Fokine) along with the great artists that collaborated with the company to realize some of their finest masterpieces (Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, Ravel).

OTHER NOTABLES:
The list above is a desire to represent as many styles and themes as possible. Here are some other films that really made a nice impression as well.

Capote surpassed my expectations, and the credit was mostly due to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who resisted the obvious urge to play Truman as a charicature in order to allow the groudbreaking writer the complex reading he deserves.

Syrianna was a really admirable film as it refrained from trying to sum up an extremely complex set of problems (the situation in the Middle East today)in a neatly packaged mainstream film. Instead, while remaining in the tradition of Soderberg's earlier Traffic, a series of vignettes unfold where opposing ideologies can co-exist in a way that allows a more complete critical perspective. Viewers that complained the film was hard to comprehend as a whole missed the point - there is no absolute truth in such situations, and to pretend such a truth existed and could be portrayed in this format is guilty of trivializing all the anguish, deceit, death, and honor that has been at stake in the Middle East over the past few decades.

Good Night and Good Luck was most enjoyable, and I would hope that anyone who sees it would become painfully aware of how far short we have fallen from the promise of television broadcasting at the dawn of its conception.

The Assasination of Richard Nixon allowed Sean Penn the chance to descend into the deep end as Samuel J. Bicke, a salesman who lunges at the American Dream but slides into oblivion instead. After losing it all, his desperate attempt at existential salvation is to make an attempt on the life of the 37th President of the United States. Rather than merely offering a morbid reimagining of Death of a Salesman, the film expands into the wider arena of the Watergate era and gives us a spot-on reading of America at the onset of a moral and political crisis that remains with us today.

Favorite Re-releases to hit the theaters:
The Passenger (Antonioni)
Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle)
Classe Tous Risques! (Sautet)

Favorite DVD (re)releases of 2005
Hari Kari (Kobayashi)
Ugetzu (Mizoguchi)
Story of a Prostitute (Suzuki)
Man Who Fell To Earth (Roeg)
Andrej Wajda – Three War Films (A Generation, Kanal, Ashes & Diamonds)
Au Hassard Baltazar (Bresson)
An Angel At My Table (Campion)
Bad Timing (Roeg)
The Exorcist: re-mastered & re-edited (Friedkin)

Favorite Revival Picks/Series:
PFA’s Far East Film Festival
The Castro Theater’s 70mm Festival
The Castro Theater’s Godzilla Festival
The Balboa Theater’s Samurai Festival

Things to Look for in 2006:

Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques has been remastered and may just show up at your local rep-theater (or video store) this year. If it does, check out this great French noir with a unique slant – an anti-hero tragedy with lots of heart.

The Criterion Collection is set to launch one of Luis Bunuel’s Mexico City masterpieces: Viridiana has a release date of late February 2006 – it should hit your local video stores soon after. Also coming soon on Criterion’s new releases list is Akira Kurosawa’s polished gem The Bad Sleep Well.

Review: Eveline Glennie – Touch the Sound

2006-01-11T01:41:00.000-08:00

Eveline Glennie is a percussionist, born in Scotland in 1965 and has played throughout the world with many great musicians, orchestras and chamber ensembles. What is unique about Ms. Glennie is that she is extremely hearing impaired and relies on a varieties of other senses to guide her musical effort.

I saw Touch the Sound recently and thought it not up to the level of Rivers and Tides, Thomas Riedelsheimer's film on Andy Goldsworthy (in terms of clarity or erudition), but it was enjoyable nonetheless. One of the most intriguing scenes, where Glennie is talking to a student and they are discussing the relationship between dynamics and touch was something I wish she had commented on more. For me, that was something totally unique to her experience and yet it was left (for the most part) unexplored.

The few performances in the film were nice. The autobiographical fragments were OK but drifted a bit. I especially liked her performance on snare drum in Grand Central Station - a captivating scene!

As much as I enjoyed the film and wished there were more like it out there, I couldn't help but feel the film lacked a clear focal point (I think more attention to the element I mentioned in the 1st paragraph would have allowed the film to succeed on this level).

Upon further reflection, I wondered if the tone and pace of the film was trying to pull the viewer further into Ms. Glennie's world - a world that may read a bit un-tethered due to her hearing impairment. I can appreciate this desire on the part of the filmmaker (if indeed he considered it), but the final product may not have succeeded having made that stylistic distinction/decision.

But hey, how many films can you say are made about great, off the beaten path musicians? I'm glad I saw it and would encourage anyone on the list to check it out. I hope it did well enough to keep Thomas Riedelsheimer's in good favors with film financiers; he certainly deserves to keep at it (and you know how fickle film financiers can be). I caught it at the Balboa (one of the last great low-key rep theaters in SF with superior programming), and there were only a few folks in the audience.

Re: Great Directors - The Films of Yasujiro Ozu

2005-11-07T18:43:00.000-08:00

Re: Great Directors - The Films of Yasujiro Ozu

Relatively unknown in America, but an acknowledged master and influence on nearly every major Japanese director of the 20th century, Yasujiro Ozu has created a unique body of work that rivals the works of William Shakespeare in its examination of the motivations common to our human species. Ozu seems to have invented his very own blend of social study with comedy that allows people to chuckle at issues that touch our more vulnerable emotional states.

Ozu’s style is simple and perhaps well-known to his audiences: the camera sits roughly three feet off the floor and seldom moves, giving the distinct impression that you, the viewer, are sitting on the floor with your ever-changing panorama of hosts and hostesses. The metaphorical restaurateurs that populate Ozu’s films serve up the microcosm of family and all that comes with it: birth, growing pains of childhood, the plight of education, easy and uneasy transitions into adulthood, gender issues, marriage (to be or not to be), bustling careers, failed dreams, separations, alcoholism, tragic suicides, easy deaths, tender reconciliation and the age-old questions that come with old age and the inevitable confrontation with death.

Here is a short list of some of the films that I would recommend without reservation:

1)Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) A potpourri of Ozu’s themes all woven together in a satisfying tale – a great place to start for Ozu initiates.

2)Tokyo Twilight (1957) A tragic tale of a disintegrating post-war family that features a fleet of masterful performances that will melt the coldest of hearts.

3)Good Morning (1959) A tale of two adorable kids who take on a vow of silence because their parents won’t buy a TV – a great introduction to Japanese film for kids.

4)An Autumn Afternoon (1962) Ozu’s last film tenderly reveals a father facing old age as his daughter contemplates marriage – more great performances from the Ozu stable of actors!

5)What Did the Lady Forget? (1937) FUNNY story of a liberated young woman that visits her fairly conservative aunt and uncle and sets out to break their exalted social taboos.

6)Early Summer(1951) This spacious film features a great performance by Setsuko Hara a dutiful daughter whose family is trying to find a husband. While the theme may be familiar to Ozu fans, the performances and the subtleties of emotion and psycological understanding are the reasons this director has carved out a place that is unique in the history of cinema.

7)Tokyo Story(1953) One of Ozu's most highly acclaimed works, this film presents an elderly couple visiting some of their children in Tokyo, only to find themselves not particularly welcome in their fast-paced urban lives. The couple return to their country village at a time of tragedy that brings the family together at the film's end in a heartbreaking and unforgettable way.

8)Floating Weeds(1959) Shrouded in Ozu minimalism, this film tracks the movements of a band of traveling actors who have settled temporarily in a fishing village. While stranded without work, the actors in Ozu's film give the great director lots of personalities to explore and merge in dramatic and non-dramatic conflict.

Re: Great Directors - The Films of Akira Kurosawa

2005-11-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)

For those that have heard of Akira Kurosawa but have never seen any of the great director’s work, here is a list of essential classics. Acknowledged as the creator of not one, but many undisputed masterpieces (Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Ran, Rashomon, High and Low, Dersu Uzala, Stray Dog, Red Beard, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, The Idiot), Akira Kurosawa helped to revolutionize Japanese Cinema while providing inspiration for other directors (George Lucas: Star Wars, John Sturges: The Magnificent Seven, Sergio Leone: A Fistful of Dollars). Kurosawa was particularly successful with adaptations of great literature, using works by Shakespeare (Ran, Throne of Blood) and Dostoevsky (The Idiot) as a springboard to create some of his more compelling and complex narratives.

1) Seven Samurai (1954)
This film has rightly earned unanimous international acclaim since its release in 1954 for providing us with a complex story rich in historical overtones handled with absolute technical brilliance and superbly realized by a notable cast that features some of Japan’s finest actors from the period.

Desperate farmers hire seven samurai (who wander the land after the fall of warlord feudalism in 16th century Japan) to defend their land from bandits who pillage their village. The samurai organize to train their meager army of not-so-innocent peasants, create a plan of defense, and enact one of the greatest hand-to-hand battle sequences ever conceived and delivered on film (the final battle sequence occupies nearly 1/3 of the movie’s total 3 ½ hour duration). Seven Samurai is an outstanding allegory of social reconstruction conceived in post WWII Japan and has inspired countless imitations but few rivals. (The film served as a blueprint for The Magnificent Seven, and is thought by many critics to have revived the Western genre in American cinema).

2) Ikiru (1952)
Kurosawa’s heartbreaking chronicle about a man searching to give meaning to his empty bureaucratic life once he discovers he has stomach cancer. The first half of the film focuses on the principal character as he wanders the seedier side of Tokyo nightlife. The second half of the film takes place at his funeral, where many members of the community gather to debate his greatness and/or folly. Finely sculpted characters, a unique narrative structure, an inquiry into what constitutes our individual identity, and an unparalleled performance by Takashi Shimura make Ikiru an unforgettable film event.

3) Rashomon (1950)
Rashomon features several breakthrough ideas on film narrative and structure. The movie opens amid the ruins of Rashomon, a palace once occupied during the great era of warlords. The beggars that find shelter there swap stories and we become the audience of a tale of the rape and murder of a princess. When the suspects appear at a trial, the story is told through the multiple perspectives of its participants.

4) Ran (1985)
Based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, Kurosawa has his great warlord divide his province between his three sons to fatal consequences for all. Ran is perhaps one of Kurosawa’s most well-known film by American audiences and received several academy awards for its stunning art direction and costumes.

5) Yojimbo (1961)
Great music and comic action drive this follow-up to Seven Samurai, and forms a companion piece to Kurosawa’s Sanjuro (1962). Fans of John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven will find the original model to retain all of the psychological intrigue and action of its western-styled descendant.

6) Stray Dog (1949)
Kurosawa often instigates his more successful character studies by turning the world of his protagonist upside down. In the unforgettable Iriru, the central character discovers he has stomach cancer and will enjoy precious little remaining time on earth. In High and Low, a rich businessman’s life careens toward disaster when his son is kidnapped by greedy corporate extortionists. In Stray Dog, a young detective (played by Toshiro Mifune in his first film with Kurosawa) leaves a crowded streetcar on a miserably hot day only to find his gun has been pick-pocketed. As in Ikiru, this existential crisis forces our hero to hit the seedy streets of Tokyo in search of his weapon, or his symbolic identity. Echoing noir classics like The Big Sleep, once detective Murakami penetrates the criminal underworld a whole new swarm of crimes unfold as Mifune descends further and further into psychological and social chaos.

7) Throne of Blood (1957)
This powerful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in the tradition of Japan’s Noh Theater may be one of the greatest readings of the bard’s oeuvre. Kurosawa re-imagines Macbeth as Isuzu Yamada (acted miraculously, as always, by Mifune), a brave knight fighting to protect Spider’s Castle. While returning to from battle to receive a medal of valor, a forest spirit foretells his future and the rest is the stuff of history – warrior kills king and becomes king only to be killed by another warrior who takes the throne for himself.

Brilliant photography exploits Kurosawa’s insistence on shooting the majority of the film in extreme fog, which ideally underlines the idea that the land itself is closing in on the mad warrior. The final scene, where arrows rain down on the dying warlord, is one of the more celebrated (and imitated) endings in cinema.

Re: Great Directors - The Films of Luis Bunuel

2005-11-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

Re: Great Directors

The Films of Luis Bunuel
Bunuel’s movies are rarely easy to summarize or categorize. His career as director scans several decades and due to the strikingly original nature of his work, many are considered without compare. It would be hard today to find a film that could be confused with Exterminating Angel, L’Age D’or, or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisies. Luis Bunuel is acknowledged (along with Andre Breton and others) as being one of the founders of surrealism – a style that informs all of his work in unique and unpredictable ways. Bunuel’s writings, while not widely read, range from surrealist fragments to insightful expressions of criticism for film and the theater along with his autobiographical musings. Highly influential and yet rarely imitated (successfully), Bunuel’s movies were created in many countries, as the maverick filmmaker seemed to find it difficult to call anywhere his home for very long. Financial support for his work varied from year to year and from place to place, and yet he was able to make strikingly original movies on several continents for comparably far less money than many of his more celebrated peers.

1) Un Chien Andaldou (1929)
Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali proclaim the death of rationality in this short film that has earned its rightful exalted place at the dawn of the surrealist movement. One of the most oft-quoted works in the history of film, movie-goers have seen many of the famous images without ever seeing the work as a whole. Eyes are sliced open by razors, flowers and stigmata appear in the hands of angels, and buildings burn to ash with the same detached level of observation. The editing allows the images to move quickly, as if a great host of scenarios were passing on a speeding train of light.

2) Los Olvidados (1950)
Los Olvidados stands as one of the most visionary of all Bunuel films, and is one of several undying masterpieces from his Mexico City period (1940’s – 1950’s). A viewing of the film today reveals its influence on an entire new genre of movies that might include Amores Perros, Ratcatcher, George Washington, Elephant, and City of God.

Translated to English as The Forgotten Ones, Los Olvidados received scathing criticism from the Mexican film industry. Friends close to Bunuel also complained of the portrayal of impoverished youth struggling to create social order and resist a criminal life on the streets of Mexico City. In a style remnant of Italian neo-realism at one turn and, during the nightmare dream sequences, producing effects that recall his surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dali, Bunuel handles the children’s violent deeds while refraining from romanticizing or criticizing his subject. He refuses to answer the questions that accompany the social problems inherent in the movie, which frees the film from unwanted moralizing or the urge to provide a happy ending.

Bunuel is said to have spent a great deal of time in the capital city’s slums befriending the criminal youth (Stephen Hart – Bunuel’s Box of Subaltern Tricks ©2004), and the result is not unlike Larry Clark’s 1995 shockumentary, Kids. 54 years after its creation, Los Olvidados haunts us with images of children relying on little other than their courage to survive life on the streets.

3) The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955)
On the eve of the Mexican Revolution, young Archibaldo de la Cruz believes that he has wished the death of his nanny while contemplating his mother’s music box. Moving to “the present”, the film hovers from flashback to present tense, where Senior de la Cruz is confessing a myriad of imagined crimes, all tenderly illuminated by Augustin Jimenez’ crisp photography and shuffled along with some of Bunuel’s most deftly satirical and comic romps. The music box becomes Sr. de la Cruz’s principal fetish, which accompanies, (and re-kindles) his penchant for murdering women. Will he conquer his obsessions and get the girl? If so, how do we define “get”…check it out and see for yourself.

4) Nazarin (1959)
One of the most beautifully photographed of all Bunuel films, Nazarin captures the harsh Mexican landscape for a tale of a turn-of-the century wandering cleric who has shed his priest’s garmentsin hopes of comforting the poor, free from the Church’s chastising shadow. He is accompanied by two desperate women and an assortment of life’s outcasts. His is a Christlike effort, to wring charity out of a peasantry locked in the absurd cruelty of their environment, but also locked into the very material reality of being human. (PFA guide)

5) The Exterminating Angel (1962)
This film holds a special place in my heart as it is the confessed all-time favorite film of Don Van Vliet (Captain Beffheart). The cream of Mexican society gather for a meal only to find themselves mysteriously held captive by nothing other than their own inexplicable anxieties in this utterly unique meditation on class and meaninglessness.

6) Belle du Jour (1967)
Catherine Deneuve descends into the subconscious of the upper middle-class and turns idle afternoons into a foray of prostitution and sexual perversion in order to exorcize a few of her formative demons in this hypnotic examination of power and sex. An obvious influence on films like Barbet Schroeder’s Maitrese, Polanski’s Repulsion and many others.

7) The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined. Fernando Rey, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyring, and Jean-Pierre Cassel head the extraordinary cast of this 1972 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film. (Summary: The Criterion Collection)

Cine Mexico at Film Forum & PFA

2005-11-07T18:35:00.000-08:00

Cine Mexico
Featured at Film Forum (NYC) Summer 2004, and at Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley) Winter 2004.

Many American viewers are unaware of the great tradition of filmmaking in Mexico and how that industry has reflected its society’s idealism and proud cultural heritage from its historical origins to the present. Cine Mexico showed moviegoers that Mexican cinema has paralleled many of the stylistic penchants that have driven countless Hollywood classics – from “western” styled folkloric pieces to Peliculas Romanticos, and absurdist comedies that rival the adventures of the Marx Brothers.

Here is a short list of some of the memorable films I caught at Film Forum and PFA. Many of these are available on VHS, but have not ye**.3*t made the transfer to DVD. I borrowed a few descriptions from the PFA reader’s guide and those entries are marked accordingly.

1) That’s the Point (1940)
This is the film that established the comedian Cantinflas as a superstar – the Charlie Chaplin of Spanish-language films. But where Chaplin used silence, Cantinflas’s urban vagabond, the pelidito, confronts the arrogance and hypocrisy of the Mexican middle-class with words – lots of them, brilliantly woven into a web of semantic confusion. (PFA)

2) Tender Little Pumpkins (1948)
A botched suicide attempt leads to a veritable conga line of comic events in this delightful musical starring Tin Tan – the Mexican equivalent of Jerry Lewis. (PFA)

3) Aventurera (1949)
Moody melodramas known as rumberas were, like their heroines on screen, socially condemned by the middle class only to become forbidden pleasures for their cult following. Aventurera is considered the epitome of the genre and features a dynamic performance by the Cuban rumba dancer Ninon Sevilla, the queen of the cabareteras, cast successfully against Andrea Palma. (PFA)

4) Miroslava (1993)
Miroslava is about a woman whose life was so much larger than the life she had to be a movie star. Considered one of the most beautiful actresses in Mexican cinema history, Miroslava acted in about two dozen films before committing suicide in 1955 at the age of 25. (PFA)

5) Frida (1984)
I much preferred Paul Leduc’s Frida to Julie Taymor’s recent effort. Where Taymor rushed you through her smorgasbord of color, image and flesh, Leduc allows you to float effortlessly in Frida’s interior worlds. Subtlety and grace are the operating principles in illuminating the serious detachment needed for Frida Kahlo to find her unique and delightfully disturbing vision. (PG)

6) Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1954)
One of Luis Bunuel’s Mexico City chronicles, Illusion posits a revolutionary manifesto as two streetcar workers hijack one of their repair subjects and give unbridled service to the sprawling metropolis. A cleverly funny look at the absurdity of bureaucracy, Illusion takes the neo-realistic aims of the Bicycle Thief and couples it with a logic that would have pleased Eugene Ionesco. (PG)

7) Danzon (1991)
Set in Mexico City and Veracruz, Maria Novaro’s 1991 dreamy tale is a road movie led by an unlikely heroine. Maria Rojo plays Julia, who leaves Mexico City to search for her long-term dance partner, Carmello. Inciting a delicate character study that would satisfy fans of Central Station, Danzon casts Julia to the dancehalls of Veracruz, where she meets characters that could have easily graced the early films of Pedro Almaldovar (but without the forced hyper-anxieties). Filled from end to end with exquisite music, most of which is performed by groups on screen, Danzon is an endearing character study packed with compassion for the human experience and the subtle epiphanies of a woman in pursuit of liberation and self-discovery. (PG)

Going Down with Der Untergang

2005-09-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Der Untergang, or Downfall, as it is expressed in its English translation, is one of the finest films to come along in the past decade and will likely be hailed as a masterpiece for years to come. It is the unflinching portrayal of the final days in the life of Adolf Hitler along with his cabinet members and military associates during their retreat into the infamous bunker during the fall of Berlin in 1945. Downfall accesses a wealth of historical data to bring this dark moment of 20th century history to light, and a knowledge of this history would allow viewers to better understand the subplots and political intrigue (which are clarified on repeat viewings). The German/Italian/Austrian co-production sports an outstanding supporting cast led by Bruno Ganz in one of the finest performances of his acclaimed career.

The airtight direction is among one of many things to marvel; there doesn't seem to be a single moment of wasted film in Downfall's running time of 156 minutes. The excellent script utilizes the enormous cast extremely well, as Hitler's associates scramble to determine their own allegiance to Der Fuhrer and the allegiance of others around them. This allows for a continually shifting web of psychological intrigue and the director uses it to sustain a high level of suspense throughout. All the supporting actors turn in great performances; it is difficult to recall an ensemble that functions so well together. The casting and art direction are flawless; the authenticity draws viewers into the work and holds them in awe.

Director Oliver Hirschbeigel's intention was to make the figure of Adolf Hitler and some of his more sinister associates play as human as possible. Previous filmic efforts have taken a different road by portraying the Fuhrer as a rabid dog or senseless lunatic. But in this case the power comes from the understanding that these people, capable of so much bloodshed and destruction, were ultimately mere human beings. This perspective gives Downfall an added emotional weight that pushes the narrative beyond normal definitions of tragedy due to the horrible ramifications of the Nazi Party's agenda.

The path of Hitler's decline is nicely counterpointed with the character of his secretary, Traudl Junge, deftly portrayed by Alexandra Maria Lara. From the moment she is hired at the onset of the film to the final scenes of her escape from the bunker, she is both sympathetic and suspect. The real-life image and words of Frau Junge is presented at the beginning and end of the film, as she muses on the multi-layered levels of responsibility for the action of the Nazi Party she may have accepted or overlooked.

The film achieves its greatest intensity as viewers watch the internal military mechanisms of the Third Reich disintegrate as the Russians approach Berlin while Hitler's sanity really begins to fail. The scenes where Ganz is ordering his generals to shift troops (who have already perished on the battlefield) to support other failing units create moments of tremendous tension. There is great detail to many aspects of the fall of Berlin, and all are tracked in a way that never allows the pace to slacken.

Downfall examines aparallelparalel character in Eva Braun (played by Julianne Kohler), who went to great lengths to keep those around her from stepping away from their loyalty to Der Fuhrer. Corinna Harfouch and Ulrich Matthes merge with the roles of Madga and Joseph Goebbels, and their performances could be considered among the finest in the past decade of moviemaking. Their final descent brings about some of the most terrible acts of tragedy.

Der Untergang is a masterpiece of cinema that reveals a dark page of our not too distant history. Without ever nodding to present political situations, it reveals the danger of having so much power resting in the hands of so few individuals. Downfall is an important film on many levels and viewers will find that repeated viewings only help to appreciate the immense effort involved by this impressive director and his cast and crew to bring this powerful story to fruition.

Pretty Persuasion Isn't Pretty (but see it anyway!)

2005-09-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty Persuasion is a film that is sure to invite controversy. The plot, if you haven’t already heard, is about a highly intelligent high school girl that convinces two friends to assist in bringing sexual harassment charges against their English/drama teacher in order to achieve fame and media popularity. While the film’s influences and plot devices show their seams from time to time, director Marcos Siega avoids common Hollywood fluff by pushing Persuasion’s satirical humor into the darker recesses of the American Psyche. Previous efforts like Heathers, Election, Mean Girls, or To Die For, lead the pack of said influences, and yet Pretty Persuasion nudges its way past most audiences’ comfort zones into deeper territories of racism, class issues, and over-zealous desire for notoriety, urging the narrative to its natural conclusion - a pandora's box laden with tragedy.

The real gem of the film is Evan Rachel Wood, whose performance is near-perfect. Her few minor stumbles seem more the fault of direction than of her instincts and delivery. Her ability to hold the darkly satirical line of humor while keeping the audience emotionally engaged and sympathetic to her plight (however ill-advised) is no small feat. While Pretty Persuasion is not a perfect film, its highest merits belong to Ms. Wood and the director’s use of art direction to counterpoint the emotional climaxes of the film. It also features a narrative structure that moves back and forth in time but in this case, unlike so many other recent films that suffer from more the "more device than substance syndrome", Pretty Persuasion uses these devices with self-mocking humor and the effects heighten the suspense and mystery of the story. The film has fairly strong and consistent direction throughout, with momentary lapses into a banal vulgarity, pushed over the top in those moments by James Woods, who plays the father of the movie's anti-heroine.

This might be one of the better independent films out there at the moment, and if you’re on the fence about seeing it in the theater, it should be high on your list of rentals later this fall.

Richard Rodriquez and An Eyeful of Sin

2005-04-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

Review of Sin City by Phillip Greenlief

If you evaluate Sin City for what it is: a comic-book styled graphic novel on screen replete with pulp plot devices, raw violence and film-noir overtones, it's pretty hard to beat. It's certainly one of the more interesting visual feasts released in recent months.

But if you hold it up to what we tend to expect from top-drawer film noir (unseen plot twists and structural advances from classics like The Big Sleep) or hold it accountable to the psychological studies that are latent in the same genre (the 1949 classic DOA, or any of Fritz Lang's noir efforts), the film falls short. The urge to borrow structurally from Pulp Fiction seems irresistible to Rodriguez, but the shuffling of episodes ultimately plays tedious by the final frame. The director's urge to resolve all the plot elements, while usually satisfying, feels labored. For a movie that runs at 126 minutes, it seems long despite several shocking action sequences and a carnival of cinematic pyrotechnics.

Nonetheless, while Sin City has its problems it could be one of the better films in theaters right now (but pales in comparison next to something like Der Untergang (Downfall) - a new film from Germany about Hitler's final days in the bunker led by Bruno Ganz in one of his finest performances).

Mickey Rourke drops in at Sin City, and delivers a surprisingly satisfying performance as does Elijah Wood (two actors I don't tend to applaud). Rosario Dawson adds some levity to the often overly dank atmosphere and keeps the film from plunging endlessly down underworld lane. She acheives this admirable pursuit while delivering an almost unbearably sexy performance. The remaining barrage of Sin City's characters exist in a cinematic world that rests defiantly outside the gates of "live-animation", and seeks almost desperately to carve new stylistic trails at every turn. If Sin City inherits a genre popluated by earlier efforts like Dick Tracy or Tim Burton's animated works, Rodriquez's howling gem reveals an advance in visual and dramatic intensity. The recent rekindling of a fascination between young people and animated films notwithstanding, parents will sleep more easily having resisted bringing young children to this rodeo of sex, torture, cannibalism and graphic murder.

To sum things up, while the film is one of the most stunning visual creations in recent years, the story and the character development lack the depth and attention to detail inherent in the aforementioned astonishing imagery. But if viewers are in the market for pure entertainment that is violence-soaked, but thanks to the animated quality of the film resists being overly heavy handed and overwrought, Sin City is a movie that deserves your attention.

Top 10 Films of 2004

2005-01-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

Top 10 Films of 2004
Phillip Greenlief

Rather than my usual introductory remarks on how the preceding year was a bad one for moviegoers, I’ll initiate our 2004 discussion with a few questions:

Is it foolish to write about film after wading through the calamity-filled trough of 2004?
Why spend time thinking about movies when so much was at stake on our recent presidential election? With all the films out there dedicated to providing a balanced array of information on the White House, the Military, U.S. Intelligence, or the Media, was anyone inspired to think or act differently? Is it more and more difficult to tell the difference between the natural disasters imagined in cinemascope and those dominating the 6 o’clock news? Has the fog of war shepherded America into a blind submission that keeps us from comprehending that our bullying operations in Iraq has more to do with Halliburton’s $63M revenue in 2004 than amassing a harbinger of liberty in that war-torn nation? How many of the 100,000+ Iraqi citizens that have perished were innocent civilians? Is gas cheaper? Was it worth it? In what ways do we abstract the death toll of U.S. Troops (1,330 and counting) so that we can avoid shedding tears over the senselessness of it all? What now? Do we desire our own personal Kill Bill revenge fantasies with George W Bush, Mel Gibson, or your local child molester kneeling before a fleet of flying daggers? Was Christ passionate? Should news agencies like the Fox Network display disclaimers that their #1 priority is to serve the Almighty Right Wing rather than presenting the facts? How are our film-going experiences altered by the opening statement based on real events? Should we believe organizations like Families First when they tell us that SpongeBob Squarepants (the film, the TV show, and his entire wet and wooly undersea world) promotes homosexuality and should therefore be taken off the air? Are there weapons of mass destruction camouflaged in the video games that flank the lobbies of your local theaters? Have our suburban neighborhoods merged seamlessly with multiplex convenience and amenities? Have your mayor’s urban renewal policies sentenced the disadvantaged to populate the parameters of Dogville? Has anyone seen Spiderman lately?

With the blurring of real and imagined realities approaching at an ever-accelerated race for your attention, the documentary film seems to have attained a temporary parking pass at the intersection of independent and mainstream cinema. Several movies that sought to supply the voting populace with a wider range of political perspectives were worth the price of admission. Out of a much longer list of worthy documentaries that would, for brevity’s sake, be reduced to Fahrenheit 911, The Control Room, and Uncovered (The Truth About the War in Iraq), only The Corporation and The Fog of War knocked the ball out of the proverbial park.

Movies outside the documentary field seem to be nervously flirting with social commentary, as if not covering current-affairs this year was suddenly not an option. New-family dramas like Thirteen read like a mature after-school special designed to reveal the peril our youth suffer under the raging glare of consumer media and the highly efficient systems of peer pressure that accompany those taunting images. Spanglish presented evidence that even loose cannons like Adam Sandler consider the unsung Mexican labor force in California a marketable plot device, while A Day without a Mexican hoisted a more sober reading of this condition to the screen but fell flat in its delivery. Will Rogers famous quip “I only know what I read in the newspapers” strikes a particularly ironic tone when trying to cite the difference between the events leading to Stephen Glass’ dismissal from the The New Republic and Billy Ray’s limp feature, Shattered Glass.

Outside the annals of Hollywood new works like Jean-Luc Goddard’s Notre Musique and Ingmar Bergman’s Saraband were released in 2004, received admiration from the press and awards at the festivals, but have yet to arrive in American cinemas. Distribution for Goddard’s films has deflated over the past decade (along with the quality of some of his work). His 5-hour documentary, Histoire du Cinema (2003), sure to be one of his highlights of the past decade, has yet to screen in American cinemas but was released on DVD in the U.S. by the ECM recording label (known mainly for releasing contemporary flavored Euro-jazz and a few select 20th century composers). The release is out of many viewers’ price range at $179.95 and many video stores have refrained from placing it on their shelves. (There are times when the tenets of capitalism bear an uncanny resemblance to censorship…)

Bergman’s Saraband will play the usual independent cinema haunts in 2005 and from all the emerging praise (for the power of the script, groundbreaking digital photography and top drawer performances from Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson), it seems mandatory viewing for anyone interested in learning why the great Swedish director chose to break silence and give us a final installment of his earlier serialized work Scenes from a Marriage**. Bergman retired from cinema with his unparalleled autobiographical swan song Fanny and Alexander* (1982), although he has been writing and directing for the Royal Swedish Theater.

*Fanny & Alexander was recently released by The Criterion Collection on DVD in both its 3- ½ hour theatrical release and the 5-hour format created for Swedish Television, a version never before seen in the U.S.
**Criterion has also released Scenes from a Marriage in similar duel-version format.

10 Favorite Films of 2004
1) Dogville
2) The Corporation
3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
4) The Fog of War
5) Bad Education
6) Father and Son
7) Hero
8) Kill Bill
9) Open Water
10) Maria Full of Grace

1) Dogville
Lars Von Trier’s newest film flowers like a Pandora’s Box of morality plays set in the good ole’ U.S. of A. Nicole Kidman leads an excellent ensemble through an introduction and 9 episodes that examine how society (and the artist) exploits the poor and disenfranchised. The film had difficulties securing its release (originally slated for August 2003) and was postponed four times until it appeared in theaters on limited distribution in March 2004.

The complex script, great performances and the excellent use of a confined “open” space invites repeated viewings to unravel a myriad of metaphors – all probing an America that once prided itself on hospitality and an eagerness to reach out to those in need. Civic justice, xenophobia, revenge, and the question of goodness underline what may have been the most artistically successful film of the year. Dogville is the first of a proposed trilogy by Von Trier, all intended to examine the American socio-political landscape.

2) The Corporation
2004 produced a bumper crop of lefty documentaries, all seemingly pointed at the target of The Bush Administration, the bloody quagmire we Americans have produced in Iraq, and the misuse of power by American corporations. Out of all the documentaries that tried to encourage Americans to think differently about the current course of business as usual, The Corporation stood alone in its unique construction, the clarity of ideas expressed, and the solutions it posited with sober optimism.

The Corporation was created by producer Mark Achbar, director/editor Jennifer Abbott, and writer Joel Bakan. Jennifer Abbot’s direction and editing in particular tilt the applause meter throughout. The filmmakers begin with an outline of how corporations were first formed to conduct business while representing a corpus – a “body” of individuals with similar commercial objectives. The film then questions whether or not corporations should be held accountable to follow the same ethical and moral principles that the law holds its individual citizens.

Following the DSM-4 personality diagnostic test that psychologists use to evaluate psychopathic behavior, the filmmakers chart the parallels between corporate behavior and that of a psychopath. Activities such as callous disregard for the feelings of others, incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness: repeated lying or conning others for profit, or failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, top the list of unacceptable activities. Based on the evidence presented in the film, the “average” psychopath is a better behaved citizen than the body of our corporate institutions.

Rather than relentlessly painting the world of corporate behavior as a nightmarish landscape of destruction, The Corporation capitulates by proposing ways that the postmodern corpus can move toward a sustainable future in the next few decades to come – a silver lining only possible if the populace holds these manufacturing giants to operate with respect to the laws that govern all of us.

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Charlie Kaufman plucks a resonant heartstring with this clever inquiry into memory and its ability to shape love and an individual’s identity. Tom Wilkinson plays an inventor who has developed a tool to erase memories. Kristen Dunst stars as Berringer’s reason for needing such a machine and the remaining fumblers assigned to administer this mad cure are realized just awkwardly enough by Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo.

Jim Carey and Kate Winslet occupy the principal characters doomed to delve into their memory/dreamtime, where a fantastic voyage through the ups and downs of their challenged love affair leads them to believe they have more to lose than gain by scrubbing each other out of their remembered experience. The imaginative sequences where the lovers struggle to keep their memories from literally melting off the screen lives comfortably in the reality-challenged world of Charlie Kaufman’s fecund imagination.

Jim Carey, who ordinarily upsets the applecart of performance dynamics, reduces the size of his character to something in the realm of subtlety – a task he seems rarely able to achieve. He is more Buster Keaton than Charlie Chaplin in Eternal Sunshine, and he admirably carries the film along with a nice performance from Kate Winslet, who is equally irresistible and annoying while coursing a darkening maze of emotional entanglement in search of daylight.

4) The Fog of War
This film was originally released to critics in 2003, and judges awarded it an Oscar at last year’s Academy Award ceremonies. The film was not released in America until 2004 however, and although the Hollywood machinery was primed to praise it, the powers that be were not ready to distribute it until 2004. Errol Morris accepted his award and thanked the academy for “FINALLY recognizing my work”.

The Fog of War happens to be a great film, despite Morris’ lack of humility, the absurdity of The Academy, and Philip Glass’ overwrought score. Its principal subject is Robert McNamara, one time Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The Fog of War charts McNamara’s participation in the military from the 1940’s through his resignation from his position of Secretary of Defense in the midst of the Vietnam War, with a sidebar that discusses McNamara’s stint at the Ford Motor Company throughout most of the 1950’s. The movie charts several lessons that the filmmaker and its subject wish to impart in order to better understand what McNamara calls “The Fog of War” – an experience that occurs in the context of war that blinds its participants from the truth. In typical Morris fashion, the audience is left to decide just how much truth McNamara reveals in this fascinating look at how governments perceive, plan and execute the difficult matter of war maneuvers. Despite where you may reside on the subject of McNamara’s honesty, The Fog of War offers an important perspective on a particularly difficult period in America’s recent past and sheds valuable light on the values and decisions that have shaped our current involvement in Iraq.

5) Bad Education
Pedro Almadovar’s newest feature allows him to exorcise a few of his childhood demons while holding dear the dark satirical tone of vintage Hitchcock. Bad Education closed the 2004 season with a psychological thriller that was submerged in noir overtones and entangled in a structure not dissimilar to the architecture of a Chinese Box. The lively Spanish auteur hit stride in 2000 with All About My Mother and has approached recent films with greater confidence in his actors and the material subject; a thematic concern Almaldovar is most likely to link to the human body or, more particularly, to the human heart. His brazenly sculpted results offer a mature style that recalls some of the great post-war European directors (Melville, Fellini, Bunuel) while remaining grounded in a personally informed and highly charged cinematic universe.

Bad Education is populated with: a writer, a group of children, a director, a few teachers, and a few more actors (all based on autobiographical sources). These fleshy castanets realize a symphony of revenge, blackmail, fictionalization, childhood molestation, libel, and possibly murder – all neatly housed in the chambers of the parochial school and in the various laboratories of cinematic invention. A web of relations between priest, teacher, student, actor and director tangles past and present and accompanies a shedding of emotional scars from dense layers of past tense. Motivation upon motivation abounds as Almaldovar superbly balances his character studies so that no one might go unnoticed or unscathed. Cinematically, Bad Education lives in a neo-Technicolor time-warp. Check it out and see if you don’t recognize echoes of Vertigo and other Hitchcock color classics from the 1950’s. Combine great pulpy fun, edgy gender-bending material, exciting performances, and you’re sure to recognize another fine work by Spain’s ugly-duckling gone mad genius.

6) Father and Son
Alexander Sokurov, the restless poet of New Russian Cinema gives us the companion piece to his 2002 effort Mother and Son and continues his use of the family model as a metaphor for exploring social and personal challenges faced by post-Glasnost Russians. The film presents an dialogue between the children of the Iron Curtain (represented by the father) and the children of Glasnost (represented by the son).

Like Sokurov’s Herculean effort Russian Ark, the narrative moves in unexpected ways and does not follow a chronological sequence; time shifts as it does in a dream – that is to say scenarios develop in a logic that is overtly opaque. The narrative technique in Father & Son is comparable to Andrei Tarkovsky’s collage structure in his cultural memoir Mirror (Zerkalo), which delivers an overview of historical matters rather than the specifics of an individual (for the communal ideal is never far from the Russian consciousness). Father and Son walk that delicate line of revealing the collective through the human foil.

Sokurov’s newest effort will challenge its viewers. Audiences will likely achieve a greater appreciation of the work with repeated screenings. Like the ideal audience for Sokurov’s Russian Ark, viewers most likely to achieve satisfaction would have some interest or knowledge of Russian culture. The more you know, the more there is to appreciate. Similarly, the closer you look when watching a film with the rare depth of Father and Son the more you discover.

7) Hero
More than anything, Xiang Yimou’s Hero is a celebration of moving pictures and epic imagery. Highly saturated color, visual poetry and a cunning warrior who seeks to single-handedly destroy the army that wiped out his village, escorts the viewer on a nearly hallucinogenic action-filled ride through a world of folkloric fantasy. Some of Hero’s expositions echo Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in its attempt to reveal universal truth by presenting the multiple perspectives of diverse characters. But Hero is less concerned with the politics of justice than illustrating the eternal human fascinations with love, loyalty and how to annihilate your enemy as artfully as possible. An especially fine experience on the big screen, Hero is a movie for people who love movies that transport us into alternate realities that captivate our imagination and stir the soul.

8) Kill Bill
Unlike other critical readings of Tarantino’s newest effort, the following observations on Kill Bill focus on the work as a whole, not on the individual parts. Watching the film in its entirety with a short intermission in between seems an optimum way to experience the full breadth of this potent revenge epic. Viewed in this manner, Kill Bill is hard to beat if you are the kind of person that enjoys spending an afternoon mesmerized by the playfully dark, cathartic sequences found in movies like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly; Seven Samurai; or Once Upon a Time in the West.

Tarantino gleefully follows the footsteps of many masters. His highly stylized photography and his uncanny ability to use music to drive an extended narrative inherit most successfully from the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. The Byzantine mechanics of violence and obsession with the poetics of cinematic imagery reveals his fixations with Hong Kong fight classics. Structurally, you can trace his models back to the Wandering Rocks episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses – there is the ability to move back and forth through time by revealing pivot points that link sequences of action. Like all iconoclasts, he devours his passions and exhibits an obsessive need to balance an enormous array of stylistic material and if the film doth possess flaws they reside in a din of stylistic excess. Kill Bill is a long sequence of film about film and it offers a string of killings that surpass the psychotic density of The Big Sleep. It is both prideful and vain in its search to provide a cinematic throne for the 21st Century’s new bloodthirsty woman.

Clocking in at about 4 hours, it is possible that some viewers will find Kill Bill an experience that stays too long at the fair. Having considered that, we courteously warn the public at large that Kill Bill is a film for film addicts by a film addict. But beyond the shock value of all the flashes of carnage and wailing buckets of blood, it could be easily said that Kill Bill carries out the tenets of existentialism with far greater vigor than Sartre’s No Exit or Camus’ The Stranger (and is infinitely funnier). And if 4 hours were not enough, be it know that Tarantino’s films improve with repeated viewings; as the shock value fades with multiple exposure, all the humor and highly-orchestrated points of thematic light appear more clearly in view. Up close, there is no more exhaustive pursuit for revenge in the history of film by a single individual than the journey Uma Thurman travels in Kill Bill. The act of revenge is the ultimate existential responsibility, and our heroine takes great steps to fulfill her duties. She fights her foes to the death for over 3 ½ hours, and leaves an incalculable death count in her wake on a voyage that eventually brings her to a new level of self-discovery – the hitherto hidden knowledge of her own offspring.

9) Open Water
Open Water opens with an unsympathetic couple (played to perfection by Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) arguing about what to pack for their vacation and ends in deep tragedy. Writer/director Chris Kentis handles the understated material with refrain from special effects or sappy nostalgia while tapping into our most primal fear of being preyed upon by the unknown. Shot on digital film and reading all too much like your cousin’s “what we did on our summer vacation” home video, Open Water could be the closest thing the yuppie generation ever gets to its own personal Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

10) Maria Full of Grace
Catalina Moreno Santira’s miraculous performance is only one of the many reasons that make Maria Full of Grace a wholly satisfying film experience. Told from a young woman’s perspective, Joshua Marston’s newest feature is a hypnotic coming of age story about a girl who chooses to escape an impending existential crisis by working as a “mule” for Columbian drug-runners. (A mule ingests heroin or other substances in packets, passes through International Customs and delivers on the other side).

The director’s understated touch re-envisions the noir/pulp theme of wayward girl on the run in ways that free the script and pacing from falling into melodramatic quagmire. Instead, Maria gracefully burrows down into earnest characters whose separate destinies bring about a heartfelt climax without trying to smugly resolve any of the difficult to answer moral questions raised in the somber script.

Re:Discoveries – Local Color

If you’re a film lover, one of the great things about living in the San Francisco Bay Area is the access you have to a myriad of revival houses and film societies. This year, the Castro Theater Movie Palace hosted frameline 28 (The 28th SF International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival), the SF Jewish Film Festival, a week of Godzilla-related flicks (including, for you MF Doom fans, screenings of Monster Zero, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and Ghidrah: The Three-Headed Monster); a rarely-seen selection of noir potboilers; and gorgeous newly re-mastered prints of the Ingmar Bergman masterpieces Fanny & Alexander, Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Virgin Spring, and Persona. During the summer, re-mastered prints of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and a troupe of Orson Welles’ classics flashed upon their super-size screen.

In the fall, The Castro hosted a tribute to cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose versatile and influential camerawork gave immediacy to films like The Thin Man, The Rose Tattoo, Prisoner of Zenda, Mark of the Vampire, and Seconds. Finally, and speaking of GREAT documentaries, the Castro screened Hearts and Minds, one of the finest films on (the Vietnam) war ever made (available on Criterion Collection DVD at local video stores).

In addition to the outstanding CineMexico festival, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley presented a retrospective on Victor Sjostrom (one of the great silent-screen Swedish directors) with live musical accompaniment to his movies and a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, (in which Sjostrom plays the leading role). The PFA presented a few Visconti films that the Castro missed (and vice-versa), and both theaters celebrated with screenings of his masterpiece, The Leopard.

Spellboud Without a Hitch

2004-11-04T09:34:00.000-08:00

Note: I wrote this sometime ago, but never posted it. These films are now available on DVD or VHS for your home viewing pleasure.

Spellbound Without a Hitch
On the Air in Winged Migration

Introduction
Summer is not officially here yet, and already I feel like I'm being forced on a 10-calorie-a-day cinema diet. It's frightening, really frightening, to think back over the last two months and realize that one of the best new releases I've seen is X2...(is that possible?).

Of course I'm forgetting Abbas Kiarostami's Ten, which was a great discovery, but it only played in the theaters for about a week after showing up at this year's San Francisco International Film Festival. But where is the new Eric Rohmer film that was advertised as “coming soon” LAST YEAR? Why did Goddard's new film (In Praise of Love) play for ONE NIGHT in the SF Bay Area in 2002 before getting swept back into obscurity? (In recent interviews, Goddard revealed that he has been unable to find distributors for his last two films: Histoire du Cinema and In Praise of Love.)

Fortunately, little gems slip by the schlock-radar and this week I can report on two films that took me by surprise and gave pleasure. Both films seem appropriate for children and adults, and yet both have maturity that summer pep-flicks like Searching for Nemo will more than likely avoid.

Spellbound Without a Hitch
The first subject on today's menu is Spellbound, a documentary that illuminates the pursuit of winning the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee Competition in Washington D.C. In addition to providing a glimpse into the search for an individual with the perfect blend of phonemic awareness and visual memory for words, Spellbound is a study of Americana that few documentaries have been able to unearth from our United soils.

In the first half of his study, filmmaker Jeff Blitz presents eight adolescents preparing for the competition. There are interviews with the kids and their families, and these opening scenes reveal their respective environments, their churches, their dogs, their appetites, their varying work ethics, their ultimately unique personalities, and the different ways that they prepare for the big event.

Since the age-limit for the competition is set for 12 year-olds, the viewers' vantage point is set at the cusp of childhood and puberty. Puberty is that strange and unforgiving passage between childhood and adulthood that have stunned so many of us. Viewers can see the adult forming in these youngsters while viewing the actions (or non-actions) and urges (or non-urges) of their parents.

On the Air in Winged Migration
The second film I saw over the past weekend was Winged Migration, a beautifully photographed work that studies and charts the migration patterns of many species of birds. The film is brilliant in its presentation of the birds, flying in small or massive formations, and the nature photography of the places they depart, travel through and arrive are stunning.

The problems of the film stemmed from a lame soundtrack (was the composer lost in some 70’s cloud of pot smoke?) and an unnecessary voice-over track. Both elements felt like too much of a human presence in a film that otherwise belonged solely to the birds and their fascinating travel patterns. The different species and their trajectories were documented with text and that seemed to provide ample information; viewers were treated to points of departures and the corresponding destinations.

The innate knowledge of these routes represents the unbelievable. How is it that a specific species of bird not only knows that it must travel from the north pole to the south pole and back again each year, but also knows the route and travels it exclusively again and again? It is this sense of belonging, this sense of place within a given timeframe that will surely fascinate viewers.

Cine Mexico at PFA in November & December

2004-11-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

PFA IS SCREENING "CINE MEXICO"!!!!!

When I was in NYC this summer, Film Forum screened this festival of classic Mexican cinema, which features dozens of amazing films. The works run from the 1930's up to the late 1980's. Unfortunately, the great works by Bunel that he did in Mexico City in the '40's are not included, but from November 12 until about December 12, you can expect the unexpected.

I went to more than half a dozen films at the festival, guided by a general interest but never knowing anything about the movies and was knocked out at every screening. The films traverse an enormous thematic and stylistic landscape and many works, like "Aventurera", "Danzon", and "Tender Little Pumpkins" (among others) have fantastic scores and heaps of scenes where musicians are playing live on screen.

There's also "Frida", a meditative memoir on the life of the great Mexican surrealist by Paul Leduc, which I MUCH preferred to Julie Taymor's overly muscular effort a few years back (a film that seemed more fascinated with Diego Rivera than its principal subject). If you're a revolutionary, check out films like Leduc's "Reed: Insurgent Mexico" and others.

Highly recommended. This festival was one of the highlights of my summer.

Check out:
www.bampfa.edu
for specific showings and showtimes or grab a bright green calendar just about anywhere in the east bay.

What Does it Take to Make a Best-Selling Documentary? - Scrutinizing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

2004-07-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write about film. Sadly, it seems that 2004 has not been a great year for movies unless you have access to some the new Criterion releases on DVD – (“forgotten” classics by Visconti, Kurosawa, Ozu, Bergman, and Pasolini, among others); also, in the past year a German distributor has mounted the task of presenting the complete works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder on home video and DVD (Criterion recently released his award-winning BRD Trilogy). If you’re a film lover and you don’t like what’s in the theaters these days, there are options…

All of that aside, Fahrenheit 9/11 was released last week to American audiences despite considerable efforts to keep it out of theaters. The film attempts to connect the dots between the 2000 Florida presidential election debacle, the devastating events in New York and the Pentagon on September 11th, the Bush Administration and its ministry of fear, war profiteering, military recruitment and their prime target audience, innumerable lies about weapons of mass destruction, innumerable military follies in Iraq (needless brutality of Iraqi civilians that U.S. forces are liberating, needless destruction of Iraqi homes and families, the controversial use of torture on captives, etc.), the Bush Family (Poppa Bush in particular), the Osama Bin-Laden family, the ever increasing costs at the gas pump and finally, the mystery that most of us are dying to solve: is George W. Bush really as stupid as he looks? Is he a puppet manipulated by men and women that are cleverer than he is (conceivably everyone else in the country including my cat George)?

It would be daunting for anyone to take on such a monumental task, for the above mentioned themes amount to material for several films, not one. But Michael Moore seems to enjoy presenting himself with impossible feats, and he usually does a decent job of dealing with difficult subject matters despite his messy narratives and ill-supported claims. I often think of him (as many do) as a left-wing Rush Limbaugh – doling out a social critique that reads more Op/Ed than documentary – through the proliferation of film footage can border on the miraculous – his work seems to raise the inevitable question: how the hell did he get that on film?

It is notable that Moore’s newest effort had higher box-office receipts on its opening weekend than any other documentary – ever. Fahrenheit 9/11 brought in $21.8M in its first few days on the screen – not bad for a film that Disney Pictures decided it could not release due to unpopular themes. It was said that Miramax had picked up the film, but Miramax’s name does not appear in the title sequence (although Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s names do appear – aren’t they the heads of Miramax? – what happened? – did stockholders express overwhelming resistance?). One imagines that the rest of Hollywood will soon take up the charge of light brigade and start producing politically penetrating and controversial documentaries – given (of course) they get the right responses from test audiences and focus groups.

For a documentary to be this popular, it’s worth asking what exactly has earned the film all the attention. Are Americans really fed up with George W. Bush, or do they just want to see what all the hoopla is about? Was it the controversial nature of the film, the film’s celebrated struggle to reach distributors; or, did George W Bush’s (and others) unsavory comments about Michael Moore create a renewed (and increased) interest in his work? Are there really so many people who identify with Moore’s rhetoric? If so, why have they chosen to be silent these past few years? The answers to these questions are difficult to pinpoint; perhaps all of these reasons (and more) are part of why it is still difficult to see the film without buying tickets in advance.

As usual, Michael Moore knows that his audience is rife with prime-time expectations and he fails to disappoint their challenged expectations. His Comedia del Arte routine plays out without a great concern for presenting facts that could otherwise strengthen the mass of exposition that litters his film. This is often the weak link in Moore’s work. It disappoints because documentation (on the Florida election, for example) does exist. If writer Greg Pallast can get his hands on the document that Jeb Bush issued in Florida that profiled voters who would not be allowed access to the polls, surely our Canadian watchdog would have had access to Pallast’s work, or the document itself – apparently not. Moore also overlooks the fact that the White House spent $20M on an advertising campaign to get America “behind the war effort” – an important missing link in his rhetoric because he tries to examine the Bush Administration’s penchant for instilling fear among the populace. Rather, he chooses to sweep over the rug with images and voice-over narrative to tell the story in a way that more often that not feels like handholding.

There is also the difficult to dismiss evidence (that Moore chose to ignore) assembled by the MoveOn.org folks in the documentary Uncensored – a film that used insiders from the CIA and the White House to present the truth behind the lies that Colin Powell used in his presentation to the U.N. on weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps Moore didn’t want to tread on familiar ground (but seriously, compare the number of viewers of Uncensored with Fahrenheit 9/11 – whoops! Sorry, there is no comparison – Uncensored was distributed to those who made a contribution to the making of the film and it has not yet found its way to theaters).

It is hard, however, to criticize him for making Fahrenheit at a time when so many people seem out of the loop on the motivations behind the invasion of Iraq and indeed, behind the “work” in Florida that allowed Bush to take office. And yet it is important not to just let the film just wash over you and walk out afterward feeling like you really are informed.

On the other hand, it’s impressive that he has crystallized the enormous socio-political dung-heap that the Bush Administration has produced, and has put it out there where audiences can get to it in an easy to digest format. Most folks resist working too hard to get the facts unless their son or daughter is killed in a senseless war, conceivably designed for no other reason than to get corporations salivating over the potential for huge profits in this oil-rich region. This is a point that doesn’t go unnoticed (or perhaps unexploited) in Moore’s recent offering. Did I forget to mention that one of those corporations just happens to be owned by vice-president Dick Cheney, who, while being questioned last week by Senator Patrick Leahy (who suggested Cheney was war-profiteering), told Leahy to “go fuck himself”?

If nothing else, the film stands as an effort to wake America up – and it is possible that the best way of waking people up is to set an alarm – and surely Michael Moore’s film has all the alarming points of light associated with a wake-up call (and it also poses great satire!). It is clear that many Americans have been sleeping on the issues, perhaps fearful of stirring a fuss that would secure a reservation at a newfound resort in Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps we are the victims of a barrage of media images and sound-bytes that have neglected (or have blocked) a clearer presentation of the facts. While watching the film, it seems impossible that all the facts will ever be collected and digested without a certain amount of destructive bias.

Like Nixon’s Watergate scandal and countless other political mishaps, the facts are often hard to find, and it seems that Americans may never know the truth behind the issues. If the American public and the people of Iraq are lucky, Fahrenheit 9/11 may just live up to Michael Moore’s goal: to de-throne Child Bush and his war-mongering, capital-hungry cabinet members. Of course it remains to be seen whether or not Bush’s imagined successor will be able to withdraw US forces in Iraq as quickly as some would like to believe.

Finally, if the film were to have such an impact on the psyche of the American body politic (swaying an election as it were), it merely proves the fickle nature of that delicate and temporary condition: popular opinion in America and the public’s faith in media images to tell them how and what to think.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Documentary

2004-07-08T01:17:00.000-07:00

I would not have rented this film on my own. I've never seen Seinfeld, and have hitherto thought of this guy boldly, (well, arrogantly), as kind of an idiot. It turns out he isn't. The film is a documentary on comedians and the life of being on the road and working your act, refining it, suffering the bad nights, tearing apart the good ones in order to keep developing that thing, the ellusive rocking, kick-ass set. It's a really well done documentary, because there were times that I kept asking myself, "is this scripted, are they building characters in a docu-drama, or is this shit just happening...."

Comedian was a really satisfying film experience, and it reminded me a great deal of what it's like to tour and constantly examine your work and be at the beck and call of your material - one night you own it, one night it owns you. There's also GREAT music all the way through, from folks like Mingus, Miles, Ornette, and others...the spirit of improvisation is present in nearly every frame of the movie.

I would highly recommend renting this, it just came out on VHS and DVD. Although it's a film about comedy, or comedians, it's a rather serious film, with more psycological struggle than laughs. There's a young comedian in the film too (Orney Adams), and in one respect he almost ruins the film, because he's such an ass; but it's interesting that he's in there, because it shows how this younger generation is trying to wrestle the art from the older comics with little skill, but LOTS of attitude (sound familiar?). So, ultimately, it works, but his moments on screen are not the highlight of the film.

I came away from the film with lots of respect for Jerry Seinfeld, who "had it all" in many respects regarding "the business", but has tossed it all and is putting himself on the line by working night after night in small clubs on his art. There are scenes where he just walks in a club at the end of the night unannounced, takes the stage, and does his thing. See it, and tell me whether or not you gotta give the guy credit.

One of the lovely pay offs at the end of the film is Seinfeld visiting Bill Cosby on the road. Their discussion reminded me of how great Cosby is/was, and how much I enjoyed those comedy records he made in the 1960' and 70's.

It's definitely worth checking out. I'm glad I saw it.

Oakland, CA
June 2003

Weekend of Cinema 05/02/03 – 05/04/03

2004-07-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

I have not sent reviews to my friends for a while, although I am currently writing an essay called, “Media and Terrorist Identity in Schlondorff & Von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum”. I promise to send it as soon as it is finished, which should be next week, possibly later (I’m stuck in research land). For the time being, I’m going to catch up with a few short reviews of some recent film experiences.

Over this last weekend I saw a smattering of cinema: some artful, some strictly commercial, some walking the line between both, some deeply probing in the realm of emotion and spirituality, some disguised as pop and displaying some great writing, some just falling flat on their faces (despite favorable reviews), some displaying high intellect and very little feeling, and some delightfully informative.

Here are a few words on all that I saw. Usually, I try (read: with great effort) to write more in-depth, but in this case, I thought that some of you might just want to know, should I see this damn thing or not?

Friday – 9:30 p.m.
Little Bear
With two delightful three-year old houseguests hanging out on the big red couch in our North Oakland home, we displayed a few short animation films made for children that I sort of watched. I was eating while Madeline in Hollywood ran, so I can’t comment on it!

Based on Elsa Homeluk Minnarik’s Little Bear series that I love to use in readings with children, the film in comparison, was a little limp. The books are animated by the great Maurice Sendak (creator of Where the Wild Things Are, et al) and the films are not, which was a disappointment. The delightful, delicate, and naive quality of Little Bear’s personality that comes across in the books are sorely missing from the short films (there are three on the video). The tender exchanges between Mother Bear and Little Bear are reduced to fairly pedestrian conversations – in short, nothing in particular to grab your attention and take notice. Your kids might like them, but you’ll want to file your nails or work a crossword while they’re running – or entertain dinner guests while the kids are in the other room.

Friday – 10:30 p.m.
Mostly Martha
I avoided this film in the theaters but brought it home to check out. I liked it better than I thought I would; my initial lack of enthusiasm was a response to the fairly uneventful previews that circulated last year. A romantic comedy about a control freak that runs a kitchen – wasn’t that already done (to death) in Big Night?

The pleasant surprise was that the film had other plot lines to keep the viewer interested. I will not go into details, because I don’t want to give away parts of the film that are worth watching. Suffice to say that there are developments to help fuel what would otherwise be a fairly unresponsive romantic comedy. Among the problems that remained was a distinct lack of character development. It is clear that Martha is an obsessive-compulsive that alienates just about everyone around her – why she is like that is never dealt with (okay, some people are just born that way), nor can the viewer sense that she changes much as a result of all the trials and tribulations that the script lends to the mix. In the end, she’s able to kiss an Italian – what a stretch! The acting is functional, the story line unbelievable – the final evaluation: great child actor in a supporting role, but little else at this banquet on which to dine.

Saturday – 2 p.m.
Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
I have seen a few documentaries on the great Italian filmmaker that broke the mold for imagination. I entered the theater hoping that, as my next-door neighbor suggested, “if I just see one or two new stills that I hadn’t seen before, I’ll be happy”.

Fellini: I’m a Born Liar delivered so much more. The film was poetic, quite informative and celebratory, albeit a little slow in places. The main event was Fellini himself on film discussing his childhood (“I always identified with the vagabonds and tramps in our town”), his work, his approach to a variety of technical and thematic problems, his approach to working with actors, and his approach to dealing with producers and studios. About 30% of the film is dedicated to the obligatory talking heads, discussing their work with Fellini – some of which are salutary, some of which are fairly critical (mealy-mouthed Donald Sutherland complaining about how he actually had to work at his role in Cassanova, Roberto Benigni mumbling incomprehensible stories about receiving direction from his fellow countryman, Terrance Stamp waxing astonished about the director’s process).

I’m a Born Liar includes discussions with Giuletta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni, and a host of artists that assisted Fellini on many of his films (cinematographers, art designers, producers, more actors, etc.). There were lots of excerpts, both from the films and from locations that Fellini used in his movies. The films were not identified, which might be frustrating for viewers that don’t know the director’s work. Although one reviewer complained bitterly about this, all of the identification appears at the end of the film as the credits start to roll.

If you like Fellini’s work, see the film. If you don’t like Fellini’s films, you might develop an appreciation for his artistic process and catch a glimpse of something that could inspire you to take a second look. If you don’t give a hoot about Italian films or the huge influence they have had on world cinema and Hollywood, stay at home and wait for the next re-run of Seinfeld – Fellini would be the last one to deny a body its fool’s paradise.

Saturday – 6 p.m.
Holes
I read several rave reviews about this film and a few kids that I know recommended it to me. Usually I can trot out my inner child and see a film made for young people and enjoy it – if it is well made. Holes proved that I am firmly an adult and require some semblance of grace with my mindless entertainment. I sat through the film asking myself, “When will this end?”

I can’t say anything nice about this film, except that Patricia Arquette and Sigourney Weaver are in it, and usually that would be enough to get me through some otherwise pitiable cinematic efforts. In the case of Holes, it was merely a waste of good talent. This attempt at refreshing moviemaking brings together a group of unlikely comrades – a PC-advised ethnically-balanced cast (rife with stereotypes) – on a secluded work farm to dig away at salvation in the form of buried treasure, and the parallel stories that buried said treasure, eventually plays out in a (oh, really?) test of wits between good and evil (or the greedy and the poor in this case).

Saturday – 10 p.m.
Blue
A dear friend recently made a gift of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois Coleurs on DVD, so now I can sit and obsess over them endlessly in the privacy of my own home. Over the weekend, my wife Sarah and I delved into the spiritual web of stories that Blue, White and Red weave quite naturally and with great results.

I cannot say enough good things about these films. They achieve what is usually thought of as impossible – the registration and tracking of the human soul, and a non-affected glimpse into the realm intimacy. One can approach these films from a variety of viewpoints and come away from them with a wealth of critical perspectives or interpretations. The three DVD discs have LOTS of extra features – interviews with Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob, among others, as well as interviews with the great Polish director and his collaborators and a host of film historians.

I will be brief here, because I want to write about all three of the films in a longer piece. Suffice to say that I loved Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge – all of which I saw over the weekend. If you have not already checked them out, get around to it! Having viewed them closely in succession, I am beginning to see the way that they rely on and inform each other to create an indelible triptych.

Saturday – Midnight
Endgame
A few years ago, the Irish Gate Theater of Dublin Company paired with the Beckett on Film Production crew to commit the complete (19) plays of Samuel Beckett to film. They attracted lots of great directors (Neil Jordan, David Mamet, Patricia Rozema and others) and actors (Julianne Moore, Jeremy Irons, Kristin Scott-Thomas, the late Sir John Gielgud, Juliet Stevenson) to take part in the project and the end result, Beckett on Film, stands as a major achievement.

Several years ago, I saw a production of Endgame at Berkeley Repertory Theater. I had read the play several times beforehand and thought I knew what to expect. What I saw was a powerful realization of one of the finest plays about despair ever written. In comparison, the filmed version, directed by Conor McPherson and starring Michael Gambon and David Thewlis, left me a bit cold at times. There were certainly moments of absolute psychological clarity and revelatory brilliance. At other times, the director and the actors played the easy role with Beckett, and that is to look away from the terrible humor and beauty that can be found in nearly every line of Endgame.

In some of the bonus material in the DVD package, a few of the directors and critics volley the idea of whether or not Beckett’s works for theater should in fact be filmed. What is true is that Beckett was very strict about actors and directors following his directions to the letter. But after reading several biographies and critical studies over the years, I find no evidence that Beckett ever made any statements about his plays NOT being filmed. The Irish production company set out with this vision – that the directors and actors were not allowed to change the text in any way – fair enough!

When I watch these filmed discussions, all I can think of is how stuffy and narrow minded the critics are for questioning this issue. But I also realize that part of what they have to say is true: that theater is a three-dimensional experience that viewers take in and evaluate on their own. With a camera and a director, all of the shots are pre-determined – the audience is not allowed to look at Clov (for example) if the camera is tightly focused on Hamm.

This critical perspective may sound didactic, but it is not without its merits. Live theater, like live music that is perceived by a viewer/listener is best experienced in person – a strange synchronicity of vibration, sound, image and the physical space where you are witnessing the work occurs, and this almost never happens sitting in front of a screen. Filmed images can, of course, astonish us by presenting an eye for image design, timing, and other countless miracles that occur when great directors make movies.

Ultimately, the end product (our experience) and ones’ preference for theater over film (or vice versa) is best left to the individual. While I deeply respect the folks behind the Beckett on Film Project for bringing these plays to the screen for greater accessibility and access (some of the realizations, like the Atom Egoyan – John Hurt collaboration on Krapp’s Last Tape, are simply fantastic), there’s nothing like seeing Endgame, Waiting for Godot, or Happy Days on stage with actors that are not afraid to commit a great deal of effort and concentration to the texts.

Sunday – 11:45 a.m.
Bend it Like Beckham
Like Saturday’s Holes, Bend it Like Beckham had its share of obvious plot devices. Fortunately, the latter succeeded with the advent of greater development on characters that simply had more appeal. The relation between the actors in Beckham was far sweeter and more heartfelt, the acting was better, there were no obvious bad guys that had to be battled, and no absurd ending sequence where a string of problems were miraculously solved in a single gesture.

Although Beckham’s ending did have its fair share of lunacy, the heroines wore it better (maybe if I were a 13 year old girl I would have found the cast of Holes more appealing – maybe not!). The distinct difference, if I may go on with this ridiculous comparison, is that there was no “Good ole’ American Good vs. Evil” to have to stomach. Perhaps the British, with many more centuries of experience in Imperialism than America, know how to couch it all in a way that proves no one is above laughing at. This film will not change your life, but it may leave you longing to be a 20 year-old female soccer player. Stars Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightly made it look like a lot more fun than a barrel full of shovels in the hot desert.

Sunday – 3:45 p.m.
X2 - United
This is the unusual case where the sequel surpasses the original. The first film spent lots of time introducing the various characters, and then – whoops! Time was up and the film was over.

In X2 (I’ll keep it short), all the characters are familiar (we learned their creation myths in the first film) and although audiences are introduced to a few new recruits, there leaves lots of time to work out some major conflicts between the followers of Xavier and the ever-invasive United States Military, who just happen to have Magneto in check. The opening scene where Alan Cumming in full mutant attire attacks the president of the United States (if only!) is worth the price of admission.

In short – it just gets better as it goes along. There are lots of places where the film could have fallen into check with too much music, too much glory, too much heroism, or too much inconsequential love interest, but director Bryan Singer knows his job and he keeps the train running. (What’s that? Halle Berry in a movie and no gratuitous sex(y) scenes?) The film moves incredibly smoothly, the writing is better than you would expect in a fantasy-action-film-based-on-a-comic-book, and the acting does what it should do – keeps the viewers engaged in a fantastic world of superhuman mutants (the last barrier to celebrate diversity? – count me in!) without ever really questioning their unusual powers or unique vulnerabilities. If you were ever a kid, you might just want to see this one.

Sunday – 8 p.m.
White
See my comments above for Blue

Sunday – 10 p.m.
Red
See my comments above for Blue

Favorite 100 Films

2004-07-08T00:58:00.000-07:00

1)Fanny & Alexander (Bergman)
2)The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
3)Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini)
4)Stalker (Tarkovsky)
5)Belle et la Bette (Cocteau)
6)The Bicycle Thief (DeSica)
7)The 39 Steps (Hitchcock)
8)Alphaville (Goddard)
9)Wild Strawberries (Bergman)
10)The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov)
11)The Big Sleep (Hawks)
12)Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)
13)The Decalogue (Kiezlowski)
14)Nosferatu (Herzog)
15)2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
16)The Elephant Man (Lynch)
17)The Godfather (Coppola)
18)The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
19)8 ½ (Fellini)
20)Nights of Cabiria (Fellini)
21)Frankenstein (Whale)
22)The Shining (Kubrick)
23)Lost Highway (Lynch)
24)Pink Flamingoes (Waters)
25)Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
26)La Strada (Fellini)
27)Eraserhead (Lynch)
28)Wings of Desire (Wenders)
29)Ran (Kurosawa)
30)Solaris (Tarkovsky)
31)Orpheus (Cocteau)
32)Ballad of a Soldier (Chukhrai)
33)Au Revior, Les Enfants (Malle)
34)I Am Curious – Yellow (Sjoman)
35)Das Boot (W Petersen)
36)The Women (Cukor)
37)M (Lang)
38)Discreet Charm Bourgeoisie (Bunel)
39)Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
40)Pandora’s Box (Pabst)
41)All About My Mother (Almaldovar)
42)Touch of Evil (Welles)
43)The Trial (BBC version)
44)Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
45)Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
46)North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
47)The Ice Storm (Ang Lee)
48)Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
49)La Aventura (Antonioni)
50)Exterminating Angel (Bunel)
52)Monty Python & Holy Grail (Jones)
53)Onibaba (Shindo)
54)Persona (Bergman)
54)Never Cry Wolf (Ballard)
55)Men With Guns (Sayles)
56)Alien (Scott)
57)Once Upon A Time in West (Leone)
58)Psycho (Hitchcock)
59)Lost Honor of K Blum (Schlondorff)
60)A Woman on the Edge (Cassavetes)
61)Paris, Texas (Wenders)
62)Orlando (Potter)
63)Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman)
64)Crimes and Misdemeanors (Allen)
65)Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock)
66)The Dead (Huston)
67)Rashomon (Kurosawa)
68)Midnight Express (Parker)
69)Female Trouble (Waters)
70)Le Trou (Becker)
71)Walkabout (Roeg)
72)His Girl Friday (Hawks)
73)The Wild Bunch (Peckinpaugh)
74)Silence of the Lambs (J Demme)
75)Brazil (Gillian)
76)Shoeshine (De Sica)
77)Le Temps Retrouve (Ruiz)
78)The Last Wave (Weir)
79)Red (from Trois Coluers) (Kyzlowski)
80)Black Orpheus (Camus)
81)Prospero’s Books (Greenaway)
82)Russian Ark (Sokurov)
83)Easy Rider (Hopper)
84)The 400 Blows (Trufault)
85)Requiem for a Dream (Aronovsky)
86)Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper)
87)Beloved (J Demme)
88)X (Spike Lee)
89)Underground (Kusturica)
90)The Third Man (Carol Reed)
91)Arabian Nights (Pasolini)
92)Kwaidan (Kobayashi)
93)Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges)
94)Two Women (DeSica)
95)Clockers (Spike Lee)
96)Secrets and Lies (Leigh)
97)American Beauty (Mendes)
98)Naked Lunch (Cronnenberg)
99)Vagabond (Varda)
100)The Thin Red Line (Malick)

Jag Ar Nyfiken – or, I Am Curious (Yellow & Blue)

2004-07-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

Why, in the midst of so much turmoil in the world, am I spending valuable time writing about film? First of all, the work up for discussion this week presents an interesting perspective on resistance and it played an important part in the battle against censorship. Secondly, in addition to informing myself on the latest travesties perpetrated by the Bush Administration and acting out against them, I try to balance the insanity of the new and improved Gulf War with satisfying experiences of artistic expression (books, music, exhibits, Hello Kitty bath mats…). These days it seems possible to become part of the madness unless we seek refuge in a nurturing oasis from time to time. With all that in mind, here is an encounter with one of the most controversial films in the history of cinema.

I Am Curious – Yellow and I Am Curious – Blue, are ground breaking films that appeared at the dawn of the hippie generation (1967), which, as some of us remember, had much to do with protesting the war in Vietnam. The films were made in Sweden by director Vilgot Sjoman and represent a unique blend of political documentary, an examination of women’s rights, and a travelogue of the female psyche and its search for sexual freedom. Ideally, the two films should be viewed in succession: I Am Curious – Yellow first, and I Am Curious – Blue, second. Today, the level of spontaneity in both works continues to surprise audiences as they did when released four decades ago. For readers that are unaware of the unique history behind I Am Curious, a brief summary is on its way.

Filmstaden Studios surprised Sjoman when they agreed to grant him total artistic freedom and 100,000 meters of film for a project without a script. The director struggled to make I Am Curious and had difficulties completing his largely unprecedented vision. Nearly a year of shooting passed and as the film began to take shape, Sjoman realized that the material was developing into a two-movie sequence (he received more film before the project reached completion).

After several additional months of editing and post-production, I Am Curious Yellow was released to an eager Swedish audience. Notwithstanding the controversy that later ensued, the studio was happy to have produced two films instead of one (they would release I Am Curious – Blue later that year), and Yellow reached 1.3 million viewers on the initial run (out of a total population of 8 million Swedes).

Upon international release, I Am Curious – Yellow was immediately banned in Norway and Finland. When publisher Barney Rossett bought the rights to the film and brought it to the states, it was seized by U.S. postal officials and declared obscene. Two years later, after fighting obscenity charges in several state courts, I Am Curious won its case in the U.S. Supreme Court and helped to change the laws governing obscenity in cinema. Attorney Edward DeGrazia defended the films for Rossett’s Grove Press – long revered for their ability to defeat similar cases brought against writers like Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and a host of (banned) Soviet writers. Eventually the films were distributed in America, breaking box office records ($20 million) and making their mark as the highest grossing European releases of the 1960’s.

Given that much of America was still coming out of a cultural slumber induced by the McCarthy era, it is not surprising that Jag Ar Nyfiken challenged the censors. The film openly portrays a woman on a mission to satisfy the urges of her irrepressible curiosity. Lena (played by Lena Nyman), explores the terrain of her body, her rights as a woman, the class system in Sweden (a nation priding itself on not having a class system) and the intertwining of church and state, while often defending herself against the reactions of others. Sexual relations are portrayed in a quirky realism that reads differently from what viewers are exposed to today and are presented with a naturalism that allows the fictional narrative to maintain a refreshing naiveté.

The film opens with a lecture by the poet Yevgeny Yevtuschenko, who later (once he finds a functional microphone) will discuss revolution and the current political climate. After interviewing his filmed image, Lena takes to the street and interviews anyone that will talk into her tape recorder, and I Am Curious - Yellow becomes a testament (read: predecessor) to the Michael Moore manifesto (roll the camera and let the people speak for themselves – or – give them enough rope and…). The film shifts its focus, and scenes of the movie-in-the-making provide structural links between the film’s diverse narrative styles. Director Sjoman speaks with Lena about her role. The film crew determines the best angle for an upcoming shot (that is never presented). Lena appears to be involved sexually with the director (off-screen). Lena practices Yoga. Lena appears to be involved sexually (off-screen) with another character in the film. Lena interviews Martin Luther King Jr. on the topic of non-violent protest (or is she interviewing a film of MLK?). In interviews, Swedes state that non-violent protest is cowardly. Viewers are left with more questions than answers. Fiction and truth are difficult to sort.

The technique of presenting behind-the-scenes-while-in-the-scene is deemed fresh when it appears in contemporary films like Soderburg’s Full Frontal or Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. But clever technique is not all that Sjoman has to offer. A disorienting quality in the shifting narrative keeps viewers on their toes while balancing disparate elements that fit together in surprising ways. One unexpected aspect of the film is that many candid responses from interviewees resound with a complacency (and an ignorance of the issues) that feels reminiscent of modern day America. In addition to this influential take on filmmaking and the information it provides us, I Am Curious is a timely counterpart to present day themes of censorship and resistance.

Finally (and unfortunately), these films are only available on DVD and laserdisc. The good folks at The Criterion Collection (a panel of film historians and master restoration crews that distribute great cinema on DVD) have released both films in one package with LOTS of bonus materials: interviews with the director, film historians, and a discussion on censorship with attorney Edward DeGrazia and publisher Barney Rossett. For innovative cinema that sways giddily between political documentary, acute realism, and fictional narrative, I Am Curious – Yellow and I Am Curious – Blue are well worth the trip to your local video store.

Oakland, CA
04/04/03

Top 10 Films of 2002

2004-07-08T00:27:00.000-07:00

2002 was a tough year for viewers. Just months after September 11th, we found ourselves timid to go out and do much. Travel was difficult, going to a concert seemed frivolous, but staying at home and watching a movie seemed a safe bet. The burden on films to soothe our troubled sleep was a great one.

Video sales and rentals increased, and the new installment of The Lord of the Rings and other blockbusters continued to show that Americans were ready to let go of billions of annual spending for the sake of entertainment. What else could we do, short of wondering about how we as Americans may have had something to do with the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. There were so many unresolved feelings that occurred for such a wide variety of reasons that it was possible that we were going to view movies this year with a more critical mind - if in fact we were going to the movies in order to do some thinking.

So, with no further ado, here are the films that remain fresh in my memory, these are the ones that floated to the top of the mix. This year, the items are presented in order of preference. Thanks for reading and feel free to send any comments to pgsaxo@pacbell.net

Happy viewings!

1) Sex and Lucia (Spain)

Never mind the Y Tu Mama Tambien, this was probably my favorite film of the year, and for good reasons. The director gracefully handled themes of love, loss, redemption and, oh yeah, sex, in one of the most intriguing film narratives of the year. Although some critics found the story-line confusing, on a second (welcomed!) viewing, it was much easier to see the way that the whole was conceived. Of course none of that really mattered, the fusing of film narrative, author's narrative (the film is about a writer who is writing one of the sub-plots of the film) and the elements of a magically realized myth was presented in a completely coalesced film world, where it didn't matter so much how the pieces fit, but rather that at the end of the story, (even when a new beginning is suggested) most of the themes were resolved. This type of self-referential writing, which could be compared to the process in "Adaptation" (without the use of Hollywood steroids), can seem gimmicky, but only when you're aware that it is writing. In Lucia Y Sexo, the viewer is completely engaged in the images of the story (after all, it is film) and swept up by the beauty and playfulness of the actors as they traverse erotic love, tragedy and forgiveness.

2) The Pianist (Co-Production of France - Poland - Germany - UK)

Watching Roman Polanski re-enact his childhood memories of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw through the eyes of survivor and pianist Wladislaw Szpilman was the most powerful film experience I had with a new film this year. The Pianist is a sober, emotionally gripping film of courage that plays more like De Sica's diamond In the Garden of the Finzi-Continis rather than Spielberg's well-polished cubix zirconium Schindler's List. There's no frills, no sensationalized weepy moments of grandeur (although some of the scenes will certainly drive you to tears), just simply some of the finest performances of the year throughout the large cast of players that populate Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto. The Pianist is a truly great film by a master film-maker at the top of his game. (Winner of the Palm d'Or - Cannes Film Festival)

3) The Piano Teacher (France)

Okay, so there's a piano theme going here. Some folks will find this film hard to watch, but I found this startling meditation on power one of the most moving and disturbing films of the year. The film is fueled (beneath the surface) by an over-arching metaphor: that French culture is crippled when it relies on the art-forms established by the Hapsburg Dynasty. The film deals with the stagnation and the emotional and cultural paralysis that sets in as the heroine finds herself fenced in a cultural dead-end street. Isabelle Huppert (an icon of cinematic ice-queens) plays a master pianist that teaches at a conservatory in Vienna (where not a note of French music is played). She is a woman that is eclipsed on one side by her bitter matriarch at home and the patriarchal grip of the first and second Viennese schools of composers while at work. Rather than hitting the road and building a cultural identity of her own, she acts out rebellion in the form of torturing (both physically and sexually) her students.

Anyone that has gone through institutionalized musical training will find many of the images and conflicts in this film between student and teacher familiar, but certainly pushed to the border of extremes. For those of you not familiar with "Conservatory Training" (yes, in capital letters!!!), welcome to the darker side of music education. And you thought those skinny models had it bad.

4) Secret Ballot (Iran, in Persian)

Babak Payami won the director's prize at the Venice Film Festival this year for his simple little film about a woman that must spend the day collecting ballots for an election. She is dropped off on a small island full of idealism and has a full day to collect the votes of everyone that she can find and/or encourage to take part in the election process. Her challenge, among the many she faces along the way, is that she must be accompanied by an unwilling armed soldier who has little regard for women or voting who may just lose his job for his troubles.

Although the film starts slowly (for American audiences), the young woman faces issues of brutality, gender roles, and the seemingly every question one might have about the voting process, not to mention the act of voting when someone is standing nearby with an automatic rifle in their hands. Transcending ideas from odd couple films, road movies, and politically driven films, Secret Ballot is a film that is more dream than cinema - and it leaves you with impressions that could easily spark debate rather than clearly stated "ideas" about politics, feminism and freedom. Fascism? Not in this film - look to Hollywood for films that tell you how to feel.

5) Rivers and Tides (Germany)

The art of Andy Goldsworthy must be truly remarkable to see in person. If you don't have the time to travel to one of his locations and stand knee deep in a river, or wait while snow is falling at just the right angle, you might want to get down to the theater and catch Rivers and Tides - a beautifully crafted film that reveals Goldsworthy's process. Rivers and Tides, like Goldsworthy's work, seems to be blessed with an alchemy that fused the elements - in this case, film, subject and music, into a beautifully conceived whole. Time is the essence of the artists' work, the time that it takes to conceive and create on the fly, and the time, which literally changes with the weather and effects the work, that it takes for Goldsworthy's art to recede back into nature, which is often does.

If you're unfamiliar with Goldsworthy's work, Thomas Riedelsheimer's film is a wonderful introduction - perhaps the best way to experience his process, which calls on nature and the elements and culminates in sculptures that are made entirely of whatever the artist can find in whatever immediate environment he chooses. The stillness and simplicity of the work is something we could all aspire to take into our lives, and is especially inspiring to witness in this meditative documentary.

6) Bowling for Columbine (USA)

Michael Moore delivered the one film this year that clearly set out to look at some of the problems that fuel violence in America, particularly focusing on the problem with guns and how Americans make use of them. The film, while presenting all the usual problems of a Michael Moore film (bad editing, bad structural decisions, sloppy presentation of facts and themes), allows us to take a (decidedly biased) look at ourselves when we are in the possession of weapons. Along with presenting these ideas, the true gem of the film, and certainly reason enough to go see it, was the fast-paced sequence of US imperialist actions (our easy manipulation of developing nation governments, CIA trained contras, etc.) that could be perceived as events that led to the attack on 9/11.

Whether or not you like the way Mr. Moore goes about his business is really outside the point. His ability to startle people and catch them off guard allows us to see people at their worse, or perhaps merely their least prepared. I'm reminded of a statement that Martin Luther King once made: "show me not how a man acts in time of peace and tranquility, but how he acts in times of chaos and trouble" (forgive my possible mis-quoting). This idea seems to fuel most of Moore's films. He gets people on screen, whether they're ready or not, and asks them to defend themselves against his questions...questions any American should be prepared to answer.

In the case of Charlton Heston, (whom I've heard so many viewers defend as a result of seeing this film), I have only this to say: If you're going to be the spokesperson for the NRA, you damn well better know your shit and be able to stand behind your position. Heston, clearly, was not up to the challenge - he appears the nearly drooling idiot, and as Moore questions him to support any of the gun-toting rhetoric he so boldly pronounces publicly on a regular basis, Heston falls short of his heroic stance.

7) Far from Heaven (USA)

Todd Haynes seems to have a knack for drawing air-tight environments in a film. An earlier project of his, Safe, also a collaboration with Julianne Moore, placed a sterile suburban Pandora's Box beneath your nose, where chemicals and real and imagined illnesses could simply jump off the screen and infect you with ease. In Far From Heaven, he imagines, along with Moore, a suburban environment of a different era - one that includes the ubiquitous white upper-middle class clientele, replete with bigotry, homophobia, and a good dose of initiative (read: over competetive).

Watch Julianne Moore slip and slide along with Dennis Quaid through the thickets of New England bigotry, homophobia and a generous helping of upper-middle class initiative. Todd Haynes, who seems to love directing (as he did in SAFE) Moore seems a match made in the interior of American

8) Italian for Beginners (Denmark)

The Dogma film makers have sought to make films that step outside the traditions set in stone by Hollywood and the more traditional tracts of film-making. Part of the fun of watching these films is trying to work out what the "rules" are that they must follow. One imagines the following: Do not adhere to the usual structural considerations (the M.O. must be established and the problem set in motion by the 30 minute mark - the crisis and turning point must occur at the 1 hour mark, etc etc etc...), do not use special effects; digital cameras are preferred, handheld camera work is more natural than crazy cranework - to imagine just a few. This places greater emphasis on story and acting, both of which seem to rise to the occasion in most of the Dogma films and certainly in this case.

In Italian for Beginners, the viewer is rewarded with a host of seven interesting characters who decide that taking Italian lessons would be a great use of their spare time. While Lars von Trier and many of the other Dogma film-makers have chosen to focus on the darker impulses of human nature, writer and director Lone Scherfig has given us a film that features far more tender relations. Themes of forgiveness and the complications of sexual attraction between unlikely couples replace dark family secrets and the failure to communicate, although mis-shapen information is clearly one of the comic devices that allow the characters to revolve around one another like a stream of roulette wheels - each searching for a deeper connection with their community and a sense of belonging within and with someone else.

9) Sunshine State
John Sayles is an American film-maker of the first degree. He is one of the few directors largely concerned with problems that plague our country and he examines them faithfully in every feature. Even when he leaves the country and makes a film like Men with Guns, you're aware that he's also commenting on our relationship and influence on politics in Central America.

You can think of Shakespeare's "genres" and find that Sayles films fit easily into them: The Histories (Matewan, 8 Men Out, The Return of the Secacus Seven) The Tragedies (Men with Guns) The Comedies (Brother from Another Planet) and the Character-Driven Plays (Passion Fish). Surely Sayles style, particularly in Sunshine State, is much like a play that's being filmed in real locations. Dialogue is heightened, landscapes are there only to help tell the story, and the direction of the actors is just a little bit stilted, so that you're always aware that this is a "dramatization" of an idea - something that would read overly self-conscious in the hands of a less masterful director.

10) The Hours (USA)

This film had a hard struggle to find itself on this list. There was the problem of Michael Cunningham's book, which, despite its Pulitzer Prize status, proved little more than an exercise in how to write like Virginia Woolf. The ideas in the book are interesting, but as Nabokov (a vastly superior writer) once told us: "beware of ideas".

Mrs. Dalloway, the prime victim of cannibalism in this postmodern feast, is Woolf's response to James Joyce's Ulysses - a book that takes on epic proportions in its view of a single day in the life of an ordinary woman about to throw a party.
Capturing a single day on film proves a little more difficult (not that the above mentioned novels appeared without their own set of challenges). Capturing a single day in the life of three characters living in different time periods proves very interesting (the idea that perhaps exalted Cunningham among the literary cognoscenti) and extends the idea that Woolf used to show us 1) that women are still struggling to find their way in a male-driven society and 2) That queer identity still must struggle amongst a society that largely ignores their existence (or their right to an existence).

Getting past all of these ideas and noble gestures, The Hours offers of some truly fine moments in cinema. Nicole Kidman, in order to completely submerges herself in Woolf, hides in a remote spot in the country for months, doing little but reading and writing, and emerges as the ethereal hermit, blessed by genius, as was Woolf herself. Julianne Moore, one of America's great actors of her generation moves beneath a veneer of stifling suburban life - neither able to appreciate the "gifts" of the post-war housewife, nor the stability her nearly catatonic husband (read Ozzie Nelson) offers. Meryl Streep, in one of her many brilliant roles, somehow manages to tie up all the loose ends that the screenwriter offered the actors. The male roles could have benefitted from a closer eye on the book, Ed Harris' Richard comes off overacted and hyper, John C Reilly doesn't offer Julianne Moore much of a spine to rub up against.

Re: Discoveries

In addition to the 10 films that rocked my world in 2002, I have added a section for truly amazing older films that I saw this year for the first time. Some of them are classics - some obscure, some not. Thanks to the Criterion Collection, a group/panel of film enthusiasts who package great films on DVD and go way out of their way to remaster and restore prints of great films, some unsung gems are just blocks away at your local video store.

OTHER RUSSIA:
These three films, along with the Tarkovsky films that follow them, are some of the finest films to come out of post-war Russia. Unfortunately, due to the cold war and other complications, these newly restored classics have been sorely absent from American screens since their creation. Along with others like them, these works are beginning to make it into US video stores thanks to Russico (one of the larger Russian film distributors) and represent some of the post-war milestones of Russian cinema.

The Cranes Are Flying
From the very opening of this heartbreaking film, the audience is seduced by Veronica (played by Tatiana Samoilova), Boris (Alexei Batalov), and the cinematic vision of director Mikhail Kalatozov. Witnessing Balatov's conception for image design, it's easy to see the influence Eisenstein had on the director in these opening scenes, and also where Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock learned a few lessons on how to frame a shot.

Astonishing film technique aside, this post-war Soviet masterpiece was filmed in 1957, just one hear after Khrushchev's declaration of the "thaw", a time when Russians began to take back control of their artistic visions.
Consequently, Cranes has a unique vision of later day 20th century art in Russia. The story focuses on individuals outside the party, unlike so many previous films made during Stalin's lifetime. Kalatozov's film focuses on a beautiful love affair and how it is destroyed by the war. At the films' end, American audiences might find some of the Russian sentiment on war in drastic conflict with what we have been fed throughout most of our lives.

Veronica and Boris are blissfully in love, until the eruption of World War II tears them apart. Boris is sent to the front lines…and then communication stops. Meanwhile, Veronica tries to ward off spiritual numbness while Boris’ draft-dodging cousin makes increasingly forceful overtures. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, The Cranes are Flying is a superbly crafted drama, bolstered by stunning cinematography and impassioned performances.

Ballad of a Soldier (1959)
Ballad of a Soldier could be seen as a companion piece to The Cranes Are Flying. While Cranes shows the spiritual numbness of a woman separated from her lover during wartime (and for the rest of her life), Ballad presents a character whose innocence is comparable to the young protagonist in Truffault's The 400 Blows. Directed by Grigory Chukhrai

Russian soldier Alyosha Skvortsov is granted a visit with his mother after he single-handedly fends off two enemy tanks. As he journeys home, Alyosha encounters the devastation of his war-torn country, witnesses glimmers of hope among the people, and falls in love. With its poetic visual imagery, Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier is an unconventional meditation on the effects of war, and a milestone in Russian cinema.

Come and See

A dramatically different film that the other two Russian films on war mentioned above, Come and See was made years later (1985) by director Elem Klimov. The film begins with two boys unearthing a german rifle from a sand dune near the Russian front and continues with one boys' journey to his home village, only to find that the Nazis have invaded and are about to destroy. Not for the faint at heart, this journal of war and its effects on the human psyche is an especially heartbreaking experience in that it is seen through the eyes of children. Also included in the DVD are Stalin-era newsreels that depict the German invasion of Belarus - true stories and events which served as historical models for the creation of this film.

Director Alexander TARKOVSKY:
Stalker

Seeing this film at the Tarkovsky Festival at the Castro was a good move. It's amazing seeing a large-scale visual feast like this in an old, enormous movie theater with lots of other viewers. Without a doubt, this was the highpoint of my film viewing experience in the past year, and probably in the past few years. Viewing Stalker on the big screen is like no other film experience.

What is decidedly different about Tarkovsky's films, (especially this one), is that if you're prepared to sit and be still and hang out with some slow plot developments, you're likely to come away from the theater feeling as if you've witnessed one of those religious experiences that have graced so many sages. It's possible that Tarkovsky doesn't make films at all, he makes experiences for people to work through. And yes, the films take work, there's the act of paying attention for over three hours, which, in this case, is relatively easy to do when the visual material is so rich and spiritually charged. What you don't get are easy answers, no bombs exploding, no cheap sex, and no clever dialogue to "capsulate" or "drive the plot". If you suddenly feel as though I'm speaking another language, you can stop here. If not, consider a film that can create a great deal of tension simply by showing a man and a woman sleeping in the dark. In the future, when I see David Lynch point a camera down a dark hallway and I suddenly feel terrified, I will think Tarkovsky and of the ways that he can frighten you by merely pointing a camera at a field, a tree, an abandoned building (not to mention a frozen sewer).

Solaris

Ground control has been receiving strange transmissions from the three remaining residents of the Solaris space station. When cosmonaut and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to investigate, he experiences the strange phenomena that afflict the Solaris crew, sending him on a voyage into the darkest recesses of his own consciousness. In Solaris, legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky creates a brilliantly original science fiction epic that challenges our preconceived notions of love, truth, and humanity itself.
(Criterion Collection synopsis)

Andrei Rublev

Widely recognized as a masterpiece, Andrei Tarkovsky's 205-minute medieval epic, based on the life of the Russian monk and icon painter, was not seen as the director intended it until its re-release over twenty years after its completion. The film was not screened publicly in its own country (and then only in an abridged form) until 1972, three years after winning the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Calling the film frightening, obscure, and unhistorical, Soviet authorities edited the picture on several occasions, removing as much as an entire hour from the original. Today, viewers can watch the complete version of a journey that placed the artist at the forefront of the search for meaning in the midst of the Tatar invasion and the loss and retreival of faith.

Other Re:Discoveries

Travels of Sullivan
Preston Sturges' bright and fast paced comedy is a road picture rife with satire that stars Veronica Lake and Joel McCrae.

Pygmalion
The original film effort of GB Shaw's play, years before Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn decided to sing their way through this commentary on class and human destiny. Starring Trevor Howard and (the real delight) Wendy Hiller.

Movies that I really wanted to see but couldn't catch:
(i.e. - films that would probably have made this list if I would have caught them!)
Daughter from DanangIn Praise of Love
The Fast Runner

Top Films of 2003

2004-07-08T00:20:00.000-07:00

After having my psyche pulverized by all the hoopla surrounding the war in Iraq, I tended to hunger for more silence and space in films this year. In the face of being pummeled with misinformation, whether it was Colin Powell lying to the U.N. on the undeniable evidence of weapons of mass-destruction in Iraq, GW Bush lying about how we were liberating the citizens of Iraq, or the myriad of lies that kept most of us from clarifying the connections between Enron, Arnold Schwartzenegger, the natural gas crisis in California, and the recall of former Governor Grey Davis, I found myself looking for movies that beckoned us to peer beneath the surface of things.

My expectations of film have also been transformed over the past two years by repeated viewings of the works of Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu. These two filmmakers are well known for taking their time and focusing in on the subtleties often overlooked by many of their contemporaries. I wrote about some great films by Tarkovsky last year in my Re:Discoveries section (Stalker being my absolute favorite), and this year that section will present a few of the many gems shown at the recent Ozu Retrospective (honoring the 100th anniversary of the director’s birth) at the Castro Theater and the Pacific Film Archive in November and December 2003.

1) Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov – Russia)
The story behind the making of Russian Ark is a fascinating one, and those viewing this monumental achievement on DVD will be able to watch how the director and his crew, one cameraman equipped with an specially crafted steady-cam, 850 actors, and over 2,000 extras achieved the remarkable task of loading in, rehearsing and shooting their film in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in a mere 36 hours. As Sokurov states in the film’s featurette: “despite the technical achievement, if my film does not succeed on artistic merits, then it did not succeed at all”. Sokurov has little to worry about. The film is a wonder on so many accounts – from its conception and the imaginative way it allows history to come alive within the walls of a museum, to the astounding real-time execution on the part of the actors and crew – that in 100 years time this film will have been as influential in this century as Sergei Eisenstein’s early works were to the 20th century.

Bonus Track: For a more complete description, refer to the bottom of this document for the text of an article that I wrote on Russian Ark in March 2003)

2) Tamala 2010 (t.o.L. – Japan; Japanese release: 2002, limited US release: 2003)
What if your cat could boast that she was a secret agent, tattoo fetishist, astronaut, performance artist, thrill junky, chain smoker, repeatedly resurrected savior, capitalist icon, shoplifter, and sex-starved nymphomaniac with a potty mouth? What would happen if you woke up in a world where cats and dogs ruled society, living out an uneasy S&M relationship? The outcome could be that you are living in the film Tamala 2010 – which arrives with a fresh look at religious and philosophical themes and a probing of the capitalist ideal – all wonderfully animated in black and white Tex Avery meets Hello Kitty images.
Tamala 2010 takes an enormous amount of imagination to watch, and that alone makes this movie a potent treat. The cinematic rules of structure have been murdered – themes are jangled in a precious surrealism that is uniquely and unmistakably Japanese. And yet the story works on a level of logic that is epic (read: archetypal) and familiar (read: comic books), as it deftly accesses narratives found in the Hindu, Buddhist and Christian scriptures only to regurgitate them in images you’ll want to have stamped on beach towels and key chains.

3) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Ireland – Kim Bartley & Donnacha O’Brian)
This rare jewel celebrates what happens when a documentary crew lands in the right place at the right time – in this case, during the military coup on Hugo Chavez and his supporters in 2001, which failed within 48 hours. The filmmakers were lucky to have access to video footage from inside the coup, and the movie’s perspective is greatly broadened by presenting images from both sides of the standoff. Contrasting these events with Colin Powell’s press statements is a study in spin-politics and cover-up maneuvers that America has developed to great extents.

There’s Chavez, openly criticizing the Bush rhetoric on the subject of Iraq – there’s the CIA plane landing on Venezuelan tarmac – here’s the military, making the move to overthrow Chavez – there’s Powell on TV, calling Chavez unstable, stating US support of said military – here’s the incredible support of the people of Venezuela, both from inside Chavez’ camp and outside – there’s the media manipulation on Venezuelan TV, wrongly accusing Chavez supporters of open-firing on innocent civilians – here’s Chavez surprising the world with support of the people and the truth of the military involvement in the massacre mentioned above – here’s Chavez taking back the palace – there’s Colin Powell, stating that the US has supported Chavez all along….

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is genuinely inspiring in times when US foreign and domestic politics are anything but, an achievement not likely to be duplicated again too soon. Get out and see it if you can – THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED!

4) Ten (Abbas Kiarostami – Iran/France; International release 2002, US Theatrical Release 2003)
Abbas Kiarostami’s (Taste of Cherry, The White Balloon) newest film places the camera on the dash of a car to document 10 conversations between the driver (a recent divorcee) and her sister, a friend, a prostitute, an elderly fundamentalist and on more than one occasion, her son. The ten short episodes appear to take place over the course of a few days in the city of Tehran.

It’s unusual to watch a film that uses the same two camera angles throughout, but it brings the faces of the subjects up close where they perform miraculously, revealing a natural form of characterization that is unique among the usual efforts of neo-realism. Kiarostami’s choice to “remove himself as much as possible from the direction” allows the subjective material to come to the forefront. The provocative conversations, like the hands of the clock, revolve around the axle of feminism and the role of women in contemporary Iranian society. The driver and her passengers wrestle with issues of self-image, dependency and independence, separation, spiritual devotion, and ultimately liberation in this urgent rumination on identity. Ten is a memorable film with a unique take on characterization and directing – which is to have almost no direction at all.
5) Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz – U.S.)
Shot before and during the U.S. Spelling Bee Competition in Washington D.C. in 2000, Spellbound examines Americana through the eyes of 8 young contestants as they prepare to do battle. The film allows viewers the rare opportunity to see how different contestants polish their superhuman skills in phonemic awareness and visual memory for words while developing a keen sense of the culture that these youngsters inhabit.

The first half of the film presents the 8 central contestants preparing in their home environment and the second half of the film shows them in action – a non-stop sequence that has more genuine humor and suspense than the majority of the entries in this year’s comedy and thriller categories. A great film for kids and adults alike, Spellbound is a fine blend of social study and entertainment.

6) Spider (David Cronenberg – Canada/U.S.)
David Cronenberg’s newest effort resists some of the creepiness associated with his special- effect driven work of the past few decades to create a pared-down, character-driven story that allows Ralph Fiennes to do some of his best work, despite the fact that much of his dialogue is little more than a series of murmurs and incomprehensible utterances. Fiennes plays a Mr. Clegg, who has been released from an asylum and comes to a boarding house designed to integrate psychiatric patients back into society. As time passes and his environment triggers childhood memories, Clegg’s present merges with past, and different versions of his history play out in the physical space like double exposures of reality.

With its near-predictable ending aside, Spider does a great job of disorienting the audience as it burrows within the psyche of its subject. Mr. Clegg’s nickname, given to him by his mother, is both the film’s title and structure (web). Bradley Hall plays Mr. Clegg as a young man and gives a natural performance that exists comfortably in Cronenberg’s seamless interiors and landscapes.

Last but far from least is a fantastic performance by Miranda Richardson, whose work here is the finest effort by any actor I saw this year. Ms. Richardson divvies up ample doses of femme fatale among multiple characters to further realize the multi-dimensional aspect of Spider’s interior web. Howard Shore continues to his best work with Cronenberg, unearthing the music of the film rather than writing music to fill out the movie.

Based on the novel by Patrick McGrath who also penned Spider’s remarkable script.
(Official Selection Nomination – Cannes Film Festival)

7) In The Cut (Jane Campion – U.S.)
I never thought I would be writing about a film that featured Meg Ryan, but Jane Campion has done the unthinkable and given us a movie where we can at last fully respect the sugarcoated cover girl. Ryan delicately inhabits the soul of a writing professor at a downtown NY campus who witnesses the preliminaries of a murder by a man she may or may not have met before. An investigation takes place and Ms. Ryan and Mark Ruffalo (one of the two investigating officers) fall deep into some of the most successfully executed erotic sequences since Last Tango in Paris.

Jane Campion’s newest film achieves remarkable subtlety and suspense thanks to her unusually steady hand and pacing. The film moves like an arrested belly dance around a series of violent acts – but in places where similar efforts like Seven pound the viewer into submission with extreme gore drafted from tabloid sensationalism, In the Cut manages to mysteriously draw viewers into a more vulnerable space that brings on the tension in a way that few films have managed. Don’t resist this film because you’re not a Meg Ryan fan – In the Cut will alter whatever you thought you knew about her skills as an actor.

8) Elephant (Gus Van Sant – U.S.)
Gus Van Sant’s latest effort frees itself from traditional film technique in order to allow the camera and its many subjects room to create the kind of environment that could produce a Columbine-style massacre of innocents. Apart from the director’s familiar gazes into cloud-ridden skies, Van Sant mostly allows Elephant to pace the grounds of a high school like a truant student in search of a friend with whom to converse the travesties of isolation, anorexia, concert tickets, who is dating whom, and the proverbial “how’s it goin”, leaving any responsibility of summing up or rationalizing the film’s tragic events on the part of the viewer.

Elephant precisely captures a phenomenon that comes out of the works of Tarkovsky (and others) – the artistic decision to leave enough space in the film for the viewer to exist within the movie. In many films today the overzealous efforts of special effects, actors with enormous egos and directors with no patience for patience tend to populate contemporary cinema with an anxious roar that leaves viewers deafened by the din. In this respect American cinema accurately reflects a culture that seems to thrive on anxiety, or what could be called justified rage – the kind of inner angst that drives children to use automatic weapons on unsuspecting peers.

9) Carnage (Delphine Gleize – France/Spain)
First-time director Delphine Gleize turns in an impressive effort that flirts with the absurd in a way that is reminiscent of the films of Luis Bunel and Pedro Almaldovar in this merry-go-round of a movie that revolves around the unfortunate outcome of a bullfight. Structurally similar to works like Amores Perros, 21 Grams and the Wandering Rocks episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Carnage balances a variety of injuries and healings with a great deal more grace than the aforementioned cinematic works by director Alejandro Inaritu.

While some critics described the story as unclear and messy, I found the understated narrative strands and the suggestive nature of the relations between the parts of the kaleidoscope refreshing. The film’s sublime epiphanies and tender relations between the characters seemed to stay slow burning in memory throughout the following week – an all too rare event.

10) Once Upon a Time in Mexico (Robert Rodriquez – U.S.)
Clearly derivative but wildly entertaining, this epic plot-octopus calls on the ghosts of Sergio Leone and Sam Pekinpah to inform director/producer/composer Robert Rodriguez’ quest for the perfect blend of humor, shoot-‘em-up sequences, boomerang plot twists and stylistic beauty. The outcome is a Machiavellian Molotov cocktail of intrigue and action, driven by the kind of quirky performance we have come to expect from Johnny Depp and a sultry dreamscape of Mexican folklore delivered playfully by the gorgeous duo of Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek. Better than dinner and a dozen Margaritas at Mom is Cooking, (and certainly better for your health), Once Upon a Time in Mexico is all you need to start a riot in your very own home.

Hits and Fizzles in 2003
What started out as a slow year for movies ended up producing a crop that made it tough to settle on this year’s list of treasures. Secretary delivered an original spin on the comedic aspect of sexual politics and allowed us to see just how good Maggie Gyllenhaal could be at being bad; Pretty Dirty Things continued to prove what a great director Stephen Frears is; and the erotic poetry of Girl with the Pearl Earring came in strong at the end of the year with Scarlett Johansen and Colin Firth peering deep into the feel and rhythms of 17th century Flemish painting.

2003 also gave witness to the completion of two trilogies that were years in the making. The Matrix series seemed to crumble beneath the weight of its own overly manufactured and mass-produced cyber-girth. What started out as a great opening effort eventually failed as the Wachowski brothers opted to work in capacious formats that brought on the inevitable Star Wars style battle sequences, stripping away all the visceral qualities of what made the action sequences in the opening work so potent and entertaining.

On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings trilogy stayed consistently grounded in the world of medieval folklore, imaginatively presenting a rich fantasy world that didn’t allow the special in special effects to get in the way. The performances throughout the large cast were on equally secure footing, and the trilogy offered the characters an epic arc to work through that was ultimately satisfying for an all-ages crowd.

Kill Bill Volume I opened this year after a long process of production and a considerable pause for Uma Thurman to return from the throes of motherhood. When Quentin Tarantino presented the four-hour film to Miramax, the studio’s response was to cut it down to less than 3 hours or release his picture in two parts. Tarantino wisely chose the latter. Since the film was conceived as a whole and really should have been released as such, I have chosen to wait until I have seen the complete work before commenting on it.

As always, there were a few efforts that received critical acclaim and street chatter that hardly deserved the attention. Mystic River failed on many accounts: its heavy-handed direction (how it compares with Eastwood’s The Unforgiven is beyond me), its over-wrought acting (exception: Kevin Bacon), its sophomoric metaphors (we get it, our post 9/11 penchant for revenge is BAD) and its borrowed themes (Act 1 courtesy of Bostonian Catholic pedophilia, Act 2 courtesy of Titus Andronicus, Act 3 courtesy of nearly any Scorsese film, and Act 4 courtesy of Lady Macbeth) were ultimately disappointing. Lost in Translation showed that Sofia Coppola was capable of producing a nice atmosphere for Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansen to move around in, but her superficial view of Japanese culture was offensive. Bad Santa made me laugh out-loud several times, but its concept read like a bottom-drawer effort by John Waters, hardly on par with Zwigoff’s unforgettable Crumb or his unique vision of L.A.-style teen angst in Ghost World. Finally, Winged Migration had a fantastic visual style & camera technique and viewers will find it hard to forget some of the wonderful birds and their habitats that were explored, but the musical score and invasive voice-over plunged it to a level that fits in a category with Wild Kingdom re-runs.

Re:Discoveries

Sergio LEONE - Once Upon a Time in the West
I’ve been a fan of Leone’s infamous spaghetti-westerns since puberty. Why I have waited all this time to see Once Upon a Time in the West is way beyond me. I’m sure most of you have long celebrated its awesome (and never successfully imitated) opening title sequence; its ability to bring a complex portrait of a woman into the western genre; its unique criticism of the origins of corporate America and the dangers that accompany it; and its marvelous and multi-layered yarn all wrapped up in that unmistakable style that is uniquely Sergio Leone.

Rainer Werner FASSBINDER:
Out of all the films of Fassbinder’s that I have seen over the years, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul stands out as a great achievement in taboo smashing. Crossing lines of age, race, and cultural gaps the size of a southern-California freeway, two unlikely people form a romantic relationship that has comic and near-tragic (not melodramatic) results.

Masahiro SHINODA:
Pale Flower (1963) is a Tokyo gangster film that successfully uses the lack of action as an element of suspense. Characters chase each other around the metaphorical habit-trails of organized crime in the seedier side of Tokyo nightlife. Classic black and white photography frames a mysterious narrative about a hit man that falls in love with a wildly independent gambler in sharp and unforgettable images. Both Shinoda films have brilliant soundtracks by Toru Takemitsu that merge with the film in a dreamlike manner.

Double Suicide (1965) is diametrically opposed in terms of style to Pale Flower, where the latter’s post-noir pulp style surrenders to Noh Theater minimalism and costumes to better expose the passions between three ill-fated lovers.

Counting the Spokes of Abbas Kiarostami's Ten

2004-07-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I recently met with Tim Perkis at the Shattuck Cinemas to see Ten, a new film by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (Director of Cannes Winner Taste of Cherry). The entire film takes place in a car with the camera mounted on the dash in order to document 10 conversations between the driver (a recent divorcee) and: her sister, a friend, a prostitute, an elder fundamentalist, and on a few occasions her son, all presented in 10 chronological episodes. The film appears to take place over the course of a few days.

While the camera captures the faces of the characters in an uncanny way that defies past efforts of realism, the conversations, like the hands of the clock, revolve around the subjective axle of feminism. The driver provokes her passengers to wrestle with issues of self-image, dependency, separation, spiritual devotion, and ultimately, liberation. The final episode approaches redemption in a touching moment when the driver's sister reveals a way that she has freed herself from her male counterpart.

The conversations with her son are perhaps the most revealing of the subject, while he struggles with his parent’s separation and seems to unanimously blame her for their troubles.

This film will more than likely make it to the 2003 top 10 list. It's the first film this year (apart from the Castro Theater’s presentation of Le Cercle Rouge, which is not a new release) that has made me even consider that a top 10 list could emerge from what has been a fairly bleak year for movies.

Oakland, CA
05/19/03

The Hermitage Comes Alive in Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark

2004-07-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

Introduction

James Joyce completed his greatest and most misunderstood work, Finnegans Wake (abbreviated below as FW), in 1939. After 19 years of writing the 20th century's most enigmatic masterpiece of linguistics, Joyce would claim that he had written a history of all humanity disguised as a dream. In his latest film, Alexander Sokurov managed the Russian equivalent of Joyce's hermetic novel in a movie (albeit in highly abbreviated form) that defies historical apathy while creating one of the more realistic dream-sequences ever expressed in film. Upon closer inspection, the two works have a lot in common. Russian Ark is a marvel in many respects: it is hard to imagine how this meditation on history and cultural identity could be made in one continuous 96-minute take, as combined feats of choreography, staging and pacing reveal a tour-de-force of film-making and artistic vision. It is especially impressive that the effort took eight months to conceive, construct and rehearse (with over 850 actors) and one day to shoot (Ark was filmed on December 23rd, 2001).

When the preview and first descriptions of Russian Ark came on the scene early this year, we learned that the film’s action took place within the Hermitage and was shot in "one breath" (to quote Sokurov). Curiosity piqued immediately. This was a film that would deliver an unusual slant on editing; an exploration of one of the greatest art collections in the world (over 3.5 million pieces); a core of actors pooled from the Marinsky Theater (who mounted an exuberant and enormously satisfying production of Waiting for Godot that I caught during my stay in Saint Petersburg); and finally, a film that brought Russian history and this fantastic museum to life. For a wannabe Russofile, it would not get any better any time soon.

Historical Backdrop

Since the film veers in and out of timelines that range throughout the past 400 years of Russian history and rarely stays in one era for more than a few moments at a time, it was possible to let the film wash over you and allow yourself to be swept away by the magnificence of the Ark’s film technique while missing the historical relevance of the work. Several friends told me that they desired a greater knowledge of Russian culture to fill in the film’s historical subtext. With that in mind, perhaps the first thing to discuss is how the Hermitage came into existence. The following is a highly condensed form of that story.

Tsar Peter (the Great) conquered the Swedes that occupied this northwestern region at the turn of the 18th century. This was a strategic battle for the Russians, for Petersburg sits at the mouth of the Neva River where it runs into the Gulf of Finland - a window to the North Sea, the Atlantic, and a piece of land essential for controlling trade routes to the west. He then initiated work on draining the swamp where the city of Saint Petersburg now stands.

At the time of Peter’s death, he and Catherine II had successfully engaged Venetian architects to design the look of the city and its many canals. She also contracted them to build a home for her art collection - her Hermitage - that would continue to increase throughout her lifetime and beyond. The combined efforts of Peter and Catherine the Great were to bring the west to Russia, and the foundation of this wondrous city is the crown jewel of that great achievement.

The Hermitage is also referred to as the Winter Palace, and there are a few wings of this enormous structure that were designed as living quarters for the Russian aristocracy. Catherine II lived there, as did some of her successors, many of whom appear in the film. Historically, Catherine the Great is known as being largely responsible for opening the doorway to the west; partially due to the European architecture she imported to the city and partially due to the fact that she filled her Hermitage with European art (along with the art of many cultures) while encouraging a variety of political relationships with the west.

What’s in the Ark?

The negotiation between Russian and European culture is one of the central themes of Russian Ark. The narrative that drives the film, like the narrator(s) of FW, delivers a story of the ages without ever disclosing an identity. In both cases, it is the voice of contemporary humanity looking back through history in order to gain a footing on the present state of society. Today, as Russians face a tremendous moral crisis as a result of post Glasnost politics, Russian Ark serves as a mirror to the past. For Joyce, the years that followed WW I and led to the Nazi occupation of Paris, represented a period riddled with moral questions posed by the political and social changes of the Modern Era, and those issues populate the archetypal dreamscapes of FW.

It is in fact a narrative voice that begins the journey of this Russian Ark in absolute darkness (FW is often referred to as Joyce's "Book of the Dark"). Several questions float in a quiet confusion before a light begins to break upon the screen. As images sharpen, the narrator is walking toward the entrance of a building, following a party that has just descended from a fine carriage, dressed in early-18th century costumes. He discovers that they are entering the Hermitage and shortly thereafter he meets a gentleman who goes by the name "The Marquise" – a man temporarily dumbfounded by their location and one who seems equally surprised to find himself in the narrator's dream and that he can suddenly speak Russian.

The two continue together to pass through over 35 rooms while pausing to comment on Rembrandt, Italian baroque sculpture, Pushkin, the allure of women, music, theater, the military, religion, and the ever appearing (and disappearing) icons and figures of Russian history. These debates transpire as the dialogue weaves dialectic on the dependence of Europe in Russian art.

Time and history do not flow in a strict chronology in Sokurov’s dreamtime, which hinders any kind of rational assessment Russia’s cultural evolution. In one hall, Russian soldiers march past in WW II uniforms while the next room hosts an apology to Czar Nicolas I from the nephew of a sultan in Iran. A play is rehearsing on the main stage while Catherine II runs to the WC, and on her search for the elusive toilet she leads viewers to a hallway where university students in jeans and parkas stare at paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. The Romanovs, just days before the October Revolution, which took their lives and the lives of their children, sit impatiently at the dinner table waiting for Anastasia to return from dancing in the hallways with her friends. Through the benefit of dream logic, the audience travels through a museum that has come to life, and the different wings that represent different eras of time appear randomly, often taking the viewer by surprise.

During the closing scenes of the film, the narrator and the Marquise lead the audience to a large ballroom, teeming with late 19th century aristocracy – a time that now exists in a sentimental wonderland that a bygone generation once enjoyed before the October Revolution. The orchestra plays a mazurka for men and women who dance in stunning period costumes while the camera miraculously weaves a finely choreographed pathway through the grand ballroom. The music ends, the audience applauds and praises the conductor and the musicians and there seems to be an overwhelming sense of appreciation for the arts pouring out from the crowd and off the screen. The crowd makes their way out, and the Marquise, dressed in strange attire (many around him complain of the scent of formaldehyde in his presence), decides that he will remain, allowing the narrator to move freely into the future - a future that promenades with what seems like a great assembly of ghosts, all moving toward an exit that looks out upon the Neva River, where fog rises lazily into subtle rays of morning sunlight. Like the ending of FW, the reader/viewer is following a river that flows onward and is about to lose itself to a larger body of water (the Neva flows into the gulf of Finland, the Liffey flows into Dublin bay in FW) representing rebirth, the future, and the collective unconscious of both Sokurov's Russia and Joyce's Ireland.

Conclusion

Whether you know anything about Russian history or not, Russian Ark may seduce you to want to learn more. If we could learn history while walking through museums that come to life as the Hermitage does in this intriguing feature, it is possible that history would hold a place of awe for more of us. In this way, Russian Ark succeeds where lecture and mere readings are left lacking in imagination and immediacy. For the sheer spectacle of one of the world’s great collections of art and the history of a consistently misunderstood culture, this masterpiece of historical fiction is not to be missed.

Oakland, CA
March 2003

Spider, a Film by David Cronenberg

2004-07-07T23:53:00.000-07:00

Spider is a great film by a master filmmaker and this one lives up to any of his other films, displaying an uncanny ability to create an airtight world that is totally consistent and unto itself. Spider hangs out in an emotional nether-land that is similar to Cronenberg's earlier films Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers, but different in narrative shape and without the sensational or shocking images that those other films celebrated.

One of the great things about Spider is the astonishing performances by Ralph Fiennes and especially Miranda Richardson, who portrays three strikingly different characters. I have greatly admired her work since I first saw her in Dance with a Stranger, and I can't think of an actress that could have better handled the tasks she was up against in this effort.

The other actors are all equally valuable in their supporting roles and even Gabriel Byrne, who seems to over-act in most of his performances stays in the web that Cronenberg spins and plays his cards close to the chest. The young lad who plays Fiennes' character as a boy (Bradley Hall) is also well-cast and does a great job of matching the unusual mood of the film.

Unfortunately, the story isn't the best part about the release, and the finale is something that I predicted from the over-informative previews (when are the studios going to figure out that we don't need to know everything about a movie in order to get excited about seeing it?). If you haven't seen the previews, go see the movie before they give it all away!

Yes, as you may have already read, the film is slow, but boring it is not. American audiences that are used to Hollywood pap will perhaps be a bit dazed by it all (the plot line may add to that confusion), but I believe that this particular effort is the sign of Cronenberg's increasing maturity as a director. It took great courage to surrender to the pace that this film needed. After all, the world of the movie is the world of a nearly catatonic schizophrenic...to pace it any faster would have felt forced and out of place. You can make movies that are going to wow audiences or you can make works of art. Fortunately, Cronenberg’s late works continues to reside in the world of the latter.

03/09/03

What Does it Take To Make a Best-Selling Documentary? - Scrutinzing Michael Moore's Farhenheit 9/11

2004-07-07T23:45:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to sit down and write about film. Sadly, it seems that 2004 has not been a great year for movies unless you have access to some the new Criterion releases on DVD – (“forgotten” classics by Visconti, Kurosawa, Ozu, Bergman, and Pasolini, among others); also, in the past year a German distributor has mounted the task of presenting the complete works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder on home video and DVD (Criterion recently released his award-winning BRD Trilogy). If you’re a film lover and you don’t like what’s in the theaters these days, there are options…

All of that aside, Fahrenheit 9/11 was released last week to American audiences despite considerable efforts to keep it out of theaters. The film attempts to connect the dots between the 2000 Florida presidential election debacle, the devastating events in New York and the Pentagon on September 11th, the Bush Administration and its ministry of fear, war profiteering, military recruitment and their prime target audience, innumerable lies about weapons of mass destruction, innumerable military follies in Iraq (needless brutality of Iraqi civilians that U.S. forces are liberating, needless destruction of Iraqi homes and families, the controversial use of torture on captives, etc.), the Bush Family (Poppa Bush in particular), the Osama Bin-Laden family, the ever increasing costs at the gas pump and finally, the mystery that most of us are dying to solve: is George W. Bush really as stupid as he looks? Is he a puppet manipulated by men and women that are cleverer than he is (conceivably everyone else in the country including my cat George)?

It would be daunting for anyone to take on such a monumental task, for the above mentioned themes amount to material for several films, not one. But Michael Moore seems to enjoy presenting himself with impossible feats, and he usually does a decent job of dealing with difficult subject matters despite his messy narratives and ill-supported claims. I often think of him (as many do) as a left-wing Rush Limbaugh – doling out a social critique that reads more Op/Ed than documentary – through the proliferation of film footage can border on the miraculous – his work seems to raise the inevitable question: how the hell did he get that on film?

It is notable that Moore’s newest effort had higher box-office receipts on its opening weekend than any other documentary – ever. Fahrenheit 9/11 brought in $21.8M in its first few days on the screen – not bad for a film that Disney Pictures decided it could not release due to unpopular themes. It was said that Miramax had picked up the film, but Miramax’s name does not appear in the title sequence (although Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s names do appear – aren’t they the heads of Miramax? – what happened? – did stockholders express overwhelming resistance?). One imagines that the rest of Hollywood will soon take up the charge of light brigade and start producing politically penetrating and controversial documentaries – given (of course) they get the right responses from test audiences and focus groups.

For a documentary to be this popular, it’s worth asking what exactly has earned the film all the attention. Are Americans really fed up with George W. Bush, or do they just want to see what all the hoopla is about? Was it the controversial nature of the film, the film’s celebrated struggle to reach distributors; or, did George W Bush’s (and others) unsavory comments about Michael Moore create a renewed (and increased) interest in his work? Are there really so many people who identify with Moore’s rhetoric? If so, why have they chosen to be silent these past few years? The answers to these questions are difficult to pinpoint; perhaps all of these reasons (and more) are part of why it is still difficult to see the film without buying tickets in advance.

As usual, Michael Moore knows that his audience is rife with prime-time expectations and he fails to disappoint their challenged expectations. His Comedia del Arte routine plays out without a great concern for presenting facts that could otherwise strengthen the mass of exposition that litters his film. This is often the weak link in Moore’s work. It disappoints because documentation (on the Florida election, for example) does exist. If writer Greg Pallast can get his hands on the document that Jeb Bush issued in Florida that profiled voters who would not be allowed access to the polls, surely our Canadian watchdog would have had access to Pallast’s work, or the document itself – apparently not. Moore also overlooks the fact that the White House spent $20M on an advertising campaign to get America “behind the war effort” – an important missing link in his rhetoric because he tries to examine the Bush Administration’s penchant for instilling fear among the populace. Rather, he chooses to sweep over the rug with images and voice-over narrative to tell the story in a way that more often that not feels like handholding.

There is also the difficult to dismiss evidence (that Moore chose to ignore) assembled by the MoveOn.org folks in the documentary Uncensored – a film that used insiders from the CIA and the White House to present the truth behind the lies that Colin Powell used in his presentation to the U.N. on weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps Moore didn’t want to tread on familiar ground (but seriously, compare the number of viewers of Uncensored with Fahrenheit 9/11 – whoops! Sorry, there is no comparison – Uncensored was distributed to those who made a contribution to the making of the film and it has not yet found its way to theaters).

It is hard, however, to criticize him for making Fahrenheit at a time when so many people seem out of the loop on the motivations behind the invasion of Iraq and indeed, behind the “work” in Florida that allowed Bush to take office. And yet it is important not to just let the film just wash over you and walk out afterward feeling like you really are informed.

On the other hand, it’s impressive that he has crystallized the enormous socio-political dung-heap that the Bush Administration has produced, and has put it out there where audiences can get to it in an easy to digest format. Most folks resist working too hard to get the facts unless their son or daughter is killed in a senseless war, conceivably designed for no other reason than to get corporations salivating over the potential for huge profits in this oil-rich region. This is a point that doesn’t go unnoticed (or perhaps unexploited) in Moore’s recent offering.

Unfortunately, what often lies behind Moore's film is a deft ability to present social and political satire that's so well packaged, so finely integrated into the fabric of the film, that it can go unnoticed, and Farhenheit 9/11 is packed with such moments. The title sequence alone, with the lens focused on GW Bush while he waits to announce that the US is about to strike the people of Iraq is a memorable example.

If nothing else, the film stands as an effort to wake America up – and it is possible that the best way of waking people up is to set an alarm – and surely Michael Moore’s film has all the alarming points of light associated with a wake-up call. It is clear that many Americans have been sleeping on the issues, perhaps fearful of stirring a fuss that would secure a reservation at a newfound resort in Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps we are the victims of a barrage of media images and sound-bytes that have neglected (or have blocked) a clearer presentation of the facts. While watching the film, it seems impossible that all the facts will ever be collected and digested without a certain amount of destructive bias.

Like Nixon’s Watergate scandal and countless other political mishaps, the facts are often hard to find, and it seems that Americans may never know the truth behind the issues. If the American public and the people of Iraq are lucky, Fahrenheit 9/11 may just live up to Michael Moore’s goal: to de-throne Child Bush and his war-mongering, capital-hungry cabinet members. Of course it remains to be seen whether or not Bush’s imagined successor will be able to withdraw US forces in Iraq as quickly as some would like to believe.

Finally, if the film were to have such an impact on the psyche of the American body politic (swaying an election as it were), it merely proves the fickle nature of that delicate and temporary condition: popular opinion in America and the public’s faith in media images to tell them how and what to think.