The Dark of the Matinée

We've Moved!

2006-01-23T09:28:00.000-05:00

I know what you came here looking for and aren't finding. Let me hasten to add - it's here! Sure, it's only mp3s with cryptic references and glossy images now, but it'll be the temp-to-perm home of The Dark of the Matinee unless I decide to create a dedicated film blog. Meanwhile, update your links.

The bad news is that these "articles" won't be making the trip. Read up as much backstory as you like, and we'll be shutting these doors very shortly. You see, it's Blackmail Is My Life's 2nd birthday and it would be The Matinee's first. Pump the celebratory music into the house and let's dance!

[Oct 18, 2006 EDIT] Thanks to Wordpress, this whole site was transferred to "miscellany" at Blackmail Is My Life some time ago. I think it's time to shut this down and move on. However, keep an eye open for Blackmail version 1.5 coming soon! [I know, starting a new blog in January, bored with the format by October? Pretty sweet, right? Expect changes.]

News of the World

2006-01-02T18:24:00.000-05:00

This page will be moving very shortly to a new home, which will be found here. The Dark of the Matinee will continue as a film diary, with an eye more toward criticism than review, although I don't like treating those subjects discretely.

Tell me what you think of the new page. I'm trying to come up with a header image right now and I'm sifting through several films. We'll see what happens.

What's The Matter with Kansas, Revisited: Capote

2005-12-28T12:26:00.000-05:00

Tonight. Such fertile land for storytelling.

What C. Wright Mills Already Knew: Syriana

2005-12-26T22:37:00.000-05:00

Turns out, power is something worth discussing, even if you thought Who Governs? explained that troublesome bogeyman away. Get out your Gramsci, Fanon, Reuther, Niebuhr, Foucault, Said and Anderson, put on a pot of coffee and theorize Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton and The Carlyle Group. As an incipient, lacksadaisical political scientist, I'd say the film lacked an additional layer of complexity and subtlety by missing the role played by NGO's and nonprofit corporations mining a lucrative third way. Why bother with shadowy front operations when the money can be funneled back and forth between well-meaning third parties?

From a moviegoing perspective, Syriana does things that confuses Americans (read: non-ideological thinkers) by violating certain principles of fairness which automatically subverts the exoticist rampage storyline. This is Melville and Conrad territory, albeit less poetic, suspended in a value neutral vacuum. This is beyond good and evil; these are tactical losses and collateral damage, tit for tat. Finally a metaphor for the movements of portfolio capital, embodied in the several persons animating the drama.

Unlike Moore, Gaghan and Clooney (channeling something he must have learned under David O. Russell) conspire to create a nearly unimpeachable political film, so restrained it can't be considered exciting or suspenseful or any of the Oscar-worthy blurb cliches that will doubtless be imputed to it. Syriana refutes Soderbergh's hamfisted lecture on the war on drugs and complicates matters by presenting a story in which allegiances change, lessons are learned and time overlaps, rather than evolving from one point through an arc, creating a story rife with coincidence and stinking with serendipity. Unlike the revelations of Medium Cool, Syriana's message breaks across faces with the same grim realization undergone by the executioner in Kafka's In the Penal Colony, not out of enlightenment, but painful necessity.

Let's Play Get the Guests: The Incident

2005-12-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Incident unravels like an Albee-an nightmare, as if his stuff weren't nightmarish enough. From the moment the film begins, the characters pouring in to their own Manhattan Transfer, each with a tiny narrative of their own, we get a grandiose prisoner's dilemma (or collective action problem) in which we see the worst of humanity in acts of high cowardice. This is the stuff of the real Calvin and Hobbes.

The Incident pits randomly selected individuals against two menacing hooligans. The hostages come from all walks of life and somehow the criminals suss something about each individual that paralyzes the others with fear. It's a vulgar Freudian nightmare at cross purposes with Darwin - sexuality and power are in the fore and these wounded animals can't defend themselves adequately, leaving the cats to play with the mice before they kill them.

It's a powerful film. Deeply naturalistic, this is McTeague without the money; the criminals have figuratively chained themselves to the car, at once putting them in a position of strength and weakness. Spectacularly cruel, The Incident seems like an answer to Elia Kazan's so-called do-gooder politics, Peerce thumbing his nose at those who believe collective action to be inherently red, or inherently anything. Equally interesting is that this film could be remade, set in the eighties, before any notion of "quality of life" crime and other police vocabulary had yet to be created and the legendary, pre-Giuliani New York that was mythologized as the province of junkie warlords and gangbangers, open to the promise of a police state.

Stranger than Fiction: Good Night, And Good Luck.

2005-12-15T20:34:00.000-05:00

A film that proved fresh and exciting because it feels like fiction. As Anderson Cooper skulks in the desert, dragging the Vanderbilt fortune behind him somehow plays like cinema verite. With the post-Network era of infotainment so engrained in our epistemic reflex that local and national no longer registers as inane and asinine commentary or pleasant fictions more likely opposite the truth, ushering in a reality reduced to simulacra: the shared experiences remembered through bizarre anecdotes of cultural memory littering our psyche with the sort of useless knowledge helpful solely for Quizzo and Google searches. We've reached a societal disconnect that transgresses escapism and blunders fecklessly past citizenship into the new, weird Americana that represents the country's international reputation.

But Good Night and Good Luck doesn't say that, nor does it preach to its audience. Unlike Network, a film that presaged the era of soft news, Good Night and Good Luck comes across as a rote history with no catchphrase to speak of or even cartharsis. In fact, history is presented as it ought to be: an unfolding process, not some triumphal arc replete with the pompous class president speeches leading to easy, ludicrous conclusions. More importantly there is no point in nostalgia; the direct continuum past to present, from McCarthy and Hoover, to COINTELPRO and Hoover, to Ashcroft, Gonzalez and the PATRIOT chorus, there's nothing worth rhapsodizing. Analytically speaking, this is the stuff of a Benjamin aphorism.

David Straithairn's Murrow is breathlessly reserved, forthright and filled with conviction. Opposite him, Clooney plays his equally cool producer, the aptly named Fred Friendly, Clooney being careful to write himself out of St. Peter status as Jesus' footman. The remaining cast offer lovely supporting performances, Jeff Daniels perhaps foremost among them as the stern but fair management man and secret couple Joe and Shirley Wershba playing the skeptics with something to lose.

Good Night, and Good Luck. succeeds among biopics for its restraint; at under 90 minutes there's no time for meandering flashbacks that place characters in irrelevant context. The film is present to itself and its subject and leaves out the messianic qualities for which is hagiography's renown. A film so lavishly produced, shot in gorgeous black and white to remind audiences that this isn't some science fiction, gives historic weight and Dianne Reeves plays a jazz singer whose interstitial performances are as much evidence of television's Golden Age as they are the choruses corresponding to each scene in turn.

With message films being the order of the day and so few delivering on their promises, Clooney exceeds expectations. Unlike his predecessor Robert Redford and mentor Steven Soderbergh, Clooney as a writer and director undoes all the things that made HBO's K Street so unbearable. By avoiding cant and cliche and presenting a realistic portrait of an important, but minor historical figure, Clooney has a faith and optimism that perhaps more likeminded people lack. As politicians struggle to define their legacies and shore up support for upcoming elections, films like this one are like quiet cautionary tales instead of morality plays and dumb shows pantomiming to the choir.

What's The Matter With Kansas: The Ice Harvest

2005-12-11T23:18:00.000-05:00

This perverse Dickensian tale has the makings of a modern day Christmas classic: a morality play gone awry in almost too many ways to count, with a Scrooge who realizes that even if he's generous, the bank account's still full. There's Christmas past, present and future, all rolled into one icy rainstorm as a Benz whisks Cusack from tense to tense.

If it sounds like another maudlin Christmas movie to you and if you've had enough of The Christmas Story to last a lifetime, consider this: Cusack plays a mob lawyer involved in a "perfect crime," partnered with Billy Bob Thornton as the muscle guy with motivation. Set in Kansas, we're made aware of the contradictions at play; you can almost hear Sen. Brownback chiding his congregation, ahem, constituency against the evils portrayed herein. This is the other Kansas - one that was left behind as rock 'n' roll moved out of Kansas City for Detroit, New York and Los Angeles. The political ambiguity still allows for a critique of greed and hypocrisy, something Daniel Kasman notes in his review.

Ramis returns to a familiar theme: small town claustrophobia. But unlike Groundhog Day, the danger in Wichita Falls is as palpable as it is inevitable. As Cusack skirts the cops and his would-be killer, we learn how desperate everyone is to escape; think of a thousand toasters dropped into a thousand bathtubs in the name of existential freedom. But for Cusack and his company, there are no easy outs.

If The Pardoner's Tale were a Christmas comedy or Groundhog Day a noir soaked in rain and bourbon, then The Ice Harvest would be a brown paper bag waiting for you Christmas morning beneath the tree, decorated with blood red ribbon.

How to Disappear Completely, Vol. 3: Mr. Arkadin Returns!

2005-12-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

This is more than just good news. As I wrote here, this is a promising film, but as usual Laserlight couldn't have done any worse with handling and presenting it. I have some details regarding the forthcoming Criterion release, but they're unfortunately not at my immediate disposal. Actually, they're already published!

Innocent Bystanders - Looker

2005-12-10T19:46:00.000-05:00

As I continue to assemble a heartier blogroll as winter sets in, keep an eye on Looker from time to time. It's posts like this one that make me wonder if I'm the only person who still likes Antonioni!

Rare and Out of Print: 24 lies per second

2005-12-10T18:09:00.000-05:00

Something that gets lost in a lot of the conversation regarding repertory films being reissued on DVD is not just how idiosyncratic the process is, but how motivated it is by profit. 24 lies per second points up just how many interesting films get lost in the mix. Some of these may eventually find their way into broad re-release, but not without efforts like these that go a long way to develop a consciousness of what's out there waiting to be re-released.

The desperate thing about a wonderful site like 24 lies is how it makes me wish that everything were available, all at once. Of course, I'm taking a quick lunch break from The Man Who Fell to Earth and maybe I'm taking Newton/Sussex's "multi-tasking" a bit far.

*Obsessive's edit: Fortunately for me, my employer maintained a VHS copy of the film currently featured, The Incident, starring Beau Bridges and Martin Sheen.

Public Notice - Self-Styled Siren, Flickhead, Coffee & Cinemarati

2005-12-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

We're flattered. If you're not already reading Self-Styled Siren, Flickhead, Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee and Filmbrain on a semi-regular basis, well, you should be. Add to that list the impressive Cinemarati community, where Siren and Filmbrain began contributing recently. Updated links accordingly to right.

With good images and fine commentary, film blogs tend to outweigh music blogs in terms of information and critical heft, contrary to what mainstream critics would have you believe. There's a, dare I say, lingua franca among film critics that doesn't exist in music criticism; the canon is embraced in an entirely different way, although I may be too charitable there. As an auto-didact who's got but nary three years experience with cinema, I have to believe that there's room for us amateurs too. A video clerk's sense of auteur theory, combined with a democratic familiarity with being surrounded by movies, imparts considerable humility when it comes to the expansive catalogue of titles now available on DVD.

As an addendum, I hasten to add that Cinemarati is a site like Daily Kos, except with an aesthetic compass. I can think of few more interesting internet "communities" that actually further critique through recursive processes. This comes as no surprise as they are serious about maintaining their structural integrity: they have by-laws!

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee, etc. recently looked at Fukasaku's Street Mobster which I saw about a month ago. What I don't understand about Fukasaku was his shift from remarkably realistic crime/yakuza epics to the gory romances of his later movies, exemplifed by Battle Royale. I can see that he might have exhausted the yakuza genre and would want to move on, but films like Battle Royale, while amazingly entertaining for their suspense and bloodlust, really lack Fukasaku's real talent as a storyteller willing to work within the constraints of historical reality.

Wild Love - Masculin féminin

2005-12-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

Masculin féminin has something for everyone. Not only is it for me the apex of Godard's romantic comedies, it's also the subtlest of his political films; there are no outlandish, unrealistic monologues delivered in political argot, nor are there any Truffautian paeans to love. Both of those things may be wonderful, but this is May '68 in '66; France's post-colonial agitation had begun and what's most refreshing (is that the right word?) is that there's no hint of isolationist rhetoric or warped Wilsonian internationalism. Godard's joie de vivre illuminates both political conviction and carefree love in ways that few films have before or since.

By borrowing General Doinel from Truffaut, Godard captures Leaud the libertine at his peak. Vulnerable and virile, Leaud plays with the expectations of youth and how they sabotage them, from whimiscal allegiances to acts of idiosyncratic defiance. In six short years, Godard would come out the other side as a hard-bitten, disillusioned Marxist, upset with the failures of the movement and its token gestures toward rebellion and revolution in Tout Va Bien.

That maturation and wide-eyed understanding are the elements that make Godard's political love stories so believable; in many ways these works are novelizations of serious documentaries and other works of non-fiction, retold in a style that takes into account humanity and sexuality. The encumbered complexities are what is often forgotten in Leftist politics, even though everyone from Bernardo Bertolucci to Todd Gitlin understood the importance of sex in its relationship to anti-fascist politics including feminism as elements of a holistic view of humanism, leaving the sexless stereotypes to the Americanized, sanitized Second Wave and its middle-class mannerisms and cult of the individual essentialisms. Godard's problematic, contradictory impulses make for a more interesting film that is as much a document about the time as it is a story of it.

It's a Wonderful Life - Woody Allen's Early Years

2005-12-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

There's probably no more overlooked figure in my knowledge of film than Woody Allen. He's always been on my radar; I saw Sleeper as a pre-teen and knew immediately that his was a sense of humor and a sensibility I could automatically appreciate. Annie Hall too. Maybe I thought that said too much about me, but this could be some Carly Simon psychobabble about overwraught, intellectual narcissicists.

So it was after seeing Manhattan that I completely fell in love with Allen as a filmmaker. I can think of few examples where someone can not only tell a beautiful story in such a self-contained, self-absorbed manner. And it's educational! Allen keeps no secrets about his influences and his films always point to cinematic history. His appreciation for Bergman in Manhattan is not only a metaphor but also a compliment.

In fact, it's to Allen's credit that he can so lightheartedly present audiences with film lectures while telling a story at the same time. It's good because there has to be some way for moviegoers who aren't neurotic, self-loathing Jewish New Yorkers to identify with his characters. Those caricatures are what people find funny - these reified distortions sometimes look like cartoons not people and not monsters - making it easier to come to grips with the story itself, which might be painful in ways that hit too close to home.

This has led me to buy Woody Allen Collection Vol. 1 and digest it immediately. For 49 bucks it seemed too good to pass up.

Price, Yeah!

2005-12-05T12:25:00.000-05:00

If you were wondering how much you should've paid, check here. Not only do they compile prices, they include whatever specials are running on the sites listed. It's like Campusi for DVDs!

The Passenger

2005-12-02T00:04:00.000-05:00

This film not only has a cosmology, it poses a potent ontological dilemma. Again, issues of identity, being and time and being and nothingness are presented against a barren backdrop that offers no answers, only questions: a Gaudi rooftop reveals a rabbithole that delves into Deep Meaning. Soon it can all be yours (Via DVDBeaver)!

Send more Rossellini!

Tech Solutions

2005-11-28T20:32:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend I splurged and bought a copy of Nero 7 Ultra Edition. Not only does it solve all the screen capture issues, it offers a handy tool for resizing images along with a bundle of media management features I've yet to explore, thus making it far more attractive than the one-dimensional WinDVD program partially installed on all HP desktops. Now I just have to wait for Best Buy to mail that $50 dollar rebate to me to make it reasonable.

The Life Aquatic with Noah Baumbach

2005-11-28T18:57:00.000-05:00

Interiors was rented, so I chose Manhattan instead. While I await the arrival of my eagerly anticipated, 20% off impulse purchases of The Man Who Fell to Earth, L'Avventura and Solaris, I'm on a bender to get into Baumbach's very sensible influences. Unfortunately I lack the psychological imagination to grasp Baumbach's fascination with underwater imagery. Am I willing this to favorite film of the year status, or is it just that intriguing?

If there are any other obvious film references that I'm missing, drop a line in the comments box.

The Squid and The Whale

2005-11-27T22:47:00.000-05:00

There's no easy way to talk about this movie. The easiest comparisons are Allen's Interiors and Bergman's relationship films, but Baumbach skirts both influences carefully, although even in a charitable frame of mind the decision to name the family the Berkmans seems a more than just a little precocious. A tiny movie about minor histories, plagiarisms, charlatans and philistines, The Squid and The Whale deals with the matter of divorce, set in late '80's Park Slope, Brooklyn.

A literary family, the Berkmans have the sort of hangups most overwraught intellectuals just aspire to. Bernard Berkman's fascination with perfection verges on Grand's insistence on a "hats off" salute in The Plague. Jeff Daniels captures the role of the overweening father figure perfectly, never flinching from a cruel, unsubstantiated judgement or hiding his preening vulnerability. Laura Linney's emotional range as his wife is stunning. Both children manage their pubescent and post angst in ways that I found intriguing and open-ended. Baumbach has succeeded in making a film that celebrates and derides the coming-of-age story without devolving into Solondz' suburbanite drivel or some triumphal Ridley Scott "masterpiece"; the realism is real and the whimsy is not, at least not in the tangible sense of which the characters are aware.

Unlike writing partner/producer Wes Anderson, Baumbach doesn't get caught up in denotative dream time - there's no difficult Christmas or a forgotten birthday to speak of. It's a strangely realistic venture of parent-teacher conferences, tennis lessons and bad dates. It'll have you singing songs of innocence and experience before you know it.

The Passenger

2005-11-26T08:09:00.000-05:00

More on this later, as well as more notes on Walk the Line and The Squid & The Whale.

Walk The Line

2005-11-23T10:39:00.000-05:00

What they said. Briefly? Everyone loves a Christ story at Christmastime. Also, when folks tell you that you that you can't take your eyes off of Reese Witherspoon, it's not simply because she's breathtakingly beautiful or inordinately talented: the tight focus on her face leaves no alternative. If you've seen one biopic then you know too well the strict adherence to Great Man thesis which wouldn't be complete without messianic hagiography. To their credit, both leads are believable as Cash and June Carter, but that isn't enough to cover for a gauzy gloss on The Man in Black.

But a film like this begs the question: has a celebrity ever lived an irredeemable life?

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

2005-11-10T09:15:00.000-05:00

Thanks to some nice people where I work, this ended up in my hands. I'll be catching up on Mr. Fukasaku shortly, but Mr. Vengeance comes first. I'm sure Filmbrain will be pleased. Well, Filmbrain won't be pleased that I haven't seen Oldboy yet (and yes, I know the company I work for is partnered with the company released it!)

Fukasaku Days

2005-11-08T08:55:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the hiatus. Ramping up at PopMatters and Decibel Magazine and contributing reviews for both presently has me distracted and practically unable to sit down in front of the television for movies, much less get out to see them. As busy as it is for film, it's busier for music - October/November are touring months, year end reminders all their own.

In light of this, I'll be catching up with Kinji Fukasaku's Street Mobster and Graveyard of Honor very shortly. I still need to sit down and watch The Yakuza Papers boxset I got almost a year ago as a reward for outstanding service as video store clerk.After that I may finally get after Suzuki's reissued catalogue in earnest.

In the Year of the Pig - Emil DeAntonio

2005-10-29T11:22:00.000-04:00

I just finished reviewing this film for work. My words will ultimately appear on this page, accompanied by a reasonable price for an excellent documentary. I happened upon this conversation with DeAntonio, who is a Scranton, PA native, and it gives greater insight into DeAntonio as a political figure/person of interest and an artist. That article complements very nicely the commentary DeAntonio provides in the film.

Another well known DeAntonio film, Point of Order, documenting the McCarthy hearings, is also available on Home Vision Entertainment.

At The Movies

2005-10-19T11:33:00.000-04:00

There's so much to go out and see. Pardon the temporary interruption. We'll be back soon, with a new design and so on. Prepare to update your links and bookmarks!

What we're trying to see before it goes out of theaters - Corpse Bride and Elevator to the Gallows.
Good Night and Good Luck, History of Violence, Capote and many others are on the schedule.

North Country

2005-10-09T22:58:00.000-04:00

It starts out where Five Easy Pieces leaves off; you can practically see Nicholson jumping into that logging rig at the gas station as Theron pulls in to fill up. Every ensuing cut invites comparisons to America's early Seventies New Wave, the expectation being that the oil derricks would be replaced with another landscape right out of Bernd and Hilla Becher's imagination: the modern mining complex with its gargantuan, noisy machinery and the cratered wasteland it creates. The impersonal, industrial vista, frozen like space, creates a harsh background to a bleak story of brutal misogyny and domestic violence.

These traits hold for the first third of the film. The cuts are quick and the camera never lingers, except for a few beautiful, towering crane and helicopter shots across the mining factory and its surrounding quarries. Charlize Theron comes off as a believably beautiful Minnesotan, never exaggerating an accent she hasn't quite mastered, or attempt some untenable level of working class authenticity. There's an absurd naturalism about her character as she develops a political consciousness, an observant naive. The representations of the work itself are unsettling and painful; the women in the cast, led by Frances McDormand as a union rep and truck driver, lend themselves to cultivating a culture of work and home that's entirely believable in much the same way Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is ghoulish and real. Unfortunately the entire film isn't staged at the mine, in the home, or at the bar.

To the film's credit, it isn't simply the unencumbered, Updikean fantasy land of Five Easy Pieces where the man is somehow the real victim and the woman is a sexless harpy determined to anchor him at home with his family. Nor does this keep the film from taking on deeply existential qualities; one might argue that films about work and prison are probably more "existential" than those of aimless ennui. Although this aspect is muted and ultimately deleted by the courtroom drama unfolding behind each of these flashbacks, it's worth noting that it provides ample opportunity for a fantastic cast to exercise gritty dramas in the home and workplace. However, as the past reaches the present, the film looses it's seamlessness between now and then. Unlike The Sweet Hereafter, the legal drama isn't personal in quite the same way in terms of detachment and loss, and it emerges as a jarring eruption in an otherwise gripping story.

Maybe that's the Hollywood stranglehold at work. Is it possible that even stories that have audiences applauding progressive politics and small novelists are indelibly compromised by their adaptations? Characters like Bill White are just cowboys in white hats and these sorts of paternalistic, even when well-intentioned, progressive and sensitive Gary Coopers come off like chauvinists in spite of themselves. As the film winds down and the conclusion becomes obvious, the sheer momentum is obnoxious and insulting to even sympathetic sensibilities. There's still something not quite right about these message/issue pictures even if they're maybe as close to the genuine article (a reification and bit of wish-fulfillment if I've ever formulated any) as it gets? If that's true, then maybe the artistry that's been heralded in big budget productions has been dramatically overstated.

The sense of film history exhibited in North Country comes as a stinging indictment of its pat conclusion and mechanical progress. There's a real story to be told, but this wasn't it. The story's more in the struggle and less in the temporary and hermetic "victories" presented.

The Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection

2005-10-05T10:37:00.000-04:00

I'll be working on this all winter. My partner loves Hitchcock and I've never had an excuse to get anything like this for her. Needless to say, this is the first "toy truck" gift that genuinely surprised and thrilled her. She was expecting the new Cinderella on DVD, and she'll get it, but this was easily where the smart money's going for belated birthdays, two month "anniversaries," and holidays alike.

The link has all the details, but they're worth reiterating - 14 movies plus a documentary disc.

Other film-related items this week: North Country pre-screening tomorrow night and a review of Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig.

Back To The Future: 2046

2005-10-04T09:15:00.000-04:00

A few belated notes about Wong Kar-Wai's flawed sequel to In the Mood for Love are forthcoming. Let me amplify this statement with a conditional phrase: from a lesser filmmaker, this would be a landmark accomplishment, but from a renowned perfectionist like Kar-Wai who reportedly edited and re-edited the film until moments before it screened at Cannes last year it's something of a disappointment.
------

That's a damning preface, isn't it? There are some stories where any sequel will fail, and for me, this proved one of them. In the Mood for Love had an open-ended sadness that was penetrating, poignant and perfect. That Wong Kar-Wai was so arrogant to believe that we'd care about any other relationship is folly; more arrogant was carrying it out. Sure, it's like In the Mood for Love in terms colors and mis-en-scene, but those inexplicable elements of longing and courage and boundless love are replaced with a wardrobe of deadend lust and confusion.

Yeah, so he didn't repeat or better his meisterwerk, so what? And he made the films simultaneously so it was perhaps more difficult to get perspective on 2046 while In the Mood for Love stole his focus. Where In the Mood for Love was subtle and torturously existential in sentiment and tone, 2046 is rash and absurd. Philip K. Dick didn't write The Unbearable Lightness of Being and there's a rational explanation for that somewhere I'm sure, separate from the fact that Dick wasn't part of the Velvet Revolution and that Kundera didn't get caught up in sci-fi as a metaphor for passing time. While the kernel of a romantic/erotic idea of collaboration was there, the short story itself was too literal and Kar-Wai was too deeply possessed by the George Lucas moments in the film. It's forgiveable for a filmmaker to do uncharacteristic things - that's part of the film's appeal - but they should have a clearer narrative coherence without simply aping the plotline. Where's the pain and anguish of a man cuckolded, who turns to another woman for love?

If we're tracing the story of a man traveling backwards from 2046, freezing on Jules Verne's railway in a sci-fi North by Northwest, then shouldn't more effort be dedicated to creating the feeling of time passing on the train, or was it meant to be thought of as an infinite and eternal journey, the closest analogue to that fevered longing Chow feels in In the Mood? I guess what we're left with is a damaged playboy, still vulnerable after being scorned, still lonely for wanting too much. Chow still wants too much, but the film, like his character, is aimless and the only thing guiding his life, is the passing of time. Thus imprisoned, Chow's so-called vulnerability seems a pathetic and hackneyed ruse used solely to take advantage of lonely people like himself. Unable to share his innermost feelings, he whispers them into holes in trees, covers those holes with mud and drinks to forget himself.

Ossessione

2005-09-30T10:46:00.000-04:00

For a director who would later develop a style so personal and more astutely political, Ossessione is remarkable for its faux noir trademarks: murder and intrigue on a low budget. It's Visconti's later works that address Italian politics during times of crisis and the manner in which the aristocracy responds to them, most blatantly in The Leopard but elsewhere in less pronounced fashion. Ossessione is a simple, straightforward story about a drifter who comes between a man and his wife, and the consequences one faces when money is an issue. The stakes are love and theft and the means are the perfect crime. The determination with which Visconti picks apart romantic affairs is at times excruciating, but nonetheless emblematic of couples struggling furtively toward happiness or some semblance of it.

This film hinges on varieties of guilt, theft and deception. Drawing on Dostoyevsky's suspicions about human psychology, Visconti makes a tense film about criminals and those who would be criminals. Seen as a morality play, Visconti plays his hand much further in favor of "justice" than he would in his second film which confronts directly the class struggle in Sicily. As such, the conflict between the lumpen beggar and the petit bourgeois is trivial and a bourgeois struggle at that: fights over women are seen as transfer of property and Bregana and Gino treat her as such. Giovanna is perhaps underdeveloped as a failure to understand more completely her anxieties, which seem facile compared to the "risks." But like Lady of Shanghai, one can read into Giovanna a more sophisticated narrative that imparts an insufficiently calculated plot to use the men in her life to gain independence.

In fact, Giovanna never gets chance to explain herself. From her lovelorn confessions to Gino, we're led to believe that she's been a prostitute, noting that men never have to prostitute themselves in the same way (in the context of this film, at least). Nor does Gino have to beg; he can hitchhike and pick up odd jobs on waterfronts, as a sandwichboard bearer, or as a mechanic. Visconti begins to develop his class orientation in public and rather than obfuscate his vision with his own incriminating class status, he proceeds with moral conviction. As a romantic and a humanist, Visconti tells the story of love through the class lens using Giovanna to show how not only women, but also love itself is treated as a commodity to be openly traded and cheapened by jealousy and murder.

While it's unfortunate that the film's third act ends so simply and abruptly given the trajectory and experience of the second act, but maybe those possibilities weren't as apparent to the novice filmmaker. It's clear from the outset that Gino and Giovanna are star-crossed lovers whose sins will be remedied by tragedy and suffering, but until the climax, it's not clear how their love will end. As Visconti grew into a more sophisticated filmmaker, he began to realize that there were things worse than death that take on many forms, some more cruel than others. For brothers-in-arms Gino and Bregana, it was a mortal struggle for to parade Giovanna as they might prize livestock, and sadly, like an animal even in death she can only submit.

Loves of a Blonde: Grizzly Man

2005-09-28T10:05:00.000-04:00

In two documentaries about his work, Burden of Dreams and My Best Fiend, Werner Herzog makes it clear that he fears nature and loathes its brutish power over man, while revealing his affinity for a certain talented, but tortured blonde. Grizzly Man may prove Herzog's most personal statement yet. Herzog's compassion and curiosity decidedly influence his approach to Timothy Treadwell, an ex-alcoholic and would-be actor turned amateur naturalist. In dealing with this man, his life and works, Herzog mutes his usual cynicism and takes Treadwell at face value, his skepticism abiding what might seem the behavior of a suicide.

We meet Treadwell in media res, at play in his fantastical world of anthropomorphic creatures, as we get to know him through footage shot by an off-camera partner, likely whichever woman he was dating at the time. Like Bruce Dern in Silent Running, Treadwell hopes to present himself in a way that makes him a Brooks' Farmer, while his Margaret Fuller is kept off-camera to preserve his facade of transcendental austerity and self-determination. Strangely, Herzog reserves judgement on this score, when it would've been easier to call Treadwell a lunatic and a fraud, or resort to armchair psychoanalysis with the help of an "expert" brought in specifically for the occasion. Rather than investigate the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of Treadwell's personal life, or even speculate about them for a cheap and easy laugh, Herzog focuses on Treadwell's legacy as a filmmaker, a naturalist and a human being. Herzog very gracefully delineates the difference between documentary filmmaking and sensationalism in a time where the reality show continuum supplants artistry as entertainment.

In dealing with his work as a naturalist, Herzog discovers that Treadwell's activities were not only unorthodox, but unlawful, and according to several biologists interviewed in the film, likely dangerous to the animals. Motivated by a love for grizzly bears and the secluded Alaskan wilderness, Treadwell went to dangerous lengths to be around those he considered his family; these animals that couldn't touch him emotionally and hurt him with rejection, unless they destroyed his physical body too, something Treadwell chose not to believe. Unfortunately, his career as a naturalist incorporated unpredictable nature into his recovery, and his co-dependence on the animal kingdom ultimately and mortally betrayed him.

Treadwell's performance in this film is nothing short of remarkable. His canny sensibility of composition and his childlike curiosity make him an interesting filmmaker with a message. His psychological profile makes him a daredevilish Mr. Rogers or a preschooler's Ace Ventura. As a film diarist, Treadwell collects all of his emotions and edits them sparsely; these are rare moments of uncensored human drama, a rarity when so much television is manicured so and inoffensive. We witness his triumphant highs and follow him as he descends into deep trenches, all charged with tempestuous intensity. Herzog realizes that his own deep compassion for Kinski is what permits him to understand Treadwell as a creative entity tormented by his own ambitions. Herzog, in interviews and editorials, passes no judgement against him, presenting his friends and co-workers as those best suited to explain his motivations and actions. Perhaps some filmgoers will expect an indictment, but Herzog offers but one admonition in his cold observation that Nature continues to dominate humankind, a fact made all the more evident by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It's an atheist's prayer he recites, recognizing the danger and mute violence in the eyes of the grizzly Treadwell filmed shortly before his death.

Grizzly Man will doubtless polarize audiences. There will be those who reach facile, commonsense conclusions about Treadwell's behaviors and there will be those who take another approach, calling into question his psychological well-being, and offer amateur diagnoses. What's left however, is the memory and history of his life, as enigmatic as it ever was, and a troubling statement that leaves many questions unanswered. While March of the Penguins dominates the documentary box office, Herzog's work may go unnoticed or underappreciated. Nevertheless, it's as difficult and thought-provoking film as I have ever seen, and something that will hopefully affect audiences as it affected its author.

The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Aristocrats

2005-09-20T14:18:00.000-04:00

When Kerouac wrote of seduction and its empty promises in On The Road, we see a young man bragging about his lovemaking abilities to a young Spanish girl as they travel westward by bus. After they've had sex, he's vomiting apologies, sickened not only by his inability to perform, but seemingly moreso about having betrayed himself - one assumes that the Delphic Oracle penetrated the Beat Manifesto and that such violations were not only treasonous, but inevitable. Secrets only have value when kept, which is something Penn Jillette should know.

Unfortunately, Jillette's telling of comedy's darkest joke violates the magician's code. Had Gilbert Gottfried told The Aristocrats with no explanation, had it been censored beyond recognizability and confounded Comedy Central audiences for years to come, it might've maintained that in-joke respectability; now it's fodder for Bob Saget and his ilk of new Borscht humor, along with the Drew Careys and Don Rickleses. Sure, Martin Mull deadpans murderously, Sarah Silverman's trauma narrative is devastatingly funny and Taylor Negron's disco days variation is at once sophisticated and slimy and entirely believable, making it for me the closest to George Carlin's theories regarding the joke, and how it should be.

If Carlin, instead of Jillette, shepherded this loose documentary, it might've had a chance. Unlike Jillette, Carlin isn't actually thrown by the subject, and as a comedian's comedian, has been exposed to this joke throughout his career. Jillette comes off as a novice, and he laughs too hard at mediocre tellings. His stance toward the subject and the film is snobbish and naive. Rather than tell the story of why Gottfried told this joke and then work backward towards its origin, we get a scatterplot of the whos, hows and whys in no particular order. The "inside baseball" feel of the movie takes away from its politicized content in a time of Ashcroft and Gonzales, and while it shouldn't be a high-minded film, it ought to have conveyed more fervently the folly of imposed decency and prohibitionism.

Nevertheless, an NC-17 film deserves seeing in the theater; it may be your last transgressive act!

Mike Nichols' Couples - Albee and Everything After

2005-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00

Edward Albee entered my life holding Samuel Beckett's hand. In a school district where censorship and book banning were regularly discussed, that Zoo Story was taught and that Endgame was available in the library remain mysteries to me. By the time I read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I'd decided that Albee was perhaps the cruelest writer I'd read; his cynicism and lovelessness were passionate, unforgiving, and relentless.

His compassion was perverted. It isn't that he doesn't care about his characters; on the contrary, he clearly cares about them considerably, but wishes triumphant, cleansing pain upon them, dousing them with torrential sadism. Mike Nichols' adaptation was so true to the original in that classic cruelty, so palpable is the tension between Taylor and Burton. But for Nichols, that tension and taboo would prove formulaic, a theme he'd return to twice, separated by thirty-three years. In between times, what Nichols seems to have missed is the fundamental shift in public opinion about marriage and adultery.

What makes Carnal Knowledge so edgy and Closer an exercise in banal titillation stems from our expectations about ascribed gender roles and the degree to which those understandings can be subverted. That the women in Carnal Knowledge would be endowed with aggressive sexual appetites, be intelligent and employed and that the men would be chest-thumping, foulmouthed and impotent speaks volumes about Nichols' incisive take on the burgeoning second wave and provincial attitudes toward women. What Nichols fails to realize is that in the interim, behind the outmoded and backward worldview that passes for morality today, America accepts the seamy underworld and appreciates it in a collective sense in much the same way the neighborhood speakeasy was an open secret; there's doubtless a transgressive zealotry afoot in those seemingly chaste households, each harboring incipient cultural terrorists. The Lewinsky scandal demonstrated that public opinion about monogamy and adultery had changed, even if husbands and wives weren't sharing their thoughts on the subject.

But Nichols maintains an Updikean sensibility about urban and urbane sexuality that seems at odds with his intentions. Closer feels so suburban and middle class; there's no pretense of sophistication or detachment. Every character makes immediate connections and longs to possess that person. The very notion of requited love in a film meant to be about calculating casanovas and damsels in distress struck me as quaint. But perhaps for Nichols, it's time to apply nostalgic lacquer to the stripped furniture of his former glory, and remake all the world as Shillington.

Criminal Elegance: Luchino Visconti

2005-09-08T10:40:00.000-04:00

I hope to wend my way through this genteel Marxist's work beginning with Ossessione and continue through his often epic work. Inspired by the recent Criterion release of Le Notti Bianche, I've decided to pursue a director whose work has eluded me aesthetically since I became aware of him and had time to fashion some sense of Neorealism and its tenets and obligations. I might've chosen Rossellini, but there's so little available on DVD and too little to be comprehensive on VHS. That said, barring further distraction I hope to begin sometime on Saturday - full disclosure: Infernal Affairs got my attention; Mysterious Skin was handed to me by a coworker; and 2046 probably won't remain in Philadelphia much past next week. It's my belief that Visconti may be the most often cited, yet least seen director of his generation of Italian filmmakers.

Welles complicates things a bit next Monday, when Citizen Kane screens at International House.

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Be it resolved: Le Notti Bianche will be returned today and exchanged for La Terra Trema, which I've rented several times and never watched. I must mention in passing that I've seen several of these films on the in-store monitors, including Trema and Senso.

Truth and Coincidences

2005-09-01T09:43:00.000-04:00

The Village Voice clues in all the lucky New Yorkers here, here, here and here.

Whither Philadelphia? It seems like things will be o.k. to good this year, which for Philadelphians means that it'll be very busy this fall. Curiously, Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated looks captivating, but I say that with reservations; the cult of the "small movie" fan has been manipulated so frequently and with such sophistication that discerning an underdog approaches the complexity of hermeneutics.

As an aside, which film journals/magazines are worth reading? The only magazine I read monthly without fail is The Wire, a snooty music rag for cynics, hermits and weirdos. I also am always sure to pick up Ugly Things, which is much the same albeit for a different subset of cynics, hermits and weirdos. Thanks.

The Fall Movie Season

2005-08-31T09:45:00.000-04:00

Summer may be lingering, but in Philadelphia the Fall movie season is in full swing, which at least partially explains my absence here. That, and yesterday's re-painting of the spare bedroom/study that doubles as the Blackmail Is My Life office, which has uprooted the desk and the desktop computer.

Be back shortly with:

Mike Nichols and John Updike - A Lover's Quarrel: Carnal Knowledge, Closer and Bourgeois Marriage
Grizzly Men -Timothy Treadwell and Klaus Kinski, or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Petite Sophisticates - Penn Jillette and the Problem with Middlebrow Comedy

For tonight? 2001: A Space Odyssey! And 2046 reaches the provinces Friday. Also coming soon: The Conformist, The Passenger and Elevator to the Gallows - repertory delight!

Technical Question

2005-08-27T19:44:00.000-04:00

While some of us are bragging about our new home viewing capacity, there are those of us still trying to assemble sensible computer infrastructure so as not to monopolize the good T.V. That said, in a horserace with no riders, which software is preferable - the partially installed Intervideo that manifests itself in Hewlett Packards, or the Nero software I've tried loading unsuccessfully on several occasions? I ask specifically because the latter is on sale this week, dirt cheap. My hesitation comes not only from past difficulty, but also from the knowledge that it's not great for fullscreen viewing.

Any words of wisdom are welcome. If there's any shareware that would serve my purposes (screen capture, potentially ripping/burning discs), drop me a line at blackmail.is.my.life AT gmail dot com. Also - send all URL's to sites like DVD Beaver and that ilk. Knowing which Criterion Editions will be released in November heightens their anticipation.

Once the landlord comes and paints the walls in the spare bedroom and the new desk is built, watch out!

Mike Nichols' Double Feature

2005-08-25T12:47:00.000-04:00

My partner wisely wants to catch up on some recent releases, so it's my hope to have something to say about Carnal Knowledge and Closer shortly. Meanwhile, I'll continue to ruminate on which director to cover next - Bresson, Kurosawa (as once promised), Antonioni, Visconti, Billy Wilder, or Bogdanovich (that's right.)

Comments welcome as always. Thanks to Alfred, I may simply direct emails his way reasoning why Antonioni in so many ways affected the way audiences view mis-en-scene like no other director, using landscape as a prop and a character, and why those things make him one of the finest and most influential directors of modern film. He did for desert landscapes what Herzog's done for the rainforest!

New York Film Festival

2005-08-23T12:02:00.000-04:00

Wishful thinking. Better living vicariously through dearest Filmbrain. As a special note, I'm thrilled to hear that a director's cut of Antonioni's The Passenger (starring Jack Nicholson for those of you who are unfamiliar with the title) will be screened (and probably made available on DVD finally), but how soon is now for Red Desert, which may be the most underrated and perpetually overlooked Antonioni film in my opinion.

In any case, maybe the next turn will be to Antonioni's filmography, whose work I fell in love with immediately and whose aesthetic choices inform how I look at modern film. His work to me is also a natural gateway into Italian film, combining his trademark breathless style with the stark emotional brutality of his neorealistic colleagues like Rossellini. More on Rossellini and Sarris' derogatory evaluation of Antonioni to come.

The Constant Gardener

2005-08-23T02:49:00.000-04:00

How I thought this would be what Pollack hoped for The Interpreter, plus all the best elements of French Connection II (that's right - the sequel), is beyond me. After they threw in the kitchen sink stylistically, what else was left to be done? Fiennes almost redeems his smash-you-over-the-head (figuratively) performance in Schindler's List. Nevertheless, this has that sort of wish fulfillment that ruins most left-oriented political thrillers. Can't someone be smart enough to let the good guys lose, and badly?

See also: Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois World and Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians.
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Controversial post-vacation edit: Considering how few films actually drew me into the theater (precisely two - Batman Begins [IMAX cut] and The Land of the Dead), there's more to be said of The Constant Gardener. Perhaps it's that the film has much to be said that hasn't yet been said elsewhere, but with all the subtlety of John Q. and its best intentions notwithstanding, this is yet another film adaptation that promotes literacy. Aa good story and bad retelling can be easily identified, and such was the case here. In political films like this, it's often the revelation and naivete that make the difference between patronizing the audience and preaching to the choir, engendering the sort of despair necessary to tie the personal to the political, each in their own inextricability.

That feeling of righteous indignation that becomes brooding anger in films like Z, The Battle of Algiers, The French Connection, Masculin-Feminin and in particular Medium Cool that makes it possible to consider how easily the public can be duped into supporting positions in which it doesn't believe and believing in positions it doesn't support; there's a variety in play here that simply can't be manipulated so didactically. Plenty of people know that pharmaceutical companies are fraudulent, cynical and heartless, but few know the manner in which these corporations go about executing their mendacious schemes tied to profit in the name of health. Truth be told, The Constant Gardener doesn't really tell that story very completely, resorting to vague explanations about suspicious activities, disappearances and questionable testing practices in the global South.

Maybe those other films succeed because they do away with messianic principles and The Constant Gardener clings to them. This is a personal reflection on the character of American and English political thrillers and their notions of heroes and villains, but there was something disgusting in believing that self-righteous European elites and local elites would be the sole actors in the film, reducing a poverty stricken populace to a position of voiceless animals being led to slaughter. As we can see in our current global political circumstance, no amount of intimidation and oppression goes without some degree of public protest. That, and the myriad other plotlines (ethnic/clan violence) that go more or less unexplored depict a place so chaotically banal that it's as though one English diplomat tours Africa with a violent storm of steel tracing his every move.

Absent are all the democratic sensibilities present in City of God, Meirelles' brilliant film about rival gangs in Brazil's underworld. Unlike that film, where good and evil are less clearly and ardently supported, The Constant Gardener fails to investigate the inability to build coalitions around issues like global health and drug testing, choosing instead to rely on the age old instant-sleuth tactic so common among films that treat social justice as something to be adminstered paternalistically rather than reclaimed from their expropriators. That may be my own wish fulfillment betraying me - how can one tell a story if it's not actually happening - but it's my belief that there is far more dissent among indigenous people than is portrayed in the film, a discredit to the subject matter and the people whose lives are at stake.

It will be a curious thing to see how critics receive the film this week. It would be easy to pass it off as a triumph of the liberal imagination, but I fear that would discredit the literary underpinnings that have clearly been done a disservice by the adaptation.

How to Disappear Completely, Vol. 2 - Mr. Arkadin

2005-08-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Welles' 1955 paranoiac thriller delves deeper into matters regarding memory, identity, privacy and anonymity all in the service of tremendous wealth. An interesting film that Welles may have believed to be more complex than it actually is is made tedious by a poor print and sound transfer. In addition to the DVD production flaws, a painfully embarrassing Tony Curtis introduction (he's wearing gloves. . . for no good reason!) and afterword taint what might be a gripping drama of international intrigue, murder and love.

The story begins with a killing at a wharf, mimicking in certain respects plot elements from The Lady from Shanghai albeit from the viewpoint of the onlookers rather than the perpetrators. The conditions of perspective, both visually and intellectually, are what set Welles films apart from Hitchcock in that both directors are extremely visual, yet Welles somehow prefers that his stories remain open-ended to the audience in terms of meaning and Hitchcock tends to resolve things very neatly, if sometimes unexpectedly and unrealistically.

Following the wharf murder we chase Arkadin's real identity backwards and forwards in time - after all, he is different things to different people. Arkadin's generosity and munificence belies his sinister past; his amnesia hides his secrets and protects his reputation, thus maintaining his beloved daughter's impression of him. Tracing the story introduces us to all the relevant figures in Arkadin's former life, but strangely, the telling becomes rote too quickly, leaving little to the imagination. Welles' flawed sense of Arkadin's mystery keeps us from having any investment in the personal entanglements, much less the characters themselves, despite their exoticism, eccentricities and bizarre attachments to Arkadin's life.

What might've been the central metaphor of the film is shown in the first scene - the empty plane cruising aimlessly - but Welles never brings us back to it with meaning. It's a beautiful image, but ultimately is just rendered a cheap plot device that connotes some existential mirage; an empty vehicle careering downward, literally following the story arc. Outside of that image is little more than your standard tale of high stakes globe-tripping. Where a story like Fitzcarraldo provides ample sustenance visually and intellectually, confusing even the director (see Burden of Dreams for proof), Mr. Arkadin unsuccessfully conflates narrative and critique and artifice with suspense.

It's unfortunate the film doesn't live up to its promise. Welles assumes too much about the audience's belief in his filmmaking ability and the magic he typically orchestrates. He also leaves too many loose ends in an atypical fashion; one grows accustomed to open-ended films but in this case too many questions remain unanswered - which government nearly fell? Why? It's as though Arkadin were edited in one take followed by studio butchery without equal. Whether or not that is the case I don't know, and we're not offered any chance for further exploration thanks to the paltry extras.

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Despite a full month's hiatus from Welles blogging, I hope to continue with renewed interest soon. Apologies for the work stoppage, but my wedding and first vacation in three years intervened. But fear not, a new and exciting program at Philadelphia's International House caught my eye (and I'm trying to keep track via Myspace's convenient events calendar) and Bryn Mawr remains indifferent to the seemingly inexorable advance of commerce over art - Saraband will be seen in the theater!

Upcoming screenings likely to include The Aristocrats, Last Days, Grizzly Man, 2046 and The Conformist! Let's pause momentarily and give A Girl and A Gun, now silent, his due. R.I.P. George Fasel. It's a strange tribute to film blogging that such vibrant and interesting writers found their way into unremunerated, yet undaunted criticisms, are discovered and appreciated, each in their own quiet corner of the theater.

Family Values Tour

2005-08-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

Expect some notes about the connotated and denotated expectations of existentialist art and their value in cinema. Then I'll explain how Broken Flowers achieves none of it, save for a few inspired, understated performances, including Bill Murray's.

The Welles wrap-up comes soon too. Well, short of that, how about How to Disappear Completely, Vol. 2?

How to Disappear Completely, Vol. 1 - The Lady from Shanghai

2005-07-22T01:41:00.000-04:00

For a filmmaker whose best work was already considered behind him, The Lady from Shanghai proves how harshly Welles was treated by the studio system, and how critics fell in line to magnify all the minor flaws in his subsequent work. A radical film by today's standards for its underlying political meaning, The Lady from Shanghai stands out; it's not often that one finds such a subtle intrigue in the characters and their political leanings - whether it's in the cannibalistic pathology of the leisure class, the brutal pragmatism of the working class hero, or the vindicated criminality that permeates the story and implicates everyone involved.

Artistically speaking, it's been fascinating to find that when Welles directed himself he couldn't help but be a fading tyrant, or have access, even as a servant, to power, and the ways in which Welles used the camera to illustrate power relations, servility and authority. Whether behind the camera or in front of it, he chose to show the impotence of wealth as part of a trajectory of power and justice, like making Macbeth an axiomatic principle and a theory of filmmaking. The curse of reckless ambition applies to Welles' career itself, but in film he treats it less as an act of aggressive commission (even Citizen Kane doesn't seem as permanently manic as say Gordon Gecko) and more as an illness that creeps over its passive victim, a disposition likely influenced by his interest in European proto-existentialism and continental philosophy.

The problem of agency in these films is part of their sophistication, and The Lady from Shanghai is hardly an exception. Agency, secrecy and manipulation dictate the action, and Welles never flinches from combining the visual aspects to exacerbate the narrative chaos, choosing dizzying shots and disorienting angles to contort and distort appearance and perception, a visual relativism of sorts. Perhaps what's most interesting in terms of agency is an overall lack of culpability. Welles treats his characters as pawns in a confidence game, one disappearance holding the key to several fortunes and Welles knows that there can be no winners.

The span between Black Irish Mike O'Hara's casual understanding of this central gambit and his employer's professional mendacity gapes wide to swallow the streetsmart O'Hara whole. In a world of no innocents, Welles uses San Francisco in much the same way Polanski used L.A. almost thirty years later in Chinatown. What O'Hara counts as his advantage is the tricky matter of disappearing, something he has done repeatedly without attachments, out of his willingness to walk away from material comforts that he feels entrap their owners, the very things for which, in his mind, the leisure class barters away its freedom. Welles endows his characters with Hitchcockian prescience, balancing instinctual traits with cunning and subtlety.

Like many of Welles' films, the proximity to power corrupts and Schlesinger, Jr.'s aphorism regarding power rings true: in these retellings of Macbeth and Lear, great men are denuded by their ambition and negligence. How to disappear completely, for Welles, means a willingness to forego any permanency, to betray those commonsensical values about stability and comfort. However, he doesn't trumpet the individual as an entity unto himself, completely unencumbered; rather, The Lady from Shanghai maintains its intellectual and emotional complexity until its final moments, sublimating individual motivations and explicating the meanings of sacrifice, tragedy and absurdity, leaving all that is solid to melt into air.

This is Orson Welles

2005-07-16T18:26:00.000-04:00

Unsurprisingly, skimming this book is imparting perspective in generous doses. Expect some edited posts and further thought on some of the films recently discussed. Also look for a two part entry, How to Disappear Completely, dealing with identity and character in Mr. Arkadin and The Lady from Shanghai very shortly. Some marathon viewing of Citizen Welles, a two-disc collection of The Trial and The Stranger, as well as the propaganda shorts It's All True is upcoming.

The Magnificent Ambersons

2005-07-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

It's unfortunate that this film is available only on video, especially one that begins with Robert Osbourne apologizing for everything that's wrong about the print chosen for commercial release. Whether it was the fact that thirty-one minutes were edited and burned by the studio while Welles worked on projects in South America, or that it was, alas, a full-screen print, it's difficult to imagine The Magnificent Ambersons as Welles intended it.

Nevertheless, the story itself, based on Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, shocked me for its notable thefts, tearing pages from Dreiser, Howells, Twain, and Wharton, especially as it was published in 1918, leaving only Dreiser and Wharton to hash out differences with him. But it's Howells' book The Rise of Silas Lapham that seemed to have been scavenged most ruthlessly. Tarkington's story begins in 1873, tracing the Family Amberson from its peak fortune through their decline into madness and depravity. Howells' book does nearly the same, introducing readers to Silas Lapham from the discovery of mineral deposits on his family farm, through the rise of his paint manufacture, to his embarrassment at the loss of his Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts mansion. Unlike Tarkington, Howells' reputation (given to him by notable critic Mark Twain) as the smiling face of realism, stops short of Tarkington's naturalistic telling.

Regrettably, Welles didn't make a film about the Laphams and the Coreys, and old money versus new, choosing instead to adapt Tarkington's work - I wonder if he even knew about Howells as anything other than a literary critic - which gets across more or less the same notions about the fragility of aristocracy and the persistent hope of realizing some American dream. The antecedents are switched in Welles' film, in this case allowing Joseph Cotten's Eugene Morgan to emerge as an inventor- industrialist after his frivolous childhood, and the descendants of Major Amberson scattered to the wind, ruined by bad investments, following a theme pursued by Wharton in The House of Mirth.

The film itself is like these books as a study of American types: the alternately opulent and sedentary aristocracy set against an energetic, hopeful petit bourgeoisie, the working class represented by docile servants. Their attitudes and aspirations are reflected in the young heirs of both fortunes whose star-crossed paths mirror those of their lovelorn parents. Notions of borrower and lender take on erotic forms; Morgan cannot marry the widowed Minafer for proprietary reasons, providing evidence of America's enduring caste structure, despite remonstrations to the contrary in print and politics. Likewise, technological progress plays as foil against social injustices: that George Amberson Minafer can't control all the aspects of his life proves his downfall, opening but one space atop Edward Bellamy's metaphorical stagecoach, a seat Morgan happily claims.

Retribution equated with justice is a common element in literature of the period, but it wasn't always in the venial manner expressed in these books and Welles' film. From Bellamy's Looking Backward to John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, one can easily see all manner of justice exacted on the cunning and witless. Like Lapham seeking reassurance from his clerk, we find a would-be scion begging for work, dangerous work, from a former subordinate. For Minafer, the loss of dignity begets the fall of empire, proving, albeit in a convaluted way, Spencer's perverted understanding of Darwin's evolution, in which the wealthy and the poor alike may be brought low their perceived weaknesses.

For Welles, this film marked what many critics consider the beginning of the end. Chafing under a studio system that sought creative control for commercial ends, his absence resulted in the unauthorized editing of The Magnificent Ambersons. Forthwith, Welles bold visions are more conservative, and while films like The Lady from Shanghai are remarkable triumphs artistically, one senses that these films, nearly all of which are concerned with matters of identity and power, might have been more piercing indictments of American policy, economics, and justice.

Somebody Up There Likes Me

2005-07-10T06:12:00.000-04:00

This comes as magical news. Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing are on the Criterion Collection's September release schedule. Can Eureka and Insignificance be far behind? Even if they're already available a guy can dream, right?

Then again, September also brings Godard's Masculin féminin, which I feel is the crux of his politico-romantic films, or vice versa.

Developing. . .

It Should Happen to You

2005-07-09T21:35:00.000-04:00

Glover, Gladys Glover: Judy Holliday

Bogdanovich didn't disappoint. If anything he seems a little hemmed in by the format, keeping him from telling one story after another, each tidbit and personality quirk reminding him of another conversation he had with a classic filmmaker, who in this case was George Cukor. But it was a 1961 conversation with Jack Lemmon that proved most interesting. Lemmon believed that the studio ruined the box office for It Should Happen to You with its bland name. Originally titled A Name for Herself, Lemmon felt that had a unique ring - something to set it apart from the vague title it was ultimately awarded.

It's a shame that it didn't get wider recognition. A charming picture balanced with equal parts technical sophistication, intellectual heft (yes), and aw shucks screwball comedy, It Should Happen to You bears Cukor's upbeat style and his trademark escapism. If you're a dead-to-rights realist, you may as well forget this picture, but if you can appreciate the whimsical nature of certain Woody Allen films, namely The Purple Rose of Cairo combined with maybe Crimes and Misdemeanors, then this might be the picture for you.

There are some interesting elements that set it apart from other, more notable Cukor pictures and it's almost transparent why Bogdanovich selected it. It has a traditional, Horatio Alger in sensible shoes story arc but it has pleasant, sophisticated flourishes that keep adding depth to what seems like a facile story about a poor girl making good after being down on her luck.

Dealing with issues of individuality versus collectivity during the mid-fifties (the film was released in 1954) likely also raised some eyebrows, but as Gladys Glover strives for fame, her counterpart, the levelheaded Pete Sheppard, a documentary director who "discovers" Gladys wandering Central Park as she feeds the pigeons. As they walk together, Gladys notices an empty billboard and has a mind to rent it, publicizing herself like an urban Kilroy. Looking backward, Bogdanovich noted the Warholian and McLuhanesque implications of such a plot; as Gladys ascends and gains notoriety, she encounters unanticipated dangers, many of which would outlast, or more likely, ruin her fame.

Reading the film forward, the mention of Mark Twain during Gladys' first television appearance proves more interesting, particularly because Twain had such a keen imagination, spurred by his maturation during the great invention age of the late 19th C America. These sorts of insights into celebrity, combined with Lemmon as the humble filmmaker toiling in obscurity, focused on reality and truth (although he never says it aloud), make an interesting and underdeveloped subplot. As we see Gladys become an advertising agency icon, we catch snippets of Pete filming a film within a film, preparing a sort of debriefing for Gladys so she might reclaim her identity, and so that he might reveal his feelings for her.

A prismatic film about identity, celebrity and reality, It Should Happen to You prefigures insta-celebrity as delicately as possible, and is certainly more memorable than its title suggests.

Peter Bogdanovich & The Essentials

2005-07-09T18:34:00.000-04:00

Nobody's laughing: Bogdanovich & Stratten

Peter Bogdanovich seems like a natural choice to host The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). It's hard to believe, but it was only relatively recently (maybe three years time) that I "discovered" TCM, Robert Osbourne's mellifluous voice wafting from our television. Although their programming can be a times a bit repetitive, they exhume films that I manage to consistently miss. I didn't realize it at the time, but outside of New York City, repertory cinema is in much the same place it was before it was appreciated, which means that for me and others in Philadelphia, TCM is sometimes the only place to turn to see something rare. Imagine my dismay when I tuned in to see Rossellini's Europa 51 reaching it's climax - it might not be so bad if I didn't know these films weren't available for rent anywhere.

Fortunately, TCM tends to be a sharp bunch of film enthusiasts who do a fair job of programming (but why screen Kubrick's 2001 at 1 a.m.?), but Bogdanovich cast as film expert, while entirely appropriate, seems cruel at best. Having lionized classic American directors while his peers saw fit to devour them along with the studio system, fueled by speed, Italian Neorealism and French New Wave cinema, Bogdanovich finds himself a relic of that heyday and practically the only member of that club that didn't experience lifelong success financially or critically. Maybe the Schatzbergs and Mazurskys don't immediately come to mind, but those names vanish in the looming skyscrapers of Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas.

So it strikes me as odd and disappointing to see such a bland array of films (many admitted favorites among them) on Bogdanovich's list. My anxiety grows when I think that Wes Anderson has seen Bogdanovich's precious notecards which it seems he may never publish - a work that I think would rival Sarris' congenial outlook to America's past masters as well as the Hollywood hacks who popularized the artform. Nevertheless, I can't wait to see his introduction to It Should Happen to You tonight.

Orson Welles: Gimme Fiction

2005-07-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

Things have been quiet here for quite some time. This isn't because I gave up on blogging, or that it failed me in some technical way; I have found less time to write, or have found increasingly creative excuses for not writing, which is probably more apt. One of my more convincing rationalizations is a twofold excuse, fabricated by varieties of awe. The first is the ever pressing engagement with what might be seen as more pressing matters, mainly political, that constitute the lived experience of humanity, something of which art is part, but isn't the focal point for me. Secondly, tangentially, and undemocratically, it's the realization that when faced with Great Art in any media, why bother?

Therein lies the problem. Contained in Andrew Sarris' preface to his landmark survey of American movies from the late 20's to the late 60's, one gets the sense that it's incumbent upon the critic to not be intimidated by such Great Works, and probably not even consider them as such, which would go a long way toward preserving democratic participation in media criticism.

Clearly blogging has changed this somewhat, but there remains nonetheless a para-professional bent: the backscratching became evident well before major media tried to discredit blogging at all levels of professionalism. It's also my belief that Sarris' work launched a new thinking about American cinema and its influences in a way that deadened the high culture/low culture debate at its actual height, although nearly forty years later, it's still being argued, even though populist/popular forms of entertainment have more or less overwhelmed things like theater and classical music. That result was not what Sarris was arguing, although major media were poised to pursue those artistic forms that guaranteed the greatest return, even as he wrote - the Sixties demonstrated the ability of B cinema to grow audiences and the durability of pop music in all forms.

But this newly stratified media - from zines to the New York Times - have opened opportunities in criticism that are astounding. Anyone can participate in a debate, provided they have readers or the wherewithal to comment persistently enough (without being blocked) to establish themselves as a voice (or in Sarris' vernacular, become a "tree") in the ghoulish media forest. In the past six months, the forest proved serene and not worth stirring: as I immerse myself in new films and music and am introduced to new artists of all kinds, past and present, I've found myself struggling to regain footing. For me it's been a case of Odysseus meeting Heisenberg, and the veritable wanderer cannot simply reflect on position or movement, the place and time being secondary to the discovery itself. With that in mind it's my intention that this blog becomes something other than a site for superlative pronouncements (unless otherwise warranted) and instead a film diary where entries are made as notes and observations based on films viewed, a far less daunting task than director and talent retrospectives for which I am generally unqualified.

One such discovery (that's not much of a discovery at all, since he's more or less the grandfather of American independent cinema) has been Orson Welles. With the recent release of the counterfeit masterpiece F for Fake, Welles caught my eye and immediately captured my imagination; the notions of authenticity and "the expert" being at stake, as well as customary ideas about value/worth/price that are often inseparable from discussions of art, art being a commodity first and a spectacle second. Gaddis' The Recognitions (not to mention William Gass' humorous introduction) immediately came to mind as I watched in mock horror as several illusions unfolded before me: the first being the biographical account of Elmyr de Hory (his Court TV entry is here; Wikipedia entry here) and Clifford Irving, de Hory's biographer, imagining an "official" autobiography of Howard Hughes. Like the magician he portrays, Welles narrates, positions and repositions the various subjects before the viewer, manipulating the story and its effect in plain sight.

But this, I would learn upon further inquiry, was Welles' trump card. After all, he announces, wasn't he the man who terrified listeners with a fable about the end of the world brought upon us by aliens, inspiring a panic despite several reassurances that it was indeed fiction? From the outset Welles took on only the largest personalities when he deigned to act as well as write and direct, and in so doing fashioned a penumbra personality that eclipsed even his own status - indeed, his performance as a sociopathic Texas baron in Man in the Shadow suggests the comparison itself, as does his performance in The Third Man where his character literally hides in the shadows even as he commands all of the film's action and Joseph Cotten's motivation!

Welles' shadowy career has come under repeated scrutiny. Verily, Sarris' names him as both a studio victim and one of his own ambitions, the very creativity that put him at odds with his financiers. Forced to work to produce his own material, Welles captained a lifeboat against the icy obstacles and floes that kept him from creating willy nilly, stifling his potent imagination and inhibiting the impulse to put down a project to move on to something newer and more interesting. F for Fake contains a documentary that catalogues his unfinished projects, some of which seemed very promising, including his last attempt at a full-length film, The Other Side of the Wind, which would've starred Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston. That he never finished it, and couldn't finish Don Quixote struck me with so much sadness while watching, even moreso than Lost in La Mancha.

If you're interested in further reading, I stumbled upon Wellesnet.com moments ago. It's a nice if modest resource. I'll have more later, including comments on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Mr. Arkadin.

Heartless in the Balcony

2005-03-06T13:28:00.000-05:00

If the Golden Globes are the wake to the Oscars' funeral, then we're still in mourning. Nothing blander or more predictable exists in all awards shows, and if box office returns are any indication, movies have returned to a stratus of elite detachment. Please see our notes over at our surrogate. We apologize for the labyrinthine approach to publication - but it's the draconian editorial penchant that's bettered us for the moment.

Intermission

2005-02-22T12:31:00.001-05:00

We know it's been too long at the concession, but the popcorn line is so long!

Meanwhile, check out the latest entry at The Projector. We'll be back with pieces on Night of the Iguana and William Holden before long.

Being There

2005-01-29T02:44:00.000-05:00

As part of a general frustration with the hagiography that takes place when it comes to film criticism, it seemed necessary to apply the defibrillator to countless critics' chests in an effort to revive what has sadly become a simple adjunct to so much promotional material. The purpose of Being There is to bring attention to artists and their oevre to the extent that it is possible to illumine vast bodies of work cogently while describing the creative personality behind the films or characters presented.

In upcoming volumes one can expect substantive discussion of Hal Ashby and his 1970's films (ending with the namesake of this column), as well as insights into The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, the man himself, and his filmic contortions throughout his career. The effort to elucidate the best elements of repertory cinema is a daunting one, and something better done in concert with others, and as the developing links will demonstrate, there are a number of amateur critics far more capable of the task than those regularly published in print media who are unfettered from commercial ends, the same commercial ends that have brought the notion of an enduring American cinema to a near standstill.

So it is the auteur spirit that imbues the enveloping dark of the matinée with the aim of revitalizing discourse about film history by invoking the initial ambitions of the best filmmakers in their prime, particularly those who were themselves amateur students of film, before such a thing as film school existed, before one could be trained to understand what was and wasn't permitted, prior to the induction of hobbling conventions, and the major studio insistence that it simply couldn't be done. It is hoped that this space will be a proving ground and a notebook for developing ideas that will regularly appear over at The Projector, and that the inputs at-large will shape them and the column as it becomes a regular feature there.

Overture

2005-01-22T09:24:00.000-05:00

Der Bruno welcomes you into The Dark of the Matinée. Here, it is hoped, he'll guide you safely through the cinematic Scyllas that await all of us between cultural shores. This will be a film blog from the outset, partnered with The Projector at Stylus, and entering into the amateur film circle populated by Filmbrain and the like. It is hoped that Bruno S. will solicit guest bloggers from time to time to tackle the films that perplex and fascinate audiences, and the issues that face creative thinking presently in Hollywood. Bruno steadfastly supports independent filmmaking, but not to a fault: while some film students pursue no goal in particular, many find themselves unhappily situated in proximity to film, without means to create, and their energies drain out in service to work instead of their art. This blog will become a critical clearinghouse for those artists as well as it progresses.

Check back for interesting stories and insights and enjoy the show!