Martin Scorsese's new film Shutter Island has been pushed back from October 2nd, the heart of Oscar season and frequently my favorite month at the movies, to February 19th of next year, a dumping ground for low-rent horror flicks, Norbit-style comedies, and the occasional fun action flick.
Good.
Look, like all guys who got into film in their mid-to-late teens, I love Martin Scorsese. But after The Departed (a fun, pulpy crime flick), the promises of Shutter Island (a fun, pulpy, horror-shock flick), and the announced Frank Sinatra biopic (aside from watching Scorsese's direction, that film couldn't interest me less), I've found the Martin Scorsese of late to be exactly as interesting as the Steven Spielberg of late (Indiana Jones 4, Tintin, the announced Harvey remake). Granted, Spielberg made on of the best films of his career in 2005 with Munich, and Scorsese made one of the best films of his career in 2004 with The Aviator, but unlike Spielberg's, Scorsese's last great film didn't feel nearly as vital as the best of his work.
Vitality is, by its very definition (full of life, full of spirit), often the province of younger filmmakers, and while my knee-jerk reaction is to point to Francis Ford Coppola's last two films, which, as uneven as they may be, are clearly the work of a man who needs to make these films. There's something deep within Coppola screaming to get out. Now, granted, not everyone has this in them, especially after forty years and twenty-one narrative films. Fewer still are given the financing to unleash this. But I find it difficult to believe that Scorsese, one of the most thoughtful, creative, and inspired filmmakers in American history, really has this little left to express.
Especially since his real next film is, by all accounts, Silence, an adaptation of a novel by Shusaku Endo, about the persecution two Jesuit priests face trying to bring the gospel to 17th-century Japan. Also, he's been working on this for over a decade.
This could be the project that reinvigorates Scorsese, or at least our view of him, as Shutter Island's Oscar prospects go from "distant" to "almost impossible" and the film can play as it was meant to (and as The Departed should have) - a one-off, a clever genre film from a man capable of much more.
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Saturday, August 22, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Still?
So I'm working on expanding a piece I wrote about Howard Hawks' Red River, and it'd been awhile since I worked on the piece or saw the film, so I popped on over to Netflix to stream it. Naturally, the system worked fine, but for some reason it was...wait for it...colorized. Why? To what end? I've actually rented the film FROM Netflix, and since they get things basically right, it was in black and white, but for some reason, that didn't carry over to the online version.
More and more, though, I question the extent to which my Netflix subscription is worth it. It's impossible to tell what version of a film they'll send you, since the cover art presented doesn't always correspond to the disc you receive, and even if it does, that might not be the best transfer to home video the film has received. Being the cinephile that I am, how I see a movie is massively important to me. I don't just want to get a general idea - I want it to be the closest possible to seeing it on a quality print in a movie theater.
And so, obviously, Red River is WAY off base. Looking forward to getting back to Portland, home of Movie Madness, the finest video store in this great land.
More and more, though, I question the extent to which my Netflix subscription is worth it. It's impossible to tell what version of a film they'll send you, since the cover art presented doesn't always correspond to the disc you receive, and even if it does, that might not be the best transfer to home video the film has received. Being the cinephile that I am, how I see a movie is massively important to me. I don't just want to get a general idea - I want it to be the closest possible to seeing it on a quality print in a movie theater.
And so, obviously, Red River is WAY off base. Looking forward to getting back to Portland, home of Movie Madness, the finest video store in this great land.
Friday, August 14, 2009
REVIEW: District 9
I have some good news and some bad news – District 9 is at once a whole lot smarter and a whole lot dumber than just about everyone would have you believe.
Let’s start with the smart, since co-writer/director/creator Neill Blomkamp does. Yes, the film heavily invokes the apartheid that formally separated blacks from whites in South Africa for almost fifty years. But that’s not a particularly “smart” idea. It’s a clever idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of thought to come up with that (especially since it’s been done before). It is, however, an interesting way of expressing a lot of the thoughts and feelings Blomkamp must have from growing up under Apartheid, and (this is where the smart comes in) he goes all the way with his idea. Mild spoilers do follow, but I can’t think of a science fiction world this fully realized since Alfonso Cuaron’s shoulda-been-revolutionary Children of Men.
It’s easy to come up with the idea for aliens landing on Earth and humans shoving them into a ghetto. It’s another thing to make the first twenty-thirty minutes basically a documentary about that area. It’s on a whole other planet to come up with interspecies prostitution as a major problem within District 9, the slum the aliens are relegated to. It’s that level of detail that brings this world alive, makes it tick. And the first half an hour is brilliant. We’re introduced to Wikus van der Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley, in a tremendous performance), who, without explaining too much, is basically a government employee tasked with evicting the aliens from District 9 to a new, more restrictive camp.
Wikus, at least at the start, is the kind of character we could use more of in mainstream entertainment. Unlikable on nearly every level except for the fact that he’d probably be nice to you if he were your neighbor, Wikus is the sort of friendly bigot who believes he treats the aliens with basic respect, all the while exhilarated when he gets the chance to order the abortion of hundreds of alien fetuses. With a flamethrower. He’s the guy from the IRS who smiles when he comes to audit you. He might say he’s just doing his job, but you know otherwise.
And, you know, if it weren’t for the fact that, through the mix of documentary aesthetics and cinema vérité, the film so fervently announces itself as some new, exciting, different, fresh, and relevant, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as disappointed with the turn in takes around the beginning of act two.
As I felt the film slowly shift from its docudrama to the same outline as Michael Bay’s The Island, I felt a profound disappointment. Suddenly, Wikus, a desk-jockey bureaucrat, becomes an action hero. Suddenly, the chase is on. Suddenly, there’s a villain, for god’s sake, and not a terribly good one – just a soldier leading an elite death squad (and not a terribly good death squad). You know, just like in The Island. And while execution always trumps conception, for a film that touted itself as not just different and fresh, but actively intelligent, the shift from political thriller to routine action movie is a really, really dumb move.
Now, don’t get me wrong…Neill Blomkamp isn’t just a clever man, but a damn good director. In a year that has given us everything from the purposefully abstract (Public Enemies) and the accidentally incoherent (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) in our action movies, a first-time director using a handheld aesthetic crafted a totally readable film full of genuinely thrilling action set pieces. That they’re trapped in a misfire of a screenplay is unfortunate, but I have high hopes for Blomkamp’s future. Just as long as he doesn’t buy into the hype that now surrounds him.
Let’s start with the smart, since co-writer/director/creator Neill Blomkamp does. Yes, the film heavily invokes the apartheid that formally separated blacks from whites in South Africa for almost fifty years. But that’s not a particularly “smart” idea. It’s a clever idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of thought to come up with that (especially since it’s been done before). It is, however, an interesting way of expressing a lot of the thoughts and feelings Blomkamp must have from growing up under Apartheid, and (this is where the smart comes in) he goes all the way with his idea. Mild spoilers do follow, but I can’t think of a science fiction world this fully realized since Alfonso Cuaron’s shoulda-been-revolutionary Children of Men.
It’s easy to come up with the idea for aliens landing on Earth and humans shoving them into a ghetto. It’s another thing to make the first twenty-thirty minutes basically a documentary about that area. It’s on a whole other planet to come up with interspecies prostitution as a major problem within District 9, the slum the aliens are relegated to. It’s that level of detail that brings this world alive, makes it tick. And the first half an hour is brilliant. We’re introduced to Wikus van der Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley, in a tremendous performance), who, without explaining too much, is basically a government employee tasked with evicting the aliens from District 9 to a new, more restrictive camp.
Wikus, at least at the start, is the kind of character we could use more of in mainstream entertainment. Unlikable on nearly every level except for the fact that he’d probably be nice to you if he were your neighbor, Wikus is the sort of friendly bigot who believes he treats the aliens with basic respect, all the while exhilarated when he gets the chance to order the abortion of hundreds of alien fetuses. With a flamethrower. He’s the guy from the IRS who smiles when he comes to audit you. He might say he’s just doing his job, but you know otherwise.
And, you know, if it weren’t for the fact that, through the mix of documentary aesthetics and cinema vérité, the film so fervently announces itself as some new, exciting, different, fresh, and relevant, I probably wouldn’t have been nearly as disappointed with the turn in takes around the beginning of act two.
As I felt the film slowly shift from its docudrama to the same outline as Michael Bay’s The Island, I felt a profound disappointment. Suddenly, Wikus, a desk-jockey bureaucrat, becomes an action hero. Suddenly, the chase is on. Suddenly, there’s a villain, for god’s sake, and not a terribly good one – just a soldier leading an elite death squad (and not a terribly good death squad). You know, just like in The Island. And while execution always trumps conception, for a film that touted itself as not just different and fresh, but actively intelligent, the shift from political thriller to routine action movie is a really, really dumb move.
Now, don’t get me wrong…Neill Blomkamp isn’t just a clever man, but a damn good director. In a year that has given us everything from the purposefully abstract (Public Enemies) and the accidentally incoherent (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) in our action movies, a first-time director using a handheld aesthetic crafted a totally readable film full of genuinely thrilling action set pieces. That they’re trapped in a misfire of a screenplay is unfortunate, but I have high hopes for Blomkamp’s future. Just as long as he doesn’t buy into the hype that now surrounds him.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Infants and Their Formula
As is my habit on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, I rushed over to the NYTimes.com movies section to see what their feature articles would be this week (a habit born from the days when my parents’ subscription to the Sunday New York Times coincided nicely with my burgeoning interest in film), and was thrilled to find the kind of well-written elitism I just absorb upon contact in the A.O. Scott feature, “Open Wide: Spoon-Fed at the Cineplex.” A selection:
It’s a great observation that people who choose to seriously consider their entertainment (or increasingly, culture itself) have been aware of for some time. It’s the next logical step from “the dumbing-down of America” (to paraphrase Roget Ebert, an unavoidable cliché), that many Americans, and, increasingly, the worldwide market as well (it’s important to export the dumb), have been and are continuing to be mentally reduced.
But this is an incomplete assessment. We’ve all known dumb people throughout our lives, but think for a second and consider the dumb. Sure, they may never advance terribly far in life, but being dumb does not automatically remove the excitement of gained knowledge. It just might take a few tries to get that knowledge working.
No, the infant idea is more compelling – young children may possess a certain curiosity for the world, but they’ll always be happiest when they feel comfortable and safe. So it is with the modern moviegoer. They may thrill at some deviation from formula (The Dark Knight) or artistic flourish (Wall-E), but those must be couched in the familiar, and instead of taking that thrill of the uncertain to its next logical step (i.e. seeking out films with more than a flourish of artistry), they immediately retreat into the familiar and the expected (Star Trek, Wolverine, Transformers 2, The Hangover, Monsters vs. Aliens).
My only gripe with Scott’s piece is that he doesn’t go all the way with his idea – maybe he’s unaware of this, but does he know that fully-grown adults aren’t only passively being reduced in mental capacity and curiosity, but actually actively yearning to reenter childhood?
In a comment on Roger Ebert’s Journal, a haven of required reading, “Khalid S.” said the following (in fairness to him, I included his disclaimer):
“Just to let you know I'm 30 years old, and very successful in my field of finance, to counter being labeled 'dumb'. But if I get a chance to relive my childhood by watching a live action movie about my childhood toys, comics, and cartoons, please don't call me 'dumb' and allow me this indulgence as a way of tuning out the problems of the real world for a while. Also, it would be interesting to see an audience profiling based on age and their opinion about Transformers 2.”
It should be noted that he lists among his favorite movies Braveheart, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Dark Knight, the Spider-Man trilogy, and Iron Man. Not that there’s anything wrong with those films. Quite the contrary. But when you’re watching entertainment as finely wrought as Iron Man or Spider-Man 2, why settle for Transformers 2? Do they not offer the necessary escape from “the real world”? I understand that not everyone can find escape in Bergman, but if you’re only willing to watch what’s being marketed to you, can’t you still have SOME sort of filter? Just because the TV told you to watch it doesn’t mean you should.
All of this relates back, of course. I’m a young man of 23, but I’m sure (and, in fact, pop culture—A Christmas Story, for example—has taught me that this is true) that even someone of Ebert’s many years (or, say, someone of 30) can remember back to being a child and demanding something from their parents because the television, radio, or magazines told us we MUST have them. It’s just that many (increasingly fewer, I suppose) of us grow out of this and begin to want things because we feel they will enrich our lives.
And what’s even more troubling is that so many people seem to love this so much. It’s one thing for a film to make you feel like a kid again. Speed Racer and The Incredibles do this for me – one’s based on a cartoon I could never stand; the other is *gasp* a wholly original idea. It’s another to go see a film, and further, to actually enjoy it, apparently solely because it shares the brand name of something you played with when you were eight. I hear this CONSTANTLY, too, as justification for, as an adult, rewatching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers cartoon series (two things I devoured rapturously in my youth, for what it's worth), or listening to some shitty band, or yes, for seeing the live-action/animated (how quickly the lines blurred between the two) remake of any of the above, because “well, it was kind of a big deal when I was a kid, so, you know.”
Imagine if they did a sequel to A Christmas Story (crap, now the idea’s out there) and picked up with Peter Billingsley taking a few hours out of his day to fire his Red Ryder BB gun at a target in the backyard. You know, just to relive his childhood. To “tune out the problems of the real world.” That wouldn’t be considered sweet, a desirable activity, or even understandable. It would be considered pathetic.
Scott can be reached at ScottN_86@yahoo.com, but really, posting in the comments is the way to go. Make your voice heard.
“From Wolverine and Mr. Spock in May through the Decepticons and wizards of July it has been a triumph of the tried and true, occasionally revitalized or decked out with novelty, but mostly just what we expected. No surprises.
What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one!...Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.”
What kind of person constantly demands something new and yet always wants the same thing? A child of course. From toddlerhood we are fluent in the pop-cultural consumerist idiom: Again! More! Another one!...Children are ceaselessly demanding, it’s true; but they are also easily satisfied, and this combination of appetite and docility makes the child an ideal moviegoer. But since there are a finite number of literal children out there, with limited disposable income and short attention spans, Hollywood has to make or find new ones. And so the studios have, with increasing vigor and intensity, carried out a program of mass infantilization.”
It’s a great observation that people who choose to seriously consider their entertainment (or increasingly, culture itself) have been aware of for some time. It’s the next logical step from “the dumbing-down of America” (to paraphrase Roget Ebert, an unavoidable cliché), that many Americans, and, increasingly, the worldwide market as well (it’s important to export the dumb), have been and are continuing to be mentally reduced.
But this is an incomplete assessment. We’ve all known dumb people throughout our lives, but think for a second and consider the dumb. Sure, they may never advance terribly far in life, but being dumb does not automatically remove the excitement of gained knowledge. It just might take a few tries to get that knowledge working.
No, the infant idea is more compelling – young children may possess a certain curiosity for the world, but they’ll always be happiest when they feel comfortable and safe. So it is with the modern moviegoer. They may thrill at some deviation from formula (The Dark Knight) or artistic flourish (Wall-E), but those must be couched in the familiar, and instead of taking that thrill of the uncertain to its next logical step (i.e. seeking out films with more than a flourish of artistry), they immediately retreat into the familiar and the expected (Star Trek, Wolverine, Transformers 2, The Hangover, Monsters vs. Aliens).
My only gripe with Scott’s piece is that he doesn’t go all the way with his idea – maybe he’s unaware of this, but does he know that fully-grown adults aren’t only passively being reduced in mental capacity and curiosity, but actually actively yearning to reenter childhood?
In a comment on Roger Ebert’s Journal, a haven of required reading, “Khalid S.” said the following (in fairness to him, I included his disclaimer):
“Just to let you know I'm 30 years old, and very successful in my field of finance, to counter being labeled 'dumb'. But if I get a chance to relive my childhood by watching a live action movie about my childhood toys, comics, and cartoons, please don't call me 'dumb' and allow me this indulgence as a way of tuning out the problems of the real world for a while. Also, it would be interesting to see an audience profiling based on age and their opinion about Transformers 2.”
It should be noted that he lists among his favorite movies Braveheart, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Dark Knight, the Spider-Man trilogy, and Iron Man. Not that there’s anything wrong with those films. Quite the contrary. But when you’re watching entertainment as finely wrought as Iron Man or Spider-Man 2, why settle for Transformers 2? Do they not offer the necessary escape from “the real world”? I understand that not everyone can find escape in Bergman, but if you’re only willing to watch what’s being marketed to you, can’t you still have SOME sort of filter? Just because the TV told you to watch it doesn’t mean you should.
All of this relates back, of course. I’m a young man of 23, but I’m sure (and, in fact, pop culture—A Christmas Story, for example—has taught me that this is true) that even someone of Ebert’s many years (or, say, someone of 30) can remember back to being a child and demanding something from their parents because the television, radio, or magazines told us we MUST have them. It’s just that many (increasingly fewer, I suppose) of us grow out of this and begin to want things because we feel they will enrich our lives.
And what’s even more troubling is that so many people seem to love this so much. It’s one thing for a film to make you feel like a kid again. Speed Racer and The Incredibles do this for me – one’s based on a cartoon I could never stand; the other is *gasp* a wholly original idea. It’s another to go see a film, and further, to actually enjoy it, apparently solely because it shares the brand name of something you played with when you were eight. I hear this CONSTANTLY, too, as justification for, as an adult, rewatching the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers cartoon series (two things I devoured rapturously in my youth, for what it's worth), or listening to some shitty band, or yes, for seeing the live-action/animated (how quickly the lines blurred between the two) remake of any of the above, because “well, it was kind of a big deal when I was a kid, so, you know.”
Imagine if they did a sequel to A Christmas Story (crap, now the idea’s out there) and picked up with Peter Billingsley taking a few hours out of his day to fire his Red Ryder BB gun at a target in the backyard. You know, just to relive his childhood. To “tune out the problems of the real world.” That wouldn’t be considered sweet, a desirable activity, or even understandable. It would be considered pathetic.
Scott can be reached at ScottN_86@yahoo.com, but really, posting in the comments is the way to go. Make your voice heard.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
MY LIFE IN ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN: Elizabethtown
Elizabethtown came out in October of 2005, and I was the only person at my school who cared that it existed, and the only person (at the time) who fell for it. The past few years have been about coming to grips with this fact, and the fact that aside from Almost Famous, it’s actually my favorite Cameron Crowe film. Not that it’s as objectively “good” as, say, Say Anything or Jerry Maguire, or even Vanilla Sky, but I love it so much more than any of those, in spite of and sometimes for its faults
Re-reading my original review was sort of embarrassing, but this is a movie that’s sort of embarrassing to be a part of. And that's okay. People in this movie make bold, blatant declarations of love (in many forms), and whereas this year’s terrific Two Lovers was all too aware of how embarrassing those decisions are in retrospect (or even at the time), Elizabethtown is all about how good it can feel in the moment. It’s everything Cameron Crowe was working towards aesthetically in Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous – the purity of experiencing a truly transcendent moment.
In a recent liveblog between Kevin Lee and Vadim Rizov about this film, Rizov claimed Drew (Orlando Bloom) actually has no arc in the film, and while that’s sort of true, it’d be a stretch to say he doesn’t change at all. After all, Claire’s (Kirsten Dunst) entire goal in the story is to change Drew; it’s got to amount to something.
Claire’s mission is the very embodiment of a quote I’ve been coming back to a lot recently. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” Drew’s life before Elizabethtown (the place and the film) was spent looking toward another land, until he found the eternity in each moment after two massive blows to the person he had constructed himself to be.
Now, granted, Elizabethtown is overflowing with these moments (some which may last hours, or even days), and it does seem like Crowe was trying to push the boundaries of just how happy one film could be. Crowe, the film, Claire, and eventually Drew are and become exactly who Patricia Graynamore was talking about when she told Joe that very few people in this world were truly awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement (Joe Versus the Volcano). And when I think about Elizabethtown I tend to care less about its occasionally overwrought dialogue and often stale performances, and come back to scenes like Drew and Claire’s all-night phone conversation, so evocative of the at once ethereal and fleeting nature of those encounters, or the tactile sensation of releasing ashes out a car window.
And say what you will about the rest, but while I find a lot to love about the film but very little to admire, it’s impossible not to applaud Crowe’s willingness to let the film be totally what it wants to be. It never winks at you or thinks less of its emotional core, as Garden State, the film so often referred to in conjunction with it, did. In describing the joy he takes in watching Monte Hellmen’s Two-Lane Blacktop, Richard Linklater said, “above all else…Two-Lane Blacktop goes all the way with its idea. And that’s a rare thing in this world: a completely honest movie.” Whatever feels cliché, schmaltzy, or cheesy about Elizabethtown, I believe Cameron Crowe believes fully in everything he lays out. And in a medium overcrowded with the ironic, the unoriginal, the audience-tested, the focus-grouped, and above all the so totally uninspired, I live for a completely honest movie like Elizabethtown.
SOME NOTES ON THE DVD
Elizabethtown is availalbe on DVD with a serviceable, occasionally lovely transfer that nevertheless shows quite a few compression artifacts (some outdoor shots of Kirsten Dunst are especially wrenching) and an audio mix that can stand being cranked all the way up, as the film should be (let that music fill the room, man). The extras are a total disappointment, with absolutely nothing of any informative or educational value, suffering all the more for the absence of the always-great Cameron Crowe commentary track. Somewhere along the way, Crowe was convinced the film was a total misfire. Whether or not he believes that now, that’s his business, I don’t have to have his approval to love the film (as they say in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, what does he know, he’s only the writer); I just would have loved to hear more from him when he totally believed in it.
Re-reading my original review was sort of embarrassing, but this is a movie that’s sort of embarrassing to be a part of. And that's okay. People in this movie make bold, blatant declarations of love (in many forms), and whereas this year’s terrific Two Lovers was all too aware of how embarrassing those decisions are in retrospect (or even at the time), Elizabethtown is all about how good it can feel in the moment. It’s everything Cameron Crowe was working towards aesthetically in Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous – the purity of experiencing a truly transcendent moment.
In a recent liveblog between Kevin Lee and Vadim Rizov about this film, Rizov claimed Drew (Orlando Bloom) actually has no arc in the film, and while that’s sort of true, it’d be a stretch to say he doesn’t change at all. After all, Claire’s (Kirsten Dunst) entire goal in the story is to change Drew; it’s got to amount to something.
Claire’s mission is the very embodiment of a quote I’ve been coming back to a lot recently. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.” Drew’s life before Elizabethtown (the place and the film) was spent looking toward another land, until he found the eternity in each moment after two massive blows to the person he had constructed himself to be.
Now, granted, Elizabethtown is overflowing with these moments (some which may last hours, or even days), and it does seem like Crowe was trying to push the boundaries of just how happy one film could be. Crowe, the film, Claire, and eventually Drew are and become exactly who Patricia Graynamore was talking about when she told Joe that very few people in this world were truly awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement (Joe Versus the Volcano). And when I think about Elizabethtown I tend to care less about its occasionally overwrought dialogue and often stale performances, and come back to scenes like Drew and Claire’s all-night phone conversation, so evocative of the at once ethereal and fleeting nature of those encounters, or the tactile sensation of releasing ashes out a car window.
And say what you will about the rest, but while I find a lot to love about the film but very little to admire, it’s impossible not to applaud Crowe’s willingness to let the film be totally what it wants to be. It never winks at you or thinks less of its emotional core, as Garden State, the film so often referred to in conjunction with it, did. In describing the joy he takes in watching Monte Hellmen’s Two-Lane Blacktop, Richard Linklater said, “above all else…Two-Lane Blacktop goes all the way with its idea. And that’s a rare thing in this world: a completely honest movie.” Whatever feels cliché, schmaltzy, or cheesy about Elizabethtown, I believe Cameron Crowe believes fully in everything he lays out. And in a medium overcrowded with the ironic, the unoriginal, the audience-tested, the focus-grouped, and above all the so totally uninspired, I live for a completely honest movie like Elizabethtown.
SOME NOTES ON THE DVD
Elizabethtown is availalbe on DVD with a serviceable, occasionally lovely transfer that nevertheless shows quite a few compression artifacts (some outdoor shots of Kirsten Dunst are especially wrenching) and an audio mix that can stand being cranked all the way up, as the film should be (let that music fill the room, man). The extras are a total disappointment, with absolutely nothing of any informative or educational value, suffering all the more for the absence of the always-great Cameron Crowe commentary track. Somewhere along the way, Crowe was convinced the film was a total misfire. Whether or not he believes that now, that’s his business, I don’t have to have his approval to love the film (as they say in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, what does he know, he’s only the writer); I just would have loved to hear more from him when he totally believed in it.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Top 10 of 2009 (so far)
This is a pre-Harry Potter universe (I will see it, just haven't yet).
Summer Hours (in select theaters now)
Silent Light (DVD Sept 8)
The Hurt Locker (in theaters now)
Adventureland (DVD Aug 25)
Goodbye Solo (DVD Aug 25)
Moon (in select theaters now)
The Girlfriend Experience (DVD Sept 29)
The Hangover (in theaters now)
Away We Go (in select theaters now)
The Man From London (in select theaters and available OnDemand now)
Summer Hours (in select theaters now)
Silent Light (DVD Sept 8)
The Hurt Locker (in theaters now)
Adventureland (DVD Aug 25)
Goodbye Solo (DVD Aug 25)
Moon (in select theaters now)
The Girlfriend Experience (DVD Sept 29)
The Hangover (in theaters now)
Away We Go (in select theaters now)
The Man From London (in select theaters and available OnDemand now)
Monday, July 13, 2009
Criticize THIS
The staggering opening shot of Carlos Reygadas' masterpiece, Silent Light, available on DVD September 8th.I'll admit something - it doesn’t really bother me that the average viewer doesn’t consult the critics. It bothers a lot of film critics, but, as someone who's trying to develop into that role, it honestly doesn't bother me. It bothers me somewhat that almost no one I went to film school with considered movies that weren’t being advertised at them, and never went to a non-genre foreign film, but that’s only because they’re supposed to be interested in film itself. Too often people claim to love movies, but in reality stay very close to their comfort zone, and rarely actively seek the movies that are really worth watching. Which is why they end up complaining that “they don’t make them like they used to.” There are huge strides being made in film making, but how many people actually saw Silent Light or Youth Without Youth?
(A subject for future consideration - how many people had the opportunity? I had exactly one available night to catch a two-week run of Silent Light in Portland, OR. It never even came to Boston, a city otherwise rife with opportunity for the cinephile.)
What does bother me is the fact that, once someone has seen a movie like, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (or, as Jim Emerson has taken to calling it, Transformers: ROTFL) or Bruno, and has reached an opinion on it, that opinion will shield them against any sort of discussion you’d like to engage in about it. If we are to refrain from discussing religion and politics, as manners have taught us, shouldn’t we at least be allowed the cinema?
As is quite often the case, Jim Emerson gets to the bottom of it: “Critical thinking is not a value prized by our culture.”
Over the last week, I saw five films in new release: Two Lovers, Three Monkeys, The Hurt Locker, Bruno, and The Man From London (don't worry, I hit the multiplex quite a bit, too, it's just been an art house kind of week). Of those, the only one I would strongly recommend against somebody watching is Bruno, which, incidentally, just hit #1 at the box office last weekend (I felt okay knowing I paid for The Hurt Locker and snuck into Bruno). By the next night, I was in an apartment full of people who had seen Bruno, and I tried to point out the many ways in which it totally failed as a film (a totally uninteresting central character, a plot connected by only the thinnest of threads, a general feeling that most of what we were seeing was a lie). I was met with the typical response when it comes to criticizing a comedy: “Well, I laughed.” That may be the case, but it saddens me more than a little bit that the be-all and end-all of considering comedies is whether or not it makes us laugh. While that should certainly be a factor, it can’t be everything, but because audiences allow it to be, Bruno succeeds.
This is ultimately why I feel that film and television should be taught in middle school and college. English and Lit classes try to teach people critical thought, but by and large people do not have the capacity to consider literature seriously, because it’s been decades since literature was something the average person, much less children, engaged in for entertainment. We are raised on movies and television, and if we were required to ask ourselves why something entertained, engaged, or – God forbid – honestly moved us, things like Transformers: ROTFL or Bruno wouldn’t happen. We would come up empty.
Ebert insists (in a piece well worth reading) films like these happen, and people enjoy them, because they’re not sufficiently evolved; he believes people haven’t been exposed to many truly great films, and thus settle for the spectacle in front of them. This would be similar to how, in the early days of the cinema, a theater could put just about anything onscreen and people would go in droves for the sheer amazement of simply seeing a picture move (actually, now that I say that, I wonder if we as a people have actually devolved?).
I hope he’s right. In large part, I’ve seen that in myself over the years. As I’ve seen more and more films of varying intent and quality, it takes more creatively and less spectacularly to thrill me. But on the other hand, last year saw tremendous box office success with such films as WALL-E, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man. Obviously, the box office only indicates how well the marketing team did their job, but it does show people saw these films, so they must know movies can be at least that good. And if that doesn’t teach them, what more will it take?
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