A Diversion (But What a Diversion!)

I've been rewatching The Red Shoes over the last couple of days (not like on repeat, mind you, just here and there as time allows), having seen it only the once (and now owning the magnificent Criterion Blu-Ray). I've already gone on record about how magnificent it is, and it is one of the highest regarded films, like, of all time, so there's really no call for this other than pure celebration of those rare movies that are absolutely perfect. There is, quite literally, nothing wrong with this film. Everything I ache for at the movies - purity of expression, honesty of emotion, and no concessions - is present here. God, this is magnificent.

The Limits The American's Control

I've written in the past (about another George Clooney film, in fact) how delicate a balance is required in order to maintain mood and tone in the cinema. All the good one sets out to accomplish can be so easily undone with the slightest nudge.

The American is a film all about mood and tone, and for it to be successful, it needs to take an extraordinarily measured approach in shot composition and editing. As Martin Scorsese said, "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out," and the director of a film such as The American must have absolute command over this principle. Keeping in mind such antecedents as Antonioni's The Passenger, Melville's Le Samourai, and Jarmusch's The Limits of Control would be advised, though not strictly necessary. Any Antonioni or Jarmusch will do.

And when I say The American falls short of those films' achievements, I mean that neither as a backhanded compliment nor as a negative reaction. After all, I don't even really like The Limits of Control all that much. But it without a doubt sets a specific tone and maintains it absolutely for its running time. With The American, director Anton Corbijn establishes a certain mood but hasn't the full courage of his convictions. His tempo is measured and calm for much of the film, fitting his protagonist's manner, and Clooney is well up to the task of turning his natural instincts way down. The Clooney charm can't help but peak through from time to time, but this is otherwise a side of Clooney we've not yet seen. It's not just his calm (we've seen that in Solaris) - it's his control. Like Clooney, Corbijn can't quite maintain absolute control. Too often he buckles, allowing the music to flourish when quiet would be best, or removing us from our protagonist's point of view, to which we have otherwise been tethered.

Yet that simply makes The American an imperfect film, though thankfully not fatally so. One wants to praise this to the heavens in the midst of all the "it's too slow!" remarks burdening the Internets, but one must still be honest. It is still a wondeful, rapturous film, full of the tension that comes about only in quiet. The introspection of watching a man absolutely in his element (in constructing a rifle or working out) and completely out of it (the film's final moments in particular). The limits, that is, of his own control.

Going the Distance (dir. Nanette Burstein)

Never underestimate what can be done with a great cast and likeable protagonists.

Going the Distance is far from a perfect film or even a very good one. It tells a much longer story than really works when you're trying to bring it in under two hours, without really acknowledging this essential problem. The movie takes place over the course of a year or so, but this is one of those films where not a lot seems to happen between the moments they choose to show us from this time. A lot of the jokes fall flat, and the supporting characters are pretty stock. The romance central to the film is built almost entirely via montage.

But it does work in a way these sort of stock films so often don't, and a lot of credit goes to the cast. Justin Long and Drew Barrymore play Garrett and Erin, who fall in love before Erin has to move away and try to make a go of it in a long-distance relationship. These are two fairly polarizing performers, and the worst things you can say about them are because of these sorts of roles, where they have to be relatable and likeable but simply come off as bland.

Luckily, writer Geoff LaTulippe has a character that seems tailor-made for Barrymore, giving us her usual ditz five or ten years down the line as a 31-year-old intern trying to make up for the follies of youth. Both she and Long are given actual characters with wants and desires totally outside of what they're looking for in each other, and their struggles are driven by what real people struggle with in their situation - trying to wed professional aims with a relationship that works really well. They don't fight over stupid, shallow things. They don't take petty measures to "get back" at the other person. They're just normal people trying to make the best of a bad situation. It seems simple, and yet this is the exception.

What really makes this film rev is the supporting cast. Erin lives with her sister's family, and Christina Applegate and Jim Gaffigan are just as good as you'd expect. Applegate is hindered by playing what could commonly be defined as the Leslie Mann in Knocked Up role, which is an irritating, never funny character, but she pushes through all right in some key moments. Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis play Garrett's friends; Day is playing a more likeable version of his It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia madman, which will cause someone to say he "can only do that one thing," but...c'mon. Assuming that is true - I'm not familiar with the guy enough to know if that's all he has - any actor would kill to do one thing as well as Day does his thing, and any scene with him and Sudeikis is gold.

Sudeikis and Gaffigan ended up being the stand-outs in the cast for me. They're doing something you have a hard time coming across in mainstream comedies - the earnestly performed, ego-free supporting performance. There's no way to put it other than that they play the role they're given, and they play it very well. Better than either of the leads, and better than most leads in most films. Like a lot of things about this film, their performances are the kind of thing we should be able to take for granted. As we can't, they're almost worth seeing the film for all on their own.

I'm dying for some film to save the mainstream romantic comedy, that most despised of genres that too often earns its hate but which I do actually kind of love. This isn't it, but it's helping. It's sweet, and it tries to get at some real issues, and it does have a handful of very, very funny moments, but ultimately comes up a little short in some key areas.

Piranha 3D (dir. Alexandre Aja)

After the movies have enjoyed over one hundred years as the nation's (and perhaps the world's) preeminent artistic entertainment, it can be difficult for a modern artist to find new images with which to populate his or her film.

I can say with no uncertainty that Piranha 3D contains many images I've never seen. Mostly ones I'd never thought I'd see. Not only is it one of the most ferociously three-dimensional pictures to date (it quickly dispels with the notion that subtlety is best), the audacity of even showing us half of the things we are shown is insane. What else is one to make of a woman pulled out of the water to reveal she's missing her lower half? Or another whose face is removed when her hair becomes too entangled in a motor blade? Never mind everything that happens to Derrick, the mastermind behind a Girls Gone Wild-esque empire whose fate is so outrageous and prolonged that I dare not spoil it here.

There reaches a point when the piranha attack goes full tilt that you really cannot believe they can top each new gag, and yet somehow they do. It should become a parody of itself, and perhaps to some it is, but I instead saw a filmmaker who took his chance to make a piranha movie and became dead set on giving us the best piranha movie he could possibly give. And boy does he. Every single scene involving piranha is invariably awesome. From the opening scene, which utilizes comic book aesthetics as well as any direct comic adaptation to depict the demise of an old man (who may be familiar to you), to the last (which I'll leave for you to discover), this is go-for-broke, give-them-what-they-came-for, old fashioned entertainment spectacle. And it's glorious.

And then you get this underwater photography that, in 3-D, is stunning. There are shots as intoxicating as some of the imagery Avatar provided, if more...forward about their intent. Let's just say it - two attractive members of the fairer sex get completely naked and swim around. When underwater, director Alexandre Aja smartly pulls the frame back to keep their entire bodies in frame and pushes them as far forward as current 3-D technology will permit him, resulting people just floating in the middle of the theater. And naked, clothed, underwater, in space, whatever - this is exactly what I've been hoping for from 3-D. I'm sick of this nonsense that the only good 3-D is the kind you don't notice. If you can make people fly through the air right in front of me, that's sure as hell worth the extra $3.50. That's true spectacle. I dream of seeing things that only 3-D will permit, of an auditorium totally enveloped in the environment. Believe it or not, Piranha 3D gets us a little closer to this reality.

Machete (dir. Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis)

On May 5th of this year (i.e. Cinco de Mayo), Robert Rodriguez debuted a trailer for Machete that presented the film as a reaction to increasingly tight control over illegal immigration. This was just days, as I recall, after Arizona passed their unheard-of measures to tighten their border, and Danny Trejo's introduction provides no room for misinterpretation. And yet, two weeks later, Robert Rodriguez showed up to clear some things up. The immigration angle isn't all that important to the film. He just cut the trailer that way as a reaction to what was going on in Arizona. Isn't it fun what you can do to change the tone of a film through editing?

But now I have to wonder if someone put him up to it, because Machete is all about the state of immigration, and more specifically the debate about immigration, in this country. It's pretty much the entire thrust of the narrative. There are more than a couple instances where the film stops dead for a character to tout the virtues of keeping the borders quasi-open. Those against illegal immigration are portrayed as either naive, misinformed, or completely and totally evil. And even though anyone who says this is calling for a race riot is probably a little nuts, there is sort of a rallying cry thing happening here.

And whatever your feelings may be about the issue, it makes for a fascinating, if not totally successful, piece of filmmaking. It's an overstuffed film, for starters - too much plot that doesn't pay off or matter at all. It's one thing to say we're really just going to see Machete (Danny Trejo) hack his enemies to tiny pieces, but the film clearly demonstrates that it shares our interests. The opening scene, which details how Machete arrived at his current predicament, is really phenomenal, and the straightest take on the grindhouse aesthetic in the whole film. The execution of this scene will provide the template for all similar scenes to follow - when your protagonist uses a giant knife as his key weapon, the action should be up close and blunt. And so it is.

Rodriguez and Maniquis aren't shy about the show they're putting on here. At one point two nurses with uniforms ending just under their crotch step out of a van and grab semi-automatic rifles, and we get the big two-shot of them standing side-by-side blasting the hell out of everything. There are many, many low-angle hero shots of people holding gigantic weapons. Everything you think Machete is will absolutely prove to be true. Whether or not that's a good thing is totally up to your own taste. As super-violent macho men movies go, though, on a pure craftsmanship level, this was head-and-shoulders above The Expendables.

Even if it does get too caught up in its own storytelling, following too many threads to unsatisfying, unnecessary conclusions (huge aspects of Michelle Rodriguez's role could have been covered in one scene), when Machete does get rolling, it really gets rolling. As for the lefty preaching, I guess if that sort of thing bothers you, then you're out of luck. I've never much minded a film preaching politics opposite my own (as in The Dark Knight). It's just a little rough when they upset the narrative flow, which can be the case here. But hey, at least it's interesting for a film to have a strong, polarizing point of view for once.

My Weekend at the Cinema

Movie Memories: Lost in Translation

In September of 2003 I was consumed with the sort of melancholy that can only set in when you are a particularly privileged seventeen-year-old. I was halfway through high school, and at this point had, quite successfully, lived the persona of the guy who didn't give a second thought to dating. It served me well as long as it did; I didn't get too broken up over missed opportunities, made a lot of friends very easily - people are quick to latch onto the carefree - and altogether was fairly pleased with myself most of the time.

The trouble is, when the girl I found myself dating in the summer of 2003, a girl I'd been quite crazy about over the preceding year and change, decided to break up with me a little before the start of the school year, I suddenly had nowhere to turn. Everyone knew me as the easygoing guy who didn't worry about anything, especially the idea of the high school relationship, so not only was I heartbroken, but completely unable to talk to anybody about it.

So I turned, in what would become a common coping mechanism in the years to come, to the movies. This was really at the cusp of when movies were taking over my life, so I started going fairly regularly, typically an early afternoon showing on a Saturday. And, for the first time, I'd go alone. I figured I watched movies by myself at home all the time; what's the difference, really? It turned out to be one of the most wonderful experiences, one I still quite enjoy but, like many things, will never quite reach the heights of those first few outings. Sitting in the dark, alone yet surrounded (well...as surrounded as one gets on Saturday afternoons), I found peace and serenity.

As Lester Bangs says in Almost Famous, true music...it chooses you. I've found the same too often true of movies, and I can't help but feel that Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's ode to undefineable, momentary relationships and exploring foreign countries, chose me. At the Regal Cinema inside the Pioneer Place mall here in Portland, on that Saturday afternoon in September of 2003, Lost in Translation reached out from beyond the clutter of pop culture and life and said "I'm here for you."

The whole world opened up to me. I discovered a cinema not of ideas or laughs or thrills, but of feelings. Emotions and impressions were the landscape of the film. I was introduced to people with completely different life experiences from my own, feeling exactly as I had been for the past month, asking the same sort of questions. I learned the value of simply walking and exploring. Not because it was spoken - nobody in the film had to make fun of people who use a guide book to show how wonderful it is to just go.

I learned it was possible to identify more with the woman in a movie than the man (being a straight white male, the majority of American cinema is more or less about me). There's a moment, and this is exactly what I'm talking about in saying the film's all about moments and impressions because it lasts...maybe a second, but it's the kind of breathless perfection you dream of experiencing in art. It's when John (Giovanni Ribisi) is heading out to leave his wife, Charlotte (Scarlett Johanson), alone in Tokyo while he does business in a neighboring town. He gives her a kiss goodbye, and she grabs his face, holds him for an extra second, lingering in the moment of that kiss as he's trying to be someplace else. It's simple, it's easy, but it's effective. I knew that feeling so intensely that even now it gets me a little choked up. I'm sure more than a few of you understand how closely knit your life can become to a movie.

It could have been depressing to learn that these things don't go away as we get older, that they only become more complicated; but it wasn't. It was comforting to see acceptance, and the possibility of a new surprise. It encouraged me to open up to new experiences, new people, and within a month I found myself in a platonic relationship very similar to the one depicted in the film, one in which trust and openness were everything. She moved away the following summer and I hardly ever speak to her anymore, but for a brief period of time, we had something amazing. Something that I can honestly say wouldn't have happened if not for this film.

Many movies impart certain values and life lessons; Lost in Translation taught me how to live. I know, for many, it hasn't aged well, and for many others, it never lived up to the hype. But seeing it before any of that set in, in a vacuum all my own, the movie became an inextricable part of me. And whatever problems others may find, to me it is perfect - its mysteries, its conclusions, its suggestions...most of all its suggestions.

Thanks to my lovely girlfriend Julie for the inspiration.