jentleman film journal.

More on the same...

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:30:00 -0400

As it happens, Wes Morris’s review of Superman for Grantland touches on some similar points to what I explored in my essay on franchise films:

“Whether it’s Batman or Star Trek or Star Wars, the audience has been there before and can’t wait to go again — to find the Easter eggs hidden for only them, to bask in the filmmakers’ adherence to sacred texts. This obviates any real expectation that a movie will work as a movie, that it will be a piece of commercial art that takes you to some emotional or visceral place. Certainly, a few of these movies have cleared that bar: Christopher Nolan’s second and third Batman films achieve this, as do Bryan Singer’s X-Men and its first sequel. J.J. Abrams’s maiden Star Trek do-over went for something audacious. It contorted the parameters of nostalgia, using the series’s relationship to the vagaries of time and space to attempt to free itself from the oppression of fandom. But its sequel gave in and enslaved itself to the original films.”

Check out his full review here.

Star Treks, Iron Men, and the Movies: Examining the Franchise in Hollywood

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:10:49 -0400

Star Treks, Iron Men, and the Movies: Examining the Franchise in Hollywood:

I’m very pleased to have my most recent essay, on the nature of franchise films in Hollywood, featured on the website for Bright Wall / Dark Room.

Very Quick Take: "Star Trek Into Darkness"

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:24:00 -0400

On the face of it, there is something alarmingly cliche about the new Star Trek movie, which clones a bunch of now-familiar Hollywood tropes into the comforting confines of the Starship Enterprise. From a storytelling standpoint, what I found most troubling was the ongoing Hollywood slavery to the concept of the ‘arc.’ Anyone who has read anything about the way screenplays are structured will be familiar with this concept, which states, essentially, that characters must start in one place and end in another; there must be a personal change as well as a physical one.

These days, the result of that often seems to be a storyline that is force-fed to the audience, with such arcs jammed in as necessity rather than as organic to a story; hence the need of the last Batman movie to reset itself to start off with a broken-down, retired Batman, and hence the need of this movie to tell us that, actually, Jim Kirk still has a lot of lessons to learn.

All that said, despite the bells and whistles, despite moments obviously manufactured to create a more titillating trailer (I’m looking at you, Alice Eve), there is something about this movie that is refreshingly and fundamentally consistent with the tone of what this franchise has historically been. It may have abandoned the outer trappings of Star Trek, which is, narratively, all about exploration and novelty. But, on a thematic level, these shows have always been about morality, and I cannot think of any major movie this year that has been more transparently concerned with right and wrong. In that way, at least, director JJ Abrams and hack extraordinaire Damon Lindelof (the writer who brought us Prometheus) have crafted a refreshing, entertaining, and thematically faithful take on a venerable Hollywood franchise.

Fullness of Narrative in “Lawrence of Arabia”

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 15:00:30 -0400

Or, The AFI List Project, #7: Lawrence of Arabia

I don’t know that Lawrence of Arabia is the greatest movie ever made, because I’m not sure that, in questions of taste, it’s possible to affix such definitive and concrete labels. I am sure, however, that it belongs to that very select group of films that have to be a part of that conversation; it is one of the few movies in history that delivers both deep narrative complexity and substantial sensual entertainment. And, if we are to discuss film as a visual medium, there may be no higher example of the visual art of moviemaking than Lawrence, with its vast landscapes and vividly saturated photography. Seen in a movie theater, one becomes aware that it is something akin to a miracle of cinema.

It is also a movie that seems to change with each viewing, as one notices yet another buried strand that, once picked on, turns out to weave its way through the entire picture. The one that most struck me on my last viewing of the movie, around a month and a half ago, was the remarkable dichotomy of the narrative, and, surprisingly, how important it was to the success of the film’s project. Accordingly, that is the thread that I want to explore in this space today.

Almost always, when we speak of a movie being two stories in one, it is as a criticism, an indication of a film’s failure either to successfully establish the connection between two plotlines into a unifying overarching story or to fully develop a central storyline into a rich and complete whole. In either case, a viewer is left unsatisfied, having taken in neither a story nor an interesting idea. On the face of it, the structure of Lawrence of Arabia is really that of two different movies glued together; as one friend remarked after we walked out of the theater, the first half alone feels like a finished film. Instead, there follows after the intermission a second portion that moves the film in a new, significantly darker, direction.

If, for some ungodly reason, you haven’t seen Lawrence, it is a historical epic set in the Arabian desert during World War I, and follows the efforts of young British officer T.E. Lawrence to unite the fractured, factious Arab tribes into a force that can oppose the power of the Ottoman Empire. The first half of the movie plays like a particularly good colonial adventure, in tone not unlike, perhaps, The Men Who Would Be King. It is, fundamentally, a story of heroism, as Lawrence proves himself again and again in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and culminates in his successful conquest of the key port of Aqaba on the Red Sea. In the meantime, he becomes increasingly enamored of the people, culture, and environment of Arabia, and becomes fixed on the idea of establishing a unified, independent Arab state on the ruins of Ottoman rule. The second half then becomes about personal crisis and the ultimate failure of his ideal, which founders on the twinned shoals of Arab tribalism and British politicking.

Of course, Lawrence is given the license to explore both its halves fully; we are talking about a movie that runs almost four hours, so the fact that it isn’t boring is almost more remarkable than its ability to develop both halves fully. Nonetheless, central to what makes both function independently is that neither is complete without the other. Taken as a whole, Lawrence of Arabia is a miniaturized portrait of human life: there comes first triumph, and then there comes, not exactly defeat, but the discovery that triumph is a simple event with complex consequences. At the end of the movie, as Prince Feisal and the British begin to negotiate the delicate politics of a British mandate over a nominally independent Arabia, Lawrence feels that he has failed to achieve his goals. Yet, taken all together, Lawrence has succeeded in every endeavor that he has put his mind to: in winning over Feisal, in taking Aqaba, in liberating Damascus before the arrival of the British.

What Lawrence discovers, as we all must, is that the moment of triumph is ephemeral and leads to new challenges – challenges which alter our retrospective understanding of what we have done. The need to motivate this discovery is the reason that both halves of the narrative are vitally important to the success of the picture. In the Western tradition, stories of adventure tend to be about the transformation of a normal man into a hero, while tragedies are about the fall of heroes. The grandest and fullest tales, however, comprise both. Oedipus becomes a great hero and solves the riddle of the Sphinx, only to fall into a tragedy of his own making. Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and forges for a time a great kingdom, only to be undone by the treachery of others. Fullness of narrative demands both rise and fall – both victory and what comes after.

With this in mind, it is telling that the film’s most triumphant moment is Lawrence’s victory at Aqaba. Though the later taking of Damascus should represent the greater prize, Lean shows no part of that battle at all, cutting from the massacre of a group of Turks by Lawrence’s army to a Damascus occupied by the Arabs. In the moment, that is a jarring decision; we have heard so much about the importance of Damascus, at this point, that to not show the battle seems like an obvious omission. In fact, though, having the British and Arabian push on the city culminate with a major battle scene would have run counter to the project of the narrative: we have already seen Lawrence as the conquering hero, and the second part of the movie is about the fall of a hero, not about his triumph. Aqaba is the film’s most triumphant moment because it represents the apotheosis of Lawrence as a heroic figure. In Damascus, Lawrence’s heroism matters only in that it has rendered itself irrelevant. With the battle won, what is left is for the parties involved to divide the spoils, and division means discarding their uniting figure.

That division speaks to the film’s other great tragic theme, the division between the two worlds that Lawrence seeks to balance himself between. On a macro level, Lawrence of Arabia is a film about the rise and fall of heroes and the failure of dreams. On a human level, however, it is about a man of one world who wants to enter another, discovers that he cannot, and then finds that he cannot go home again, either. Even as Lawrence is embraced and respected by the Arabs, he is always apart from them as well, a fact that he relishes even as he tries to become one of them (never more disastrously than in his ill-fated expedition into Deraa). And, in the end, when he has performed the service required of him, he is politely retired: “I think we are both glad to be rid of him,” Feisal says to the British General Allenby in the film’s harshest moment of realpolitik.

This, too, is characteristic of the picture’s fullness of narrative. We are accustomed to heroes as those that overcome, who work relentlessly towards their goal and ultimately, through the imposition of their will, win out. Lawrence of Arabia is as heroic a film as has ever been made, but it may be the only one that has the brutal honesty to render its hero, in the totality of his victory, powerless against the whims and divisions of other men. Just as the story of Lawrence of Arabia comprises both rise and fall, so does its world comprehend wills and actions beyond those of its central character.

This all comes dangerously close to an assertion that Lawrence of Arabia is a great film because its conclusion is sad and its outlook grim. Such a perspective, however, relies on an end-oriented perspective of story. The narrative of Lawrence comprises both triumph and ambivalence, because both are a part of life; and when its conclusion turns out to be dark even in victory, it is only because that is the truth of its hero’s story. If the purpose of art is to represent life to us, as truly as possible, for our examination, then Lawrence is as successful a work of art as any.

No Harm, No Foul: Butch Cassidy and the Construction of the Immoral Protagonist

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:26:20 -0400

Or, The AFI List Project #73: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

One consistent theme that I’ve touched on in the Journal is the idea that the filmed narrative thrives most when it depicts characters on the margins, or completely outside, of the world that we know and inhabit. In part, that’s because the particular genius of the movies is the ability to tangibly create worlds that the spectator conceives of only abstractly or not at all. Thus, film gives a window into the lives of those that are outside our everyday existence: superheroes, aliens, outlaws, and all the rest.

Of course, every story needs its center, and the failure to develop a successful protagonist is one major reason that many filmed narratives do not succeed. Whether or not we care about a protagonist’s journey, and the extent to which the nature of a protagonist fits the tone of the story that we are being told, are the operative factors in whether or not we care about the story itself. This is why movie stars exist, and why efforts to ‘create’ movie stars are so often misguided: we pay to see certain performers because of the way they fit into certain types that work for certain roles, not because Hollywood tells us we should care about their personal lives.

The question of how protagonists are made occurred to me watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because its storyline is seemingly at odds with its tone. If you told the story straight, its narrative would seem to be a particularly dark one, of two outlaws who are forced to run for their lives, hole up in Bolivia, and are in the end killed for their crimes. And, indeed, the sepia-toned first scene begins in the dead earnest that one would expect from this sort of plotline.

Tonally, however, the movie strikes a strange, perilous balance between adventurous romp and inevitable tragedy, and it straddles that line by means of its colorful protagonists. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (played with wit and panache by screen legends Paul Newman and Robert Redford) are the two parties in what may be cinema’s greatest bromance, the sorts of overgrown kids who delight in mischief but don’t quite believe, even down to the final hour, that their mischief may have real consequences.

‘Mischief’ may, in fact, be the term that is the key to unlocking just what makes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid work so well. The cinema has seen a great many memorable protagonists, ranging from the heroic (James Bond, Ripley, Dirty Harry) to the tortured (Terry Malloy, Rick Blaine), but the ones that stick most easily in the mind are the mischief-makers, characters like Han Solo or Indiana Jones (on a side note, the fact that both those characters could be so perfectly embodied by the same actor may explain why Harrison Ford was a movie star) or, in the case at hand, the inimitable Butch Cassidy himself.

What makes Butch Cassidy so memorable, and so charming, is how at odds his personality is with his chosen profession. Butch and Sundance are both outlaws, but they go out of their way to avoid ever hurting anyone – eluding the authorities and taking money from railway magnates is more like fun and games than like a malicious pursuit, and so it remains until it becomes they that are to be hurt because of it. Meanwhile, the movie makes space for Butch’s whimsy and for his unexpected friendship with Sundance, even allowing for a musical number to illustrate the complicated, mildly incestuous relationship the two have with Sundance’s lover Etta Place.

Butch and Sundance are, in other words, perfect immoral protagonists: their behavior, technically speaking, is illegal, but those that are harmed by it are kept out of frame for as long as possible (and, in a post-collapse climate, they might even be applauded by some for stealing from bankers and railway magnates). At the same time, they themselves – and, more importantly, the relationship between them – are charming and lively. Thus they pass as heroes, and thus the feel of the movie remains lighthearted throughout, even as their situation becomes more and more desperate.

That the question of the actual morality, or lack thereof, of its protagonists is altogether ignored by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turns out, surprisingly, to be one of the greatest strengths of the picture. Once the movie finishes, and we have seen Butch and Sundance pinned down and presumably killed by the Bolivian army, the narrative seems to have consisted of two parallel thrulines, one of the actual set of events that occurs and one of the personalities of its characters. These two narratives, however, don’t really intersect, rendering the question of what happens to Butch and Sundance quite separate from the question of who they are.

There are many lesser films where the sequence of events is linked to a moral judgment about the characters taking part in those events. Here, it is only the actions of Butch and Sundance that lead to their demise: they rob banks, and so they are hunted down. Questions of their moral character never enter into that equation; whether they are good-hearted or villainous, charming or surly, does not, in the end, matter for the linear account of how they arrive at their fates. And, similarly, their chosen profession of robbing trains and banks does not translate to a blanket interpretation of who they are as characters: it is a part of their character, and the one that governs what happens to them, but it is not the only thing that matters about them, nor necessarily an outgrowth of their moral nature.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is, in other words, a film that constructs its characters in a certain way, sets them in motion, and sees what happens to them. The result is that, even as the movie becomes, tonally, a buddy comedy about a pair of mischevious charmers, there is a truth and authenticity to how it treats the ultimate end of those charmers. We cannot do other than like Butch and Sundance, but we also cannot deny that they earn the fate that they come to. In the end, the value of turning the two main characters into such likeable actors is not that they become memorable – though that is certainly an added bonus. The value, rather, is that it allows us to more perfectly examine their actions, and how they get to where they end up, and to question what, if anything, it says about them. The answer may be that it says nothing at all, that it is simply a sequence of events, but even if so, it is better that the movie makes us ask the question than that it reassures us, like so many others, that what happens is simply the result of a concrete and binary morality.

"Django Unchained," "Zero Dark Thirty," and the Film in Contemporary Discourse

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:04:00 -0500

On Sunday, this year’s Best Picture winner is going to be crowned, and all indications suggest that the big winner on the night is going to be Argo. No one seems to be particularly upset about this – something of a relief a year after all the spittle spewed by cinephiles over the victory of The Artist – but it does mean that Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, the two movies on the docket that probably have the most fervent groups of supporters, are likely to be shut out completely. That’s not upsetting to me personally – neither movie made the cut on my top five films of 2012 – but both films, as the objects of such fervent (if minority) admiration, as two of the most controversial releases of the year, and as the two best examples of contemporary American auteurism to be found in 2012, are deserving of further exploration.

Django Unchained is the latest revenge fantasy sprung from the mind of Quentin Tarantino, and in its way its concept is as heroic as the journey of its central character, a slave enlisted by a bounty hunter who becomes his own sort of avenging angel by story’s end. Frank depictions of slavery are so rare as to seem almost taboo in American cinema; the subject is usually either whitewashed to protect from controversy (The Patriot), or sanitized to the point of deliberate obfuscation (Gone With The Wind). It is this fact – and possibly this fact alone – that makes much of Django Unchained a remarkable work of cinema. The film’s most striking moments come not in the flights of dialogue for which Tarantino is known but in those moments where slavery ceases to be an obvious narrative element and becomes a part of the fabric of the movie’s world. There is a moment, I think about a quarter of the way through, when Django and Dr King, proceeding through some town or another, ride past a procession of slaves being led in chains and collars to the market. It may be the only moment in the movie that the peculiar cruelty of American slavery is not overtly commented on, yet it is also the moment most starkly effective in portraying its nature.

That fact shows up what is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of this particular film, which is of course its auteur, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino has become one of the most fervently beloved – I wouldn’t quite say respected – directors in American cinema, largely on account of daring plotlines and plot structures mixed with a brazen willingness to shock. He’s never learned, however, the value of subtlety; indeed, he’s the sort of director who’d probably respond to that criticism with a polemic on popular filmmaking and the value of trash. (Never forget that his last four movies – the two Kills Bills, Inglorious Basterds, and Django – are all deliberately over-the-top revenge fantasies.) Hence the omnipresent use of the n-word in Django, and the presence of scenes like the one in which a bumbling proto-Ku Klux Klan tries to run down and lynch Django and Dr King. Such scenes, boiling over as they do with the sort of darkly comic dialogue and situation that are distinctive enough to have earned the term ‘Tarantinian,’ are precisely what draw lovers of Tarantino the auteur to the movie. They are also the fat that frustrates those searching for the movie rather than the auteur.

Of course, most of the dialogue around the movie has centered on its supposedly controversial aspects, which basically boil down to Tarantino’s childish obsession with racial slurs and the fact that Django openly admits his desire to shoot white people. It’s this second controversy that, narratively speaking, is one of the most interesting things about how the movie has been received, because it may be the aspect of Django’s personality that makes the most immediate sense: if you give a slave his freedom and the power to avenge himself on the men that beat and humiliated him, how could he not have such a reaction? The condemnation of Django for a narratively consistent aspect of its protagonist’s personality is in itself an interesting point of study for thinking about how storytelling truth can be overridden by cultural hysteria.

If Django Unchained has obscured its portrayal of an American trauma through flights of auteurist fancy, Zero Dark Thirty has instead obscured an American triumph through its own claims to total veracity, the questioning of which, as they wilted under the thunderous gaze of various Congressional leaders, almost certainly cost Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller a shot at the top prize on Oscar night. If I had to guess where the fervent acclaim for Zero Dark Thirty came from in the run-up to its release, I would point to its self-conscious positioning as a film About America Today. Where several of this year’s American prestige pictures seek to examine questions about America’s past – slavery, the Civil War, and our involvements in the Middle East, to name the respective issues at the hearts of Django, Lincoln, and Argo – Zero Dark Thirty takes on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and, through it, the trauma of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. In tracing the thread of its manhunt from its roots in torture and intimidation, the film takes on a deliberate gravity, which, in combination with its directorial deftness, demands that it be taken seriously.

When all is said and done, though, the film’s timeliness and subject matter obscure more than they illuminate: at its core, Zero Dark Thirty is no more than an intense procedural about a story that happens to be grounded in fact. In terms of the awards conversation, they also turned out to be more weakness than strength, as the film has come under fire for being less than totally accurate in its assertion that torture was a key component in gathering the pieces of the Bin Laden puzzle. Ever since its release, Zero Dark Thirty has been bogged down in an ongoing discourse of controversy, which is probably one of the main reasons that it hasn’t featured in the Oscar conversation to the same degree that its studio overlords had hoped. If we’re going to see a movie about so recent a trauma, apparently, we want to see it portrayed as accurately as possible, while liberty-taking accounts like those of Argo and Django can get away with their revisions because their subjects occurred in a more distant past.

All that said, the fundamental issues with Zero Dark Thirty as a movie are not questions about its authenticity. They are, rather, fundamental questions about the film’s structure and meaning. The virtuosity of Kathryn Bigelow’s direction, especially in the culminating raid scene, should not be overlooked. Nonetheless, it is probably that virtuosity, along with the torture controversy and Bigelow’s apparent ascension to the role of auteur-muse of contemporary American imperialism, which has allowed these fundamental issues to pass largely unremarked. It is impossible to watch Zero Dark Thirty with a critical eye and not notice how casually it is put together. The movie bills itself as a factual account of how the CIA hunted down Bin Laden, but in its progression it is clear that we are watching something that has been reverse-engineered. Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have gone back and followed the clues from the end to the beginning, then put them back in the proper order. In doing so, they lose what would have given the movie its real sense of urgency and importance: the countless other clues and threads that ended up leading nowhere. You may rightly point out that the movie is already two and a half hours long – where would all that material have gone? To which the only response is, the movie would have had to be structured in a completely different way. Perhaps if it had, we might also have been able to get to know more about our protagonist than the fact that she is married to her work.

As for the troublesome question of how to read meaning in Zero Dark Thirty, it is hard to find one in a film that is essentially without a real plot.The movie’s closing moment – a close up of Maya’s face as she cries after the successful completion of her work – is meant to round out the film’s narrative as a comment on the ultimate wastefulness of war; now that she has accomplished her task, she has, apparently, nothing left to live for. It is, in other words, a coda tacked on to try to say something about the moral consequences of what amounts to America’s desire for revenge on the man responsible for its greatest injury. How can it mean anything, though, when, through all two-and-a-half hours we have spent watching this woman, we have formed no sort of relationship with her? Bigelow and Boal have replaced empathy with the desire for revenge that we feel along with Maya. That fact is precisely why we have such a strong desire for the film to be accurate: the journey of watching Zero Dark Thirty is, in its way, a journey to closure with 9/11. The result is a movie that can’t possibly hold up once the world has moved on from that trauma – and, as the world will keep on turning, it certainly will move on.

I don’t want to give short shrift to how accomplished the film is: as noted above, there is no doubting Bigelow’s work as a director, and both star Jessica Chastain and her cohort of C-list TV celebrities who appear alongside her do fantastic work throughout the film. Nonetheless, there are fundamental issues here beyond whether or not you think it an unambiguous endorsement of torture. Unfortunately, as in Django, those real issues – the ones that actually matter to the question of how these movies could have been better – have been lost in a fog of contemporary discourse, a fog that, along with the reputations of the films’directors, will probably prevent these films from ever being examined solely for what they are.

Support "Gallery A"

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:10:02 -0500

Support "Gallery A":

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Why The Oscars Matter

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 23:58:46 -0500

Why The Oscars Matter:

An article on Django and Zero Dark Thirty to come, hopefully by the end of the week. Until then, from the archives to your computer screen, the Jentleman’s thoughts on why the Oscars actually do matter.

The Year Of Should-Have-Been; Or, The Year in Review, Part II: The Best Movies of 2012

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:27:59 -0500

It seems like, everywhere I look, pundits reviewing 2012 in cinema are nodding their heads in approval and talking about how it was a “great year” for the movies. In comparison to what was, by any metric, a dismal 2011, they’re justified in doing so: at least this year the Best Picture Oscar won’t go to a creampuff French silent film about a Hollywood that never existed. Still, as I survey the year, I can’t help but feel that those pundits are letting their relief that things were better in 2012 cloud their understanding of what the year really represents.

I wrote in last year’s review that 2011 was a year of slack ambition; that, at least, was not a problem over the last twelve months. 2012 saw a bevy high-aiming auteur-minded projects (The Master, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild), risk-heavy studio productions (Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Flight), and at least a couple movies that straddled the line between them (Django Unchained, Looper, perhaps even Life of Pi). At the end of the day, though – at least as far as this professionally unimpressed critic is concerned – almost none of them stuck the landing.

Think back for a moment over what the shape of the year ahead looked like at its beginning. Looking ahead on January 1^st, there was justifiably boundless optimism for 2012’s offerings. The first third of the year, historically the doldrums of the cinematic calendar, nonetheless included a promising action movie from Steven Soderbergh, a major sci-fi film that was the first live-action feature from one of the finest working animation directors, a reboot comedy starring two of Hollywood’s most promising up-and-comers, and new films from Whit Stillman, Lasse Hallstrom, and the Duplass brothers, if you’re into that sort of thing. Blockbuster season then promised two major superhero events in the culmination of Marvel’s cinematic universe building and in the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s supposedly genre-redefining saga, as well as yet another Steven Soderbergh movie (this time about male strippers), a new Pixar movie, and new comedies from Sacha Baron Cohen and Wes Anderson. The prestige season, finally, offered the returns of Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis (in different movies this time), political thrillers from Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow, and epics from Tom Hooper, Quentin Tarantino, and Peter Jackson.

A pretty good lineup, in other words, and you’d be right in pointing out that only the most optimistic bystander would expect every one of them to live up to expectations. Still, it’s a little daunting to think about how few hit their marks, ranging from soulless, bloated messes like John Carter or The Avengers, to major steps backwards like The Dark Knight Rises, to interesting but deeply problematic works of art like Zero Dark Thirty or Django Unchained. (Both of those films, incidentally, deserve more thorough dissections than I can offer in this space. I’ll hopefully get to them in time for the Oscars.) Compared to 2011, it was a step forward – even a relative failure like The Master was more ambitious than most of last year’s Best Picture crop, and had its redeeming qualities. Nonetheless, I can’t look back on the movies that came out in 2012 without remembering how good, and how effective, the year in movies should have been had everyone worked up to the standard that they’d previously set for themselves.

All that said, it was a year in which something like 250 movies were released in theaters; if you think they were all disappointments, you’re even more cynical than I am. So, what was worthy of the highest honor in cinema, the Jentleman’s designation as the best film of the year? Here’s the list – as always, based on the movies that I’ve seen so far.

Honorable Mentions: Moonrise Kingdom, Django Unchained, The Hunger Games, 21 Jump Street

I’m as surprised as you are at the content of this Honorable Mentions list; 21 Jump Street making it into this group might just be the biggest upset since the Ravens beat the Patriots to get to the Super Bowl. Like all good comedies, though, its ultimate victory was not in how much it made us laugh but in believing in the humanity of its characters. As in Bridesmaids, and as in so many of the really great comedies, the fact that it was funny helped us to accept an underling sweetness that is hard to sell on its own. Django Unchained should get its own post, but let me start by saying here that for about sixty percent of the movie I was convinced it was the best film I’d seen all year; that was followed by forty percent where I increasingly lost any grasp on why the presented events were happening. The Hunger Games, meanwhile, was quite surprisingly the best blockbuster that anyone made this past year, outpacing both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. I’ll always have a soft spot, finally, for Moonrise Kingdom, which missed the cut for the top five only by coming to me through the heart rather than the head. As much as I saw my own experiences in those of its young protagonists, I wasn’t sure if I liked it for the right reasons.

Now, the top five:

5. The Intouchables – I was, frankly, astounded that Intouchables couldn’t garner a Best Foreign Film nomination from the Academy, because, pound for pound, I don’t think there’s any movie that gave me as much pure enjoyment as this French-language gem from directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano. The movie focuses on the relationship between a paraplegic millionaire and his immigrant caretaker, and has garnered some criticism on this side of the Atlantic for what some perceive as a French iteration of the ‘magical Negro’ stereotype. What these critics fail to acknowledge, though, is that French culture has only recently begun to grapple with the sorts of highly racialized and politicized culture dynamics that have existed in America for well over a hundred years. Taken in its own cultural context, The Intouchables, in suggesting that the divide between a white upper class and a marginalized immigrant population can be overcome, should be lauded for, not tarnished because of, its central relationship.

4. Looper – Rian Johnson’s first studio movie is unarguably imperfect, as anyone attuned to science (or basic problems of logic) likes to point out as soon as Looper is brought up. But, as I discussed at greater length in my essay on the genealogy of Looper, the movie isn’t really about those questions: even when its final, inevitable twist is predicated on its concern with time travel, it remains, at heart, a film about a moral question rather than a narrative one. It’s possible that it doesn’t answer that question as well as it should have. Nonetheless, it’s the most sophisticated, most ambitious genre movie of the year, and it delivers on enough of that promise to make it into the top five.

3. Argo – Somewhere between its relatively early release and the December onslaught of prestige releases, Argo appeared to run out of steam, thrust out of the limelight by the endless hype surrounding genre-mate Zero Dark Thirty. In the battle between Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow, though, it’s Affleck who crafted the better movie, an intelligent, thoroughly entertaining thriller that takes on an overlooked trauma of 20^th century history. Like the top movie on this list, it doesn’t make any effort to stretch its genre or the craft of filmmaking. That, to me, makes its success almost more impressive, because, in today’s Hollywood, the bar is higher the more traditional a film’s approach is (more on this below). Argo is the most successful blend of comedy and drama that the year offered, and, impressively, it manages to keep you worried that things might not work out even though you know that they will. I’d been skeptical about Affleck the director; with Argo, it’s safe to say that he is a real talent, and one that is here to stay.

2. Beasts of the Southern Wild – I’ve hemmed and hawed about my feelings for Beasts of the Southern Wild ever since it came out, because – as with Moonrise Kingdom – I’m aware that it’s precisely the sort of movie that most appeals to me. No matter: this movie, as occasionally frustrating and difficult as it may be, was the richest cinematic vision that I encountered all year, a celebration of endurance and an entirely original concept of the heroic journey. Much of one’s opinion of Beasts, I think, rests on how political one judges it to be. I, personally, saw no statement in it, and that allowed me to appreciate it for what it was: an epic, grandiose hymn to life set on the boundary of a world we know and a world we imagine.

1. Lincoln – It was difficult allowing that Lincoln was the best movie of the year, not because it has any obvious demerits but because, as a staid, highly traditional Hollywood movie from a seemingly overplayed director, it’s probably the least sexy choice of any of them. But Lincoln’s fundamental lack of cool is exactly why it’s important that it be recognized as the year’s cinematic capstone. We like to see movies that stretch our understanding of what a movie can be, that transport us in new ways and to new destinations, and that can make us too quick to dismiss movies that don’t try to do that as dull or unoriginal. In cinema, however, as in any other art, true quality is true quality, no matter the form it comes in, and Lincoln, staid and traditional as it may be, is nonetheless the most finely-crafted, most effective, most important movie of 2012. Acknowledging it as such is, strange as it may sound, also an acknowledgment of the full breadth of what excellent cinema can be. I don’t feel cool when I say that Lincoln was the best movie of the year, but that doesn’t change that it was.

The Year In Review, Part I: The Worst Movies of 2012

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:39:00 -0500

Now that we’re fully into the swing of the awards season, with Oscar nominations and the Golden Globe winners already announced, it’s clearly past time for the most important and definitive account of the past year in movies: the Jentleman’s analysis of what went wrong, what went right, and what to take away from the year in cinema. As with last year, I’m kicking off with my ‘Worst Of’ list, mostly because it’s reliably my favorite essay to write in the year. Here at JFJ, the focus is usually on the thoughtful, constructive analysis of cinema, meaning there’s little room for vitriol and bloviating (though who knows how my readers construe the Journal in general…) Still, if there’s anything more pleasurable than the thoroughgoing love of a great film, it’s the experience of pure, unadulterated contempt for the depths of the cinematically inane.

Nothing this year quite got to me in the way that last year’s Worst Picture, Melancholia, did (my brief analysis: “A loathsome piece of crap”), which is probably a good thing, and my movie-watching in general was a bit more targeted this year than last, meaning that I initially thought that I’d managed to miss most of the worst 2012 had to offer. As always, though, a quick glance over my list was enough to demonstrate that, even with the best of intentions, you can never escape all the asinine productions that invariably crop up. Like last year, these movies are not a true accounting of the worst movies of the year, because I didn’t see every movie that was released: Battleship, Transformers 4, Total Recall, Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 2, The Raven, and so many others offered so much promise for awfulness, and I promptly saw none of them.

So, without further ado, a Jentleman presents: The worst movies of 2012.

Dishonorable mentions: Lawless, Man On A Ledge, John Carter, Prometheus

Without a doubt, Man On A Ledge was among the stupidest scripts of the year, begging the question of what brilliant packing agent managed to assemble what may rightly be called an all-star cast (Ed Harris, Sam Worthington, and Elizabeth Banks, among a group of recognizable character actors). Still, I had some fun watching it, and it introduced the lovely Genesis Rodriguez to the big screen, so I can’t relegate it to bottom-five status. John Carter, meanwhile, was a train wreck of epic proportions, but the weight of its flop has obscured the fact that the movie itself, though by no means particularly good, had some moments of real cinematic strength. Prometheus was little more than a less-brilliant retread of Alien, but it at least had some moments of great visual beauty, and there was a kernel of a good movie buried deep down somewhere. Lawless, finally, was totally incomprehensible, and narrowly missed inclusion here. Still, there was some ambition to the production, and stellar acting from Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain rescued it from falling to the bottom of the barrel.

Now, the bottom five:

5. Les Miserables

It makes me feel kind of bad to recognize Les Mis as a bottom-five movie, partly because the stage show is such a spectacular theatrical experience and partly because of the valiant efforts of all the actors involved: other than a woefully overmatched Russell Crowe, everyone acts and sings well, from likely Best Supporting Actress winner Anne Hathaway down to the miniscule Gavroche. Unfortunately, neither of those things can cover up the fundamental problem that Les Miserables faces, which is that what works on stage doesn’t read the same way on the screen. Here, as in the dreadful Chicago, watching the movie involves jumping from song to song without taking the time to fill in the narrative gaps with a little plot. The result is that we spend extended amount of time hearing songs about one thing or another, indulging deep exploration of a particular emotion or setting, but don’t get the basic links that connect them. Nor does Tom Hooper help matters. Hooper, as has been reported over and over, wanted to use the camera to establish a level of intimacy impossible onstage, bringing us tight in on every actor’s face. Since he uses this same approach for the majority of every scene, though, the movie has the eerie quality of feeling like the movie is a long, single, claustrophobic take. Which is a damn shame, because there are one or two moments that suggest how epic this movie could and should have been, and that’s the movie I wanted to see.

4. Being Flynn

This was one of those movies that was released in the first quarter of the year, which means that everyone knew right away that it was going to be a failure. And, by God, were they right: Being Flynn made just a bit more than $500,000 in box office, which is the cinematic equivalent of sitting the SAT and only getting the 400 points for writing your name. “Anchored” by a characteristically over-the-top performance from Robert De Niro and pushed forward by Paul Dano’s heavy-handed voiceover (was it really five years ago that he was matching wits with Daniel Day-Lewis?), Being Flynn is about a young writer dealing with his own mental health issues while watching his estranged father fall apart at the seams. It should be a measure of how much this movie doesn’t work that that description makes the movie seem far, far more interesting than it really is.

3. Hyde Park On Hudson

Is this the most boring movie ever made? There’s nothing actively malicious in Hyde Park On Hudson, and there are even a few moments that intrigue – mostly involving Bill Murray being charming in some way. But there’s a fundamental problem here: as with last year’s The Iron Lady, the production team of this movie decided to pursue a movie about the least interesting aspect of the life of a very interesting person. Even worse, they explore that aspect – FDR’s propensity for philandering – through the lens of a character whose interiority is limited to concerns for the President’s well-being and breathy discourses on the ‘special relationship’ between them. This is the sort of movie where a key moment of dramatic tension revolves around whether or not a character will eat a hot dog, and it’s apparent from the first fifteen minutes (which include one of the most unintentionally hilarious scenes ever committed to film) that it’s a disaster.

2. REDACTED

1. Project X – I refer you to the only thought I could formulate after seeing this brutalization of a movie, recorded on Twitter for posterity: @jentlemanjames, 31 March 2012,12:17AM. “ProjectX is the movie equivalent of jabbing a fork into your own eye over and over and over again for an hour and a half.”

That’s really all that there is to be said.

Oscar Nominations: Quick Takes

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:26:00 -0500

My 2012 In Review posts are coming soon, I promise. In the meantime, some quick thoughts on this year’s Oscar noms.

- Very pleased to see that Beasts of the Southern Wild scored well-earned nominations for Picture and Director (less convinced on the Writing nod). This is the end of the road for it, but it was one of my favorites this year and the sort of fresh, bold filmmaking that the Academy should be honoring. Also happy that Q Wallis got a Best Actress nod.

- Still, shouldn’t we cap the Picture noms at 7?

- I guess we can’t really pretend that Bradley Cooper isn’t the real deal anymore. I am as culpable as anyone on this, I have spent the last two years convinced that he would start dating a Kardashian and vanish into the ether.

- How soon can we give Daniel Day-Lewis his Oscar?

- The only Director nod that I would contest is Ang Lee’s for Life of Pi. Also, where is the support from this movie coming from? Almost everyone that I know in Hollywood is lukewarm on it.

- Also on the Directors: I’m not the biggest fan of Zero Dark Thirty, but where is Kathryn Bigelow? I’m not convinced that she is deserving, but — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — AMPAS does itself no favors on its long-standing criticism that it disempowers female filmmakers when it shuts out the female director of one of the year’s most highly-lauded movies.

- Good Supporting Actor list, but I would have preferred either Leo or Sam Jackson over Christoph Waltz.

- My thoughts on Prometheus are well-documented, but I will allow it its Special Effects nom.

- Pretty clear that I need to go see Amour.

- Looks more than ever like Lincoln is the presumptive winner, which should make no one sad. But… Let’s go Beasts!

A Complete List of the Movies I Watched in 2012

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:22:00 -0500

The Jentleman took in 96 movies in 2012, heavily weighted towards the 2000s (with an average year of 2003). After the jump, the full list. Coming soon: The Worst Movies of 2012 (That I Saw).

Yulki 2 2012

Haywire 2012

Man on a Ledge 2012

Chronicle 2012

Safe House 2012

Wanderlust 2012

Being Flynn 2012

John Carter 2012

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen 2012

21 Jump Street 2012

The Hunger Games 2012

Project X 2012

Goon 2012

Damsels in Distress 2012

Sound Of My Voice 2012

The Cabin In The Woods 2012

The Avengers 2012

Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter 2012

The Dictator 2012

Moonrise Kingdom 2012

Snow White and the Huntsman 2012

The Intouchables 2012

Prometheus 2012

The Master 2012

The Dark Knight Rises 2012

The Campaign 2012

Beasts of the Southern Wild 2012

Ted 2012

Lawless 2012

Looper 2012

Argo 2012

Seven Psychopaths 2012

The Sessions 2012

Skyfall 2012

Lincoln 2012

Anna Karenina 2012

Hitchcock 2012

Hyde Park on Hudson 2012

Life of Pi 2012

Silver Linings Playbook 2012

This Is 40 2012

Bernie 2012

Jiro Dreams of Sushi 2012

Django Unchained 2012

Les Miserables 2012

Promised Land 2012

War Horse 2011

Real Steel 2011

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close 2011

The Help 2011

Amnesty 2011

The Iron Lady 2011

Bridesmaids 2011

Hugo 2011

The Flowers of War 2011

Thin Ice 2011

Crazy, Stupid, Love. 2011

A Separation 2011

Margin Call 2011

Tangled 2010

The Joneses 2010

Synecdoche, New York 2008

Paranormal Activity 2006

Accepted 2006

Half Nelson 2006

Brick 2006

Man On Wire 2006

Collateral 2004

Punch-Drunk Love 2002

Adaptation. 2002

Being John Malkovich 1999

Office Space 1999

The Big Lebowski 1998

Rounders 1998

The Thin Red Line 1998

Good Will Hunting 1997

Boogie Nights 1997

Billy Madison 1995

Seven 1995

Heathers 1989

Who Framed Roger Rabbit 1988

Die Hard 1988

Full Metal Jacket 1987

Raising Arizona 1987

Blue Velvet 1986

Kramer vs Kramer 1979

Midnight Cowboy 1969

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 1969

Bonnie and Clyde 1967

Doctor Zhivago 1965

I Vitelloni 1953

The African Queen 1951

Nosferatu 1922

Foster

In Orange

DailyLounge.com: Handicapping the Best Picture Race

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:19:10 -0500

DailyLounge.com: Handicapping the Best Picture Race:

Go over to Daily Lounge for the Jentleman’s quick take on the state of the Best Picture race.

Space Babies and Orbital Ballet: The Cinematic Non-Narrative of “2001”

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:35:00 -0500

Or, The AFI List Project #15: 2001: A Space Odyssey

For a movie so championed as a chilling parable of the final and necessary opposition between man and its mechanical creations, 2001: A Space Odyssey devotes remarkably little time to fleshing out the conflict between computer and the astronauts that it is trying to kill. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” has entered the lexicon as the most memorable line from cinema’s most celebrated piece of science fiction, but the movie is fixated on far more cosmic themes than Dr Bowman’s derring-do in dismantling his ship’s microchip brain. The origins of human behavior; the insignificance of man in the infinite scale of the heavens; birth, death, and resurrection – it is The Tree of Life, but better, in spaceships, and shot half a century earlier.

Nonetheless, it is the battle between man and machine that automatically draws the eye, almost certainly because it is the easiest narrative chunk to grab onto in a movie that stubbornly resists approaching any sort of conventional storyline. We spend the first quarter of the film watching apes scratch themselves as they slowly discover fire, war, and the usefulness of tools, then fast-forward millions of years to the Space Age imagination of what the year 2001 would look like, including a long sequence of jaw-dropping virtuosity that turns spaceflight into the delicacy of ballet. The conflict between HAL and Keir Dullea’s Bowman takes place over perhaps half an hour, and then we progress to Kubrick’s psychedelic vision of man’s future evolution into – what? – a gigantic, glowing space fetus.

I first saw 2001 when I was around sixteen, and my first reaction, as the dissonant modernist overture played over black, was to wonder if the DVD was broken; when the movie ended, I walked away confused and irritated by the movie’s refusal to offer me a conventional storyline. Almost a decade later, with the benefit of a little more age and a much longer list of movies watched, there is no denying the film’s fundamental brilliance, but I still think my sixteen-year-old self was justified in being confused by the movie. How are we to judge a movie that plays by a set of rules that is totally different from those which we have been taught to abide by? And what are we even supposed to look for in such a movie? A frequent knock against the Hollywood system is that its movies are predictable, and it’s true that, once you’ve seen enough films, it’s possible to pinpoint at the beginning the seemingly throwaway piece of dialogue that will come back as the answer to the central question at the end. Nonetheless, that very predictability – the embedded knowledge of how the story should function, and of how the protagonist should relate to those around him – is the framework that helps us to recognize when a film reaches truths and emotions that are beyond what the formula usually permits.

The standard rules cannot apply to 2001, though, because the scale of the story is so far beyond that which the rules govern. The vast majority of movies focus on the individual human experience, be it in fantasizing about how we wish that experience worked (as is the case with almost every romantic comedy) or in trying to portray one individual’s struggles (often with a causal moral message). Occasionally, a movie dedicates itself to making a thematic point, either with portentous seriousness or with lighter-than-air frivolity(Love Actually, for example). 2001 instead blows up the appropriate subject matter of cinema to be the place of man in the cosmos: it tells a story not about man but about mankind. We grasp onto the man vs machine subplot because it is the section of the film that most closely resembles the standard narrative –and that should not be surprising, because the standard narrative is what comes closest to our lived experience. It is not hard to find resonance with our own lives in the portrayal of an individual’s story. It is hard, though, to find resonance in a story about the abstract conception of the collective past and future history of the human race.

With reference to 2001 specifically, then, the question must be whether embedding a comprehensible, complete narrative chunk into a larger four-act structure is the capstone that allows the film to function or if doing so allows the audience to avoid grappling with an unfamiliar narrative structure that uses individuals to tell a collective story. Frequent readers of the Journal will be unsurprised to discover that, in the eyes of this critic, both answers are to some degree true. On the one hand, without the HAL / Bowman conflict that makes up the third of 2001’s four acts, it is easy to imagine that the film could end up plagued by the same issues that so thoroughly marginalized The Tree of Life last year. That movie has an extremely vocal and also extremely small cabinet of supporters – a cabinet that, with time and effort, may well move the needle on critical consensus regarding the movie – but the vast majority of people who watched it walked out puzzled, enraged, or unmoved. In giving the audience something to latch onto, 2001 opens a window into the more cosmic narrative that is its raison d’etre: given something comprehensible, audiences can at least take in that which is less so.

By the same token, though, comprehension very rarely comes in the act of doing something – our remembered experience, and the dialogue that we engage in about it, is as central to our understanding of a narrative as is the immediate impression that it made on us. As such, even with an impression of Kubrick’s larger project in 2001, its most comprehensible narrative chunk, as the thing we grasp onto in the film, can replace the overarching project with a smaller, less interesting claim.

I don’t mean to suggest that Kubrick’s portrayal of conflict between man and machine is uninteresting or unrewarding: for what it is, HAL’s effort to kill his overseers is a rich and well-constructed piece of narrative, and is, I think, essential to the movie’s overall interest in creation and evolution. It is not, however, the most interesting or most essential aspect of the movie as a whole – becoming so only because it is a recognizable narrative in a film that is more like a poem than a story. 2001 is a non-narrative: a story, but not really. Stories have specific characters that move from one place to another; either they change or they don’t, but they have a journey. Well, there is an individual’s journey in 2001, but it isn’t what the movie is about, and the central movement is that of a species’s journey from created to creator to divinity.

Delving into the meanings and functions of 2001 would demand an essay – even a book – all to itself, and I don’t think I’m qualified to be the one to do it. This is a singular film, largely because its project is almost unique in cinema; Intolerance and The Tree of Life come the closest, but the former is more expository while the second doesn’t succeed. It would be oversimplistic to say that there is little room in the modern cinema for this sort of project: the fact that I can think of only three movies of its type in an almost century-long period should demonstrate that it’s an entirely different sort of beast, and one that must be entirely artist-driven, in the sense that no studio would ever dream this sort of thing up and therefore it would take a lot of clout to get a movie like this made.

Or, perhaps, it’s simply because it succeeds at what it wants to do that 2001 is so singular: it is the greatest film by one of the greatest directors in the brief history of the medium, and the efforts of lesser directors trying to do the same thing nonetheless end up firmly rooted in the ground. There are some works of art the greatness of which defy analysis. 2001 is one of them.

DailyLounge.com: The Art of the Short

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:11:45 -0500

DailyLounge.com: The Art of the Short:

Inspired by my current short film endeavors, check out my thoughts on DL regarding the art of the short film.

Hiatus

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 20:38:13 -0500

JFJ is on hiatus for production of a short film. Look for it here, along with further articles, in mid to late December.

A Brief Genealogy of “Looper”

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:16:59 -0400

In a year of highly-hyped movies that were supposed to be great – that by all accounts should have been great – Looper is an anomaly, a comparatively small-budget (at $30 million) high-concept sci-fi that was almost under-marketed and that landed with a soft bang last weekend to universal praise and decent box office. It’s been drawing frequent comparisons to Inception, and with good reason: differences in scale aside, we’re not used to our action movies being intellectually challenging, and both films tackle mind-bending subject matter with similarly mind-bending directorial deftness. Just as notably, they’re both original creations in a world where the familiar is king.

Of course, as has been pointed out by others, Looper’s antecedents aren’t just easily traceable, they’re practically referenced within the script. There’s a strong argument to be made that this movie couldn’t have existed if Christopher Nolan hadn’t visited his dreams-with-dreams Rubix cube of a movie on the world back in 2010. Its thematic connection to Twelve Monkeys, another science fiction saga that takes as its subject the circularity of time, feels almost intentionally reinforced by the strange coincidence of Bruce Willis starring in both movies. There are even points where it leads like a proto-X-Men, except that mutation hasn’t quite reached a point where it can be anything but a lame party trick.

For all its sci-fi bona fides, though, the film that Looper has inherited most of its DNA from is not any of those but the 1978 thriller The Boys From Brazil, most notable today for giving all-time good guy Gregory Peck, as fugitive arch-Nazi Josef Mengele, license to read lines like, “Shut up, you ugly bitch!” That film – I suppose you could label it science fiction as well, though it bears little resemblance to what that means today – stars Laurence Olivier as Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, tasked with hunting down Peck’s Mengele. Along the way, he discovers that Mengele has been applying his medical expertise during his exile to further his goal of the return to power of the Third Reich, using samples of Hitler’s tissue to create clones and planting the resultant children in families resembling that in which the young Adolf grew up.

At the end of the movie, having vanquished Mengele, Lieberman is asked to give up the names and locations of Mengele’s ninety-four Hitler clones. He refuses, burning his list, on the grounds that they are only boys and may grow up to be different (though it must be noted that the story does not seem quite as optimistic as its protagonist). Though time travel was not an option for a story set in the ‘70s, Boys is concerned with the same questions of circularity and determinism that drive Looper. It is for the better that, in both cases, the question is not a scientific one so much as a moral one: can we change who we are, or are our futures already written? Do we do good or ill because to do so is intrinsic to who we are, or because we choose one or the other?

Though The Boys from Brazil ends on a darker note than does Looper, neither movie, as is appropriate in dealing with such an open-ended, unanswerable question, offers a clear-cut answer: in each, the hero makes a choice, but there is no way for him, or us, to know if that choice will have the impact that he hopes it will. Is fate written in stone? Maybe so – but, in the absence of knowing, we cannot but hope that, given the opportunity, history will take a different path.

There are often times when Looper is too smart for its own good – especially because the fabric of its world starts to unravel as soon as you tug on one of its many loose threads – and Johnson is clearly aware of this, going so far as to have old-Joe tell young-Joe not to ask about time travel, “or else we’ll be here all day, making diagrams with straws.” In other words: don’t question the ground rules, because if you do, you’ll miss the big picture. That messiness notwithstanding, the film’s thematic richness separates it from almost every other genre movie that we’ve seen this year. You don’t need to watch all that closely to see the narrative direction that the movie is taking. For once, however, it doesn’t matter that you know from the outset that the ‘TK gene’ is going play a major role in where the story ends up, or that the little kid is going to end up as the key to the entire narrative. Most genre movies live and die by the twist; Looper has bigger things on its mind.

That being so, its most recent relation is probably 2006’s Children of Men, a less commercial, somewhat more accomplished picture about a dystopian future in which children have ceased to be borne. Thematically diverse though they maybe, they nonetheless base themselves on the same underlying concept: that what we think of as ‘genre’ filmmaking – science fiction, fantasy, horror, thriller – need not be limited to frights and thrills and instant gratification, but offer alternate lenses through which to see the world and so can provide a different perspective on it.

Is it to its detriment that the genealogy of Looper is so easily read – that the movies it emerges from can be identified so easily, that they even seem to make up part of its texture? I would argue that it is not. The obviousness of its antecedents, I think, points more to how few movies like this that there are. If we are to point to a flaw, it is, rather, that it remains cold from beginning to end: intelligent and thought-provoking though it may be, it fails to connect deeply on an emotional level. Nonetheless, it may be the year’s best film so far, entertaining, visually compelling, and thought-provoking from beginning to end.

"The Master": The Non-Review

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 22:31:09 -0400

I started writing a review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest offering The Master a week ago, in the aftermath of seeing it projected in glorious 70mm at the Arclight Dome in Hollywood. Yet the more I tried to say about it, the more I found myself wandering in different directions that had little to do with the movie I had actually watched: reflections on American auteurism, contrasts between the new film and Anderson’s previous work, and commentary on Anderson’s use of 70mm are all relevant to how we think about The Master, but all of them deal with the film as it exists in cinematic discourse rather than with the work of art itself.

The film, among the year’s most hotly anticipated among the cinephiliac crowd, is ostensibly the story of a postwar cult leader as seen through the eyes of an unstable disciple. Beyond the automatic buzz that came with its being Anderson’s follow-up to 2008’s instant classic There Will Be Blood, The Master has also garnered significant attention for its subject matter, which many believe to be based on the life of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard. Those claims aren’t wrong – the similarity between Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd and Hubbard, and between Dodd’s technique of ‘processing’ and Scientology’s Dianetics – are too obvious to leave room for doubt about where Anderson found the starting point for his script, but it’s not the direct attack on Scientology that it’s been made out to be, either. It is, rather, a point of departure, from which Anderson spins out reflections on postwar discontent, on surrogate fathers and sons, on men trapped by their own legends, and on a number of other equally weighty themes.

It is precisely the multiplicity of its concerns, I think, that made it so initially difficult for me to put down any thoughts on it: though it’s been on my mind for a week and a half, the trouble hasn’t been, “Is it good or bad?” so much as, “How am I supposed to think about this?” In that way, it most closely resembles the most divisive film of 2011, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, another movie that clearly operates on a different set of rules but refuses to say what those rules are. In fact, many of the two films’ constituent elements are the same: gorgeous photography, superb acting from its leads, ambitious projects, and an overarching failure to make an emotional impact on the vast majority of its audience. (Yes, the people who like The Tree of Life love it with the sort of fervent devotion normally reserved for beloved books and movies of childhood, but almost everyone else either hated it or found it boring.)

The difference between the two – and the reason that The Tree of Life is a better film – is that, while The Tree of Life simply fails to accomplish its project, we know what it’s trying to say and can respect its ambition even though it doesn’t really work. The Master, by contrast, is full of questions and ideas and themes, but none of it hangs together coherently. It isn’t that it doesn’t make a point; it’s that it doesn’t have any idea of what point it wants to make. We see many scenes of misanthropy and abuse. We ask questions, now and then, about the ideas that it introduces. We marvel at the clarity and composition of its photography. And, when we walk away, none of it fits together, narratively or thematically.

This kind of mushiness is not unique to The Master in Anderson’s filmography. His shortest movie is Punch Drunk Love, which, though contained and ultimately coherent, offers a bizarre, almost surreal story without signposting how we’re supposed to fit the pieces together. We know when we’ve arrived, but we’re not quite sure how we ended up there. There Will Be Blood stretches that messiness to the point where it almost breaks; it is a grand, operatic piece of work, and it could not accomplish what it does without its acceptance of its own imperfections, but there is no denying that for most of it we pay attention and follow without having any idea where we’re going to end up. Make no mistake: There Will Be Blood earned Anderson The Master, because in the earlier film the audience trusted him to bring them somewhere, and he did. The Master, memorable and challenging as it is, instead wanders in the wilderness and ends in the wilderness. It has the same visual beauty, and its actors are almost as accomplished, and its questions are no less fundamental. The difference is that, unlike the earlier film, The Master doesn’t drive to a point.

That isn’t to say that The Master is bad, or even that it isn’t worth seeing: there is much food for discussion, and there is no shame in not measuring up to the best and most important film of the last decade. It’s almost worth seeing simply as a beautiful object to look at. It is hard, though, to consider it without reflecting on where it does not succeed.

Talking Titles

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 11:30:32 -0400

At work, we’re deep in post on our latest project, and the last thing to polish off before it’s more or less in the can is the title sequence. That means that we’ve been knee deep in archival footage, font choices, and crawl edits, all towards figuring out what our sequence is going to say about the movie. For me, it’s also been a rare opportunity to reflect on an element of the movie narrative that stands outside of its normal rules but that can be used to great effect in enhancing helping the audience to understand what they’re seeing.

If you’re not aware, there’s a significant body of work done towards examining the motivations and processes of individual title sequences; in particular, I highly recommend taking a look at the work published at The Art of the Title, which first gave me the inkling that there might be more going on in these sequences than a simple announcement of who the Executive Producers of the movie were. My goal in this space is more general than anything there: to use the next thousand or so words to sketch out a couple of different ways that the title sequence can be used to enhance the movie that we’re watching.

There are, I think, three primary components to what title sequences can do, all of which complement each other but which may individually be more or less present in a given example. These components are tone, which tells us what kind of movie we’re going to be watching; texture, which helps to ground our belief in the narrative; and information, which transmits to the viewer narrative or background elements that helps him to connect the dots of the coming story more clearly. Which of the three is most emphasized is largely a byproduct of figuring out where the audience needs the most help.

To get started on considering how these elements work together, let us consider the famous title sequence of Star Wars, which, along with being known to practically everyone, is probably the most straightforward example imaginable. Transparently, the title sequence of Star Wars (and of all its sequels) is all about transmitting information: in fact, it’s not properly a credits sequence at all, just a title card over silence (the legendary ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’), followed by the brassy introduction of the title and the golden crawl giving us backstory that fades away into the stars, bridging immediately into the opening shots of the movie with nary an Executive Producer in sight. The sequence, then, is aimed, first, at telling us whom we should be rooting for (one of the great things about Star Wars is that George Lucas tells us straight out that the Empire is evil and never gives the audience a chance to wonder), and, at getting a lot of potentially bulky exposition out of the way. We don’t need hear Princess Leia explaining why she’s on this ship fleeing from an even bigger ship, because it’s already been given to us in the crawl. At the same time, the text and music indicate to us just what kind of movie we’re going to be watching: from the first opening trumpet blast with those gigantic, gaudy yellow letters streaming across the stream, we know that this is going to be huge and heroic.

By contrast, let’s consider another series with an instantly recognizable form for its title sequences. In the James Bond movies, the title sequence is truly a credits sequence, a long interlude in which everyone from the director down to the 2^nd Assistant Best Boy gets his moment to have his name on screen. These sequences, however, are never about giving us pertinent information so much as about establishing the movies’ tone. Watching the title sequence of a Bond movie, with its psychedelic colors and gigantic floating women, places us squarely in a fantasy world of sex and spies. But there is always something unsettling in these sequences as well: Bond may live a fantasy life, but part and parcel to it is that the world he inhabits is full of peril and not a little madness. The construction of the title sequence, positioned at the head of the movie, signposts for us the kind of story that we’re going to see.

For an example of texture, finally, we may consider a movie like Catch Me If You Can, which features a retro animated sequence, almost straight out of The Pink Panther, of a detective trying to chase down a thief amidst a labyrinth of airplanes and ladies’ legs. If you’ve seen or know anything about Catch Me If You Can, you know that it is not a silly caper of the type that the sequence hearkens back to; it is not even really a caper, possessing a dark seriousness and legitimate moral undertones. It is told, however, with an eye towards those kinds of movies, and it is the levity of its structure and storytelling, in combination with its fundamental seriousness, that make it the most sophisticated of Spielberg’s movies. The title sequence here tells us about the ‘feel’ of the movie, in a tactile sense – what to expect from how the movie is going to be told.

(It is hard to separate cleanly what I mean by ‘tone’ and what I mean by ‘texture’ in this context, though the concepts seem sufficiently distinct to me to merit their own examinations. The clearest way I can think of to divide them is this: tone is the overarching sentiment aroused by the story, while texture is more like the way in which we feel that sentiment.)

Of course, it’s unusual for a title sequence to have so single-mindedly clear a purpose as that of Star Wars, and even within these three main components there are different end purposes for these sequences. That’s most obvious, of course, for those sequences that seek to transmit information. Star Wars transparently tries to offer pertinent narrative information to bring us up to speed on enough backstory that we can understand what’s going on on screen. Perhaps the most celebrated credits sequence of recent years is the virtuosic design for Watchmen, which carries the viewer through a fictitious fifty-year history of costumed heroes in the space of a couple minutes. This historical data is, yes, backstory of a sort, but it’s aimed more at enriching our understanding of the world than at cluing us directly into the plot. Finally, moving to TV, the title sequence for Game of Thrones (as one excellent article at Art Of The Title explores) is meant to provide geographical data for each episode, letting the viewer know just where in Westeros he’s going to be for the coming fifty-odd minutes.

The title sequence, in other words, is a sort of spandrel – a necessary but originally useless stretch of film that has come to represent an opportunity for directors and producers to say something unique and pertinent about their film and to help guide their viewers into the viewing process. Sometimes, they’re not necessary at all, and get blended into the central narrative as name cards appearing over the movie’s opening shots, or over black. Often, they’re a chance for the people involved to do something cool and different – as was the case in last year’s most celebrated sequence, that of The Girl in the Dragon Tattoo, which didn’t have much to do with anything but which was certainly interesting to watch. And, many times, they have more of an impact on the meaning of a movie than the casual viewer will realize.

DailyLounge.com: The Hardest Books to Make Into Movies

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:01:16 -0400

DailyLounge.com: The Hardest Books to Make Into Movies:

I promise, there are some irons in the fire and some work to come. In the meantime — my post on the most difficult books to adapt, via DailyLounge.com.