Days of the Locust

Big Changes

2005-10-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted since the weekend because I was preparing for my Oral Qualifying Exam (no jokes please)this morning. I passed. Now instead of being a PhD student, I am a PhD candidate. Woo-Hoo.

Caption contest

2005-10-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

"One thing I learned from working for Nixon, Mr. President: When there's a pile of bodies at your feet, just keep looking up."

There ought to be a law ...

2005-10-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

In reference to the last post, apparently there is.

Story, Story, Story

2005-10-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

After telling Anne Thompson that "The studio model has to be rethought," Steven Sodervergh adds: "I want them to sell 'Bubble' DVDs in the theater lobby."

I missed Bubble at Toronto so I can't weigh in on the film itself but Soderbergh's idea of selling DVDs of a film in the lobby of the theater where it's just played raises some interesting issues. The concept isn't that much different from Disney selling all manner of merch in the lobby of the El Capitan to customers on their way out. A plush toy or a poster stands in as a subsitute for and extension of the direct experience of the film, itself. From the earliest days of my VHS collection I recognized that owning a film -- on whatever format, VHS, laserdisc, DVD -- operates in the same way. I don't have to re-watch a movie in my collection to feel connected to the movie again, to access the experience of it in a satisfying way. Like looking at a movie poster, a DVD is a kind of fetish object, a substitute for/extenstion of the real thing. A DVD in the lobby, however, would be more appealing to adults who are less likely to buy a poster or a plush toy for themselves for fear of being labelled some kind "fan." Afterall, what adult wants to risk being mistaken for someone who may still live with their parents? Buying a DVD doesn't send the same signal (unless it's a Dr. Who box set).

Still, the succcess of Soderbergh's plan depends entirely on whether or not the movie is actually good. No one is going to plunk down $20 bucks for a DVD with the bad taste of a lousy movie still fresh in their mouths. Which is why, as it ever was, it's all about story, story, story. Keven Drum makes the point here. The only thing I would add to the discussion, however, is to disabuse the notion that Hollywood movies suck now in comparison to some golden age when Hollywood movies didn't mostly suck. Kevin says of the studios:

If they think Transporter 2, Flightplan, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, and The Constant Gardener are examples of a resurgence of great movies, they're setting the bar mighty low. A year from now no one is going to look back and think of those as memorable films.

Aside from the fact that The 40 Year-Old Virgin was fucking hilarious Kevin's complaint seems to assume that these films were made to be remembered. Think of it this way. Many film historians argue that 1939 was the peak year of the classical studio system in terms of quality. That year the studios managed to make Stagecoach, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Only Angels Have Wings,Ninotchka, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Dark Victory. Without a doubt this top ten holds its own, if not outright trounces, the top ten of any other single year in Hollywood history. But, according to Joel W. Finler's indispensible book of studio histories and statistics, The Hollywood Story, the eight major studios released an addition 357 movies in 1939, the vast majority of which are completely forgotten and probably wisely so. Anyone down for a revival screening of Columbia's Blondie Takes a Vacation? Or how about MGM's Honolulu, which the AFI film catalogue describes thusly:

Dashing film star Brooks Mason and shy pineapple plantation owner George Smith meet in Hollywood, and upon discovering that they are exact doubles, they hit upon a cunning scheme.Brooks will assume George's identity and return to Honolulu for a restful vacation, while George will fulfill his yearnings for glamor and sophistication by substituting for Brooks on a personal appearance tour.

Interested now?

My point being that even in its best years Hollywood has always made more shitty movies than good ones. Any given year we're damn lucky to get five Hollywood movies to carry away with us into the future. Most years, even with a few highlights, yield zero titles destined to stand the test of time. If, as Soderbergh and Kevin both suggest, the studio system is broken, it's always been broken. Kevin asks, "What keeps Hollywood from producing decent scripts?" My answer would be nothing, excpet for the fact that Hollywood's business has always been about quantity rather than quality. Not every movie can be great, or even good, but the studios, huge conglomerates that they are, can't afford to leave the theaters empty until a great script comes along. Of course, almost every studio tries to produce some number of quality films for Oscar consideration if only so everyone in the industry can live with thenselves but that doesn't change the fact that, by and large, they are in the business of producing heaping piles of crap. Which is why avid movie goers have always been a lot like the guy in the joke: "There has to be a pony in here somehere."

Shining

2005-09-29T19:08:00.000-07:00

This is the funniest, smartest short film (mov file) I've seen in a long, long time.

Stop, Hey, Look Around ...

2005-09-29T17:21:00.000-07:00

Which political party is this asshole taking about:

This is not the actions of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority - it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and sieze all power for itself...it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made.

Why it's the Democratic Party, of course. Recognize it? I didn't think so. Hunter pretty much says it all here and I urge you to read it. We'll need a lot more of these kind of steely-eyed pep talks as we slog our way through the nightmare political world that the modern Republican Party has been slouching toward for four decades.

What Mark Noonan wants to say but which even his feverish, addled mind recognizes as pure madness and depravity, is that he and the Republicans are willing to destroy this country to save Tom DeLay from prison. Noonan and his ilk, to the extent that he has supporters and speaks for them, are now talking about turning to violence, real violence, to ensure the corrupt spoils of a select few political hacks, cronies and incompetents. They talk about violence now but how long until they work up the horrible will to act on their words? I just happen to be reading Richard J. Evans The Coming of the Third Reich at the moment which I beleive I first came across on Billmon's reading list. It's a good read, especially now. Covering the years from the end of WWI to 1933, Evans recounts in rivetting detail the failure of liberal democracy in the face of rising tyranny. Evans writes of Germany post WWI:

"... the language of politics was permeated by metaphors of warfare, the other party was an enemy to be smashed, and struggle, terror and violence became widely accepted as legitimate weapons in the political struggles. Uniforms were everywhere. Politics, to reverse a famous dictum ... became war pursued by other means ..."(72)

Noonan would have you believe that it is the Democratic Party that has injected metaphors of war and violence into American politics, turned the Republicans into enemies to be "smashed." Hunter lays out the particulars in why this is utter rubbish. I'll only ask, does this sound right to you? Does this make sense to you on its face? Even today, who in the Democratic Party, or any of its supporters, have evoked the image of civil war in discussions of political opposition? The Republicans and the conservative movement are talking violence now. We've seen Reblubican mobs at work in Florida election offices in 2000. How much longer until we see it again? And will we be ready to meet them?

Of course, it may not come to this. Afterall, we already know that Noonan and guys like him are too chickenshit to fight in Iraq.

Confessions of a blah blah blah

2005-09-29T07:03:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest video pick in the LA Weekly: Let's Go With Pancho Villa!

You can find my capsule review of Serenity here. (Just scroll down.)
It's not a ringing endorsement. I never saw Firefly but I was a fan of Buffy even if I tuned out around seaon 3 or 4. I've just never had the staying power for TV dramas. It's the same with sports seasons: I'm in for the first two games then tune out until the play offs or the final. I am not cut out for serial narrative forms, I guess. I like my visual narratives (I do, afterall, enjoy reading)told in one sitting. So Whedon always had a better chance getting his story and characters to a guy like me in movie form but they seem to have lost something in the compression. As I say in my short Weekly review the most engaging thing about the film are its central characters and their relationships. The action drags, the plot bores and the fx are subpar. On the fx front, I recognize that Whedon may have been going for a certain look on purpose. He certainly takes risks staging the film's first major fx sequence -- a violent chase between two space craft -- in the broad daylight of a desert-like planet. But the lack of shadows puts every detail of the composite and rendering out there for scrutiny and it isn't always pretty. Over a longer period of time, like say in a TV show, the personality of the characters may have won out against the banal plot and the technical faults (again I haven't seen the show) but in the movie they battle to a draw. To discuss the ultimate flaw of the film's plot would require a giving away the ending so I won't go there but suffice it to say that in today's media climate the ending of the film just wouldn't fly.

But what about the marketing campaign in which Universal invited political bloggers from across the spectrum, from Josh Marshall to Powerline, to spread tickets amongst their readers and offer their reviews. This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is not new. The studios do it all the time with films like this, bringing in fan club members, fan magazine writers, and community groups and high schools to get the buzz going. A saturation marketing campaign may get your attention but a friend's tip on a flick is gold.

What's new here, or at least relatively new, is the addition of blogs to this age old strategy. I'm sure that old media critics, like myself (not that I'm old, just that I write for an old medium), are expected to get all huffy about this. What, after all, qualifies John Hindraker to write about movies? Harrumph! Although seriously, who would take movie going advice from a guy who rated Mike Brown's recent testimony performance "most impressive"? Get that speech ready Rob Schneider, your Powerline approved Oscar is on its way.

But hey, the movies, at least Hollywood movies, are the most democratic art form going so I'm not going to fall into the elitist trap. Just because I've sat through The Decalogue (hey maybe I'm a serial narrative guy afterall!) doesn't mean I'm better euqipped to tell you whether Serenity sucks.

The ethical considerations that always come up are no less murky. Everyone knows that segments of the press whore themselves out to the studios for perks and access. At the Serenity screening I attended in Los Angeles a young pup of a press member (because I am getting on in years) was complaining about the Universal press junket the night before: "I was there to cover it for the magazine and from a press perspective it was a disaster. I got the large poster but then no one could tell me where to get it signed." I swear. This is what he said. I will not argue that I am on any firmer ethical ground than this guy. I need access to films to do my job and any time the studio doesn't like what my paper is doing it can restrict that access. But does that mean I play nice occassionally to keep my paper in good stead? No. I've never done that either in my theatrical reviews or with my video column. In both instances I always think of myself as answering first to my readers and then to my editor. The studios needs or desires simply aren't in the equation. What's my guarantee? There isn't one. You have to read my stuff and learn to trust me based on what kind of critic you think I am: A whore or the other kind. Of course, the same goes for Hindraker or Marshall or Kevin Drum if they go in for advance access to films or books (remember, were not talking about reviewing something you see on TV or pay to see in the theaters). On that level there really is no difference between me and them but that doesn't change the fundamental fact that at this most basic level the whole process begins compromised: We depend on the studios/distributors to do what we do. Our readers are then left to their own devices to determine if we have allowed that original sin, if you will, to taint what we do.

The fact that the process is fundamentally compromised is what made it so surprising that, as far as I could tell, every blog who was given free tickets seemed to go along with minimum reservations. Did anyone out there actually say no? Kevin Drum put it best:

However, what I'm really struck by is the fact that bloggers can apparently be bought so cheaply. I mean, a free movie ticket? That's what, ten bucks? Sheesh.

So basically, for the price of a movie ticket, the new media gladly allowed itself to help the old media with what may be its oldest tactic: manufactured word-of-mouth. I wonder if it would have made a difference if the NY Times offered all these bloggers a free subscription to their new premium service as long as the bloggers wrote about (even if they couldn't link to) the editorials. Is it just because it was the movies that everyone thought, "What the hell?"

Oil on the Brain

2005-09-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum dissects Bush's oil-addled brain here.

Speaking of which, I just moved the recently released Rollover to the top of my Netflix list. I'm a fan of paranoid thrillers and while this one may not prove to be all that thrilling it sounds ridiculously paranoid.

On another note, I'll heading out to see Serenity tonight to review for the Weekly. I'll keep you posted and I've got a thing or two to say about the movie's blog related marketing campaign.

Toronto Film Festival -- Wrap up

2005-09-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

It's impossible to sum up a film festival the size of Toronto's, which screened 350 films this years, with any sort of overarching authority. Was it a good year or a bad year, on the whole? Who's to say. No one can see everything. There were films, such as Ballets Russes that generated a lot of buzz (not the least of all because the filmmakers, in a canny move, brought one of their film's older subjects to the fest and he apparently charmed the socks off audiences and critics alike)which I never saw. And as seems to happen at every festival I've been to, from Sundance to Sarajevo, I didn't see any of the major award winners, incuding Tsotsi (Audience Award) and Sa-kwa (FIPRESCI). All of which is to say that no matter what else you hear about this year's festival, the one I went to was fantastic.

Battle in Heaven confirmed for me the power and daring of a new voice on the scene. The Wayward Cloud showed an old favorite still stirring things up in entirely unexpected and innovative ways. In Harsh Times I found an American writer-director intelligently tackling intensely personal material that implicates all of us to one degree or another. Three films to carry away from any festival ain't a bad week at the movies.

I have to admit though that the thing I love most about the Toronto fest (aside from the fact that the love of my life works for it) is that it is in Canada, of course. I always feel most like an American in Canada. Or rather, I always feel most like what I think the average American feels like when I am in Canada. I am a political junkie and follow American politics and policies very closely. I am obsessed with it. I have, however, deliberately and scrupulously avoided learning anything specific about Canadian politics since I first went up north six years ago after K. and I started dated. My ignorance has paid off. Now, when I walk down the streets of Toronto I am utterly oblivious to the larger contexts and controversies surrounding me, free from the rage, judgement, righteousness and sadness that can come from knowing too much about the way things work. When I see a homeless person on the street in Toronto I can drop a "toonie" in his cup and walk away without the slightest bit of frustration over the failures of the political and economic system I live in. Yes, I know it's all still capitalism but I have a different relationship to it in Canada. I don't recognize it in the same way, if at all. I don't know if such a willful naivete would be possible in other countries. History and politics bear down on you in Europe, they're unavoidable. At resort spots like the Bahamas or Jamaica, the inequities of capital, I suspect having never been to either place, might be too sharp in the sunlight to ignore or walk by. I have no doubt that would be the case anywhere in Africa. I don't know, maybe somewhere in Asia?

At any rate, Canadian politics are a blank slate to me which is how I imagine the average American -- the ones who don't vote and can't name the three branches of government -- must feel in their own country as they go about their otherwise rich and full lives. Which is not to say that I think this ignorance is blissful for the average American -- everyone has it rough sometime whether they can name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or not -- just that it seems, to me, to be a less tangled up way of being in the world.

I have come to really appreciate this space of ignorance that I have cultivated for myself during festival time. Drawing films and filmmakers from around the world the festival is awash in politics, it swims in controversy, it exists to shock people from their usual way of seeing. All of the films that I loved at this year's festival did that for me, to varying degrees. That is, of course, one reason why I love the movies but even if being shaken up is a welcome experience it isn't always pleasant. Sometimes it can be downright traumatic. Which is always when I'm most thankful for the cushion that Canada has become for me, to be able to step out in the light of a warm Toronto day, merge back into the bustling flow of the sidewalk crowd and dissapear with my thoughts into a reassuring fantasy.

Confessions of a blah, blah, blah

2005-09-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest video pick in the LA Weekly.

Getting back to normal

2005-09-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

Back in Los Angeles, trying to get everything back on track. Can't find my cell phone. Hmmm. I'll post a final round up of the festival tonight. In the meantime, here's my top ten features (out of 30 seen and yes I got lazy) with addendum:

Battle in Heaven
The Wayward Cloud
History of Violence
Be With Me
Harsh Times
The Well
The Proposition
Adam's Apples
Entre Ses Mains
Fallen

It's a sex and violence hit parade. I was disappointed with Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and really disappointed wth Mary and Dear Wendy. On reflection, I think the most memorable stuff I saw was on the first Wavelengths program, Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, the Oliveira short Douro, Faina Fluvial and sitespecific_ROMA 04 which was amazing.

UPDATE; Did I say tonight? I meant Saturday morning. I've been home a week and I'm still living out of my suitcase!

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 9 & 10

2005-09-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

The last two days of the festival I largely stuck to public screenings except for an early Saturday morning press screening of Žižek, a documentary about Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek. I've come across Žižek's work here and there in my academic film studies but as I've never really taken to psychoanalytic film theory he never really had much impact. That isn't to say that he doesn't have some interesting and very illuminating things to say about film but I have never found that the work of mastering Lacanian theory pays off in any greater expressivity or clarity in my own writing so I've tended to leave it at the critical buffet table. Director Astra Taylor doesn't spend that much time with Žižek's film crticism, however, prefering to focus on his larger takes on capitalism, culture, ideology and the subject. If your familiar with Žižek you will learn that he was one of the first and most influential critics to fuse Lacanian psychoanalysis with a Marxist critique of capitalism. If you knew that already, you aren't liable to learn much more because that's about as much as Taylor explains with any lucidity about what it is that Žižek is trying to do. At least, I didn't walk out of the theater any more convinced. By and large, this documentary limits itself to spreading and expanding, not Žižek's ideas, but his reputation in the academic world as a bomb throwing egoist, the intellectual equivalent of a rock star. Like Derrida before it, it is too much blinded by the light of its subject to be very illuminating. There is, however, a wonderful scene in the film when Žižek goes shopping for DVDs.

In New York for a reading, he stops into a video store to pour over the shelves with the careful discrimination of a kid allowed to open one present before Christmas. Confused by the shelving system he practically leaps at the counter person for some clue, a key on how to unlock it and find what he wants. He grows increasingly animated and excited moving from one title to the next totally succumbing to the pleasures of consumption that he spends so much effort in his work taking apart. When Taylor herself offers -- problematically, I think, for a documentary filmmaker -- to pay for the two DVDs Žižek picks out (one of which I noticed was this)
Žižek does what any self-respecting cinefile would do: He goes back to buy some more.

Witnessing such un-re(de?)constructed joy in movie watching, indeed, even in the anticipation of movie watching, says more to me about the power of cinema to compel both our attentions and pleasures, inspite of ourselves, than a lot of what passes for theory these days.

Confessions of a blah, blah, blah

2005-09-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

Here's my latest video pick in the LA Weekly.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 8

2005-09-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

I caught four public screenings yesterday: Diane Bertrand's L'Annulaire, Phillipe Faucon's La Trahison, Theo Van Gogh's 06/05: The Sixth of May and (with K.s mom) Anna Villaceque's Riviera.

At the first screening I met a guy, probably in his early 60s, who flew up from Massachusetts for the festival. He comes every year, he told me, because it's the only place he can see the kinds of movies he likes with the kind of audiences he likes. He lives in a retirement community only a few hours outside of Boston but he can't get into the city on a regular basis to see movies. When an art film does come to his neck of the woods, he says, he has to suffer through the people, mostly seniors, around him. "All the time," he says "It's 'What did he say?', 'Who's she again?' They have to give each other running commentaries during the movie because they can't hear it or they can't see it. Ever year when I get home from the festival I spend a few weeks depressed because I know it's another 12 months before the next one." He bought tickets for 36 movies this year. In my mind, this is the purest kind of cinephilia: 36 tickets at around $20 bucks a pop, plus airfare and hotel for 10 days on the outside chance that a handful of the titles he had picked, most totally blind without any idea of what to expect, would be worth remembering.

He showed me a little index card on which he had carefully graphed his day's schedule of four films marking places and times noting the times in between that he would have to get from one theater to another, or grab lunch. At the end of the day he had scheduled himself a massage. He had the festival wired. I was somewhat in awe of his cinephilia but there was something kind of sad about the guy as well. I told him that I was a film student and minor league critic and that K. was working for the festival, hoping to break into programming. "I would give my right arm to be a programmer," he said. I didn't ask him what he did for a living before he retired but he had the air of a man who wished he had followed a dream long since packed away. Clearly spending his retirement watching movies was a way to compensate but it wasn't always enough. I don't know. Over the last decade, there have been years when I could pay my bills writing about movies and years when it was tough going. Taken altogether though, when I look back on my life am I going to regret spending most of it in darkened rooms watching lights flicker on a wall? Three decades from now will I be sitting in yet another darkened room looking for something in the pictures before me that could salve my regrets or justify my decisions? I guess we'll see.

As for the films I saw yesterday all of them were so-so. 06/05: The Sixth of May hit the fest with the tragic backstory of van Gogh's assassination at the hand of an Islamic extremist who didn't like what the director had to say about Islam's treatment of women in his short documentary Submission. The theater was packed and there was no escaping the sense of morbid fascination in the air as 06/05, van Gogh's last film, just happened to be a fictionalized account of the assassination of popular right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn. The film spins an alternate conspiracy theory to the killing in which the Dutch secret service discover that a group of environmental radicals is plotting to assassinate Fortuyn but allows it happen any way because the sure-to-be-elected Fortuyn was opposed to some military spending bill or something. A photojournalist stumbles on to the plot and the cover-up Blow Up-style and tries to blow the lid off it.

Steeped in the personalities and policies of Dutch politics, there's a lot in the film that sailed straight over my head but even so it never achieves the level of tension required to put over the paranoid political fantasies of its plot.

The only other film really worth mentioning is Anna Villaceque's Riviera if only because of its emergin young star Vahina Giocante. I first saw Giocante at last year's festival in Lila Dit ca . I loved the exuberant, youthful sexuality of that film's coming of age tale and the way director Ziad Doueiri pits it against the racial and cultural tensions of multicultural France. Giocante plays a blonde, ingenue and object of adolescent affection for a young Muslim boy. In Riviera, director Villaceque give Giocante the full Brigid Bardot treatment. The camera is never less than three inches from her face or body, completely shutting out the natural beauty of the Cote d'Azur in favor of a tanned, carnality. Here Giocante plays the sexuall aware and active daughter of a hotel maid, played by a bone fide French film legend, Miou-Miou, a one time beauty herself struggling to cope with being a middle-aged, single working mother in the lap of youthful paradise. In all the film never flies as either a mother-daughter story or as a crime film, which eventually, suddenly, becomes but it announces Giocante's arrival as the newest, latest French sex symbol with international appeal.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 7

2005-09-15T06:37:00.000-07:00

Last night I got to see K. introduce Sophie Fillières's Gentille. Cool. She averages around 10 to 12 intros and Q&As a day at the fest. Later that night, she told me that after the intro she spent the next two hours hanging out with Amos Gitai. So cool.

Gentille was my first public screening here at TIFF, which has two separate program schedules, one for the press and one for the public. It's an isolating arrangement that gives the festival a bifurcated identity. Often attending only the press screenings, it can feel as if the festival is occurring somewhere else, at another theater, in another line, in a whole difference time zone. That is, in part, one of the things that makes Toronto what it is. The festival began 30 years ago as a round up of the best films from other festivals around the world. Under the slogan "The Festival of Festivals" its founders endeavored to bring the best of the international cinema to the Canadian public, not the Canadian press. Three decades later the emphasis remains much the same with the press forced to stand in line for rush tickets if they want to actually see a film with a "real" audience, instead of the jaded industry-types that swarm all over Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance et al. Toronto audiences, in turn, have earned a reputation as a cinema-literate and loving bunch with sales agents and distributors paying close attention to their reactions at the public screenings. While a standing ovation at Cannes is no guarantee of a commercial hit -- indeed, it's almost the opposite -- a standing ovation at Toronto says money in the bank for those doing the buying and selling. (This year's festival saw a marked increase in deal-making over last year as the fest has turned its attentions to developing it as a market. For more biz stuff check here.) I asked K. last night if any films had emerged yet as a front runner in the Audience Award. She hadn't heard of any film generating a stand out amount of audience biz. It'll be a close race this year.

As the fest winds down and most of the big name, high profile films have had their press and industry screenings, I'll be venturing out to try and catch a few public screenings today to see what I might have missed. I'll keep you posted.

Toronto FIlm Festival -- Day 5 & 6

2005-09-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

Today proved to be my wall day, after a screening in the morning I just couldn't get myself back into another theater. It sort of feels like the whole fest is winding down, less people at the press screenings, fewer must see films remaining (if any as far as I can see). The next few days may just be picking up the odds and ends. IN the meantime, here's a smattering of reviews, long and short, from the last two days. I'm still hashing out my thoughts on David Ayer's Harsh Times, it keeps rising in my estimations.

The Proposition: John Hillcoat’s Australian Western, The Proposition, written by musician Nick Cave, leans heavily on the influences of John Ford, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone for its kicks. It’s an unruly bunch to try to corral together and the resulting friction works both for and against the film. Hillcoat, however, has an outstanding cast that pulls the film through its shakier moments, especially when the whole thing threatens to bog down in a stagnant, gory muck.

The incomparable Ray Winstone plays Captain Stanley, a British officer sent to tame the Outback, a vast, arid flatland where both indigenous peoples and European bad men try to stay one step ahead of civilization’s punishing vanguard. It is Captain Stanley’s wife, Martha, played by a delicate Emily Watson, who keeps the Fordian garden in the Stanley’s front yard, its neat, tended rows a miraculous anomaly sheltered behind a white picket fence in the middle of a wild dusty nothing. In addition to taming the frontier beyond, Captain Stanley has also sworn to protect his wife from knowing about the evil that men do, which means he must hide much of himself from her, as well.

While Stanley has nothing but contempt for the officious magistrate who okays massacre as an acceptable policy for dealing with ungrateful indigenous people, he still sends his men out to do the job. Capable of being an especially cruel colonialist when he wants to be, he also takes a sadist’s pleasure in an unorthodox plan to rid the region of its most notorious white outlaw, Arthur Burns (Danny Huston): force his brother, Charlie, played by Guy Pearce, to hunt him down and kill him. Using the life of a third Burns brother, the baby-faced, mentally dependent Mickey (Danny Huston), as leverage, Stanley pitches Charlie the proposition of the title, giving him until Christmas Day, no less, to return from the badlands with Arthur’s corpse or else see Mickey hung.

The brother against brother conflict echoes the existential wire of Mann’s Winchester 73, the film that introduced post-war American to a shockingly flinty-eyed Jimmy Stewart in his first anti-hero role as a man hunting down his sibling to retrieve the macho trophy of the film’s title. Hillcoat and Cave never quite wind this familial conflict up to maximum tension before letting it snap back. Hillcoat allows Pearce to channel more Eastwood than Stewart (although he looks damn good in a cowboy hat no matter how you slice it) with Pearce’s resulting stoicism undercutting much of the role’s poignancy. For his part, Huston gets a hell of a build up before his first on-screen appearance as Hillcoat weaves indigenous legends and Charlie’s fever dreams to make him out a monster of mythical proportions. But once we get to Arthur fully formed, Huston has only clichés, instead of icons, to work as a cultured killer prone to quoting Shakespeare while he watches men die.

For all the big themes and existential expectations at work here, however, shock and surprise are the tools that Hillcoat most frequently pulls from his bag of tricks. Whether in tight canyon passages or at high noon in the town square, this is one Western that’ll make you jump and squirm like a horror flick. Blood flows and flesh tears freely on this frontier as much to illustrate the savagery of its outlaws as to underscore the hypocrisy of those that would civilize them. There’s more than a touch of Leone and Peckinpah in Hillcoat’s orchestration of all this carnage but too often it slips beyond his control. Case in point, there’s a flogging sequence so unrelentingly brutal it overshoots Leone’s raw frontier martyrdoms to land in the realm of The Passion of the Christ. When swarms of digital flies settle on the townspeople watching the bloodletting, it doesn’t echo Peckinpah’s social commentary as much as it recalls the presence of a skulking Beelzebub. That Mel Gibson proves the stronger impression here than either Leone or Peckinpah, may be one of the film’s biggest failures of tone, despite its larger themes. The violence is ugly, for sure, but just as in Gibson’s Christ tale, it borders too closely on grind house exploitation.

Still, Hillcoat has a built in out: For all Captain Stanley’s desire to keep the world’s ugliness at bay, it’s inevitable that his efforts will backfire and bring it all back home. Like several of his characters, Hillcoat finds redemption in the film’s powerful final scenes which return us to an essential humanity hemmed in on all sides by violence.

…

Short takes:

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance: Not as solidly entertaining – in that fascinatingly grim way – as Old Boy. It drags and drifts in places as Lee Geum-ja’s grand plan for revenge unfolds against the man who forced her to confess to a murder she did not commit by kidnapping her young daughter. Her plan may be too grim or it may be that writer-director Park Chan-wook never clearly delineates what exactly it is before, in what was probably supposed to be a surprise twist, he drops it all together and heads off in another (though still bloody) direction altogether.

Fallen: Like Chris Nolan’s first film, Following, Fred Keleman’s Fallen is black-and-white, shot-on-video thriller that sets modest goals for itself and, after a little slow going at the start, ends up nailing them dead on. After a file clerk in the Latvian national archive fails to stop a woman from jumping off the bridge he walks home over everyday, he becomes increasingly obsessed with finding out who she is. The archivist becomes an amateur detective and begins putting various pieces together but the picture that emerges isn’t what he thinks it is.

Dear Wendy: Directed by Thomas Vinterberg (Celebration) from a script by Lars Von Trier (Dogville) in which a rag tag band of small town losers become the locus point for a European dissection of America’s fascination with guns. I dig most if not all the previous work by Dogme brothers Vinterberg and von Trier but Dear Wendy is shite from start to finish.

The Grönholm Method: I was a huge fan of Argentinian director Marcelo Piñyero’s Burnt Money, a down and dirty, sexy as hell crime thriller. His latest doesn’t take as many risks with genre but still satisfies as, again, a modest thriller that follows through on what it promises: backstabbing and betrayal in the corporate world. Six candidates up for the same job are put through the wringer by their faceless prospective employer to see who gets the gig. Set almost entirely in a sleek, anonymous boardroom, the film unfolds against the backdrop of a massive anti-globalization march in the street far below.

Toronto Film Festival -- Intermission

2005-09-14T05:56:00.000-07:00

Just past the half way point of the festival the people I was talking to about how it was all going were divided. The half that had seen a number of films previously at Cannes thought the new stuff they had seen in Toronto was so-so. The people for whom most everything at Toronto was new thought the festival was going pretty well. I'm in the latter category. After seeing Battle in Heaven, Be With Me, and the Tcherkassky and Barbieri films in the Wavelengths program, all by the second day I had already met my usual festival average of two or three great things outof 30-40 films seen. History of Violence, The Proposition and Harsh Times were all to come and yesterday I caught the new Tsai Ming-Liang, The Wayward Cloud, which was simply dazzling. So I'm having a great festival with three more days to go. I have a bunch of new films to write up along with a few I haven't had time to post yet. I hope to get all caught up by the end of the day. In the meantime, thanks for checking in here.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 4 & 5

2005-09-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Whoops. Did I lose a day somewhere? Feels like it. Day 4 and 5 kind of blurred together even though I didn’t go to that many movies. I hit two yesterday and then trying to head out for a third my body froze up out at the door. No way, it said. I must be getting old. Film festival attendance demands two essential physical activities: race walking to cover five city blocks in the two minute window between screenings and then sitting for hours at a time in the dark. The body gets confused. Your feet hurt but so does your ass. WTF, it says, no more for now.

…

So yesterday evening I shut down at home which was good as I caught a call from my mom with good news about my dad. His situation has stabilized and he may be going home sooner than expected but no one knows what caused the problem or why it seems to have corrected itself. I told my mom that he should take an extra day or two if he can but knowing him, we both agreed, that as soon as the doctor told him there was a 40 percent chance he could home early there was a 70 percent my dad would check himself out regardless. I told my mom not to be surprised if he showed up at the door in a hospital gown, a cab waiting to get paid at the curb. We’ll see how it goes.

…

It’s early evening now as I write this, killing a few hours before tonight’s screening of Park Chan-wook’s Sympathhy for Lady Vengeance, the third in Park’s vengeance trilogy which also includes Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy. Having seen the first two films (at Toronto as well) I feel obligated to catch this installment. That said, there’s a lot of buzz for it so the negotiating the press line will suck and my last three films, The Proposition, Why We Fight and Harsh Times have each, to one degree or another, been explorations of violence prone masculinity and I’m not sure how much more bloodshed I’m willing to take. That said, watching a woman, Park’s lead actress, Lee Yeong-ae, unleashing a maelstrom of blood may just be the refreshing change of pace I need.

Why We Fight is the declarative title of the anti-US imperialism documentary by Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) but it could also be the initiating question to both The Proposition, directed by John Hillcoat from a script by musician Nick Cave, and writer-director David Ayer’s Harsh Times. The answers in each case are intense mediations on the violence borne of and at the heart of what it’s supposed to mean to be a man. In Jarecki’s doc, that violence comes write large in the swaggering American foreign policy of the Bush administration, rooted as it is in the imperialist dick-swinging of the neo-cons now greasing the gears of the military-industrial-media complex.

There will not be anything too original in any of these projects for anyone who follows the Western, war movies, American foreign policy and or the multitude of crucial intersections between them. What’s left to be sought in each then are the stuff of the aficionado’s fascination, the nuance of a particular emotional ache, an inspired glint of blood or steel, the grimness with which the various players meet their inevitable fates. Of course, since Jarecki’s film is a documentary the stakes are higher. In this thorough linking of foreign policy events from the end of World War II to the beginning of our invasion of Iraq, the emotional ache remains Vietnam, the glint of steel beams from the assembly-lines and convention booths of America’s arms merchants, the grim determination reveals itself in the willingness of every institution that’s supposed to embody and protect our democracy – from Congress to the media to the voters themselves – to abdicate responsibility in the face of seemingly all-powerful military –industrial corruption.

Like a lot of left-leaning documentaries in the Michael Moore-era, Why We Fight preaches to the choir, and lazily at that. Trotting out a whore and an idiot like William Kristol and Richard Perle to argue the case for a 9-11 aggressive American military presence just about everywhere in the world doesn’t force Jarecki to sharpen his own arguments as much as it gives his audience the chance to let off steam with boos and hisses. Similarly, why, in a film called Why We Fight, does our invasion of Afghanistan go completely missing? Jarecki jumps from Eisenhower’s farewell warning about the military-industrial complex almost immediately to 9-11 and then to Iraq before backtracking through America’s long history of pre-emptive military actions around the globe leaving Afghanistan out completely. It’s a glaring omission not only because there are reasonable arguments for why we toppled the Taliban but also because our as yet fruitless hunt for Usama Bin Laden raises serious questions about Bush’s real foreign policy priorities as he shifted military resources to Iraq. This oversight doesn’t damage the film’s credibility although it renders it less sophisticated and complex than its series of serious talking heads and archival news footage would suggest.

That said, Jarecki smart enough to give a lot of screen time to Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York police officer who lost a son in one of the towers, and who proves the most compelling figure in the whole film. Struggling with his desire to both avenge and memorialize his son’s death, Sekzer, a Vietnam vet, sent an email to an Army commander asking if someone could write his son’s name on a piece of hardware or munitions headed to Iraq. After flying around the Army’s tangled bureaucracy for awhile, Sekzer’s request was granted and his son’s name was written on a bomb that was dropped in Iraq sometime during the early days of the invasion. Later, Sekzer, a once die-hard supporter of Bush, heard the president admit, under mounting public pressure that he do so, that there was no evidence linking Hussein to 9-11 and that neither he nor Cheney had said anything to give the impression that the opposite was true. The look in Sekzer’s eyes as he recalls the betrayal he felt on hearing the president’s craven admission should be evidence enough to impeach Bush and his entire administration. In Sekzer’s mind the connection the president denied had indeed been made, again and again, which is why he supported the invasion and choose it as the means through which he could salve the wound of his son’s death. Bush preyed on this man’s anger and pain to get the war he wanted so bad, only to then trash all his hopes for justice and inner peace. Nothing any of the film’s talking heads could has the power to change minds as Sekzer’s moment of realization.

...

I have to head out to catch Sympathy so I'll have to post my thoughts on The Proposition and Harsh Times later. In the meanwhile, here's an unedited version of a review of Cuban director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti's Viva Cuba that I wrote for the Festival Daily:

VIVA CUBA

The visual inventiveness of Cuban director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti grabs our attention in the first shot of his family friendly second feature: A young boy, in extreme close-up, appears to pull himself up on the bottom of the theater screen to peer out suspiciously at the audience. The image’s trompe l’oeil calibrates our imagination for the playfulness to come in a charming tale of friendship faithfully framed around a child’s eye view of the world.
At the film’s opening Jorgito (Jorgito Miló Ávila) scans the horizon for enemies in a dirt lot reenactment of Cuba’s fight for independence, never expecting a rear guard maneuver from Malú (Malú Tarrao Broche), the lone girl in a pack of boys, who declares herself Queen of Spain and brings the hostilities to a screeching halt. When Jorgito gets mad anyone who remembers their school yard days will know the truth instantly: He has a crush.

As it turns out, the two are pals. It is their mothers who are at war. Though Jorgito’s family lives across the street in Havana, Malú’s mother, clinging to a memory of lost middle class status, treats them as if they were from the wrong side of the tracks. Jorgito’s mother, on the other hand, berates the snobbery of the bourgeois next door. The family tensions add an echo of Romeo and Juliet to Jorgito and Malú’s puppy love even as they pepper the story with evidence of the social and economic tensions at work in contemporary Cuba. When Malú’s mother finally decides to leave the country, Malú and Jorgito make their own bid for freedom in cross-country trek to find her father.

On their picaresque adventure, the pair skips across the island like bright stones. Against the edge of the film’s political satire, Malberti sets an infectious sense of wonder fed by Cuba’s lush tropical vistas, wide blue skies and the special bond between little children in a big, big world. There’s more than a touch of magic realism in the air. Looking up at the night from a long, sparkling beach, Jorgito and Malú write their dreams in the sky with shooting stars. Ever wary of adults and their petty battles, the film celebrates the boundless imagination and the friendships we hope will last forever.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 3, Part II

2005-09-11T06:14:00.000-07:00

After getting the news about my dad I was just going to stay home and collect my thoughts but I got restless so I went down to see a doc by Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon called The Smell of Paradise, billed as a journey through the world of jihad. (I really know how to wind down, don't I?). It's short and a little drifty but required viewing nonetheless -- if it ever gets distribution. Throughout 2004, Pilis and Mamon travelled to Afghanistan, Cechnya, Qatar and other Islamic hotspots around the globe to interview the men who, since the Mujahideen drove the Soviets out of Afganistan, have been shaping the military and spirtual direction of radical Islam. I didn't recognize any of the names -- none of them have the Western star power of Usama Bin Laden -- but these are the guys who really keep the money and the rhetoric flowing. During each of the first three interviews, we are told in voiceover that the men we see speaking were soon after later assassinated or killed in combat in Chechnya. In each case its the Russians, not the US, pulling the trigger (or putting the poison in the poisoned letter in one case) which is striking given than four years after Sept. 11 the US has yet to capture or kill either of our particular boogeymen: the Taliban's Sheik Omar or Bin Laden. What's interesting is that Bin Laden is barely mentioned at all by any one in this doc, suggesting that his influence may be less than we think. There's a lot in the film that confirms common understanding about Jihad -- that the promise of paradise is what drives the jihadists and suicide bombers -- and a lot that confounds it.

At one point in the film, an Afghani man whose family has for centuries guarded the prophet's mantle, Islam's holiest relic, in Kandahar tells the director that he's glad the Taliban are gone -- because they weren't true Muslims. Indeed, when the Taliban's Sheik Omar came to Khandahar he defied tradition and dared to don the mantle and proclaim himself the new leader of all the world's faithful. The man telling this believes the American invasion was God's punishment of both the Taliban and the Afghan people for this blasphemy but that it will clear the way for a true Islamic state in Afghanistan. I had never heard this before. The media and the Bush administration told me that, of course, most Afghanis were glad to see the Taliban go but no one mentioned that it may be because they want to put a truly Islamic government in place. There was another scene in the doc where local tribal leaders in Khandahar and in the desolate south were urging their followers to vote for the most strident Islamic candidates. Outside, the camera documents the bangs and flashes of a distant firefight -- and this was in the summer of last year. In another interview, a tribal elder who once placed his faith in the American promise of a better life, wonders now why his son was arrested, where he is, why he can't talk him and when he will see him again. The words Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are on the lips and minds of a number of the tribal leaders interviewed.

Today, of course, should be a day of reflection on the last four years and this doc helped to focus and shape my own thoughts for the day: Since 9-11, do we really know what we've been doing in the world? This doc suggests that where and when it counts, we haven't a clue.

This is simply unaccetable

2005-09-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

Mercenaries on American streets?

Excuses, excuses

2005-09-10T15:27:00.000-07:00

Oh and sorry about all the typos, bad grammar and lack of links in the last few festival notes. I don't know what I was thinking when I suggested that I was taking so long between posts becuase I wanted to polish my thoughts. In re-reading some some them, it all reads fairly spewed. I may go back an add links and clean up a few thoughts here and there. Hope you don't mind.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 3

2005-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

I came to grab a bite to eat and blog a little about the films I saw today but got waylaid by a message from my mom. My dad is in the hospital and has been since Tuesday but because he is who is he didn't want anyone to know. Pre-arranged weekend plans forced his hand and he finally conceded yesterday that his children should be told. I know the guy so that makes perfect sense to me but I'm a little angry too, which also allows me quite nicely not to focuss on the fact that I'm also scared. Who knows, maybe that was his plan all along. I don't want to get into the details but it looks like he might in for monitoring for at least another week. The prognonsis at the moment could go either way. Still, I'm thankfull this didn't happen before his 65th birthday in June. I guess now he's on Medicare so there hasn't been an undue financial burden on my mom, yet. We'll see how it all goes.

Watching and writing about movies always seems utterly irrelevant in times like this (or when things like Katrina or 9-11 happen). There's always been a serious solipsistic absurdity to what it is that I've chosen to do with my life but I manage to keep it safely out of my mind most of the time. Every so often when it jumps out and says "Boo!" I try to remind myself of what it is I think I'm trying to do. It is perhaps best summed up in a little commandment written by Robert Bresson to himself: "Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never been seen." My dad has made a lot of things visible to me, not all of them pretty or pleasant, but I love him and I'm eternally grateful to him for everything he has shown me.

. . .

I saw four films this morning, Cronenberg's The History of Violence, Anne Fontinae's Entre Ses Mains, Liam Lynch's Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, Abel Ferrara's Mary.

Cronenberg and some of his cast make a few wrong moves in The History of Violence but it's a great story about the deep reflexes of American violence similar in tone and temper to Sam Rami's small town morality play in A Simple Plan. Entre Ses Mains is an well executed, ice cld thriller from France about a woman who enters into an affair with a man she suspects is a serial killer. Fontaine does an excellent job of parcelling out the psychological kinks that make such a relationship possible with a few twists and turns along the way. Lynch's concert film of Sarah Silverman's stand up act is fucking fabulously hilarious, in spite of the few staged, extraneous musical sequences and skits that break up the set. As for Ferrara's answer to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ I'm still undecided. By which I mean I've decided it's a mess but not yet just how what kind of a mess it is: a thin, mushy mess defying any attempt to strain meaning from it or are there some chunks worth salvaging. I'm inclined toward the former.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 2

2005-09-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

Got a late start to the screenings today. I spent way too much time working up my takes on yesterday's films. I'll to be more off the cuff. I also had some errands to run for K and her mom but was able to make it to the 3:45 screening of Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen's jagged Job-inspired parable Adam's Apple. More on it later but for now a taste of its mordant sense of humor: After a character gets shot in the head, a doctor says: "Medically speaking, that's what we call a half-Kennedy." Yikes.

Off to the first Wavelengths screenings.

Also, overheard more pre-screening chatter about Workingman's Death. The Nigerian slaughterhouse sequence has reallt got people worked up.

...

Just got back from the Wavelengths program. Like the films themselves, the venue is off the beaten festival path at Jackman Hall at the Art Gallery of Toronto. It's a nice theater, six stops, a change of trains and four blocks from where I'm staying. It was well worth the trip. The film that caught my eye and drew me out there was Peter Tscherkassy's Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, which the catalogue described as a "metacinema" reworking of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The catalogue lists it as 35 mm but the print we saw had to be 70mm. Tscherkassky strips the film of color to a primary black and white, tears out and isolates a few key scenes centered on Eli Wallach's Tuco, tweaks and pulls the sound track, throws in a few snippets of academy leader, a couple of China girls and sprocket holes and whips it all into a pulsing frenzy. It was metafucking awesome. Tscherkasky has a webpage that I will be checking out more soon.

That was followed by a several works by local artists that were okay, abstract light forms and shifting video squares. Then came a real surprise, Olivo Barbieri's site specific_ROMA O4. Structurally it's quite simple just a handful of aerial helicopter shots over various sections of Rome featuring both easily recogninazble landmarks and neighborhoods as well less its newer but less well-known suburban edges. Each shot, however, is like a small miracle of optical trickery and utter fascination. For decades special effects artists have tried to make miniature cityscapes and sets look life sized. Using a special lens, Barbieri achieves the at the center of the frame which diffuses slightly towards the edges. You would swear that the resulting image was of a miniature, an incredibly detailed, absolutely perfect miniature reproduction of Rome's neighborhoods and architectural landmarks, old and new. Every so often a moving car or slight shift in composition can break the illusion but not for long. It's absolutely spellbinding in the way that only miniatures can be. Anyone who's read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and his discussion of intimate immensity, will really dig this film. Barbieri is apparently a fairly well known photogrpaher whose still work follows along the same lines. He also made a similar movie over Las Vegas, site specific_LAS VEGAS 05.

Then came the really cool treat, a screening with live piano accompaniment of aa 1931 film, Douro, Faina Fluvial, shot by Manoel de Oliveira. I came late to Oliveira's work which is saying a lot since he's the world's oldest working filmmaker at the age of 98 and I love his approach to the world and movies. Shot on the banks of the Douro River in Portugal the film is probably a greater testiment to the influence of Vertov and Ruttman and the city symphony film at the time than it is early evidence of any personal preoccupations on Oliveira's part. Still, there's a lot in that echoes images of travel, the sea and local faces in recent works such as A Talking Picture (2004). Amid the daily labor of the docks and lots and lots of shots of bridges and water, a few short sentimental and dramatic vignettes emerge -- a working class boy makes a pass at a young working class girl, another boy is run down by an oxen cart. All in all it was just a delight to see and a rare one at that.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 1, Part II

2005-09-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

After lunch I headed back to the Royal Ontario Museum (where K.’s sister held her wedding reception after last year’s festival) to take a seat and wait for the screening of Carlos Reygadas’s follow up to his feature debut, Japon, Battle in Heaven. Behind me a quartet of regional programmers killed time with classic festival small talk: “What have you seen?” “What’s got buzz?” “How do you get people to come to your screenings where you’re at?” At one point, their conversation turned to the two films I had just seen, Workingman’s Death and Be With Me (See previous post). They mostly focused on Workingman’s Death in particular the graphic images and sounds of the Nigeria slaughterhouse sequence. There reactions got me thinking about a couple of things. First, they all agreed that most of the film’s other sequences each included a number of shots of both natural and industrial beauty. Which is true. For all the documented human drudgery there’s also some breathtaking sublimity in watching a volcano huff and puff against the edges of a verdant jungle or witnessing a 10 or 20 story high plate of iron fall into the ocean from the side of an oil tanker. Nothing like these moments are present in the Nigerian sequence. Indeed, it is a pure charnel house of blood and mud and the only sequence in which men are seen doing violence to nature as opposed to toiling against either its beauty or making a meager living off its inanimate bounty. There’s something decidedly political at work in Galwogger’s decision to use such bloody work to represent labor on the African continent. It’s a little troubling and I’ll leave it at that.

The other thing that struck about the conversation behind me was just how unformed and still tentative the opinions of these film professionals were. Really, festivals are one of the few places you get to hear this kind of raw, straight off the top of one’s head response to films. I have to admit I’ve spent much of the second day of the festival writing the rest of this post because I wanted to polish my thoughts. Maybe that’s not what blogging is supposed to be but there you are. That said, I am still trying to sort out my response to Battle in Heaven. I saw Japon in Toronto and remember walking out of the theater feeling much the same way: physically and emotionally drained, unsure of how to proceed. As with Japon, I think Battle is brilliantly original but I’m not sure if I can articulate yet just why. Where to begin? Of course, Reygadas begins the film with a blow job, strikingly photographed and strikingly dispassionate, so why not start there. There’s a lot of extended full frontal nudity and several extended fuck scenes in the film, each shot with varying degrees of interest and/or intensity. At one point, Reygadas’ camera floats out the window as one zipless fuck unfolds to give us a long languid 360 degree pan of the still, surrounding city neighborhood where construction workers fix a roof, trees sway in an afternoon breeze and off in the distance a figure shambles down an alley. Elsewhere, Reygados gives us a front row view of the pounding of what must surely be the widest, sweatiest ass ever seen on a non-porno screen. In both instances, the man getting fucked and doing the fucking, respectively, is Marcos, an overweight, ostensible handy man for a Mexican army general who oversees the fort’s raising and lowering of a giant Mexican flag each day and chauffers the general’s young, Lolita-esque daughter in between. On the side, he and his equally corpulent wife are involved in a kidnapping scheme that goes horribly wrong in the film’s opening scenes when the baby they’re ransoming dies. The death snaps Marcos painfully out of the moral vacation he seems to have been on (his wife laments the lost money) but he’s still left stranded unable to decide what to do. He blurts out a confession to the general’s daughter who somewhat surprisingly advises him to turn himself in. It’s remarkably decisive advise coming from a rich and pampered bad girl who spends her leisure time working at a brothel, where Marcos partakes of her services. Moral clarity is not exactly anyone’s real strong suit, here. The vagaries of crime, punishment, forgiveness and repentance all circulate in the film’s hothouse atmosphere with the profusion of sweaty, fleshy bodies and a heavy does of Catholic guilt playing a central role in keeping it all stirred up. Mid-way through Marcos’ slow breakdown, Reygadas introduces an annual Christian pilgrimage to the city at the edges of his story. As the numbers of repentant swell in the background – and after Marcos, on a pre-planned family picnic finds himself standing on a mountain top next to a large silver cross -- the film’s frequent nudity begins to evoke a sinner’s proverbial nakedness before God. But the way Reygadas photographs all the film’s excess flesh deliberately conflates and confuses God’s judgement with the camera’s judgement, leaving us stranded somewhere between morality and aesthetics with no clear direction on how to proceed. Which brings me back to where I started. There’s no question that Battle in Heaven is a brilliant, challenging film. It reminded not only of my reaction to Japon but also my favorite film from last year’s festival Lisandro Alonso’s Los Muertos. Both Alonso and Reygadas are making bold forays into the realms of nature, morality, death and forgiveness and making some damn exciting cinema along the way.

I also caught the first half of Les Saignantes, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s shot-on-video Cameroonian SF thriller about a pair of prostitutes in over their heads when a government leader dies in one of their beds. I liked what I saw but left early to catch Workingman’s Death and will try to catch the rest when it screens again or at the video library.

Toronto Film Festival -- Day 1

2005-09-08T05:15:00.000-07:00

It's day one of the Toronto International Film Festival and we woke up to thunder and rain. Looking out the window just before the alarm went off K said, "It's getting darker not brighter." I hope for her sake that wasn't a premonition of the festival to come. She's working the event in a fairly high profile position. Me? I'm here for late night moral support and to nod my head every morning (as I just did): "Yes, that looks good. You look great." (And what else could I say, she looks great in everything.) And I'll be watching movies. I have a press pass so I'll be trying to see as much as possible and trying to post as often as I can about even more. So check back in regular the next two weeks (is anybody even out there?). I'll be posting a lot more frequently than I have.

...

The sun came out some time during the screening of director Michael Glawogger’s documentary Workingman’s Death, which you can gather from the title isn’t exactly a ray of light and hope itself. While Jeremy Riskin argues that the digital era is bringing about the end of blue collar work as we know it, Glawogger shocks us into the recognition that, for every Blackberry-carrying middle manager in the West, there’s ten people in the developing world laboring under horrendously difficult and dangerous conditions in order to survive. The film opens with an assaultive montage of found footage from the mid-Twentieth Century when muscles and sweat still drove the post-war Western world. That Glawogger culls many of these scenes from Soviet-era propaganda films heralding the workers on-going revolution is only the first in the film’s waves of irony. What follows are five portraits of some of the world’s most backbreaking jobs and the men (mostly men) who do them. In the Ukraine, freelance coal miners literally scrape and chisel out a meager living in precarious mines long since abandoned by the government. In Indonesia, laborers trudge past tourists on the edges of a steaming volcano to gather sulfur deposits for pennies a pound. In Nigeria, mud, blood and the screams of dying animals sluice together in an open field where hundreds of men work in brutal efficiency to supply the region with cheap meat. In Pakistan, teams of men reduce massive, beached oil tankers and cargo ships into piles of scrap metal. The fifth and final portrait is a brief stop at a Chinese steel plant where workers still beam about the glorious people’s project before an epilogue that takes us to a similar steel plant in Germany that has been converted into post-industrial public park. Along the way Glawogger captures images both breathtaking and harrowing while stopping every so often to listen to these workers describe their work and their world. Coincidentally, I happen to be reading anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s Local Knowledge: Further Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology in which he writes, of his time spent in the 50s and 60s in Bali, Java and Morocco:

Land was short, jobs were scarce, politics was unstable, health was poor, prices were rising and life was altogether far from promising … yet in the midst of this depressing scene there was an absolutely astonishing intellectual vitality, a philosophical passion really, and a popular one besides to track the riddles of existence right down to the ground. Destitute peasants would discuss questions of freedom of the will, illiterate tradesmen discoursed on the properties of God, common laborers had theories about the relations between reason and passion, the nature of time or the reliability of the senses.

Glawogger gives us a sense of a similar deep awareness and understanding of the world, shaped and hardened by difficulty and labor, that these men share. While one young sulfur miner looks to Bon Jovi and the Scorpions to get through the day – although he can’t afford their CDs – others in each place around the globe speak frankly and eloquently to Glawogger about God, the dignity of work, the real necessities of life and a powerful gratitude at being able, even in the most meager of ways, to care for themselves and their families. It’s profoundly moving but at times, frustrating stuff. There’s plenty of hopelessness expressed but its acceptance, not anger or revolt, that emerges as the order of the day. It may be that part of it that sent me out of the theater wanting more. Though the film runs 122-minutes it still feels like Glawogger swoops in and out of each region. The drum and bang score by John Zorn reinforces an inevitable comparison to the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy only with Glawogger taking longer stopovers at each point of exotic misery. Where the Koyaanisqatsi films are all maddeningly aestheticized wide views, Glawogger keeps his focus insistently local, never pulling back to expose the global network of capital that, for all the high-gloss digitopia that marks its view of itself, shapes and, to some extent, depends for its existence on the worlds of work depicted here. It may be just be a knee-jerk response to so much of the misery on display here but with so many victims, this documentary really needed a more delineated villain.

After Workingman’s Death I made my way Singapore director Eric Khoo’s Be With Me. I gather this film hit Toronto a known quantity having apparently received a five minute standing ovation at Cannes but I came to it having liked Khoo’s Me Pok Man. There’s something both elegant and all too obvious in Khoo’s approach to the themes of communication and loneliness here but then again, isn’t that the balance that distinguishes all the best melodramas? Inspired by the memoirs of Theresa Chan, a national treasure in Singapore who lost both her hearing and vision at an early age, Khoo delicately intertwines four stories of love, heartbreak and isolation with Chan’s most hopeful survivor’s tale as the film’s center of gravity. Chan plays herself in a riveting performance, yielding her indomitable personality to both Koo’s narrative and subtle moments of pure documentary as we watch in long takes as she moves about her spare apartment preparing meals or working at her manual typewriter. Though in these scenes Chan can appear removed from the world we learn from frequent subtitles that represent the inner monologue of her memoirs (Khoo eschews voice-over narration one imagines to better represent the interiority of Chan’s world) that she has not been spared any of its emotional pain. Beyond the trauma of her disabilities, she recounts all too familiar experiences of lost love, heartbreak and unrequited dreams that she has struggled to live with or overcome. Around the core of Chan’s resilient humanity, Khoo weaves a trio of intimate, loosely criss-crossing stories: a shop keeper who loses his wife after a long illness; a beautiful young lesbian who loses her first love to a boy; a security guard with an unsettling, voyeuristic fixation on a businesswoman in the high rise he works at. Distance, isolation and loneliness permeate each small tale which unfold virtually without dialogue. Khoo reveals an ingenious sense of visual storytelling as he mobilizes text message screens, video monitors and his own masterful sense of composition to convey his central themes. Along the way, the film tends toward the sentimental but not every tale proves as hopeful or reassuring as Chan’s. Indeed, Chan’s story places the choices of the film’s other characters in a poignant context as each one perseveres or surrenders in the struggle to make contact.

Wizbang Watch II: The Premature Patrol

2005-08-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

I hate to bring too much attention to the regular dickheads over at Wizbang but sheesh, what a bunch of putzes. Case in point, Jay Tea, who opens a recent post with this:

Now that the initial buzz over the story of Marine Sergeant Daniel Cotnoir's firing a ahotgun has abated, more details are emerging. And my earlier piece's "oops" appears to have been a smidgen premature.

Now I suspect that Mr. Tea is premature in a lot of things but that's another story. In the post described he apologizes for prematurely scolding a former marine who fired a shotgun into a crowd of noisy neighbors after someone threw a bottle at him. Jay writes:

From what I can see so far, it was an extreme reaction, but within the realm of acceptable.

So to in the realm of the acceptable for Jay was the killing of Brazillian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes by British authorities in a London tube station. Why? As Jay wrote at the time under the headline, "If it walks, talks, and quacks like a duck during duck season, it's gonna get shot":

Now, while the late Mr. de Menezes has been exonerated as a terrorist, I have yet to hear the original facts of the shooting disputed. And let's look at those facts:

1) It was the day after the second bombing.

2) The man was wearing a heavy jacket on a hot summer day.

3) The man jumped the turnstiles, violating the law.

4) The man ran from police.

5) The man ran towards a crowded subway car.

Well, Jay, turns out you were premature once again. From today's Observer:

Initial claims that de Menezes was targeted because he was wearing a bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers have all turned out to be false. He was wearing a denim jacket, used a standard Oyster electronic card to get into the station and simply walked towards the platform unchallenged.

It has also been suggested that officers did not identify themselves properly before shooting de Menezes seven times in the head.

Best of all Jay concludes his update of the story by attacking the Bostong Globe for painting Marine Sergeant Daniel Cotnoir as a disturbed Iraq veteran. He writes:

That's the angle the Boston Glob is taking. They dug up some old stories on Cotnoir, sent someone to his arraignment, and spun the rest. It's the easy approach, the lazy one. Just skim the facts, and latch on to the ones that support your own agenda.

Yes, Jay, easy and lazy. Right up your fat alley. I'm sure another "oops" post will be forthcoming.

Wizbang Watch I

2005-08-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

Paul at Wizbang says he's boycotting Drudge because of the pop-up ads. Uh oh. Where will Paul ever find the utterly boilerplate and innocuous news articles he uses to perform his patented brand of auto-neurotic asphyxiation?

Thankfully, when he wants the world filtered to protect his delicate synapses he'll just go to "Lucianne or something." Phew, that was close. Of course, the story doesn't end there. Seems some other righteous warrior out there is also shocked, simply shocked, that Drudge would stoop to over-riding pop-up blockers to shove his advertisers' messages in your face. As Teflon at Molten Thought says:

I'm pretty ticked that Drudge would support something so destructive to make a buck.

Unbelievable.

Hollywood Come Clean; Bush: Carry-on

2005-08-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

What he says.

That's All It Was

2005-08-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

There's a great article in the LA Times about the current state of the art house v. Hollywood narrative debate that nevertheless reminds me that, when it comes to film talk, what's old is new again. Once more ambiguity and duration is pit against pell mell sensorial assault with the eternal hope that the current box-office slump will once more snap Hollywood out of its current machine hum induced daze to make Real Movies again. You've heard it before, these articles pop up at least once a year, at least since distributors started counter programming the summer months, but the filmmakers interviewed, Phil Morrion (Junebug), Gus Van Sant (Last Days), Jim Jarmusch (Broken Flowers) and David Cronenberg (The History of Violence)all seem particularly on their game in articulating what it is they do and what it is they value.

Morrison:

"I can't presume to know what people seeing my movie would feel," he says. "But I want to create an opportunity for you to discover your own feelings."

More and more, he adds, it's just assumed that movies should be about things that are special, remarkable or peculiar. Even when the subject matter doesn't seem special, the goal of the movie is to prove that it is. "So the goal of moviemaking," he says, "becomes to prove that everything is special. But people don't have to be special or remarkable to have value."

Jarmusch:

"The problem with the studios is not that they make these big, loud productions," he says, "it's that they're so cowardly, so timid. The corporate mentality is to go the safest way. But name me the most successful businessman in Europe when Bach was writing his music. You can't. Because that kind of success doesn't matter."

Van Sant:

"We're so used to dialogue-heavy movies," he says. "Whole scenes are just encasements for delivering dialogue. We like that because we like how we sound when we talk. We are fascinated by our ability to talk. So give us some clever dialogue and we love that."

Cronenberg:

"There is a desperation in this culture not to let anything get by," says Cronenberg. "Anything that could be new or could be cool. We live in fear of being boring and afraid of being creative, so the answer is hit people over the head with the soundtrack and then give them 24 quick shots."

Cronenberg sees his film as less of an experiment than a return to a time when movies were encouraged to tell a story rather than achieve demographic crossover.

"It sounds very '60s," he adds with a laugh, "but we need to remember to be in the moment."

Each quote could be the seed of a manifesto. Particularly, Morrison's emphasis on the emotions of the film viewers. What a brilliant articulation of the interactivity of movie going, of how we become personally invested not in a storyline but in the space and place of a story. Those seemingly empty shots of nothing in Junebug, in Ozu, in Kaurismaki, we fill with our feelings, our histories, our desires. For films like these to move us we have to re-connect with ourselves first. It's a beautiful thought, the regenerative power of image and sound alone.

Implicit and explicit in each one of these filmmaker's is a hope that there is a present and a future for this kind of cinema because it is has such a golden past. In Morrison's "more and more" there is the urgency of something being lost. But what? Interestingly, the names of Ozu, Antonioni or Bresson never come up. Instead, it's Cronenberg who cites John Ford as the reference point for the a long lost cinema of time and space that he and his colleagues aspire to.

For David Cronenberg, the "new" slower pace is simply a return to Hollywood tradition. The attention to place and character in "A History of Violence," he says, "is very John Ford. In a Ford film, the town and the landscape meant something. Many classic novels begin with a description of the landscape."

The workman-like Ford himself, no doubt, would have none of it but the point is well taken. And yet there's something odd about the way the article and the quoted filmmakers themselves struggle to define or describe a golden age of cinematic ambiguity. We know we need a tradition to call on to move forward, but, perhaps ironically, it can never exactly be defined or located.

Morrison's screenwriter, Angus MacLachlan, argues that something happened to the audience, that audiences changed somewhere along the line such that they could no longer take pleasure in what they used to desire.

"People have a hard time with ambiguity," says Angus MacLachlan, the screenwriter. "The gray area is a place most people do not find comfortable anymore, if they even recognize it. But that is the poetic realm — where you can't quite say what you feel but you feel it nonetheless."

When exaclty audiences were ever comfortable with the "gray area" I'm sure neither MacLachlan nor anyone could say. In American cinema the mid-1940s to early 1950s, the heydays of noir, might fit the bill but what is noir if not the expression of a profound discomfort with "gray areas" and "ambiguity"? One might also ask, how many mid to late period noirs were box office hits.

Van Sant specifically alludes to classical Hollywood cinema in the author's paraphrase:

"When corporations own studios, [Van Sant] says, the emphasis becomes the most efficient way to make money. "So if you're not making an action movie, you are literally wasting money," he says. "Filmmaking then becomes about your talent in handling money."

Contemporary Hollywood filmmaking is definitely more about accounting than aesthetics -- and let's face it, there's no accounting for aesthetics (ha ha) -- but even when the studios owned the studios the emphasis was on the most efficient way to make money. Look no further than the Hollywood careers of von Stroheim, Welles, Lang et al. So when was this "time before," this prelapsarian moment when audieces didn't lapse into a stupifaction and slumber before a two minute shot of a tree swing? When was it that audiences longed for the unresolved, the ambiguous, the sustained? I'm sure I couldn't tell you except that the answer is not an "age" or an "era" or even a "period." Rather the answer, if there is one, would probably sound something like Peter Fonda's line about the 60s in The Limey: "It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was."

Roshomon Redux

2005-08-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

Between "Over There", military blogs, the liberal blogosphere, the 101st Fighitng Keyboarders and what these morons have to say, Iraq is beginning to look a lot like Roshomon.

The Song Remains the Same: Cindy Sheehan in the News

2005-08-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2004
Sacramento Bee

The family of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan gathered in its Vacaville home Tuesday night to mourn the 24-year-old who died Sunday in a firefight outside Baghdad ...

Cindy Sheehan, his mother, last spoke to him March 14 after he arrived in Kuwait.
"He was on his way to Mass and he said he loved me," Sheehan said.

A devout Catholic, Sheehan spent his Sundays at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Vacaville. For 10 years he served as an altar boy. He later became a Eucharist minister and assisted his mother with her youth ministry ...

"He was such a quiet, shy person, but when he was performing he came alive," his mother said. Three years later, joining the Army seemed like a good idea to him.

"He joined so he could finish his education, but then September 11 happened and the whole world changed," his mother said ...

His mother last saw him for two weeks at Christmas.

"I pray for the other families who lost their children over there," she said. "And I pray that this will end soon and we can bring our kids home so nobody else is killed."

September 9, 2004
The San Francisco Chronicle

Which is exactly the point. This administration would rather we not listen too closely to Mark Crowley tell us that his 18-year-old son -- just 10 months out of high school -- was killed on patrol, or that his gunner, who weathered six hits to his machine gun, was killed when a seventh bullet went through his head.

It would rather we not listen to Cindy Sheehan, holding her son's childhood teddy bear, say that she sleeps only when she takes a pill and even then just three or four hours. "It gets worse every day," she said Tuesday night. Her son, Casey, died in April.

September 9, 2004
The San Francisco Chronicle
NEXT OF KIN: FAMILIES RECALL THE LOVED ONES THEY HAVE LOST IN THE WAR IN IRAQ

Spc. Casey Sheehan

Sheehan, 24, of Vacaville died April 4 in Baghdad when his unit was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. He was assigned to the Army's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.

Pat and Cindy Sheehan, parents

The Sheehans do not believe that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States or that the decision to invade was the right one. They said that the war has made the nation less safe and that the troops should be withdrawn. They support John Kerry for president.

"Our only goal is to have people understand the human cost of the war and how devastating it is to lose a child to a lie, and what an awesome person the world lost."

SEPTEMBER 9, 2004
The San Francisco Chronicle
UNITED BY GRIEF

But several families found another controversial image reassuring -- the pictures of the flag-draped coffins coming home that leaked out in April despite a Pentagon ban.

"We found out subsequently that my son was one of the coffins in that picture," said Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Spc. Casey Sheehan, was killed in April. "Even when we didn't know it was Casey, it comforted us to see what respect and care that they are held with."

Most wanted better coverage of the dead, especially as the toll threatens to become just a number instead of names.

"Today, they will know that there's 1,000 soldiers that have been killed, but if you ask them tomorrow and for the next few weeks, nobody will know," Meredith said. "We have Scott Peterson on the front page, but when our children are dying, we don't see that."

On occasion, anger was directed at those for whom the war is largely a matter of seeing it on television.

"People need to wake up and recognize the sacrifices our men and women are making for you," said Tiffany Hicks, Lance Cpl. Travis Layfield's sister. "People just don't get it. If they don't have someone in the military, they go about their life. They forget, unless you're in our shoes."

But even when they were talking about the rights and wrongs of the war and the media and whether the military brass was doing right by the troops in the field, family members could suddenly, without warning, switch to the deeply personal, as when Cindy Sheehan held up a threadbare doll.

"This is his teddy bear. He ate all the fuzz off of it while he was a baby, but he wouldn't go to bed without it. He would cry, 'Bear, bear, mama, bear.' He was my oldest," she said. "I know how worried their moms are ... I know the mom of the 1,000th soldier was praying all day, 'Please don't let it be my child.' "

September 29, 2004
The Washington Post

The DNC this week aired a commercial mocking Bush for not fulfilling his vow to capture bin Laden "dead or alive," and a new ad yesterday cited the 1,000 U.S. combat deaths and said of Bush: "But no one can tell him he's wrong."

Kerry's allies are also trying to personalize the war. Cindy Sheehan, a California Democrat whose son was killed in Iraq, will appear in a tearful ad being released today by the liberal group Real Voices. "I thought the president was rushing us into this war," she said in an interview yesterday. "I just felt betrayed."

September 30, 2004
Sacramento Bee

"We have been so betrayed by this president," Cindy Sheehan said Wednesday. "He has lied to us. He has betrayed my family. He betrayed my son."

Sheehan is 47. She still can laugh, but she looks tired. She was given a script to read for her ad when the camera crew showed up at her home. She set it aside. Instead, tearful then as she was Wednesday, she spoke to the camera, describing her son's last mission.

"And the sergeant said, 'Sheehan, you don't have to go,' because my son was a mechanic," his mother says in the ad. "And Casey said, 'Where my chief goes, I go.' "

Army Spc. Casey Sheehan died in a Baghdad slum on April 4. The 24-year-old former Eagle Scout had been in Iraq about two weeks, serving with the 5th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division.

October 3, 2004
The Washington Post

During rallies before the march outside the cemetery and afterward on the Ellipse, speakers derided the Bush administration's policies as they eulogized sons, daughters, brothers and friends who were killed or wounded in Iraq. "I can't sit here in my grief and let another mother go through what I'm going through," said Cindy Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., the mother of Casey Austin Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist who was killed in Iraq in April. "[My son] died for someone who wouldn't even fight for his country."

Under qualified

2005-08-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

Online polls are always qualified with "This is not a scientific poll" but what qualifier could possibly make sense of this poll question on Sean Hannity's radio show site:

Results: Was it constitutionally and morally acceptable for President Bush to nominate John Bolton to the UN?

Was it constitutionally acceptable? Ya, Sean. The Constitution grants the president the power to nominate ambassadors. Was it morally acceptable? What does that even mean? What do morals have to do with it at all?

Of course that last question is the stinger for Conservatives, that's the question that they want Democrats and liberals to ask when faced with a such a non-sequitor equation. It gives them the chance to go on the attack: "What does morality have to do with it? Harumph. Why morality has everything to do with it. Harumph. And Bush understands that. Harumph, harumph. Liberals don't care about right and wrong they only care about hurting this President. Harumph."

In the meantime they never actually explain how Bolton's nomination in any way constitutes the morally acceptable choice or why that should be the measure of the nomination to begin with. They do however, avoid talking about whether he is the wise choice, the reasoned choice, the strategically acceptable choice, or even the right choice.

Conservatives would much rather argue morality because it allows them to drag out the old strawman of the touchy feely liberal, the radical who makes emotion-based decisions. It's the kind of hard v. soft, emotion v. reason dualism that Lakoff argues underpins all conservative issue framing (though I think Lakoff ultimately stretches his framing premise too thin across the political discourse). In this case, Bolton was the Constitutionally (reason) and morally (hard) acceptable choice in the face of liberal Bush hatred (emotion) and UN appeasement (soft). What's so fascinating is that the mobilizations of the Constitution and "morality" in this "poll question" are so monstrously vague and meaningless they are as mushy as anything conservatives might accuse liberals of thinking.

It would either take a mush head to write such a poll question or else it would take a mush head to take it seriously. And since we know that Hannity is a sharp motherfucker, the real results to be gleaned from this poll? 100% of Hannity listeners are mushheads.

"Aw shucks, that's not for me."

2005-08-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

This NY Times article looks into whether the studios are gaming the ratings system to entice teenagers into seeing R-rated films. Uh, yeah, entice teenagers to see R-rated movies.

According to the article, Hollywood's latest sneaky marketing strategy since fake film crickets involves running outdoor advertising for R-rated films before the ratings board has officially rated the movie which allows the studios to bill the film as "Not Yet Rated." Concerned critics argue that if Hollywood really wanted to get their films to the ratings board on time they could. The studio's real aim, says "Movie Mom" and Yahoo film critic Nell Minow, is to "intentionally and maliciously exploit a loophole" in the ratings system to better titillate those tough-to-titillate 15-to-17 year olds. Says Minow

"The sweet spot for an R-rated comedy is the 15-to-17-year-old range. Not having a rating means that a 15-year-old is getting more interested in the movie than if it already said, 'This is not permissible for you.' It's that most vulnerable audience that's most intrigued. I don't think it's parents being fooled, I think it's the under-age audience that's being titillated by the prospect of seeing the movie."

A movie not yet rated is more "titillating" than a movie rated "This is taboo for you"? What could be more titillating to a teenager than an R-rating, besides a light breeze? As if an R-rating has ever lead a 16-year-old to sigh, "Aw, shucks. I wanted to see that but I guess I'll have to wait until I'm 18 when I'm mature enough to enjoy Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo responsibly. Darn those movie companies for leading me on with their 'not yet rated' advertising.'"

The point here is not to cleanse Hollywood of any wrongdoing. The studios may well be doing exactly what Minow accuses them of doing. After waging countless lightsaber battles with my impressionable and inexhaustible four-year-old nephew in the months before and after the release of Revenge of the Sith I realized that Fox's real target audience for that film ran from pre-schoolers on up. But if we aren't going to delude ourselves about Hollywood's principles, let's also not delude ourselves about what titillates 15-17 year olds. The same moral high-horse crowd that decries the victim culture and "the mommy state" supposedly cultivated by liberalism are the same ones who argue that 15-17 year olds are "vulnerable" and must by protected from Hollywood marketing.

I remember from my own pre-teen elementary school days -- and here I risk violating my fresh by dating -- the playground buzz about Blake Edward's 10 (dig the poster here)It wasn't until a few years later, still under 18 mind you, when I finally saw it on cable that I discovered that the cool kid who claimed to have seen 10 in the theaters, the kid who had described to us salivating disbelievers, scenes and plot points right down to the film's, uh, climax, had pulled his entire synopsis out of his ass. He made it all up to be "the kid who saw an R-rated movie." And let me tell you, this kid had an imagination long before he actually tasted of the forbidden fruit.

Nostalgia aside, the ratings system in its entirety is an antiquated joke. Ratings are an integral part of movie marketing from conception to home video and R-ratings aren't the big downer to kids that Minow seems to think they are. Deuce Bigolo will be more readily accessible to teenagers in a couple of months on DVD when it will probably be available in an "un-rated" special edition which will make the R-rating look like nursery school material to the same 15-17 year olds who couldn't see it in the theaters. When studios connive to get "not yet rated" on their advertising, they aren't trying to avoid or hide from the expected R-rating. They're building to it. "Not yet rated" is just another teaser, a come on until the final rating is revealed. And there isn't a self-respecting 15-year-old who isn't hoping that the film they want to see turns out to be rated R. Then they're just a "March of the Penguins" ticket away from sweet, sweet corruption.

What An Asshole

2005-08-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

Rumsfeld says:

"This year the Department of Defense will initiate an America Supports You Freedom Walk," Rumsfeld said, adding that the march would remind people of "the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation."

Hey Donald does this ring any bells? How about this?

Viewing Anxiety

2005-08-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

I have over 600 DVDs in my collection about a third of which I have not gotten around to actually watching. And we're talkng a healthy dose of classics by Chabrol, Ozu, Kurasawa, Fellini, Antonioni etc. Nevertheless, I also have 127 DVDs (and counting)in my Netflix queue.

Here's the thing. Standing in front of the wall of DVDs in my closet looking for something to watch, I am invariably striken with viewing anxiety, the irrational fear that in watching something I already have at home I am missing out on something not yet in my possession that will prove even more edifying, more satisfying or just plain more. Why spend two hours with a film I can watch anytime I want when there are hundreds of films I want to see out there which I may never get around to unless I ACT NOW!

This is akin to walking into record store with a clear, focussed mental list of what you want to buy that suddenly dissapates before the vast storehouse of recorded music history. My viewing anxiety is like a Stendhal Symdrome for the movie lover.

Netflix has both helped and exacerbated the problem. On the one hand, instead of racing out to rent something that pops into my head or comes up in reading I just go add it to my cue. On the other hand, I now spend all my free viewing time watching what arrvies in those now familiar red envelopes while the stuff on my shelves continues collecting dust. I'm not sure what the solution is. I am too compulsive to narrow my range of viewing (Must. Watch. Everything.) and it's doubtful I could convince the planet to stop making movies until I catch up.

Jarmusch

2005-08-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

"Wouldn’t it make sense to have a wider variety of products that cost less to produce?"

If he had said this three times Hollywood would have disappeared.

Just Saw (DVD): Le Petit Soldat

2005-08-04T08:34:00.000-07:00

Again, just catching up to Godard's second feature. Though it is not his most clearly structured nor altogether satsifying experiment, I'm again surprised at its relevance for America today. The French tortured in Algeria, we torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. I doubt the Pentagon would bother to screen Le Petit Soldat but didn't they watch The Battle of Algiers? Did they all leave before the end?

("When I thought I was screaming, I was barely murmuring.")

Must See (Theatrical):

2005-08-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

Darwin's Nightmare

I'm gald this film is finally getting out there. It is one of the most depressing, harrowing documentaries I've ever seen. This film documents the beginning of the end. If you can, it's a must see. Here's what I wrote about it after seeing it at Toronto last year:

d. Hubert Sauper
Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare is the kind of film that sends you out of the theater in a daze of horror, disillusion, impotence and disgust. About the best you can hope for is that you’ll make it home and under the covers before your head clears and you remember it’s a documentary.

Sauper’s subject is the ecological disaster and human tragedy unfolding on and around the Tanzanian banks of Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world and the source of the Nile. Some time in the late 1960s, as part of a “little experiment,” someone (apparently no one knows for sure) introduced a new species to the lake waters, the Nile Perch, a voracious carnivore that multiplied like crazy. The perch quickly became the region’s only staple product when Europeans developed a taste for it. A fishing culture took root as small, outrigger style boats feed the processing plants on shore which in turn load the gaping Russian-operated cargo planes that carry the filets from one strip runways to European plates. Decades later, however, the perch has decimated the indigenous fish stocks and turned on its own young as a fresh food supply. This cannibalistic turn, combined with decreasing oxygen levels in the lake, heralds the end of the Nile Perch and the human community that depends it.

For Sauper the fate of the perch is also a chilling reflection of the lake’s human community, the fisherman, pilots, factory owners, prostitutes, mercenaries and hustlers. It’s a wasted pool of victims and vipers in which every desperate bid for survival only hastens an inevitable extinction. Meanwhile, the dwindling fruits of it all are sold in the markets and restaurants of Europe, a far away land, its citizens the only off-camera link the entire perverted food chain.

What’s there, on screen, can at times be unbearable to watch, in part, because of the horrible efficiency with which the local economy operates. Once the perch are filleted for export their skeletal remains are discarded in wide muddy dumping grounds where the poorest of the poor gather them up in unspeakably unsanitary conditions for curing and re-sale. Standing barefoot in an ankle deep mush of mud, maggots and rotting fish, a woman with one eye tells Hauper, “My life is good. I have work.”

Even the extra, discarded plastic wrap used to package the fish for export has a use: gangs of street urchins melt it down into a glue and huff it for a high that makes it easier to sleep on the sidewalk or in an alley.

On the macro level, Hauper runs down the answer to a question posed early on in the film’s 107 minutes: If the Russian cargo planes leave full of fish, what do they bring when they arrive? At first, all Hauper can get anyone to say – pilots, local officials, factory owners – is that the planes come in empty. Eventually, however, the truth is revealed in one of the film’s most poignant moments when a Russian navigator, on the edge of tears, confesses that the planes are part of lucrative trade supplying weapons to the regions bloody conflicts. The welling eyes of this gruff, hard Russian are as shocking as anything in the film as a quiet acknowledgement of the role he plays in the region’s nightmare but that he, like the woman in the muddy fields, has no choice: it’s a job.

Just Saw (DVD):

2005-08-02T20:22:00.000-07:00

Les Carabiniers

After reading about it for years I finally saw it. Bleak. Delerious. Brilliant. The most relentlessly anti-war movie movie I have ever seen. Godard makes his point with grim resolve: war is insane. This image would have been right at home in it:

Twenty bodies of people who had been shot or beheaded were found in southwest Baghdad on Monday, a police source said.

One weeping relative of a victim held the decapitated head of a man as it lay on the back of a flatbed truck, pictures taken by a Reuters photographer showed.

("Even so, it's a nice summer.")

Lifies?

2005-07-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

Neal Gabler's a smart guy who has crafted and persuasively argued for some original and illuminating theses but I'm not buying what he's selling here. Maybe it's just a knee jerk reaction to anyone who says "movies don't matter" or maybe it's my deep, deep dislike for his tone deaf term "lifies" (The book editor who let Gabler get away with this particular neologism should turn in their red pencil in shame) but to argue that this summer's box-office slump can be put down to the satiating effects of gossip seems like a stretch.

Gabler's premise is that people are now so entertained by celebrity gossip and movie industry scuttlebutt that the actual entertainment the entertainment industry produces has become utterly superfluous. Says Gabler:

Over the last 10 years or so, being entertained has been supplanted by a seemingly more gratifying exercise: being in the know.

His evidence:

More people will read, hear or joke about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes than will see either "War of the Worlds" or "Batman Begins." More people will read about the romantic entanglements of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie than will see their movie, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith."

Undoubtably. Afterall, no mass marketer (if we dare take gossip as another arm of the promotional biz) expects to get everyone on the planet into a movie seat but that doesn't stop them from trying. But does this constitute the "culturally momentous change" that Gabler says it does? Is it inconceivable to think that more people had heard of Humphrey Bogart's affair with Lauren Bacall than saw The Big Sleep? And it's gotta be true that more people heard about Ingrid Bergman's affair with Roberto Rossellini than went to see Stromboli.

But Gabler goes on. The meat of his argument is that gossip -- or being in the know -- has more cultural capital these days than actually seeing and talking about a movie. This is due not only the cult/glut of information on the internet and its attendent cache (?) but also due to what he likes to call "lifies" (ugh) "because they combine life with the narrative appeal of movies." "In the battle of competing narratives," writes Gabler, "people are likely to prefer the real-life ones with real-life consequences to the fictional ones on screen. Most movies suffer by comparison."

By this theory, people were so narratively satisfied by the 24 hour coverage of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez that actually going to see Gigli would have been two hours of entertainment too much. Or does it mean that Gigli bombed not because it sucked but only because it was bad in comparison to how great the real Affleck/Lopez story was too follow. Just what were the "real-life consequences" of that whole thing anyway?

Admitedly, there was more than a touch of snobbery at work in my initial reaction to this line of thinking. "The movies don't matter but gossip does? Fuck you, buddy." But is it really true that gossip, a.k.a. "being in the know," has more cache than it used to? Everyone may read People magazine, as Gabler argues, but who admits to it? Defamer.com certainly has cache (ironically, the LA Times profiles Defamer's Mark Lisanti under the headline "Feeding the Beast" in the same paper as Gabler's op ed) but can a blog really provide satisfying narrative appeal?

High v. low culture debates aside, isn't it just as likely that people are avoiding the theaters this summer, not because they so enterained by gossip, but because they're so exhausted by the hype? Maybe once you've heard every detail you never wanted to know about Tom Cruise at least ten times from ten different media sources the thought of seeing his face blown up to the size of your hosue on a movie screen is just a little too much to take.

Anyway, I'm still sorting out my take on this but one thing I know: It's been seven years since Life: The Movie was published. It should be obvious to Neal by now that it just ain't going to happen for "lifies." Time to hang it up, kid.

We're nuts

2005-07-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

American culture is crazy. The latest symptom of our collective insanity? The Great Raid. Here we have a World War II movie about rescuing American P.O.W.s which includes, going by the trailer, scenes of their physical abuse at the hands of their Japanese captors. I'll bet this thing tanks at the box office (it probably sucks given that Miramax has been hanging on to it since 2003) but isn't it odd that a major movie about saving American POWs is coming out in the era of Abu Ghraib? I would be interested to know if Abu Ghraib played a role in Miramax's subsequent decision making about the film's release date after the story broke in early 2004. But even if it didn't, The Great Raid raises some interesting questions about Hollywood, history and the news of the day.

I've seen commentators on the Rightbitch about the lack of heroic Iraq war movies, accussing Hollywood of liberal hatred for our troops, Bush, America blah, blah. Seriously kids. Hollywood hates reality. Hollywood is not a fan of current events. Hollywood likes old events, the older the better. It especially loves old events that remind us of how wonderfully flawless we supposedly once were. When Hollywood does make movies about controversial current events you can bet they're so watered down, so designed not to offend that they typically end up satisfying no one.

The Great Raid was probably born from the hope that a classic-style WWII film would cash in on the American desire/need to equate our current war with great causes past but then current events overtook it and fucked it all up. That kind of shit must drive Hollywood nuts. Then again, what the American psyche wants the American pysche gets. What started out as an attempt to map past American glory over our current Iraqi debacle could still work as an ego soothing switcheroo, a collective displacement of guilt over what's being done in our name on to the real prisoner abusers: The Japanese.

Just Saw:

2005-07-24T21:23:00.000-07:00

Happy Endings
Worth full admission price.
An American Love Actually made by a director who doesn't mind screwing with your sympathies, fucking with your head and hanging you out to dry when all is said and done. The scenarios of the film's three loosely interlocking stories don't always swing to the realistic (Lisa Kudrow's Mamie submits to the extortion scheme of a film school wannabe and produces his film in exchange for information about the son she gave up for adoption twenty years earlier) but the messy lives that drive them are always recognizable and the emotions they generate couldn't be more raw and affecting. The main characters are a red state nightmare of intelligent sexual beings: gays, lesbians, single white females, a divorced white dad, an illegal immigrant and Kudrow's planned parenthood counselor. Roos' cutting satire spares no one their self-absorption or self-righteousness but each character is at least granted a sometimes unexpected moment of grace on their way to, if not a happy ending, at least a new place where happiness remains a possibility. Maggie Gyllenhaal owns the white hot center with Kudrow turning a great portrait of a woman on the edge.

Cinema is the art of time and space

2004-08-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

It was early Saturday evening and I was reading a book in the corner of a Starbuck's in Toronto or at least I had been until a young woman approached me for the time. I confessed I didn't know it. I haven't worn a watch in ages and I didn't have my cell phone. My ignorance seemed to upset her. Her slight frame reeled back, her face fell and her look grew confused as if I had disturbed some fundamental law of how the world worked. Now what was she supposed to do? Ask someone else? In the same shop? The idea of asking someone else in my sight would have blown her own carefully presented, casual, too-cool-to-care relationship to the hours of the day. I knew the anxiety she was feeling. I'm the same way. This is what happens when the two of us meet. As she staggered off to the washroom to contemplate this sudden rupture I returned to my book but now I was too conscious myself of the passing minutes to resume reading.

I was there afterall to wait for K. When she got off work she was going to meet me there so we could grab dinner and a movie. She was going to pick the film and the time before she left. It was the kind of plan I liked, requiring as it did a complete abdication, on my part, of responsibility for our schedule. So I showed up casually at the Starbuck's whenever and set into sipping a venti frappucino and reading a book. But now I wondered where she was. It was beginning to get dusky out and as the fine details of the daylight faded the fuzziness of the whole evening started feeling like a bad idea.

I couldn't tell which I was I more worried about though: Where K was or whether or not we'd miss our movie. Before this sense of smudged priorities could do any psychic damage I looked up from pretending to read my book and she was there.

She was there and she had a plan: Walk up Yonge Street to the Varisty cinema in the Manulife Centre on Bloor Street, buy tickets for the show, get dinner and be back at the Varsity to get good seats. It was a little after five and the movie was at 7:10. We had plenty of time.

If you've never been to the Varsity it's a multiplex at the top of an indoor mall with eight regular theaters, several of which have decent to large-sized screens and a handful of what they call VIP theaters, intimately designed venues with only two dozen or so wide reclining seats, stadium seating and little snack tables but miserably small screens. The movie we wanted to see was playing in both a regular and a VIP theater. The woman at the ticket counter wanted to know which one we preferred. K. looked to me.

"Well, my ego likes the sound of VIP," I said "but my senses tell me to go for the eye candy. It's a tough call. Big shot or big screen?" K cut short my performance, "Two for the regular."
After some hesitation over where to eat, we ended up at a sushi joint in Yorkville for dinner. It was crowded but tasty and surprisingly cheap for the neighborhood. When we finished and got back to the theater we still had about 45 minutes before the movie started. We found some good aisle seats (we like the aisle) in a middle row and settled in to a running commentary on the slide show ads playing on the screen: "Check it out Celine Dion is singing 'You and I were meant to fly' over an ad for a hot dog and nacho combo deal.'" This kept us pretty well engaged for 40 minutes when we realized that the theater had become rather crowded. From our vantage point it looked like only a handful of seats remained for the dozen or more people still scouting from the periphery, one of which was directly in front of K.

To set the scene for what happened next, I was on the aisle with K. in the seat to my left. A rather short guy was in front of me so I had a great view of the screen while the seat in front of K. was empty. To the left of this empty seat was a couple and the seat to the left of them was open as well. As far as K. and I were concerned, we arrived early and nabbed two great seats with no one in front of us to block our view. The system worked, the world was just. In two minutes the lights would go down on a perfect seating coup. These were the anxious moments. The turnover rate of the onscreen ads seemed to slow. Each ad hung on screem for an eternity before it faded out, each time renewing the hope that it would be last and that the theater would dim with it. Inevtibaly a new ad came on and K. and I, gripped in silence, held our breath again. We scanned the theater for potential hawks circling the seats in our vicinity. Then, from behind, we heard the dreaded quesion: "Are those two seats taken?"

When I turned to see the descending predator I saw a tiny woman who looked about ten months pregant and her husband, the one doing the talking. From my seated position he looked about seven feet tall. In reality he was probably closer to six foot four and before K. and I knew it, he had asked the couple in the row in front of us to move down a seat so that he and his wife could sit together. The wife took the far left seat and the husband dropped his mamoth self in front of K.

I looked over at K. and saw her staring into the back of a giant head where the screen used to be. Her jaw dropped and she turned to me, throwing up her hands in disbelief. Of all the seats in the all theaters in all the world ...

I kicked into chivalry mode immediately and offered to switch seats. K. rejected that idea.
"But I'm not going to be able to enjoy the movie if I know you can't see," I told her but she responded with the same line. Now I'm no giant but at 6' I could probably see over the guy or at least around him but K. argued there was no way. I just didn't have the complete picture. As she saw it anyone short of an NBA center would be counting hairs in the dark for two hours.
We went back and forth on this in an increasingly heated whisper campaign for a few more minutes. "Well, how 'bout if I ask the guy to slouch down or slump in his chair?" This behemoth was, afterall, sitting bolt up, spine straight as if his sadistic third grade teacher was still standing behind him, ruler in hand. Surely, if alerted to the situation he'll understand and make some adjustments.

"No. Forget it. Don't ask him to do anything."
"Come on, he has to know he's blocking your view."
"No, don't ask him."
"I'm asking him."
"No. Don't. He can't help it if he's that tall."
"What? He has to know he's blocking your view. He's being a jerk. I'm asking him."
"No, don't you dare. If we ask him anything I'll do it."
"What? Why you and not me?"

Something more than watching a movie was on the line here. On the surface I'd say it had to do with manners and politeness and the rules of a civil society. Going to the movies is a social experience and this guy's lack of concern for his impact on the people around him is defintiely anti-social. Deep down, however, I could care less about the rules of civil society. Going to the movies is definitely a social experience but this had less to do with manners than it did with gender. Evoking chivalry was no empty metaphor -- my masculinity had been challenged. This guy wasn't blocking Ks view so much as getting in my face. True he wasn't even facing me but he had to know that his big lunk head was an obstruction in situations like this but he didn't care and he thought he could get away with it. Earlier I had abdicated responsibility for the evening's plan, I had prefered to remain passive. Now was the time to act. I wanted to do something, to set this situation straight, to assert my will. The lights came down on my overheated system and the trailers started playing.

Now with a picture on the screen it was readily apparent to both of us that switching seats just wouldn't cut it. One of us had to ask him to stoop or slouch or remove his head or something. Or else we'd have to move. K and I sat in silence through the first couple of trailers.
When I couldn't take it any more I sprung up from my seat to scout for other seats. It didn't take long to realize it was pointless. The place was packed, sold out, full up, standing room only. Even if there were any open seats I'd never be able to find them in the pitch balck theater. When I got back to my seat I leaned over to see the face of the lumox who triggered this whole scenario. Yup, in the flickering silver light reflected off the screen he looked like a lantern jawed jerk. Then I noticed his knees pressed up against the seat in front of him. The guy looked as comfortable as a sardine.

Sitting back down I whispered, "This guy is giagantic."
"I know. It's pointless. I can't see a thing."
"Well let's not just sit here. Let's go and get our money back."
"Okay. But let me handle it."

So we headed for the ticket counter. K. asked for our money back but I cut her off as she began to explain why. It was none of their business, no one had to know. We got our refund without any hastle and went about trying to salvage the night. On the escalators we laughed about the couple just now arriving for the film to find two open seats right on the aisle -- what a stroke of luck ...

Saturday, July 16, 2004 7:10 pm
The Bourne Identity
Varisty Cinemas, Toronto, Canada

"One Please"

2004-07-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

It was already late Sunday night when I decided to catch a late screening, 10 p.m., at The Bridge cinema just down the freeway on the way to LAX. My fiance is out of town and so, just like Bill Clinton, I did it because I could. I was also feeling anxious about the week ahead so I wanted to stretch out the weekend as long as possible. By the time I got out of the theater it would already be Monday and I wouldn't have noticed at all.
It seemed like the perfect plan but I hadn't been to the movies by myslef in a while and I had forgotten just what an awkward experience it can be. Like one of those dreams where you show up at work or school in your underwear, going to a movie alone is to flout vast networks of entrenched social convention and practice.

The thing is, I'm an old hand at movie solitaire. I can't count how many times I've walked out of a theater into the blinding blaze of a weekday afternoon when the ticket taker or any passerby who cares to consider it can only guess that you're unemployed, hiding out from a presidential assassination or both. I once attended a Saturday morning screening of Disney's Dinosaur at the El Capitan in Hollywood, just to check out the digital projection, knowing full well that every mom in the lobby pulled their son or daughter just a little closer to them in the popcorn line on seeing this lone adult male walk through the front door. I'm definitely acquainted with that abberent feeling you get whenever you speak that seemingly simple phrase, "One please." For the most part I learned how to handle it.

This time around, of course, I ordered my ticket online. Just one of the many tactics I have devised to avoid the discomfort that I still believed I had long since dismissed as the last vestiges of a discredited adolescent anxiety. I mean going to a movie alone isn't like going solo to the prom. Right?

Nevertheless I planned to leave a little late -- but not too late -- for the screening, expecting traffic on the freeway to hold me up enough that I'd get there just before the movie started. Apparently, I haven't been on the 405 South on a Sunday night in a while either. Traffic was moderate and before I knew it I was pulling into The Promenade at the Howard Hughes Center with a half hour to spare. I was not phased. It was, afterall, 9:30 on a Sunday night. Who was going to be at the mall? The weekend's prime date nights had the come and gone. Surely the center's 17 eateries, 13 retail franchises and gym were all winding down, spent after two days of opening weekend frenzy. All the way down I expected to commiserate with the loneliness of the mall's closed stores, to slip like a spy through its emptied out pomo spaces, to feel the cool summer night breeze as an errant thought floating through its open air panopticon.

Then I saw The Promenade's ramparts teeming with people and I realized that I wasn't the only one who wanted to push the limits of the weekend -- and that everyone else had a partner to do it with. Immediately the old feelings came flooding back, the panic of the 14 year-old who spent his whole first summer in a new suburb going to the movies only to realize too late, on his first day at his new high school, the truth of Mark "Rat" Ratner's line in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, "I hate working the theater. All the action's on the other side of the mall." With any luck, that axiom would be my friend tonight.
Heading up the escalators, however, it's immediately clear that all the action at The Promenade is entirely centered around The Bridge, an 18 screen multiplex with IMAX theater. The three or four lines at the box office each ran 15 to 20 couples deep, spilling over in to the food court where dude packs and girl gaggles buzzed among the Steffano's Pizza, Jamba Juice, Rubio's Baja Grill, Wild Thai, Mrs. Fields et al. Making my awkward way through the largely young, interracial crowd I catch sight of the only solitary figure I see over the course of the entire night: an elderly man in windbreaker and slacks staring blankly out over the food court railing at the stores below. I try to reclaim some critical distance by imagining the high glass walls of the theater belong to some new kind of church.

Of course none of what I'm witnessing is new at all. The first successful nickelodeons were all located in high density, urban commercial zones where immigrant working classess mingled. The Promenade itself -- with its sweeping modern architecture, greeter at the door, three plus concession counters, cafe booths with high tables, hallways inset with plush love seats -- hails from a long, if broken, tradition of movie palaces that elevated the experience of the lobby to the level of anything playing on screen. Movie-going has always been a highly social and socialized activity -- an odd quality for an acivity that largely involves sitting quietly in the dark.
In front of the advance ticket machines, I wait behind a trio of Latinas who whisper and laugh as they each take a turn, swiping their cards and getting their tickets. At the machine next to them, three white guys decked out in basketball gear go through the same motions trying to play it cool. Neither group seems to notice the other before they go their separate ways up the steep staircase to the theaters. Their nervous, exicited, expectant energy, channeled through dozens of teenagers, charged the whole lobby.

It struck me in that moment that there's a vast difference between going to a movie and going to the movies. A movie is what unfolds on screen but the movies includes everything going on around the space of the theater and within it. Perfumed skin, hard plastic, harder stares, the smell of butter and salt -- territories mapped and remapped a hundred times in the concession line.

The movies teem with social, cultural and technological currents that stay in flux right up to when the lights dim and beyond. In the dark they transform, cease to seethe and go all slippery and silvery. Merging themselves with our fantasies and change course, again, forever. A movie is what we go see, the movies are what we live.

It was 10 p.m. The pre-show countdown was over. As the lights went down in the theater, I wondered: Why do reviews only ever talk about what happens on screen?

Sunday, July 9 2004 10:00p.m.
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban
IMAX Theater
The Bridge Cinema De Luxe, Los Angeles