I Am Love

The perverse flaws of this film are matched only by its characters' general incompetence at being human. The film debases liberty by suggesting that it consists only in the kinds of personal expression that stem from egoism.

The film text itself contains this sentiment. At one point a brother denies that a gift to his sister is generous by claiming that his motive is selfish: he is happy when he sees his sister happy. Too bad this voice from beyond, the bearer of this genuine insight about ethics, must be slaughtered for the others to be capable of self-respect.

If the film strives to affirm the value of living for oneself, it fails because it portrays autonomy as based in ridiculous violence. If it suggests that love and desire are only possible in constraint, then it's completely corrupt because it fails to differentiate the two. If instead it wishes to punish us for being capable of these tendencies, if it seeks to reveal the logic of our own deeply destructive habits, then it succeeds marvelously but the message must be dredged up with more effort than it would take to have fun being a member of the Recchi family.

Greenberg

Despite appearances, this film is a romance that celebrates the existence of true love. The film approaches this subject matter obliquely, and comically, but the impact is powerful.

Greenberg, a man "trying to do nothing", winds up caring. The only infelicitous choice here was making the basis of his cynicism, at least in large part, his pathology. This adds little to his struggle to overcome solipsism and detracts from his triumph.

Shutter Island

An all around disastrous failure. Oh god. Someone should put all the outstanding prints of this film on an island near Boston and then invite Leo's imaginary arsonist enemy to set them all on fire.

Neither a compelling drama nor a successful psychological thriller, this film tries and fails to develop any legitimate suspense. Lightening? Scary music? Low angle pans in the woods? It verges on farce. Minutes in I found myself wishing the film could have been re-written as a send off or dark comedy. It probably would still have been a failure, but at least I wouldn't have been the only one laughing at the tear-stained face of a man momentarily tricked by his psychiatrist into believe that his delusions were real.

Avatar

Talk of this film's racist undertones is sophistry; the interesting subtext here is about institutions. The film depicts a future social order that completely lacks an independent politics; the only institutions that appear to have survived are corporations (we get to know an intergalactic mining corporation pretty well) and a semi-autonomous but powerless scientific establishment. Then there's a military that occupies itself exclusively with facilitating commercial endeavors, a situation which in part resembles first wave European colonialism. The people with power in the film are the corporate stooge and the general, but it's occasionally easy to forget that the general, whose official title is "Head of Security," isn't a politician.

Indeed, he sounds all too obviously like a Bush-era politician when he speaks to his troops: "We can’t wait. Our only security lies in preemptive attack. We will fight terror with terror." What's the point of this? I think the thesis is admonitory: the contemporary concern about special interests interfering with the democratic political process may be a distraction. In Cameron's view, a greater threat posed to the future by the market system is the alignment of commercial and military interests to the exclusion of politics altogether. And where would this alignment leave the individual, the citizen? Damned to consuming the "Lite beer and shopping channel" of Jake Sully's scorn?

The film's most harrowing line is at the beginning, during the funeral scene: "Your brother represented a significant investment." Pretty bleak. But then again, so is sleeping in the forest.

Up In The Air

In ultimately affirming the value of love, this film is a romantic comedy; but in its protagonist's contempt for formula (in love, lifestyle, domesticity) it nuances this affirmation in interesting ways.

Every character except Ryan Bingham is capable of being earnest in love; his foils include a woman who uses him as an escape and a pseudo-gamine who punishes him with generic discourse brimming with unchecked conformist cant.

But after he gives sincerity a shot, a disappointed Bingham returns to his starting point only to find that his old game is much less thrilling. The lesson: if you're cynical you better find a good way to stay so. The moment you vacation in hope, trust, belief etc., the poverty of cynicism will come into view but it won't necessarily be easy to change.

A Serious Man

It's not exactly clear what this film sets out to accomplish. Dark comedy? Maybe. But its protagonist's breathless search for answers, and his confusion about suffering, fate and free will makes it a tragedy.

And as a tragedy I think it's a wonderful film. Aside from the Rabbis, no character is spared imminent pain, suffering, or death. The agent of catastrophe appears natural in all cases (tornado, disease), but in fact the implication is that individual deceit or moral failing is responsible.

The reference here is thus not the Job story, but rather classical Greek theatre, where characters witlessly play a role in their own undoing. In this light, the film is an elegant culmination of the era of Jewish anxiety. It's not just neurosis--fear of failure guarantees failure--that is the engine behind horrible events. The serious man's sin is hubris, seeking knowledge beyond its natural bounds.

Tetro

There's a lot to like in this film, but there's even more to dislike. The plot seems painfully formulaic: loveless childhood produces adult mood disorders, and the main character must renew his faith in love through a defiant act of will. Unfortunately, Tetro deviates from the formula with some unlikely (and occasionally impossible) plot lines and revelations. In this case the pure formula would have sufficed.

Praiseworthy here (prior to the unconvincing Sophoclean surprise) is a genuine depiction of the complexities of brotherhood. I like the burden the younger brother suffers under; he relies on others to make sense of his own life and history before feeling ready to live independently. This is easy to identify with.

The Limits of Control

People need to stop hating on this film. I think it's great.

First, elision. Jarmusch is a master at omitting action and dialogue; it gets under our skin because we've been handicapped by verisimilitude. I found this film's slow pace refreshing; and its unexplained eccentricities are charming.

Second, allusion. Melville's classic film Le Samourai is among the silent partners here. So is Antonioni's extraordinary The Passenger. There's also explicit mention of Hitchcock and Welles. I don't find these references pretentious, however, mostly because Jarmusch departs so significantly from the genre that the citations establish contrast, not inclusion. His earlier film Ghost Dog did this too.

What I liked most about the protagonist was how he seemed to be in search of purpose, even though he's officially working under contract during nearly all of the film. There's a subtle argument here about subjectivity and selfhood in the market system, brought to the fore in Bill Murray's shaky monologue at the end. The film asks, rather politely and calmly, what sense does it make to identify with a generic task?

The Stranger

If the fame of Camus' novel outstrips its quality, Visconti's film suffers from the converse. I think this film is virtually unavailable and it's a damn shame. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a restored print and thank god none of the dialogue was dubbed in french.

This film is incredibly well shot and pulls off the remarkable feat of giving screentime to huge swaths of Camus' interior monologue. The voice over works incredibly well. Another strength is Anna Karina, she deserves more credit for this role. And a final strength is not overdoing the existentialist camera work. There's something elegant in Visconti's close-ups; consider the one of Meursault's steady hands as he flirts with smoking a cigarette beside his mother's coffin. The story is about a man's misrecognition by society; the film does an excellent job of portraying the subtle irritation this condition gives rise to.

The Antichrist

It's been several years since I've left a cinema and felt like stopping people on the street to apologize for something.

The last time this happened to me was after watching Pasolini's Salo, a film which convinced me that any kind of hunger or desire has a logical conclusion in extreme cruelty and even fascism. Lars von Trier is also really good at playing with logical extremes. The Antichrist explores two kinds of responses to the challenge of living in the aftermath of an inexpiable crime. The masculine response is rational, ordered, structured, and even cold. The feminine response is disordered, emotional, unstructured, and unpredictable. Both come up short.

The ensuing drama is terrifying, and the acting is convincing--so convincing in fact that it's easy to overlook the thin and annoying plot mechanism of the woman's failed PhD dissertation on medieval misogyny. It's the closest von Trier has ever come to extremely lazy screenwriting, but he can easily be forgiven on account of how much success he attains with his characters.

And I'm uncertain whether the ghoulish talking animals and other unsightly preternatural junk remain below von Trier or if he exalts these elements of schlock horror. Either way it is the disturbing treatment of human problems and our hastily drawn, totally inadequate solutions that makes this a great film.

The Box

At least Sartre's face wasn't made from crappy CGI.

After spending millions of dollars to create a 1970's NASA hanger, the producers of The Box must have decided that instead of making a movie, they wanted to make a dramatic instructional video for future generations of screenwriters. They should have called this film "How To Mangle Exposition," or "Philosophical Topics: Let's Abuse Them".

Surprise: the Creator (or 'the power responsible for lightning' in this film's mystical jargon) wants to test human fidelity to the categorical imperative. According to Kant, we're supposed to be hard-wired to universalize our maxims before acting morally; according to The Box it's somehow fair to 'test' people by making them desperate for money and then offering them cash with unobvious negative consequences. This makes no sense.

Another surprise: the depiction of 1970s wives as more morally vulnerable than their husbands, willing to 'push the button' for money and tear the roof down. Really? Does NOW have a film review council?

The only good thing to say about this film is that it's not the worst film about death, disease, free-will, the afterlife, and the non-specific divinity. That honor belongs to The Fountain.

Inglourious Basterds

Complete drek. How disappointing. None of the splendor of Kill Bill 1&2, next to none of Tarantino's signature wit, and such intermittent violence that it almost always comes across as phony.

I missed many of the allusions to the war films I'm sure inspired many of this film's scenes and quirks, but one excellent french film came to mind: Army of Shadows. Indeed, Melville's film is a drama, but the flimsy Inglourious Basterds is so unsatisfying that it ought to be chased by something more substantial.

Le Bonheur

It would be easy to dismiss this film as incredibly simple in its ambition, especially given how exhilarating Cléo from 5 to 7 is.

The film's flaccid subject matter is working class marital infidelity and it seems to condemn reckless male desire by demonstrating how tragic the consequences are if it goes unchecked.

But this is too easy a target for Varda. I want to believe that she's somehow satirizing this simplistic reproach of masculinity. I want to believe that she's complicating a sad vision of the world proposed by moralists who try to tighten their grip on other people's behavior. An ironic reading of this film, however, is implausible.

A more likely interpretation is that Varda wants to elevate the irritatingly trite content of this narrative by blessing it with cinematic splendor. This film is, if nothing else, a colorful experience.

Le bonheur

The Girlfriend Experience

This is a film about a woman groping hopelessly toward complete self hood in an unforgiving context. She's unable to distinguish artificial playacting from reality, and since this playacting is her livelihood she is easily read as a critique of market capitalism.

Such a reading is effortlessly confirmed by the other characters' obsession with discussing how the financial crisis in autumn 2008 affects their lives. Is this critique helpful or, at the very least, exciting?

Probably not. But the film is still remarkable. In real life, Sasha Grey is an audacious porn star, so being cast as an escort who sells intimacy is something of the inverse of her typical gigs. This is interesting to keep in mind, especially since the film isn't pornographic--it's melancholic, even contemplative, mostly thanks to Sasha Grey's surprisingly capable acting.

So does anyone really benefit when the tools of old Manhatto feel the need to buy friendship? Neither they nor the people who sell it to them seem very fulfilled by the transaction. A cynic might complain that consumer culture has deteriorated to an unsalvageable mess of desire, fantasy, disappointment and despair.

I'm not sure about this--there's an odd sense of hope in Sasha Grey's blank face and childish mien.

The Girlfriend Experience

Rachel Getting Married

It's too bad this film's title makes it seem like just another romantic comedy, it's the opposite of formulaic nonsense. In fact, it's a head-on collision with painfully serious questions about substance abuse and subsequent coping strategies.

Some of the drama seems thin at first because the film's structure delays a lot of the necessary exposition, but once it all comes out the motives are in place for some legitimate conflict.

The film's argument is that there are two tendencies in response to trauma: blame others or blame oneself. Is this right? Are there merely plaintiffs and defendants in matters of the soul?

The secret murderer, the real culprit, is the mother. She's the only one left out of the film's subtle arc of reconciliation, and it is her love that may have been missing from the start.

Rachel Getting Married

The Best of Youth

This massive Italian epic was originally produced for television and it shows. This isn't art, it's camp. Melodrama leaps off the screen at every predictable turn. As unlikely as Forrest Gump and just about as contrived, it's a grand mess of 1 (and occasionally 2) dimensional characters who seem incapable of taking a step back and evaluating their lives.

I found myself thinking a lot about Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage during the 6 torturous hours of La Meglio Gioventù. Some people love these completely clichéd and horrendously oversold formulaic dramas, but I think they're as poor a representation of life as soap opera. In alleging to portray everything, almost nothing genuine is accomplished.

A.O. Scott points eloquently to two characters' "moral allergy to their own feelings and to the messy bonds that connect them to their lovers and families" in his review of several years ago. Excuse me? Some motive would have been nice here. A tendency to treat loved ones with unexplained cruelty isn't dramatic, it's inane.

Scott suggests that this film's argument is that "a commitment to human dignity is ideology enough". What calamitous quietism.

La Meglio gioventù

Duplicity

There are two slightly-obscured agendas in this film, despite its appearance of being merely a spy film with some ingredients of slack romantic comedy. The first doesn't really interest me at all: some vague moralistic suggestion that trust must be constantly renewed in love relationships. When the dew-eyed spies confide in each other that "they aren't like other people" aren't they actually universalizing their suspicions? In other words, doesn't their game feel at some level like the normal process of guaranteeing sincerity on which all intimacy is based? Aren't they then just like other people except that they talk about this process instead of living it? The argument would then be that we all ought to realize how unreliable a testimony of love is. But what do we do? Subject this testimony to more scrutiny?

The second agenda is much more interesting but unfortunately its vehicle is the hoakiest part of the film: the provocation that shareholder-beholden corporations have inherently perverse incentives. Here the film is awesome. Misinformation and counterintelligence doesn't bother us so much in the context of warfare, ultimately the sides are drawn tidily. But in the context of corporate espionage the game seems crass, even pathetic. Intelligently, the film suggests that profit-driven corporate spies can only be played by the system they think they can outsmart. Without spoiling the plot, I think Duplicity is on to something interesting: try to leave the system by fooling it, and you get marooned.

A really good film that I thought about during Duplicity is Le Cercle Rouge - Criterion Collection

Les Plages d’Agnès

This funky, chaotic, charming bricolage often put me in mind of Synecdoche, New York. There's a lot to love in this film because Agnès Varda has led a long, extraordinary life and she shares it here well, in several media and with an overt interest in being entertaining. Gems include back story on the nouvelle vague, the story of Varda's time in LA, and the evolution of her latest creative endeavors.

I saw this film at a Varda retrospective which she herself attended. It's unsettling, even unreal, to consider that someone from the world of Cleo de 5 a 7 is alive and conversant. After Varda's remarks I lingered to ask her about my favorite shot from her 1962 film (the famous point-of-view sidewalk scene when Cleo attracts the attention of several idle men). I panicked in front of Varda and wasn't sure if I had a question or merely a compliment. She told me that the men weren't actors and that they only shot the scene twice.

If you haven't seen Cleo, take the plunge at your earliest convenience: Cleo From 5 to 7

Choke

This film is entertaining and often clever but it doesn't amount to much. The whole sex addict shtick gets a little old (and so does the self choking scam). They're both basically great ingredients for a trailer but they don't cohere well enough to breath life into a full character. But splicing in those flashbacks at the nursing home was a nice touch.

What really sucks about this film is that the person's contemporary life is supposedly explained away as a pathetic recapitulation of the indirect child abuse he endured being raised by a mentally ill mother.

I feel strongly about the misuse of psychology as a plot device.

The film's mockery of tourism put me in mind of a great quotation from the late David Foster Wallace's essay Consider The Lobster: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

The Dark Knight

It's no Matrix but it's definitely a philosophical action film. Not sure why the female lead had to die (is this a quotation of Antonioni's L'Avventura?). What makes this film interesting is obviously what makes real Westerns captivating: an exploration of the role of the outlaw in society. The joker is an anarchist who cannot be reasoned with and knows it...Batman is a moralist who won't kill recklessly. Unlike the great Westerns, though, this film is tinged with piercing Bush-era questions about whether, in extraordinary circumstances, it can be worth compromising the moral integrity of a state in order to stabilize it.

As philosophical film it's certainly lacking, especially when the plot wears thin: humanity's nobility is demonstrated by two boats worth of people unwilling to blow the other boat up to save their own? Come on.

You've probably already seen it, but just in case Click Here

Woman Under The Influence

"Be yourself!" is Nick's fierce refrain in the face of his wife Mabel's breakdown. Yet his efforts only exaggerate her fragile condition, which seems to walk the line between severe pathology and mere social dysfunction. This film's subtle thesis is that our mental life belongs to us, of course, but we share it with the people in our lives and they in turn influence it in a variety of disastrous ways.

In the film, Nick is particularly concerned with his co-workers' impression that his household is normal and functional. And he genuinely loves his wife and children. But in treating them as a means--as the route to social esteem, parental approbation, or personal gratification--he's cruel to them. Mabel isn't innocent, however, since it's never clear why she's so ill equipped to resist the opinions and desires of others in the first place. You can't blame her for being helpless or weak, but isn't her self-indulgence toxic too?

Woman Under the Influence

The Lives of Others

I couldn't be happier that there's actually a contemporary German film distributors have deemed worthy of sharing with us, but this film's wretched depiction of femininity ruins everything for me. I'm not certain whether a subtle comment on the status of women in the DDR was intended (if so then my anger might subside), but as it stands the world of this film is one in which women witlessly bring about the destruction of the noble male project.

Perhaps the script was rushed and no mechanism other than a woman's drug addiction (i.e., weakness) could bring the ship to port. If not, then women everywhere who praise this film's romance/drama should take a closer look.

The Lives of Others

Hard Eight

"Never ignore a man's courtesy" is the ominous line that looms large over this artful film's plot and the idiocy of several main characters. These characters bear a distinct resemblance to those in PT Anderson's later film Magnolia which I can't stand (I think his so-called masterpiece is an overrated, dirty rip off of Altman's Short Cuts). However, there's a dramatic heft to Hard Eight stemming largely from Philip Baker Hall's performance. He nails the role of Sydney, a worn out degenerate gambler secretly attempting to expiate his earlier crimes.

Anderson's directing talent does make certain scenes in this film shine. Too bad the best filmed scene comes at the very beginning.

Hard Eight

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Aside from an enchanting and lyrical performance by Camilla Belle, what makes this film great is its suggestion that narcissists can evolve into better people even as they age.

On the brink of ruining his daughter's life by attempting to shelter her from capitalism and sexuality, he actually makes some progress towards a fuller humanity himself. One is reminded of the excessive lengths parents of tennis players go to in advancing the success of their children. Being raised seems like a recipe for disaster, and this film's forced tragic ending is no exception.

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Gentleman's Agreement

This film is melodramatic and the romance in it is completely unconvincing. Doesn't it make you thrilled you didn't live through the '50s? And if you were alive at that time, then doesn't this film make you cringe?

The film is about a righteous journalist who fakes being Jewish to go under cover and "blow the lid off antisemitism". Pathbreaking, brave, topical, helpful--this film was many things in its own day. But today it's a little embarrassing, not just because its portrayal of the protestant establishment is boring but also because the whole ploy seems unlikely.

Also, the way this couple falls in and out of love is hilariously lame. If the '50s were really like this, then thank God they're over. And if only the '50s films were like this, then why?

Two redeeming notes: Mr. Green's prose is actually quite persuasive--an interesting assessment of bigotry which probably comes from the novel the film is based on. And the scenes where Mr. Green (Peck) plays father to his young son. These are charming.

Gentleman's Agreement

Persona

Bergman's Persona has to be among the richest films in history, if not for its insane beauty then surely for its provocative illustration of human frailty. The film is about an actress whose mental illness prevents her from talking. She bears a striking resemblance to her nurse, who takes her out of the hospital and proceeds to care for her in charming seaside home.

The uni-vocal but maddening relationship that ensues will give rise to a panic that even thousands of hours of yoga won't be able to soothe.

Persona

Damage

I wish more people saw this film so I could talk about it with someone. Part family drama, part romance, and utterly twisted, there's little chance this film won't scare you into contemplating whether your deep-seated contempt for western values is misguided.

I'm not saying that Jeremy Irons' character Dr Fleming is totally unsympathetic. When drunk on power, we all have difficulty being reasonable, this is in human nature. What's gorgeous about Damage is that Dr Fleming suffers a path dependence that can only end in mass casualty, and yet somehow he continues to believe he's not going to be responsible for it. This could be you one day. Melville: "The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves"

Damage

Secrecy

Oh my god this film is extraordinary. It's a documentary about the tension between state secrecy (in the interest of national security) and governmental accountability. There's an ugly paradox at work in the US government's invocation of state secrecy privilege, and the journalist, attorneys, and former CIA officers that star in this film unintentionally make it hard for any thoughtful patriot to be completely "pro-transparency". What if terrorist attacks can be prevented by covert operations? How can these operations be monitored without jeopardizing their efficacy?

In the end, no one wants to compromise our free society by endorsing the government's reckless abuse of "secrecy", but what good is the government if it doesn't have the freedom to do its job?

Before this film I was complacently anti-secrecy and very hostile to the Bush administration's expansion of presidential powers. Now I'm terrified that the Rubicon is so far behind us that we need much more than utopian political theory to salvage the American experiment.

Secrecy

Shortbus

Even without knowing that John Cameron Mitchell's project began with a public search for first time actors interested in changing the way that sex is portrayed in American cinema, it's possible to have enormous respect for this film. On the outermost level, this film is about a post-9/11 NYC salon for sexual libertines, but it's also about how the fight for authenticity and self-acceptance inevitably involves sexuality. I've heard people refer to Shortbus as Queer Film, but this is a mistake. It depicts the misery that various individuals--gay and straight--endure as they strive to be honest with themselves. Their fight is universal.

Shortbus (Unrated Edition)

The French Connection

The pace of this famous film is slow by contemporary standards, but there's undeniably something charming about it. Many of the plot turns (incredulous police chief v. investigator with a sixth sense, federal agent with an axe to grind, etc.) have become so standard in crime films that they seem terribly familiar. And the thick fake blood they used looks just plain silly.

But Popeye's obsession with "Frog 1" is classic, and so are the scenes of 1970's New York City. The city is authentic in ways that are considered shameful today. Popeye's fervor in tailing the Frenchmen is muted but fierce. My favorite scene is when he stands in plain view outside the opulent restaurant where the Frenchmen dine. His partner brings him a lousy cup of coffee which he can't finish. He pours it out on the street while a waiter pours a fine brew for the well-heeled dealers. Milton: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven"

The French Connection

A Letter from An Uninteresting Unknown Woman

God this film's score got under my nerves, but its idiosyncratic staginess is actually quite hilarious...for the first few minutes. Then you're forced into imagining how annoying your life would be if you hung all your hopes and ambitions on an adolescent obsession. This is an important lesson for all dreamers of all ages, except it's one that cold, hard disappointment teaches much more effectively than cinema.

Lisa is occasionally an attractive character, but she's the architect of her own misery and (albeit unwittingly) of her own death by Typhus. She's also one-dimensional: the sum total of her adult wishes, beliefs, desires, and thoughts are variations on her teenage crush. But this latter aspect of her actually makes her interesting. But in the end, she's effectively little more than a didactic metaphor for the emotional repercussions of meaningless sex. "If only you could have recognized what was always yours, could have found what was never lost." There's a universal truth in there, but it's not exactly a compelling one, and honestly I'd exchange it any day for a bite from an Austrian caramel apple.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)