A Brutal Film Blog

I Am Love

2010-07-06T00:24:00.004-04:00

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

2010-05-06T19:43:00.004-04:00

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

2010-03-02T20:38:00.003-05:00

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

2010-01-31T18:58:00.005-05:00

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

2010-01-27T04:10:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-21T11:17:00.004-05:00

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

2010-01-11T08:02:00.004-05:00

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

2009-12-09T09:47:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-30T19:55:00.006-05:00

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

2009-11-18T03:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-06T04:32:00.004-05:00

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

2009-08-26T06:38:00.006-04:00

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

2009-06-07T14:17:00.005-04:00

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

2009-06-03T23:32:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-03T23:11:00.004-04:00

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

2009-05-11T09:35:00.007-04:00

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

2009-03-22T20:49:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-16T17:39:00.009-04:00

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

2009-03-10T23:37:00.006-04:00

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

2009-03-10T23:28:00.010-04:00

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

2009-03-06T13:04:00.004-05:00

"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

2009-03-03T18:41:00.004-05:00

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

2009-03-02T17:14:00.017-05:00

"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

2009-02-27T16:47:00.008-05:00

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

2009-02-24T14:58:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-24T12:17:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-20T17:51:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-20T13:02:00.006-05:00

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

2009-02-19T09:48:00.005-05:00

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

2009-02-18T15:53:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-09T14:40:00.012-05:00

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)

FACES

2009-01-30T12:53:00.008-05:00

The contrast between surface-level frivolity and the turmoil it masks makes this film remarkable. Redolent of La Notte, Faces has the uncanny ability to universalize domestic misery and, deliciously, teach us nothing but that we are accountable for our own suffering. I love the scene at the end when husband and wife sit on the staircase, the morning after both have explored the mixture of melancholy and liberation in adultery. It occurs literally minutes after the wife recovers from a suicide attempt. On the staircase, they smoke cigarettes which they've lit with a grudgingly shared lighter. At a certain point they both cough violently. There's a certain elegance in this tragic moment: a marriage has just ended, but the habit of idiotically seeking happiness continues.

Faces (1968) - Criterion Collection

Shoot the Piano Player!

2008-12-22T00:52:00.007-05:00

Honestly, Shoot the Piano Player makes me think a lot about one thing: where will I be when I wash up? This concert pianist now plays in a pathetic small bar in Parisian anonymity where un-self-conscious folk go to dance among whores and sailors et cetera. It turns out he's there because he can't resist tasting something from his former life but, as we eventually learn, the whole gig is a dish of self-pity served cold. This film is fundamentally comic (the thugs are incompetent, Fido the kid apes adults with a physical comedy embrionically redolent of The 400 Blows, and the faux femme fatale perishes with comically bad splicing and poor pacing/editing). And yet there's something horribly appealing about Charlie's sober psychology, his calculated ability to desert women at the crucial juncture of intimacy, and his hilarious capacity to survive thoroughly unlikely confrontations. So it's hard not to consider how much we all resemble Charlie, our fantasies of unbounded success hindered by other people's interests and our real-world failures.

Shoot the Piano Player - Criterion Collection

Un Conte de Noël

2008-12-11T10:40:00.004-05:00

This is a schmaltz free French Royal Tenenbaums, and this film's virtue is that it never lets a single character become completely accounted for, as if everyone is continuously evolving or unraveling and exploring themselves throughout the drama. Indeed, self knowledge is a major theme of the film and the family's problems are to a certain extent based on the frustrating paradox of kindred mis-recognition (i.e. your family's known you forever but being around them only causes you to wonder how well they actually know you, and whether you even know yourself as well as you assume). In addition, the film's own numerous self-conscious peaks--the best of which is a family production of a play called Zorro while arch rival siblings torment each other a few floors above--raise the fascinating question that all wonderful cinema does: how much in our own lives is authentic? Are we merely fools on some social stage slavishly reciting scripted lines that seem appropriate? The other great lesson here is that mirth is sometimes buried beneath catastrophe, and only the French could avoid brutalizing this lesson with too much reconciliation or a high minded conclusion. Instead there's enough alcohol abuse and tobacco in this film to give the characters credibility but the right amount of confession and debate to keep them interesting.

Synecdoche, Happiness

2008-11-14T00:09:00.005-05:00

'We're all alone' says the worn-down husband in Todd Solondz's "Happiness". More than a decade after this wry, melancholy film showcased Philip Seymour Hoffman as a repressed onanist he returns as Caden Cotard in the brilliant Kaufman film Synecdoche, New York.

Solitude is a central theme in Happiness, and as the misery of each character becomes increasingly developed it is obvious that Solondz's point is that the standard ways of coping with solitude are futile. By systematically exposing the emptiness and inauthenticity of marriage, household, career, literary art, care-free retirement, and self-improvement, it seems Solondz argues for a universal recognition of how pathetic we all really are. Seems pretty clear that Solondz wanted us to believe that no matter where we stand on the life cycle we're actually tumbling into tragic meaninglessness. I like it.

The supposed conclusion of happiness studies is that relative wealth and well-being produces the greatest self-reported happiness. Bullshit says the live metaphor in Kaufman's recent film. Happiness is not only unattainable, but a complete illusion, the grandest fiction which, in addition to love, exists only in the hyperbolic narratives that drench our vulnerable humanity from beginning to end. Try to win by controlling others, try to win by creating a controlled environment like a play, try to win by discerning order amidst chaos, and you only end up with maps that contain smaller maps that contain smaller maps...

In other words, the real synecdoche is Cotard-for-everbody, not his magnum opus for New York. We all derive assurance from stupid projects; if we could risk abstracting ourselves slightly then there's no telling how much more difficult (and then enjoyable) it all becomes. So the real reward comes from figuring out how to relate to each other despite the inauthentic scripts running amok in our consciousness, self-descriptions, and conversations.

Synecdoche New York

I'm back, on Marathon Man

2008-11-12T13:13:00.007-05:00

It's been nearly three years since my last post but I haven't lost my deep suspicion of cliche'. I recently saw Marathon Man and despite celebrating Obama's victory last week in earnest, I can remain terrified by formula.

I may be jaundiced by the revolting, totally scarring experience of having seen 88 Minutes. That film should never have been made, and once produced it the script should have been edited to exclude all references to personal psychology. Total garbage and a disgrace for all the actors. I can picture distribution people in a smoke-filled room rolling on the floor laughing their hearts out at this film--it's a compendium of hollywood genre cliche's and will be studied by historians developing an expertise in American cultural decay.

Back to Marathon Man and Obama. So I'm running high on hope and earnestness and I still can't get that excited by the supposed classic performance by Dustin Hoffman. There's nothing genuine about his psychology--his obsession with recovering the honor of his dead father provides incredibly thin character development beyond his decision to be a graduate student. And the endless footage of him jogging in New York? Why? To make it likely that he'll be able to outrun the bad guys at the end? To add poetry to his perseverence? I can't even talk about the ending without cracking up...Olivier swallows a diamond before drowning, makes me cackle.

The only part of the film I found touching was the Shoah survivors recognizing their torturer on 47th St. But even those scenes are mired in unfortunate stereotyping and, 30 years later, the whole concept seems crusty.

Marathon Man

A River's Edge

2006-02-26T02:54:00.006-05:00

This film is an incredibly convincing and dark alternative to 1980's suburban films like pretty in pink or the breakfast club. It's characters all fall prey to a vicious brand of nihilism peculiar to Reagan era cold war culture, a nihilism that very well might be the logical extreme of other rebellious adolescent sentiments. The youngsters' indifference to the death of their friend, their partially developed sense of remorse comes not from the event but from an incapacity to feel bad about it. They admit that the only aspect of life which holds their attention is drug use, an unsurprising conclusion to a psychological story whose premise is the death of the Real. Unlike their playful cultural equivalents (whose commitment to shirking social expectation is never tested in quite the same extreme), these people discover that violence is the only manner in which contact with the Real can be restored. The psychoanalytic content continues with the series of obsessive pygmalionisms--the child to doll, the adult to sex doll, the teen to girlfriend. If the grand apocalyptic threat of nuclear holocaust leads to nihilism, then the nihilism in turn yields to desperate attempts at generating meaning. This is to say nothing of what seems to be a scathing social critique of loveless and mismanaged middle class households, that infamously american hotbed of repression and the unlikely birthplace of protagonistic valor.

River's Edge

Zabriskie

2006-02-25T20:15:00.013-05:00

Slavoj Zizek said once that Zabriskie Point is Antonioni's worst film because it's sincere about love, let alone hippie love. True, the film tells where the tetralogy shows, and its blatant case against consumerism is schmaltzy. Its claim about consumer society is marvelously subtle.

The film can be seen as flexing an individual's anti-social resolve to the point of fracture. The liberty that the two had come to know in the desert (a liberty cinematically enhanced by the addition of a kaleidoscopic cadre of imitators) is only possible outside of human community. The lovebirds escape in technological vessels which, contrary to their purpose, imprison their occupants and effect the tragic reformation--even deformation--of the human back into a socially acceptable shape. In one case the deformation is fatal. So as the lovers part, they guarantee the impossibility of their love and simultaneously secure the space for freedom outside society. This is a subtle take on standard counter-culturalism and affirms, rather than destabilzes, its founding principle.

Zabriskie Point - by Michelangelo Antonioni (Import)

Matchpoint's Metaphysical Argument

2006-01-03T17:13:00.003-05:00

A remarkable feature of Woody Allen's didactic Matchpoint is that its mild meta-theatrical elements draw amperage from the plot to make a loud and meaningful metaphysical remark. Nola professes to be an actor but is ostensibly deficient in skill while Chris does nothing but play parts, as member of high society, as keen cultural critic, as financier, and then most significantly as loyal husband. The result is a man whose belief in life's meaninglessness ensnares him in a dogged belief in fortune. When passion threatens this belief, the autonomous being rears its head for an act of savage violence. Faith in fate, it seems, can only be sustained at the dramatically high personal cost of defrauding oneself.

Chris's expressed fear in life is failing to make a contribution. This fear can be seen as the vehicle for the entire tragedy, for it prevents him from nobility in the time of his great decision. Far more profoundly, it is this fear which enables him to perform the spectrum of roles which comprise his existence. This tragic self-evasion makes the film something of a morality play, except in place of a principled constructivism we receive only the most befuddled nihilism. It's no wonder Woody Allen is so fond of the macabre creed from "Oedipus at Colonus" (he also used it in Deconstructing Harry)--where oh where has the nervous bard's optimism run off to?

Match Point

Against Psychological Plot Resolution

2006-01-03T02:09:00.002-05:00

Since schizophrenics are unaware of their own psychological circumstance, it's high time that their pathology ceases to be exploited for convenient plot resolution in suspense/horror/thriller/mystery films. Unless such psychology is evident to the viewer from the beginning (e.g., Breaking The Waves) where the plot is about such dysfunction, a revelatory concluding twist is insulting to the type of dramatic realism which makes thrillers interesting in the first place.

In Stephen King's Secret Window, for a recent example, an otherwise compelling script is punctured and then deflated by a "surprising" yet by now altogether predictable and unsatisfying schizophrenia. What is the point of this? Is it at all suspenseful to find that cinema has been lying to us, that a character with every semblance of empiricism was the fantasy of another character? Hitchcock's Psycho, the popular genre's likely germ seed, takes severe pain not to give cinematic existence to Mrs. Bates. Contemporary audiences since the Usual Suspects have been prepared to suspect cinema's contents of dissimulation, and this is getting boring.

High Tension

2005-12-20T23:28:00.002-05:00

In the Globe review, High Tension's psychoanalyic argument is summarily dismissed: "What happens in the final minutes is narratively dumb -- and psychosexually ridiculous". Either regretting the film's homophobia or rejecting its illogic, most reviewers are entirely unsatisfied.

I disagree. What makes the film and its final twist interesting is that the victim has a non-standard relationship to the perpetrator. In fact, it is never clear whether both Marie and Alex are victims of a third, or whether Marie is Alex's worst nightmare. This is incredibly intelligent and has a lot of traction. Like the dream narratives horror films embrace, this one enjoys a premise of narratological uncertainty and finds no resolution. In fact, the entire film is inscribed within Marie's dream while napping in the car, so any attempt to fasten realistic windows to this frame should be seen as irrelevant.

Without overstepping the bounds of plausibility, I believe Alex is the more compelling philosophical and psychoanalytic subject here--Marie is boring since she slaps film critics in the face with a sexual origin for sociopathology. That reading follows predictable lines: Marie represses her lesbian love for Alex and would sooner kill her than permit a male to come between them. Unfortunately, this facile case is aided by the distracting sexual perversion of the male killer, Marie's final tragic mantra, as well as a collection of Marie's obsessive responses to Alex. This is a misreading of the film, for I see these weak gestures at a typical forensic--sexual repression as the only possible explanation for homicidal mania--as the very object of this film's disgust.

Keeping Alex at the center does the trick. Since she would react to the insanity of her best friend in the same way as she would to that of a stranger, she is the only character for whom the film's narrative coheres (albeit in incoherence). She doesn't need to account for the time lost as Nahon thuds about and Marie tries to escape or hide or strike back. To her, the horror doesn't make sense. It is as if the film asks for her, alongside her mother, why this is happening to her. Her confusion over the role Marie plays is as much oneiric as it is a result of the trauma she experiences all night long.

The point is thus not to wonder where Marie got the truck if she's the real culprit or what exactly happened to the dude if he never existed. The point is to remember that our unconscious is a benevolent enemy, a horrible place where love of another conflicts with self love and our friends try to kill us.

High Tension

True Romance

2005-12-19T23:58:00.004-05:00

When texts seem like parody one rarely stops to wonder if there ever was or will be an era in which they could seem sincere. When they seem sincere, the temptation to recast them as parody is often irresistible. True Romance is a film which furnishes this temptation elegantly, not merely because Tarantino's later work so explicitly plays against genre, but largely because on its own terms it showcases exaggeration. This showcase, no matter how theatrical, is quite pleasurable.

When a parodic reading feels like a misreading, it can only add to a text's case for earnestness. True Romance is admittedly a gushing romance. Its sarcastic title clues us into the entire ordeal, for while the textual romance is indeed true, the plot is un-true because romantic plots, in cinema or life, are not supposed to contain gory, mafia/cop utopian criminality. One entirely untenable reaction is that cinematic and real-life romance is un-true since both follow the narrative prescribed by cheap and sincere sentiments from Austen or soap opera. This is the only place romance can be found, the film seems to say, purged of complex psychology, cleansed of dissonant emotions, this couple marries on a whim, dreams together, escapes together, and after flirting with an amusing series of treacherous obstacles to the beachside frolic with a happy child, no problem, they make it in the end.

This reaction is illadvised because it requires that aspects of the film be realistic. My reaction is that far from supporting a renovation of genre film, this film is its arsenic. The romance it depicts is not true, it is not faithful to the genre nor to real life, and it thus provides for its own validity. You don't even have to enjoy it, but if you so much as watch it, it works. And the possibility for self-justified art is splendid.

Sure the metanarrative abounds, from the aspiring actors to the producers, to the bizarre and dogged inclusion of other cinematic texts on screen and television, to the startling denouement that takes practically between a film projector and a projection screen. But these moments aren't what justifies the film; rather it is the trademark tarantino plot trajectory inside a romance that reminds you not to take romance seriously.

Why was the infantile kid-at-xylophone score allowed? Who placed it at key dramatic instances when it was thoroughly inappropriate? When Slater cries at his father and recounts the man's sins, the pebbles drop optimistically and the sanguine score sucks all the legitimacy from the scene. Aside from the score, there should also, as always, have been more Christopher Walken. What deity confined him to the cameo?

True Romance

Walk The Line

2005-11-18T11:54:00.002-05:00

....turns out only to cross lines of acceptable art. Instead of glorifying the accomplishments of our mythically esteemed cultural ancestors, biopics like this one exaggerate our willingness to accept and then valorize highly reduced contours of a human life. In producing this script, hollywood not only plays right into an american public satisfaction with the far-fetched birth of a star, its accelerated rise, inevitable fall, and redemptive reconciliation or death, but also tickles us as it tricks us into accepting someone's shadow in place of his spirit. This is unacceptable.

Our ineffectual collective masturbation to the cult of celebrity is alarmingly acute with this film. Johnny Cash and June Carter, co-conspirators of a real culture and a legitimate art, suffer degradation in this film. As Phoenix and Witherspoon croon in derivation, nothing of Cash rises from the ashes and all that remains of Carter withers into parody.

Walk the Line (Widescreen Edition)

Breakfast on Pluto

2005-10-18T22:45:00.003-04:00

There's something awful about hastily drafted harsh reactions to films. There's something equally reprehensible about how lately I haven't enjoyed the movies I've had the privilege of not paying for. Blaming capitalism's distinctly efficient powers of seduction, I really never wanted to think about Breakfast on Pluto ever again.

A day later, I still find its shortcomings offensive. Briefly, the film fetishizes its protagonist's obliviousness, distorts an otherwise fascinating queer coming of age story into a flimsy decadence, and induces already thin drama to a boring genre cannibalism (history pic snacks on catholic repression while queer tragedy dines on both). At every turn the film gurgles out indescribably jagged chapters of human discomfort, and instead of calmly organizing them someone had the bad idea of splattering them about. The results are risible. People die, endure physical abuse, search for meaning in vain--and I suppressed laughter. I damn this script for conjuring up comedy in me and for promoting infelicitous scorn for a topic I care about.

It takes so much time/money/talent/vintage clothing to makes these movies, people should start reading scripts before producing them.

Breakfast on Pluto

on Snobbery

2005-10-06T16:23:00.001-04:00

What is the nature of snobbery? Is the oft-mocked reverse snobbery more deplorable? Does taste necessarily beget snobbery? What is the difference between taste and preference, its value-neutral cousin?

Human autonomy, from infancy to senility, constantly results in preference. Whether presented with competing alternatives or given the freedom to make selections at will, people are driven to express themselves through decisions. In every economic context and in all of the various sociopolitical and culture systems, human experience evidently requires the maintenance of personal standards.

At first blush, the assignation of snobbery is merely a response to the pervasive disequilibria in human possession. Resources are scarce (or so we're told) and thus not everyone acquires the same things. This puts everyone in a position to accuse another of being a snob, for material self-similarity seldom occurs in reality.

But matters are significantly more complex than objectively measured amounts or quality of property. Snobbery is also an attitude toward property--it is a manner of acquiring and possessing goods. The snob's defining characteristic is lending superiority to consumption. But does the snob cultivate the superiority associated with his consumption? Or is such superiority imputed by the more sparsely endowed onlooker?

It is an undeniable fact of reality that there exist different kinds of film, wine, cheese, clothing, coffee, bread, cities, art, restaurants, literature, residences, and music. The snob conflates his opinion with fact. When his personally reserved taste slides into public pronouncement, the snob offends us because he lays claim to the arbitration of taste. Nobody has time for obvious elitism.

Having just dismissed of self-declared aesthetic objectivity as snobbery, we can finally turn to reverse snobbery. In a certain sense, reverse snobbery travels along the same vector as its predecessor but with far greater magnitude. Reverse snobs are obesssed with anti-taste; for snobs, taste is far more incidental. Reverse snobs occupy the reactionary space that used to contain counter-culture.

The allegation of reverse snobbery, however, leads to a distinct paralysis. Imperiled by the potential snobbishness of every cultural moment, people spurn their checking accounts and attempt to distance themselves from what they have deemed reproachable. In so doing they further refine notions of taste and unwittingly rarefy the air they permit themselves and their conspirators to breath. This pun on the etymology of conspiracy suits reverse snobbery quite well, for such types seem even more exclusive than their grandparents.

How then can anyone avoid the snobbishness of everyday life? In capitalism, they probably can't.

With mechanical efficiency, Capitalism has probably precluded the possibility of authenticity. Political life, culture, esteem of others are all contaminated by toxic droplets of currency and the exchange it facilitates.

So that's it then. Considerations of snobbery are an invitation to paradox. The inescapable variables of material necessity, combined with the free market constant of disparity, leads to an empty universal applicability of the label (or the non-label). And like all emptied signifiers, this one is probably worth getting rid of.

...the 1 train as apparatchik?

2005-10-02T04:11:00.001-04:00

Lately the 1 train has been perceptively slow, and its tardiness directly correlates with its overcrowded and aggressive cargo.

I want to blame the Bush administration. I believe that Bush prefers a negligent MTA to an efficient one, not because he simply delights in the misery of others, but rather because he recognizes the typically unexploited opportunities of turning a population against itself in subtle ways.

Suggestions that Bush's political savvy might outpace his marketability have always seemed untenable. Occasion after countless occasion he prattles presidentially and pathetically--we shall not be fooled, most maintain. What if the dolt were reinscribed in Machiavellian manipulation? What if the idiot tank were the only viable breeding ground for an ungodly political dynamism?

Sometimes when I ride the 1 train it takes forever to arrive and then I sadly sardine myself amidst the flock. The other day steerage was so scrambled I had no need to touch a pole or wall, the herd helped me remain on my feet. And yet the feelings that arose in me were hardly camaraderie or companionship, communalism or compassion, but in fact a brand of xenophobia. Yes, Bush likes slow trains because it fosters xenophobias which then make prejudicial treatment of 'the other' far more palatable. By beginning several million people's day closer to several other million people, Bush undermines what ought to be collective endeavor--the commute--and distorts our view on philosophical alterity.

Instead of an homage to the stranger, the other, the train ride has become a session in larval hostility and egoism. Riding crowded trains makes it easier to resent and ultimately loathe the unknown, a process which in turn justifies the war on terror. Bush inconveniences us to render us pliable pieces of complicit citizenry...

Unsuspecting masses of the free world unite! For we approach one day when such thoughts might not only be illegal, but also outside the reach of everyday consciousness.

Google is Dismantling our Epistemic Reliability

2005-09-30T14:10:00.002-04:00

Google, and the relation to knowledge it promotes, is eroding the dependability of the pursuit of knowledge the world over. Google advances a pedagogy of surfaces by distributing effortlessly accessed and seemingly useful information. A cult of Googling is mounting an attack on culture and, more astonishingly, on concepts and the way we view them. Our very approach to knowledge is shifting toward a reductive extreme, namely that of "direct access to fact". This is a radical departure from the traditional center of inquiry characterized by method and fueled by reason.

Google has replaced critical inquiry with a pacific stasis, an ugly complacence, a dis-empowering passivity.

Knowledge can admittedly be sought in different ways. Poetry, for example, hardly obsesses over knowledge, but when it does it instructs in interstice. It is thus indirect and purposefully inefficient. Poetry's adversary, Google proclaims efficiency and follows through only because it has preconditioned its users to appreciate the result. Google teaches us to unitize information and then superficially link it to an obscene amount of other units. Google indexes information which it leverages toward advertising. Crass capitalism married to nifty marketing by specious claims to life improvement.

In the methamphetamine saturated culture we've inherited, it is no surprise that a Google approach to knowledge has mass appeal. Whether speed creates the problem or solves it badly, our attention span has crumpled to a traumatized and brittle few seconds. I confess: I rarely, if ever, travel beyond the first 10 hits that google retrieves. Skipping to another search is a reflex that google cherishes because it spells the inevitability of future searches.

Furthermore, memory has not only been neutralized--which would at least be tolerable--but actually replaced by a strong tendency to self-indexing. By this I mean that where an individual memory was once the property of a uniquely assembled (albeit transient) human brain, propriety has now been transferred to anyone who should happen to steal a cell phone or view web content. Instantaneous duplication of immediacy is home to a vile circularity that threatens all sorts of endeavors.

Online chatting, for instance, has encroached upon the solitude that people used to seek for repose. Reflection isn't a lost art, it has turned into Version 1.0 in the evolution of modern selfhood. Reflection and introspection used to confirm people to themselves by themselves. We have gradually substituted virtual confirmation by others for this fiercely defined personhood. Look at my photographs, listen to my narrative, and relate to my crisis, then remind me why I still matter. Where once we individuals mattered as individuals unto ourselves, today we only matter as voracious consumers of the attention of others.

Google, it seems, might not be the culprit but rather the altar, built hastily for self-love and not sacrifice.

Elizabethtown

2005-09-30T10:11:00.003-04:00

Grinding gears last night was the soon to be released "Elizabethtown" starring two dramatically handicapped specimens of face-driven Hollywood casting. There is hardly a need to point out that this movie is bankrupt--musically, emotionally, romantically--but I want to explore exactly why it is so weak.

With high fidelity to its genre, the movie exploits a natural tendency to confuse emotion and experience. Emotions, raw human responses to exoteric events, can simply not be trapped between two pieces of celluloid. The experiences that contain emotional life can. "Elizabethtown" seeks to shortcut (and only short circuits) the path from event to emotion. It actually depicts the emotions and tries to pass them off as authentic. In so doing, it blasphemes the genuine warmth and kindness that characterize relationships, bereavement, career failure; instead of successful parody or subtle satire we get a swizzle of pop tracks, extreme close-ups, and saccharine speech acts.

Might there remain escapist entertainment value? Impossible. Movies like this one promote evacuation, not escapism. They empty out, purging life of legitimacy, excusing individuals of accountability, and suggesting that a thickly applied melodic varnish will get us through to the end. Escapist film, aside from being entertaining, induces a departure to an ideal place and typically drags a trace of ideality back to reality. Evacuation leaves only a hollow, anti-experiential, and deceitful sense of satisfaction.

Elizabethtown

on The Pillowman

2005-09-29T16:31:00.001-04:00

After a week now, my primary disappointment with the Pillowman still centers on its concept. An excellent set-up led to an near-hollow perspective on creativity under totalitarianism, on art's imitation of life, on the interplay of human comedy and misery, and on the sustainability of a will to life given a surfeit of inductions to nihilism. In other words, it failed to generate a meaningful or feasible response to the demands of existence--instead, the play manufactured comedy where it is, I believe, least appropriate.

After further consideration of my comparison of the work to Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish, I want set those aside in order to examine The Pillowman's own logic on the role of storytelling. It will then be possible to return to those films whose arguments about the centrality of experiencing narrative are fundamentally more sound.

Here are the brass tacks: K's agonizing biography (albeit a dubiously factual account revealed by his own hand) is supposed to have generated the misery behind his creative instinct. Predictably, the anguish of youth, the misery of his slaughterhouse job, his critical scrutiny of authoritarianism, and his difficult domestic duties, cast a dismal pallor over his fiction. Enter (inappropriately) dark comedy. There is no inherent mirth in K's misery, nor is there any cause for laughter in his incarceration. And yet that is what was intended and that's what happens. The audience is tickled alternatively by morose scandal and cheap humoristic gags. These are not intrinsically objectionable devices, except that here they accumulated into a full-blown disaster. The reason is that these comedic darts completely miss any meaningful target. A commitment to narrative doesn't rescue K or his brother, it lubricates their slide into destruction. True, narrative is slightly palliative for the brother, but then he exploits it out of ignorance. For K, writing is possibly cathartic, but when based in a justifiable matricide/patricide, it seems self-defeating for that writing to become the vehicle of a modern audience's onanism and then the eternal legacy of a self-styled artist.

To compare the play with two works I so deeply respect now feels heretical, but I ought to clarify why I did so instinctively. Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish legitimate a most human recourse to narrative because they expose narrative as a basic survival mechanism. Big Fish evokes tender feelings in me because it argues with eminent agility that narrative preserves a sacred connection between actuality and ideal existence (elevation). It then goes on to demonstrate how difficult disillusionment can be, and then, if you can see the screen through your tears, it permits death to endorse the duty that the bereaved owe to the task of living.

Cinema Paradiso is the best treatment of nostalgia in the history of the world. Truly savage. I usually weep for a full hour after watching the film as my own mind dances into the terror-filled regions of consciousness that include the irrecuperability of childhood, the power of memory, the inescapable feelings of neglect felt by the elderly, the infelicitous restlessness of the young male with self-imposed expectation from life, the panic of modernization, and the devastation that attends maturation.

Finally, The Pillowman depends upon a damning socio-political irresponsibility. Today's political topography demands accountability in the arts--this is especially true in the case of an overtly political drama. There is a desperate need for intelligent popular critique of the kind of moral absolutism and dogmatic nationalism that has already started to infringe on civil liberties. I by no means desire the universal substitution of sobriety for levity; I'm arguing that we can't afford to pass up excellent opportunities for critical citizenship in the name of entertainment. There should always be room for frivolous comedy in the arts, that fact is incontestable. There persists, however, a non-salutary neglect of just how imperiled our legitimate democracy is. Comparisons to Weimar Germany make me want to vomit ever so slightly, but there is unimpeachable evidence that once again fear and chauvinism copulate and begin to beget the insidious enemies of liberalism (e.g., the collapse of the welfare state, the patriot act, public rise of puissant moral rhetoric). Our only solace comes from the fact that the current demagogues are apparently incompetent bunglers when it comes to state action ( c.f., the big easy)....or do they only appear so?

This is to mention nothing of the play's elaborate and enjoyable set, the often delightful turns of phrase, the lively short stories, and the charm of silver screensters in real time. To be frank, these elements did little to outweigh the spiritual emptiness and philosophical bankruptcy of the production as a whole. Crudup's histrionic oscillation between grief and cynicism was just plain annoying, as was Goldblum's incapacity to avoid his typecast-characteristic nebbishness. But how the dramaturgy stumbled would be an altogether different and largely uninteresting essay...

To conclude, The Pillowman was neither funny nor written to make an intelligent point about the importance of storytelling. Dahyenu. The work is also politically reprehensible and socially deplorable.

Rather than a refund, I'd love it if McDonagh would read this blog, for by most accounts The Pillowman amounts to an egotistical defense of his own art, and that's disgusting.

the meta-blog

2005-06-23T17:37:00.001-04:00

i hope you're kidding. just to prove it, i'm posting this thread to the blog!

On 6/20/05, Lukas wrote:> i'm afraid of placing my points of view and opinions, as well as tidbits> about my personal life, out in the open public sphere where the fruits of> this frankness and intimacy will be quashed by the steel-toed boot of> unrestrained criticism. Down w/blogs. Up with cocoons and emotional> protectionism.