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)

FACES

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!

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

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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