IT'S, LIKE, CANONICAL; THE 2007 NY FILM FESTIVAL

This was the best Film Festival in years. The schedulers showcased filmmakers that embody the Festival canon, a notion of undeniable art meeting viable commerce that the Festival helped create and codify. New films by familiar faces seemed oddly, pleasantly familiar. Not exactly knowing self-parodies or post-Modern commentaries, these films hit like (worthy) assemblages of each auteur’s greatest tropes. The Lumet film so recognizably Lumetian, the Schnabel so damn Schnabelistic, etc.

Christian Bale as Jack in I'm Not There. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Wenk/TWC 2007.

This gave the lineup a digestible gravitas, a potentcy, a sense that art house and arty commercial movies matter again (as art and commerce), that the last forty years count for something and that the Festival’s canon helped make it so. Bringing back touchstone directors might open the Festival to accusations of relying on brand names to fill the house, but the courage of this year’s programming was most evident when nobody showed up. Shockingly, Iron Horse, John Ford’s seldom seen silent horse opera with a capital O (with live orchestra accompaniment), had to be cancelled for lack of sales! Who knew scheduling John Ford was a commercial risk? That Iron Horsefailed demonstrates the necessity, the community service, even, of the Festival’s return to canon.

It’s been a good while since the Festival got accused of being too smart, too historical, too in touch with the times, too educational, too aware of the debt it owes the very universe it created. Let’s hope they hear the same accusations next year.

The Butterfly and the Diving Bell (Julian Schnabel)

Unlike so many directors, Schnabel loves his characters. For a putative narcissist, he has an overflowing compassion for all their quirks and desires. Schnabel—as well he ought—has a singular eye for using color to convey emotion, cuts like a master and convinces us to feel as he does: that cinema is a dream. Based on a French and American best-seller, Diving Bell picks up after the narrator suffers a crippling stroke. He awakens paralyzed in a hospital—the absolute worst has happened and things won’t get better. As depicted through Schnabel’s terrifying, claustrophobic, one-eyed POV, our hero narrates an entire book of his experience by blinking his eye, one letter at a time. In the least corny way, it’s inspiring. Schnabel doesn’t sugar-coat; our hero is no angel and his narcissism enables him to get his story told while he still can. Perhaps the women are all a little too gorgeous/adoring and the children all too well-behaved. But Emmanuelle Seigner conveys such Jungian feminine patience and warmth…Schnabel only slips when he enters Wes Anderson-land and inflicts upon us how varied is his musical taste. Just once I’d like to see him end a film without a Tom Waits song. But these are minor, minor complaints. The film is heartbreaking, beautiful and perhaps most surprising, wise.

A scene from The Butterfly and the Diving Bell. Photo by Etienne George.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Sidney Lumet)

When Scorsese introduced Once Upon A Time in the West at the Tribeca Film Festival, he finished up by saying: “People ask me if this is a Western. I don’t know if it’s a Western. It’s a Leone picture.” Devil, despite its awkward, stupid and never once appropriate title, may not be a noir, but it sure a hell is a Lumet picture. Along from Prince of the City, which was based on real-world scumminess, Devil is Lumet’s bleakest, most hopeless and violent film. The plot’s a bit schematic, as befits a screenplay by a playwright (Kelly Masterson). The only other annoyance is Ethan Hawke. Incapable of credibly projecting any emotion except smug self-regard, he resorts to histrionics and meltdowns that, happily, prove more irritating to think about later than to watch. You, too, might abandon any middle ground if you were getting blown out of every scene by the subtlety, delicacy and detail of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s minimalist despair. He’s fucking great—the best performance of the year easily, and one of a character that looks almost entirely inward.

In surf movies, when the plot bogs down, someone yells: “Surf’s up!” and everyone runs out to catch a wave. Here, whenever a slow spot manifests, Marisa Tomei takes off her clothes. It’s shocking, dislocating, really, since half your mind is tracking the character and half the Hollywood politics of her going naked. The rest of your, uh, consciousness might get taken up with how astonishingly beautiful she is. It’s Tomei’s best work as well, and the first time I can remember her understating. The bad son/disappointed father subplot (a swollen-faced Albert Finney as the wrath of God) adds to the Lumetian vibe; it’s a late ‘50s, overly Freudian explanation that justifies itself by becoming Greek tragedy. There’s little of Lumet’s bemused compassion here—this is a merciless vision of self-made hell. Whenever the tiniest potential of redemption or salvation appears, hope is crushed once more. That level of earned bleakness, these days, the refusal to provide any hint of melodrama or a happy ending or lessons learned, is artistic/commercial courage of the highest order.

A scene from Redacted. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara)

Ferraras films are sine waves. The re-occurring apogee is some smoothly depicted transgression, the re-occurring perogee macho posturing and endless scene-setting before an aimless camera. Sometimes, the posturing and the transgression meld and psychosis becomes poetry (The Bad Lieutenant). Most times, they don’t. King of New York remains Ferrara’s most succesful film because it’s his least indulgent; all the Ferrara tropes—meandering improvisation, forced street language, naked girls, obsessive sex/violence/appetites, self-destruction—are subsumed into plot. Go-Go Tales, for as long as I lasted anyway, presents Ferrara with a surprising A-list of B-list stars, too much money and not enough ideas. Lots of hollering and actorly posturing, several (high school age) models half-pretending to be topless dancers (while never getting topless), lots of floating semi-Altmanesque shots. Sylvia Miles gives a feral committed performance, demonstrating—as does Sidney Lumet—that no real New Yorker becomes nicer over time.

 Redacted (Brian DePalma)

DePalma runs a triple-helix of plausible deniability to disguise how hateful, empty, pandering and morally noxious his attempt at a U.S. army in Iraq portrait really is. As in Casualties of War, nobody shoots sexual violence with more prurient, pornographic interest, and no one is quicker to deny his motives under the rubric of: ‘Don’t blame me—it’s war! Can I help it if war is brutal, disgusting, dehumanizing and fought by the lower classes?’ DePalma’s clumsy attempts at dumbass American lumpen dialogue—presented in a series of preposterously over-wrought/over-shot supposedly ‘real’ moments—reveal a deep contempt for the characters he insists he views in all their humanity. The film begins with formal conceits on a high-school level: one of the soldiers announces that, hey, guess what? He’s going to shoot a video of the war! With this here camera right in his very hands! Later, drama plays out in front of security cams, the only ones I’ve encountered with perfect sound recording capability. It’s all so junior high…but the structure protects DePalma. He claims Iraq is a moral free-for-all and he’s the objective eye. It’s hard to convey the putrid corruption of Redacted: I felt unclean and enraged sitting there—as if I was colluding somehow just by watching. Bottom line: DePalma exploits the pointless death and amoral waste of Iraq; exploits it for cheap violence, for rape, for class hatred, for the most arrogant groping after the moral high ground…all the while working overtime to convince us how sensitive he is. It’s the artistic equivalent of appearing on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit in front of a banner that reads ‘Mission Accomplished!’ And should be greeted with equal skepticism.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant)

Van Sant employs his infatuation with teenage boys and their mores, dialect, style and inchoate aspirations to create a hypnotic portrait of the impenetrable otherness and moral rigor of high school. Van Sant’s gift for realist dialogue makes the self-conscious New Yorker style of say, Margot At the Wedding, seem as theatrical as opera. Especially memorable is the tortured syntax of real-life Portland detective Daniel Liu playing a cop without a clue. Best-cinematographer-in-the-world Christopher Doyle (In the Mood For Love, Hero and Van Sant’s remake of Psycho) floats his camera through the seedy parts of Portland, finding luminosity and grace under cloudy skies and railroad underpasses. With his last three films, Van Sant has sought a new story-telling paradigm, one based on character, dialogue and well-honed (if casually realistic) mise-en-scene. His rejection of plot/character climax and his embrace of what seemed like navel-gazing turns out to have been meditation. Park is a genuine artistic breakthrough and Van Sant’s best film since Drugstore Cowboy. He has become America’s most innovative director. Now we’ll see if his vision finds an audience.

I’m Not Here (Todd Haynes)

Hey—I’m all for Cate Blanchett acting out every one of Dylan’s moments from Dont Look Back and No Direction Home. I could watch her prance around in them leather pants and polka-dot shirt all day, what with her perfect inflection and better slouch. And if Richard Gere wants to appear in an apparent remake of the last-of-days village scenes from El Topo, more power to him. But, like, to what end? Following the train wreck of Velvet Goldmine, director Haynes stands revealed as a pretentious wanker—with decent taste in music—who did his best work under the structures of plot, like Safe. Hayne’s attempted parsing of the impenetrable Dylan by pastiche, free-association and 8th grade myth-making brings to mind only Mr. Natural’s invaluable words to Flakey Foont: “If you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it!”

Underworld (Joseph Von Sternberg)

Why do we so fear that silent films are boring? Because the accompaniment is so often overblown, sentimental, predictable? Sternberg created the DNA of all gangster films and most noir. Like F. W. Murnau, he cast with an eye for archetypes, so all future molls must be judged against Evelyn Brent and all consigliere compared to Clive Brook. It was tragic to see the house only ¾ full for this inspiration for Coppola, Scorcese, DePalma and everyone else. What made the film, what made it come so alive, was the astounding, nuanced, sophisticated original score by the three-man Alloy Orchestra. They studied the film and composed frame by frame for three months for only two live screenings. Let their sacrifice and care serve as the best metaphor for the worth of this year’s Film Festival.

Margot At the Wedding (Noah Baumbach)

Baumbach doesn’t exactly stunt-cast, but he instantly signposts by his choice of actors. And once signposted, no deeper dimension of character emerges. Nicole Kidman incarnates the smart mean babe who denies playing the babe card; Jennifer Jason Leigh denotes neurotically undermined potential and Jack Black overplays impulsive resentful self-hatred. Black ruins the film, but it’s not his fault. If Baumbach wanted a male lead who wasn’t a cartoon, if he wanted understatement, he would have cast Edward Norton. The question is why? Baumbach’s women characters are so detailed and multi-leveled and his men such one-dimensional scumbags. The story hinges on White’s and Leigh’s relationship having enough cred to withstand Kidman’s contempt for it, and it never does. Given the torments Baumbach puts his characters through, his obvious sensitivity and gift for dialogue makes him seem like a too-smart adolescent torturing his toys.

No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen)

Within their own rigorous world, the Coens still undercut themselves, usually by contempt for their characters. Barton Fink, O Brother and even The Big Lebowskiall featured scenes that seemed unfair—the Coens just roasting some innocent for their own glee. Not since Miller’s Crossing have they back off from their infatuation with smart-assedness and just told a murderous, haunting story with their oversize brains, gift for cinematic structure and cold-blooded Kubrickian bemusement at anybody who dares to make a plan.

 The relentless, Old Testament rhythm of Cormac McCarthy’s prose—even when he channels Elmore Leonard—provides the metronome for the Coens. Their adaptation of No Country is respectful, attuned and as wholly immersing as the book. So much so that some may balk at the brothers’ willingness to minimize what at first seemed the maximum plot-moment. But they play it same as Cormac did, straight up. Their reverence for the material emerges as a welcome dignity conveyed on all concerned. As with The Big Lebowski, the most profound moment is the finale, when—without making a big deal about it—the Coens merge mythology and character, for an ending befitting a masterpiece. Tommy Lee Jones is, of course, God.

Running Down a Dream (Peter Bogdanovitch)

Two hundred and fifty three minutes of Tom Petty?! This ass-numbing, career-overview hagiography—running longer than Chelsea Girls, Woodstock, La Maman et La Putain or the director’s cut of Heaven’s Gate—is constructed by Bogdanovitch in a shockingly standard VH1 visual language that owes nothing to the big screen. Structured for the DVD market (a Best Buy exclusive!) in chapters and self-contained vignettes, the film presents Petty sitting and talking intercut with thirty years of his playing and recording. Petty’s a great interlocutor, with his hangdog hair and jowls, and his deadpan demeanor renders him more profound than he looks (most of the time). He’s weirdly credible about his own life throughout and even more weirdly hard to dislike. Petty’s first ten years—up to Full Moon Fever—are better documented and more listenable than the last twenty, which the film seems to admit add much up to not all that much.

 Petty’s eerie life-long confidence is repeatedly sustained by the universe; the two cornerstones of his band, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, both just wandered into his teenage band-life in Gainesville and stuck for the next three decades. The inevitable jettisoning of other Heartbreakers gets short telling, with an admirable fairmindedness. Bassist Howie Epstein’s death by unspecified drug use receives little of the usual sentimentality such events engender, which is a great relief. Even greater relief is provided by Stevie Nicks’ appearances being as brief as good manners permit; if you make it to the end straight through (and why would you?), you get ten unbearable minutes of famous folks saying how great Tom is. Why, one wonders, when we’ve been pretty much left to draw our own conclusions for the previous 243?…never quite dull, never quite compelling, the film suffers only one noticeable flaw: there is nowhere near enough Traveling Wilburys.

THE BEST FILMS OF 2006

1) Brick

Noir as high school, high school as noir. The life or death impenetrable social horror of the hierarchies of jocks, babes, geeks and one cool loner get inverted through a prism of classic noir tropes: the femme fatale, the mysterious boss, the thug with a heart of gold and, of course, the letterman bully who rules the parking lot after study hall. As in high school, the kids invent their own slang. As in noir, slang = code, and means someone has to think harder to keep up. The story’s tight, the cast all gorgeous but true to their roles, and unknown enough to keep the focus on the narrative. The mannered moments are, for noir, precisely as mannered as they should be, and the air of absurdism and tragedy as intact.

Brick incarnates the best of ’06, when perverse auteurs pursued their vision with little money, and a determination to be individuals honoring traditions they admire. The best directors this year took on violence for pay, death from above, self-destructive love, teen angst, teen lust/violence, bloody murder, ex-cons and pure American psychosis. If that doesn’t comprise a perverse agenda, what does? Their films stand in contrast to the over-budgeted, self-aggrandizing wank of the big boys, who made great-looking product with scant connection between visuals and narrative, leaving only spectacle (Pan’s Labyrinth, World Trade Center, Babel). Every great film of this year built its greatness on the merging of story and cinema, until the wheel turned so fast you couldn’t tell them apart.

2) 13 Tzameti

Capitalism sucks. Poverty sucks harder. The dead end of work without any redemption in sight sucks hardest. Géla Babluani brings a refugee’s desperation and a tragedian’s eye to an unprecedented merging of Jean-Pierre Melville’s hard-boiled mythology and the new Europe’s economic reality. This transgressive, breathless, art-thriller offers a simple premise/universe: everybody’s got a gun to his head—except the paying audience panting to see who’ll survive. Karma? Instant, baby, instant.

3) United 93

Of course you didn’t see it in the theatre. Neither did I. You knew it would be either a sentimental travesty or impossible to bear. Instead, it proves shockingly immersing, mostly due to director Paul Greengrass’ invention and restraint. He remains true to the scale of each moment, never bends events to make any sort of point and somehow avoids signposting emotions. A master of cutting from one ambient sound to another to establish transition and suspense, (evoking those two classics of ambient sound-cutting Downhill Racer (1969) and The Candidate(1972)) Greengrass also directs extraordinary performances from amateurs in their real-life roles. It’s not like homework, honest. But it will tear you to pieces.

4) Climates (Iklimler)

Two smart grown-ups who could so love one another, if the guy wasn’t a repressed passive-aggressive manipulator and the girl wasn’t kind of seduced by being manipulated in a passive-aggressive way. Echoing Antonioni’s endless shots and blank faces, Nuri Bilge Ceylan follows his 2002 masterpiece Distant (Uzak) with an equally lustrous but more meditative exploration of how adults cannot or will not get out of their own way. With exquisite landscapes, ferocious sex scenes and monosyllabic arguments that burn like ten pages of Pinter, Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the alienated couple as supposedly sophisticated people trudging through hurricanes of internal contradictions. That Ceylan can make those contradictions so apparent and heartbreaking is only one facet of his singular gifts.

5) Linda! Linda! Linda!

Three Japanese and one Korean high school girl have to learn and play a punk rock song for their high-school talent show (The Blue Hearts’ ripping tune of the title). That’s it. That’s the entire story. Their route from being thrown together to learning their parts to finally getting onstage is observed with a delicate eye for nuance, and miraculous understatement. And it features one of the great dream sequences of all time: the guitarist’s boyfriend gives her a magic glove made from a legendary bluesman's hand, and takes her to the school auditorium, where all the Ramones await to wish her well. Proof that we should all keep up with Imaginasian’s screening schedule: www.theimaginasian.com/index2.php Pray for the DVD.

6) Sailor Suit & Machine Gun 
(Sailor-fuku to kikanju)

A 1981 mainstream smash hit in Japan of completely perverted, offhand, sincere, utter, impenetrable, weird strangeness. A prepubescent girl’s yakuza daddy gets murdered and she has to take over his gang. It starts like a Hayley Mills vehicle and ends with a yakuza fucking her on the floor and her wiping out a rival gang with a machine gun while screaming: “Kaikan!” (Ecstasy!). Director Somai prefers Tarkovsky-esque one-shot scenes that go on for hours, hypnotizing you as you grow mad with wonder at his skills and impatience at his pace. Proof that we should all keep up with The Japan Society’s screening schedule: www.japansociety.org.

7) The Aura (El Aura)

Fabian Bielinsky’s first film, Nine Queens, played like an indie Mamet caper, only slower. Bielinsky was enamored, like Mamet, by the art of the con, and the symbiosis between player and mark. A quantum leap in style and ideas, The Aura is pure modern noir. A frightened man has fantasies above his station. Fate seems to give him a chance to play them out, but he’s not equipped for the game. He ends up with nada—not the girl, not the money, not the cajones—only blood on his hands up to the elbows. And when he gets to the end, as a frightened man in noir would, he wants to start all over again. Bielinsky’s cool, distanced wide-screen frames, bleached colors and sparse dialogue build an atmosphere of bad luck and dread. No doubt his next film would be even more compelling, if he hadn’t died in June at age 47.

8) Renaissance

What Sin City woulda, coulda, shoulda been: blazingly smart, dizzying, mind-blowing French live action/animation futuro-punk, set in a repressive Paris built thousands of levels above the Seine however many decades from now. Daniel Craig and Catherine McCormack bring an unusual level of schmoove, charm, brains and erotic appeal to B/W animated characters as they stand up to L’Homme. Not exactly the most intelligible plot, but who cares?

9) Sherry Baby

The Straight Time of 2006, told with the same sinister dispassion and acted with the same neorealist star turns. Maggie Gyllenhaal submerges herself to the demands of the character as Dustin Hoffman did 18 years ago. Being a woman, her character has to eat a whole different brand of shit, and cope with an even more parasitical universe. But Gyllenhaal’s removal from her own fate, her indifference to certain indignities and her joys at certain pleasures, make her cycle from jail to freedom to who knows what ring especially true.

10) Little Miss Sunshine

How did this film find an audience? By showcasing the aspects of American life about which Americans remain most in denial: class, drugs, the disconnect between hard work and results, the power of luck, the steamrolling acceleration of bad news and how some views of child sexuality are sanctioned and others are most certainly not. Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear bring the pain of watching real losers really lose, and Paul Dano’s primal scream is among the most harrowing moments of the year (I hope for his sake they did it in one take). That the film looks awful, and occasionally descends into slapstick below its own level, speaks only to its economic realities. That it remains subversive and honest—and that it found an audience—only adds to its grace.

BUBBLING UNDER:

The Descent
Heading South
Le Petit Lieutenant
The Illusionist

!Filmed In Lugubrivision! Casino Royale / Tears of the Black Tiger

!FILMED IN LUGUBRIVISION!

Casino Royale

Sean Connery was cool and sadistic. Roger Moore was a smirking impotent alcoholic in a hairpiece. Moore’s casting function was to reassure the producers—who were in Moore’s demographic—that smirking impotent alcoholics in hairpieces could still get laid. His cultural function was to convince First World audiences that old white men could still kick the ass of uppity colonials. Moore never seemed to take on a European: Indians, Africans and darker-skinned South Americans were his preferred targets.

Lonesome Cowboys from Tears of the Black Tiger

After the dead space filled by the robotic Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan marked Bond’s return to a pre-middle age schmoove and to actual competence in the world. Brosnan could shoot a gun, drive a car, wear clothes and, unlike Roger Moore, it was not inconceivable that someone might actually want to fuck him. But Brosnan’s quote charm close quote pulled a heavy load of ironic self-comment. He radiated a 90’s post-modern ‘look at me playing Bond’ vibe. That damaged the franchise in a subtle way, by suggesting that we were all in on a joke, a piquant nostalgia groping for cred. A little ironic distance is fine, but smarmy self-regard is deeply unsatisfying. Bond may be an anachronism, but you don’t have to remind me all the time. I don’t want commentary, I want to escape.

Now Bond’s sincere once more. Daniel Craig is cool and thuggy. He suggests a Connery-sadism: he likes to hurt people. But any connection to Craig as a hero—and the film’s utility as escape—gets wrecked at the outset. Throwing back to the Moore era, Craig chases a black man, an African, through an African construction site filled with Africans. Craig chase the guy relentlessly; the chase scatters damage and African lives indiscriminately. Bodies fly from scaffolding, bulldozers smash buildings, construction workers minding their own business get blown to smithereens, just so one hyper-determined European can nab an African fugitive. The message is clear: when white folks have policy goals, the Third World will just have to bear the consequences.

Franchise-institutionalized racism aside, how dumb can you get? Why wipe out any sympathy for your protagonist from the entire urban market and half the world’s audience? At the close of the sequence, Bond shoots the unarmed black man dead and blows up an African embassy. The disheartening underlying message and the disheartening text (racist chase scenes with no visible plot point) start things off so wrong. How does that sequence, with so many black bodies scattered about, play at any Magic Johnson multi-plex? How is any non-white audience supposed to root for Bond after that?

2001’s thriller Training Day found a solution to this problem that was nothing short of racial/showbiz political genius. Denzel Washington’s a bad guy; he has to go down. The likely candidate to do him is good cop Ethan Hawke. Now, in Hollywood power-karma, no way is Denzel going to allow himself to be offed on-screen by a lightweight like Hawke. And Hawke has a parallel dilemma—he doesn’t want to be branded to African-American audiences as the white boy who killed Denzel. Yet, as the film built to its climax, there seemed nobody else for the job. The meta-suspense of this issue was far more gripping than the text-suspense of the plot.

The solution? The good old reliable Russian Mafia. While technically white, Russian Gangsters 1) wear black balaclavas so their literal racial identity is never confirmed; 2) have no stake in America’s cultural race-wars and are thus more like evil space-aliens 3) are regarded as such super bad-asses that being killed by them brings Denzel no loss of cred.

Why couldn’t the Bond folks have followed Training Day’s fine example and availed themselves of Russian Gangsters, Serbian Flesh-Peddlers or Rogue IRAkillers?

Another curiously misguided motif is the animated opening credits (and, by the way, it’s axiomatic: any film with animated opening credits is not worth seeing. Walk out as soon as they begin to roll.) As whatever lugubrious incomprehensible song played (who would have believed that we’d look back on Live and Let Die as a high-water mark?) the animation always featured hot sort of naked girls in profile. Now it’s shadow-figure guys kung-fuing. Why? We’ll see plenty of kung-fu in the movie. During the credits, we want nipples.

Bond girls were, in the old days, modeled on Vegas show-girls: illiterate, big glittery horsy eyes, garish features (aquiline noses like Pinocchio, giant or prominent tits, rounded asses with gravity systems of their own) and the inability to speak an English sentence as a human being might. They were like ponies on a rotating stand—pinups that moved. The Brosnan era brought a classier level of jiggle interest: woman who could walk & talk simultaneously (while, like Brosnan, somehow commenting on their role as a Bond Girl). Casino returns dishearteningly to girls so plastic and lame that the audience laughed when the first one showed up in a bikini on a horse, desperately thrusting her pelvis while hanging on for dear life. Casting Eva Green as the romantic lead only underscores the problem. The only emotion she communicates is a narcissism so uncut there’s no problem believing she’s French.

It all plays so tired and pointless. The Bourne franchise demonstrates that spy-thrillers can be smart and even authentic in their human relations. Bond is an icon and human—tough duty for any screenwriter. It ain’t necessary to put him in Chekhov. But even Bond can’t come alive if he’s buried in every dead cliché from the past.

Leone-Sirk-O-Rama (In Thai) 
Tears of the Black Tiger

Seeing films from a culture I know nothing about brings an enlightening freedom from meaning. There are moments in Black Tiger that seem screamingly camp, but for all I know of Thai filmic/cultural conventions, they might be butcher than Steven Seagal. Originally released in 2000, and now distributed domestically by Magnolia Films, Tiger harkens to the recent screening at the Japan Society ofSailor Suit and Machine Gun (covered in last month’s Rail). It’s so weird, deranged and sincere that it makes a mockery of films that strive for strangeness (like, say, Takashi Miike’s later work or anything made by David Lynch in the last twenty years).

I’d like to give you a plot summary, but I have no idea what actually happened. There’s a guy named Dum who’s both the fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Lash Larue) and a Rock Hudson-like heartthrob who can’t have the rich girl he loves. Or, maybe he does get her in one plot and gets killed before he can in another. Dum has a worst enemy/best friend who’s the second fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Tom Mix). It’s difficult to tell from one scene to the next whether Dum’s friend is helping him or about to kill him or both.

There’s a gang of bandits, a corrupt police captain and something about Dum getting kicked out of university, going home and finding his family murdered. The story flashes forward and back; Dum sometimes stands arms akimbo before a lurid neon sky like a Douglas Sirk finale and sometimes blasts twenty villains out of tree-tops and barn-windows with his totally inappropriate World War I six-gun. He does trick shots, too, and the director stops the film and offers us slo-mo replay of the best. After Dum shoots, we get mad super-close-ups of steam rising from his smoking-hot gun. It’s Thai, so if there’s a metaphoric resonance in that shot beyond what a dumb Westerner might assume, I can’t suss it. In other words, if the gun represents more than a dick, its meaning/significance/whatever beats me. This is true of almost all the symbolism in the film; it’s so juvenile it’s profound.

If Ken Russell re-made Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys with Nicholas Ray on acid and Busby Berkeley, the result might be Tears of the Black Tiger. The style, setting, dialogue and action combine West Side Story hyper-stylized movements,Rebel Without a Cause Technicolor wide-screen adolescent longing, Sergio Leone close-ups and music, manga frame-composition, hallucinogenic colors turned up to eleven and an amphetamine camp surrealism that’s all the more dislocating and hypnotic for its utter conviction.

The chaos of the story-line reflects the director’s passion for the Western film motifs he celebrates even as he eviscerates them. Because everything is so stylized, the most powerful emotion that comes through is the director’s joy in making the film. And no matter how anarchic the plot, that joy keeps you riveted. It looks amazing, every second , and is as sweet as it is fun.

THAT'S GREAT* THAT SUCKS - THE BEST FILMS OF 2004

Uma Thurman and Gordon Liu in Miramax Films’ Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Photo © 2004 Copyright Miramax Films.

1) Kill Bill: Vol. 2: Tarantino 101

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the most expensive, intelligent, graceful, bemusing, thoughtful, loving, referential, thematic, and fully realized music video ever made. Is it a bad thing, when our most innovative director makes a two-and-a-half-hour music video? Well, it’s better than our best music-video directors trying to make movies. None of them have Tarantino’s grasp of, never mind ardor for, plot structure, pacing, character development, shot selection, narrative cutting, or cinema history. Music videos teach directors about the startling image, the evocative moment, the antinarrative cut, how to generate momentum without a story, and innovative camera moves/special effects; Tarantino has all these wired. But videos also teach directors to worship their own cockroachlike attention spans. Tarantino spins a story over the long haul, for good or ill.

If Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a music video, then Vol. 2 is most expensive, intelligent, graceful, bemusing, thoughtful, loving, referential, thematic, and fully realized mix-tape. Its virtues are the virtues of the mix-tape: the hipster-geek’s evangelism, perfectionism, and obsession with telling minutiae; the connoisseur’s ecstasy in the face of that perfect segue; the thief-turned-composer’s understanding of how the fifth song (or scene) resonates with the twentieth and vice versa; how the mix-master’s glee lures us into the narrative of the mix and, when it becomes too apparent, pushes us into a colder, less involved appreciation. That glee also makes the mix-tape easy to dismiss as a collection of someone else’s ideas without seeing the originality that links them.

Situationist Guy Debord called Godard “a child of Marx and Coca-Cola.” No matter how much Asian martial-arts Tarantino cannibalizes, he remains a child of Godard and Sergio Leone. Like Leone, he’s obsessed with visual form and willfully slow pacing and shows—in his own idiom—great stylistic rigor. Like Godard, Tarantino adores color, camera movement, mocking his own movie, cinematic references, and abrupt shifts in tone or pace. Like both, Tarantino loves to watch film, he loves to hear film spool through the camera, he loves the images it produces: you can feel how enthralled he is with shooting throughout Kill Bill. And, like Godard, Tarantino doesn’t give a fuck, and will toss his rigorous style overboard in one second for a joke, a violent effect, or to amuse himself at our expense.

Tarantino’s the only man on the planet to elicit human, believable performances from Uma Thurman, Pam Grier, and David Carradine, so clearly he’s a genius with actors. The disappointments are, of course, his eighth-grade sense of what constitutes transgression and the curious fact that his pictures have no metaphorical depth. Not visually, not in the narrative, not in the characters’ situations. All that style and not a molecule of content (music videos rear their ugly head). Yet so many images and moments that linger so strongly.

2) Hero

Hey—remember back in July I wrote that “Zhang’s an artist and his only true mode of expression is sincerity”? You don’t? Good. Because the opulent, aggressive emptiness of House of Flying Daggers proves me so wrong. Still, Hero merges wire-fighting special effects and visual metaphor, high and low, mechanics and poetry, like no other picture, ever. Since Zhang’s now riding the dumb-ass blockbuster train down a one-way track, I suggest we all DVD-up on Hero and savor.

Photo © 2004 Touchstone Pictures.

3) The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou: Tiny Zen Conceits

Wes Anderson is a mannerist and a formalist; he’s one arch dude. His archness is literary—it’s an authorial voice. This makes him not much of a cinematician. His primary visual orientation is the tableau. As befits aWASPy upper-class southerner, Anderson’s tableaux are (William) Egglestonian. And, like William Eggleston,  Anderson’s primary gift is for capturing the essence, and using that essence to comment on the absurd social context of the object, the moment, the person, the location, or the gestalt he’s just captured the essence of.

When Anderson shoots Bill Murray’s condomlike red ski hat, that hat becomes the platonic ideal of all red hats, a ridiculous vanity, a commentary on branding, a little joke on Bill’s character and a tiny nudge-nudge wink-wink to the audience. That we don’t know why we’re being nudged nor what to make of the wink only underscores the quote marks Anderson puts around almost everything. Shining through all this mockery and mannerism is a tenderness that appeared only fitfully in The Royal Tenenbaums. This tenderness is Life Aquatic’s saving grace.

Pedro Almodovar is the one filmmaker in my life whose work I just don’t get. I can’t tell a good Almodovar film from a bad one, and I can’t suss what he’s after. But I do feel a saint’s compassion, an overflowing love of all humans in all their misshapen humanity. Neither Tarantino nor Zhang seem vested in compassion, particularly. But Anderson, for all his quote marks, seems driven by it, and emotional generosity, the yin to his intellectual astringency’s yang, makes his work profound. Anderson’s compassion for middle age resonates so much more fiercely than, say, Martin Scorsese’s wet dreams of monied, gilded youth gone wrong.

Anderson and Tarantino are singular, original visual stylists, who somehow get the backing to do what they want. As Tarantino always seems to go too far at some point, as he wants to break his own spell, so Anderson’s style is a constant pushme-pullyou. The story takes us over, the style pushes us away. Is this a trend or something? None of the best movies this year were wholly sincere (well, the Ramones movie, maybe). Those that strived the hardest for sincerity (like The Aviator) left us more on the outside looking in than all this supposedly alienating mannerism.

Anderson’s high-wire act remains aloft on the strength of his extraordinary taste in music and the (absurdist) delicacy with which he deploys it. So much soothing sweetness emerges from David Bowie gently sung in Portuguese. But Anderson, as in Tenenbaums, shatters his hypnotic hold with one spectacularly wrong song at a critical plot turn. He turns self-indulgent and show-offy when WASPunderstatement was required. His bad judgment’s off-putting in the moment but makes the film more accessible, somehow less of a shiny, perfect object. And you have to love a picture that cops the closing credit sequence from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and casts Bud Cort (Harold and Maude, Brewster McCloud) as a “Bond Company Stooge.”

4) The Incredibles

This was the year I—and most of my cinema-aware friends—finally gave up. We quit going to big Hollywood movies and quit believing anything good anyone had to say about them. Which kept me out of The Incredibles until a rainy day in Miami Beach with nothing else in the theatre. It’s such a relief to come out of any blockbuster feeling that you weren’t egregiously insulted every minute. And that relief seems to confuse some critics into thinking a movie’s worthy when it merely isn’t vile. But The Incredibles hasn’t a single dead spot, is charming, astonishingly unstupid, makes no vapid plays for hip cred, and is cast with resonant awareness for the emotions of the story. Plus, all the urban landscapes, cars, and homes come straight out of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and the beach from Doctor No.

5) Zatoichi

Beat Takeshi the neo-classicist. Who more unlikely or better suited for the role?

(See Meyer, “Two Lone Swordsmen,” Rail, July 2004.)

6) Enduring Love

That rarest thing, an unembroidered, accurate adaptation, perfectly cast (Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans, and Daniel Craig), true in tone, pacing, context, valence, and—with Ian McEwan’s novels, this is no easy feat—creepiness. Accurate adaptations of McEwan are so resoundingly creepy they drive away the attention they deserve (cf. Paul Schrader’s disturbing and criminally underseen The Comfort of Strangers). McEwan specializes in those moments when politeness, especially English politeness, leads to doom—when holding the proper form blinds his characters to the lethal urgency of civilization going bye-bye. As with Tarantino and Anderson, director Roger Michell’s visual style draws attention to itself but still expresses the emotions of each scene with old-school cinematic discipline. Even though all three films are modernist and self-referential, their visual approach nourishes the narrative; the motivation for every edit and every shot lies in the story.

7) End of the Century – The Story of the Ramones

There’s only one problem with that Metallica documentary everyone thinks is so great: it’s about Metallica. Despite an inescapable crudity—the Ramones prove not exactly genius monosyllabs, there’s little contemporaneous footage of the early days and not nearly enough Joey—here is the true arc of lived-out rock and roll: Nerd-dom, alienation, practicing in one’s room, inspiration, honing a style, commercial acceptance of a sort, endless brutal routine, crippling, incessant mutual loathing…death. Who knew Dee-Dee was a fount of deranged common sense or Johnny such a pig?

8) The Manchurian Candidate

Wit, political satire, commentary on the pervasiveness of TV’s preference for high-tech extravaganza over reportage, and one blindingly awful performance/hopeless miscasting at the core (Kimberly Elise as Denzel Washington’s kind-of girlfriend). Director Jonathan Demme prefers an old-fashioned post-Beat notion of hipsterdom. He likes that little hipster wink at the genre conventions he gleefully undermines. Maybe he proved a hair too hip for the room.

Meryl Streep follows Demme’s lead and creates one of the most believably (avec hipster winking) sinister moms since Leopoldine Konstantin in Alfred Hitchcock’sNotorious. And not even Leopoldine, for all her infantilizing of her adult son, could make your testicles ascend like Meryl leaning over greedily to blow her boy. It’s some shameless shit.

Demme turns incongruously against his own aesthetic for the final third, slipping into Brian De Palma-land while sacrificing if not exactly realism, then narrative credibility. Even so, why did this subversive, stylish gem tank? All that yak about the original omits one key fact: it wasn’t that good. The original was over-the-top madness, with a visual style more Twilight Zone 1950s TV than worthy piece o’ film history. Demme kept the anarchy and found a consistently intelligent visual approach. Maybe nobody wanted to see Denzel helpless and confused, never mind wielding an assassin’s rifle. Good on Denzel for so going against his brand.

9) Maria Full of Grace

 Ice Cube called Boyz in the Hood “an after-school special with cussin’.” Well,Maria is a really, really good after-school special with cussin’. Its apparent cultural authenticity overcomes the necessarily schematic plot, and the sense of a society coming undone lingers despite the almost happy ending.

10) Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring

Only one season too long.

*Thank you: The Shemps

Blue Crush: The Higher Horror of the Whiteness

THE HIGHER HORROR OF THE WHITENESS

Or

How  Blue crush sanctifies the blonde

 In the wake of XXX and SIGNS and even GOLDMEMBER, most folks I know who’ve seen BLUE CRUSH are saying: well, it's not that moronic. They’re relieved to have been only a little insulted. I think they ended up not-so-insulted the same way I did: by ignoring the plot, which I expected to be an excuse to parade hardbodies.  But, I was wrong.

BLUE CRUSH proved to be the Bizarro BAYWATCH. BAYWATCH purports to be about life-saving but, as we all know, concerns itself more concretely with showcasing that ass. BLUE CRUSH markets itself as a movie all about the ass, but, at its core, the film pursues transcendence. It’s difficult to be insulted by a clear appreciation for the quest to transcend  (especially when the aforementioned ass appears in abundance). And ain't nothing as transcendent as big wave surfing.

The surfing footage is, as surfers say, epic and the style will seem familiar to fans of home-rental, hardcore 16mm/digivideo surf-movies. But visuals like these have never been attempted in 35mm. The director's properly enthralled by the terrifying sensuality of the sport, and the force of will required to excel. It's a singular will, that surfer's will, requiring that balls-to-the-wall courage and a psychopath’s disdain for consequences merge with cosmic Zen in-the-momentness and attention to the ever-changing nuances of the consistently lethal natural world. The key surfer's ambition is to use the body (never the brain) & Zen & courage to Nail The Moment with understated grace in the face of instant death. This gives even the stupidest surfer a certain spiritual awareness and/or one-ness of self.

That helps BLUE CRUSH conceals its deeply insulting nature, as does the film’s deeply concealed cunning. The girls of BLUE CRUSH espouse and live not only sisterhood, but self-actualization and mutual support and anti-commercialism and non-competitiveness -- about waves and success and guys, like, constantly. Almost as constantly as they peel out of their clothes for no narrative reason while making sure to lift arms and breasts way up in the air and thrust out -- while simultaneously rotating --their smallish rounded booties in the tiniest, lowest-slung, most ass-crack molded, pudenda-shaping, hoochie-short bikini bottoms in the contemporary cinematic universe. And this is not a complaint: I prefer that my jiggle-interest espouse worthy politics. It makes my lust less embarrassing. Even though, weirdly, either the blatancy of their display or the poignancy of such shoddily camouflaged body-exploitation cynicism kept me from actually experiencing lust. My experience was more like: "Look at the abs on that girl!" That is, more of a stunned amazement that consumer culture always finds a way to ratchet up the ante and keep us over-stimulated dupes, uh, stimulated. And my objective appreciation (nay, wonder) never trickled down from the front of my brain to the back.

Or lower..

I thought BLUE CRUSH would be TOP GUN for girls or DIRTY DANCING with surfing. In fact, it’s even simpler than that. On plot alone, BLUE CRUSH is a gender-transposed Wallace Beery wrestling picture, a sports-based personal-growth melodrama of the kind Hollywood’s been making since sound. The astonishing surf-photography --  and the seeking transcendence held therein -- raises the non-plot moments to a higher and more memorable level, but the demands of the plot hold sway. And however desperately the story tries to distract us, the point of the plot seems to be another long-standing Hollywood tradition: The Sanctification of the Blonde.

In pursuit of that Sanctification, BLUE CRUSH avoids certain tropes with disarming no-explanation straightforwardness. After a day of teaching the Himbo love-interest to surf, our Blonde Goddess heroine agrees to go up to his hotel room. She's feels ambivalent in the elevator, and my testicles were tightening into a big cringe in anticipation of the horrors of the obligatory pre-love-scene sprightly chatter to come. Amazingly, there was none: no excuses for the fact that, without preamble, they were just going  to do it. They'd spent a nice day together, they found each other hot, she came upstairs to fuck him and everybody knew it but me, the remnants of another age of movie expectations. Gooey fuck-justifications went out with The Real World, apparently. My testicles relaxed.

Tellingly, though, the himbo lures The Blonde up to his room in by promising to pay her for his surf lessons (he knows she’s broke). He slaps a thousand bucks cash into her hand and then lays a big wet one on her. She melts and he reaches for the tie-string of her bikini. It’s always so much schmoover to pay up front…

The Real World looms large over BLUE CRUSH in its emotive and dialogue style. Blondie cannot act; she never looks ridiculous or embarrassed like the generations of beach jigglers who preceded her. She has genuine self-possession (she is, after all, a beautiful young upper-crust New England horse-jumping blonde) and almost no range. She can smirk, look intense or kind of giggle with a really soul-scarring falseness. (My soul, or what’s left of it, I mean, not hers.) Her giggling seems intended to suggest nervousness at expressing her true hidden depths. And that makes her stumbling attempts at replicating human emotion generate all the more compassion. … So she and her comrades speak in an amped-up horribly ersatz naturalism, like the dialogue in any Cameron Crowe picture or the self-conscious for-the-camera sincerities of The Real World.

Since every plot situation reeks of disingenuousness and necessity, the director seeks to lessens our sense of watching pre-ordained wheels turn by aiming for an elusive teen-conversational veracity between the sistahs. He fails, but the other two girls in this posse are so compelling, lovely and competent that their attempts to play out the cheesy Real World neo-realist style make their scenes moving for reasons I’m pretty certain the director never contemplated. And as you watch the two girls -- who were carefully chosen for their non-pin-downable but unmistakable Other-ethnicity (one seems a Jersey ChicanaRican; the other a Chinese/Hawaiian/Polynesian mongrel with the air of a budding NYC model slumming) -- it seems at first ridiculous, and then entirely intentional, that these more intriguing characters/actresses find themselves relentlessly sucking hind tit, stardom-wise.

Every ethnic in the picture exists only to validate a different aspect of the Blonde Goddess, and to confirm that despite her apparent physical perfection and her throwaway arrogance regarding its effects, she got soul.  This is key because no white hero can be heroic without soul – then they’d just be white. You know, like Kevin Costner. And not only does this superior being got soul, she’s also beloved (or obsessed over) by her inferiors. BLUE CRUSH is a universe of ethnics misunderstanding, underestimating, yearning for just one more little slice of, envying, supporting, deifying, inspiring and/or sublimating their own life & desires in deference to the one representative of the oppressor culture. It’s no accident that Blondie’s sole equal – the only man she could love -- is a Norse God from the Mainland, whose naiveté  and absence of street smarts (which = an utter lack of soul) is proof of his racial purity. And thus, his suitability.

The Norse God passes a key ordeal by learning to surf. The next ordeal occurs when he surfs a local’s spot and is confronted by one of the Yearning Ethnics, a putative Hawaiian local (who sure looks like he went to Little Neck High). The local fights the Norseman because he encroached on taboo ground, but also because The Norseman now possesses what the Yearning Ethnic threw away: the goddess’ love. The sight of the Yearner now embarrasses the Blonde, because he represents an unseemly episode of Fucking Down. And he knows it. The ethnic’s resentment of the Norse God, while played as teenage jealousy, is pure, straight-up class loathing. And the end of the film, the Yearning Ethnic chases another white girl (though her blatant cleavage marks her as lower class and so more likely to throw the Yearner a lil’ somethin’ somethin’). Seeking upward mobility by association, the Yearner forces the Norseman to pose in a friendly photo. The Norseman looks acutely uncomfortable at participating in this piece of class betrayal.

The American International Pictures beach blanket Annette Funiciello surf movies of the early ‘60’s utilized surfing as a backdrop. Surfing was the air the characters breathed, never the focus of their desires, and when the plot ground to a halt, someone was sure to run in and yell: Surf’s up! Everyone would drop what they were doing and go surf.

 In BLUE CRUSH, when events slow down, it’s time for a Minstrel Show. And what better minstrels than two jolly fat black men? The only black men in the film play oafs, boobs, clowns who mock their own bodies, revel in their own disgusting habits and seem to be channeling classic Stepin Fetchit. We first meet one jolly fat black man via a tour of his hotel room, which proves a chamber of anti-bourgeois grossness: puke on the floor, rubbers on the ceiling, pee on the seat, food in the bed, etc. We meet the man himself when the Blonde publicly humiliates him by dangling the rubber in front of his face; she’s the Plantation Mistress scolding the slave for expressing his sexual desire. In his very next scene, the jolly fat black man shakes his bootie in a skirt, demonstrating  the castrating power of the Blonde. Later of course, his willingness to play the clown (which demonstrates that he is a harmless black man) and to surf (which proves his class/race aspirations) allows him to confer upon the Goddess his soulful approval. How? He slaps her five, proving that The Blonde grokked the mysterious black code, and thus, has soul. It’s actually a hundred times more unbearable than this description.

But as much as the jolly fat man suffers, the ChicanaRican suffers more. Her role is the most thankless. She not only constantly encourages Blondie at the expense of her own ambitions, but has to play a scene genuflecting before the family-videotaped image of The Blonde as an itty-bitty six year-old surfer girl. “ I wished I could be you,” says the ChicanaRican wistfully, as the lithe blond limbs and straight blonde hair fly before the waves on the grainy screen. No shit, honey. You and everybody else watching at the mall.

The ChicanaRican, who has the acting chops to back up her charisma, serves as the Blonde’s Tonto, ducking her head with embarrassment at her desire to be the Blonde’s equal while trying to shame the Blonde into accepting the gifts and responsibilities of her class. When the Blonde scores the Norseman – when she hooks up rather than train for the Big Surfing Event -- the ChicanaRican is reduced to guilt-tripping her over her Blonde responsibilities. The ChicanaRican reverts to a screen stereotype not (much) seen since Butterfly McQueen: the head-shaking bewildered primitive who jes’ cain’t figger out why dese white folk don’ hab’  bettah sense! And with all they opportunities, too! It’s an interesting reversal, and one worked to perfection in GONE WITH THE WIND: the supposedly less rational primordial displays shock when The Blonde wallows irresponsibly in primality, the alleged turf of the darker lesser beings.

The Mongrel ethnic doesn’t really have much of a role beyond bootie-rotation, hooting from the car at cute guys, shaking her head at Blondie’s cowardice (and with all her opportunities, too!) and smiling her soulful angelic nasty smile that, in any righteous universe, would have her starring and Blondie playing a snotty waitress in a throwaway scene. And as if all that weren’t enough genuflection before The Blonde, The Blonde’s main competition in The Big Surfing Event -- a funky toughass surf-girl who clearly surrendered all  mainstream social ambitions to ply the sea – actually shows Blondie how to ride the wave of her life. Even the Blonde’s competition can’t resist the impulse toward masochism in the face of racial superiority.

 BLUE CRUSH marks an end to those WILD THINGS/IN CROWD-type teenage girl movies wherein the Country Club Set gets their comeuppance from a unified army of non-blondes and social misfits. This one’s about the triumph of the Cheerleading Class, and is most remarkable for the ethnics’ universal jubilation at The Blonde’s ascendant to Power Romance and  Success On Her Own Terms. The film tries to suggest that Blondie lives in a multi-culti world, and on the superficial level presents her as merely one of Los Pueblos, with her own issues and dreams, just like them. But in the end, only one member of this democracy gets a chance to change her station, and that’s The Blonde. When she does, her entourage takes it as a triumph for their whole little world.

It’s a strange new Hollywood mix: gritty realism in the mise en scene, benign fairy-tale horseshit in the narrative and gruesome racial politics in the guise of diversity.

Plus bootie-rotation, of course, often and in close-up. And the nakedness follows the tautology of the rest of the film. It’s like: well, girls do get half-naked and dance around their rooms, don’t they? We’re just honestly trying to show their lives… And fat black guy are often jolly and self-mocking, right? And Norse Gods cash-rich, modest and well-hung?

I’d claim it’s a totally cynical exercise but I swear, I think the producer/director really wanted to make a surf movie. And for the surfing alone, never mind the politics, it’s worth the money. But can you never mind the politics? The dissonance between its ostensive message and visual/narrative reality is so wearing that the only way to experience BLUE CRUSH may be the only way to experience most current big-studio action-epics: wait six months, buy the DVD and skip every scene that features dialogue.