the kinetograph

Resolutions

2011-12-30T20:11:00.004-05:00

Okay, let's see how long these last.

In 2012, I resolve to:

Exercise. Eat less. Eat healthier. Lose weight.
Read more books, and read more widely.
Watch more movies.
Not neglect this blog so much.

The Horror, the Horror

2011-08-03T21:24:00.013-04:00

It's funny, but it also makes you want to cry. In her NY Times column today, the ever-irrepressible Maureen Dowd uses a string of horror-movie analogies to describe the recent congressional battle over the debt ceiling. From the great Universal Pictures franchises (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, et al.) to Vincent Price and William Castle flicks to The Exorcist, Jaws, Halloween, and Alien, Dowd manages to work in witty references to just about every cinematic shocker from the 1930s through the late '70s that you can imagine. She doesn't allude to the more recent subgenre of torture porn (Saw and its offspring), but she easily could have, given how torturous the sad, sorry spectacle in D.C. was to watch as it played out in the media. I thought of zombies—yes, Dowd does mention them—because the image of brain-devouring ghouls jibes neatly in my mind with the Tea Party crowd and what they've done to intelligent political discourse.

This and That

2011-06-18T11:49:00.015-04:00

I've been away for a bit, but that doesn't mean that movie-related stuff has been far from my mind. Random musings follow.

Notable Passings
The recent deaths of playwright/screenwriter Arthur Laurents (on May 5) and actor Farley Granger (on March 27) make for an interesting coincidence in that the two had been romantically linked in the late 1940s. They met and became lovers while working on Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), a film loosely inspired by the Loeb-Leopold "thrill murder" of the twenties. That movie, for which Laurents received his first Hollywood credit, is not, in my humble view, one of Hitchcock's more successful efforts: among its problems, it never quite transcends its origins as a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, and by its closing moments it veers pretty sharply into heavy-handed sermonizing. However, its use of long takes and disguised cuts to create an illusion of unbroken action certainly makes it an intriguing experiment in framing, camera movement, and spatial/temporal unity; but that, of course, was Hitchcock's doing, not the writer's. Laurents—and, to a lesser extent, Granger—may well have contributed something to the film's homoerotic subtext, though you could also say that element was built into the material.

Laurents remains best known for his work in musical theater, particularly West Side Story and Gypsy, as well as his scripts for the '70s films The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack) and The Turning Point (dir. Herbert Ross), which were both big hits in their day though neither is a favorite of mine. I'm insufficiently familiar with Laurents's other work to offer an informed opinion on his career as a whole, and while what I have seen of it doesn't impress me that much, I'm sure he was a fascinating dinner companion.

As for Granger, he went on to work for Hitchcock again, this time in a much better film, 1951's Strangers on a Train (which also had a strong homoerotic subtext). Unfortunately, his bland performance in the lead role of tennis player Guy Haines paled alongside costar Robert Walker's brilliant portrayal of the villainous psychopath Bruno Anthony. (Hitchcock, never one to spare actors' feelings, told interviewers he would have preferred William Holden in the Guy Haines role.) Regarding Granger's overall career, I again must plead virtual ignorance. He was good, I thought, as a sympathetic Depression-era bank robber in Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but I believe that's the only other Granger performance I've seen. (In fact, Granger didn't make that many movies. Like Laurents, he preferred the stage.)

I can claim more familiarity with the oeuvre of director Sidney Lumet, who died on April 9. From Twelve Angry Men (1957) to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), he turned out around fifty films in a variety of genres; I've seen about half of them. Lumet was known as the quintessential New York director, and in his best work—Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City get my votes—his felt-in-the-bones familiarity with the grittier corners of Manhattan and the outer boroughs resulted in some exemplary social realism. But he also directed a fair number of clunkers (The Wiz, Guilty as Sin), and even some of the films that won him praise, notably The Pawnbroker and Network, struck me as overwrought. Still, I've always admired Lumet's overall seriousness of purpose: he was devoted to film, he was good with actors (even if he wasn't a great visual stylist), and provoking thought remained central among his concerns. With so much trivial junk on today's screens (as in yet another Pirates of the Caribbean installment!), that last attribute is not to be sneezed at.

The Best Movie on DVD I've Seen Recently
That would be Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours (2008). The two slightly kinky thrillers Demonlover and Boarding Gate, the extent of my previous knowledge of Assayas's work, didn't prepare me for this delicate study of the role that a summer house and the precious art and antiques it contains play in the lives of a French family whose ties are dissolving in the face of the mother's impending death and her children's far-flung careers. It's rare that a work dealing with such themes as loss, regret, and dissolution does so without being depressing. Indeed, in its quiet artistry and avoidance of melodrama, Summer Hours is exhilarating.

Obviously, Assayas is a versatile man. He also directed Carlos (2010), a film about the terrorist Carlos the Jackal that topped a lot of recent ten-best lists. Originally conceived as a miniseries for French television, with a shorter theatrical version released on this side of the pond, it's high on my next-to-see list—if only it would come out on DVD.

The Best Book on Film I've Read Recently
I've praised University of Delaware film scholar Thomas Leitch on this blog before; let me now praise him again. His 2007 book Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Johns Hopkins University Press) offers a refreshingly new take on the problems involved in literature-to-film transformation. Leitch doesn't give us the usual close readings of particular adaptations, the approach pioneered by George Bluestone in what Leitch calls the "founding text of adaptation studies," Novels into Film (1957); rather, he ranges widely over a number of broader issues, from the shaky relations between religious inspiration and entertainment value evidenced in adaptations of the gospels (such as, most recently, Mel Gibson's bloody Passion of the Christ), to attempts at "exceptional fidelity" (e.g., Gone with the Wind and Lord of the Rings), in which filmmakers feel particularly obliged to satisfy the expectations of a much-loved literary source's readership.

Especially fascinating to me were the chapters on the countless versions of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle's venerable sleuth Sherlock Holmes. In the former, Leitch explores the idea that adaptations of A Christmas Carol, whether reconfiguring it as a cartoon, a western, a musical, or a comedy, serve as a kind of beginner's introduction to Dickens and the cultural traditions and moral lessons that the great Victorian novelist and his Yuletide classic embody. In the Holmes chapter, Leitch surveys an array of texts—cinematic and otherwise—that has become so dizzying in number as to prompt this query: "Why should Holmes and not other impossible heroes such as Superman or James Bond or Tarzan or Frankenstein's monster assume an aura of historical actuality that allowed him to survive the death of his author, spin off half a dozen fictional series starring his supporting characters, spawn hundreds of fan clubs in every corner of the globe, and provoke reams of commentary seeking to reconcile apparent factual inconsistencies in his adventures?"

The answers Leitch proposes to that and other questions are never less than provocative. But what impresses me most about this book is the author's command of his sources. My comment earlier about Leitch's Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock—that he writes "with the authority of someone who has seen every film and read everything of relevance"—applies equally to this volume.

Farewell to the Lady with the Violet Eyes

2011-03-23T21:11:00.001-04:00

The NY Times's obituary of Elizabeth Taylor ends on what I think is a perfect note: "Late in life, when she had one of many offers to write her memoirs, she refused, saying with characteristic panache, 'Hell no, I'm still living my memoirs.'" It's sad that she's living them no more. Now there was a movie star.

The Less Said . . .

2011-02-28T08:23:00.006-05:00

The most memorable thing about last night's Oscars show? For me, it wasn't Melissa Leo's use of the f-word during her acceptance speech, and it certainly wasn't who won and who didn't. It was the number of gown changes the producers put co-host Anne Hathaway through.

House Plants

2011-02-26T10:41:00.018-05:00

Anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast might explain why so many movie references were planted in this past Monday's installment of House, M.D. The episode, built around the premise of the misanthropic diagnostician addressing a fifth-grade career day, contains explicit references to Pulp Fiction, A Few Good Men, Ghostbusters, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, The Thomas Crown Affair ("the Steve McQueen version," it is pointedly noted), and the 1960 Jerry Lewis vehicle Cinderfella. Also, the episode's main narrative thread, an extended quid pro quo dialogue ("You tell me something; I'll tell you something") between House (Hugh Laurie) and a couple of kids sitting in a principal's office, might owe a bit to the Anthony Hopkins–Jodie Foster face-offs in Silence of the Lambs, but the connection, assuming there is one, isn't openly acknowledged. The movie most often cited on House, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (Singer is a producer of the series), seems to have gone missing here, although House's line "I ain't no snitch" does sort of echo one of Kevin Spacey's retorts in the 1995 film. But counting that one is probably a stretch.

Sucker that I am for movie trivia, I found it to be a fun episode overall, though one colleague of mine thought it too clever for its own good. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to follow on first viewing: the story is told in multiple-flashback form with a scrambled chronology that owes an obvious debt not just to Pulp Fiction but to the entire oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino—nonlinear in the extreme, in other words. And when you consider how crammed Tarantino's work is with filmic and other pop cultural allusions and then consider the implications of another pop culture enterprise like House referencing and parodying Tarantino . . . well, the mind starts to reel.

I'm aware that this is all symptomatic of what some critics and theorists describe, indeed condemn, as postmodern decadence: here we have, they'd say, yet more evidence of a late capitalist culture that has nowhere to go but backward, feeding endlessly on itself. But I'm also aware of counterarguments which posit that in such self-consciousness and "hip" irony lie the seeds, at least, of progressive social critique. I'm inclined toward the latter position, but maybe I'm just rationalizing my enjoyment of TV shows like House and movies like Pulp Fiction.

P.S. I hear that an even more "postmodern" episode of House awaits us—one in which various genres from film and television are evoked in elaborate fantasy sequences. Hmm, maybe there is something to this whole decadence thing.

The Nominees Are In

2011-01-25T12:42:00.011-05:00

No big surprises among the Oscar nominations—except that The King's Speech and True Grit (the latter having been ignored completely by the Golden Globes) garnered more nods than did the big Globes winner, The Social Network. It's nice that Hailee Steinfeld snagged a nomination, although, as I grumbled earlier, placing her in the supporting category is a gross injustice. But I guess there was room for only one teen-aged newcomer (Jennifer Lawrence of Winter's Bone) in the Best Actress lineup this year.

And, yes, I know the Oscars are silly, but they are now, and always have been, the only awards show I ever watch. So, it's a vacation day for me on February 28. I'm going to be up late the night before.

Just One More Thing . . .

2010-12-30T11:47:00.081-05:00

Bear with me: one more posting on True Grit, and I'll move on to something else.

The academic critic Stanley Fish, a regular contributor to the opinion pages of the NY Times's online edition, devotes his latest column to the religious/philosophical undertones of True Grit, and though I don't agree with all that he says, I think he's on to something. Noting the scriptural references in both the Coen brothers' new movie and Charles Portis's original novel, and relating them to the harsh events of the narrative, Fish discusses how True Grit illustrates the "brute irrationality" of the universe and how the dispensation of God's grace can only remain a mystery to us mere mortals, what with bad things forever happening to good people and vice versa. The narrative twists, he writes, point to "two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously."

It surprised me that Fish makes no mention of A Serious Man (2009), the film the Coens made just prior to True Grit, since it bears considerable relevance to his argument. Even more than True Grit, in fact, A Serious Man puts religious questions front and center. A darkly comic take on the Book of Job that draws heavily on the brothers' Jewish background and their upbringing in Minnesota, it chronicles the inexplicable misfortunes—slander, familial strife, threats to health and career—that suddenly befall a mild-mannered physics professor named Larry Gopnik, who receives neither answers nor comfort from the rabbis he consults. And unlike the biblical Job, Larry faces at the end (spoiler alert) only further uncertainty. God has restored none of what he has lost, and new threats loom on the horizon: as Larry gets some ominous, if nonspecific, news from his doctor, a nearby tornado approaches his son's Hebrew school while the students mill about outside and their teacher fumbles for the key to the basement.

Fittingly enough for a Western (more spoilers follow), the parade of misfortune in True Grit is more violent. Frank Ross, a charitable man, is robbed and murdered by a no-account hired hand. His young daughter Mattie vows revenge, and several more killings and woundings ensue before she finally puts a bullet into her nemesis—only to have the firearm's recoil send her tumbling backward into a pit of rattlesnakes. She nearly dies and does lose an arm. Yet despite all she sees and endures, Mattie’s moral convictions, born of Protestant fundamentalism, never waver—even when, as Fish notes, "the world continues to provide no support for them."

The Coens, I think, are not really religious filmmakers but absurdists, who believe, to quote Webster's, "that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe." Religion, obviously, is one way humans have tried to find that order, and in A Serious Man and True Grit the Coens are merely taking note of different ways religion has served, or failed to serve, those who use it for guidance. If the brothers, their Jewish heritage notwithstanding, subscribe to any religion, it's the religion of cinematic art. I read somewhere recently that their rigorous formalism—their meticulous compositions, shot selections, and editing—might be their way of making sense of, or at least resisting, the disorder of the universe. Sounds right to me.

A closing note: Clearly, my previous posts about the language of True Grit being its primary attraction to the Coens didn't go far enough. There is obviously something else at work, something in Charles Portis's wry depiction of his Calvinist heroine—the author was raised a Presbyterian in small-town Arkansas and doubtless knew many a stern elder who served as a model for Mattie Ross—that clicked with those two talented lads from a very different background. Therein, perhaps, lies a subject for further research.

The Coens and True Grit (Again)

2010-12-25T09:50:00.015-05:00

Several postings ago, back in early April, I speculated that the uniquely stylized dialogue and descriptions of Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, were what attracted Joel and Ethan Coen to the material. The book was the basis for the popular 1969 movie that won John Wayne his only Oscar, and the Coens' announcement that they were remaking it raised a few eyebrows. Not mine. I figured that the quirky filmmaking siblings—who love an odd turn of phrase the way a tabby loves catnip—would relish the challenge of adapting the peculiar diction of Portis's characters, and indeed various news articles surrounding the movie's release this past Wednesday have suggested as much. As actor Matt Damon, who portrays a callow Texas ranger in the film, told the New York Times: "Once I read [the novel], I understood [the Coens' desire to adapt it], because the language is amazing. So much of the dialogue that is in this movie is right out of the book."

That was also true of the '69 film directed by Henry Hathaway from a screenplay by Marguerite Roberts, but I agreed with some reviewers at the time who felt that the speech worked better on the page than on the screen. Portis's odd combination of folksiness and formality (eschewing contractions and drawing, it seemed, on every arcane frontier expression he could think of) often sounded clunky when it came out of the actors' mouths. But, recalling the Coens' aptitude for projects distinguished by similar wordplay, I hoped for a better outcome this time around.

Having now seen the new version of True Grit, I can't say the Coen brothers quite licked the language problem. As good as everyone in the cast is, I was still too often aware of actors speaking scripted lines—a disconnect resulting, I think, from the Coens' respect for the source and their decision to adapt it with a generally straight face. The gleeful absurdism of projects like Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?—films where ornate rhetoric is three-fourths of the joke—is missing here. The abundant humor in True Grit is deadpan, not ostentatious, and it serves a straightforward narrative. In the book the antiquarian language works because the tale is couched as a first-person memoir, related years after the fact, by a character of a very particular time and place, with very particular ideas about morals, manners, and the way sentences should be constructed and stories told. The people in the novel speak as they do because that is how the prim narrator, Mattie Ross, thinks they should speak or would have remembered them as speaking. In a film, unless the overall conception is broadly comedic, such lines do have a way of sounding a little, well, clunky.

And yet I still enjoyed the movie immensely, savoring particularly the Coens' solid craftsmanship (they not only wrote and directed the film but edited it under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes), the harsh winter landscapes beautifully captured by Roger Deakins's cinematography, the somber music by Carter Burwell, and, most of all, the amazingly confident performance by thirteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie. With scant prior acting experience, she more than holds her own with Jeff Bridges, Damon, and the other seasoned members of the cast. Coming from her the language sounds perfect. It's a travesty that the producers are touting her as a contender for the supporting actress Oscar. She carries the film.

So Many Movies . . .

2010-12-18T16:41:00.015-05:00

The recent death of Blake Edwards reminded me once more—as if I needed reminding—that there is so much cinema out there I've yet to experience. While Edwards's stylistic flair and comedic gifts (in the service of a rather grim outlook on life) earned him a lofty spot in the directorial rankings Andrew Sarris assembled for his seminal 1968 book, The American Cinema—specifically, Sarris put him among the directors who fell just short of "Pantheon" status, the category he labeled "The Far Side of Paradise"—I find, alas, that my own sampling of Edwards's output remains just that, a sampling. I've seen 10, Victor/Victoria, S.O.B., at least one of the Pink Panther farces (A Shot in the Dark, I think), and maybe a couple of others. I've not seen Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, etc., etc.

And as I flip through Sarris's book for perhaps the five hundredth time, I'm struck by the many other worthy directors whose films have largely escaped my eyes: Frank Borzage, Erich von Stroheim, Gregory La Cava, Leo McCarey, even most of Cukor, Capra, and Minnelli, for heaven's sake. I could go on and on, and I'm only speaking here of American directors whose works mostly predate the mid-twentieth century. When Film Comment hits my mailbox every two months, or whenever I peruse some film website or other, I read of an important new talent from Europe, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East that I really ought to check out. When will I ever get to them all? And I say this as someone who's seen thousands of movies!

Netflix has been a great aid in remedying gaps in my film-watching experience, but I often think I could see three movies a day for the rest of my life and never feel that I've earned the right to call myself a proper cineast. And let's not get started on the books I haven't read . . .

Orson Welles Is Spinning in His Grave

2010-11-09T20:26:00.022-05:00

A couple of months ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover piece by Mark Leibovich on Fox News's wackiest windbag, Glenn Beck. For me, the most surprising revelation in the lengthy profile (which I admit to reading with nostrils pinched firmly between thumb and forefinger) was that Beck is a big fan of Orson Welles. It seems that Beck keeps a picture of Welles on his office wall and named his own production company, Mercury Radio Arts, after Welles's famed Mercury Theatre.

Has no one informed Beck that Welles was (gasp!) a lifelong progressive, the political species Beck claims to despise most? That Welles considered running for office as a New Deal Democrat? That among the likely reasons for his self-imposed European exile was (as Joseph McBride has persuasively argued*) to escape the blacklist and the anti-leftist witch hunts?

Apparently, Beck's admiration for Welles stems from his youthful exposure to a recording of the latter's notorious 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast—a radio play (based on the H. G. Wells novel about Martian invaders) that managed, unintentionally, to panic thousands of listeners who mistook its fake news flashes for the real thing. Gee . . . concocting fiction disguised as news that scares people—that's a pretty good description of what Beck does, so I guess it's no wonder he was impressed.

I'm reminded of the moment in Citizen Kane's famous breakfast scene when Kane's first wife says, "Really, Charles, people will think . . ." and Kane finishes her sentence with an emphatic ". . . what I tell them to think!" That exchange was part of Welles's withering indictment of an arrogant media mogul's sense of entitlement and readiness to abuse his power. I suspect that Beck, if he ever saw Kane, thinks of those words as simply a sound professional axiom.

__________

* See McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006).

Arthur Penn, 1922–2010

2010-10-06T12:33:00.131-04:00

In my previous post, I marked the passing of Claude Chabrol. Alas, I now have to note further sad news. Last week, on September 28, Arthur Penn died. Understandably, his obituaries all led with some variant of the phrase "best known as the director of Bonnie and Clyde." I won't repeat here the received wisdom on that 1967 film's importance as a taboo breaker and harbinger of the "New Hollywood." For a short recap along those lines, see Dave Kehr's piece in the op-ed section of this past Sunday's New York Times, which focuses on some intriguing contrasts and parallels between Penn's career and that of actor Tony Curtis, who died just a day later. If you're interested in a broader, more in-depth perspective on Bonnie and Clyde's place in film history, check out Mark Harris's excellent book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008).

For me, though, Penn's finest film is not Bonnie and Clyde but a moody detective picture from 1975 called Night Moves. It stars Gene Hackman as a private investigator who takes on a missing-persons case that he quickly solves—or so he thinks until the troubled teenager he was hired to find is killed amid suspicious circumstances, thus sending him, guilt ridden, back on the trail of clues he may have missed. The film is not, as the usually sensible Richard Schickel wrote at the time, "just another private eye flick." Rather, working within genre-convention boundaries while simultaneously subverting those conventions, Penn and screenwriter Alan Sharp offer a thoughtful meditation on the limits of individual perception and knowledge—a theme that foreign directors such as Kurosawa (Rashomon) and Antonioni (Blow-Up) had gnawed on in previous decades. And Penn's treatment of it, I would argue, is just as serious as those of the art-house giants. Decidedly down-beat, Night Moves didn't do especially well at the box office upon release—it was one of many films lost that summer in the churning wake of Steven Spielberg's Jaws—but I'm gratified to see that it has had some real staying power among cinephiles. For example, the current issue of the Web journal Senses of Cinema contains a very interesting article on the film that I recommend.

Penn had a rather spotty career—in late films like Target and Dead of Winter he seemed to have sacrificed his directorial personality for a paycheck—but at his best, or near-best, he was never less than intelligent and provocative.

Claude Chabrol, 1930–2010

2010-09-16T21:28:00.043-04:00

It was sad to learn of Claude Chabrol's death last Sunday. One of that handful of critics-turned-directors who made up the core of the French New Wave (for a related post, click here), he specialized for the most part in sardonic thrillers that skewer the habits and mores of the suburban/provincial bourgeoisie. While he counted Hitchcock and Lang among his influences, his work has a peculiar tone that's like no other filmmaker's. Marked by irony and black humor, it is not to everyone's taste. Chabrol's narratives can tilt toward the absurd, his characterizations toward caricature. Seldom, if ever, are his protagonists' motives pure. Indeed, corruption, betrayal, and guilt are among his movies' key concerns, and murder is usually the central plot element. From early on in his career, Chabrol was accused of cynicism and coldness. Yet, as unlikable or appalling as his characters and their actions often are, his films also display a bemused detachment and stylistic economy that make them consistently compelling.

I've seen only a fraction of his considerable output (maybe twenty films out of a total of fifty or so), and I'm still trying to catch up. Chabrol stayed active right up to his death, and his last film, Inspector Bellamy, will hit U.S. screens before the end of this year. I'll be in line.

A Rare Bird Indeed

2010-09-02T20:33:00.016-04:00

Here I depart from my usual subject matter to plug a new book that has nothing to do with the movies. (Actually, there is a film connection of sorts, but I'll get to that in a moment.)

Titled Ghost Birds, the book describes how, during the late 1930s, a young Cornell graduate student named James T. Tanner undertook an ornithological expedition that led to what probably remains the most remarkable field research ever conducted on one of America's rarest birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker. It's a great story that takes the reader on a twisty tour of remote wetlands in eight southern states. While Tanner had disappointments along the way—his extensive searches in Florida, stretching from the panhandle to the Everglades, led to not a single sighting—he also experienced an extraordinary triumph: in a remote swamp in northeastern Louisiana, he was able to study several ivory-bills, including a young nestling that he handled, banded, and photographed at close range.

Full disclosure: This book is published by my employer, the University of Tennessee Press, and I had the privilege of copyediting the manuscript, a process in which I worked closely with the book's genial and gifted author, Stephen Lyn Bales, a naturalist at Knoxville's Ijams Nature Center. So I'm biased, but no matter: it's still an immensely enjoyable read, and I highly recommend it. For more about the book, here's a link to the UTP Web site. Also, this month's Smithsonian Magazine carries an article that Lyn wrote about how Tanner came to photograph the ivory-bill nestling. That story is an amazing mini-drama in itself.

Now for the movie connection. Coincidentally, a documentary called Ghost Bird (singular in this case) was released earlier this year. It focuses on a much more recent hunt for the ivory-bill, the one that followed reported sightings in Arkansas in 2005. Those sightings made national headlines because the bird was thought to have gone extinct in the decades that followed Tanner's groundbreaking research. Unfortunately, a lengthy Cornell investigation (eventually suspended) was unable to produce definitive confirmation. Birders remain hopeful, however, that the ivory-bill is still out there.

I haven't seen the documentary yet, but that will soon change. On October 21, UT Press (in cooperation with the Tennessee Clean Water Network) will host a screening of the film at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Lyn Bales will be there to sign copies of Ghost Birds, along with Nancy Tanner, Jim Tanner's widow, who played a big role in the writing of the book. (Mrs. Tanner was also interviewed for the film.) If you live in the area and are interested, click here for more information.

Accidental Ambiguity

2010-08-07T08:09:00.133-04:00

This is a story about how a tiny technical mishap led me to think a little more deeply about a movie than I might otherwise have. But first, a warning: If you've not yet seen Brothers in either of its forms—Susanne Bier's Danish original, a.k.a. Brødre (2004), or Jim Sheridan's American remake (2009)—you may wish to read no further. Spoilers follow.

I already had Brødre in my Netflix queue when the remake came along. Wanting to see the original first, I avoided Sheridan's movie during its theatrical run, though I did read reviews that supplied a few plot basics about both films.

In Bier's version, the brothers of the title are called Michael and Jannick. The former is a straight-arrow U.N. military officer, the latter a seemingly hopeless ne'er-do-well. Early on, Michael ships off to Afghanistan, where he's captured by Taliban insurgents and presumed dead. Back home, Jannick, having just finished a prison term for a botched bank robbery, starts putting his life in order and strikes up a warm, protective relationship with Michael's wife, Sarah, and her two preadolescent daughters. Sarah and Jannick briefly consider sleeping together but think better of it. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, Michael is rescued. He returns home, severely traumatized, and soon, amid mounting jealousies and misunderstandings, he seems headed toward an emotional meltdown.

What the reviews didn't reveal was the central plot twist that drives the action during the film's second half. And, thanks to a smudged DVD, I missed that twist completely as I was watching Bier's film for the first time. The movie's midsection focuses mostly on Michael's imprisonment and his relationship with a fellow Danish captive, Niels Peter, a young radio technician. In one scene, the insurgents order Niels Peter to demonstrate the use of a captured rocket launcher, but having no advanced weapons training, he can't help them; Michael, the more experienced soldier, has to do it. It was around this point as I was watching the DVD that the image began to stutter and stall. But before I could retrieve the disc and clean it, the problem resolved itself, or so I thought. The film continued as Michael is being rescued. But now Niels Peter is nowhere to be seen. What's happened to him? Subsequent scenes—a questioning by Michael's superiors about the young man's whereabouts, an awkward visit with Niels Peter's wife, and finally a climax in which Michael, brandishing a pistol, threatens to kill his family and then himself (Jannick, now the stabilizing force his brother once was, intervenes)—all suggest that something terrible befell Niels Peter and caused Michael's trauma. Exactly what it was, however, is never clear. In the final scene, Michael is in a military prison, with Sarah telling him that unless he confides in her, she'll leave him for good. "He had a little boy," Michael sobs, referring to Niels Peter. End of movie.

Now that was interesting, I thought, immediately assuming that Bier meant to leave Niels Peter's fate an open question. After all, I reasoned, this was a European film, and in European films (especially if the director's name happens to be, say, Michelangelo Antonioni or, to use a living example, Michael Haneke) things often aren't spelled out with Hollywood-style explicitness. My guess was that Michael had had to witness his countryman's execution, doubtless a brutal one (a beheading perhaps?). But for whatever reason, Bier had chosen to leave us in the dark about the specifics. I sealed up the disc in the Netflix envelope, planning to mail it off the next day.

The irresolution nagged at me, however, and soon a bit of Web research revealed that, indeed, I had missed something vital: Michael had not simply witnessed Niels Peter's execution; he had been forced to carry it out himself at gunpoint. I unsealed the Netflix envelope, cleaned the DVD, and returned it to the player. Sure enough, there it was: the insurgents, having decided that Niels Peter is of no use to them, hand Michael a steel pipe and order him to bludgeon his comrade to death; otherwise, they'll just shoot them both. Later, back in Denmark, as Michael's guilt and rage boil over, he screams at Sarah, "Do you know what I did to get back to you?" The irony, of course, is that Michael now appears poised to destroy the very thing—his family—that had determined the dreadful choice forced upon him.

The accidental ambiguity that came with my first experience of Brødre spurred some intriguing thoughts. In some ways the truncated version of the film seemed, however unintentionally, more interesting, more provocative, more artful, than the movie Bier had actually made. Smugly basking in a sense of my "superior taste," I attributed my response to an aversion for works whose moral geometry seems a little too tidily delineated, a little too obvious. But if I had seen the film with the critical scene intact, would I have judged it differently? It's hard to say because my first impressions, based on an incomplete viewing, were so vivid. Any subsequent viewings would inevitably be colored by those impressions.

And then I had another thought: What really happened between Michael and Niels Peter turned out to be worse than the scenario I had imagined. Why did I assume a less awful alternative? Did I have such conventional notions about the qualities befitting a film protagonist that I wasn't prepared to admit that an ordinary, decent man like Michael was capable of so terrible an act? And even if what Michael did was somehow understandable—the alternative would have been his own death as well as Niels Peter's—his subsequent actions, as he slides into denial, are troubling to say the least. He lies to his superiors; he lies to Niels Peter's wife. He can't open up to Sarah. He almost annihilates his family. Bier's film, in its concrete conclusiveness, is actually darker than the reading I gave to the "ambiguous" version. Maybe my taste isn't so superior after all.

This brings me to a truism I too often forget. Like many of us who aren't film professors or professional critics, I'll frequently watch a film, register whether I liked it or disliked it, assimilate it in some way, and move on. Yet, if one claims to take movies seriously—those worth taking seriously, anyway—thinking about them seriously is an imperative. I'm grateful that a thumbprint on a DVD reminded me of that.

A postscript: I've now seen Sheridan's remake, which closely follows the original. Interestingly, on the commentary track, Sheridan says he toyed with the idea of not showing the execution scene until late in the film, when it would have been revealed in flashback (which is what I kept expecting to see, first time around, in Bier's version). But ultimately Sheridan opted for the same structure Bier had used. What difference would it have made if either director had gone this alternate route? Hmm, I guess I'll have to think about that some more.

Commentary Track Gush

2010-06-27T19:45:00.014-04:00

Early in the commentary track on the Duplicity DVD, writer-director Tony Gilroy says he hates those commentary tracks in which the filmmaker just starts "gushing" about everyone he or she worked with on the movie. So then what does Gilroy proceed to do? He gushes about the actors. And the crew. And (with a few feints toward modesty) himself. Gilroy's commentary turns out to be indistinguishable from dozens of others that often sound like long versions of Oscar-acceptance speeches.

It's not that I advocate a ban on DVD directorial commentary. If you accept that a certain amount of congratulatory blather is inevitable, there are almost always intriguing things to be learned from even the most self-serving commentary track. Regarding Duplicity, for instance, it's not uninteresting (if hardly earthshaking) to find out that the Bahamas stood in for both Miami and Dubai, or that the cafeteria of a Manhattan girls' school was dressed to look like a posh hotel suite in Rome, or that Gilroy used a handheld camera in one scene because he wanted to suggest that at this point in a story otherwise brimming with misdirection and con games, the "real reality" was being shown for once. For me at least, understanding how cinematic illusions are created, or how specific techniques express meaning, has always been part of the movies' appeal.

That said, I certainly prefer the commentary tracks one typically finds, say, on a Criterion Collection DVD. Usually, Criterion enlists a well-credentialed film scholar to talk about style, theme, historical context, and so on. Sound a little dry? It can be, but at least you don't have to hear that this or that actor was "such an amazing pro" or how a "brilliant" DP, editor, or production designer—and they're never anything less than brilliant—helped save the director's butt.

Happy Birthday, Psycho!

2010-06-17T21:12:00.031-04:00

I couldn't let this week pass without noting a special anniversary. Yesterday, Psycho turned fifty. On June 16, 1960, driven by an offbeat marketing campaign ("No one will be allowed in the theater after the movie begins"), Alfred Hitchcock's terrifying (and deeply ironic) masterpiece opened to eager crowds.

The film seemed like quite a departure for Hitch. He had reigned as the cinema's Master of Suspense since the 1930s, but none of his earlier pictures could properly be called a horror film. They were terrific thrillers, mind you, mixing wit, glamorous stars, glossy production values, stunning formal mastery, and, yes, suspense in equal proportions; but the shocks of Psycho— that notorious stabbing in the shower, the subsequent staircase murder, and the final unmasking of the killer—caught his fans by surprise.

Only a year before Psycho, Hitchcock had made something more typical of his oeuvre: the spy-chase epic North by Northwest. It was produced for what was then Hollywood's biggest studio, M-G-M, on what was then a lavish budget, $4.3 million. Its screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, called it "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures," and indeed the movie proved to be one of the director's most popular to date.

But then Psycho came along. Determined to scare the hell out of the audience, Hitchcock would push screen violence to the very limits imposed by industry censors, "good taste" be damned. Working from a pulp novel by Robert Bloch and a script by former songwriter Joseph Stefano, he shot the movie in black and white on cheap sets with $800,000 of his own money: Paramount Pictures, his primary employer at the time, was wary of the lurid subject matter and had balked at financing it. The cast, which included Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, was quite capable but not exactly in the Cary Grant–Grace Kelly–James Stewart league, at least in terms of star power. Hitchcock cut all sorts of other corners and went without salary in exchange for 60-percent ownership of the film. Responsible only for marketing and distribution, the Paramount executives figured they had little to lose.

Of course, Hitch made out like a bandit. Psycho quickly raked in millions and, more important, became a milestone in movie history. It's now a staple of film-school classrooms. Critics and scholars have written about it, and written about it, and written about it—and keep writing about it. The late Robin Wood, in a famous mid-sixties essay, compared it to Shakespeare's Macbeth and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, dubbing it "one of the key works of our age." Wood toned down his enthusiasm for Psycho a bit in later writings, but for my money he got it right the first time.

An Art House in the Hinterlands

2010-05-30T21:11:00.011-04:00

When I wrote in my last post that I put a new French documentary in my Netflix queue after reading about it in the New York Times, I implied that French documentaries aren't typically the sorts of things that find their way into movie theaters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Actually, that was more than a little unfair. Some years ago the Regal Cinemas chain, headquartered right here in K-Town, converted one of its older multiplexes, Downtown West, into an art house showing mainly indies and foreign films. It's got eight—yes, count 'em, eight—screens, and I think that's pretty impressive for a southern city of this size. (Before the Downtown West conversion, we had an independent art house with just two screens, and my wife and I were enormously grateful for that.)

Because of Downtown West, there actually is a chance that Two in the Wave (that French documentary I was blogging about) will make it to Knoxville. Of course, even eight screens don't guarantee that every offbeat or subtitled film in current release will arrive here—far from it. For example, I kept waiting and waiting for Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles to show up, but no luck, so now that one is in my Netflix queue.

Yet, even if we don't get everything of outside-the-mainstream interest, I did want to set the record straight about my current city of residence. This very afternoon I saw the Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Downtown West, and in the neighboring auditoriums such films as The Ghost Writer, The Mother, and The Square were playing—none of them exactly standard fare for the "hinterlands." I don't usually tip my hat to large corporations, but in this case, I'll say, "Thanks, Regal."

A Tale of Two Directors

2010-05-21T20:47:00.035-04:00

Appearing in Wednesday's New York Times, A. O. Scott's review of a new documentary from France sent me immediately to the "save" button on the Netflix site. Two in the Wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent and written by Antoine de Baecque, focuses on the early, intertwined careers of the two directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who best exemplified what came to be called La Nouvelle Vague, or the "New Wave," of French filmmaking. I can't wait to see it.

Truffaut, Godard, and several of their friends (notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) were devout movie lovers who started out as critics for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their readiness to champion such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks transformed film criticism on these shores as well as in Europe, and the group had an even more profound effect on film production when they became directors themselves. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) were landmark works that inspired filmmakers around the world. America produced its own generation of "movie brats"—Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al—a decade later, and it's impossible to imagine that phenomenon occurring in quite the way it did without the French New Wave that preceded it.

According to Scott's review, Two in the Wave follows Truffaut and Godard up to their infamous falling-out in 1973. "As Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so," writes Scott, "a schism emerged that would become irreparable." Apparently that's where Laurent's documentary ends. I'm not sure whether it includes this postscript: Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984—he was just fifty-two—and Godard publicly lamented their stormy split, and his own role in it, in an introduction he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters that was published some years later. It was a rather sad turn in one of film history's most remarkable chapters.

Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.

Referencing Hitchcock

2010-04-24T12:54:00.022-04:00

Click here for a book review I wrote about eight years ago.

I originally penned this piece for a now-defunct online magazine called Retroplanet. The book under review was Thomas Leitch's The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock, a 400-plus-page reference volume published by Checkmark Books/Facts on File. Sadly, it's now out of print, although you can still get used copies from the usual online sources (Amazon, ABE, etc.). Anyone seriously interested in Hitchcock should have it. A professor at the University of Delaware, Leitch is a thoughtful and meticulous film scholar, not just a buff, and he put together a remarkably solid work, writing all the entries himself. See my review for details.

The book was part of a short-lived Facts on File series called Great Filmmakers; it produced only two other volumes, one on Orson Welles and one on Stanley Kubrick. While I never acquired the Kubrick tome, I do have The Encyclopedia of Orson Welles, an edited volume with multiple contributors. That book has its uses, but, unfortunately, in terms of accuracy and insight it's much inferior to Leitch's solo work on Hitchcock, which should be better known than it is.

Of Director's Cuts and Deleted Scenes

2010-04-18T16:15:00.004-04:00

"There's a point at which auteur perfectionism slides into decadent excess, and the film suffers," writes Alex Rose in the spring issue of the American Scholar. Rose is addressing the phenomenon of "director's cuts"—re-released versions of movies in which scenes previously deleted have been restored, or to which, in a few cases, some computerized cosmetics have been applied. His examples include Apocalypse Now Redux, with its "inexcusable interludes of colonial romance and stranded Playboy bunnies"; the twentieth-anniversary edition of E.T., in which the cops' guns are digitally replaced with walkie-talkies; the "Special Edition" Star Wars, with its "egregious Pixarification of Jabba the Hut"; and the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Amadeus, which reinstates a scene wherein Mozart's wife explicitly offers herself to Salieri in hopes of securing her husband's acceptance by the emperor's court. Finding this last instance particularly deplorable, Rose contends: "The scene is boring, weird, redundant and finally detrimental in that it tips Salieri's libidinal hand. No longer is he a chaste Italian craftsman whose devotion to God is corroded by tyrannical jealousy, but an ineffectual pushover whose petty sexual frustrations threaten his lust for retribution." Rose goes on to argue that production constraints which prevent directors from getting everything they want can sometimes benefit their films. Such constraints, he says, can force a director to find inventive ways around them and produce a better end product. By contrast, director's cuts, which offer "the opportunity for infinitely many do-overs," too often serve only the filmmaker's vanity.

Though Rose's points are all well taken, something he neglects to mention bears notice: the inclusion on many DVDs of deleted scenes as part of a "special features" section. These, I would argue, are not a bad thing at all. The original theatrical versions are left intact, and for anyone who's interested, seeing the stuff that landed on the cutting-room floor can spark insights into the creative process. We get to judge for ourselves how certain omitted scenes might have harmed—or enhanced—what did make it into the final cut. An example from the DVD of Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah leaps to mind. In the film, Tommy Lee Jones plays a straitlaced retired MPO investigating the murder of his son, a soldier who was killed near his base shortly after returning from Iraq. The scene in question depicts Jones's visit to the hospital room of his son's girlfriend, herself an Iraq veteran who lost an arm and a leg to a roadside bomb. When she reveals that the son responded to her injuries with a crude sexual joke, the father is taken aback and apologizes to her on the boy's behalf. The scene underscores both the father's naivete and his essential decency; and it makes an important point about the desensitizing effects of war—effects that turn out to have been a crucial factor in his son's death. Whether retaining this scene would have lent the finished film more texture or richness can be debated. But its inclusion as a DVD "extra" makes that debate possible, and if you're at all intrigued by how movies get made and the choices (not to mention the compromises) involved in the process, deleted scenes can be particularly illuminating.

The Coen Brothers and the Language of True Grit

2010-04-05T21:43:00.003-04:00

I can't say I was too surprised when I heard that the Coen brothers were planning a remake of True Grit. (Production may already have begun on it, in fact.) While the Coens are no strangers to genre exercises (see Miller's Crossing) and western settings (see Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and especially No Country for Old Men), I suspect that what most attracted them to this project was the language. Charles Portis's original novel (1968) mimicked the voice of an aging, no-nonsense spinster recalling how, as a fourteen-year-old in 1870s Arkansas, she swore to avenge her father's murder, enlisted the aid of a boozy, one-eyed U.S. marshal, and rode with him into Indian Territory to accomplish the task. Befitting the narrator, the dialogue and descriptions were at once folksy and formal; here's a typical passage: "He took only a second to draw a bead and fire the powerful gun. The ball flew to its mark like a martin to his gourd and Lucky Ned Pepper fell dead in the saddle. . . . 'Hurrah!' I joyfully exclaimed. 'Hurrah for the man from Texas! Some bully shot!'"

As arch as that isolated snippet sounds, Portis's stylistic conceit actually worked quite well over the course of the novel, which became a best-seller. How well the language worked in Henry Hathaway's film version, which appeared a year later, was questionable, however. Time's critic described the problem thus: "On the printed page, the studiously naive dialogue contributed to an authentic period piece. Spoken onscreen, such lines as 'I will not bandy words with a drunkard' tend to clutter the air like gnats." (Still, the film was a hit, for which John Wayne, playing the marshal, won his only Academy Award.)

Stylized speech, often some bent version of regional vernacular, has always been a favorite implement in the Coen brothers' toolkit—from the "you betchas" of Fargo to George Clooney's outlandish patter in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Given that history, they'll probably have great fun adapting Portis's peculiar rhythms and constructions, and I'm hoping it'll all work better this time around. Reviewing the original film in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris observed that Hathaway directed his actors "somewhat against the consciously literary dialogue" of the novel. The Coens, on the other hand, are likely to have their cast reveling in it.

Scorsese's Operatic Impulse

2010-03-28T13:50:00.008-04:00

No Martin Scorsese film is without interest, but I doubt that his latest, Shutter Island, will ever be ranked with his best work: among other things, it's overloaded with way too much expository dialogue and way too many plot points, most of them red herrings. Still, its clammy atmospherics do get under your skin, and its core concern—guilt and the defenses we construct to deny it—is fairly compelling, as Scorsesean a theme, certainly, as in anything he's done.* I was never (well, rarely) bored by it, for it contains more than enough of the director's signature pyrotechnics to sustain interest. Here his formidable command of the medium encompasses a hurricane, hallucinatory flashbacks, and a climactic quest through a cavernous, chamber-of-horrors asylum.

On the other hand, those very pyrotechnics and Scorsese's propensity for grand spectacle—his operatic impulse, I'd call it—make me a bit wistful for those past occasions when he worked on a smaller scale, within tighter budget constraints and without so much razzle-dazzle. I'm thinking here of films like The King of Comedy (1982) and, reaching back further, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974). Within the last twenty years, however, it seems that every feature Scorsese has done (excluding his documentary work) has had to be outsized, larger than life. Whether the spectacle is violent, as in Gangs of New York and The Departed, or genteel, as in The Age of Innocence, Scorsese seems doggedly determined to blow us away—through flashy cutting, swooping camera movements, sudden shifts to slow motion, portentous camera angles, what have you. For just a film or two, I'd like to see him deliberately restrain himself and demonstrate once more that he can be entertaining and thought-provoking without always having to overwhelm us.

__________

* That theme, of course, comes by way of Dennis Lehane's novel, which Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta Kalogrisis adapted quite faithfully. Kindred spirits all, I suspect.

Legacy of a Series Long Gone?

2010-03-26T20:37:00.000-04:00

The Little Indie That Could—Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker—richly deserved all the honors it won during the recent awards season, up to and including its six Oscars. It's Bigelow's best work to date, no question. And one of the things that really struck me about it on first viewing was how much of a stylistic departure it seemed for the director. Her flair for visceral action sequences has long been noted, but the near-constant nervous intensity of this film—the hair-trigger editing, the swish pans and quick zooms, the unexpected shifts in perspective, the whole handheld, quasi-documentary look of the movie—wasn't quite like anything she'd ever done before. Or was it? I then recalled that she directed a few episodes of the NBC cop series Homicide: Life on the Street late in its run about a dozen years ago. The house style of that series was, much like that of The Hurt Locker, deliberately jittery, rough, and immediate; any director hired for the show had to conform to it. I lamented the demise of Homicide—it was so much better than anything its creator, Paul Attanasio, and executive producer, Barry Levinson, ever achieved with their big-screen collaborations. Though it lasted seven seasons, the series was never very popular, and now it's pretty much forgotten. Thus it cheered me a bit to think that it might have a legacy of sorts in Bigelow's much-praised Iraq war drama.

P.S. The Hurt Locker has been much on my mind of late, and I hope to have more to say about it in the near future.

Welcome to the Kinetograph

2010-03-25T22:03:00.000-04:00

On this site, I'll be sharing random reflections on the art form I love the most: the cinema. My posts will be wide-ranging and, I hope, mostly intelligent. They may concern an old favorite, a current film or DVD I've just seen, or just some thoughts about movies in general. I've named this blog after one of the Edison lab's early movie cameras: kinetograph means, loosely, "motion recorder" or "motion writer." Since I'll be writing about motion pictures, it seemed appropriate.