Tag / Film

by Edward Champion

NYFF: RR (2007)

[This is the first part in an open series of reports from the New York Film Festival.]

“You know, I have a copy of The Rape of Europa.”

“The lineup this year was so predictable. It was almost as if they knew how to control my reactions with the programming.”

“I’ve seen so many trainspotting books. So I know what to expect from this film.”

“He’s very enthusiastic about writing for the Web. Yes, it’s not print. But it’s still something.”

These were some of the astonishing sentences that trickled into my upturned ears during the first day of press screenings for the New York Film Festival. And while I plan to cover as many of these films as I can on these pages in a quasi-gonzo style, supplementing these reports with podcasts, I feel the need to declare a few things at the onset: (a) I enjoy writing for the Web and consider it more than just “something,” (b) I have no intention of going into a film and judging on what it might be before I have seen it, and (c) if New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick tries to pull some shit with me, I will kick his ass.

Ozu, of course, loved his train shots. And one of the lengthiest shots in Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi involves a freight train rolling past the camera, gradually speeding up, for about two minutes. But James Benning’s RR, part of this year’s avant-garde series falls somewhere between a Situationist cinematic exercise and an Andy Warhol film. The film is composed of nothing more than static shots of trains, the camera serving almost as a surrogate driver waiting at a railroad crossing (hence the film’s title, which, if you are a trainspotter, could likewise stand for “rest and relaxation”). Each shot begins with the train arriving and ends with the train leaving. The film, containing nothing more than visuals and sound, intercuts these long takes with a few seconds of black leader. And the film’s 16mm format lends it a grad school feel that admirably deflates its artistic pretensions. I don’t know if it could work as well on 35mm. But it is a rather interesting cinematic experience for anyone fascinated with everyday minutiae.

It is a film that requires patience. I certainly don’t believe that this film quite warranted its 111 minute running time. And RR‘s nearly unwavering commitment to landscape over humans does cause one long for a few souls ambling around in the distance. (Near the end of the film, Benning does give us a gentleman emerging from camera left, walking well into the distance and staring at a passing train to share our vicarious passiveness.)

But the trains, rolling through plains, rusty bridges, snowscapes, and dilapidated freight yards, do cause us to dwell on interesting details. I became acutely aware of vegetation and plant life slowly dying and wildly overgrowing close to the tracks. The multihued boxcars and the rolling shadows frequently overtake these sometimes dull landscapes. But as the film progresses, Benning does something quite interesting. In the film’s early shots, there is a sense of anticipatory timing. When will the train first appear? This offers a brief moment to fixate on a beautiful scene of, say, trees and rivers, before the train occludes the view. When the train does arrive, the viewer is left to fixate her attentions on the scrub weed, abandoned blue plastic bags, and dessicated goldenrods that litter “our” side of the tracks. But as the shots continue to come, Benning gives us less time to get our bearings. And when Benning cuts early, the trains begin including a few vacant boxcars that offer hollow recesses and/or hollow frames. And the train’s recurrent bifurcation becomes so imposing that we then start to focus more on the landscape on our side of the view, only to begin ignoring the train itself. In fact, I became so accustomed to doing this that, at one point, I began to fixate on croaking frogs and almost completely overlooked the fact that the train in question was composed of only one car. There are surprises here. But you have to have an attention span.

As the film began to adjust the camera’s relative distance from the train from shot to shot, I also found myself shifting in my seat: moving forward when the train was too far and moving backwards when the train was too close. I found it quite alarming that there was a set distance in which I was comfortable perceiving the train. And I must express some gratitude to Benning for making me aware of this programmed tendency. Who knew?

When the film juxtaposes radio snippets over its visuals, such as “This Land is Your Land,” some religious nut on the radio, and Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech, to impart a bogus significance, I felt the film failed. The film is more true and intriguing when it concerns itself with the unexpected sounds that the train decimates or succumbs to — whether wildlife whooping off-screen, profanity-laced hip-hop blaring from trailers hitched across the tracks, or a loud motorboat speeding beneath a bridge. Benning has claimed in an interview that this film “came to be about consumerism and overconsumption.” But this suggests great political import that really isn’t here. This is a film specializing in the American relationship with landscape. But if it were about the goods transported within freight trains, surely we would have been permitted a glimpse inside? An occasional shot of a bulldozer tied down on a platform or a car bogged down with lumber simply doesn’t cut it. The relationship here doesn’t seem that political to me, even with the film’s final shot in a wind farm. But depending upon how patient or open-minded you are, it may or may not be your kind of ride.

by Edward Champion

Review: Choke (2008)

Writer-director Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s 2001 novel has a number of things going for it. It has, first and foremost, the intriguing choice of Sam Rockwell cast as sex addict Victor Mancini. Rockwell plays this role as a strange amalgam of Greg Kinnear’s Bob Crane in Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus and Luke Wilson’s detached presence. His lanky mien suggests a Stan Laurel to the slightly chubby Brad William Henke’s Oliver Hardy. And while Henke here is not bad as Victor’s best friend and co-worker Denny, a chronic masturbator unafraid to lust after Victor’s mom (Angelica Houston), this comedic pair-up doesn’t quite anchor the film the way it should. Denny, like many wingmen before him, exists here mainly to pester Victor to move to “the fourth step,” or, in less Erhard-like terms, get on with his life or, as another character tells him later in the film, “to begin at the beginning.” With Victor, Denny attends support group meetings to help the pair get over their sex addiction. But Victor spends most of this time banging an anal bead enthusiast named Nico (Paz de la Heurta) in the backroom.

Rockwell’s look is certainly right. His shaggy brown hair, desperately in need of a haircut, frequently sticks up, suggesting a 1990s Northwestern slacker aesthetic. He wears shirts with gaping holes near the collar. He works a day job as a historical reenactor and, early on, declares directly to the camera, “I am the backbone of colonial America,” a postmodern possibility that Gregg never quite pursues that suggests that his addiction is a throwback to a more early and hypocritical age. Victor insists that he’s an asshole, but maintains a wide-eyed and bemused presence that seems perfectly aligned with the film’s often frustrating inability to decide whether it’s satirical or sincere.

No Country for Old Men‘s Kelly Macdonald appears as Paige Marshall, whose eyes were seemingly invented for the light, but who we know, upon her character’s first step inside the mise en scene, will almost certainly become Victor’s love interest and will almost certainly never live up to Bechdel’s Rule. Which is too bad. Because the more I see of Macdonald, the more I realize how much she has it. And it will take a very intelligent film director, perhaps one with more smarts than even the formidable Coens, to give her the role that will finally catapult her into the superstardom she deserves. Her presence in this film is part of the Big Reveal, which is a substantial copout. But then if you’ve read Palahniuk’s book, you know the Big Reveal already. And Macdonald likewise know it. Her character speaks in a particularly pronounced hayseed vernacular, pronouncing “traumatic” like “TRAW-MA-TIC.” But this permits her to play Paige as if she’s on the inside of a terrible joke.

The terrible joke may very well be the fact that David Fincher was not only the first director to make a film about a Palahniuk novel, but the one to transform it into his masterpiece. One cannot view Choke without being aware of Fight Club‘s imposing shadow. Like Fincher (and screenwriter Jim Uhls), Gregg has one interesting scene that plays as nihilistic absurdism. In Fight Club, it was the moment in which Edward Norton punched himself in the face to blackmail an office manger. In Choke, it’s presented when Rockwell insists to a group of asylum inmates that he’s not a good guy, proceeds to take away a walker from an older woman and smash it against a locker. But while there is something in this scene vaguely reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, the scene plays like some doughty transplant from a pre-9/11 America. It works to establish Victor’s internal dilemma, but it doesn’t feel particularly contemporary.

Gregg is at his best when he avoids this dated approach to shock value for the more troubling truths of the seemingly perverse, such as one moment involving a woman who Victor seeks out for a rape fantasy involving a knife. The woman sets very specific terms, speaking less like a person with fey needs and more like a human resources manager. (The safe word is “poodle.”) There’s also an interesting exchange in which Victor confronts the boyfriend of a woman who has fallen asleep giving him a hand job. Victor urges the boyfriend to turn back and walk away. But these scenes work because of their naturalistic ironies. They present moments that are not particularly normal, but frame them as if they are normal. Even when the dialogue itself feels transplanted from some banal sitcom. And to consider again Victor’s insistence that he is “the backbone of colonial America,” this suggests an American take on the many unusual situations of this type that one finds within Francois Ozon’s early, more daring films. I have neglected to point out that Victor has worked out a scam, whereby he lodges a piece of food in his throat, chokes, and wanders around a restaurant in search of the right benefactor to perform the Heimlich. He does this to earn some pocket money to help pay for his mother’s care in a hospital. It is something that occurs quite frequently throughout this film, but these moments, which should have likewise served as nihilistic absurdism, simply did not stand out for me. Part of this may have to do with Gregg’s inability to push things far enough. Gregg does not entirely understand, as Fincher did, that this is the kind of behavior must be played out as melodramatic in order to work. There is one somewhat funny moment in which the choke confidence game backfires at a Chinese restaurant. But the moment simply doesn’t have the naturalistic irony or the nuanced play of these other scenes I have mentioned. And in a film largely concerning itself with the subject of phoniness, it seems absolutely vital for a filmmaker to get the tone absolutely right.

Gregg’s film does disguise New Jersey locations somewhat successfully as the Northwest. The apartments are laced with tacky wallpaper. There are many dead patches of lawn on the historical reenactment site. There are unwashed radiators, grimy kitchen surfaces, and photographs tacked carelessly to walls. But the film’s many flashbacks to the 1970s and 1980s, containing muted browns and the kind of predictable tan jackets and vests that have become something of a production design cliche, reveal that this is more kitsch than verisimilitude. More of a time capsule than a movie of the moment.

Gregg has been mostly faithful to Palahniuk’s novel. But he doesn’t quite have Fincher’s talent to properly translate Palahniuk’s cartoonish riffs on reality to the big screen. He does have Victor and Denny frequently stare at women and suddenly see them topless, and this tic even extends to an older nun. But this isn’t really pushing the envelope, much less forcing us to ponder the perceptions we keep to ourselves. His efforts to plunge into the scatological, such as a moment in which Denny drinks out of a dish and an incident late in the film involving chocolate pudding, don’t feel particularly offensive and don’t particularly unsettle us the way they did in Palahniuk’s novel. It is also a telling sign that most of the sex scenes occur with clothes on. The vulnerable nature of being naked, which should mean something in light of the film’s dialectic between love and sex, is confined to “being in the circuit” late in the film. But it feels perfectly safe. The kind of thing you’d find within some harmless Skinemax movie from the 1980s.

If a Chuck Palahniuk film adaptation cannot unsettle us, what then is the point of making it?

by Edward Champion

Edward Douglas, Hopeless Hack and Amental Film “Journalist” — Part Two

Last week, Reluctant Habits initiated a weekly series on New York hack “journalist” Edward Douglas, a creative typist employed by ComingSoon.net and an intellectual coprophiliac quite happy to scarf down the moist cloacal deposits offered by film publicists. Unfortunately, in the last seven days, Mr. Douglas’s work has not improved much. We see traces of anti-intellectualism and a failure to comprehend basic nouns, along with other unpardonable sins.

MR. DOUGLAS’S OFFENSES AGAINST JOURNALISM AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — THE WEEK OF JUNE 8, 2008

Edward Douglas offers this stunningly idiotic sentence:

Director M. Night Shyamalan often gets a bad rap, not because of his movies, whether you like all, some or none of them, but because people claim him to be an arrogant egomaniac.

Not only do we get another typical instance of Mr. Douglas mangling his clauses, but we get the redundancy “arrogant egomaniac.” Is Mr. Douglas then suggesting then that Mr. Shyamalan is a humble egomaniac? Or is he simply clueless with nouns? One thing’s for sure. Mr. Douglas has no problem wrapping his well-oiled orifice in Mr. Shyamalan’s presence. While boasting about his “10-minute lightning round interview” (such insight!), Mr. Douglas writes, “You have to admit that he doesn’t make movies haphazardly though, always spending a good amount of time thinking about every aspect of the story and characters and how they might be perceived by the public at large.”

There are many filmmakers, of course, who spend a good deal of time thinking about movies. Consider the time that Michael Cimino expended to think about every detail in Heaven’s Gate, right down to the period underwear. And we all know how that film is currently regarded. But it does not logically follow that, because a filmmaker has used up time and energy, he has put out a quality film.

Mr. Douglas’s paralogia can also be witnessed in such dunce questions as “With all the paranoia in the air, can this movie still be seen as escapism?” (presumably, Mr. Douglas has a limited definition of the escapist blockbuster) and “This is a very short movie compared to your other movies, but it’s only 90 minutes and I was curious about that.” In clinging to such boilerplate, Mr. Douglas remains as graceful as a two-year-old who requires a life preserver in a wading pool.

Mr. Douglas also suggests that Scientific American “grilled” Mr. Shyamalan in asking about science. I must presume that Mr. Douglas is referring to the innocuous question, “Do you see part of this movie being a statement about science and technology being all you need in the world?” If this question did indeed come from Scientific American, it does not grill in the slightest. It is a question founded on legitimate inquiry. Perhaps by “grilled,” Mr. Douglas is referring to a vaguely intellectual area he will never inhabit. But rather than asking more specific questions about The Happening‘s relationship with science (Scientific American‘s George Musser had the decency and the smarts to ask him aboutthe great Guy Maddin. But don’t let Mr. Maddin’s importance fool you into thinking that Mr. Douglas offered anything approximating interesting inquiry. Early in the conversation, Mr. Maddin offers an intriguing answer about Michael Burns okaying a rough outline for My Winnipeg. And rather than asking Mr. Maddin about just how loose he can get with Burns and the level of rejection he receives as a maverick filmmaker, Mr. Douglas asks instead, “Did you still do any kind of research at all?” (Incidentally, Mr. Burns was recently fired, which leaves one to wonder about Maddin’s remaining allies at the Documentary Channel and the freedom he still has a filmmaker. But, of course, Mr. Douglas is too gutless a questioner to follow up.) He doesn’t even ask about the relationship between writing with wholesale invention and relying upon preexisting fact, which would seem an important component to a film dealing with urban legends in some form.

When one interviews someone like Guy Maddin, the interview practically writes itself. But there are too many times in which Mr. Douglas cannot parse the conversational trajectory in front of him. Mr. Douglas’s interview is a fine example for anyone wondering how not to conduct an interview.

by Edward Champion

Edward Douglas, Hopeless Hack and Amental Film “Journalist” — Part One

New York hack “journalist” Edward Douglas, a creative typist employed by ComingSoon.net and an intellectual coprophiliac quite happy to scarf down the moist cloacal deposits offered by film publicists, recently left a comment. Mr. Douglas writes that telling the truth about Hollywood and the junket system is “the reason why blogs like [sic] shouldn’t be considered viable outlets to do these interviews.” Is that so?

In a moment, I’ll address the question of whether Mr. Douglas is a writer with enough credibility to make such a claim. But for now, there is a more pertinent question: What makes Mr. Douglas’s idiot tinkerings at ComingSoon.net any different from a blog? It appears that Mr. Douglas doesn’t write for newspapers. In fact, he writes exclusively online. Could it be that Mr. Douglas is merely a piss-poor journalist? Could it be that Mr. Douglas’s isn’t that good of a writer? Could it be that he is a small insect creeping his way up the dunghill of film journalism? A mere mite to be smashed with a robust and responsible Doc Marten?

In an effort to determine precisely why and how Mr. Douglas is a lazy and inept journalist, I’m initiating a weekly series that will examine Mr. Douglas’s work (if his scrabbling can be called that) as it appears on his site, ComingSoon.net. This is the first installment.

MR. DOUGLAS’S OFFENSES AGAINST JOURNALISM AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — THE WEEK OF JUNE 1, 2008

On June 5th, Mr. Douglas interviewed Jon Favreau. Instead of using this time to investigate Iron Man 2 at length or ask Favreau about some of the interesting connections between his earlier and more “real” films (Swingers and Made) and these newer fantasy blockbusters, Mr. Douglas preferred to state the obvious to Mr. Favreau, asking him the vapid question, “So now you are back to being in front of the camera and goofing off?” Clearly, it is Mr. Douglas who is the one goofing off here with this slipshod inquiry. But, of course, since Mr. Douglas (and the other junketeers who were present for this interview) is a consummate ass-kisser, this early question was merely a setup to stroke Mr. Favreau’s ego with this scintillating observation concerning all potential superhero epics now in the planning stages: “I guess you will have to direct all of them.” Again, we see that Mr. Douglas and his unsearing peers prefer constant assuaging over journalism.

Also on that day, Mr. Douglas wrote this amazingly idiotic piece of hackery in relation to Anand Tucker. Marvel at this atrocious sentence!

It must have been a bittersweet departure, because it would have been a fantastic film under Tucker’s guidance and he was a big fan of the books, but leaving the film allowed the director to successfully dodge the bullet and the backlash when the movie bombed horribly, something that many felt greatly accelerated the decline and death of New Line in its previous guise.

Mix your metaphors much, Mr. Douglas? Split your infinitives much, Mr. Douglas? Separate your clauses at all, Mr. Douglas? Are you even aware of Strunk & White, Mr. Douglas? Does anybody edit your pieces, Mr. Douglas? Unable to deploy a figurative metaphor (“the bullet”) for his object, Mr. Douglas feels a strange need to introduce a literal one (“the backlash”). And who are the “many” who felt that The Golden Compass was responsible for New Line’s decline? Is this like the tribunal scene at the end of M? Mr. Douglas suggests by this cavalier item that he is an insider. But he is a dilettante. A proper journalist would offer a link or a specific authority for others to follow.

Let us also ponder the modifier “exclusive” — a word that Mr. Douglas seems peculiarly fixated upon. An exclusive interview suggests that Mr. Douglas is nabbing these interviews on his own, that he is obtaining bits of information that nobody else has. Mr. Douglas is not in the habit of confessing when he’s at a press conference or a sharing a roundtable interview with other journalists. So perhaps he has deluded himself into thinking that he’s getting an “exclusive.” Or this is what he tells the people who pay his checks. Either way, he is a liar. And further examinations into the “exclusive” nature of Mr. Douglas’s material are forthcoming.

But for now, I note that Mr. Douglas reported that he had “an exclusive” item involving Werner Herzog’s upcoming movie, Bad Lieutenant, with Herzog claiming that his film was not a remake of the Abel Ferrara film. But if Douglas had such an “exclusive,” why then did the same news (with a strikingly similar quote) crop up on Defamer one day before Douglas’s report? Could it be that Defamer’s S.T. VanAirsdale (who also blogs at The Reeler) was at the same junket/press conference? (VanAirsadle, to his credit, had the humility and the decency to avoid the word “exclusive,” pointing to “some minor miracle/apparent PR botch” that permitted this interview to happen.)

On June 3, the hopeless Mr. Douglas posted his conversation with documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport, where one can see Mr. Douglas’s considerable deficiencies as an interlocutor. Davenport was commissioned to film an Iraqi film student. The resulting film became an altogether different documentary named Operation Filmmaker. Sounds like an intriguing exposé into cultural transition, yes? Well, not for Mr. Douglas. He was not so tickled at putting forth remotely challenging questions on, say, how much Davenport and her camera might have been inadvertently responsible for the film student’s erratic behavior. In fact, since Mr. Douglas is apparently incapable of using his noggin (or unwilling to) for his questions, we get three questions from Mr. Douglas that rely upon the “It must have been hard”/”Was it difficult?” interviewing cliche.

Let us consider this hackeneyed phrase. In what world do you utter such a conversational banality and not get your ass kicked? You don’t ask a dentist if it’s “difficult” for him to fill in a cavity. You don’t tell a barista that “it must have been hard” to make that latte for the last customer. Why are amental hacks like Mr. Douglas so content to treat their interview subjects like children? (Answer: Because today’s junketeers aren’t interested in adult conversations. They remain inveterate assuagers.)

Douglas really thinks his readers are idiots. Why else would he write, in relation to a junket with Kung Fu Panda co-director John Stevenson, “A lot of what he had to say will certainly be of interest to anyone hoping to one day break into the animation or computer effects field.” Even discounting the fact that Douglas (or one of his fellow roundtable junketeers) foolishly compares the Head of Story position with ADing, is Douglas arrogant enough to believe that aspiring animation students will be going to ComingSoon.net to get technical information? Compare Mr. Douglas’s condescending flummery with Steve Fritz’s more comprehensive and informed interview of both Kung Fu Panda directors, where Fritz not only gets answers on how fight moves were animated and carried out, but even obtains a concise paragraph on key frame animation.

It will, of course, take some time to examine the spineless atavist known as Edward Douglas. I should observe that Mr. Douglas’s affronts to journalism are, as I have intimated with the comparisons above, by no means endemic to film journalism as a whole. I have my problems with David Poland, but at least Poland is attempting some basic ratiocination. One cannot say this of Mr. Douglas, whose execrable word spewing makes Poland look like F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is not just the ineluctable conclusion that Mr. Douglas writes with all the dependability and precocity of a malfunctioning dot matrix printer that should trouble us. He actually gets paid for this.

It is now my goal to inform those who pay Mr. Douglas for his services that they are getting a terrible deal. It is he who is the one not deserving of any credibility. It is he who is the one who should be confined to a go-nowhere office job without the benefit of air conditioning. Future dispatches will follow.

by Edward Champion

RIP Sydney Pollack

I have long been baffled by the suggestion put forth by hip film folk that Tootsie is an “overrated” picture. The film may not be on the level of Some Like It Hot, but it is nonetheless the kind of elaborate comedic farce, a natural descendant of Lubitsch, that nobody makes anymore. It is funny, immensely subtle, and full of wonderful performances (well, save Jessica Lange, a one-note performance that arose from a one-note character). It is a rare film in which the side characters are just as essential as the protagonist. It offers fascinating takes on gender through physical gesture. (Just watch Dustin Hoffman’s movement as he begins inhabiting Dorothy Michaels’s mannerisms over the course of the film.) The screenplay was infamously put together at the last minute, and it could not have happened without Sydney Pollack at the helm (and Elaine May on the revisions).

Pollack is now dead. And I will forgive him somewhat for the many turkeys he helmed over the past fifteen years. He didn’t always succeed. (Random Hearts is a mangy dog, Out of Africa is an overlong bore, and the less said about his atrocious remake of Sabrina, the better.) But the man gave us Tootsie, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Electric Horseman — all intelligent and well-crafted films directed at popular audiences. He always cast a major leading man in his films, whether it was Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffmann, or Robert Redford, who could be counted upon to deliver some modest human insight for mass consumption. Today, this seems like almost a quaint notion.

He was also a fascinating, if limited actor. In addition to the agent in Tootsie, I cannot forget Pollack’s fine performance as Jack in Husbands and Wives. The scene in which Pollack tries to leave a party with Lysette Anthony is one of the most harrowing depictions of a seemingly confident middle-aged man seeing his world crumble right in front of him. We realize at that moment just how much Jack relies on others to feed his being. Pollack was the only person who could have played that scene.

I’ll miss Pollack, because I can’t think of anyone who will replace him. He wasn’t the greatest filmmaker in the world. But he stood out in large part because today’s emerging filmmakers seem more interested in spectacle over substance. I suppose this is what sells tickets. But Pollack understood that the true spectacle lies in fascinating human moments. He may have focused mostly on lighter fare. He may have made mainstream movies. But when his films delivered, it was the natural spectacle that commanded your attention.

by Edward Champion

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The fourth Indiana Jones movie is a piece of shit. Gone is the sense of wonder. Gone is the great love of Republic serials. This is a movie made by two men who have misplaced their ability to have fun. Lucas and Spielberg’s collective contempt for their audience is evident from the opening shot, where the Paramount mountain dissolves not into a bona-fide peak, but a gopher hill. That’s right, a gopher hill with a bunch of bad CG gophers running around. (And if you think that’s bad, there are also bad CG monkeys in this movie too.) What the fuck is this? Caddyshack 3?

Typically, the opening Indiana Jones scene features an exciting set piece that sets up Jones as an ass-kicking protagonist and establishes a breakneck pace that the film must live up to. But not Indy 4. Instead, we get a bullshit cruising race between some Russians and some smarmy teens. Where the fuck is Indy? And then these Russians go to Area Fucking 51, shoot the men at the gate (with one of the big baddies leaning down to tie his shoe, a ridiculous visual) and are somehow able to walk through the entire base and into a warehouse containing some of the biggest secrets collected by the government without a single security guard around. (They can’t all be positioned at the gate.)

But where the fuck is Indy? Oh yeah. He’s in the trunk. He gets out, mutters “I like Ike” to prove that he’s American and all, condemns the Reds (in case we missed the “New Mexico 1957” title) and then there’s a ho-hum shooting scene before we venture into an hour of relentless chatter about geoglyphs and the like (although you’ll see the plot coming a mile away) and Shia LaBeouf as sidekick Mutt Williams, a character so bland that I actually longed for Kate Capshaw’s screams, which is something I’d never thought I’d do.

Should I tell you about how they turned Marion from a spunky, self-sufficient sidekick into a more or less helpless chick who drives the truck? Appalling. I’m sure the idea to put the hussy in her place (domesticated no less!) came from Lucas, and I want to punch him for it.

Should I convey to you the constant mimesis as marketing? At one point, Indy tells Mutt about an adventure with Pancho Villa he had “when I was your age.” And it’s nothing less than a plot summary for a Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode. Something that has nothing to do with the plot. Someone knocks over a crate in the warehouse and oh ho ho, it’s the Ark of the Covenant! Harrison Ford pushes his hat down while traveling in the plane. The same way he did in Raiders! And it is this constant repetition of moments from previous films in which we are expected to be charmed. Harrison Ford even says, “I have a bad feeling about this,” the dreaded line from Star Wars. The constant recycling suggests to us that nobody really wants to create anything original, that Han Solo and Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford are all the same. So why care really?

Harrison Ford looks good, but seems considerably irritated to be in this picture.

Cate Blanchett gives the worst performance of her life, unable to sustain a convincing Ukranian accent. (Her Australian seeps through in every sentence. Didn’t they have a dialogue coach on this?) She juts her chin forward, wears a preposterous black wig in a bob, and spends most of her time pacing with her hands folded behind her back. This is what is considered a convincing villain. I longed for Honey Ryder.

The plot is preposterously pedestrian. Lucas wasted nearly twenty years and several screenwriters on this. And what is the end result? An embarrassing Chariots of the Gods premise that will surely earn David Koepp’s screenplay a spot on the Razzie longlist.

It’s not all bad. There’s one very fun jungle chase scene in which Mutt and Cate Blanchett get into a sword fight, each of them on a separate vehicle. I liked some over-the-top red ants that munched upon victims. This is largely due to Spielberg’s half-hearted attempts to make something of this crappy material. But none of this comes close to the tank scene in The Last Crusade, the wondrous mine chase in The Temple of Doom, or any moment of Raiders.

This was the first Indiana Jones picture in which I didn’t have much fun. Not content to simply ruin the Star Wars franchise with the last execrable trilogy, George Lucas has made a mockery of the Indiana Jones universe, and will be rewarded with millions of dollars for insulting his audience and cheapening his creations. He doesn’t care. He is Hollywood’s answer to Kenneth Lay, defrauding his audience of the pleasures he is now incapable of generating.

by Edward Champion

Interview with Ralph Bakshi

I recently had the opportunity to talk with underground animator Ralph Bakshi. A portion of our conversation appears this afternoon at Vulture, where you will discover the song that was originally going to play during the finale of American Pop. (For the specific reasons why, you will have to wait for the podcast.) Unfortunately, there were space constraints. So what follows is some of the additional material that didn’t make it into the piece. The entire conversation, which includes even more from Bakshi, will be released as a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show. (Please note that edited elements of the same conversation appear both here and at Vulture.)

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about music in your films. It’s certainly important in American Pop. You pilfered from your record collection for that, as well as the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic. And there’s “Ah’m a Niggerman” from Coonskin, which you wrote. I’m wondering if you did this because you have an aversion to Carl Stalling-style orchestral music.

Bakshi: First of all, I love music. I’ve always loved music. And I’ve loved various kinds of music. Music is part of our lives. It’s part of the soundtrack that what we all grow up with. Especially in my day. I don’t know today. There’s so many things going on. I’m talking about yesterday and my day, which are the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Music is so emotionally important to the movie. It’s just as important as anything else. If the song is emotionally correct for a scene, the scene plays better. Or the scene plays better than it would have with a different song. So music is so critical to movies. I chose songs that I knew emotionally worked with these scenes that I wrote. Because whenever I listened to music while either driving in a car or sitting at a bar or listening to Coltrane or Billy Holiday – you daydream. If you don’t daydream to music, then you’re not listening to good music.

I went out and I bought every record that I’ve ever loved that was right for the scene. “Yesterday” by Billie Holiday for Fritz the Cat was perfect for Big Bertha and coming into Harlem. You know, it was a classic song. “Maybelline” and “Twist and Shout.” And all these records. “Scarborough Fair.” All these records I used, I got for fifty to a hundred bucks. They were dirt cheap. I could buy any record I wanted for under two hundred dollars. Why was that? Unbelievable.

Because everybody else was scoring their films. And why were they scoring their films? Because if they had a hit, they’d own the music. They’d make money from the score. They’d own their own records. I can’t release Billie Holiday’s “Yesterday” and make any money out of it. I never considered that. The issue was what was right for the movie. I couldn’t believe the cheap prices I was getting. And I had a low-budget film! So I could afford to get anything I wanted.

Correspondent: But you had Andrew Belling on Wizards. I’m curious if you gave these composers specific instructions.

Bakshi: Well, Andrew Belling on Wizards did an absolutely brilliant job. Let’s talk about Wizards. Wizards is very low-budget. One million two. Okay. I’m not going to fall back on my records, because it’s not that kind of movie. I need a score. But I need a score that I love. And I don’t remember how I got to Belling. I’d been to New York with a lot of other guys. But Belling came with a little synthesizer. One little machine which was a very big deal. We didn’t have any orchestra. We had synthesizers. All that music was done with Belling in the room. And he said the right things and he did the right things. And he came back and he played me a piece of music that was beautiful. I think Belling did an incredible job in that song he wrote. And the battle scenes. And the emotion. Belling nailed it. He did it himself and everything. It was all done without an orchestra. It was good.

Correspondent: This is an interesting conundrum. I think one of the reasons why the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic is so stirring is largely because of that music. But here you have a scenario in which someone else is composing music that doesn’t originate from another source.

Bakshi: I was terrified what he would do. I was scared. I was nervous. I had nightmares that it wouldn’t work. And he nailed it. I don’t know how he did it. I had nothing to do with it. How do you talk to another composer about music? Now look. Let’s talk about freedom. I demand freedom as a director. I demand the right to fuck up, to do what I want. I am not about to take that freedom away from another artist. If Belling walks in and says that he’s a composer, and I believe what he has to say and I believe that he’s sensitive enough and I believe it, man, prove it. Go do your music. It’s not my job to write the music for him.

(I also discussed with Baskhi why he hired Thomas Kinkade. In addition to the remarks at Vulture, Bakshi also had this to say.)

Bakshi: In the middle of the picture, [Kinkade] stands up and he says, “I’m going away with Gurney for three weeks. We’re traveling cross country.” And I said, “Well, wait a minute. We’re doing a picture.” “All right. We’ll be back on a certain date. We will paint enough before we go. And when we get back, we’ll double paintings.”

He worked with Frank Frazetta. Those kids, Gurney and Kinkade, painted wonderful paintings so fast. And Frank Frazetta would come in — he was a great illustrator – and show Kinkade a lot of tricks. Both of those guys, when they painted other stuff, when Kinkade painted closer to the Ashcan school, which I loved very much, wonderful. He can sell anything. He opened up galleries. He’s building a city now. He’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He owns half of California. So I have nothing against Kinkade. He’s funny. He is like Elmer Gantry. He’s ‘s a great painter. But he likes to make money. And he does. He doesn’t like the stuff he’s painting.

Correspondent: But that’s anathema to your position, which is about making it as true and as honest as possible.

Bakshi: By the time I got to Fire and Ice, I was bitter. It’s not my picture. I was burned out. I was through. Though people may like it, I don’t consider that a Bakshi film. That’s a Frazetta film. That’s me not caring. I was burned out. I was tired. At that point, I was gone. And I did. I closed the studio and then I left. I had no emotional interest in Fire and Ice to tell you the truth.

by Edward Champion

Junkets

It’s a drizzly Tuesday afternoon in the Meatpacking District. I’m waiting outside a hotel suite. It’s just before a junket interview that will be my last. A film publicist wanders in the hallway, jitters in her stride. She’s gabbing into her cell, calmly trying to placate a difficult client who doesn’t realize how difficult he’s being.

Being a journalist, I’m invisible. I’m the barista or bartender of the media system. I’m considered too dimwitted to pay attention to the dismal and terrible things that actors and filmmakers sometimes say. The expectation is that I won’t write about it. The idea here is that I can’t inquire, lest this prevent future interview opportunities from surfacing upon my shoals. I truly don’t care who I talk with, so long as there’s a fun and somewhat enlightening conversation. But this modest goal is incompatible with what is expected. I’m expected to offer softball questions along the lines of “Where do you get your ideas?” or “What’s next?” But I can’t. Just can’t. Don’t have it in me to dumb things down. This simply isn’t what journalists do. I feel compelled to present a film person with a goofy or thoughtful inquiry into his craft. Perhaps it’s naivete. But it worked back in the day for Mike Wallace. But if I do inquire, and I’m just about to, it’s considered “inappropriate.” No explanation or specific solecism given.

I’m expected to be dazzled by the limitless canapes, the endless stream of sandwiches, the food and drink that publicists are expected to provide, the tab paid by a studio with money to burn. But I don’t care about any of this. Because I’m a journalist. Not a freeloader. And I want to do my job.

I don’t know who the client on the phone is, but this publicist has a difficult task on her hands. I learn that the client has had press. Regis, a profile in the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other places. Not bad. But it’s simply not enough. This client wants more.

“I understand,” says the publicist, “but it’s been difficult to get in touch with you. You don’t return my calls. And it would help…”

The publicist is interrupted.

I learn that the publicist has been leaving several voicemails a day. The publicist has been trying to book this client — who could be an egotistical filmmaker or a self-important actor — on several shows. But without that pivotal communication on the client’s end, the all-encompassing media tsunami he demands can’t happen. And even if it can happen, it simply isn’t enough. The publicist is expected to make this happen regardless of the client’s recalcitrance. And in this way, the publicist isn’t all that different from the junket journalist. If an actor detects even the faintest slight, then it’s the journalist who takes the fall and the publicist is chewed out by another publicist just higher up the ladder, but all publicists are equal and just as expendable. The assumption is that the journalist will continue to dun his nose because he needs the high-profile interviews. I, however, don’t need or care to dun my nose. Thanks to a spectacularly bitchy publicist named Betsy Rudnick, a senior account executive at Falco Ink who I haven’t yet met, but who I learn later doesn’t like me but can’t tell me why, I’m about to commit unanticipated hari-kari and I don’t know it.

A film person wants to be on every radio and television show, wants to grace every newspaper. But the film person abdicates all control to the publicist. The film person is expected to be placated, taken care of, have his ego massaged, and who knows what else.

Some New York junket veterans — like a man named Brad Balfour who I have run into at press screenings and interviews and who has eyed my audio equipment not so out of bonhomie or curiosity, but with the hope of discerning some way that he can use me* — boast about having ten minutes with Samuel L. Jackson. I heard Balfour shrieking at the top of his lungs about a Jackson chat at a screening a few months ago. He had bagged Jackson. But what kind of sustained inquiry can you have in ten minutes? In the case of Balfour, the inquiry involves such insipid questions like “What inspired you to do In Country?” and “How did you prepare for this role?” Questions that nearly any junket journalist is going to ask.

This take-no-chances approach goes much further. There’s something called a roundtable interview, in which multiple junket journalists band together to offer the same questions with the same answers for the same outlets, where they can then take the same credit for being the “exclusive” interlocutor.

As a result, quotes from the same conversation have a magical way of popping up everywhere. You may think that Balfour got the scoop on Javier Bardem. But wouldn’t you know it? The same quotes — in particular, observe the “How am I with women?” answer and the specific references to Woody Allen and Milos Forman — show up in interviews with Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas, the Boston Globe‘s Michelle Kung, Collider’s Frosty (a nom de plume for a double-dipping journalist?), and the Sunday Mirror. (And if you want to have some real fun, Google a quote. You may be surprised by how frequently a specific phrase appears in interviews. If it doesn’t come from the same conversation, then it’s likely to be a phrase that a film person latches onto. An actor, after all, must know his lines. Boilerplate is an amazing thing.)

This fiction of a perceived exclusive allows readers to think that they’re getting something unique. But when an actor hits New York, “friendly” interviewers are selected to obtain quotes, and the results are nothing less than a mass dissemination of the same material. Junket journalists often team up to collect their work. One group interviews the actor, another a director. The film person maintains the practice of repeating the same quotes, ad nauseum, to these “journalists.” It all becomes a journalistic circlejerk.

The junket has been around longer than you might expect. One of Hollywood’s earliest moments of junket excess came in 1963, when a then whopping $250,000 was spent promoting Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Kramer was summoned to defend the crazed financial excess. It set a precedent. Now nearly every film released by a studio spends a remarkable sum of money on junkets.

And if you think junket journalists are bad, there are other hacks who go much further. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association‘s ignoble relationship with Hollywood has the studios picking up the airfare and hotel bill for journalists. There are sometimes gift bags. Bribery. (For what it’s worth, the HFPA also oversees the Golden Globes, in the event you actually believed that there was some integrity.) And then there’s Ain’t It Cool News’s Harry Knowles, an online “journalist” regularly flown out by studios to premieres. In 2006, Eric D. Snider revealed more, writing a candid column entitled “I Was a Junket Whore,” in which he chronicled further indiscretions. Snider remains banned from Paramount screenings for telling the truth.

* * *

I was at Soho House to talk with film people behind Santosh Sivan’s film, Before the Rains. I set up the interview because I had admired Sivan’s 1999 film, The Terrorist, championing it when it had played during the San Francisco Film Festival that year. I had intended to talk with Sivan about his stunning visuals. But the deal was this. I could talk with Sivan, but only if I likewise talked with actors Linus Roache, Jennifer Ehle, Nandita Das, and Rahul Bose. No problem. I set up a roundtable conversation. I figured that questions could be bounced off Sivan and the actors. And all of us would have a fun time. I had set up the interview with an amicable and adept publicist named Caitlin Speed, a lively woman whom I had booked previous interviews with, and who simply got the inquisitive intent and nature of The Bat Segundo Show. But when I showed up, another publicist asked me who I was and who I had set up the interview with. I told her. And eventually, Caitlin and I found each other.

The atmosphere was chaotic. Das was on her way out. Sivan hadn’t arrived. No reason was given. No problem. I’d carry forth an impromptu discussion with the remaining actors. And if Sivan showed up later, he could nudge his way in. This was, after all, the natural flow of conversation.

Actors are, on the whole, very friendly. They are, after all, people. But there are some who have chips on their shoulders the size of Montana. And it is these prima donnas who tarnish the profession. I began my conversation with Bose — easily the best actor in Before the Rains and, as it turned out, the smartest guy at the table — and Ehle, given a relatively thankless role as the wife to Roache’s adulterer. Things started off okay, with Bose claiming to be Ehle and “very sexy.” But when Roache, the film’s leading man, arrived, flashing his pearly whites, I was expected to break off my conversation with Bose to acknowledge his presence. (You can hear this awkward pause in the podcast. I’m presenting the audio file below unedited. I leave others to make up their minds over whether I went over the line with my questions or whether the actors I talked with were incapable of working without a script.) The problem was that I was in the middle of a query with Bose on how Sivan had placed his character at the top of a cliff, and I was curious to know how landscape and position affected his performance. And I thought it very rude to break off this conversation in media res. When Bose was finished with his answer, I then introduced Roache. Roache was getting fidgety, presumably because he was not the center of attention.

Me: I should point out that Linus Roache has just joined us. How are you doing?

Roache: I’m very good. How are you?

Me: Doing fantastic. I alluded to — I was talking with Jennifer about the scene with you and Jennifer in the bedroom, where both of you are positioned in a manner in which — you’re both diagonal to the bed frame. We were talking about this notion of performance in relation to landscape. And I was wondering if you had any particular thoughts on how landscape or the environment in this film — because this is a very environment-specific film — pertains to your performance. Or working within these limitations.

Roache: Wow! What a question.

Ehle: I didn’t talk about that at all. Ed was talking about that. I said I had no idea about the landscape or anything.

Roache: I don’t know how to answer that. Uh….

Bose: I did the mountains. Landscape and the mountains were mine. She said she did the tea gardens.

Ehle: Yeah.

There was nervous laughter. And at this point, Roache then shifted into boilerplate.

Roache: I don’t know. I just loved being there. I was just out of my mind being there. It was just such an incredible environment to make a movie in. I literally like — I had tears in my eyes when I left. Because I had never been in such beauty for so long. So I understand why my character didn’t want to leave there. The way he fell in love with it. So.

Okay. So he wasn’t getting it. So I thought I’d try a goofier approach to loosen Roache up. Something predicated upon an observation I had of the film, something I was curious about, and something he might have some fun with.

Me: There was one aspect to your character that actually disturbed me. And that was the fact that your hair does not move — with an exception near the end. There’s a stray follicle that actually sticks out. But for the most part, your hair is completely slicked back.

There was a confused look on Roache’s face. Bose tried to bail him out.

Bose: He was very particular about it. Linus, you know, I won’t say he’s vain. But there’s definitely a hair thing going on there. And he just — if his hair would move, he would call for a cut and take the shot again. He said, “Let me know if my hair ever moves.”

Me: No, but I mean was this an actual plan on your part? Because not even the wind can knock your hair out of place.

Ehle: Did you enjoy the movie?

Me: No, serious! It was like a Steven Seagal motif or something.

Roache: I never noticed that. I’ve got scenes where I’m covered in water. And I’ve got scenes where my hair’s all over the place.

Me: Even…really? Because every single time, your hair is like completely pomaded.

Roache: Well, they did use pomade in 1939. But yeah.

Me: Well was there any particular Brylcreem thing?

Roache: Yeah, we used hair pomade that they used in 1937.

Me: What research did you do to get the exact nature of Brylcreem right?

Roache remained baffled. He glared at Bose, annoyed that Bose, a mere supporting actor, was the better wit.

The hair angle seemed right at the time. Knowing of the mothballs that Marlon Brando had placed into his mouth for Don Corleone, I was genuinely curious about the question of how slicking back one’s hair affected an actor’s performance. But I also wanted to have fun with this. And I can now see how an oversensitive “Serious Actor” might take the Steven Seagal comparison the wrong way. It is worth observing that Roache’s Gaia Community profile page has “to help define human relationship beyond ego” listed as his singular Goal.

I then asked a question to the group about how Sivan’s color schemes — green devoted to the colonialists, brown devoted to the tribes, and red foreshadowing a tragic event — might have affected performance. I wanted these three actors to understand that this was an inquiry. Roache then burst in with an answer.

Roache: This movie was more about a kind of creative, you know, rock and roll, jazz fusion situation. Because you had a creative genius like Santosh Sivan. I mean, there weren’t a lot of huge decisions being made in this kind of arty level like that. It was more like a creative process that was unfolding. And some of it was crazy and chaotic. And some of it was just like following what was there and making the most of it. And that’s what a genius like Santosh does. So…

Me: Yeah, but I…

Ehle: If there was anything intellectual about the film, it was streaming out of Santosh. I don’t think anybody ever sat down. It was a very unconstipated process.

In other words, any interview was a matter of parroting the press notes. Any remotely intellectual query was “constipated” and verboten.

Roache: Yeah, yeah. The script though was well thought through and multi-layered. In terms of taking a domestic story, extrapolating that out into something epic. So that’s why you had structure. That’s where you had structure. But within that, you had this guy who was like, “No no no, that shot isn’t about you. It’s about an insect.”

Me: Yeah. Well, landscape is very important. In your house, in your character’s house, there is this particular color scheme going on. So as a result, this has to affect your performance on some level. There’s the red carpet. The red that’s kind of a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen later on in the particular film. And so when you are dealing with colors that are this dominant on the set, and in your particular environment, this has to have some effect upon your performance.

Roache was having none of this. And so I brought up the way in which his eyebrows had moved up and down as the events unfolded in the film. Roache mentioned something about training at the “eyebrow school” and was then ushered away from the table.

The conversation continued with Bose and Ehle, and there were a few interesting thoughts exchanged about acting with gesture limitations. But the mood had permanently altered. I had committed the unpardonable crime of “going after” the leading man. When the actors left the table, they used a common status exercise to turn their backs to me and not offer me any kind of eye contact. Ironically enough, I had brought up the question of eye contact during the course of the interview.

My friend, serving as a technical assistant, and I left the room to ponder what had just happened. She had helped me out with a few other multiple person interviews. And she had observed another actor run away after I had asked a question about the relationship between backstory and performance. This interview, she told me, had outdone that.

We then returned to the white room for my turn to talk with Sivan. I had been told by Caitlin that I would get five minutes. Another woman — the aforementioned bitchy publicist, Betsy Rudnick, as it turned out — then told me that there was “no time in his schedule.” I told her that I only needed five minutes and that I had prepared specific questions, that one of the reasons I had come was to talk with Sivan. But talking with Sivan was impossible. A phoner was offered. My friend, who was utterly appalled by the way I was being treated, then said, “We don’t do phoners….ever.” I then tried to smooth things over by asking how long Sivan was in town for, suggesting that I could come back the next day to conduct the interview. Perhaps we could make more of this and have a serious conversation about the film. Rudnick retreated away.

We waited some more. I observed Rudnick laying into Caitlin, who stood shell-shocked by the window. I approached Caitlin and asked what the problem was. She said, “I don’t understand. The guys from The Signal loved you. So did the Hennegan brothers.”

I then approached Rudnick and asked again what the deal was with Sivan.

Rudnick snapped at me, telling me that there would now be no interview with Sivan. The reasons and conditions were changing by the minute. She told me that I had made the actors uncomfortable. That my questions were “inappropriate.”

“What specific questions?” I asked.

She would not say. So we left without causing a stink.

Out in the streets, I was overcome with rage. Not for the unprofessional manner in which Rudnick had handled the Sivan interview, but because I then fully understood how the junket system was a sham. I was upset by the manner in which Rudnick had said something terrible to Caitlin, who is a good person, and how all this had presumably originated from a minor affront to Linus Roache’s ego. He seriously believed that he could coast by on his generic answers. He seriously expected to be the center of attention.

I felt compelled to smoke a rare cigarette.

I resolved then and there never to do a junket interview again. And, at least for the time being, I do not want to talk with actors. I will have nothing to do with Falco Ink or any agency that Betsy Rudnick is a part of. I am not interested in being a marketing tool. I’m interested in inquiry. I’m interested in maintaining the mix of goofy and intellectual questions that have long been at the center of The Bat Segundo Show.

Again, I leave the listeners to judge whether my questions were “inappropriate.” The audio can be listened to at the end of this post. Yes, there were some tangents involving Roache’s hair and the way that he used his eyebrows. I suppose that what makes my conversation different from, say, David Letterman interviewing Gwyneth Paltrow about her knee is that I opted not to stare in awe at Roache’s middle-aged mien or worship his almighty presence, whereas Letterman’s intent involved soothing Paltrow. And it says something that James Lipton, the man considered by many to be the finest actor-oriented interviewer, often has actors spill their guts out to him on personal matters — most notably, Jack Lemmon confessing his alcoholism. Curtis White has identified this tendency to prioritize the personal over the intellectual as symptomatic of the Middle Mind, represented by interviewers like Terry Gross. Citing an author whose real-life husband had dropped dead shortly before this author’s book was published, White observed that “[t]his was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this ‘show of shows.’ ‘What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?’ Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor’s degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.”

The “inappropriateness” was the idea that aspects of an actor’s performance were open to playful or even quasi-intellectual questioning, and that this served in sharp contrast to the lurid soothing and constant ego-stroking that today’s celebrity interviews require. It wasn’t as if I had asked Roache what his favorite sexual position was. Although I suppose that this question would have been more “appropriate” than trying to query Roache about his acting process.

But if a film journalist does not play the fool, if he asks an actor to use his brain, or if does not spend his time assuaging the actor in some way, it is a contumely to the control that the film industry wishes to maintain. Any trade secrets or insights for the public are reserved for the DVD commentaries, which generate more money for both the studios and the paid participants. And the Betsy Rudnicks of our world demand a climate in which journalists are supplicant sycophants, but the perception of inquiry is sustained because the interview is framed in a Q&A format predetermined by unreasonable conditions and unvoiced demands. The film journalism world is as phony and fabricated as the film world. And from these execrable conditions, self-serving hacks like Brad Balfour boast and profit.

These people believe that you are stupid. They believe that you will buy anything they tell you to. And as the film industry has extended its control over the types of questions and the types of journalists that actors and directors will talk with, the only spirit of resistance comes from celebrity gossip reporters determined to dig up any bit of nastiness. And the public, hoping for one small shred of the truth, laps this up. But despite this, the pursuit for intellectual truth is abandoned.

Because of this, I have decided to abandon my brief flirtation with film journalism. I’m sticking with books, comics, and a few other things. When I wrote about movies in the late ’90’s, there was still the possibility of conducting interviews with inquiry in mind. But that time has now passed. Conversation has been replaced by kissing an actor’s ass. Current film coverage, given what I have described above, is not in any true sense journalistic. It also isn’t much fun. The true sign that it’s over is that opportunist typists like Brad Balfour seriously believe that they are journalists, and they do not recognize the sad solipsistic leeches staring back in the mirror.

* — Balfour does indeed use people, such as this poor guy who was “[e]ager enough to get sucked into becoming a transcriber for Mr. Balfour: transcribing many of his interviews for eventual publication on the website.”

Interview with Roache, Ehle, and Bose [ 17:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

Standard Operating Procedure

It seems particularly fitting to remark upon Errol Morris’s latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, as Armond White offers yet another hysterical fulmination about how online culture is apparently destroying exegesis, ranting in particular about “the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional can tenure.”

This colorful sentiment is, to say the least, a disingenuous generalization. For Morris’s documentary (and the accompanying book written by Philip Gourevitch) would seem to suggest that one cannot approach an important subject like Abu Ghraib without a sense of outrage. That no matter how rational one is in investigating the events behind this nightmarish aperçu into America’s dark underbelly, journalist, filmmaker, and audience member alike must shout to the high ethical heavens. But is it really an act of conformity — class-driven, no less — to be appalled by what is revealed in the photographs? Is it conformist to speculate upon why Sabrina Harman offered a thumbs-up signal or whether or not Lynndie England was coerced by Charles Graner into holding a dog leash?

An innate sense of inquiry cannot be called conformist if it involves an independent series of perceptions that involve grasping some aspect of the truth, subject to change upon additional thought and information. And yet the main problem with Morris’s fascinating new film is that, with the ancillary and rather fixed reenactments photographed by Robert Richardson, it is possible that Morris may be holding the viewer’s hand too much, urging her to care when the interviews alone offer enough unknowns and the horrific glimpses into a soldier’s dead eyes four years later are enough to make one uncomfortable.

In watching these soldiers, I couldn’t help but consider the scene in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in which barber Abraham Bomba works in his shop, reproducing the precise grooming moves he employed while cutting the hair of victims about to be gassed in Treblinka. It is an eerie echo from the past that cannot altogether be shaken off in the present. And in my painful determination to understand, however limited, why these soldiers had done what they did and how the Abu Ghraib experience had shaken them, I wanted to know more about how the idea of getting used to anything — even the rough interrogation and humiliation of prisoners — was carried back to the homeland. This may not be an entirely fair request of Morris. His film is, as he contends in the press notes, an investigation into the Abu Ghraib photographs. But if, as Susan Sontag observed, “the photographs are us,” is it entirely unreasonable to ask the investigator to venture further?

It isn’t mentioned in the film, but Javal Davis, who comes across as a smooth, free-wheeling raconteur, is revealed, in Gourevitch’s book, to be “in sales. The career path that I have now, you know — comfortable. I deal with people on the regular basis. I’m not handling anybody’s problems. I’m not dealing with anything violent. So I’m business to business, all personal, ‘How you doing? I’m Javal Davis. Nice to meet you.’ Everybody’s happy. I like that. Sales. I’m a salesman.” And because Morris has flown out Davis, along with all the other soldiers, to his Cambridge headquarters to conduct these interviews, we do not see these soldiers in their current habitat. For all we know, Davis could have viewed his trip to Cambridge as a business trip. Business to business. And he could have adjusted accordingly.

It’s possible that Richardson’s visuals serve as a device similar to Comte de Lautréamont’s unusual narrator. In Maldoror, Lautréamont offered a unique device in which the narrator often parodies feelings by willfully distorting or rethinking the sordid events that are presented. Likewise, by illustrating what his interviews are telling us through these visual reenactments, this may be Morris’s heavy-handed help to us that we must rethink our own thoughts and feelings concerning these photographs. Or perhaps it’s more visceral. As I learned in an interview I conducted with Morris this week, outrage was also involved in these reenactments.

The outrage is conveyed as a prisoner is described having his eyebrows shaved off, with Morris including a close-up of a razor deracinating a tuft of hair. Morris likewise dramatizes a dog that terrorizes another prisoner. But Morris has the dog menacing the prisoner in slow-motion, with a melodramatic sound mix depicting the dog’s bottom jaw snapping shut like a steel trap.

Given the intriguing ambiguities unearthed during the interviews, this seemed to me to spoon-feed the audience too much. And I wasn’t alone. In an essay for Artforum, Paul Arthur took umbrage with these visuals, observing:

Their style, however, belongs to a film genre that provides titillation through horror. To employ this rhetoric in a documentary about actual horror is obscene, yielding familiar aesthetic thrills as a substitute for specificity of meaning. We aren’t prompted to contemplate the Iraq occupation’s signature scandal as the product of a mercenary chain of executive decisions, cultural attitudes, venalities, and personal pathologies; we are, as it were, let off the hook. It’s only a movie.

If a generic sense of horror is what is required to get through to the average moviegoer, then I cannot quibble as strenuously as Arthur does (and perhaps White will). But if a complex issue requires complex consideration, then any reenactment that will help a viewer construct a “map of reality” must not dictate too much. It is reasonable to accept the shaved eyebrow, but the dog goes over the top.

Likewise, in the book, Gourevitch maintains a level-headed, mostly objective tone for almost 160 pages before writing:

There is a constant temptation, when rendering an account of history, to distort reality by making too much sense of it. This temptation is greatest when the history is fresh and deals with crises that are ongoing — crises that mold our understanding of our world and ourselves. Surely, if you have come this far in this sordid tale, you must crave some relief, some release, from the relentless, claustrophobic annihilation of the dungeon: a clear and cleansing note of sanity, an interlude of avenging justice or an eruption of decency, the entry of a hero. But surely you don’t want to be deceived. There is no such solace or sanctuary in this story.

Gourevitch then launches into a grand attack on what the Abu Ghraib atrocities say about America, pointing to the famous precedent of treating enemy prisoners well set by George Washington and fulminating against the Bush Administration. Not even a journalist as dutiful as Gourevitch can look at the photos and the complicit involvement of these bad apples without exploding.

Others will likely perceive this film to be mostly about the visuals atop the visuals, the analysis atop the analysis, the meta within the meta. But the real “standard operating procedure” explored in this film isn’t so much the pedestrian issue of how war caused the lines of basic human decency to become fuzzy, but the manner in which a great filmmaker has partially abandoned his subtleties to get Americans hopping mad. The faults lie not in the filmmakers and not, as White suggests, the critics. They’re doing their best to continue the dialogue, but their efforts have increasingly fallen upon deaf ears. For Abu Ghraib does not entertain. And neither does moral outrage.

(To listen to my podcast interview with Errol Morris, go here.)

by Edward Champion

Charlton Heston

The phone rang.

“Charlton Heston died.”

“I know.”

“Well, what do you think?”

I hadn’t realized that my feelings for Charlton Heston were complex. I didn’t even know that I had feelings about all this. Heston was one of those dependable melodramatic actors, blessed with a wonderful and often ridiculous voice that opened the floodgates for the pleasantly overbearing masculinity one now sees in Harrison Ford, William Shatner, and Dennis Quaid. Even before he turned full-fledged conservative, he had a strange libertarian-minded approach to angst which provided an undeniable heft to the denouements of Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. Of his film roles in the past few decades, only John Carpenter really knew what to do with him, casting him as a self-serving book publisher in his underrated film, In the Mouth of Madness. But his tedious turn as Jason Colby and his embarrassing roles in third-rate literary adaptations had made even Earthquake and Airport 1975 look like 1970s Hollywood New Wave classics.

There was also the matter of his involvement with the NRA, his ridiculous condemnation of “Cop Killer,” his stumping for numerous Republican presidents of questionable distinction — in short, his 180 degree turn from the days when he marched in support of civil rights and used his influence to assert that he would only appear in Touch of Evil if Orson Welles directed, thus giving Welles a comeback opportunity.

“Okay. Let’s say there’s a parallel universe in which some nutjob shot Charlton Heston around 1975 — let’s give him Airport 1975; I can’t imagine a world without the Airport movies — and John Lennon lived on,” I said.

Quizzical silence.

“No. Really. You asked. I mean, imagine if John Lennon had not been assassinated by Mark David Chapman in 1980. He might very well have gone the Sting or Phil Collins route. All the iconoclasm we now know Lennon for would have been overshadowed by music even sappier than Paul McCartney. All the protesting that he and Yoko did might have been forgotten. He might have embarrassed himself by campaigning for Michael Dukakis. Or recording some schlocky duet with Michael Jackson. Or going conservative.”

“Okay.”

“And to get all Man in the High Castle on you, Charlton Heston would be known even more as one of the great American leading men. An actor just on the verge of a comeback, but reduced to appearing in disaster movies. Possibly a subversive. Cultural historians would have recast him as a figure who would have spoken out against the guns that this hypothetical assassin used to kill him. All the bad things that he did during the last three decades would have been wiped from the cultural fabric. There would be TV movies and A&E biographies every few years. The Ten Commandments would be played four times a year on television instead of every Easter.”

“No.”

“Yes! And with John Lennon still living in this parallel universe, he’d be the one we’d all be going after. He’d be the one Michael Moore would confront at the end of Bowling for Columbine. He’d be the one Homer Simpson would be spoofing.”

“So you’re saying that you would go back in time and kill Charlton Heston in 1975.”

“Not at all. I’m saying that when we reconsider a person’s life, they’re known more for the mistakes they make in their final years than their early year accomplishments. I really don’t like Heston after 1975. But I don’t mind the stuff that came before. And I’d say that, by comparison, Lennon got off pretty easy from a cultural posterity standpoint. Heston had three additional decades to embarrass himself.”

“You’re a sick man.”

“Well, do you have a better way to take this all in? I mean, you have to give him Planet of the Apes and Touch of Evil. You have to give him watching Woodstock in The Omega Man.”

Silence.

“Just wait until Schwarzenegger dies. I suspect I’ll have an even crazier theory.”

by Edward Champion

Cinematic Authenticity

godfrey.jpgTwo movies opening today have me concerned about the way that contemporary cinema is avoiding authenticity in an age of wartime. If we accept the idea that a movie is, in some sense, an entertainment, then should not the entertainment at least be authentic in some sense? I think of films like My Man Godfrey, The Lady Eve, and It Happened One Night, all outstanding examples of the screwball comedy. I don’t think it’s an accident that the screwball comedy emerged from the residue of the Great Depression and continued on roughly until America became involved in the war. My Man Godfrey offers a wonderful performance by William Powell as the besotted man taken up by Carole Lombard in a scavenger hunt. What Lombard doesn’t realize is that Powell, the ostensible freeloader, is quite loaded. And Lombard’s assumptions about socioeconomic status mirror the class mobility that was very much a reality in 1936. The Lady Eve, written and directed by the great Preston Sturges, likewise plays with issues of class and very much concerns itself with a milquetoast (Henry Fonda), who must find a way to embrace the realities of fortune hunter Barbara Stanwyck. I’ve always thought that Fonda, to some degree, reflected how America was concerning itself with events unfolding in Europe. After all, much of the action takes place on an ocean liner. And Fonda’s diffident spirit seemed to reflect America’s unwillingness to get involved with events across the pond. Then there’s 1934’s It Happened One Night, in which how one survives becomes a running comic theme, as in this moment, in which Colbert is shocked to learn that she’s identified as Gable’s husband, little realizing that this is how Gable’s managed to secure a room before all the bus passengers nab them.

What’s great about these films is the way that lively quirks and idiosyncrasies emerge from human moments that are recognizable not only within the framework of the prewar years, but the manner in which they become timeless precisely because they start from human moments.

I had hoped for something similar with Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It had the promise of the wonderful Amy Adams, who is proving to be nearly as endearingly effervescent as the great Ms. Lombard herself. Set in the days before Britain became involved in the war, Miss Pettigrew strives to be something of a farce, depicting how its titular character (played by Frances McDormand), who has just been sacked as a housekeeper and cannot find work, emerges quite by accident as a “social secretary” to Adams, who may also be something of an impostor.

pettigrew1.jpgBut I felt as if this film’s energy didn’t so much originate from its human moments, as it did its rampant concern for chasing nostalgia. This is evident through the film’s showy performances that are less designed with characterization and more designed with approximating screwball comedy conventions. (It doesn’t help that the great character actress Shirley Henderson, reduced here to robotic snaps of the head and her lovely voice reduced to two shrill notes, is more or less wasted as an embittered socialite.) The film relies too much on obvious gags, such as the “boy” upstairs who must be woken up, who is not some unruly tot, but actually one of Adams’s lovers. (Witness too how this setup is based around a contrived and entirely predictable irony, in which the characters are not allowed a whit of spontaneity.) It relies very much on coincidental run-ins. There are forced double entendres, such as Ms. Adams’s “There’s something so sensual about fur next to the skin,” which she manages to make work. But more attention has been devoted to sweeping pans of parties and the crazed curve of Adams’s hat. In short, the technical outweighs the human. Which likewise involves keeping Adams’s nudity constantly covered by towels and other obstructions for the obligatory PG-13 rating. (For those who detect the whiff of prurience with this allegation, I am, like any red-blooded man smitten by a striking actress, understandably curious. But I register this charge because I am disheartened by films that wish to suggest that a woman would, in the company of another woman, constantly hold up her towel in a convenient and preordained way. We are no longer in the days when husbands and wives were depicted in double beds. This is particularly ridiculous because Adams’ character wrestles three lovers throughout the film and is by no means modest in her temperament.)

The only moment in Miss Pettigrew that stirred me, and that had me pondering authenticity in entertainment, is when McDormand commiserates with a middle-aged underwear designer (played in a gruff debonair manner by Ciarán Hinds) she’s spent much of the movie resisting her romantic feelings for. They observe a number of planes heading south while many young pups shout their tally hos on the balcony. “They don’t remember the last one,” whispers McDormand. “No, they don’t.” It was a simple and by no means subtle moment. But I was intrigued by the hushed whispers, the implication of hastily capitulated memory, and it was the only moment in this movie in which I felt the human tensions of this prewar environment. I put forth that such attention to human atmosphere could have made Miss Pettigrew something special, and that such attention could have as easily have been played for laughs and worked.

I thought the running gag of McDormand desperately trying to grab a nibble, only to have a dish overturn onto the floor or an apple swept up by a broom, largely unconvincing, in part because McDormand didn’t once convince me that she was hungry. (Melodramatic lines like “I have not eaten for a very, very long time” certainly don’t help matters.) This is not to suggest that Miss Pettigrew is entirely one of those movies that you have playing in the background as you fold laundry. But it simply does not have the effrontery and good sense to concern itself fully with authenticity. It is a film made to run five years from now on some third-rate cable channel. It opts to be mere filler, and we are all the lesser for it.

statham.jpgThe Bank Job is slightly better, in part because Jason Statham is a charismatic if two-note lead and Roger Donaldson is a good enough craftsman to get some kind of performance out of the rather uninteresting Saffron Burrows, even when she beams, “I’m in a spot of bother,” to remind us heavy-handedly that we are, after all, in London. Statham, at the mercy of loan sharks, gets a lead on a bank and sets out to rob this bank in an effort to secure himself and his family for life. What makes this film work, before it drifts disappointingly into standard heist movie territory, is the intriguing way that Statham and his crew make mistakes. They haven’t committed a robbery before and they jackhammer underneath a restaurant to get to the loot, not thinking that their quite audible work is going to get them some attention. There’s a lookout man outside, but they’re all communicating through walkie-talkies on an open frequency. (This audio is intercepted by a ham radio enthusiast.) These thieves don’t know what they’re doing and, when they remain naive and clueless, this film is often gripping. And this works because these moments are human, dripping with some relative authenticity.

But when Statham wises up that he’s being used and transmutes from a car salesman to a badass overnight, the film lost me. Sure, we want these thieves to get away with the crime. And as a balding man, it was good to see a follicly challenged character manipulate politicians and pornographers and talk his way out of situations with bravado. But that’s too easy a dramatic line to pursue. We expect these things out of heist movies. We don’t expect everyday types to become criminals and we don’t expect criminals to screw up.

Authenticity, it seems, has become too much to ask of cinematic entertainment. Because it no longer fits into the formula that gets people into movie theaters. But these two films would have been infinitely more interesting had they lived up to the human promise of films that came before. But perhaps that’s too screwball a notion.

by Edward Champion

Interview with Bill Plympton

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a number of new podcasts, which I anticipate releasing today. But in the meantime, here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming interview with animator Bill Plympton.

plympton.jpgIf you don’t know who Bill Plympton is, you’re missing out on one of the most unique independent animators now working in America. Plympton emerged into national consciousness when many of his shorts begin appearing on MTV’s Liquid TV during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This came concomitantly with success on the film festival circuit — in particular, with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. But, ironically, his work has found greater appreciation outside of the States. In his own country, he’s considered more of a cult item. Which is too bad. Because if this were a just universe, Plympton would be considered a national treasure.

I wasn’t surprised at all to see Plympton name-check Winsor McCay during our conversation. There is a fascinating surreal component to all of his films. Take 1994’s “Nose Hair,” in which a pesky and ever-growing follicle kick-starts a wondrous free-associative trip involving a man walking up and down a changing landscape. Or the unusual first-person approach of 1998’s “The Exciting Life of a Tree,” which is told entirely from a tree’s perspective. Couples copulate on a blanket, believing that there is privacy. Other trees are sawed down. But somehow the tree is abandoned.

Plympton puts together his films with a small staff in his New York studio. And, believe it or not, he draws all of the frames himself — at least a hundred drawings a day, he tells me — with his staff coloring and compositing these drawings.

Plympton was kind enough to find a few minutes to talk with me while putting the finishing touches on his most recent animated feature, Idiots and Angels.

(And, incidentally, Plympton tells me that the storyline for the new film involves a disgruntled angel who is a bit peeved that the angel wings force him to be good. As soon as I learn of a release date and/or a distributor, I will follow up.)

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about something that’s long been curious to me. The suit guys, who have these square shoulders, and who likewise seem to have these very large frames and these very big asses and these very short legs. I’m wondering how this particular look came about.

Plympton: Well, that’s a very good question. Because I see a lot of young animators doing cartoons. And one of the cartoons on the Cartoon Network uses the format that “zany looking people are funny.” Like clowns or animals with big bulbous eyes and huge noses and tongues that stick out and crazy hair. And it’s my feeling that that’s really not funny. For me, humor comes across when you take something that’s normal, that’s placid, that’s bland, that’s a cliche, and do something weird to it. If the main character is weird already when something weird happens, it’s not a surprise. It’s not a shock. Therefore, it’s not funny. So I like to choose characters that are fairly bland. Like vacuum cleaner salesmen. Very normal. And someone you can identify with.

yourface.jpgI guess that character, who was originated in “Your Face,” was inspired a little bit by Bud Abbott on Abbott & Costello. The pencil-thin moustache guy with the suit, the slicked back hair. Kind of a sleazy salesman type guy. And that film was such a big success, such a big hit, that I continue that character on through “The Wise Man” and through “Push Comes to Shove,” and a bunch of my feature films — The Tune and Mutant Aliens and I Married a Strange Person. So those films use that character a lot. And I’ve found that he’s a very good character for laughs.

Correspondent: In “Push Comes to Shove,” that character resembles Alfred Hitchcock to some degree.

Plympton: Well, not at all, I don’t think. Because Alfred Hitchcock is really a caricature. And this guy — even though he is a little stockier — there were two guys in “Push Comes to Shove.”

Correspondent: Yeah.

plympton2.jpgPlympton: A thin guy and a stockier guy. I guess that was inspired by the old Laurel & Hardy gag where they would take an egg and squash it on his head and put the hat back on. It was very dry humor. Very deadpan humor. And then that would escalate. And it escalated into, I don’t know, getting hit by a board or something like that. Well, I wanted to take that escalation and exaggerate it even more. So it becomes so violent and so surreally violent, that it’s just preposterous. And that was my initial inspiration for the film. So Alfred Hitchcock wouldn’t be someone I would say. It was more like Laurel and Hardy. Although even then, Oliver Hardy is more of a caricature than I would want to use. I brought him down as to more of a normal person than Oliver Hardy.

Correspondent: It also reminds me very much of the Fish-Slapping Dance. That kind of one-upmanship between the two characters.

Plympton: Yeah. That’s exactly what the inspiration was.

Correspondent: I wanted to also ask you about some of the perspectives you have. You had a few shorts — and also in your features — where there’s this first-person perspective. I think of the tree, for example.

Plympton: Yeah, “The Exciting Life of a Tree.” “One of Those Days.”

Correspondent: I’m wondering how this came about. Did you need to get away from the typical third-person look of these particular shorts?

Plympton: Well, the magic of animation is that the camera can go anywhere you want. And it’s harder to do that with live action. Although it’s easier now with digital technology. Digital effects. But with animation, you can put the camera anywhere. And that’s part of the fun of it. You’re seeing something that is maybe cliched or boring from a different angle. It makes it exciting. It makes it interesting. And so I wanted to see an event from one person’s POV and see the worst day ever — what it would be — if you lived that life. If you were actually in that person’s place. So it’s very autobiographical in that sense.

But I like to do that a lot. I did another film called “Draw,” where it’s a cliche of two cowboys in a mainstream Texas town. And they draw their guns. Only this is a POV of a bullet. And so again, it’s a kind of cliched, boring situation. But when you see it from the eye of a bullet that is traveling through space, going through someone’s heart, it gives it a whole new perspective. And I love that kind of thing that you can do with animation: change the perspective, change the viewpoint in each shot. And that’s the reason why I love animation.

Correspondent: Is this often why you are drawn to weapons? Not just bullets and cannons and the like. But also chainsaws, I have to ask you about. And cutting people in half. This seems to be a common theme throughout the work.

Plympton: Well, you know, movies have always been violent. Whether it’s Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or Abbott & Costello or the Marx Brothers, violence has always — the Road Runner is a perfect example. Violence has always been part of humor. And so has sex. I don’t know why a lot of Americans are offended by sex in cartoons. It never made sense to me when I grew up with Mae West or Jean Harlow or Marilyn Monroe — there was always sex in adult films. And I just thought cartoons should also have sex. And so the violence is as American as apple pie. And so I like to take the violence and exaggerate it to such an absurd degree that it’s not really scary anymore, it’s funny.

I saw those Saw films and I was really squeamish about it. And it really wasn’t my cup of tea. But I think if they were to have taken that humor and that violence, and exaggerated it to an absurd level, I think it would have been much more interesting and a lot more entertaining.

(The full conversation will appear in a future podcast installment of The Bat Segundo Show.)

by Edward Champion

The Devil and Miss Cody

Diablo Cody’s win over Tamara Jenkins for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar is perhaps the most egregious Oscar victory since Oliver! beat out 2001 for Best Picture in 1968. If this were a just universe, the appropriate executives would have taken Cody out behind the shed shortly after reading Juno and shot her down like an old dog. Instead, the Academy awarded Cody the Oscar for relying upon cultural references over emotional conviction, for using characters who are ironically detached rather than prepared to face the visceral realities of responsibility, and for encouraging Jason Reitman to employ the most insipid use of angst-ridden indie rock in cinema I’ve seen in some time.

diablocody.jpgLet us be clear on this. I saw all five Best Picture nominees. And while I liked the other four, it is an outrage that so many thinking people have been duped by Juno. Ellen Page’s snarky one-note performance, originating from the same creative morass that spawned such execrable “wonders” as Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and Wes Anderson’s films after The Royal Tenenbaums, is considered multilayered and superlative. Nobody has had the balls to call out Reitman for relying so heavily upon great character actors like Rainn Wilson and Allison Janney to disguise his creative deficiencies. Juno was nothing more than an extended episode of Arrested Development — a dreadful film in which such filmmaking tactics as six consecutive cuts of a van driving in front of a suburban house are considered “clever” and in which Michael Cera has been encouraged to abdicate his talent in favor of being typecast as the nice guy (and he will most certainly be typecast, if he takes another one of these damnable roles).

Juno is a film that would rather have its titular protagonist cry out “Thundercats, ho!” while she is going into labor than express anything tantamount to fright or second thoughts. It is a film content to have Jason Bateman name-check Herschell Gordon Lewis and Sonic Youth instead of having him emote over the difficulties of getting older. It is a film content with such cheapshots as Jennifer Garner presented as a yuppie mom caricature and another mom (played by Darla Vandenbossche) mocked for being older and overweight. (In fact, Vandenbossche’s sole purpose for being in this film is to be ridiculed by Cody. What does that say about emerging talent?) This is a film designed for people who do not feel or embrace the world in any genuine way. With the exception of Juno’s parents (played by Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons), I felt nothing for any of the characters in this film. They were uninteresting, solipsistic, and as hackneyed as the flattest of paper dolls. I was appalled at the film’s reliance upon artifice over conviction. Handing over the Oscar to that inarticulate waif Sofia Coppola was one thing. But giving it to Cody for Juno last night was a true injustice.

The best original screenplay of 2007 — Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, which bristled with emotion and intelligence — was entirely ignored by both the Academy and the purported streetcred of the Independent Spirit Award for a film phonier than a second-hand Hallmark card. If awards ceremonies are anything to go by, Hollywood is in trouble. Homegrown talent can’t measure up. Not only is Hollywood awarding its acting laurels to the Europeans, but it now feel content to dismiss any screenwriter who dares to pursue the human heart in conflict with itself. It’s the hip adding machines like Cody who now matter. But despite Cody’s penchant for taking off her clothes, the naked truth of true emotion eludes her.

by Edward Champion

Diary of the Dead

Diary of the Dead is going to split critics. The film snobs who can’t handle a populist movie with a brain will groan (as many did quite audibly at the screening I attended). The hard-core Romero fans looking for Savini-style gore will be disheartened by the film’s focus on the internal (although there is one glorious zombie moment involving a defibrillator).

diary3.jpgThis is a pity, because Diary of the Dead is a gutsy and energetic film that believes in its audience more than Land of the Dead ever did. Romero made something of a mistake going to the big studios. He’s always been a more instinctive and playful filmmaker when working the indie turf. Land‘s blunt gas nozzle through the windshield has been replaced by more intriguing symbolism, such as a deaf Amish farmer now giddily grenading the dead and an overturned American flag hanging from a dormitory wall.

One of the film’s opening shots, taken from a television camera just as the dead are coming alive, is masterful satire. The camera zooms in on a driver chewing on a sandwich and crew voices mutter snarky comments over this private moment. A crew member asks an ambulance to move out of frame because it’s blocking the shot. Never mind that the camera is set up in front of a hospital.

diary2.jpgTold from the perspective of college filmmakers who see the (again unexplained) rising of the dead as an opportunity to record “a part of history,” Diary is a claustrophobic assault on media culture. “I just want to record it,” chants Jason Creed like a creed. He’s the director of the film-within-the-film, The Death of Death. And while his fellow students are initially uncomfortable, they become distressingly accustomed to having cameras in their faces. Some may decry the “amateur” acting, but when Romero has his actors mug for the camera, it’s symptomatic of a disease more pervasive than the zombies. At one point, just before entering an abandoned house, Creed tells his cadre to stop so that he can get a good wide angle shot. The voice of reason (so dissolute that he clings to a first edition of Dickens and seems, like Abigail’s Party‘s Laurence, more taken with the cover) is an alcoholic professor named Maxwell, named perhaps after the mathematician who proved that light was an electromagnetic wave and who thus made cinema and DV possible. Maxwell’s weapon of choice is not a gun, but a bow and arrow, which suggests that Romero’s affinity for chivalry — seen most prominently in his underrated film Knightriders — still holds.

Sharing a confined miasma similar to Day of the Dead, Diary champions cramped interiors over dystopic vistas. The only way of relating to fellow humans is through text messages and YouTube videos. The only real safety is a sealed panic room in a gated manor, a more socially isolating milieu than Dawn of the Dead‘s shopping mall. Its characters access the Internet not to check in on loved ones, but to upload footage. And why the need to promulgate information? As one of the filmmakers explains, “News is always horseshit. That’s how they sell soap.”

One gets the sense that Romero has been building up his fury for quite some time. His fiery stance suggests that an act of rebellion has less to do with improving human conditions and everything to do with seizing an alt-media fief. His characters prefer fully loaded cameras over the assurance of escape. “I can’t leave without the camera,” says Creed, who willfully keeps himself plugged into the wall to charge his battery while pals battle zombies. But Romero hasn’t quite abandoned his hippie idealism. The filmmakers find a number of National Guardsman — “all the folks without suntans” — who have holed up in one town with a stockpile. There’s a righteous and palliative solution to gentrification when the head points out, “We got the power,” and is even munificent with supplies when one of the students stands up to him. But in the face of chaos, honor, like all civilized tenets, goes south. Another faction shows up later, but its commander is wild-eyed and predatory, but still honorable enough to leave weapons.

diary1.jpgAdam Swica’s cinematography favors crisp and steely digital blues. The visuals remain cold and rampant even when a camera is shoved in the face of a young woman trying to remain calm after driving over a number of zombies. “How do you feel?” asks Creed, unable to discern the tangible trauma.

At times, Romero overplays his hand. While I could accept the double entendre of “shooting” that comes near the film’s finale, montages of catastrophe with Full Metal Jacket-style narration were unnecessary, particularly when nestled with such hokey lines as “It’s interesting what we find out what we’re capable of becoming.” One character even escapes with the line “Don’t mess with Texas” and needless musical accompaniment, an overly cornball tone at odds with the film’s more serious questions.

Nevertheless, Romero’s reboot (along with the forthcoming movie, The Signal) suggests that independent horror may very well be the only place where filmmakers are likely to kick against the hypocrisies of media. If Diary is not quite a masterpiece to rank up with Night or Dawn, it does signal a fantastic return to form.

by Edward Champion

The Video Game as Art

In 2005, film critic Roger Ebert ruffled a few feathers when he suggested that because video games require player choices, games are therefore an inferior medium:

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

bioshock.jpgI can certainly agree with Ebert that video games are, for the most part, showcases for the latest gaming engines, primarily designed so that the individual will drop hundreds of dollars for a next-generation console system or a needlessly expensive video card that will be outdated in a few years (only to be replaced by yet another). We are now in the nickelodeon days, although, as the Wii demonstrates, the game controllers are getting more interesting. But this multi-billion dollar industry is less concerned with the human experience than it should be. It has come close with the Civilization games and the Sims offerings, and may come even closer with Will Wright’s much delayed Spore, an ambitious god game that permits the player to develop a cell and then control the natural development of this cell into a species, and then further manage the species as it plunges into space exploration. I’ve lost many hours feeling an ignoble cathartic thrill when fragging a junior-high schooler who, like me, should probably be reading a book. But I can justify my shameful vicarious pleasure by knowing that this is a medium that has yet to produce a Battleship Potemkin or a Birth of a Nation.

To suggest, however, that the video game will never find the same gravitas as cinema is to fall prey to same prejudicial thinking with which intellectuals once castigated cinema in the early 20th century. Let’s not forget that it took the motion picture around thirty years of technological developments before it was considered more than a gaudy amusement. And we have only just passed the 30th anniversary of the Atari 2600.

This New York Times article from September 7, 1913 suggests that the then primitive motion picture was, like the contemporary video game, very much about delivering spectacle to a mass audience. George Kleine, one of the key people who established the film industry in the United states and who had just made a cinematic adaptation of Quo Vadis? with a cast of 3,000 people (then an unprecedented number), is quoted in an eerily comparable manner about the future of the medium”

“I have plans for the future which make everything I have done so far seem to be mere child’s play. The educational end has not begun. Motion pictures will not supplant books in the public schools, according to my opinion, but they will revolutionize our educational system. Instead of being bored, the child will enjoy learning by object lessons conveyed by the use of moving pictures.”

ffever.jpgReplace “motion pictures” with “video games” and you essentially have what’s reflected in this 2002 BBC News article, in which a study reveals that games are not a substitute for books, but a way to help children learn. And if, like me, you grew up playing Fraction Fever (the ROM is here, if you’re an emulator geek) or any of the other Spinnaker titles, perhaps there is some credence to these theories.

There is also this commentary from the 1913 article:

There are many pictures being thrown upon the screen every day which, although not really harmful, possess no merit. Some are positively ridiculous, and portray scenes both unnatural and unreal. It is not to be expected, however, that with the demand for films exceeding the supply every production should be perfect.

It seems to me that Ebert’s Grumpy Old Man routine was published in newspapers a century before. The medium is the only thing that’s different.

passage.jpg

Jason Rohrer’s surprisingly touching game, Passage, freely available for download and released a few months ago, quite easily destroys Ebert’s thesis that the video game is incapable of poetry. Rohrer achieves a unique poetry both in limiting the player’s perspective to a 100×16 window and through the deceptively simple manner that he has designed this game for the player. Play the game once and you will follow a strapping young man from left to right. He finds a woman along the way. A pixelated heart soon follows. As the man advances further along this horizontal tableau, he (and his sweetheart) begins to age. He goes bald. As he continues to age, his position on the axis shifts further to the right. Near the end of his life, he is hobbling. Then a tombstone crops up. The End.

Or is it?

The game isn’t limited to left-to-right movement. Play the game again, press the down arrow. and you will find yourself exploring a maze below the top, collecting many stars and stumbling for a way out. But with this simple design, Rohrer has done something very interesting. If you choose to fall in love with your sweetheart, the two of you can only explore certain areas. Because with your partner in tow, you collectively take up a wider space and can only fit into specific territory. If you choose to go through this life solo, then you’ll be able to collect many of the stars denied you and your sweetheart, but you may get lost in the maze and be unable to find your way back to where your sweetheart waits.

If Passage is not quite the video game’s answer to The Waste Land, Rohrer’s poetic game demonstrates that independent developers can in fact use the form in favor of human experience. Rohrer’s lo-fi approach is a welcome response to high-end graphical tentpole operations. I found myself thinking of all the choices I had made over the course of my life and wondered how I would have turned up if I had made slightly different decisions. Contra Ebert, I did indeed find the experience to make me more curious and empathetic about the human condition. (And this would appear to have been Mr. Rohrer’s objective.) This was something that no amount of fragging had inspired.

If all this sounds fishy, well, the game simply has to be played. Like any work of art, it is something better experienced than talked about. And it requires that superannuated naysayers keep open minds.

by Edward Champion

Weekend Sightings: “People in Order”

The question of whether life represents a parabolic arc is taken up by Lenka Clayton and James Price‘s short film “People in Order” — in which 100 people are edited together and proceed to beat on the same drum over the course of three minutes. It’s an inventive spin on the Michael Apted formula. The people here have been arranged by age, starting from the age of 1 and ending at 100. What’s particularly striking is the varying levels of enthusiasm, both in the people expressing their age and in their need to bang the drum. Some of the figures are happy at any age. Some are sad. Some seem to wonder what all the fuss is about.