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February 27, 2013

Hold Your Applause: How the Academy Rewards Cheap Tricks and Dodges the Issues

Congratulations, everyone: we now live in a world where North Korea detonates atom bombs underground for the fun of it — if that isn’t apocalyptic as all hell, I don’t know what is. It’s not like we haven’t seen this coming. If you’ve sat down with a bag of Cheetos and a video game controller anytime in these past few years, you were probably fighting ugly Ruskies or angry flavor-of-the-month Asian men off our God-given land, these United States of America. I was trying to get cozy with my girlfriend in a dark theatre when I saw the trailer for Red Dawn, in which some tried-and-true, scalp-shaved and muscled American is the only man who can stop a North Korean invasion. Major vibe kill.

Like you all have probably been doing, we were working our way through the soon-to-be Best Picture nominees and weren’t interested in seeing drivel like Red Dawn. Oscar nominees are on another level — they’re true art that dissects society like no sociologist could. If Battlefield 3 and A Good Day to Die Hard reflect our paranoia that the world at large has a — to put it lightly — uneasy relationship with the States, this year’s Best Pictures ought to tastefully address it. And boy do they: we’ve got Bin Laden, slavery, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, slavery again — no easy load.

Films have done this, consciously or otherwise, basically since their inception. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is notorious for its cold war mentality. The bombardment of this modern paranoia feels much the same as Body Snatcher’s ending, with Kevin McCarthy looking directly into the camera to cry out, “They’re already here! You’re next!” Of course, they weren’t here and we weren’t next, but that didn’t stop us from fearing our neighbors for the next 35 years. It’s much the same these days. We still don’t know what to do with those different from ourselves. We’re overreacting to a complex world, and the repercussions are increasingly scary.

Even if the Civil War and Iranian Hostage Crisis aren’t recent events, they’re obvious jumping off points for the discussion at hand (and more tasteful than CG shots of Korean bombers over your suburb). It isn’t Ben Affleck’s rugged chin cleft that the Oscars are celebrating — it’s how daring films like Argo and Lincoln are. These are difficult subjects to tackle, and maybe a good lesson can move us past paranoia and into action.

This year’s best example should be Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty for the way that she takes on torture. You’re no doubt aware of the controversy. Liberals are up in arms over the film’s pro-torture stance — and other liberals are praising the film’s anti-torture stance. What? When it comes to torture, calling Bigelow’s camera objective is an understatement — it’s downright insentient. The film is a rorschach on torture, and you’ll only see in it what you want to.

Argo and Lincoln don’t fair any better. Affleck’s film begins with the CIA overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government and then asks us to sympathize with the CIA. He seems to miss why that’s a problem. In Lincoln, Spielberg jukes the slavery issue with the promise of a story about the titular president, but it’s only an excuse not to delve into the dirty reality of the film’s true subject, the 13th Amendment. In both cases, the films ignore the oppressed other in favor of a focus on the Best Americans, powerful and proud white dudes brimming with patriotic duty.

It all speaks to more of the same. We’ve got a problem with those different from ourselves, and the repercussions are spooking us out. Modern Warfare 2 — a game in which Russia invades your local strip mall — may be more blind to it than the ‘higher art’ of Best Picture nominees, but it addressees it no less, which is to say, not at all in any cognizance.

It’s hard to put a finger on what we’re actually honoring when the foremost nominees are scared to make a statement. But maybe we shouldn’t blame them. I watch @dronestream sound off every few hours but never look up what any of it really means, and on Tuesdays, when the Children International canvassers show up at Union Square, I go a block out of my way to a different subway entrance so that I can avoid Rupert, the canvaser who’s taken up no less than an hour of my time to persuade me to donate a nominal sum to kids in need. He even followed me to SoHo once.

Maybe there’s no inherent responsibility for these directors to speak simply because they have a stage to speak from, but that makes for one heck of a lost opportunity. If, like Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,” our most praised films often fall short of art.

In some small way the Academy acknowledges this. In 2009, the Best Picture category was expanded from five nominees to a possible ten with the explicit purpose of recognizing films that would otherwise slip by. It’s easy enough to guess which films wouldn’t have made this year’s cut: the comedy, the foreign one, and the two films that do provide critique, Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Quentin Tarantino’s film focuses on empathetic brotherhood and human worth, remarking on the horror of slavery along the way, while Beasts comments like buckshot on a variety of topics surrounding America’s handling of post-Katrina Louisiana, all in the background of a father-daughter relationship.

What may be most interesting is our facade of improvement. Complex pieces like Django and Beasts don’t paint easy pictures for the way forward, but by falling in love with Zero Dark Thirty, we can act as if we’ve received confession when we’re really walking right back out the same man. But there’s no absolution in pat simplicity. The biggest and boldest films address massive issues, but they’re only actually acknowledging them. They gather acclaim because it’s much easier to recognize something than it is to actually act on it.

Maybe we can’t change the love of flash and glamour at the Oscars, but there’s no reason that we should be patting ourselves on the back for phoning in a nationwide emotional catharsis. One day, we’ll look back on Red Dawn as we do Body Snatchers, free from our overwrought paranoias and hopefully beyond the problem at hand. For now, there’s a distinction that needs to be made between knowing about a problem and saying something about it, which is something that we’re scared to do. Fair enough. It’s difficult, and maybe dabblings like these are the tangential roads that we need to take to finally get there. But let’s not love cheap tension for the philanthropic thrill it gives us — there are great films in the mix, you just won’t leave them with a saccharine smile.

11:05pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyfAGuZe

(Notes: 1)

October 15, 2012

Film: Argo

I suspect that I wasn’t the only person surprised to hear that Ben Affleck has not only moved into directing but is actually reported to be quite good. This is not to say anything negative of his prior performances, but rather that nothing about the films that he starred in suggested an interest in the type of smart dramas and thrillers that he’s been making. It’s all made me curious about his films, and though I’d missed his first two, Argo appeared to be worth checking out. The trailer presented it as sharp and fun, and the buzz going into its opening weekend painted it as a smart thriller.

Argo has none of the Ocean’s Eleven charisma and glam that it presents in the trailer, though of course, the film cannot be faulted for this. Argo instead is a slow and fairly serious thriller taking place perpendicular to the Iranian hostage crisis. Six would-be hostages have escaped into Canadian custody. Ben Affleck’s character, Tony Mendez, has to get them out. The plan is to fake the production of a film. This is almost inherently a spectacle, as anything Hollywood is of legend to be. They deal with directors, producers, actors, and are then tasked with bringing the excitement to Iran. Even in the midst of a hostage situation, there’s something seriously cool that it can’t shake. This excitement doesn’t come across however outside of its connotations. The film itself is slowly paced, but not so in a careful and deliberate way. Rather, the film simply takes a long time in some places and a swift time in others. The setup is rushed where other sequences, though never at the point of dragging on, take an oddly long time to be accomplished. This isn’t something that adds to the tension, it’s simply poor pacing.

The film doesn’t present much in the way of character development. Outside of Mendez, we have the six hostages and a few bureaucrats who alternatingly stand in his way and help him. The hostages are all kind of scared and pissed off but are also drinking a lot of wine and having a good time. Mendez is temporarily estranged from his wife and son for reasons unknown. The film also hints at a drinking problem for all of two shots, but even the film can’t seem to tell if it wants to go through with this or not. He drinks wine quickly but only one glass. He stashes away a bottle of liquor but only takes one drink. Mendez’s character never becomes anything. He’s clever and dedicated, but that’s about it. What ‘development’ is included in the film never feels forced, but it does come off as obliging some undesirable need. At one point Mendez sits down with another character and asks him if he has a son so that he can talk about his own. Like all of the character development, it comes out of nowhere and no one is really interested in having the conversation.

Fortunately, the story itself is interesting enough to hold the piece up. The hostage crisis isn’t only a backdrop, it’s the war zone through which they must travel unnoticed. This creates an inherent tension and desire for success. Of course we want them out, and of course we want this cool plan to succeed. The tension works on this basic level, but it never really develops further than this. Most of the added tension relies on minor inconveniences. Someone is thirty seconds away from their telephone. Someone refreshed a database five seconds too soon. These are all issues artificially created and quickly resolved. For one, we have to believe that they just happen to be occurring simultaneously. Even then, these situations are as tense as waiting for customer support on the phone when you have a bill due in an hour or waiting for an elevator to come when you really want to get upstairs. The tension isn’t based on any fault of the characters or the mission, it’s just an irritation that holds things up momentarily.

We’re also frequently given brief shots from the Iranian’s point of view. This too is a cheap effect. Yes, tension and suspense can be based on knowledge the viewer has that the characters do not, but if this never has any effect on the characters, it’s all pointless or the movie Serendipity with John Cusack. Why not show us that if the characters were to open a door on either side of a room they could walk into either a pile of money or an axe murderer? If they don’t choose either door, it doesn’t really matter what’s behind them. At one point in the film we see guards scrambling to chase Mendez and his crew, but our main characters never actually discover this threat. And in fact, the only thing that holds the guards back from catching them are — surprise — minor inconveniences like a locked door. Every hint of tension in this film comes from close timing and bad luck, and none of it creates any legitimate problems.

Argo, like every other film that takes place in Iran, displays the country as convoluted and messy. It does a fine job at this and at presenting the style of the 70s. It all looks good and comes across as accurate without getting in the way. Otherwise, the visual choices don’t present much thoughtfulness. The film opens with bureaucrats walking through halls and talking. It could be cut from any episode of The West Wing. Quick turns, short halls, snappy conversations. It’s oddly familiar and unnecessary, and it doesn’t match anything else in the film. The only non-standard visual movements aren’t bad, but they’re tired and unhelpful. One sequence puts Mendez wandering about his hotel room, fading from one spot to another to signifying passing time. It’s nothing that couldn’t be better delivered in one intimate moment.

This is all very critical of Argo, though it isn’t actually a bad film. It’s successful enough in its ventures, and it’s base tension is enough to bring an enjoyment out of it. The buzz around the film, however, is distinctly odd. There’s nothing particularly interesting here in terms of plot or tension, and there’s quite literally nothing here in terms of character development. The characters never come off as flat or false, and that’s certainly a success, but it simply can’t be elevated due to these shortcomings. Argo works to a point, but it’s easy to see that it could have been reworked into something smarter and stronger.

10:07pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyVL4Ibi

Filed under: argo film