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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)

February 27, 2013

"Without realizing it, we’ve allowed ourselves to exist in an Impressionistic world of filmmaking. It’s inaccurate, but the emotional quality of the visual makes us believe that it’s real. Accepting what we see as an attempt at truth is the first and absolutely more basic step of watching a film (or for that matter, watching a play, reading a novel, or viewing a painting). We don’t need it to perfectly immerse us, we only need to believe that it accurately represents what we know."

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48 FPS: how we accidentally invented Impressionist filmmaking | The Verge Forums

A fascinating read from The Verge’s Jacob Kastrenakes.

(via thisistheverge)

A Verge forum post that I wrote back in December. The proposed change in medium that Peter Jackson asserts in The Hobbit is far more interesting than the film itself, and it could completely change the film’s look and feel from what we’ve known these past 100 years.

(via thisistheverge)

10:32pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyfA6q-j

(Notes: 29)

Filed under: the hobbit peter jackson film 48fps frame rate

October 31, 2012

Film: House of Tolerance (2011)

There are striking similarities between House of Tolerance and Sleeping Beauty, both films that debuted at last year’s Cannes. It’s something of an oddity. There aren’t quite clear, modern human interests that may be informing these films’ creations. They take place one hundred years apart: Sleeping Beauty in the present, House of Tolerance in 1900. The similarities, however, are striking. Both follow classy escorts who dress in Victorian wear (or otherwise classy garments) and serve men in fancy mansions. House of Tolerance, naturally, does this organically, where in Sleeping Beauty it is a niche job. More importantly though, both films follow women brought into this position by choice. They spend their time wondering whether the life is right for them. For the most part, the women in House of Tolerance like it.

The titular house is a sort of bizarre social experiment. The women rely on the house. They are forbidden to leave unattended, and so they remain cooped up. This creates a wonderful dynamic. They live as though in a dorm, and they treat each other like siblings. Everyone helps each other out. The job bores them, but they are fed well and drink champagne every night. Broadly, the film paints the brothel as a mostly fine place to live. In another sense, they’re enslaved. Each woman is slowly indebted to the house’s owner, an otherwise agreeable woman. In spite of this, they’re treated well, and they tend toward enjoying their life in the house.

In slow movements we’re shown their displeasure. There is little way to escape their debt. They never leave when they intend to. Some girls come down with disease, others are bruised or sore after their time with clients. Most don’t seem to want to leave though. They don’t know what they’d do outside of the house. Some have even come from other professions simply because they thought that they would enjoy this more. A strong stance is never taken. Yes, it’s sometimes cruel and sick, but the environment is better than a poor woman could expect outside of the house. There’s a back and forth to everything here. The light is primarily a positive one, but what’s tugging at it, however gently, is truly terrible. This creates a great dichotomy in which these women exist.

The film’s final shot attempts to put this all in context. It jumps across one hundred years to the present, showing modern women walking the streets of France looking for clients. It’s an odd juxtaposition, and we’re left wondering what to take of it. In some ways, the juxtaposition seems insensitive. Is the director saying that what we have seen is a lost art? Is the film saying these modern women are being mistreated? Like most of the film, it’s most likely deliberately open ended. The film does not feel slow, but it distinctly has no trajectory. We watch the women work, we watch the house decline. Men come and go, women come and go. It all works to form a collage of insight from which to build our judgement.

Working off of this is the way in which the film is structured. It is largely told chronologically, but on occasion time will loop. We’ll see events and then, unaware that we are not proceeding in time, witness more until a moment that we recognize recurs. It’s delightfully disorienting, and it works to let us see multiple women’s experiences of a single night. Other moments are cut across the length of the film. We never know if we will see something, and we never know exactly when any one thing is happening. It’s all happening, slowly, across the year 1900, and that is all. Sometimes the film will cut into quarters, showing four simultaneous events, often dreary, laborious. It’s stunning visually. The outfits and sets make the period appear to have been gorgeous and romantic. This may well not be the case, but it’s the lens through which we’re made to look. There’s also a sharp score that drops in occasionally and blares gritty soul music at us. This anachronism may not be so daring in a post Marie Antoinette world, but it works to great effect in setting the mood of the house.

House of Tolerance comes away having told us about many aspects about these women but having made no definitive statement about any one thing. It’s a beautiful world and a surprisingly nice one, but there is no strict story about one or many women nor about what their occupation means. They are people, we learn that, though it’s hard to imagine having gone in without this knowledge. The film wants to conclude with commentary, and though we’ll certainly consider this, we aren’t given enough direction to take away a strong meaning here. Instead, what House of Tolerance is is a fine film about these women and this house. It may not have any strong purpose, but it need not pretend to. Even if it doesn’t quite go anywhere, there’s plenty to take in.

10:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWKKVeW

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: house of tolerance film

October 29, 2012

Film: Cloud Atlas

I gave up reading Cloud Atlas after beginning the second section. The novel is written in first person with thick dialect appropriate to the time of the character writing. This makes comprehension difficult. The reader must also slog through this to come to understand the time and world and place of the character, all while the character remains frustratingly obtuse. It’s rather unforgiving, and when the second section began only to drop the first thread entirely and leave the reader in a completely unconnected world, it was too much to take.

The film then has quite a bit to deal with. In the opening sequence we are whisked through half a dozen places and times and introduced to too many characters to remember. Over it all though, we hear one character asking us to bare with him, that if we just wait, we’ll see how this all adds up. Naturally, he’s speaking of his own writing, not the film that we’re watching, but we know how to apply this, and this wonderful meta plea from the directors goes quite a ways. We instantly feel that we’re in hands aware of how daunting this film may be to grapple with.

There are six movies here: a pirate journey, a period love story, a political thriller, a wacky comedy, a science fiction dystopia, and a post-apocalyptic adventure. The film is near to three hours long, and it needs every second of it. We cut between all six threads at varying speeds, sometimes quickly to orient us or draw comparisons between events, elsewhere we linger, spending significant time to establish the world and plot. It’s remarkable how the film retains our interest. Even when we’re away from threads for a time, we never lose our place. The film never spends too much time in one thread or forgets another thread for too long. The bouncing across time is never problematic. Even if there is no conclusiveness from where we were, it always feels correct. The film justifies every cut through juxtaposed imagery or ideas. It cuts from one character’s shuffling feet across one thousand years to another’s. It cuts from a character musing on an opening door to a physical door opening. Even if these connections seem simplistic, they go a long way in elaborating upon the connecting themes of each story.

It is, certainly, a film one must be patient with, though one never feels this need for patience. For all its ambition and niche appeal, the film comes off with mainstream sensibilities. This likely works to its strengths. This isn’t to say it is cheesy or broad, but rather, everything is clearly shown. There are subtleties, but largely these lie in the connections between the threads rather than careful moments within any one. This makes each thread deeply engaging. They’re all big and exciting, and they simultaneously speak to something more important. The film does, however, rely on our intense interest in each of these threads to keep things moving. For a good portion of the film, though we have a solid situation within each of these worlds, we can’t quite see its broader purpose or plot. It never becomes an issue, but later in the film when one still can’t see this, it can begin to nag.

This is resolved through an eventual realization: there is no grand meeting of these threads or grand purpose within these threads. These are each simple enough stories. They need to go from one place to the next. Someone comes, someone leaves, someone discovers something. Each is as good as a film devoted solely to that. There is perhaps an inherent hint of some greater crossing that films like Cloud Atlas or Magnolia cannot escape and cannot fulfill. Magnolia does not try to and neither does Cloud Atlas. When we realize this, the film’s projection becomes clear. It may not resolve in some Earth-shattering revelation, but rather, it intends to resolve in a myriad of personal connections and parallels.

Helping us draw these parallels is the continual reuse of actors. Sometimes we can recognize them, other times we can only question the similarity. It works to great effect. Big actors like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry are an intentional choice. We can always pick them out in each world. It isn’t distracting, rather, it’s enlightening. The directors make incredible visual choices. The depiction of Neo Seoul tells an entire story. We see Old Seoul, we see why this bizarre world of shanties has been constructed over water and around the remnants of buildings. It’s an entire culture and history explained through visuals. Otherwise, the film’s visuals succeed on minor flourishes. Smooth shots of a car from above, a shadow falling in the background.

It’s interesting to compare the science fiction here to that of The Matrix, another film made by The Wachowskis, two-thirds of Cloud Atlas’s directorial team (the final member being Tom Tykwer, known best for Run Lola Run). We see shots of machines descending on humans in a way reminiscent of Neo’s first awakening. There are conversations where “the one” bashfully and humbly declines their destiny. We see endless fields of machines manhandling humans. We even get the kind of swift and skillful fight sequences one would expect from The Wachowskis, a great surprise after Speed Racer and those other two Matrix films.

The film’s conclusion may not be fulfilling in a specific way, because simply, it cannot manage this. There is no one answer to these six stories. Each is individually smart, however, and their collective ideas form something ambitious and hopefully meaningful. The film is almost impossibly big, and it perhaps has no one specific message to deliver. This may hurt its impact. It cannot be sharp and precise. Instead, it leaves you with a broad fabric of ideas and emotions, though one that is truly taught. You won’t be walking out in tears, but as the film settles in, there’s a whole spectrum of emotions and ideas to consider. Cloud Atlas is a stunning piece of cinema.

10:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyWCAXAe

(Notes: 2)

Filed under: cloud atlas the wachowskis tom tykwer film

October 17, 2012

Film: 2 Days in Paris (2007)

By all means, 2 Days in Paris is a film that appeals to me. A condensed frame of time, two lovers, relationships, Paris, Julie Delpy. It’s been streaming on Netflix pretty much forever, but what had always held me back was the awful, awful cover art that made it appear to have the sensibilities of a cheesy and lame romantic comedy. Finally, after hearing from others what I had always hoped to hear, that the film was, in fact, not anything like that, it quickly rose on my to-watch list. Julie Delpy. Paris. How could this not be good?

That’s basically how this film operates. Much like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset in which Delpy is effectively half of the cast, 2 Days in Paris is filled with playful, casual banter primarily between two people. The dialogue is often topical and unimportant. The film opens on Delpy (who writes, directs, and quite literally takes almost every credit for this film) and Adam Goldberg, who play Marion and her boyfriend Jack, as they insult American tourists who love Bush and The Da Vinci Code. Naturally, if you’re immediately offended, this film probably isn’t for you. It’s by no means meant to make a political statement, nor does it stay so potentially off-putting, but this style of playful, natural, and common conversation exemplifies this film’s sensibilities.

This means that there isn’t a particularly clear plot structure, nor does there need to be. There is no exposition, no particular building and climax as they attempt to achieve something. It’s simply one couple in love and arguing and discovering one another as forced by Marion’s family and past in Paris. The arc that is present comes within this couple’s relationship. They slowly grow apart and grow clearer to one another. We see this happening not through particular events, but through the topics of conversation, through how interested they are in each other’s otherwise banal interests, how quickly they snap, how they work their way out of spending time together.

The development is good and smart enough, though it isn’t particularly stunning. Fortunately, the film is not the type that must have a happy ending. It’s a truthful exploration, and if things don’t work out for our characters, then that’s simply the way it happened. These people aren’t perfect together, that’s clear pretty quickly, and the film doesn’t try to cheat us by making it true. It owns up to their faults. They’re both getting old, they’ve both been with a lot of people before and may even want to be with other people now. Things are rarely so simple. We also get a sense of Paris. Marion’s parents are eccentric, to say the least, and it’s meant to speak to the general sensibilities of French citizens. There are several wonderful encounters inside of taxis in which Jack is unable to communicate with the driver, and we watch Marion have odd or personal conversations with the driver right in front of him. It creates a wonderful dynamic wherein we watch Jack attempt to decipher similar words and tonalities.

Delpy, both in delivery and writing, is masterful at rattling off naturalistic dialogue. Dialogue in novels or films never seems unrealistic, but there is a certain stylization necessary for clarity and comfort. A change must be applied to make it seem real. Delpy, however, has a strong ability to create truly realistic dialogue. It may not function well to advance plot, but rather, it creates almost a voyeuristic aspect to films such as this. It’s as though we’re watching a couple be intimate or joke around, as though we get to sit in on private moments. Even the casual conversations over meals or observing a new room are beautiful displays of interaction. They’re accurate and they’re simply fun to be privileged enough to overhear.

Delpy also gives us the occasional voiceover. She speaks in a careful and paced voice, and it shows further how well she knows this type of material. She could easily drift into a pseudo-emotional overkill, but always manages to stay pensive and romantic in her notions without reaching saccharine. These moments are often punctuated by still frames, photographs taken by her character or Jack, and it works to great effect. There isn’t all that much for the camera to do, the film is a plethora of conversations, but it never becomes boring. We love watching these characters walk and discover their surroundings.

2 Days in Paris sits between the sensibilities of Linklater’s films or a (good) mumblecore piece, albeit, with significantly more polish. It does a fantastic job of crafting conversations and moments for us to sit in on. We do little more than spend time with this couple. Though the film reaches a fine and smart point emotionally, it isn’t as revealing as, for instance, Linklater’s films of this style. It does a good job of pulling itself together, it’s all more than function, and it certainly presents a much more complicated view of love and relationships than many other films. It does, however, feel fairly small and simple comparatively. That isn’t a bad thing. This film, after all, presents a small, microscopic view, but that does not mean that it can’t speak louder than it looks. Largely, 2 Days in Paris stands on how much we enjoy spending time with Marion and Jack. This is where Delpy shines. They’re more than enjoyable enough to hang out with for a time.

9:05am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlHBNyVSzvvk

Filed under: film julie delpy 2 days in paris

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