Some Came Running

Service advisory

Due to circumstances that at the time were beyond my control I have been compelled to remove the entire recent post pertaining to Carnage. In order to place circumstances back in my control, I have decided that from hereon in all comments will be moderated, and that this will be the case indefinitely. As most of the longtime readers here know, I prefer this not to be the case, and, well, I'm in too crappy a mood right now to say much more about it at this point. I'll be posting announcements of my remaining MSN Movies reviews over the next week and hope to finish the promised second installment of the Holiday Blu-ray "gift guide," but that's likely to be all until the New year. Thanks for your consideration.

Literary interlude

Parker got to his feet. He'd been patient a long time, he'd explained things over and over, and now he was getting itchy. Enough was enough. "I don't care," he said. "I don't care if it's like me or not. These people nailed my foot to the floor, I'm going around in circles, I'm not getting anywhere. When was it like me to take lumps and just walk away? I'd like to burn this city to the ground, I'd like to empty it right down to the basements. And I don't want to talk about it anymore, I want to do it. You're in, Handy, or you're out. I told you the setup, I told you what I want, I told you what you'll get for it. Give me a yes or a no."

—Richard Stark, Butcher's Moon, 1974

Year's best

Back at Premiere, my bosses used to indulge me. In a LOT of ways, for sure, but one particularly crucial and welcome one was that they let me get away with doing non-weighted ten-best lists. Not only were they not weighted (sometimes I put 'em in alphabetical order, even), but they weren't always ten-best lists, either. 

Not that I'm complaining about participating in a weighted ten-best poll for MSN Movies. No, far from it. Just noting that DOING a weighted list concentrates the mind in a particular way—here, in two ways, since aside from the movie-assessment brain, the "what I want to end up on the final ten-best list" brain also has a say. As it so happens, the MSN system assigns x number of points to the number one film on a critic's list, something-less-than-x points to the number two film, and so on. I wish I could say that I'm so pure that boosting strategies NEVER entered my mind at any point, but that would be a lie. But I will report that not only did my sole (honest) boosting-strategy placement not bear the desired fruit, but that the number one film in the MSN Movies critics' poll is not represented either in my top ten or the further 17 films below that. Ten of the further 17, barring the Fincher, were submitted along with the top ten to Film Comment's annual poll. I thank Allison Benedikt for inviting me to participate in the Village Voice poll, but a) the Voice is dead to me since they fired Robert Christgau and b) I don't wanna be part of any club that would also have [at least three if not six names redacted] as a member. I don't know where the Fincher would be had I been able to see it in time to include it in either the MSN or the Film Comment poll, so there you have it. 

1) A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg) Reviewed here. Other musings here. Cronenberg interview here.

2) Hugo (Martin Scorsese) Reviewed here. Other musings here. 

3) The Descendants (Alexander Payne) Reviewed here. Payne interview here.                                        

4) Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols) Reviewed here. 

5) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Written about here.

6) We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay) Reviewed here. 

7) Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan) Written about here. 

8) Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz) Written about here. 

9) The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar) Reviewed here. 

10) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) Reviewed here.

11) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher) Come on, man. The link is in the post right below this one. Save me some goddamn keystrokes, okay?

12) Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami) Reviewed here. 

13) Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard) The review that helped solidify Andy Rector's potentially homicidal hatred for me is here. The comments thread in which you can witness the homicidal hatred gelling is here. Fun times, those were. If I do end up murdered, I trust one of you out there will do the right thing for me and my widow.

14) Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen) Reviewed here.

15) Winnie The Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson and Jon Hall) Reviewed here.

16) Shame (Steve McQueen) Reviewed here. 

17) A Separation (Asghar Farhadi) Review soon to come. 

18) Young Adult (Jason Reitman) Reviewed here.

19) Cold Weather (Aaron Katz) Reviewed here.

20) Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt) "Cultural vegetable," my ass. Reviewed here. 

21) Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt) Reviewed here. 

22) Win/Win (Tom McCarthy) Reviewed here.

23) J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood) Reviewed here.

24) Carnage (Roman Polanski) Reviewed here.

25) Burke and Hare (John Landis) Yes, really. Reviewed here.

26) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) I did not review this, but I did very much enjoy it. 

27) Rango (Gore Verbinski) Reviewed here. 

I also very much enjoyed Contagion, but the number and nature of disclosures I would have to make in order to be in the ethical clear to comment on it at any greater length are such that, well, I cannot. But seriously, check it out. And everything else here, if you haven't.

Okay, your ball.

"The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

"Playfulness is not necessarily the first characteristic one might expect from a motion picture about multi-generational serial murders, a motion picture that depicts torture both psychological and mental, humiliation of the helpless of all ages, anal rape, and other serious malfeasances. And yet there's a strong streak of filmmaking playfulness running all the way through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, director David Fincher's extremely deft and captivating thriller..." Continued here. Thanks, as ever, for reading. 

Not disavowed

So is "ghost protocol," like, an actual THING in intelligence ops, or is the subtitle of the new Mission: Impossible film just another example of screenwriters and marketing guys smushing words together until they come up with a combination that "sounds cool?" Somebody help me out here. In any event, the resultant film, which I reviewed for MSN Movies, is actually a quite decent example of what some call a "popcorn movie," AND it actually IS worth seeing in the IMAX version if you can afford it. 

No, shit

Okay, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows isn't THAT bad, as I, um, explain in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but you know how I cannot resist such a terrible joke. 

I noticed something weird watching it, which I didn't get into in the review, because I didn't want to look like I was insane. Here, where I feel more, let us say uninhibited, I can let fly. In Game of Shadows both Holmes and Moriarty reveal themselves to be great aficianados of the classical music, which won't sit well with whoever the heck that dork who does the advice column at The Hairpin is. In any event, one of the film's big set pieces visits the Paris opera, where a really ornate production of Mozart's Don Giovanni is going on. it looks pretty hot, hot enough that I think if Guy Ritchie were to really apply himself, he could come up with a staging of the opera entire that could supplant Zeffirelli's boffo version. So that's pretty cool. And later, during a nasty confrontation scene, Holmes and Moriarty discuss the Schubert lied "The Trout," the strains of which had been heard earlier in the picture. What's weird is that the great American expat director Joseph Losey directed a pretty damn fine motion picture adaptation of the Mozart opera in 1979, then, after doing Boris Gudonov for French television, made a feature called...La Truite, or, The Trout. Nothing to do overtly with the Schubert piece, but hell, don't pretend that Losey (who was what we'd nowadays call a "snob"...didja know he put Davy Graham in The Servant, jeez...) wouldn't have made the mental connection at some point in his process! And as I recollected this I wondered, was this some sorta odd undercurrent Losey tribute, and if so, why. Empirical evidence points to complete coincidence, but it's nice to dream of these connections, maybe. 

Further "Carnage"

I gave Roman Polanski's latest some consideration here during the New York Film Festival, and I've imported a few of my prior thoughts, and some new ones, into a proper review for MSN Movies. 

"The Artist"

This is an amiable, intermittently engaging picture that is as charming as it wants to be about 40 percent of the time, better-than-tolerable another 40 percent of the time, and rather dire during the period that it inexplicably uses a large chunk of Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo.

My main problem with it was the same thing that made me somewhat resistant to the two immediate prior collaborations between director Michel Hazanavicius and actor Jean Dujardin, the '50s French spy spoofs OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost In Rio. That is, none of the films quite make it at the level of pastiche to which they aspire. Yeah, you got me: I"m one of those jerks who bitched that Austin Powers, International Man Of Mystery didn't LOOK enough like a real Bond picture. And yes, it's true, I've never seen any of the original OSS 117 pictures, but hell, I've seen more than enough Lemmy Caution and Jerry Cotton pictures, and more, to get the general flavor of the '50s-'60s Euro-espionage film (see also Ferry to Hong Kong), and the Hazanavicius spoofs had an umistakable, for my money, close-but-no-cigar feel relative to those. 

Similarly, The Artist, which, as you may have read, is a "homage" to the "magic" of the "silent cinema of yesteryear" (I don't know who I'm actually quoting there, but I'm reasonably sure that SOMEBODY has written those precise words with respect to the film), while presented in Academy ratio, or AN Academy ratio, and featuring no, or not much, spoken dialogue, and such, falls kind of short on production design, which struck me as being on the chintzy side, and on black-and-white cinematography, which is frequently more evocative of the house style of Monogram than late '20s Fox. I know that Larry Blamire's Lost Skeleton films are pastiches of films from a different era and genre, but seriously, he does a much more convincing job with a lot less money than what Hazanavicius accomplishes here.

The writing is also kind of slack, which is annoying in a different way. I was put off by how immediately unpleasant the character of the silent-movie artist's wife, played thanklessly by poor Penelope Ann Miller, was. And then I'm saying to myself, why the hell am I complaining about lack of psychological depth in a pastiche movie. But later on, during the part that has the inexcusable use of Herrmann's Vertigo score (and honest, people, I'm not an OVERLY religious man, but this was really a bit much), and the film is really trying to make you feel something, I'm thinking, well, isn't this a cute little game: first it wants me to not worry about depth, and now it wants me to cry. Like I said, annoying. 

But, you know, that Dujardin fella sure is deft and energetic, and his foil Bérénice Bejo, while on occasion a trifle overtly contemporary in her projection, is adorable, as is that dog, or dogs, as the case may be. Nevertheless, the fact that this movie is being proclaimed the Best Film of 2011 by various critics' groups is literally—there's no other word for it—insane. One could make a snide remark or two about the various members of said groups perhaps strongly identifying with the film's title character's entitled indignance at his imposed obselescence, but that would just be mean. However, I will say that any expectation that these proclamations will effect some kind of populist wellspringing on the film's behalf is even more insane. We shall see. 

Gilbert Adair, 1944-2011

The first and only time David Foster Wallace visited Premiere's New York office, he made a pretty careful inspection of the books I had lying around in my hovel of a semi-detached cubicle, and honed in one one, and made a pretty immediate and enthusiastic connection with it. The book was Gilbert Adair's 1995 Flickers, an unusual kind of meta-history of the first hundred years of cinema, its method being for Adair to choose one still from one film of every one of those hundred years and compose a mini-essay ostensibly about that film but also of course about everything else. I think Dave was immediately impressed by both the eccentricity and the implicit rigor of this nearly Oulipean approach, and I believe that as he read through one piece and then another he was not only impressed by the writing but discovering a kindred spirit in Adair. Adair did not wear his erudition lightly in the Charles-Taylor-approved style; he wrote as himself, that is, as a near-obsessive reader, viewer, researcher. Yeah, Gilbert Adair was a "bookworm;" you got a problem with that? 

Flickers abounds with prickly judgments and pronouncements that border on the perverse (to his credit Adair lays all his card on the table at the outset; after listing certain omissions "about which [...] I am prepared to offer no apology" he adds "it is [...] a wholly personal, unapologetically partisan choice"), the most notorious of which, to my mind, is his avowal that he "cannot quite regret" the disappearance of Vidor's 1926 Bardelys The Magnificent. And now I wonder, and I Google,and I do not find: what did Adair make, I wonder, of the fact that since the publication of Flickers, Bardelys The Magnificent resurfaced and was restored? Amazing, these things that happen; of all the lost films to build a theory of the glory of lost films around, he chooses one that comes back. In any event, as peculiar and even sometimes stubborn as Adair's perspectives could seem, he was ever a delight to read; there's a friendliness to his use of erudition. A surrealist as well as a deconstructionist, Adair's polyglot sensibility yielded an an expansive jouissance that's visible on every page of Flickers. At any rate, as Dave was leaving my office, he unabashedly asked me, "Can I have that book?" And I said, "No."

I should explain that Dave had this impression of magazine editors that one used to get from watching the likes of The Best of Everything and Youngblood Hawke. I don't believe that he actually wanted to filch my copy of Flickers; I think he thought that, as a magazine editor, I naturally had ten more review copies of the book in a closet down the hall. I expalined that the book had taken ME forever to find and that in the short time that I'd had it, I'd made it something of an extension of myself. The next time we worked together, Dave, having had a devil of a time himself in finding a copy, made it a condition that I track down another copy and send it to him, which I was able to do. Took some effort, as I recall,maybe a special order from Shakespeare and Company or something. Dave received it VERY enthusiastically. 

The bio on the back of Flickers is worth citing in full: "Gilbert Adair has written three novels, The Holy Innocents, Love and Death on Long Island and The Death of the Author. He is also the author of The Rape of the Clock, a full-length verse parody of Pope, and two sequels to classics of children's literature, Alice Through the Needle's Eye and Peter Pan and the Only Children.  His non-fiction includes Hollywood's Vietnam, Myths and Memories and The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, and he has translated Michel Ciment's John Boorman, François Truffaut's Letters and Georges Perec's 'e'-less A Void. His is a regular columnist for The Sunday Times." Those 99 words offer, I think, a very nice thumbnail sketch of Adair's range, and this was well before Holy Innocents was made into a film by Bertolucci (The Dreamers) with Adair writing the script, or Adair's epic translation of Ciment's epic Kubrick study. Of his translations, I am particularly grateful, of course, for that of Truffaut's letters, which are ever yielding new insights and...stuff (I was particularly chuffed recently, reading a letter from Truffaut congratulating a colleague and instructing her to make him first on her dance card, and realizing that said daughter is all grown up now and a friend and neighbor of myself and my wife), and for the Perec, which by necessity is very nearly an entirely different book from the French original, which my linguistic skills of lack thereof make it a challenge to experience in anything but a patchy sort of way. And there's a lot there on that list I haven't read, and that I look forward to; nevertheless the fact that there won't be more is very sad, as is the fact that 66 is a sad age at which to die. 

Peter Bradshaw's appreciation of the man and his work at the Guardian film blog is a good jumping-off point for those desirous of further Adair awareness.

The current cinema, "Glug, glug, glug" edition, part 2

I was rather less taken with New Year's Eve, which might drive an individual to drink. Strong drink. Here is a representative sample of my review for MSN Movies: "[The movie features] a nasty bit in a party scene in which Penny Marshall, the director's sister, lavishes sarcasm on a waitress who never did her a bit of harm, asking, 'Are you an actress?' before putting the attractive young woman in her place. Um, Penny, you're old-school showbiz, so you know the one about only being as good as the last thing you did, right? Well, the last thing I saw you doing was sitting as far away as possible from Cindy Williams at an autograph table at the Chiller Theater Expo in Secaucus, N.J. So yeah, Penny, laugh it up."