Some Came Running

The Current Cinema

Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence try to silence a movie reviewer...okay, a blackmailer (Peter Dinklage) in Death.

I review a remake nobody was really asking for, that of Death at a Funeral, at MSN Movies today. Oh my. 

The Zombie "Halloween"s, or, taking the Nathan Lee challenge

The now semi-retired film critic Nathan Lee, when writing at his most unfettered, is one part connoisseur, one part provocateur, one part contrarian, and three parts...well, probably best not to go into that. He's not afraid of passionate advocacy, or of stirring shit up, or of pissing people off. He contains multitudes; witness his most recent defense of director Richard Kelly in Film Comment (not online, alas; it's in the Nov./Dec. 2009 issue), wherein he seems to embrace a "it's-so-bad-it's-good" perspective on the abysmal Southland Tales before going on to castigate its detractors (e.g., the folks who pointed out how bad it was, you see what I'm getting at here) as "mental midgets." When you go back, you realize he's not really embracing a so-bad-it's-good reading of Tales, but something considerably more complex. Something that, as far as I'm concerned, gives Kelly too much credit, and is pretty untenable. 

But anyway. My point is, for as many unpleasant exchanges as we might have had, and as irritating I've often found some of his provocations, Lee is both a genuinely sharp writer and what one should consider un vrai critic (in the same sense that Godard pronounced Scorsese's New York, New York "un vrai film"). Which is one reason why I thought it would be worth the time and effort to take his high praise of both 2007's Halloween and 2009's Halloween 2, rethinks of the John-Carpenter-originated 70s horror myth by rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie, seriously. 

Now by "high praise," I'm referring to plaudits that have scant prose backup. Lee hasn't written at length about either picture. [UPDATE: This assertion, as Lee reminds us in comments, is incorrect. Lee wrote about Halloween at some length in an article for Film Comment's March/April 2008 issue. Sorry for the error, and for having missed the piece.] The sole testimony to his regard for Halloween 2 is its number two place on his 2009 Ten Best list for indieWire, right between The Headless Woman and Summer Hours, two pictures I myself have a very very great love for. As for Zombie's first Halloween, there's a very brief Village Voice review in which Lee describes the picture as "a biopic, and a superb one at that...every bit as reverent, scrupulous, and deeply felt as any Oscar grubbing horrorshow." One would hope for something more reverent, etc., than an Oscar grubber, but you see his point. In terms of evidentiary support, Lee asks us to consider the film's "strange circumspection, the discipline of tone, the utter lack of snark, the absolute denial of gore-for-gore's sake." 

I have to say, Lee is on to something here. Whatever Zombie's talents and/or limitations as a filmmaker, his Halloween is, absolutely, conscientiously determined to respect its material. A near-obsessive student of the horror genre (hell, I used to run into the fellow back when they had the Chiller Theater Expos in East Rutherford before the Meadowlands Hilton...), he's an apt pupil with respect to both visuals and mood. But his style, at its best, is not without humor. I was particularly taken by the hilariously overdetermined horizontal planes (see almost any widescreen Italian horror flick from the '70s) and the blown-out lighting (see, of course, Kubrick's The Shining) in the shot at top, in which Malcolm McDowell's Dr. Loomis examines young family-killer Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch). As for the actual content, well, the specifics of young Mr. Myers' family situation do tend to lay on the white-trash histrionics pretty thick (and one suspects that Mr. Zombie learned most of what he knows about white trash from watching Spider Baby and such), but the scenario itself is not unconvincing and is conveyed with genuine verve. So much so that the viewer can actually feel Zombie's interest level dropping at the point wherein he's obliged to explicitly revisit the Carpenter original. 

Doing due diligence on "Wild Things"

In the fear that the foul mood in which I first saw Where The Wild Things Are unduly colored my perception of the film, and in the spirit of fair play and all that, I went and plunked down my twelve bucks whilst in a better mood and saw the big-budget art film again. The results, which do not include any kind of Road-to-Damascus moment, are chronicled over at The Auteurs'.

Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #1: "Little Big Horn," directed by Charles Marquis Warren

 

Nobody refers to 1951 as an annus mirabilis for Hollywood film, world cinema, or anything else for that matter. Which isn't to say that the year didn't see the release of some noteworthy, groundbreaking, or even classic films: '51 was the year of An American In Paris, A Place In The Sun, Strangers On A Train, and A Streetcar Named Desire, to name but a few American movies. (Quo Vadis was the year's box-office champ.) Our friends overseas gave us the likes of Tales of Hoffman and Rashomon.

And none of those pictures are even mentioned in Manny Farber's article " 'Best Films' of 1951," published in the January 5, 1952 number of The Nation. "Let Stevens and Kazan win their Oscars," Farber announces right off the bat; "The Nation's Emanuel—a life-size drip celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating in the vengeful throes of death—goes to the man or men responsible for each of the following unheralded productions of 1951." After this tongue-in-cheek (or was it? so hard to tell nowadays...) intro, Farber more-or-less soberly extols the virtues of a very interesting crop of genre pieces.

In celebration of Farber, and of the recent Library of America publication of Farber on Film, in which the above-cited piece is reprinted, I figured it would be fun, and perhaps even illuminating, to have a look at the pictures Farber praises therein. One a week, in order of citation, until we get to the end. And so we start with the Robert-Lippert-produced B Western Little Big Horn.

Hollywood's latest crisis: the core competencies

So last night My Lovely Wife and I watched The Proposal, for what they used to call shits and giggles, and also in the inquisitive "how bad can it be, really?" spirit. Well, as bad as all that, and worse. I see from the DVD box that the amiable Pete Hammond called it "the year's best comedy." Now I know humor is very subjective and such, but trust me, if this movie were the ONLY comedy to emerge, say, in a year in which the scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road came true, it still would not be that year's best comedy. Just saying.

Somewhat more troubling was just how shoddily made the damn thing was. As has been widely publicized, while much of the film is set on an island off the Alaskan coast, most of The Proposal was shot in Rockport, Massachusetts. Since the coast of Rockport faces out to the Atlantic Ocean rather than Alaska's rugged shores, the mountains and forests of said shores were CGI-ed in. Like, believe it or not, so:

 

Wow, and people complain about Hitchcock's rear projection. Five bucks to anybody who can give me a plausible source for the light coming off the left side of costar Ryan Reynolds' face.

The picture's also replete with bad cuts, which are rather difficult to illustrate with stills. There'll be a cut on a specific motion—a character's arm going down after taking a swig of scotch, for instance—to a reverse shot in which it's absolutely clear that whatever the actor playing the character had been doing before the camera started rolling, he wasn't moving. I stopped counting at around a half-dozen. The editor on this mess was the memorably named Priscilla Nedd-Friendly, whose CV includes such damnable works as Big Momma's House 2 and American Pie, but also the much more competent Tucker: A Man And His Dream and American Gigolo, so I'm inclined to place the blame on the nature of director Anne Fletcher's, ahem, "coverage."

As André Bazin would tell you, the studio system was the entity that really perfected "invisible editing," and these days it seems it can't even demand common craftsmanship of its dumbass romantic comedies. A bad sign, to be sure. 

"A Serious Man"

Adam Arkin and Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man. Photo: Wilson Webb. Courtesy of Focus Features.

This notion that Joel and Ethan Coen consider themselves superior to the characters they depict is sure a persistent one. It's an accusation that can be answered one of two ways: "Really?" and, more conveniently, "What of it?" My own view of the matter is that the Coens actually do have a great deal of affection/sympathy for their creations. They just have a funny way of showing it, is all. 

I mean, for all The Dude goes through, he still abides, no? To cite other artistes who could be deemed Imperial Creators: Tex Avery loved Screwball Squirrel, but he killed the fellow anyway. Vladimir Nabokov actually considered it an act of mercy to reveal himself to Krug, and thus drive that pitiful lead character insane, at the end of Bend Sinister. It's all a matter of perspective when it comes to the Coens. You could go into the theater with this notion that they're about to play some sort of nasty joke on you, in which case you really are likely to emerge from the viewing in a huff of some sort. Or you could go in expecting to enjoy a joke.

At least that's how it works with a number of their movies, their prior, Burn After Reading, being one of them. The problem for the Coens is that they happen to have made a handful of what some call "serious," or "mature" movies. This sets them somewhat apart from Quentin Tarantino, who's never done any such thing (although one might consider Jackie Brown a sort of feint toward "maturity"), in that it gives the scolds out there some material ammunition; it allows them to moan, "Why do you waste your time and mine on such puerile dreck when you could be constructing masterpieces on the level of Fargo and No Country For Old Men?"

A Serious Man must be especially maddening for such folks (I have stayed away from most of the reviews of it so far, reading only three, and, wow, I kind of can't believe how largely perceptive Armond White's piece on it is), as it is something new in the Coen oeuvre: A completely seamless hybrid of their putatively mature mode with their outrageous cartoonish one. This '60s-set tale of an ever-beset Midwestern Jew is a The Book of Job on acid and running on a 360 horsepower engine. The 19th-century-set preface, in which a well-meaning schlemiel brings a dybbuk into his home, doesn't need a follow-up or an explanation; it succinctly states the film's dual theme: It's always something, and more often than not, it's something you could have avoided. Poor Larry Gopnik, the film's constantly put-upon protagonist, is a very smart, and kind, and largely blameless man, but what he fails to grasp is that his passivity is part of what's bringing about his downfall. He lets everybody—wife, daughter, son, brother, students—roll over him, and can't quite figure out how that's eroding him even after his attempts at soliciting spiritual counsel/succor leave him thoroughly unsatisfied. (Let me say here that the film's acting is top-to-bottom flawless and inspired.)

David Foster Wallace wrote a wonderful essay on Kafka's humor, and I don't know if the Coens ever read it, but even if they haven't, as Jewish artists they clearly understand it. Kafka's humor, I mean. Now Kafka didn't invent his sense of humor, any more than Lenny Bruce invented his. What was the first Jewish joke, anyway? The Lord telling Abraham to kill his son and then at the last minute saying, "Nah, forget about it?" Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage? We got a million of 'em. Poor Larry in A Serious Man is treated like Gregor Samsa by pretty much everyone around him, and he hasn't even changed into a bug. If you don't think that's funny, what's wrong with you?

I mention Kafka. The more simple-minded among this film's assessors will likely mention Philip Roth. But that's not quite right: the film's other literary affinity, really, is with the work of Stanley Elkin, whose novels are replete with short-legged dyspeptic dybbuks and pompous long-winded schnorrers and all other manner of strangely heart-warming grotesques, and are largely set in the American midwest, even. And all these characters, like Larry in this film, are getting into dire situations, the direness of which increases with both harrowing imaginativeness and practically sadistic alacrity. Again, I can't say whether the Coens are conversant with such Elkin works as The Franchiser or A Bad Man, but I daresay the fellows could make better than halfway decent films out of either of those books, and several other of his novels and/or novellas.

The only place the film falls short, for me, is in the punch line to the rabbi theme; it's just not set up convincingly enough. And why snub the bassist? (You'll understand when you see the film. Don't worry, what I've given you isn't a spoiler.) But compensation is provided by, among other things, the final shot is, which, in its definitively mordant way, pretty much as  cosmic as the final shot I've been raving about in Resnais' Wild Grass. 

One of the other reviews I have read is the Village Voice notice. It's by Ella Taylor, a consistent ninny whose oeuvre constitutes a very persuasive argument for the abolition of film criticism. In damning this "loathesome" film, she cites a press release in which the Coens admit that the most fun they had in the writing of the film was "inventing new ways to torment Larry." For Taylor, this is absolutely damning. You'd think that she'd mistaken Larry for an actual person. In which case, she's more susceptible to the Coens' art than she believes she is. And still an utter dumbass for all that. 

Go see this thing. Seriously. 

Vladimir Nabokov pro/contra Alain Robbe-Grillet pro/contra Vladimir Nabokov pro/contra "le nouvel roman" pro/contra...

"The best French writer is Robbe-Grillet whom we met in Paris..."

—VN, letter to Edmund Wilson, January 19, 1960

"There is no question, as we have seen, of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form."

—A R-G, "The Use of Theory," 1955-1963

"Do you think Robbe-Grillet's novels are as free of 'psychology' as he claims?

Robbe-Grillet's claims are preposterous. Those manifestations, those dodoes, die with the dadas. His fiction is magnificently poetical and original, and the shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology—psychology at its best."

—VN & Alfred Appel, Jr, interview, Wisconson Studies In American Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967

"In March [of 1962] he saw one of the very few movies he sought out in the nearly twenty years of his final European period: Robbe-Grillet's [sic] L'Année derniere a Marienbad, a film that delighted him not so much by its labyrinthine compulsiveness as by its originality and its romanticism."

—Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov, The American Years, Princeton, 1991

"The French New Novel does not really exist apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole."

—VN, interview with AA, Jr., Novel, a Forum on Fiction, Brown, spring 1971

"In fact there would be someone, both different and the same, the destroyer and the keeper of order, the narrating presence and the traveler...elegant solution to the never-to-be-solved problem: who is speaking here, now? The old words always already spoken repeat themselves, always telling the same old story from age to age, repeated once again, and always new..."

—A R-G, Repetition, Grove Press, 2003

"I [...] adore the work of Alban Berg; I adore the music in Wozzeck or Lulu, but I am incapable of deconstructing it. This is true even for Wagner's music [...] [i]t does not prevent me at all from enjoying it. The decoding of the structure is a supplementary pleasure for someone who is capable of doing it, no more than that."

—A R-G, interview with Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith, The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews With Alain Robbe-Grillet On His Films, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

"Criticism is a difficult thing, much more so than art, in a sense. Whereas the novelist, for example, can rely on his sensibility alone, without always trying to understand its options, and while the mere reader is satisfied to know whether or not he is affected by the book, whether or not the book interests him, whether or not he likes it, whether or not it offers him something, the critic, on the other hand, is supposed to give the reasons for all this: he must account for what the book gives, say why he likes it, offer absolute value judgments."

—A R-G, "Time And Description In Fiction Today," 1963

Caring versus Not Caring

I can't honestly say if this is more of a personal quirk than a reflection on genuine critical principle, but one thing that drives me right up a wall is the complaint, apropos a given film (okay, apropos a given film that I happen to be fond of), "I didn't care about the characters." The word "care," admittedly, gets right up my nose almost as quickly as the word "relate" does. Of course the word "care" is perfectly legitimate in critical discourse, c.f. Edmund Wilson's "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd," although I dare say Wilson uses the word "care" in a slightly different sense than those puling about not caring about the characters do, the approximate difference being between "give a damn" and "feel for." My perspective is that I don't give a damn who you feel for, but I'm rowing away from my point here.

Which is, every individual film has its own agenda and its own operating system. Doesn't always feel that way, given the homogeneity of most Hollywood fare, but it is, I think, true, and it's something to bear in mind while watching any given picture. Of the films that are unspooling at the New York Film Festival, it's Steven Soderbergh's Che that's eliciting the most sniffy care-bear reactions, this notwithstanding the fact that the film isn't really asking you to care, not in the traditional sense of getting cozy with its title character, being roused by his victories, going all snurfly at his eventual fate. It is not, however, an entirely objective film, particularly as one appreciates the effects of Alberto Iglesias's score (and the music does in fact go a bit mournful at the very end). But the film is an environmental immersion and an examination; it's not designed to get you going. I thought Cannes Jury President Sean Penn's remarks, waxing wroth over the film's middling critical reception at that festival, rather curious: "I was in a jury room of nine people with more expertise in their big toenails than any of the people writing in these papers: nine out of nine wanted to go out and change the world afterwards." Really? Because Che seems to me almost the polar opposite of agitprop. It flat out does not ask for the kind of emotional engagement that more conventional epic biopics do, and that's a good thing. To see people who position themselves as new voices, with new perspectives, in cinematic discourse, complain about this movie's lack of "human drama" is mildly exasperating. Maybe I'll throw a dinner party for a bunch of them and make then screen my new Straub/Huillet box sets. That'll teach them something about "human drama..."

Then there's Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which does ask for the viewer's emotional engagement. If you're not concretely concerned with the dilemma and fate of its title character, washed-up mat maniac Randy "The Ram" Robinson, there's no there there, and all of Aronofsky and lead actor Mickey Rourke's protean efforts are for naught. Which is not to say that the picture is spuriously manipulative or any such thing. Of course it's manipulative, any film seeking to strike an emotional chord is going to involve that on some level. But its agenda is clear from the very opening shots, placing the viewer behind Randy as he goes through his early stations of the cross. Of course, Che puts you right there in the jungle with Guevera, but you never get that close to him. Whereas almost as soon as Rourke faces Aronofsky's camera, his ruined mug is right in our faces. I know, I know, I'm overstating the obvious—filmmakers do stuff on purpose. My question is, is there a viable objective rationale for privileging one mode over another?

Olivier Assayas' beautiful Summer Hours is going for two things at once. It's both a film of ideas and a character-driven story that seeks to engage on a level that at least some viewers can, um, "relate" to. Sponsored by France's Musee d'Orsay, it's the story of a reasonably close-knit bourgeois family that finds itself in conflict after the death of its matriarch leaves them responsible for the fate of the matriarchs very valuable collection of art and antiques. As such, it's a study of how art functions in both private and community life, asking whether placement of art in a museum fossilizes it, deprives it of resonance. Given the film's sponsers, the answer is unsurprisingly not unambivalent. The film's characters, provided you do in fact warm to them, are whip-smart microcosms reflecting the Way We Live Now: there's the economist who doesn't believe in economics, who should be the most rational of the bunch, yet can't bear to part with what his mother's left behind (Charles Berling); his intense, insecure, slightly flighty artist sister (Juliette Binoche); and the youngest brother (Jeremy Regnier), whose career and familial ambitions make him quite eager to get some cash out of the relics—"You see, I do the math," he says to his oldest sibling in the film's most heated exchange. These figures, and what children they have, are all sketched with exquisite sympathy and apt detail. One roots for all of them. Unless, of course, one feels the way a certain German film critic I overheard on a queue at Cannes does: "I don't like films about bourgeois people." Which is a critical bugaboo for another day.

UPDATE: But wait! There's more! I take up a few other questions pertaining to this route of inquiry over at The Auteurs', in a post called "Some notes on the 'Human Element' in film." As Lamar Alexander used to say, come on along!