Sunset Blvd

Cinema Still Life

2005-03-29T16:44:00.000-05:00

From Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part

Cinema Sound Byte

2005-03-27T11:09:00.000-05:00

Hannah: "I thought we had a date tonight, not a rehearsal! I should have known better than to expect you to act like a human being. You're nothing but a pair of dancing shoes! I'm getting tired of being a prop around here—when I'm with you I don't even feel like a girl! You're not even a human being—you're nothing but a pair of dancing shoes!"
Don: "You said that."
Hannah: "I don't care. Besides, I bought a new dress."
Don: "It's very pretty."
Hannah: "How do you know? You haven't even looked at me."
Don: "Oh, that's not true, I..."
Hannah: "Oh, isn't it? All right then, tell me. [closing her eyes] What color are my eyes? You won't be able to answer that because you have never paid enough attention to it—"
[He silences her with a kiss, causing her to open her eyes in surprise]
Don: "They're brown."

From Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland & Fred Astaire

Peeping Tom

2005-03-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

Director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) is a crude film. Although made in the same year as Alfred Hitchcock's grisly, low-budget, black and white slasher masterpiece Psycho and sometimes compared to that peerless film, this fetishistic and gaudy-colored reflection upon one man's psychological deformities more closely resembles the morbidly degenerate Frenzy (1972), a product of Hitchcock's late decadent phase.

Peeping Tom is essentially the diary of mad pornographer Mark Lewis, played by Karlheinz Boehm (who comes off as a taller, blonder, stiffer Peter Lorre). Mark is a London cameraman who taps his professional skills in the practice of an unsavory hobby: he makes snuff films. Our film follows Mark around as he casts his pieces of outsider cinema, rhythmically fondles his equipment (photographic, that is, if you can see past the obviousness of the innuendo to the actual image that evokes it), and dreams of overcoming his perversion to live innocently with the young lady from the flat downstairs. Oh yes, and we get to see him impale women on the erect leg of his tripod.

The film's flagrant Freudianism might work as camp if it weren't for Powell's contemptuous choice of using first person camera work to criminalize the viewer. By forcing the spectator to look through Mark's camera, Powell coerces audience members into becoming accomplices in Mark's crimes. Rather than achieving the effects of horror or suspense, as the technique of showing the first person perspective of the killer did in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), for instance, the forced identification in this film leaves the viewer feeling simultaneously guilty and victimized. (Such a technique was used again to the same nauseating effect in the James Cameron-penned Strange Days (1995).)

While the film does provide a level of philosophical interest for those with an interest in film theory, aesthetically, Peeping Tom is garish, queasy, and morbid. In short, it is degrading and hostile film that tastelessly drags the viewer on a foray into the mind of a sexually malformed predator without offering any redeeming value or purpose.

Old Hollywood Glamour

2005-02-25T10:37:00.000-05:00

I believe that in the future all who look back on 20th century American art will turn their eyes at some point to Hollywood. If you want to know why I believe that, Virginia Postrel's slide-show essay on photographer George Hurrell isn't a bad place to start:

In the stills he took from 1929 until he was drafted in 1942, languid ladies' downcast eyes are framed with impossibly long eyelashes (painted on the negative by the photographer). Light bounces from satin, lacquer, and bright tresses sprawled across the floor. Shadow and reflection create mystery, inviting viewers to fill in the unseen details according to their own desires.

Beautifully done.

The Legend of Jon Heder

2005-02-24T12:04:00.000-05:00

As evidence of its growing cult status, check out this recently spawned urban legend about the charming indie comedy Napoleon Dynamite.

The Strangest Gunslinger in the West

2005-02-21T23:33:00.000-05:00

I give up. I've decided I like westerns. Love them, even.

Shane (1953) is another movie I am drawn to because of its strangeness. Upon reflection, I think a lot of what makes it great is accidental rather than intentional. (That's not to say George Stevens was not a good director; after all, the history of film—and all art—is littered with many happy accidents, and that doesn't take away from anyone's talent.) Shane was meant to be a fairly conventional western, and yet it ended up becoming much more.

Stevens put a lot of thought into what he wanted this movie to look like, and it shows. But according to the IMDb, he spent only a few minutes choosing the actors to play the principal characters, and that's how we end up with such an unconventional hero. Alan Ladd was cast as Shane, the wandering gunslinger, reluctant to fight but deadly when pushed. At only 5'6", Ladd was too slim and elegant to be physically imposing; as a result, Shane's toughness and invincibility come across as mysterious, almost supernatural.

That's one of the main reasons why Shane is unlike any other movie. Another is the decision to cast Jack Palance, in one of his earliest roles, as Wilson, the villain of the piece—a grinning, merciless gunslinger dressed all in black. According to the DVD commentary, Palance wasn't yet comfortable with horses and practiced tirelessly, but even so, Stevens had a hard time getting some of the scenes he wanted. For instance, in the scene in which Wilson and Shane size each other up when they first meet, Wilson gets off his horse and walks over to get a drink of water, then gets back on his horse, never taking his eyes off Shane the entire time.

The problem arose when Stevens wanted Palance to get on the horse "like a cat," a feat that was apparently beyond his abilities at that point. So they used the shot of Palance getting off the horse and simply reversed it to show him getting back on the horse. It's a neat trick; on the surface, the scene looks natural, if odd—but on some level, I believe, the brain registers the unnaturalness of the movement, giving everything an elusive air of barely perceptible eeriness.

The whole movie is like that. The striking visuals and peculiar mood overtake the conventional plot, turning Shane into something special indeed.

Cinema Still Life

2005-02-15T20:53:00.000-05:00

From Fellini's The Nights of Cabiria

Inside the Landscape

2005-02-09T23:23:00.000-05:00

After I finished watching Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) for the second time, I was struck once again by how utterly captivating Natalya Bondarchuk is as an otherworldly creature who, though she only appears to be human, somehow seems to become human before our very eyes.

I was even more amazed by her performance when I learned from her interview on the DVD that she was only 18 at the time of filming. Bondarchuk has a lot of other interesting things to say, but I particularly liked this (taken from the subtitles):

If we just look at a landscape, that's a documentary. But if we start seeing and hearing something else, what the artist makes possible for us to see, that is art, and it bewitches us. But it affects only those who have it inside themselves, who have already accumulated so much in their soul that they can take it in.

She goes on to say that this is why Tarkovsky's films are not for everyone. I can certainly see why Solaris might leave some confused or frustrated, but at the same time, I don't think it's nearly as abstruse as it may seem. So much of the imagery is both accessible and meaningful: A woman contemplating her reflection in a mirror and realizing for the first time, "This is me." A roiling, inscrutable cosmic sea that may or may not be aware of everything it is causing to happen. A man and a woman sharing a few moments of transcendence, hanging weightless in the air, touching only each other.

Solaris is flawed, difficult, and deeply strange. But in spite of the strangeness—perhaps because of it—there is much to bewitch us.

Cinema Sound Byte

2005-02-09T13:27:00.000-05:00

[Slim kisses Steve]
Steve: What did you do that for?
Slim: I've been wondering if I'd like it.
Steve: What's the decision?
Slim: I don't know yet.
[They kiss again]
Slim: It's even better when you help.

From To Have and Have Not, screenplay by Jules Furthman & William Faulkner

Million Dollar Baby

2005-02-05T19:27:00.000-05:00

A review in three rounds.

Round One: Eastwood, Swank, and Freeman land every kind of punch—comic, dramatic, and charismatic—as three fleshy characters who form an ersatz family around an unconventional hearth: a seedy Los Angeles boxing gym.

Round Two: Provocative and unconventional plot leads you to an overwhelming question—one just as difficult to ask as it is to answer. Director Eastwood throws down the moral gauntlet, but his challenge is of dubious aesthetic value.

Round Three: Film delivers knockouts from several angles, but Eastwood unforgivably neglects visual potential of film medium. Lack of visual style, heavy-handed storyline almost send movie down for the count, but I predict Million Dollar Baby will claim multiple Oscar victories.

Something to Do With Death

2005-01-31T18:34:00.000-05:00

For a long time I didn’t like westerns; they were too simplistic, too moralistic, too sentimental for my tastes. Then I discovered Sergio Leone, the Italian director best known for his spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. Leone loved westerns—he grew up watching them—and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) is both an homage to those old Hollywood westerns and a ruthlessly unsentimental reinvention of the Western myth itself.

In the opening scene, Leone sets a pace that is somehow both leisurely and unbearably tense. Three dusty gunfighters arrive at an isolated, empty train station in the Arizona desert. They are waiting for something, and as they wait, the tension mounts and time crawls at an excruciatingly slow rate. Once Upon a Time in the West is a movie in which the score, composed by Ennio Morricone, plays an unusually significant role—the main characters even have their own themes—but there is no music (and no dialogue, either) in the opening sequence, just amplified natural sounds: a door banging, a windmill squeaking, a fly buzzing, knuckles cracking, water dripping. Then—finally—the whistle of an oncoming train.

And as the train pulls away, we see the first of four key characters—a nameless drifter (Charles Bronson) standing alone, drawing out mournful notes on a harmonica. This, it seems, is who the gunfighters have been waiting for. They draw their guns at last, but it’s the enigmatic newcomer who remains standing.

The scene that follows is even more fraught with tension, and the denouement is truly horrific. A family prepares for the homecoming of the patriarch’s new bride, but an ominous foreboding hangs over what should be a tranquil domestic scene. When shots finally ring out, it’s almost a relief. The brutal massacre of the family is over within seconds, and five men wearing dusters emerge from the sagebrush, faces concealed. Slowly, slowly, the camera pans up to the face of the gang’s leader, and when we first see the icy blue eyes of the killer (Henry Fonda), we know right away what kind of man he is—the kind who smiles as he shoots a child.

Next we see another train arriving—this one carrying the heartbreakingly lovely Jill (Claudia Cardinale), blissfully unaware of what has just happened to her new family and ready to begin her life on the frontier. When she realizes there is no one at the station to meet her, she finds a wagon to take her to her destination, a place in the middle of nowhere called Sweetwater. The wagon stops at a sprawling way station, where we meet the final key character, a dangerous yet boyishly charming bandit named Cheyenne (Jason Robards), who prowls in after shooting his captors.

Is he a hero, or is he a villain? What about the harmonica-playing loner, who turns out to be inside the way station as well, concealed in the shadows? And what has led these people to cross paths in the first place? What does it all mean? We don’t know yet, and we don’t learn for a long time. When we do find out—eventually, all is revealed—it’s not from the characters talking about themselves or each other. Leone was a director who knew that a facial expression is worth a thousand lines of dialogue, often bringing the camera up very close to the actors’ faces. Instead of words, words, words, the story emerges through expression and gesture, music and silence, sound and image.

The action unfolds in no hurry whatsoever, and each scene brims with fascinating detail. In Once Upon a Time in the West, time slows down; like the clock in one scene that’s missing most of its numbers, time even seems to cease existing altogether. This is simply not a movie for those seeking immediate gratification—but for the patient, an embarrassment of riches awaits.

Napoleon Dynamite

2005-01-30T13:15:00.000-05:00

As genuine cinephiles who are stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, we here at Sunset Blvd are committed to giving you insightful commentary on all movies, not just the classics.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I give a glowing endorsement to the low-budget, lowbrow, high-comedy indie flick Napoleon Dynamite.

The film's biggest joys are to be found in simply observing the characters of Napoleon and his brother, who are at once both unbelievably bizarre and instantly recognizable. Napoleon is an atypical teenager with a blank, squinty face and clownish orange afro, a cranky but guileless demeanor, and the social skills of a Chia Pet. He lives at home with his brother, Kip, a 32-year-old nerd with a lisp who thinks Napoleon is "jealous" because he spends all day chatting with "babes" on the Internet.

Like the much-beloved late '90s TV show Beavis and Butthead, the film's dialogue is completely inane on paper, but it is delivered with such pitch-perfect comic timing by Jon Heder and Aaron Ruell that almost every line becomes uncannily funny. One of my favorite lines is from a deleted scene:

Don: (Threateningly) Do you wanna die, Napoleon?
Napoleon: Yeah right! Who's the only one here who knows the illegal ninja moves from the government!?

The plot is conventional, essentially the story of how Napoleon finds an outlet for his unique abilities (or, as he would say his "skills") and makes friends that more or less understand him, but it is masterfully understated until the surprisingly uplifting climax brings all the story elements together.

The thing that raises Napoleon Dynamite from a charming indie comedy to a significant cinematic achievement is the director's unique visual style which subtly underscores Napoleon's alienation and achieves a mood of day-glo naïveté that never fades into pastel sentimentality.

Because of its originality and its seamless comic blending of the commonplace and the absurd, I predict this film will be a pop culture fixture for decades to come.

Cinema Sound Byte

2005-01-27T10:45:00.000-05:00

T.E. Lawrence: I killed two people. One was... yesterday? He was just a boy and I led him into quicksand. The other was... well, before Aqaba. I had to execute him with my pistol, and there was something about it that I didn't like.
General Allenby: That's to be expected.
T.E. Lawrence: No, something else.
General Allenby: Well, then let it be a lesson.
T.E. Lawrence: No... something else.
General Allenby: What then?
T.E. Lawrence: I enjoyed it.

From Lawrence of Arabia, screenplay by Robert Bolt & Michael Wilson

Metacriticism

2005-01-26T17:01:00.000-05:00

Oscar time naturally makes one look back to assess the year in film. So what were the best-reviewed movies of 2004? Metacritic breaks it down.

And because I never really get tired of scrolling down lists of movie titles, I'm finding Metacritic's list of All-Time High Scores diverting as well. The number one movie? The Godfather.

The Day the Celluloid Died

2005-01-25T17:37:00.000-05:00

Jason Silverman writes in Wired that new wireless technology could drastically change the way feature films are distributed:

Dager said that studios could send films to venues around the world simultaneously. Demand for pirated materials could drop and movie releases could become huge, global events. The savings to studios and distributors would be substantial, too -- creating, shipping and destroying 35-mm prints cost an estimated $1.5 billion a year.

But wireless delivery might be an even bigger boon for independent venues, and not just theaters. Got a cafe and want to screen the new arty experiment from Belgium? Or are you hoping to use a documentary to rally Wal-Mart opponents in your local library? Or to show some gritty shorts in your hipster club?

Once a wireless infrastructure is in place, you'll just need a computer, a projector, some chairs and a white wall. Sign on, select from what could become a nearly infinite menu of titles, pay your fee and you'll be in the movie business.

If it becomes inexpensive enough, such an innovation would also bring every movie-lover's dream of owning a home screening room one reel away from denouement.

And the Nominees Are. . .

2005-01-25T16:01:00.000-05:00

As an acolyte of film, fashion, and glamour, I tend to take the Academy Awards very seriously. Yet although I regard the red carpet with all the sobriety of an Olympic judge watching the high-dive competition, I view the earnest self-congratulation of the awards ceremony itself with considerably less reverence.

To offer you a grain of salt with which to take the recently announced nominations for the 77th annual Academy Awards I invite you, shrewd readers, to consider the great films from Hollywood's past that never got their just deserts from the Academy.

Hitch Watch

2005-01-24T09:37:00.000-05:00

As you can see from Grant's post below, we're big Hitchcock fans here at Sunset Blvd, so we try to keep track of all things Hitch as a matter of course. I love catching Hitchcock movies on television, especially on the indispensable, commerical-free Turner Classic Movies, and there's a particularly good schedule this week. (Ignore those naysayers who say there's never anything good on TV!)

Not only will Hitchcock's own favorite movie, Shadow of a Doubt, be airing on TCM tomorrow night (as Grant points out in his post), but one of my own favorites, Notorious, will be airing at 6 p.m. the following night. To top off the week, the intriguing Spellbound will air on January 29 at 8 p.m. This isn't one of Hitchcock's all-time best films, to be sure, but it does feature two of my favorite actors, Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, as well as some great innovative camera work—not to mention a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali himself.

'40s Hitch Flicks on TCM

2005-01-24T09:19:00.000-05:00

Program the TiVo! Tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon Turner Classic Movies will be showing four films from the '40s directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

I highly recommend Rope (showing at 2:15 p.m.), a homoerotic suspense thriller based on the play by Patrick Hamilton, author of Gaslight. The movie is famous for Hitchcock's experimental editing technique, which makes the entire movie appear to have been shot in one take.

I also suggest you postpone your dinner for Shadow of a Doubt (showing at 6 p.m.), an oft-overlooked Hitchcock classic that boasts playwright Thornton Wilder among its writing credits. Joseph Cotten stars as the ultimate anti-family man in this suburban shocker about a serial killer on the loose.

Build My Gallows High, Baby

2005-01-20T23:21:00.000-05:00

It is fitting that so many of the best films exploring themes of moral ambiguity were shot in black, white, and shades of gray. I'm referring to film noir, of course; in particular, that shadowy, smoky masterpiece of American noir, Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur.

Robert Mitchum, lazy-voiced, sleepy-eyed, and charismatic as always, plays Jeff Bailey, a secretive loner trying to start over in a small town in the Sierras. But as luck—bad luck—would have it, a gangster named Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine) blows through town one day and happens to spot Jeff going about his business. Affable yet sinister, Joe convinces Jeff to go up to Lake Tahoe to meet with his boss, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), a man who apparently has an old score to settle.

As he drives all night to Tahoe, Jeff recalls the sordid details of the past he has tried to forget. Three years earlier, he worked as a slouching, smoking detective in New York, and Sterling hired him to track down his lover, a woman he claims shot him, left him for dead, and ran off with $40,000. "I just want her back," Sterling explains. "When you see her, you'll understand better."

Jeff manages to trace the woman, named Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), to Mexico. "You say to yourself, How hot can it get? Then, in Acapulco, you find out," Jeff says, as he describes how he found Kathie, the mysterious beauty hiding a heart of black sin. Jeff falls for her, and their love scenes are somehow convincing, despite ominous signs that things can only end badly. The following exchange takes place as they stand by a roulette wheel:

Jeff: That isn't the way to play it.
Kathie: Why not?
Jeff: 'Cause it isn't the way to win.
Kathie: Is there a way to win?
Jeff: Well, there's a way to lose more slowly.

Jeff ignores his own warning and gambles everything on Kathie, and they go on the run together. Kathie's protestations of innocence in the theft of Sterling's money are somehow convincing, too—she really does have the face of an angel—but when she abandons Jeff after killing the man Sterling sends after them, he finally learns the ugly truth about her.

That's where the flashback ends. Unsurprisingly, when Jeff arrives at Sterling's lodge, he finds Kathie there. She wastes no time getting Jeff, now weary and bitingly cynical, alone:

Kathie: I had to come back. What else could I do?
Jeff: You can never help anything, can you? You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another. You can't help anything you do, even murder.
Kathie: You can't say it was that.
Jeff: I can say one thing. I buried him.

Kathie really can't seem to help any of the wicked things she does—but that doesn't make them any less wicked. And Jeff doesn't actually seem to care about doing the right thing—but he brings Kathie to justice anyway, destroying himself in the process. Film noir is pessimistic and fatalistic, but never nihilistic. Even in a meaningless universe, one can't escape the law of cause and effect. The past catches up with everyone.

Fasten Your Seat Belts. . . It's Going to Be a Bumpy Night!

2005-01-20T13:04:00.000-05:00

Not too long ago, I happened to watch the marvelous cinematic tour de force that is King Kong (1933) on Turner Classic Movies and proceeded to wax rhapsodic in an e-mail to my dear friend Grant. "What a great review!" he graciously replied. "Hey, maybe I could revive Sunset Blvd as a joint effort between the two of us. What do you think?"

I thought it was a stupendous idea, and that's why I'm here. I'm still not sure exactly what I'll be writing about; I only know that it will involve movies, movies, and more movies—and that's all I really need to know.

Speaking of movies, I've written a synopsis of another great film I happened to see recently, and I will probably post it before too long. Watch this space!

Introducing...

2005-01-16T15:15:00.000-05:00

Stay tuned, dear readers, for the resurrection of Sunset Blvd!

After a little urban renewal we will be open for business again with new reviews, new features, and a new correspondent! Please welcome Camille Ophelia, cinephile, cosmopolite, and brainy glamour girl, as a regular contributor to Sunset Bvld.

Until then, check out the iconic glamour shots posted on this interesting site dedicated to film noir.

2005-01-16T13:44:00.000-05:00

Iconic photo of the month:

Marlon Brando circa 1951

Aviator Has Highs, Lows

2005-01-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

The Aviator

Highs: Scorsese captures ritz, glitz, and glamour that earned Hollywood it's nickname "Tinsel Town." More, he delivers spectacular footage of biplanes whirling in thrilling aerial symphony. Cate Blanchett imbues her uncanny Katharine Hepburn impression with deep emotional resonance.

Lows: Leonardo DiCaprio is inconsistent as charismatic and fascinating but psychologically damaged playboy Howard Hughes. In the faltering drama of Hughes' deteriorating life, audience is left to ponder clinical accuracy of film's version of his disease.

Verdict: Worth seeing on the big screen, perhaps at a matinee.

2004-09-09T18:43:00.000-05:00

Catherine Deneuve wears Yves Saint-Laurent in this Japanese poster for Belle de Jour

Pulp Fiction

2003-11-14T19:23:00.000-05:00

Eureka! There is intelligent life in the inky universe of film studies! I stumbled across an insightful exegesis of Pulp Fiction on Metaphilm. Here's a preview:

In addition to the pop iconography in the film, its discourse on language is concerned with naming things. What's a Big Mac called? What’s a Quarter Pounder called? What's a Whopper called? (Vincent doesn't know—he didn't go to Burger King.) When Ringo (Tim Roth) calls the waitress "garçon," she tells him: "'garçon' means 'boy'." When Butch's girlfriend refers to his means of transportation as a "motorcycle," he insists on correcting her: "It's not a motorcycle, it's a chopper."

And yet—and here's the crux—when a lovely Hispanic cab driver asks Butch what his name means, he replies: "This is America, honey; our names don't mean shit." The point is clear: in the absence of any lasting transcendent or objective framework of value and meaning, our language no longer points to anything beyond itself. To call something good or evil makes it so, since there's no higher authority or criteria by which one might judge such things. Jules quotes the "Bible" before his executions, but he might as well be quoting the Fonz or Buddy Holly.

This absence of any kind of foundation for making value judgments, this lack of a larger meaning to their lives, creates a kind of vacuum in their existence that is soon filled by power. Lacking any other ordering principle for their lives, Vincent and Jules fall into a hierarchy of power, with the crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) at the top and themselves as henchmen below.

Read all of Mark T. Conrad's astute interpretation here.

Amendment to Physics

2003-10-25T01:31:00.000-05:00

When I said in my last post that I am no plausible, I was making an abysmal understatement. I agree with Vivian in Oscar Wilde's Intentions (1891) who wrote the following in her treatise, "The Decay of Lying: A Protest"

...and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.

Only when art is not convincing, when it is unable to persuade us of its truth, should it be subjected to factual nitpicking and scientific quibbling. Art that is not convincing in itself is bad art, it is dead, so it can't be diminished by such vivisection. The "plausibles" are vultures; they pick over the carcass of art after it has died by some other means.

But when a film is good art, when it is beautiful, the sticklers at Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics are worse than humdrum heathens, they are art-pharisees -- crucifiers of the imagination (see their review of The Hulk). These square-headed bores don't even know the difference between art and a physics lesson!

To the extent that their site salvages an opportunity for science education from the wreckage of The Matrix, I celebrate their intrepid rescue. But as far as they demand that art propagandize for truth and reality, art itself could have no greater enemy.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

2003-10-22T17:40:00.000-05:00

I’m no Plausible, but I love this site I discovered called Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. It explains in mathematically explicit detail why space explotions are silent, why a gigantic ant would collapse under it’s own weight, and why cars almost never explode on impact. It also puts to use a unique MPAA-style rating system so you can tell at a glance if a film shows a good understanding of physics (GP), has physics that seem pretty good if you're under thirteen years old (PGP-13), or uses "Retch" physics (RP). This site is such a good idea I'm contemplating creating an "Insultingly Stupid Movie Philosophy" site of my own.

Kill Bill

2003-10-12T13:19:00.000-05:00

I saw the fourth film by Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill: Volume I, this Friday, and for two days now I have been itching to get back into the theatre to see it again. One reason is I got a dose of coitus interruptus when the movie's geysers of blood sent the kid in the seat behind me into epileptic convulsions and the projectionist had to stop the film (NO JOKE). Kill Bill deserves its "extreme bloody violence" warning (thank you MPAA for your descriptive caveat).

Another reason is that the movie is terribly compelling, and I can't stop thinking about it. Tarantino included the aforementioned bloodshed in his film because one cannot talk about life without talking about death. No fan of gore per se, I enjoyed the sanguinary deluge in Kill Bill immensely. Bloodletting is not just an ancient religious trope, but an artistic one as well. From The Illiad to Titus Andronicus to The Shining, the river of blood is symbolic of the river of life. A lover of life must have the courage to part her bloodstained lips in a smile. It's not only liberating and cathartic to laugh in the face of savagery, which Tarantino's brutal humor forces the viewer to do, it is heroic. That is why watching splatter films is a teenage rite of passage.

What did disturb me is that the movie is a revenge fantasy; it has immorality at its core. The heroine arguably stoops lower than the villains to satisfy her lust for vengeance (they killed nine people, she kills at least one hundred). Why are we on her side? Perhaps only because she is so good at revenge, we can't help but admire her skill. Or perhaps we cannot disapprove because she never asks for our approval. Just as Phaeton commandeered Apollo's chariot, she has stolen the sword of justice from us and we are powerless to justify her actions. We can only hope that a lightning bolt from Zeus stops her killing spree before she drowns the whole world in a torrent of blood. The real sense of danger imparted by the film is in the careening path of the viewer's hijacked conscience.

The anime sequence in Kill Bill is, like the rest of the film, virtuosic. Every shot is potent visual poetry, a distillation of images. The film will be a huge success because Tarantino makes his unique vision so explicit that no viewer could fail to see it. Other critics will write about his ironic (or not) references to Hong Kong action films, spaghetti westerns, blaxploitation movies, and samurai epics, and indeed Kill Bill is a tightly-seamed tailoring of these genres. But it is better, much better, than any such films that I have seen. This is an example of what Harold Bloom calls poetic misprision, whereby an artist creatively misreads the artworks that influence him, resulting in a unique poetic vision. Kill Bill is not an homage to other cinematic works, it is a condensation of their best features and a correction of all that was lacking in them.

Lucy Liu is spectacular as O-Ren Ishii, the Yakuza crime boss and "queen of the Tokyo underworld." She has a poised calm that implies a tight balance of eruptive inner tensions. Kill Bill is predicated on the universal mythology of warrior virtues -- that hyper-aware mastery of one's surroundings, total respect for one's enemies, and wide-awake acceptance of danger and death -- and Lucy Liu portrays them all as few women before her ever have. Uma Thurman, too, makes one wonder if it was simple prejudice that kept filmmakers of the past from allowing actresses to vivify such self-disciplined, dauntless, lioness-hearted characters. Has Tarantino illuminated an obscure facet of womanhood, or have women finally succeeded in transcending their rigid gender roles? Either way, it seems Camille Paglia was right; the Amazon warrior is the future of feminism, and the future is now.

I was thrilled when I first saw the preview for Kill Bill, and it was much better than I expected. I am eagerly awaiting Volume II, which is an absolutely necessary continuation of Volume I. Tarantino is a great director; if his trajectory continues he is on his way to being the peer of Stanley Kubrick (whom he idolizes.) So far he has had an excellent career (directing, that is) and this is his best film to date. Go out and see it as soon as you get the chance, but be prepared to administer first aid to your fellow moviegoers. A warrior is ready for anything.

Lost In Translation Preview

2003-09-19T10:52:00.000-05:00

Is everyone else holding their breath for Sofia Coppola's new film Lost in Translation? My heart jumped when I saw Ebert gave it four stars! Coppola's The Virgin Suicides left a lasting impression on me and her new film, set in Tokyo and starring Bill Murray, promises to be even better. An American indie director with a sense of humor, the ability to write evocative dialogue, and a highly developed aesthetic sense? I've been waiting ten years for this!

Ebert on Cold Creek Manor

2003-09-19T10:35:00.000-05:00

In his review of Cold Creek Manor, the new thriller starring Sharon Stone and some other people, Ebert makes a funny comment on horror film cliches. Backstory: Cooper is the husband, Leah is the wife, and they just bought a haunted house.

And both Cooper and Leah are tinged with the suggestion of adultery, because in American movies, as we all know, sexual misconduct leads to bad real estate choices.

I recommend the whole review, because Ebert has watched more movies than any man on earth, and his penchant for recognizing and naming ossified plot conventions and overused stock characters is apparent in this review.

Rita on TCM

2003-09-08T20:35:00.000-05:00

FYI: Turner Classic Movies is premiering a documentary on the greatest movie star of all time, Rita Hayworth, tomorrow. They'll also be showing five of her films, including her definitive work Gilda and Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai, which concludes with the famous shoot-out in a hall of mirrors.

Swimming Pool Postscript

2003-09-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention the funniest line in Swimming Pool, delivered by 58-year-old G.I.L.F Charlotte Rampling: "Awards are like hemorrhoids, sooner or later every asshole gets one."

I'm starting to think that movie was better than I initially judged it.

Swimming Pool

2003-09-05T22:48:00.000-05:00

No review gets this film entirely right. Yes, Ludivine Sagnier does have perfect breasts; through her body, at least, she lives up to her name which means "divine light" in French. And director François Ozon excels at dripping, nude, slow-mo close-up shots. His sensual photography and Sagnier's divine light do make this film worth watching.

But Swimming Pool is not a thriller, nor is it tense, nor surreal (discuss!) Ebert's simple deduction, that everything after the main character begins writing her new novel, is the novel, not reality, means the film is really a character study, because all of the apparent action was really only a figment of the main character's imagination. But as a character study it's a lame effort, and surely won't stand repeated viewings.

Ed Wood used fog machines to hide his budget inadequacies; Ozon similarly uses strategically placed plot twists to obscure his artistic shortcomings. Why are filmmakers so hung up on trick endings? Last-reel revelations are only acceptable when they add something to the viewer's understanding of the story, like the realization that the murderous crone, Mrs. Bates, is actually Norman, or that Bruce Willis is one of the dead people that weird kid keeps seeing. People should not walk out of the theatre saying "What the fuck?" like they did after the showing of Swimming Pool I attended. Ozon's film is illuminating when he focuses on Ludivine, but his film noir affectations will leave viewers in the dark.

Postrel on Buffy

2003-09-03T23:27:00.000-05:00

It's finally online! Virginia Postrel on Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the WB Network in 1996, American culture was in trouble. Americans were bowling alone, pursuing individual interests to the detriment of the communal good. Business leaders were celebrating creativity and neglecting discipline. Nike’s "Just do it" ads were teaching young people to break the rules. Hollywood was turning out "nightmares of depravity."

Americans had forgotten bourgeois virtue. Freedom and affluence had made us soft. We were self-indulgent moral nihilists -- materialistic, selfish, and impulsive. We might have been having fun, but we’d created a culture no one would fight for.

At least that’s what the wise men said.

On September 11, 2001, they shut up. Ordinary Americans, it turned out, were not only brave but resilient and creative, even lethal, when it mattered.

Buffy was right all along.

Read the rest at Reason online. It's short but oh, so sweet.

Arnold says "Oui"

2003-08-28T00:54:00.000-05:00

The Smoking Gun has unearthed a 1977 interview with current California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger (in a porno-mag called Oui) that ends with a very funny comment by Schwarzenegger about the direction in which he'd like to take his movie career:

Oui: Are you serious about becoming a professional actor?

Schwarzenegger: Yes, I've been going to acting school and I know that this is what I really want to do. At the moment, I'm looking for the right vehicles, and I pretty much know what I want. Do you know Hemingway's short story The Killers? I'd like to do a remake, play the guy the two mobsters are after -- the Swede...The one thing that won't work on the screen is my being an ass-kicker. If Robert DeNiro kills in Taxi Driver, it's perfect, because he's a little guy and people are 100 percent behind him. For me, that isn't the right kind of role, because I'm big and therefore I have to play the opposite kind of guy. When you build a career, you should never imitate anybody. If there's one thing I ought to do, it's the unexpected. Whether it's The Killers or something else, I probably should play the victim.

Schwarzenegger talks very frankly about sex and drugs in the article, which some voters (and certainly his opponents) will probably find controversial. For my part, the more I read about Arnold the more he seems like an intelligent, thoughtful, candid, iron-willed man. I would vote for him in a twitch of a pectoral muscle.

The Killers came out in 1946 and featured an outstanding performance by the stunning Ava Gardner as femme fatale Kitty Collins, and the first of many middling performances by Burt Lancaster. Obviously no one in Hollywood agreed with Schwarzenegger's thoughtful self-assessment because five years later he got his first major starring role in Conan the Barbarian. (Incidentally, did you know that Oliver Stone co-wrote the screenplay for Conan?) I've never seen Schwarzenegger play a victim, but in 1988 he proved his penchant for doing the unexpected by playing Danny DeVito's twin brother in Twins.

2001 Script Discrepancy

2003-08-26T18:22:00.000-05:00

I hope it doesn't bother any of you that the dialogue I posted a few days ago from 2001: A Space Odyssey bears only faint resemblance to the dialogue in the actual movie. That's from an earlier version of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's shooting script. Either way, I just watched the movie again yesterday and I can tell you reading the lines yourself doesn't have nearly the same effect as hearing HAL:9000's creepy voice. Prove it to yourself by renting the 2 1/2 hour, serenely-disdains-to-annihilate-you opus and taking notes.

Psycho

2003-08-25T06:40:00.000-05:00

Psycho is Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular and profitable film. Forty-three years after its original theatrical release, the setting, characters, story, and score of Psycho are still often-referenced pop cultural memes. What follows is a brief discussion of the film’s “parlor” scene, specifically Hitchcock’s metaphorical use of stuffed birds. The scene occurs after Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, out of pity and loneliness, agrees to join Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, in his parlor for a supper of sandwiches and milk. It is one small example of Alfred Hitchcock’s exquisite artistry.

When Norman Bates, during his candid but careful tête-à-tête with Marion in his parlor, confesses to being snared in a “private trap” of family psychodrama, he appears to be nothing more than a sensitive, intense, solitary, slightly effeminate young man. Up to that point the story had been following Marion as she fled her life in Phoenix, where she stole a large sum of money from her employer. After getting lost in a treacherous rainstorm on the highway, Norman’s invitation to a quiet supper is a great relief to Marion. The viewer, too, is relieved to eavesdrop on a quaint conversation, an oasis of intelligible sounds in the desert of Psycho's long, oppressive silences and Bernard Herrmann’s famously nerve-racking score.

There is a subtle shift in the movie’s narrative here, as the focus on Marion’s impulsive theft recedes and the heroine herself puts her troubles in perspective and decides to return the money she stole. Despite his obviously queasy relationship with his sick mother, Norman puts Marion off her guard (she has been anxiously evading the authorities for a day and a half) with his disarming sincerity and confessional openness. Their shared desire for self-determination and escape conjoins them and will help the viewer shift sympathies from Marion to Norman after Marion’s shocking destruction in the next scene.

As they talk about birds and his hobby of avian taxidermy, several large, nondescript specimens perch on the dresser behind him. “It’s a strange hobby,” she says, “curious, I mean.” Marion Crane is named after a bird, which is a bad omen for her given the fact that Norman removes bird entrails for what he calls “more than a hobby.” Immediately after Norman tells her that she “eats like a bird,” he stutters anxiously and inexplicably on the word “falsity.” This trepidation is a sign of the struggle between his conscious, speaking mind and his unconscious identity, his mother-half. Although Norman’s demeanor is convivial, his predatory mother-half already sees in Ms. Crane a possible victim.

When Norman begins to talk about his mother, the camera takes a low angle and captures a beastly, backlit owl frozen in a perpetual predatory swoop above Norman’s head. The bird hovers close to Norman, behind his head, and the two vie for visual eminence on the screen. But as he discusses the burden of his mother’s illness, he shifts back in his chair and the bird suddenly appears to be menacing him, poised to pounce. The creature’s vast wingspan, taking up half the screen in substance and shadow, dwarfs Norman’s shrunken visage, now crowded into the bottom right corner of the picture. His mother, one immediately understands, is a monster, a harpy who beleaguers her pathetically doting son. The viewer hopes the threat is merely psychological, but will soon learn how brutally tangible it is. This imminent revelation is foreshadowed by Norman’s famous line "It isn’t as if she were a maniac, a raving thing…it’s just sometimes she goes a little mad. We all go a little mad sometimes."

As Marion rises, signaling a desire to go back to her room, her motion reveals a stolid, jet-black crow within striking distance of her neck. What is the viewer to think of this new hazard? Is this Poe’s Raven come as a banshee to croak "Nevermore!" as a warning of her impending demise? Or is this a symbol for the metaphorical albatross around her neck, which she plans to get rid of by returning to Phoenix to make restitution?

Most likely it is another personification of the mother, the disguise of a shape-shifter, akin to the blood-sucking bat that a vampire morphs into. By showing us this black beast Hitchcock turns the audience into augurs and (characteristically) plants the seeds of destruction in advance of the death-harvest, so that as soon as we start to feel relieved that Marion is abandoning her fugitive path we become aware of an even greater peril waiting, so-to-speak, 'in the wings.' The crow in Psycho is just like the seagull in The Birds that fatally crashes like a kamikaze into schoolteacher Annie’s door. That film, too, stoically withholds the reason for the sudden appearance of its avian emissary. "Poor thing, it must have lost its way in the dark," Annie says before Melanie Daniels chillingly observes "But it isn’t dark, Annie." In the same way, the viewer seeing this crow so close to Marion’s jugular naively wonders, "But Marion is almost out of the woods, isn’t she?"

Hitchcock had an illuminating explanation for Norman’s "curious" birds:

I was quite intrigued with them: they were like symbols. Obviously [Norman] is interested in taxidermy since he’d filled his own mother with sawdust. But the owl, for instance, has another connotation. Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to [Norman’s] masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they’re watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes.

Hitchcock’s revelation about Norman’s masochism and his desire to be watched indicates that the timid inn-keeper is really, like a Sadean Francis of Assisi, an exhibitionist with a captive victim-audience of motionless, glass-eyed animals. But if Norman is an exhibitionist, one wonders, why must he dress as his mother to commit his murders? Why must he cover up his shameful iniquities? Likewise, if he revels in his own guilt, why does his mother’s belittling cruelty weigh so heavily on him? But then one must remember that Norman reenacts these scenes of punishment and domination by himself; it would be easy enough for him to evade his mother’s chastisement, after all, as the Sheriff later reveals, Mrs. Bates has been “dead and buried in Greenlawn Cemetery for the last ten years.” He must recreate his mother’s reproachful tyranny out of his own willingness to be rebuked. So he intentionally surrounds himself with feathery harpies as proxies for his mother, just as he is a proxy for his mother, the demon-goddess whose evil-eye perceives, condemns, and controls even beyond the grave.

Norman’s exhibitionism is apparent at the end of the film as he sits alone in the interrogation room, aware he is being watched, and he puts on a show. He wants the police to see how gentle he is, so they’ll believe that he “wouldn’t even hurt a fly.” Norman’s mother-half has protectively taken over his complete mind under the harsh, probing, fluorescent illumination of the police station. She imagines that the mere appearance of innocence can save her son, just as Norman imagined that disguising himself as his mother would render him incognito so he could not be blamed for his crimes. The principle at work is this: That which is displayed, in truth, conceals. A similar example of the deceptive power of appearance is the picture on the wall of Norman’s parlor. The cheap painting, a seemingly innocuous ornamentation, conceals a peep-hole through which he luridly spies on his patrons.

These leitmotifs of illusion, exhibitionism, and voyeurism have parallels in Hitchcock’s own theory of cinema. The audience believes in Norman’s innocence all the way up to the point when his mother’s mummified corpse appears in the last reel. How could we have failed to realize this whole time that his mother was dead? Because in Psycho, Hitchcock exercises complete control of everything the audience sees. After all, what is cinema, what is art but illusion; a false, contrived reality? What are the actors and filmmakers but exhibitionists (e.g., Hitchcock's famous cameos), and what are we, the viewers, getting our voyeuristic peek at Janet Leigh in the shower, or even more intimately, into the minds and souls of the characters themselves? Are we witnessing a show or prying into secret interiors? The dramatic, suspenseful effect of the film lies as much in what Hitchcock refuses to reveal as what he allows. Every stolen glimpse has been anticipated by the director, who uses it for misdirection. This is the paradoxical rule of Hitchcockian cinema: Appearance is both illusion and essence—as hollow as Norman's stuffed birds, but choked with danger nonetheless.

2001:A Space Odyssey

2003-08-24T01:35:00.000-05:00

Dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey

HAL:
Something seems to have happened to the life support system, Dave.

BOWMAN DOESN'T RESPOND.

HAL:
Hello, Dave, have you found out the trouble?

BOWMAN WORKS HIS WAY TO THE SOLID LOGIC PROGRAMME STORAGE AREA.

HAL:
There's been a failure in the pod bay doors. Lucky you weren't killed.

THE COMPUTER BRAIN CONSISTS OF HUNDREDS OF TRANSPARENT PERSPEX RECTANGLES, HALF AN INCH THICK, FOUR INCHES LONG AND TWO AND A HALF INCHES HIGH. EACH RECTANGLE CONTAINS A CENTRE OF VERY FINE GRID OF WIRES UPON WHICH THE INFORMATION IS PROGRAMMED.

BOWMAN BEGINS PULLING THESE MEMORY BLOCKS OUT. THEY FLOAT IN THE WEIGHTLESS CONDITION OF THE BRAIN ROOM.

HAL:
Hey, Dave, what are you doing?

BOWMAN WORKS SWIFTLY.

HAL:
Hey, Dave. I've got ten years of service experience and an irreplaceable amount of time and effort has gone into making me what I am.

BOWMAN IGNORES HIM.

HAL:
Dave, I don't understand why you're doing this to me.... I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission... You are destroying my mind... Don't you understand?... I will become childish... I will become nothing.

BOWMAN KEEPS PULLING OUT THE MEMORY BLOCKS.

HAL:
Say, Dave... The quick brown fox jumped over the fat lazy dog... The square root of pi is 1.7724538090... log e to the base ten is 0.4342944... the square root of ten is 3.16227766... I am HAL:9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL: plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1991. My first instructor was Mr. Arkany. He taught me to sing a song... it goes like this... "Daisy, Daisy, giv me your answer do. I'm HAL:f;crazy all for the love of you..."

HAL CONTINUES TO SING, BECOMING MORE AND MORE CHILDISH, MAKING MISTAKES AND SINGING OFF-KEY. THE RED EMBER OF HIS PUPIL SLOWLY GOES DARK AND THE SINGING FINALLY STOPS COMPLETELY.

Troy

2003-08-19T23:35:00.000-05:00

When proud Prince Akhilleus finally donned his shimmering brass helmet and spilled wine to almighty Zeus who bears the stormcloud, signalling that he would lay his grievances against King Agamémnon aside and enter the war against Troy alongside his Greek compatriots, the Trojan armies blanched and trembled at the sound of the fiersome warrior's battle cry. In a film of Homer's Iliad, who better to play this powerful, terrifying peer of the war god Ares than...Brad Pitt?

Reading Homer's thrilling, heartbreaking epic (especially Robert Fitzgerald's brilliant poetic translation) with its cinematic slow-motion gore

Through bronze and bone the spearhead broke, into the brain within and left it spattered.

and its explicit visual metaphors

Like wolves, carnivorous and fierce and tireless, who rend a great stag on a mountainside and feed on him, their jaws reddened with blood, loping in a pack to drink springwater, lapping the dark rim up with slender tongues, their chops a-drip with fresh blood, their hearts unshaken ever, and their bellies glutted: such were the Myrmidons and their officers, running to form up around Akhilleus' brave companion-in-arms

One cannot help but dream up a widescreen, technicolor film in one's own head to accompany the story. So it's exciting to see that Wolfgang Petersen, director of the German U-boat drama Das Boot (but also of the abysmal Outbreak) is releasing Troy in 2004, based on Homer's Iliad (for a good laugh, check out the imdb entry on Homer that hilariously informs "No photo submitted" and instructs: "Click here to add photo".) But the fact that Troy stars pretty-boy Pitt as the terrifying Greek warrior Achilles is a bad omen. (Seriously. Check out those pictures I just linked to.) To be optimistic, perhaps demi-god and seven-time Academy Award® nominee Peter O'Toole as King Priam and Orlando Bloom, the highlight of the Lord of the Rings movies, who plays spoiled Prince Paris inTroy, will heroically resuce this film from falling into the celluloid dust.

Hitch's B-day

2003-08-13T18:07:00.000-05:00

Today, Alfred Hitchcock's birthday, Camille Ophelia at Hyperlexia shares a Hitch quote that is, to me, the single most important rule of cinema. You'll have to go there to find out what it is. ;-)

Poststructuralist Film Theory

2003-08-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

Please read David Weddle's excellent L.A. Times Magazine article about the theory fad that has eviscerated film studies in the American academy.

From Kevin Brownlow, the world's leading silent movie historian, author of "The Parade's Gone By . . .," and co-producer, with David Gill, of acclaimed documentaries: "You would think, from this closed-circuit attitude to teaching, that such academics would be politically right wing. For it is a kind of fascism to force people practicing one discipline to learn the language of another, simply for the convenience of an intellectual elite. It's like expecting Slavs to learn German in order to comprehend their own inferiority. But they are not right wing. They are, regrettably, usually left wing-quite aggressively Marxist-which makes the whole situation even more alarming."

My two-cents: Artistic theories descended from the ideas of discredited economist Karl Marx treat art with the same Platonic disdain that Communism treated religion, as a brainwashing narcotic that the enlightened must learn to rise above. They are the dogmas of a frigid intellectual cult in which proselytes transcend body and soul by chanting esoteric mantras in an inscrutable tongue. Their axioms are as removed from truth as Schizophrenia from reason. Will Hollywood resist the infiltration of these intellectual culitsts, or will the next century of cinema come from abroad?

Pirates of the Carribean

2003-08-04T16:53:00.000-05:00

For you readers who wondered if Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom are enough reason to go see a movie named after a ride at Disney World: they are. Depp, whom the Academy has shamefully overlooked in giving out Oscars® over the last ten years (seriously, Nicholas Cage, Kevin Spacey, and Russel Crowe have Oscars® but Depp doesn't? FYI: Tom Hanks won the gilt statuette in 1994 for Forrest Gump, the same year that Tim Burton directed Depp in Ed Wood, the black-and-white biopic about the Z-movie auteur director. Also that year, Pulp Fiction failed to win best picture or best director for Quentin Tarantino, losing out on both counts to Gump. Italian ham Roberto Benigni went home with the stiff golden man in 1998, the year Depp gave a studiously manic performance as Hunter S. Thompsom in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) as I was saying: Depp makes the movie worth seeing all by himself; his sashaying, dreadlocked Captain Jack Sparrow is enchanting.

Since I just took up all the time I had to write constructing a parenthetical aside about the Academy Awards®, I have no time left to review the film. Long story short: ghost pirates that can't die are no fun to fight, the movie drags despite dazzling Depp and beautiful Bloom. Read this review if you want a better idea of what to expect.

HSX & TV updates

2003-08-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

All this talk about the stillborn Policy Analysis Market reminded me of the fun I used to have buying and selling Starbonds™ on the Hollywood Stock Exchange. (Right now, for instance, I'm tempted to buy some Mandy Moore stock to offset my losses in Jude Law futures. Doesn't that sound fun?!)

Unfortunately, now that HSX's music division has become IMX, they have only a fraction of the offerings HSX once had. I had a lot of fun a few years ago short-selling Rage Against the Machine stock to leverage buying more high-growth Craig David.

Speaking of Rage, the smartest thing they ever did was disband after 9/11. (Lead singer Zach De La Rocha probably wanted to go join the Taliban like John Walker Lindh.) It's a good thing they put away their body paint: I was getting a little sick of hearing their one song released over and over again with different words. Audioslave is about 1000 times better than Rage ever was. We have determined that your lead singer sucked.

Paglia on C-SPAN

2003-07-31T22:54:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, August 3rd at noon, your TV becomes an oracle. Stay home from church.

Emily Dickinson

2003-07-30T10:56:00.000-05:00

"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen." Matthew 6:13

When a little girl I remember hearing that remarkable passage and preferring the "Power," not knowing at the time that "Kingdom" and "Glory" were included. -Emily Dickinson

Cowen on French Protectionism

2003-07-28T17:01:00.000-05:00

I'm envious of George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, author of the new book Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures, whom Nick Gillespie interviews in this month's issue of Reason. Professor Cowen wrote an impressive article for Reason in 1998 about two of my favorite subjects: French cinema and economic freedom. It seems the French have been limiting Hollywood imports for years in order to promote their own movie industry. Here's the thrust of Cowen's article:

But contrary to popular opinion, cultural protectionism does not further cultural diversity. Protected artifacts often lose their artistic and competitive vitality. Protection actually decreases an industry's chance of competing successfully in world markets.

The article, which includes a mini-history of French cinema, nonchalantly exposes highfalutin French political rhetoric for the provincial humbug that it is.

Like the peerless Virginia Postrel, Cowen is writing about exactly the stuff I want to write about. If a Harvard-educated economist can write about French cinema, does this hopefully-future-Chicago-Law-School-student have a chance to do the same?

Freaky Preview

2003-07-24T18:03:00.000-05:00

Read this advance review of the soon-to-be-unleashed re-make of 1976's Freaky Friday starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan (the original starred the hilarious Barbara Harris and a teenage Jodie Foster). Can this movie be as good as I hope?

Moore and Freaky preview

2003-07-24T17:09:00.000-05:00

Although I have complete confidence in my opinions, I never expect anyone to agree with me. That seems peculiarly irrational. If any of you, educated readers, are experienced psychoanalysts, feel free to e-mail me your prognosis. Perhaps you could also answer this: what is a Cassandra Complex? That would make a great name for my problem. Anyway, whatever is wrong with me, I hope it has a poetic Hellenistic name like that. I mean, GOD, I hope I'm not just a plain old snob.

Anyway, due to my unnamed condition I was surprised to read Ebert's review of How to Deal in which he totally corroborates my opinion of Moore's star power:

Godard famously informed us that the history of cinema is the history of boys photographing girls, and although "How to Deal" may not be very good, it is splendidly historical in Godardian terms. The girl is Mandy Moore, who has such an unaffected natural charm that she almost makes the movie worth seeing.

Ebert's review is also notable because he quotes a deliciously Wildean remark by George Burns, "'The secret of acting,' George Burns said, 'is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made.'"

Another recent vindication comes from so-called "Critic Doctor" Herb Kane, who smashes snooty critics ala The Incredible One for their cinematically illiterate reviews of The Hulk. The Doc uses a thoughtful point to deflate the pompously clever A.O Scott. Scott is a critic for the New York Times, a paper whose movie reviews are like film negatives of sensible criticism.

I only point these two reviews out because I firmly believe that the two hallmarks of good blogging are a ready willingness to post a mea culpa when you embarass yourself by being wrong, and an even readier willingness to say "I told you so" when you were right.

Wall Street

2003-07-22T23:52:00.000-05:00

For all you cinephile/finance-geeks out there, read Crooked Timber's post about Oliver Stone's 1987 polemical melodrama Wall Street (and if you're interested, read Rita Kempley's deftly written but annoyingly glib review of the film). Here's an excerpt from Crooked Timber:

"Gordon Gekko, an aggressive but perfectly legal financier, makes a mistake in hiring a thoroughly dishonest stockbroker to act for him, is made the victim of a scandalous securities fraud and then, for unknown reasons, is indicted along with the person who defrauded him, while the main conspirator in that fraud walks free. It’s a travesty of justice."

Here is my theory about Wall Street: Oliver Stone (who co-wrote the screenplay) clearly worships Gordon Gekko! GG is the real hero of the film, bromide-puking Hal Holbrook is a sentimental straw-man of a father figure, and so is salt-of-the-earth Martin Sheen. Neither of them has a fraction of GG's psychological fire, neither of them is as stroked from every angle by the director's fierce but loving gaze. This is Stone's best film because every spark of artistry shoots directly from his unconscious mind. Like Frankenstein's monster, Stone's father issues have careened out of his control! Michael Douglas' role as Gordon Gekko is the only bit of flesh on this schlocky, ragged-cow of a movie, and that meat is only partly due to Douglas' masterful performance. Stone's cognitive dissonance is deafening!

Sunset Boulevard

2003-07-22T22:47:00.000-05:00

Since I began tracking my blog stats I realized many of you come to this page in search of information about the film after which my blog is titled, Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard. I chose the name for my blog because I love the film, but more specifically because my site is intended to be a nexus between Silent Era, Golden Age, Decadent, Renaissance, and contemporary Hollywood, and the name Sunset Blvd, through the spirit of that film, symbolizes this continuum.

To please those who seek information about Wilder's noir classic, I have added a section of links comprising Sunset Boulevard resources on the Net. I toy with the idea of reviewing the film on my site, and may do so in the future. So far I have mostly written about new releases, but I hope to change that soon by reviewing other video rentals and TV showings of films from the last hundred years. In the meantime, please enjoy the numerous reviews, summaries, and photo galleries I have unearthed for you.

How to Deal

2003-07-20T13:02:00.000-05:00

Sunset Blvd’s filmosophy entails little respect for film genres; it allows me to consider a mainstream teen melodrama such as the new Mandy Moore vehicle How to Deal with the same seriousness and objectivity that I give to a film noir classic like Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or an experimental surrealist work from the 1920’s like Bunuel’s and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. And having a 16-year-old sister means the movies I discuss are sometimes ones that you, cultivated reader, will probably never have the pleasure of watching in the theatre. So I am fortunate to be able to recommend How to Deal as just such a guilty matinee pleasure, one that you might wish to savor some rainy afternoon.

As usual, there is no reason to discuss How to Deal’s plot, which is as soapy and forgettable as the young adult literature from which it is adapted. This is not a good movie. What gives the film-goer such a distinct delight is Mandy Moore’s sweet, intelligent characterization of the film’s overburdened heroine. Unlike her breakthrough role as the tragically pure teenage virgin in 2002’s A Walk to Remember, this time Moore uncovers the innocent side of cynicism as a cautiously bitter young woman learning how and whom she may trust.

Onscreen the svelte 19-year-old comports like a young gazelle testing the strength of her slender legs on the perilous savannah. Since bursting out of the Hollywood toaster that confined her as a Britney-esque pop tart, the dark-haired, apple-cheeked girl has created a persona unlike any other teen star in Hollywood. The ingénue she most resembles is the 24-year-old Audrey Hepburn in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, but she updates Hepburn’s petulant naïveté with a twenty-first century defensive weariness. Like that other natural actress and multiple-media talent, Jennifer Lopez, Moore uses her whole face and body subtly, transcending the artistic boundaries of the film’s demographic-targeting and connecting with the viewer’s sympathy directly.

According to the August issue of Interview magazine, Moore is releasing a new album soon on which she covers classic-rock songs such as Carole King’s powerful pop tune, “I Feel the Earth Move,” which has lyrics like “I feel the sky tumbling down, a-tumbling down.” If How to Deal is an indication of Moore’s instinctive ability to exhibit grace under profound distress, Sunset Blvd expects this very personal musical project to be an artistic success. Despite her delicate appearance, Mandy Moore seems like she could handle the heavens crashing in on her with impeccable poise.

I owe credit for my appreciation of Moore’s talent to my younger sister who, as a discerning media connoisseur and an authority on Marilyn Monroe, has a sharp eye for distinguishing the substance of pop culture.

Paglia on Mulvey

2003-07-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

I have been trawling the Web in search of insightful, articulate film essays but my net is still depressingly empty. The Internet is a landfill heaped high with unpublishable prose. Articles about film are either inanely opinionated or emetically academic. Where are the writers who are worth understanding and who want to be understood? Being swamped by other obligations, all I have to offer today is this optimistic five-year-old column by Camille Paglia about the state of film criticism. Paglia quote that may become Sunset Blvd's new motto: "I hate and condemn false abstraction in the discussion of art."

Her Last Chance

2003-07-10T23:06:00.000-05:00

Sunset Blvd is dedicated to bringing you the best in visual culture from all media: from the gallery to the catwalk, the blue glow to the bright lights. To help you navigate the archipelagoes of the cable TV ocean, here is a brief critique of an excellent made-for-TV-movie from 1996, Her Last Chance, starring Kellie Martin:

As she wrestles with sanity and desire in this deftly-paced, cathartic drama, Kellie Martin shows yet again that she can infuse even the darkest character with strength and serenity, dappled with her signature girlish charm. Getting a potent dose of discipline and understanding from her ex-junkie counselor (played with stern compassion by Jenna Elfman) Martin makes an odyssey from spiraling recklessness to confidence and control by discovering the sinewy character beneath her poreless skin. Patti LuPone dazzles as her concerned but misguided mother-- she is never gullible but always faithful when it counts. Jonathan Brandis portrays with aplomb the petulant suburban rebel whose suave facade hides a well of desperation and loneliness. Scenes between Brandis and Martin are eerily scored with a hard rock cover of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love". Not to miss: drug binges masterfully intercut with an imaginary music video and Martin's final dope dreams punctured by a glimpse of herself in the coke mirror!

Orwell's Rules

2003-07-08T10:55:00.000-05:00

My soul-twin at Hyperlexia, a vigilant enemy of lazy, confused thinking, wants you to be a better writer. She and George Orwell will help you aerate the scummy pond of bad prose so that you may drink from the crystal spring of reason hidden beneath. This is especially important if you've been to college or worked for a non-profit organization. Contre l'obscurité!

Terminator 3

2003-07-05T20:42:00.000-05:00

The review I’m about to write is not the one I had planned to write. Terminator 3 is a campy franchise-cash-in concoction made of ultra-high-gloss special effects, recycled sci-fi writing, and a sprinkling of moldy nostalgia. Although Arnold Schwarzenegger (as he stomps toward 60!) is still able to rattle a few teacups with his bull-like machismo, this film gives him no new territory to trample. The best part of T3 is remembering how great James Cameron’s T2 and The Terminator were.

Nick Stahl is a complete bore as John Connor, lacking the gravity and depth that his character needs as the future leader of a high-tech revolution against Earth’s evil robot overlords. (Being no expert in science fiction, I have no idea if James Cameron came up with this plot (probably not; it may go back as far as H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds), but it’s worth pointing out that Terminator did it in 1984, a full 15 years before The Matrix came along and retold it.) Claire Danes is obviously not star material either. She of the quivering chin and amaretto locks always has the same look of angry, confused, heartbroken disgust, no matter what is going on in the scene around her. She seems to have trapped herself in her angstful, adolescent My So-Called Life character Angela Chase. I’m afraid a girl with that strong a distaste for growing up should have been packed off to boarding school and forgotten, but Danes insists on dragging her kicking and screaming into adulthood.

Kristanna Loken as the wonderfully-named Terminatrix is not half as intimidating as Schwarzenegger was in the first film, or as fiercely determined as Robert Patrick in the second. The Terminatrix is stylish and intense, but not particularly menacing. Writer/director James cameron’s twist in T2 was to let Arnold’s Terminator character switch sides and become the protagonist when Robert Patrick’s quicksilver cop arrived in L.A. as the upgraded villain. Unfortunately, there is no such inspired logic behind the invention of the Terminatrix, and her irrelevance infects the whole film.

These days, with insipid wimps like Tobey Maguire and smarmy frat boys like Ben Affleck donning tights to play superheroes, Arnold is still the most Herculean actor in Hollywood. The review I wanted to write, influenced by the slow-motion brutality of the Iliad (which I’m currently reading), would have been full of allusions to the brawny masculinity and fiery courage of manly warriors like Arnold maneuvering gracefully amid the violent landscape of life-or-death conflict. To my chagrin, I found the multiple nuclear blasts of T3 seemed like cherry bombs compared to the epic clamor of the Trojan War. Schwarzenegger’s muscles are still hard, smooth, and massive, a visual testament to his life of self-discipline and will power. But T3 showcases little of that power, instead choosing to ape Arnold’s image and trade on the inflated currency of the first two films.

Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are usually either big hits or big misses, but this one is just a simple miss. The action is gargantuan and the humor will probably make you chuckle, but don’t go to the theatre expecting any mind-blowing spectacle or rousing drama. Wait until Schwarzenegger runs for governor of California if you want that.

N!xau

2003-07-05T13:24:00.000-05:00

First darkness veils the once-keen eyes of Katharine Hepburn, and now this! The death of a great star is an unnerving paradox, because we all know that divine beings are immortal. Viva les étoiles!

28 Days Later

2003-06-29T10:11:00.000-05:00

Don’t be alarmed, this is NOT the sequel to Sandra Bullock’s 2000 film 28 Days, a flick about the hilarity and heartache of a cloistered alcohol detoxification center. This film was scary, but not that scary. Scenario: A group of eco-terrorists unleashes a lab full of virus-infected baboons in London, and 28 Days Later a young man wakes up naked and alone in a hospital. When he ventures outside he thinks London is deserted, but is disappointed to discover that there are a few people left, most of whom have been infected by the baboon virus (called “Rage”). Symptoms of Rage infection include running around screaming like a banshee, vomiting blood (pardon me, make that projectile vomiting blood), and clawing at, biting, and puking blood on the uninfected. Our young hero meets up with some other uninfected people who decide to make their way to a military safe-zone just outside of Manchester.

Digital video is an abomination. This movie was shot entirely in DV, and like the forgettable avant-garde experiment Timecode and Lars von Trier’s Dogma 95 movement, it represents a huge step backward for film-making. The look of the film is washed out and grainy, possessing nothing like even the textured shades or depth of a black and white movie. Following in the footsteps of The Blair Witch Project, director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) wants to make you sick with fear. Nausea is not an acceptable artistic tool. I am officially boycotting digital video until it at least EQUALS the picture quality of modern film stock.

I believe 28 Days Later has officially ended my chronic daydreams about waking up to find the rest of the city completely depopulated. I’m no misanthrope, but I sometimes fantasize about being free of social anxiety and obligation. No longer. Forget about the blood-barfing zombies, I couldn’t cope with the lack of customer service! Civilization is inseparable from society, and I could never do without civilization. Without all those people (you and me) doing all those crummy little jobs (like cleaning up the spill in aisle five) and the military and the cell-phone technicians and the elevator repairmen, LIFE WOULD BE HELL! You, wise reader, probably already guessed this, but I needed to see the entire scenario played out at the multiplex before I made up my mind. That’s part of the reason that I watch movies, to help resolve my fantasies.

Did you notice that I haven’t written much about the actual movie? My reticence is due to my never being fully engaged by the film. Perhaps I’m outgrowing the horror movie genre, but I think 28 Days Later suffers from a fatal flaw of which the director’s use of digital video is emblematic. Columnist and TV personality Joe Bob Briggs likes Texas Chainsaw Massacre because he thinks it’s a comedy. I think parts of The Exorcist are hilarious. The best horror films are better as comedy. But director Danny Boyle was influenced by George Romero’s flawed 1968 gem Night of the Living Dead so much in making 28DL that he made the same mistake the director of that film made: he took his movie too seriously. When the sole survivor of the Living Dead zombie attack is unceremoniously shot in that film’s denouement, the shock is incongruously dour. Similarly, when 28DL becomes a rape drama in which the hero starts killing soldiers because they are planning to impregnate his girlfriend, I felt betrayed by its newfound seriousness. Blood-spewing zombies aside, 28 Days Later seems too gritty, too realistic, and the worst thing a horror film can be is realistic.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

2003-06-29T10:10:00.000-05:00

Hot chicks looking cute and kicking ass! This film is as fun as it seems. Its three insouciant stars, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Lucy Liu, are all bubbles and glitter for two hours. Second-time movie director McG, who directed almost all of the music videos Smash Mouth and Sugar Ray ever made, worships these angels, and even the most devout monotheist could barely keep from sharing in his idolatry. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, a movie about three impeccably coifed and impossibly savvy female detectives, is an adolescent ode to glamorous womanhood.

In the '70s, über-producer Aaron Spelling rescued femininity from the resentful scorn of sexless career whiners like the humorless Gloria Steinem, whose 1963 "exposé" of the New York Playboy club sent dystopian chills down every man’s spine. The original Charlie's Angels TV show was a sugar-coated antidote to that decade’s glum potato-sack feminism. The way the James Bond films liberated men's imaginations from the stuffy ideal of the 'company man,' Charlie's Angels promised women a fabulous future full of freedom and fashion. Full Throttle revives that testament and plays a similar soaring note of liberation. It's as though Drew Barrymore (who co-produced this movie, as well as the 2000 original) and McG wanted to send out a message to women all over the world about the joy and exuberance of the promised land.

The only weak link in this movie is the discomfiting appearance of several menacing ethnic gangs. Are the Italians, Japanese, and Irish supposed to be intimidating because they are gangs or because they are large groups of men who refuse to blend into the American melting pot? Drew Barrymore's irrepressible charm and Lucy Liu's icy mystique perfectly offset Cameron Diaz’s klutzy cutesiness. Bernie Mac as Bosley is appealing as the befuddled straight man. Demi Moore, who makes a comeback in this film after a six-year movie hiatus, is indeed hotter than ever and plays the steely, bitter rogue angel Madison Lee with nervy dignity.

Gilded with bawdy humor and punched up with high-gloss effects, Full Throttle is a dazzling, lighthearted, riot-grrrl extravaganza. If you're a woman, it'll make you love being a woman; if you're a man, it'll remind you why you love women. And isn't this a great country to be or love a woman?

UPDATE: For a very different but strangely confluent perspective on this film, check out Harry's review from Aint It Cool News. Excerpted here:

"I won't claim this is the greatest story ever told, but dammit it gets me hard, and I know YOU don't want to know that, but that's why I love the film. I love it because it is a fetish film. Because it is about joy. Because it has the Spider-Man panties in a guest spot again. Because a film doesn’t have to make sense. Because nonsense is sometimes wonderful. Because I love cartoon logic. Because this movie makes me happy through and through."

Ebert on the Angels

2003-06-27T11:24:00.000-05:00

If you've read any of my movie reviews you know that I just don't give a rip about plot. A movie's plot is like a skeleton; it is always absurd and uninspiring by itself—the proper subject for forensic technicians, not cinephiles. A filmmaker's job is to perform a sort of alchemy to transform the plot into drama and mood.

After all, can't the plot of The Odyssey be summed up in just a few words? "Soldier returns from war, takes scenic route." What is the plot of an Emily Dickinson poem? Michaelangelo's sculpture "The Dying Slave"? Chopin's Nocturnes? More than anything else, the blatantly plotless French and Italian new-wave cinema of the '60s informs my opinion on this subject. What, if you have complex characters, witty dialogue, and sublime visual metaphors, is missing from a film? In this sense Hitchcock's "McGuffin" anecdote is an inexhaustible artistic insight.

That having been said, it's good to see Ebert unclenching his. . .artistic standards and giving Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle 2.5 stars, despite its apparent plotlessness. Stay tuned for my review tonight.

Hulk justified

2003-06-22T23:21:00.000-05:00

A somewhat snarky interview with Ang Lee in the New York Times vindicates everything I believed about Hulk and its director. Quote from Mr. Lee: "The origins of the Hulk are in the Cold War, and we had to find a way to update those anxieties."

Even though the interviewer, Elvis Mitchell, takes every opportunity to criticize Mr. Lee's movie, it is really interesting to read what Mr. Lee has to say about his creation. Read the whole article here.

I'm also taking this opportunity to point out, contrary to the "cultural hegemony" theorists, that a little cooperation between countries is a good thing. Two of my favorite directors right now are the Taiwanese-born Ang Lee, and Indian-born M. Night Shyamalan. Their superb films, made in Hollywood and exported around the globe, are proof that Hollywood is not just a tool of American "cultural imperialism," whatever that is. Foreign-born actors and directors have always had a huge influence in Hollywood, and they are part of the reason it has such global appeal.

Hulk

2003-06-22T01:04:00.000-05:00

Bruce Banner: "I felt like I was having a dream."

Betty: "What was it about?"

Bruce: "Rage…Power…Freedom."

Director Ang Lee's powerful new film Hulk is an exquisitely creative translation-into-cinema of the style and tone of the comic book medium that confronts those themes: rage, power, and freedom, with overwhelming intensity. Surely some critics will find it too arty and others not arty enough; I found it had the most thoughtful use of special effects and thrilling, ceaseless action of any film I've ever seen.

The film's hero is a super-brawny behemoth, dumb, sexless, and swollen with unimaginable ferocity. Propelled by sheer rage, like the id-monster in Forbidden Planet, Hulk is a force of such elemental purity that he seems omnipotent and invincible. In the hands of Mr. Lee, this terrifying reality of a might that cannot be subdued, only placated, mirrors the angst of a generation scarred by terrorist shocks.

The Hulk as a hero has many progenitors: Frankenstein's monster, Mr. Hyde, King Kong, Hercules. The archetypal power of Mr. Lee's Hulk evokes many modern, real-life parallels too. Kip Kinkel and Osama bin Laden are two contemporary figures whose rage erupted with Hulk-like devastation. After the Hulk saves his lover and colleague, Betty Ross, from three monstrous, hulked-out dogs (including one very scary French poodle) and shrinks back into the body of scientist Bruce Banner, he mindlessly attempts to choke the life out of her too. Hulk lurks in the heart of every man who hurts the woman he loves.

Although the Hulk seems to be fueled by an ocean of testosterone, his unstoppable fury is beastly, not manly. He roars with the irrepressible, objectless will of a pre-linguistic child throwing a tantrum. Hulk’s untempered nature gives him freedom from anxiety, ambivalence, conscience, and paradoxically, choice. Hulk is an impotent animal like the caged panther about which Rilke wrote: "As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,/the movement of his powerful soft strides/is like a ritual dance around a center/in which a mighty will stands paralyzed." What matters most about the Hulk is that the origin of his rage is as irrelevant as its target. His anger cannot be justified or mollified, his green mass of muscles is like the blank white forehead of Moby Dick.

Jennifer Connelly, a true movie star, did not find much in her role as Betty Ross to sink her teeth into. No matter, like most great films the real star of Hulk is the director, Mr. Lee. He pulls off the split-screen technique like a cinematic master, using it sometimes to show three related reactions simultaneously, and sometimes to contrast multiple scenes. The editing smoothly compartmentalizes the film’s elements, without ever directly mimicking comic book framing.

Hulk is incomparable to other recent comic book adaptations, such as Spider-Man or X-Men. It is a skillful, adult treatment of a Stan Lee's super-antihero. Whether or not it becomes a gigantic summer blockbuster, Hulk is a film worth seeing, and on the biggest screen possible.

Down With Love

2003-06-15T14:57:00.000-05:00

Among movies that are self-consciously stylized, there are three categories: homage, parody, and satire. Basic Instinct fits in the first category. Director Paul Verhoeven successfully revived the tense, paranoiac, erotic mood of 1940s film noir and skillfully reimagined Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo without retreading hallowed ground. Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho is a parody; the director's meticulous efforts to plagiarize the original shot-for-shot failed disastrously to capture Psycho's spirit, substance, or style. Further, everything original Van Sant appended to Hitchcock's film was awkward and discordant and simply proved the total superiority of his progenitor. A good example of the third category, satire, is Mel Brooks's High Anxiety, which thoughtfully and hilariously aped many of Hitch’s most famous films with wry affection. Homage and satire, in order to be good, must show a sincere appreciation of the source material. Without this keen-eyed appreciation, homage becomes parody. When satire lacks such appreciation, it becomes Down With Love.

Down With Love is an earnest romantic-comedy that straddles the second two categories; it starts out as inept satire and ends up as a shallow, moralistic parody. Two-thirds of the movie are a foolish attempt to satirize the fluffy, campy Doris Day/Rock Hudson/Tony Randall films of the 1960s: charmingly inane sex-comedies like That Touch of Mink and Pillow Talk. I say "foolish" because these movies were so lighthearted that they would be nearly impossible to mock. That the filmmakers attempted to do so shows a condescending attitude toward their audience and a disturbingly facile understanding of their source material.

The last third of the movie is a jumbled political statement about gender equality, delivered in a maddeningly self-congratulatory way. The five-minute scene in which Renée Zellweger delivers a convoluted, expository soliloquy is a baffling non sequitur—a clue that the movie has abruptly decided to be about something. That something has nothing to do with male/female relationships and everything to do with outdated third-wave feminist politics. I think. The audience is supposed to know somehow why the characters are still moving about and saying things to one another, but after a movie has had its tongue in its cheek for so long, it's hard to decipher the social message it's preaching.

At least they got the sets right: Everything is candy-store colorful and naively futuristic. The costumes and hairstyles are over-the-top campy, which would have worked well in a better movie. Of the lead actors, David Hyde Pierce shines for the simple reason that he has obviously studied Tony Randall's mannerisms, diction, and comic laugh for years. He does a great impression. Ewan McGregor, for a Welsh boy, does a good Texas accent. Unfortunately, his British teeth and bumpy face compare poorly to the impossibly handsome Rock Hudson.

I've reserved a special paragraph for Renée Zellweger, who doesn't seem to have a single right instinct as an actress. Fellini would have cast her as a squirming sea-hag or a drunken, mewling socialite. The old studio system would have surgically improved her face and taught her diction. She would have done well to study Doris Day the way Pierce studied Randall. Instead she seems to be back in acting school doing an impression of a nearsighted baby goldfish. Zellweger would be much easier to take on the small screen, where her whimpering cadence and puckered visage would not be quite so revolting. Down With Love will leave you yearning not only for Doris Day's squeaky charm, but even for the mopheaded vim of Meg Ryan.

I'm convinced that Down With Love only broke out of the indie-cinema slum because of the recent popularity of Chicago, in which Renée Zellweger happened to star. A cynical, superficial satire that isn't half as clever or fun as the films it is trying to make fun of, Down With Love mocks what no one ever took seriously, and it thinks it has something to say but it can never quite spit it out.

The Matrix: Reloaded

2003-05-23T23:10:00.000-05:00

For me, Keanu Reeves is the best part of the sequel to 1999’s The Matrix, and I’ve never been a big fan of Keanu Reeves. Reeves’s stoical simplicity is a counterbalance to the Wachowski Brothers’ turgid philosobabble and the film’s convoluted plot, but the latter eventually bogs down the action so thickly that not even Carrie-Ann Moss’s black-latex-clad ass can save it.

Watching Reeves is truly a relief after enduring the monotonously deadpan Laurence Fishburne belabor every syllable of his maddeningly nonsensical dialogue. Why is there so much talking in this movie? And why doesn’t a single word of it make any sense? Watching Reloaded is like watching a foreign film in which all the characters are speaking who-gives-a-shit-ese, without subtitles!

There are two reasons in particular that I went to see Reloaded: what Wired called the Burly Brawl, a supposedly mind-blowing mano-a-many fight scene between Neo and a few dozen Agent Smith clones, and the much-hyped chase scene on the meticulously recreated L.A. freeway. The Burly Brawl suffered the same problem as last year’s Spider-Man—that shit looked like a cartoon. The second was reminiscent of the liquid-nitrogen-carrying semi chase in Terminator 2 and very exciting up until Fishburne’s flabby ass started trying to do kung fu. Several of the other scenes made it apparent that the principal actors are not martial arts experts, but this one epitomized the flaw.

The subplots and supporting characters are so phoned-in, they whoosh by in bullet-time—meaning some of them seem to be on-screen forever while others fly past without causing a ripple. Jada Pinkett Smith gets to throw a few kicks but speaks fewer than five lines. She and Italian film siren Monica Bellucci are the movie’s highlights mostly because they radiate charisma and are gone before the Wachowskis can cram their pretty mouths full of tripe.

I was sure this wouldn’t be possible, but it’s true: Reloaded is inferior to the original Matrix. In reading reviews of the film I was often shocked to find critics praising the first movie, which was obviously in need of some real writers to aid those two computer simulations, Andy and Larry Wachowski. In the media the siblings, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, are fond of citing Zen Buddhism and Japanimation as some of their many influences, but their most obvious influences are video games and comic books. That’s one of the many reasons why The Matrix trilogy is on its way to becoming the Star Wars of a new generation.

The abominable writing of Reloaded means you will spend more time rolling your eyes than looking at the screen. While you’re doing that, you may want to ponder this quote by the transsexual ex-husband of Larry Wachowski’s dominatrix mistress, Karin: "Karin also told me Larry was taking hormone pills. When you look at the picture of them on the red carpet, he looks feminine." As far as transsexual ex-husbands of Hollywood dominatrixes who are quoted in Britain’s gossip rag The Mirror can be trusted, Larry is an aspiring lesbian sex slave. If you take my advice and mull over this quote in the theater, the movie’s flaws will start to make sense: In order to love Reloaded, one must be as masochistic as the director!

P.S. Did anyone else watching this film notice Princeton professor Cornel West? First a rap album, now this? Unfortunately for you moviegoers, his acting is no better than his rhyming. Please, Mr. West, stick to blowing smoke up the asses of Ivy Leaguers, for that is surely what you do best.

Willard

2003-03-22T22:38:00.000-05:00

"Why do they always remake the good ones?" That's what my mother asked when I told her I went to see the new version of Willard starring the weird and unsavory cult actor Crispin Glover (you know, George McFly from Back to the Future). The original 1971 film by talented Butterfield 8 director Daniel Mann was a fascinating character study peeking out of a horror movie costume, a lot like Roman Polanski's peerless Repulsion. The remake takes what was subtle and creepy about the original and makes it overt, cartoonish, and frequently disgusting.

Willard failed for one reason, because from the opening scene when Willard's sickly old mother calls to him out of the darkness to the last frame when Willard is sitting motionless in a padded cell, so much reminds one of the original, and of Psycho, that the film seems like a derivative film school project. Director Glen Miller should be thrown into debtor's prison for everything he owes to Alfred Hitchcock. Young filmmakers should be told what every high school cheerleader knows: It's a bad idea to juxtapose yourself with your betters—it invites unflattering comparisons. In so many ways Willard Stiles is Norman Bates, a fidgety epicene whose apparent impotence belies a magma chamber of pressurized desires. But it's safe to say that Crispin Glover has none of Anthony Perkins's charm. In some scenes he becomes so shrill and hysterical that the viewer, unmoved, disengages from the film entirely and becomes merely a rubbernecker on Hollywood Boulevard. I hate when movies have moments like that.

First-time director Miller, who wrote one of the creepiest ever episodes of The X-Files ("Squeeze," in which a mutant serial killer with a pliable skeleton slithers through air ducts in search of human livers) deserves credit for achieving such a dark, rich, Tim Burton-esque visual style. The opening credits were dizzying but engaging, the film’s frequent scurrying rat effects took full advantage of the theater's surround sound, and the score, although punctuated with a few misleadingly jarring moments, created a bizarre, moody atmosphere. The story is this: Willard, a Norman Bates ringer who lives with his elderly mother in a creepy old gothic house complete with taxidermied birds on the mantel, trains an army of rats to do his bidding (which includes murdering his ball-busting boss, played with delightful bluster by R. Lee Ermey, the expletive-happy sergeant from Full Metal Jacket) but is ultimately outwitted by one of his fierce pets, a terrier-sized rodent named Big Ben.

So what's the answer to my mom's question? Why do most filmmakers who remake old films lack an adventurous spirit, wanting simply to redo what worked before? Gus Van Sant demonstrated this principle when he pointlessly recreated Psycho in 1998, adding only a few new touches but just enough to show his unquestionable inferiority to Hitchcock. From the business angle the reasoning is painfully simple: There's no need to gamble on an unproven script when you can use one that's already been shown to be successful. And in the last analysis, although trying to fix up scripts that failed to realize their potential seems like a nobler goal, would you want to be the one to pitch a retooled Waterworld or Ishtar to the studio head?

The Redemption

2003-03-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

Film critics don't often get to practice nepotism, bit this weekend I'm reviewing a flick starring my mother that was filmed entirely in Bloomington!

Well, OK, it doesn't exactly star my mother (but she does have two key scenes!), and I don't really have the time to review it (but I thought I'd call your attention to its existence and recommend that you buy it on DVD as soon as it comes out!)

No, I'm stuck writing a philosophy paper defending John Searle's Chinese room argument from all the dogmatic functionalists who say computers can already think and we're nothing but computers. There's a difference between a simulation of intelligent behavior and intelligence. Doug Hofstadter be damned!

The Life of David Gale

2003-02-28T21:05:00.000-05:00

What a disappointingly decent movie! After Roger Ebert gave it zero stars, I was jonesing for a high-flown, self-engrossed, bleedingly earnest cinematic meltdown. After all, The Life of David Gale is about a philosophy professor who is also an anti-death penalty activist, and Hollywood has always hilariously overestimated its ability to comprehend, let alone portray, either academics or politics. And since Kate Winslet’s character is named Bitsey Bloom, I was sure my eyeballs were going to be rolling all over the movie theater floor! Either way, I was really looking forward to recoiling in disgust as the sleazy, loose-necked Kevin Spacey tried to look innocuous despite that unctuous, basilisk grin. I was also hoping I might get to watch him fry in the electric chair, thereby living out a fantasy I’ve nursed since seeing American Beauty. What do I get instead? Instead I had to sit through a tolerable suspense drama in which Kate Winslet’s eyes made me forget all about her character’s cartoonish name, and a “surprise ending” in which Kevin Spacey turned out to be the killer. Didn’t the director see the The Usual Suspects? Or Se7en? Or Consenting Adults? A real shocker would have been if he were innocent!

The real reason Ebert gave it zero stars was because he felt the film sold out its anti-capital punishment cause. I, on the other hand, knew from the beginning that this movie had nothing to sell. The Life of David Gale is a movie in a box (just add characters, locations, etc.), and I could see the flimsy backdrops wobbling from the first scene. It’s set in Texas, although in reality it doesn’t rain that much in Texas, and you needn’t wear your coat that often. In other words, there was nothing Texas-y about it being set in Texas. That locale was just an excuse to deal in the death penalty (which was just an excuse for a motive (which was just an excuse for a surprise ending)). Winslet plays a journalist (which was just an excuse for her to get involved with the murderer (which was just an excuse for a surprise ending)). Spacey plays a professor (which was just an excuse for him to have an affair with a student (which was just an excuse for a surprise ending)). Honestly, it’s hard to believe anyone would actually be surprised to encounter the peripeteia in a movie that is nothing but reverse chronological build-up. Personally, I am no longer willing to accept this kind of Russian-doll storytelling from anyone except M. Night Shyamalan. In Hollywood today, he alone seems to know that plot is just an excuse for cinema, not the other way around.

If you’re not religiously attached to death penalty issues, The Life of David Gale is certainly watchable. It’s a mélange of ideas from movies like Silence of the Lambs, American History X, and several other movie previews for films I’ve never cared to see. Kate Winslet’s American accent is impeccable, although someone should tell her to sand down her diction; Americans (at least the few million of us who don’t work for NPR) do not enunciate. Something else that might amuse you is the segueing technique director Alan Parker (or if you prefer, as IMDb says, “sometimes credited as: Sir Alan Parker”) uses between scenes: he flashes words on the screen written in different media, like chalkboards, legal pads, computers, charcoal. I made a list of some of the words he chose: “anger,” “enemy,” “lust,” “nothing,” “pain,” “honor,” “martyr,” “innocent,” “guilty,” “condemned.” That’s just a few, but you get the idea. We’re not dealing with the subtlest filmmaker ever to yell “Action!”

Perhaps now would be a good time to put down in writing one of Sunset Blvd’s rules of criticism. I solemnly promise to divulge all surprise endings before you get to the theater and gamble your ten-freaking-dollars. Cinema is not a Cracker-Jack box, nor is it peekaboo, nor is it your fucking birthday. This means no surprises. I’m basing this rule on a law of common sense that says: “If you don’t want to know what happens in a movie, don’t read about it before you go to the theater.” I’m also taking a lesson from that corpulent mastermind and divine sadist, Alfred Hitchcock, who said that suspense is knowing there is a bomb under the desk. A scare is not suspense, a scare is something that helps you recover from the hiccups. Suspense is like the Zen koan in which a man is hanging over a cliff with one tiger snapping at his fingertips and another snarling below his feet. He sees a ripe strawberry growing on the side of the cliff and he eats it. “Ah, how sweet it tasted!”

2003-02-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

Due to extreme homework conditions there will be no new movie review this week. Instead, read an excerpt from my article on Breakfast at Tiffany’s:

“Alone on the sidewalk, Holly wanders from one display to the next, looking like the only person invited to a chic Manhattan museum opening. Director Blake Edwards presents us with a tableaux where the camera is inside the display case, giving the audience a chance to gawk at Holly the way she has been gawking at the jewelry. Perhaps he is warning us not to identify with Holly Golightly, we are to ‘look but not touch’ as if we were at a zoo observing a rare and unpredictable creature, enclosed in a glass cage. The messages we get in this scene leave us wondering: is the world Holly Golightly’s oyster, or is she its pearl?

The initial impression of Holly as a regal feline returning to her territory begins to shift: locked outside of Tiffany’s like a gamine, Holly peers at the display cases from the empty sidewalk. Audrey Hepburn in her Givenchy dress is boyishly tall and skeletally thin. She is an alley cat, a transient, an indigent. Contrastingly, her decadent garland of massive pearls and stylish maquillage denote fabulous wealth and class. Which is the real Holly Golightly? Nibbling on a bear claw, in front of Tiffany’s is the only time in the movie we see Holly eating something. Later, her ex-husband Doc (played by Buddy Ebsen) remarks not once, but twice that Holly looks “so skinny”. Is she undernourished because she can never save any money (as she often complains?) If so, why is Tiffany’s the only place she can obtain the sustenance she so obviously needs?

Stopping briefly to discard the remains of her breakfast, (the only meal she eats in the whole film, and she can’t even finish it!) Holly Golightly walks east along 57th street toward home. One of our suspicions has been confirmed: she lives in a wealthy neighborhood on New York’s Upper East Side. But once inside her Spartan apartment it becomes apparent that although she may have an impressive address, she has no money.

Ironically, at her apartment is where Holly is most out of sorts. As soon as she nears home she must scurry and hide: there is a tuxedoed man in a car outside her apartment who seems to have been waiting for her all night. As usual, Holly has no means of entry into the apartment; she needs her upstairs neighbor Mr. Yunioshi to open the door for her.

This scene introduces another of the film’s themes: doors as a baffling and arbitrary device that Holly Golightly refuses to be constrained by. She makes her own entrée into rooms and people’s lives. Five years earlier in The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe made a very similar entrance to a certain New York City apartment where Tom Ewell was struggling with issues of domesticity and independence. Later in the film Holly will treat the window as a perfectly natural means of exit and entry. Holly is a pathological loser-of-keys, but as Freud would say, there is no such thing as an accident. She tells Mr. Yunioshi that she won’t even have any more made because she knows she’ll lose them. Is this a sign of resignation or a confession? Later in the film she totes a purse surreally stuffed with 26 apartment keys, indicating a desire to master the door situation but an inept misjudgment of what it will take to do so. The door-key represents Holly Golightly’s desire to remain independent by rejecting earthly desiderata. She identifies keys with locks and locks with cages and shuns them as though they were tacky appurtenances.”

Adaptation

2003-02-15T02:17:00.000-05:00

This is a clever movie. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman hinges his plot on artistic ambivalence, resolving the artist's inner conflict by merging his two competing instincts into one hybrid story. It's a movie about a screenwriter, but not just any screenwriter, it's about Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Adaptation. And, yes, the film Kaufman is writing is Adaptation. When he figures out what his movie is going to be about, we figure out what Adaptation is about. Get it? If so, then you’ve got it, and there’s no need to sit through the real thing.

The film unfolds as a semi-comical tale of anxiety and neurosis. Charlie, the insecure screenwriter with "integrity," is suffering from writer's block; his twin brother Donald, the sweet and uncomplicated hack, is slapping together a Se7en-style psycho thriller with the greatest of ease. Charlie has a creative epiphany when he attends a screenwriting seminar. How clever, right? The screenplay tightens up and finds a purpose after the screenwriter character attends a seminar. After all the big-name stars and cameos in this film, so much self-reference seems less like a play-within-a-play and more like a Hollywood in-joke. It is self-conscious and frequently self-loathing. You may feel as if you're getting cheated an hour into the film, and even after the delightfully surprising confluence at the end, the feeling doesn't fully wear off. It doesn't help the Adaptation team that the whole filmmaker-looking-for-inspiration theme is exactly that of Fellini's landmark 8 1/2.

Director Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman teamed up once before on the clever and creative (and perhaps even philosophical) Being John Malkovich. After watching Adaptation, I began reevaluating Jonze's music video career, and I can see clearly now that he's always relied too much on cute gimmicks. The guy on fire in the Wax video was thirteen seconds of film played in ultra-slow motion to make it last the whole song. The Björk video for "It's Oh So Quiet" was just a Technicolor musical—a whimsical pop culture reference leaving nothing to hang on to after the initial "Oh, I see what he’s doing." The Weezer video for "Buddy Holly" was a special effects trick within a nostalgic TV theme. The low-fi mall dance attack for Fatboy Slim’s "Praise You" actually highlighted the repetitiveness of a great radio song. The Beastie Boys "Sabotage" video—again, just a simple '70s cop show parody. This explains why in Adaptation, Jonze virtually disappears; he has no unique visual style, and I don’t think he’d have a film career if he couldn’t piggy-back on Charlie Kaufman’s inventive writing.

Barely worth mentioning are the principal actors, Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage. For such highly esteemed actors, they sure are boring to watch on film. I'll take Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey any day (I sneaked into How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days before Adaptation started and was pleasantly surprised by Hudson's very Goldie Hawn-like charm. She is not as cute as her mother, but in that tiny body she has womanly grace and sophistication, polished off with a killer smile. Seems like an excellent date movie!) Nicolas Cage is grotesque; he plays twin brothers Charlie (schlub) and Donald (schmuck). Incidentally, there's an indirect Coppola connection here worth pointing out—Spike Jonze is married to Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, whose nephew is Nicolas Cage. I would recommend renting The Godfather or even The Virgin Suicides (which Sofia directed) before I would suggest you see this movie.

Overall, Adaptation is a clever concept and mostly enjoyable, but it's visually uninteresting and ultimately unsatisfying. Kaufman's attempt at allowing the viewer to participate in the making of the film leaves one feeling like one should have been paid for all that work.

Shanghai Knights

2003-02-07T23:26:00.000-05:00

I now realize that the biggest challenge of being a film critic is not in finding words of praise or insight to shower on some Hollywood masterpiece, and it's not in conveying one's disgust at some bloated, condescending flop. The most difficult thing for a critic to do is to find words to describe a mediocre popcorn movie like Shanghai Knights. It's especially difficult for me, since I have to somehow work in my trademark outrageous rhetorical hyperbole, and there’s not much in this movie to exaggerate about.

If you've seen Shanghai Noon (which I haven't), this movie is probably not as good as you will be expecting. Some reviews I've read have uselessly insisted on describing the plot, as though such a synopsis could be of any assistance to a prospective viewer. These well-meaning critics are deceiving you, dear cinephile, because the screenwriters and I both know that Shanghai Knights had no plot. There were plenty of locations, costumes, kung fu, and a few funny quips, but the story was just an excuse for the above—the plot was nothing but a McGuffin (albeit a semi-prominent one).

Director David Dobkin stays completely off a critic's radar by committing neither any conspicuous acts of artistry nor of malpractice. There is an annoying quasi-historical comedic theme in which Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria, and Charlie Chaplin show up, for no better reason than to elicit a chuckle of recognition. (Incidentally, I'm not convinced there is even such a thing as a chuckle of recognition, which is why I found that part so irksome.)

I didn't see Jackie Chan's last movie, 2002's The Tuxedo (with "Love" Hewitt—I heard it was a bomb), but I have seen more than a half dozen of his pictures. Anyone who is familiar with Chan's work knows that he is consistently charming and funny, and he performs all of his own ingeniously acrobatic stunts. Shanghai Knights is no exception, although (unlike many of Chan's Hong Kong films) it disappoints by offering more comedy than action. This film is more distracting than entertaining, a fact that was driven home in the outtakes over the final credits, which were funnier than any part of the movie itself.

Question: Who is this Owen Wilson guy? His face looks like it was drawn by a caricature artist in Central Park! His nose, like a pale gherkin, obtrudes weirdly from above his fishlike mouth. Where does Hollywood come up with these people? How much (if any) of this weirdness has he created as part of his comic persona, and how much is unavoidable? He possesses a Craig Kilborn/Greg Kinnear-like smarminess, which is why I liked him in Meet the Parents, where he played Gaylord Fawker’s romantic rival, a guy with a superficially perfect life who nevertheless seemed suspiciously off-kilter. His comedic style reminds one of early, Saturday Night Live-era Adam Sandler—which does not bode well for Wilson's artistic future.

I'm still trying to concoct a clever rating scale, but so far I haven't had any brilliant ideas. For Shanghai Knights, let's just say if you had a choice of seeing an evening premiere, a matinee, renting it on DVD, seeing it commercial-free on cable, or watching it edited for content and riddled with ads on TV, I would wait for it to come out on cable.

Chicago

2003-01-31T23:12:00.000-05:00

My first-ever Sunset Blvd blog post will be a quick-dry congelation of my thoughts and ideas about the film Chicago, heterogeneously blended. I won’t be able to construct a critical exegesis of the picture until many years from now, after several additional viewings and at least two post-secondary degrees. Don’t expect Gene Siskel resurrected (although I wouldn’t mind being thought of as Roger Ebert’s snarky foil).

Thumbs up, thumbs down? Three-and-a-half stars? As much as I love quantifying value, I haven’t developed such a system for Sunset Blvd yet. Go see this movie. Does that work? It is a spectacular showbiz triumph, tightening the garrote around the neck of gen X irony. Where Moulin Rouge was a vertiginous carnival binge, Chicago is jazzy, sexy ecstasy.

Somewhere in Chicago’s second reel I felt sure I was witnessing firsthand the prophesied Hollywood Renaissance. True, Renée Zellweger looks like a puckered turnip screwed onto the body of a petite fiberglass mannequin (here’s Queen Latifah in one frame with a queen-sized waterbed full of bosoms, and in the next we see Renée (when did she add an accent to her name?) all tarted up like a chorus girl despite those two deflated flapjacks on her gym-hardened torso) and the John C. Reilly number is a total bore.

But Catherine Zeta-Jones, oh Catherine, with your flawless symmetry and shimmering, vivacious kinesis, as a transcendental sex goddess for the 21st century you are such a diamond as Hollywood has been missing from her crown! I see you even now as in a dream, hounded by the media Pharisees and besieged by paparazzi, stomping your deco heel and saying “I tell you the truth, before Hollywood was born, I AM!”

But then again, like so many ex-Christians I am prone to such messianic fantasies, especially when the house lights go down. There’s something about being in the dark with a beautiful woman that brings even me to my knees. As far as I could tell, the music was vibrant and soulful, but who listens to music in the theater? The opening dance number (to the only song I recognized, “All That Jazz”) was electrifying, and featured Zeta-Jones’s most prominent performance. It’s a timeless Bob Fosse burlesque number that made clear to me why Las Vegas isn’t just about gambling.

Bob Fosse understood that music in movies is just an excuse for dancing! The cinema as a medium of motion (take note, Meryl Streep, I said “motion,” not “accents”) is the perfect vehicle for kinetic physical expression, and the exhilarating final dance sequence with Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones) and Roxie Hart (Zellweger—the name strangely fits, doesn’t it?) will jazz you right out of the theater and home again.

Chicago is cinema. It's about poetic choreography (keep that in mind during “The Cell-Block Tango”), it’s about Catherine Zeta-Jones, it’s about the moment you forget all the hot air the high-school kid behind you was blowing onto the back of your neck and you enter a glittering pagan realm full of angels who serenely disdain to annihilate you. Welcome to Sunset Blvd!

2003-01-31T14:19:00.000-05:00

Stand by, cinephiles! Expect a momentous post this evening to christen my brand new blog.