Bull Durham: I hold onto this opinion, rendered two years ago. But note a few other meaningful details: the presence of a grizzled old (actually 32) Kevin Costner falling for a (nine years older) Susan Sarandon, who convincingly play as equals. Note that everyone gets a happy-ish ending, which is less about handing them everything they want than giving them some measure of dignity (Millie getting married, Nuke learning to behave like an adult and realize he doesn't know everything). Note also--very unusual for a comedy these days--the profusion of jokes and humorous moments, which go from runners to dialogue to wordplay to physical comedy. I like its vision of North Carolina, and of Durham, which plays less as "run-down old place nobody wants to be" and more as "the timelessness of these things in the midst of a very specific time functions as a metaphor for baseball itself"; it's definitely the 80s, but you'd never know it.

A Long Post About Lost, Prestige TV, Comic Book Movies, and the Serialization of Everything

Lost

It's clear that my relationship to genre cultural properties has changed in the last ten years, and given enough time, it's clear that Lost is the reason for that change. I had a much larger appetite for them before, and almost none now. It's not entirely clear what exactly about Lost took me in that direction. But for need of a lot of something to watch, I've returned to it. I had a disparate reaction on this occasion to two of the most famous emotional beats in the story, and it might be worth exploring why. "Not Penny's Boat" had all of the resonance it did the first time. "The Constant" was a tremendous disappointment. This isn't surprising, since they were told in very different ways.

"Not Penny's Boat" is genuinely affecting because it builds over the course of several episodes before resolving. Desmond begins to get flashes that Charlie will die, and tries to save him; Desmond gets a particularly tempting vision and almost lets Charlie die. For his part, Charlie has to come to accept that his death is going to come soon and there's nothing he can do about it. The emotional punch comes because he gets to pick the cause for which he dies: he's found something worthy of that kind of sacrifice. Making that resolution changes him, frees him, to become someone who can be bold and active and self-sacrificing. He is free because there's meaning in his death. That allows him to be calm enough to save Desmond and communicate the important message that only he knows and then die.

"The Constant" is not genuinely affecting because it contrives its own problem and provides too pat of a solution. The "problems crossing between times" bit is introduced no earlier than the very end of the previous episode, and does not reappear again for another whole season (where it claims one single victim, conveniently not a major character). The life-threatening problem is given to two characters, one of whom only exists in order to pass along crucial exposition about the threat and how to get around it, and the problem for the main character is completely resolved by the end of the episode. This serious problem also, surprisingly, affected no one else involved in any travel to or from the island, and none of the numerous people shuttling back and forth between the freighter and the island for the rest of the season. The episode exists only for its endpoint--Penny and Desmond getting in contact with one another--and the rest is simply a means of getting the viewer there. It's emotional manipulation rather than storytelling, gesturing at rather than being something great.

The difference is that one of these is a storyline for a character's arc in a narrative, and another is a cool episode.

The difference between these matters because their reception says something about how we understand stories at this moment. Big cultural properties are (again) serialized: movies, books, tv shows are often now guaranteed out a certain distance into the future; like previous serials, they encourage looking at individual parts closely and wholes very rarely, and then only from certain narrow perspectives: we ask what the stakes are, whether the stories are internally consistent, whether they are, in each piece, entertaining. As a whole we might ask whether the story is worth the time invested, but these are judgments of the whole, rather than "we might omit 40 minutes/three episodes/200 pages without great loss" because the economics inform the structure of the content, rather than the content dictating anything at all. No one complains very much about mid-season episodes of a tv show that spin their wheels, because, as goes the usual critic's line, these come up of necessity in every season: even if there are only six episodes of plot, there need to be 13, or 22, or 24 episodes, so something has to fill that time. That you probably need to have seen all the other Marvel movies to understand the new ones is considered a feature, rather than a bug, and anyway, that's just how they make movies now.

When I was much younger I remember watching a few soap operas (hey, they were new tv in the summer, back when that was unusual), and particularly General Hospital when Luke and Laura were first re-introduced. Luke had been a bad guy at first, but now he was a good guy, because the show needed him to be one. The catch with a soap opera is that none of the stories can ever end, because the show must go on five days a week, and should ideally involve the same popular characters or actors. Consequently narrative logic must go out the window--filling out the time is the only thing that really matters--with characters changing allegiance and motivation all the time, and all the loopy narrative flourishes one associates with soap opera as a form.

Regular tv shows, movies, and multi-part books, lacking plot to fill out the allotted time and space, now indulge generously in melodrama and soap-opera antics (*paging George R.R. Martin*). Lost would disappear as a show if people answered each others' questions and didn't just go hiking off into the jungle every time they thought about doing something: the story needs these distractions as it needs the various other fancy-looking macguffins because the story can't hold out on its own. (As an experiment: try to summarize season 5 of Lost in one sentence. It is either impossible to do, if you try to include any of the details, or quite easy--"Ben tricks everyone into coming back to the Island, except in 1974"--which only exposes how superfluous much of it is.) Everything else is plot machinations for their own sake: Daniel and Charlotte get a romantic attachment which is entirely told and never shown, because Daniel needs some stakes for his own arc and the love of his life being threatened can provide them. Don Draper cycles through alcoholism and various women either because that's what he does or because it provides a few episodes of him looking seductive and cool and then a chance to blow it all up at the end, which will happen every season at fixed times that just so happen to coincide with the major parts of the season. (Friends, by contrast, didn't bother to get Ross and Rachel together, or break them up, at any significant moment in seasons 2 and 3 (February Sweeps, probably, but at least not as predictable). Then again, when you're a cultural phenomenon, you can do whatever you want and be certain you'll get a rating. That the MCU movies don't attempt this is probably also notable.) Loki gets himself captured in The Avengers, and it hardly matters whether his plan makes sense because it provides for Character Exposition and A Chance To Heighten The Themes Of This Movie. When movies, books, tv, engage in these kinds of stalling tactics, they kill actual organic character growth, but do so simply because the economics of the situation demand it. The skeleton shows in so many places now. One only has to look for it.

The flip-side of the soap opera-ization of things is that individual moments mean a lot less. No one soap character's great scene or arc means a lot when it's stacked up against others of wildly varying quality and changing motivation. Wasn't that time Don stopped drinking and recognized his problems really inspiring? Does "The Suitcase" mean less as an episode now that you know absolutely nothing about Don changed as a result of it? "The Constant" is a great episode if you have no idea what's going to happen to Desmond. Once you know it only serves to torture him with a bit of happiness before his life is ruined, how does it seem?

The single biggest factor contributing to the Golden Age of TV is the fact that no one can conceptualize of a creative model that works differently than this ("tell a fixed-length story until it's done and then end it?"). It used to be only comic book nerds that were suckers like this: the "even numbers are good" joke about Star Trek movies is an admission that 50% of them are bad; the hype for the new Star Wars movie seems to have forgotten that four of the six were disappointments. Now people are prepared to hold out hope for years and against all evidence that the results will be worth it, or that mediocre installments (the third of any series) are just the price we pay for the good ones.

Oddly, people seem more ready to see this in comedy than drama, where no great tv show of the last 15 years goes without criticism for losing its edge (some never regaining it) and where everyone can see the problems of The Hangover or Pitch Perfect making sequels that largely repeat the plot of the original films. The Office, for example, had one great idea--bring Jim and Pam together slowly, then keep them together--from which they got three seasons of very good tv. Once that idea was done, though, there was nothing behind it, try though they might to recreate that magic--more shocks and twists than one might reasonably expect of a faux-documentary about a paper company. Why did the show stay on the air through a number of increasingly bad seasons to the point that it poisoned its own legacy? Economics.

This matters because critical standards can do something to help explain and interpret what we're seeing. The overwhelming tendency of American aesthetics for the last hundred years has been to divide out entertainment from art, to push one lower and the other higher, until there is very little room in the middle. If a property is meant to be entertaining, this serves to silence all possible criticism; if it is entertaining, it has served its purpose. Art is reserved for those things that aim at something more complex than entertainment. But since these are the only two categories, things end up wildly misplaced: the bad Marvel movies are intended only as entertainment, the good ones compete with the best of film. Prestige tv often cannot reasonably be said to attempt to entertain, so it must be art, after a fashion. But there are trashy attempts at being artistic--Rain Man, Braveheart, the run-up to Oscar season in any given year--and joke-factory workplace sitcoms that transcend being merely entertaining (Cheers, for example). Attempting to be art does not necessarily make art; having the trappings of art isn't art, either; that no one has yet recognized The Dark Knight Rises to be the highest of camp is a great disappointment to me--it looks and feels and acts like a deadly serious movie but has a scene with a football player outrunning a sinkhole as it forms. That place between entertainment and art is so often vacant because no one recognizes it even exists.

Sorting this out is a lot of work. So much easier to let it simply wash over you, and like or dislike to your heart's content, and not worry about it. That, however, is a recipe for knowing what date "Untitled Female Superhero Movie" will open on ten years from now, because the identity of the superhero matters less than knowing that the right market segments will be served in a timely manner.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
There are no surprises in this film. The quiet brunette girl who looks like she has a crush on the main guy, so much that you think they'll end up together? They end up together. When the main guy and main girl sleep together, and you think she'll probably get pregnant? She'll get pregnant. When that perfectly nice guy shows up and shows interest in the girl while the guy is away in Algeria, and you think they'll get married? They get married. When the final scene takes place in the snow and the girl hasn't been seen for 40 minutes or so, and it seems obvious that they'll run into each other one last time? They run into each other one last time.

Worse, all of the dialogue is sung, opera-style.

And yet, this is an indisputably great movie, warm, not melodramatic even in its very conventional turns. The casting is perfect, the music neither overwhelming nor clichéd, the story structured to bring at least relative happiness to everyone. Evidence, if you needed it, of what good solid writing can do.

In Which I Discover the Importance of Film Editing

Lord of the Flies
Overlord
Au Hasard Balthazar

Lord of the Flies is not a great movie: the quality of performance given by the children in it is too variable. But it is a good movie that ends on its strongest note. I was quite surprised after watching it to realize that many of the individual scenes features improvisation, including improvised dialogue. As a general rule, I hate improvised movies: Aguirre, the Wrath of God captures indolence and insanity but at the cost of narrative and viewer patience; Drinking Buddies and its mumblecore ilk hang on too little story to justify their meandering run times; Anchorman demonstrates that it might be very funny to be in the room with a bunch of humorous people trying to make each other laugh, but that hardly makes a movie. Lord of the Flies avoids all of these pitfalls. The question is why.

The answer became obvious when watching Overlord, which matches archival footage of World War II to the story of a British man who is called up for service and dies during the D-Day invasion. The director went to great pains to use equipment that would have been available in the mid-40s in order to match up the look of the different parts. The effect is astonishing: the parts don't roll off each other seamlessly, but there's a strong mutual sympathy between the two. It's a film that puts most of its focus not on story or cinematography but editing. The two halves work because each is slotted into the appropriate parts of the overall film, and it is clear that switches between the two are quite intentional. The same applies to Lord of the Flies: each individual scene has a purpose within the overall narrative, so the improvisations are good when they work to the end of that scene (and its place within the overall narrative), and may be discarded when they are not. That is to say, there is a principle that allows the director to decide what remains and what is cut, that principle is tied to the overall thrust of the film, and the director edits the film with these considerations in mind. The principle that affects whether a joke is cut in Anchorman is whether that joke is funny or not, which has very little to do with the narrative of the movie, such as it is.*

The high art version of this is Robert Bresson, who chose people who were not actors to get more instinctive reactions, and frames much of Au Hasard Balthazar around the reactions of a donkey. If the story is well-constructed and the editing purposeful, then the end product can be quite profound and beautiful.

Watching these was one of those rare moments when some new element of vocabulary makes itself known; I'm not sure I had ever thought about how a movie was edited before. But it adds something new to the conversation, a new way of understanding why we like what we do and why certain things are effective and others not.


*The Big Lebowski, which is also mostly concerned with whether its jokes are funny, gets a pass because it is obviously supremely scripted in the manner of most Coen Brothers films. It's the writing rather than the editing that exerts control, but the control is there all the same.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, Movies About Women Edition

Cléo from 5 to 7
Ida

The idea of experimental or avant-garde--it might be better to say the aspiration--is that formal experimentation with the structural components of a work of aesthetics can result in the unexpected. In the case of Cléo from 5 to 7, that unexpected thing is romance. In the early parts of the film, one can see the way that the camera is playing at the conventions of typical action shots, conversation shots, and the like, in the same way that the action itself is mannered and fractured, occurring in real time but with almost Fellini-like interludes. The camera will drift out of frame to pick up someone else's conversation; it will land at unexpected angles; the screen goes black or almost black several times; it will occasionally and without explanation shift the camera from a view of the characters to the character's own view. It reminds one of the story about Akira Kurosawa, who was asked by a famous director--John Ford, maybe--why he had composed a particular shot in a film in the manner he did; the answer was that to move the camera an inch to one side would have shown the Tokyo airport, not ideal for an epic set in medieval times. The direction shows such masterful control to work in so many continuous takes, and controlling for so many things that would traditionally be offscreen. When we meet Antoine at the end, the film can suggest several possibilities for what the encounter might be--unexpected street harassment, a tryst, a threat, an awkward encounter--that when it turns into none of these, it focused quite intently on the restorative power of conversation, of art, of beliefs, of humor, of human connection. But it requires that potential volatility, and sense of the unanticipated as built up throughout the film, to make its ending so transformative.
Obviously quite an inspiration for the Before trilogy, as well.

Ida received a lot of buzz for its artistic affectations: black and white, each shot framed with minimal camera movement (most with none), use of framing to emphasize the painterly aspects of each shot, and light that borrows fully from Baroque chiaroscuro and most specifically from Vermeer. When I was a younger man, I would have undoubtedly preferred this to the chaos of Cléo specifically for its affectations and classicism, and, as an older man, was prepared to dismiss it for those affectations. But over the course of the film, the action in each scene increases, to the point that the last shot, a long take of Ida walking, is the only one done with a hand-held camera. One has to account for both the technical aspects of the film as well as its subject matter, not least because the story centers around two characters, one of whom does not reveal very much about herself. The reading I am left with is that the final shot represents the only, or first true, action taken by someone who has mostly followed the course they were on, or simply reacted to events. The young man makes the mistake of offering her all the things she only knows by their absence, or as a source of pain, and she ultimately feels unable--or unwilling--to do any of that. Ida saw herself, as her aunt repeatedly insisted, as having a duty to people like her, until she no longer knew any people like that.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption: Let's Watch Some Movies We've Already Seen Edition

Four Weddings and a Funeral
Mean Girls

Scott Fitzgerald once said there are no second acts in American life. As if to prove the point, the line has served as easy lede copy for every magazine and newspaper story about individual comebacks since it was written. The line makes rather more sense about 'second acts' in the sense of Act II of a play: Americans like a good origin and establishment of conflict, and love the climax of conflict and its resolution, but are often quite unable to do the work of a second act of a five-(or even three-)act play. In that space the plot generally moves more slowly but themes and motifs are developed, depth can be added to characters, time taken to reflect on the situation, important counterpoints to the main action established. It's not that this cannot happen, or does not happen, but it frequently happens that all the pieces, none of them bad in themselves, do not quite naturally integrate.

Like everyone else, I love Mean Girls, but it's emblematic of a problem in a number of movies that are in the 1:30-1:40 range. The first hour proceeds with one general idea and conceit, there's a shift, and the remaining 30 or 40 minutes are tonally quite different. It's a funny high school movie about the dynamics of being a girl, up until the point when Cady throws a party in her house. After that, it gets meaner, the jokes are fewer, it stops for fifteen or so minutes to conduct a town hall about the issues teen girls face, it shoehorns in an extensive side plot about the math team--barely mentioned in the first hour--in which (as I hate) the main character explicitly says one of the morals of the movie, and ends with everyone being happy with each other. It's not bad, but it's haphazardly organized, and devotes a lot of screen time to making sure its point has been sufficiently underlined, and the tone veers as it attempts to signal both the difficulty of issues teen girls face and to resolve in the manner all high school movies must resolve themselves.

Four Weddings and a Funeral, by contrast, makes its construction quite clear: A Movie in Five Acts. The structure allows it to be significantly more winning than anything else in its general description would lead one to believe. Because it works with the conventions of a (long) play and the running time of a (reasonably short) film, any individual character or scene has to do very little work. The characters are all well-defined quickly, with additional quirks and excellent small periodic monologues, a few notable exceptions aside (is it still raining? I hadn't noticed). None has too much weight to carry, since there are so many of them and so many scenes to establish, and this also allows a certain amount to remain unsaid, an inexhaustibly wonderful quality for a movie to have. It's also--and this is, too, quite rare--a movie that allows everyone to have their dignity even as it passes them through embarrassing situations.

Boyhood

This Slate discussion seems sort of backwards:

I liked the earlier years of Boyhood when it felt like an ensemble picture, though the parents, too, got less interesting thanks to the film’s message that eventually we all become square and middle-class. But as the focus narrowed on Mason, I completely lost interest. That ending with that sunset felt like unearned, banal triumph—congrats, kiddo, looks like you’ve got a reason to put a sock on your dorm-room doorknob.

This is the danger of bringing a little too much to one's viewing. The movie read to me in the opposite way: the parents become more interesting as they get older, since the son gets a progressively larger view of them. Ethan Hawke isn't cool anymore, but he's a much better father, more grounded and mature, who has opened himself up to experiences whose validity he had previously denied (he's clearly somewhere on the religious map, if not as crazy as some of the relatives). The mother is an accomplished professional who gets to do work she loves, and the focus is at least as much on her as anyone--she gets the pleasure of seeing her son succeed, all that work coming to fruition, and a real moment of actual pain at losing him to college. What the parents are no longer is godlike, inexplicable beings: they're people. And people are both deeply interesting and a little boring.

The ending is, indeed, an "unearned, banal triumph," which seems as accurate a description of going away to college as one could imagine--it feels, significantly, like both the beginning and the end of something big, when it is (in reality) usually neither.

Casablanca

The absolute pinnacle of studio-system movies, one of the very few that lives up to the hype. The lead performances are both excellent: Bogart does some convincing emoting, and who can blame the DP for all those long reaction shots of Ingrid Bergman?* The supporting performances are all memorable and excellent: Peter Lorre, Syndey Greenstreet, Claude Rains, S.Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson. The cinematography plays with light and shadows so well, in a way that borders right up on German Expressionism. The plot is twisty but not overly so: it plays straight, with only one flashback, and the character motivations are clear pretty much all the time. It steals one of the excellent scenes from Grand Illusion, to similar effect. It plays dark humor, cynicism, and earnestness all at the appropriate moment.



The energy of the Marseillaise scene in particular seems odd until you realize that the actors and extras drew heavily from exiles and refugees from Nazism, and also if you happen to not realize the lyrics of the Marseillaise are, essentially, "we are going to murder you and your family for messing with us". It's not just defiance, it's an open threat.

This time around, it was easier to appreciate how early Rick starts his plot, and how it depends on playing everyone. It's not always sufficiently appreciated in celebrating this film: Rick's idealism comes out gradually, but his ability to succeed is dependent on his cynicism, not his idealism; it provides the motivation and then gets out of the way. An only-idealistic Rick is going to fail in just the same way Victor Laszlo will fail without Rick, sooner rather than later. The same applies to Capt. Renault: willing to ride the wave of Vichy for as long as it seems like no particular good can come from opposing them and while he can still do some small amount of good (if for selfish payoff), recognizing that anyone else in his role would likely be far worse, and prepared to reject it all at the critical moment because he knows what he should do.

Casablanca is not unlike The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in its--mid-war!--suggestion that it hardly matters how you come to the right side, so long as you join it, and that success will require both integrity and ingenuity, an insistence that some rules cannot be broken alongside the willingness to bend other of the rules. There's probably an excellent paper to be written on this.


*People are down on Paul Henreid, apparently quite the ass in real life, but I think he realistically portrays someone who is both larger-than-life and monomaniacally focused on his goals. (No one mistakes the figures of Army of Shadows as wooden, though they are similarly opaque.) That's the point of Rick sending Ilsa: Victor does not recognize his own emotional needs, though everyone else does.

Thoughts inspired by this depressing but accurate look at the movies:

In retrospect, I'm grateful to my parents for the experience of going to see movies in the theater, and the care that went in to choosing those movies: the summer blockbusters with the highest production value and the most substantial stories, whether action, suspense, or comedy. Making a point, if haphazardly followed, of seeing at least one of the films nominated for Best Picture. Sprinkling in Merchant/Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations, and most particularly not treating it as a girly thing to do. These provided me with the realization, even if I wasn't always interested in it, that there was something more worthwhile and enduring than the crap I would consistently choose to watch it allowed--Home Alone, Ace Ventura, that movie where Arnold Schwartzenegger has a baby. That experience was, in some way, cultural literacy, or its origins. I plotted a conventional-but-interested course in high school and the first part of college, classics and indie films, nothing very substantial. Then I woke up one morning in college and realized I had no vocabulary in film at all, had the proper response to this (mild shame), and subscribed to Netflix.

Now, of course, we don't go to movies. We will see the random comic book adaptation or similar (Snow White and the Huntsman killed us of that habit), or the random prestige film, but two of the last three things we went to see in a theater were Richard Linklatter movies (both excellent). The third was American Hustle. We contemplate, but do not attend, the old films that the Carolina Theatre screens... and that's it. We can watch our favorites at home and branch out a bit with the help of Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu. Film is not unlike the novel at this point: a person can choose to live entirely in the past, and do so happily; living in the past is entirely compatible with one's tastes changing, even changing radically.

Looking into the future is depressing: an endless march of slight variations on things you have already seen if you've been in a theater in the last 15 years. 'Good' and 'bad' are such relative terms now. No one would dispute that the X-Men movies tend to be, on the whole, better than the average comic book movie; the best of them (X2) could be described as 'fairly good," and the rest are ideas executed at various degrees of hamhandedness. If the argument for Days of Future Past is that it's more like the good parts of First Class than The Last Stand, how could anyone see that as more than a guarantee the movie is not a trainwreck? I liked The Lego Movie--who didn't?--but the prospect of four more fills me with dread. Is there the slightest chance that these are not all slight variations on each other? People once thought Pirates of the Caribbean was original, before the second film destroyed all that goodwill. And then they made two more. This is true even outside the realm of comic book movies: Anchorman 2 proves only that it was a miracle the first one was good at all. The key to the old system was choice, the ability to select from amongst a (relatively) diverse slate of genres and themes, and choice is the one thing that doesn't much exist now.

The lover of reading in me is moderately pleased by this state of things: if there's nothing worth watching, then there's nothing I'm missing, so let's all go read a book.

The Lazy Writer's Guide to a Blockbuster Movie

Guardians of the Galaxy

Actual dialogue from this movie:

"Put it down, you fool, or you'll destroy us all!"
"You're scared because you're soft!" [Pounds chest] "In here!"
"The time has come for you to renounce your paltry gods" (bonus: mangled pronunciation makes it sound more like "poultry gods")
[Hero miraculously survives] "But you're mortal! How?!"

There's an old bit about how the difference between amateur clowns and professional clowns is that the professionals will never paint their entire faces. Too much expression comes from the area around the mouth; obscuring it is unnatural. If the clown's goal is to look recognizably human and not, say, creepy, they know that restraint is sometimes appropriate. Attention to detail is a sign of professionalism and care about one's metier. If people think those details don't really matter, and you should just have fun and enjoy it, well, that's a vote in favor of creepy clowns.

The dialogue above is a representative sample and not nearly exhaustive. Nobody paid much attention to the details for this movie. Had they done so, there would not have been an incomprehensible rush of names at the beginning, that eventually resolved itself into a proposed genocide of one people by the representative of another for violating (maybe?) a peace treaty whose terms and purposes were not well-established, despite far too many Phanton Menace-lite scenes of diplomatic negotiation. There was also an Infinity Stone, not that the movie told its viewer anything about it other than it had a lot of power and maybe could only be harnessed by certain types of beings. As with all the other Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, there is no clear metaphysics, or physics, or economy, or politics, which all great science-fiction movies--even all the good ones--manage to establish. The sequels to Guardians have already been announced, lest the viewer be concerned someone might die: all the important characters will stick around for another two movies, no matter how 'dead' the viewer is to believe they are 70% of the way through the film.*

There are also the political complaints: a multi-ethnic, multi-species group of heroes led by a white man.** Four women characters in total: a dead mother, who lied about the main character's father's identity; the appropriate-for-a-13-year-old 'love interest,' who is just a female man except when she inexplicably isn't able to fight for herself and needs to be saved; a slave; one of the clear bad guys.

Drax has some generic "you killed my family" backstory that is delivered entirely in dialogue, without any useful details. It's as though no one thought to do the Gladiator-style flashback, which requires no actual action sequences and takes up perhaps five minutes. Everyone else in the group goes along for the ride for reasons that are never made clear, or quickly abandoned. There's also no character development, a rising problem in science fiction and comic book movies. No one has even the most basic of character conflicts: no one has to make any difficult choice, never mind being troubled by the conscience of a Mystique or Nightcrawler. Has any character learned any lesson aside from, perhaps, "believe in yourself" or "trust in your team"?

And this leaves aside the question of whether this is a worthwhile type of movie to be making in the first place, but what it sets out to do, it does poorly. Why was it so successful? Why is it so well-regarded? Because it was explicitly not as gloom-filled as many other MCU and science fiction movies.


*I am not dumb. If someone is "dead" and the movie has an hour left, they are not dead. If Agent Coulson wasn't dead, ain't nobody in any Marvel movie ever going to be dead. So that's some metaphysics, at least.

**Professor X might run the X-Men, but he clearly has some ambivalence about it.

Desert Island Friday

Films:

Barcelona: The undisputed champion from when I first saw Taylor Nichols doing the jitterbug to Benny Goodman while reading the Old Testament, a scene which I watched, rewound, and then watched again immediately. For a long time I was not so fond of the third act, which seems to belong to a tonally darker film than the rest of it, but it's really a tight character study that is incomplete without it.

Casablanca: steals the "play the Marseillaise over German officers singing" bit from Grand Illusion, but otherwise the best of the non-auteur studio films.

The Apartment: The only optimistically tinged Billy Wilder film? Cynicism and compromise, out of which comes something that's neither. Baxter's little 'Robinson Crusoe' monologue is the best:



My Dinner With Andre: Mostly known as "that movie where they just talk for two hours." But it's masterfully composed, with Andre's stories in the first half starting out funny and moving so gradually into subtler and sadder emotions that the viewer is unlikely to notice it. The second half moves on to lighter topics like how to live in the modern world and what it is to try and know someone else. What's more, the film is one long crescendo, with the strongest ideas and dialogue saved for the very end. It would be hard to imagine a more insightful meditation on what it means to be an adult.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp: aka "the WWII movie Winston Churchill hated for being too sympathetic to the Germans," all the more impressive for a film actually made during WWII. It has Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook, two of the four actors who serve as a sign of at least minimal quality in a film, and both play the comedy and drama well. It's also subtle: when the German officer played by Walbrook is attempting to emigrate to England during the war, he gets a speech in which he is asked to explain why. His wife was English, he says, and when she died, his sons, both ardent Nazis, would not attend her funeral. There are many ways to portray what exactly was wrong in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, many of them more explicit, to say that basic human decency was lacking, but "creates sons who won't attend their mother's own funeral" says it delicately but unmistakably.

On Lists, and the Popularity Thereof

The internet is filled with lists. Leaving aside economic motives for producing web content that people will find objectionable, good-faith lists have to embody two related requirements: they position the writer within the ranks of people who follow whatever is being listed, and they serve as a signal to people who have no familiarity with the genre what those in-the-know consider to be worthwhile. Lists on Gawker sites exist to start arguments. Lists on Buzzfeed or The Toast exist to make the reader feel hip should they get all the references. Pitchfork's lists are good exercises in both functions: within a community, they signal the willingness to accept or reject the hype for different musicians; outside that community, they function as a comprehensive guide to what is good in certain genres of hipster-approved music. Book rankings, like Modern Library's 20th Century Novels list, or film rankings, like those of AFI or Sight and Sound, are exercises in canon-making, but allow people to make certain claims about themselves based on where they disagree with the ranking.*

Given these two functions, this ranking of Sonic Youth albums is quite odd. The purpose of the list is, as the author announces it, to establish his credibility as a superfan, hip and knowledgable.** If he did not expressly announce this, making Daydream Nation--the generally agreed best Sonic Youth album--#6. One does not bury an obvious #1 unless Making A Statement. The list, however, culminates with Dirty, which contains five or six of Sonic Youth's most accessible, poppy songs. In other terms: it's like making a list that situates itself as bold and contrarian by asserting II to be the best Led Zeppelin album, not IV, or that Steven Spielberg the best director--neither implausible nor original.


*Let me tell you sometime about my feelings on The Best Years of Our Lives, or, say, Faulkner.

**It is also to make the bizarre argument that Sonic Youth is best when it's Thurston Moore's band which, given Moore's recent shredding of the principles he built his stardom around, is an odd choice, to say the least.

Deep inside the heart of any major fan is the conviction that their favorite artists must support their worldview. The problem with Christopher Nolan movies is that they underdevelop their thematic content: Memento is about memory and free will; The Prestige is about illusion as a metaphor for deception; Inception is about the nature of reality and our choices; Batman Begins is about what happens when you join and then leave a shadowy cabal of ninjas who secretly control the world. Each of them is about its subjects only in the most superficial and perfunctory of ways: there is the text, which lays out the themes in the broadest possible terms and rarely elaborates them, some basic symbolism, a clockwork plot, and a complete absence of any further elaboration. The films are perfect for a certain kind of reading, one that begins with the assumption that there must be a single, significant meaning to the whole and assigning that meaning in the most coherent manner possible, whether or not the film itself supports that meaning.

I am a fan of none of these things. The grim tone wears very quickly in movies that are very long. Adult seriousness is recognizable by its occasional comedic tone, which as most adults know is eternally present in life. The commitment to grim realism is also often colored by sentimentality rather than a more human range of emotions, genuine emotional reactions replaced by a general feeling of being impressed by the nature of the universe. Rather than the range of emotional connection to a variety of different people, there is only the most tear-jerking of parental or pseudo-parental connections (here we enter the territory of what is wrong with comic book movies, as well); individuals become totems of types. Cobb in Inception is a Husband and Father. The details of his wife are held out of the story for the longest possible time, and even less is said of his children: his Desire To See Them is what drives him.

The clockwork plotting of his films is also difficult to put up with. The question of construction in any narrative form is this: would the story collapse if the elements were ordered differently? My favorite example is the novel The Luminaries, ordered as the serial recollections of a group of men about events that have been transpiring in their community. Each tells his story and adds a bit of information to what has gone before, but the construction of the novel makes it clear that most of its length is taken up with these recollections, which will, by the end, bring the reader up to date. There's no particular reason why one of these gentlemen--who now all know the whole story--can't tell a brief summation of it, except that the book could not exist if they did so. Memento is not much of a movie if it is ordered in chronological sequence; Inception doesn't happen as it does if what is eventually revealed about Cobb is known at the beginning (it also might put more unwanted stress on questions like "why can't Cobb go see his kids exactly?" "why did people think he's responsible for his wife's death, which was obviously not the frame-up we are supposed to believe it to be?" and "why isn't Cobb in therapy?" Dwelling too much on this last one might also raise the question of why Batman, with his extensive emotional trauma, is not in therapy, unless Great Men Don't Need Shrinks).

This is unfortunate because the science fiction many of Nolan's films aspire to is a great genre for working out meaning, especially through the form of a single metaphor or allegory worked out to its full extent (Planet of the Apes is not subtle, but it is thorough) or complex but not complicated reflection on the conditions of normal life (Blade Runner is not a game of "who's the replicant?"; whether the world gets saved, and what happens to Bruce Willis, are neither of them the point of 12 Monkeys).

Interesting that the Dissolve roundtable on The 40-Year Old Virgin stumbles over the sexual politics of that movie. The contradiction is simple: most of them like the movie, or liked it when they first saw it, and now need an explanation of how that could coexist with its problematic treatment of women and male homosexuality. Thus the two unsatisfactory options presented, that the film was acceptable in 2005 but not in 2014, or that the jokes are acceptable because they are not mean-spirited. Not present is the obvious third option, that good-spirited people who knew better shouldn't have been making those jokes in 2005, and that the distinction between "laughing with" and "laughing at" the characters is a thin one; the long and sordid cultural afterlife of the movie's gay jokes should be indication enough that a large portion of the audience for this broadly popular movie did not grasp the difference.

There's now a portion of the internet devoted to unearthing peoples' past statements and opinions and attempting to retroactively punish people who once believed things inconsistent with the standards of 2014. This is as misguided as the attempt to play off 2005 jokes as products of a different time that cannot possibly be held to our (new!) standards. The correct thing to say, it seems to me, is this: cultural products, opinions, political stances, etc, are a product of their times, which is to say of a complex web of interactions which we cannot recreate entirely, not least because some significant portion of that web happens within an individual person's head. Since we are bound to be charitable in our interactions with one another, we should assume the presence of sufficient explanatory reasons for the behavior we deserve. But we can also, by the same standards, point out that sweeping generalizations or attempting humor off the identities of marginalized people is always going to be bad form at best. Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan may be alright guys, but "you know how I know you're gay?" was wrong as a violation of decorum, not political correctness, as tasteless in 2005 as it remains now.

(I realize this is both a cranky old man and a buzzkill reaction. I am not an Apatow fan, so it costs me nothing to point out that one of the many not-particularly-funny jokes in his movies is also deeply problematic. But compare this to a similar joke structure in 1998's The Big Lebowski:

The Dude: Walter, the Chinaman who peed on my rug, I can't go give him a bill, so what the f*** are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: What the f*** are you talking about? The Chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you do not … also, Dude, "Chinaman" is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.

...in which The Dude is wrong, Walter clearly right, and the joke is in Walter's correcting him and the precise verbal formulation in which the correction is given.)

Art and the Artist

(In response to Phoebe specifically, but also in general)

I tweet the following semi-periodically, and it probably deserves a longer explanation:

"A periodic reminder of how much relevance an artist's personal life has to the aesthetic evaluation of their work: none."

There are two primary reasons behind this: it is difficult, if not impossible, to know enough about an artist's personal life to make a definitive moral judgment about who they are, and the decision to let ethical questions dictate aesthetic responses has a tendency to crowd out the time one might take to enjoy art.

In order to get this argument off the ground, I have to stipulate one--hopefully uncontroversial--element: all human beings engage in a mix of good and bad behavior, and almost everyone's bad end includes some actions, opinions, and mental states they would prefer not to be made public. Nick Hornby has a riff on this in High Fidelity, where the narrator, having just admitted to having done five terrible things to an ex, asks his readers to think of the five worst things they've done to someone they were dating, and then asks them how they feel about being judgmental. People tend to want to accentuate the good things they have done and ignore the bad, or simply questionable, things. Outside observers who are not neutral tend to focus on the good or the bad. Consequently, the information that's available to us about artists from secondhand sources tends to be either good or bad, depending on whether it's a friend or an enemy speaking. But the information these people have is limited, and only the artist will ever really know.

Which is, as it happens, how it works with most of the people we meet: we just accept as a fact that their personal mix of goodness or badness remains unknown, and so we judge on those elements of their personality that are visible to us.

For artists, whose personalities tend to be in larger view, intentionally or not, the judgments appear to be trickier. How do we feel about Roman Polanski, or, assuming the charges are true, Woody Allen? I liked Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but I also read the book of essays where he gets very judgmental about his single mother's dating habits, and humblebrags that even though he wasn't cool, he definitely slept with at least one of her friends, and many other women he found desirable. What do I do with that? Jonathan Franzen appears to want to be the world's worst posthumous friend to David Foster Wallace, and seems to have some issues with anger and women. Dan Harmon appears to be obsessive and alienating to a number of people he works with, and the Hollywood grist mill provides more examples than I could even list here.

(I also note that the routine excess of popular musicians never generates the same ire, or certainly doesn't now. The last things I can think of are David Bowie's saying England was ready for a fascist leader, and Eric Clapton's effusive praise of Enoch Powell, both of which have obviously harmed their careers. (It's also, I believe, not entirely clear that Clapton does not still agree with Powell))

The issues multiply with past artists: what are we to do with Hitchcock's misogyny (especially as it is mostly absent from his earlier British films)? Should we lend credence to the rumors about Grace Kelly's active personal life? The grubby details of Barbara Stanwyck's rise to fame? Spencer Tracy's multi-decade affair combined with a refusal to divorce his wife? How should we react to the more sordid details of W.H. Auden's personal life, or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism and crypto-fascism? Ernest Hemingway leaving his wife and young child for his mistress? Scott Fitzgerald's drinking, and treatment of his wife? How about Jean-Jacques Rousseau sending his children to the orphanage? And what of the people whose morality we can discern nothing at all: Homer, for example?

At this point, there are two options: one is to define a standard of those shortcomings which are morally relevant to consider, both present-day standards and those which are appropriate for the time. Failure to do the latter would require excluding large swaths of culture for insupportable stereotyping by race and gender. The former is also revealing, in that there are a number of indiscretions which are not considered to be reasons to boycott an artist's work. Even so, one can define an acceptable standard, assess the information available, determine what in it is reliable and does not come from a source that might be compromised, and come to a conclusion about whether the artist's work can be supported. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of work, and fully engaging in this process would eat up more time than the average book or movie would be worth.

The other is to conclude, perhaps even reluctantly, that ethical questions are separate for aesthetic ones, and aesthetic reasons should guide our decisions about what to consume. Works of art can get away from their creators, after all: even the staunchest defender of the view that Mark Twain was a racist has to acknowledge that Jim is the human and moral core of Huckleberry Finn, and Woody Allen can say something important about the need for moral standards in Manhattan even if he's a lout. If Roman Polanski makes a good movie, it is good because it is in some important way human, or truthful, or beautiful, or excellent, even if its director is none of those things. The capacity to create something unexpectedly great is one of the formative reasons for reading and watching and listening. And, moreover, the capacity to recognize in the thing one has done wrong its meaning is the redemptive possibility of art, and not to be taken lightly; Fitzgerald's late-in-life stories are his failures realized, someone who understands the depths of what he has done wrong. The emotional core of Annie Hall is those final scenes in which the character understands exactly how and why he was wrong, and creates something to fix it, which leads him to fix himself.

All that being said, I am fine with moral reasons working on the margin of aesthetic choices: vita brevis, longa ars after all. I've seen a couple of the 'good' Polanski movies and did not much care for them, so my uninterest and the additional moral reasons provide an incentive not to attempt a new film that garners good reviews. This is not incidental, since I consider periodically revisiting things I have disliked in the past to be one of my responsibilities as a consumer of culture. The moral judgments themselves I am also comfortable with: if Woody Allen did what is alleged, he deserves a mark against him. 

(A theological aside: I am uncomfortable with this even as I acknowledge my attitude about it. I think I am bound to hope for his redemption and to believe in its possibility, so even while maintaining my moral judgment I think I must also accept that one day I might need to transcend it, and let it go. And accept the possibility that this might come about without my ever being aware of it.)

There are also relevant economic angles and authorship questions along the lines of "A Woody Allen film or one he co-wrote and directed and which a bunch of other people made critical aesthetic contributions to?" and "Scott Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins?", but this post is too long as it is. 

I am less inclined than most to be concerned about kids only watching what's on nexflix these days, despite a great amount of hand-wringing on the subject. The reason is simple: I used to be one of those people. Approximately ten years after I recognized this as a potential issue, I've seen 76 of AFI's top 100, and 53 of Sight & Sound's top 110. There are a few issues being conflated:

1. Access: part of the reason my film education was so poor prior to 2003 is that movie distribution was poor. The movies I had seen were for the usual reasons: a smattering of classics available at the local video store, a few VHS tapes my parents had bought or would rent from the library (the latter of which skewed towards Merchant-Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations for obvious reasons), and the requisite freshman year friend who was taking a film class and invited me along to the screenings that taught me the value of foreign films (The 400 Blows, Red Sorghum) and hate Robert Altman. It was hard to get a hold of very many movies at all, much less high-quality copies, so even if I'd had the money and the inclination, my options would have been sorely limited.

There's precious little appreciation that the introduction and acceptance of DVDs in the early 2000s had the same democratizing effect as the introduction of CDs in the late 80s: everyone converted their catalogues to the new format, which meant cheap, high(ish)-quality editions of almost all movies. My interest in music was sustained because I could go into, say, Best Buy in 1996 and get five cds for $25, because they were bands no one had ever heard of, and the store just wanted to get rid of the inventory. I bought Woody Allen movies and foreign films for the same reasons: I had no idea if it was good, but it was $10. This move is also what makes Netflix possible as a business.

It's worth circling back to this: if someone isn't interested in movies now, it's a question of will. But will can be changed, if it's not a question of berating people for their poor choices, worrying about the future, etc.

2. Canon: If there's a logic behind the AFI list, I've never been able to find it. "These are good movies that were made in America" is not going to ease anyone's transition into watching film. Nor Sight & Sound's "these are foreign films that usually have good cinematography." For their to be a "new Netflix canon" there must be an "old non-Netflix canon" it's replacing, except there isn't one. Film has lists, but no narrative: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gone With the Wind, Annie Hall and, oh, Up are all quite good films, but good in different ways and different genres for quite disparate reasons. A generation of filmmakers might be working in sync with what came before (the Cahiers du Cinema people drawing from noir and westerns), or in opposition to it (the 70s Auteurs versus the studio system); careers are significantly longer and credit is given for doing the unexpected (Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success; Billy Wilder writing Stalag 17), so the fact that Fritz Lang directed it or Marlon Brando starred in it doesn't tell you much. College students looking for an exhaustive-if-limited selection of films they need to watch (something on the stature of Pitchfork's best of lists) have no real options.

3. Points of ingress: The most fortunate coincidence in my years of movie-watching was having Woody Allen be the first figure I was interested in: he constantly makes reference to other films and is not particularly shy about doing so. From him, I found Bergman and Fellini, and thus New Wave and Neorealism, the 70s movies to which his best works were a contrast, and on from there. It takes a lot of time: I watched many westerns until I figured out I didn't particularly like them, and spent a lot of time figuring out I will never care for Kurosawa (Dursu Uzala, maybe). Along the way, there were surprises: Powell/Pressburger, say, or Buñuel, who I didn't expect to like, but did.

4. Let me again state a general opinion that one of the problems with American culture is the idea that all one's tastes have to be set at age 18, if not sooner. I prefer different things at 31 than I did at 21, and would suggest that the process of aging itself has allowed me to like things I would have previously dismissed. That students arrive at college--or leave!--not having sampled widely from world cinema is not a problem. There's a whole life to make that happen.

It's worth noting that these proposed edits to Star Wars Episode II vastly improve the film, but improve it only from "train-wreck" to "serviceable genre movie."

We Have No Control Over the Content of Movies!

...we just write them. And then Economics happens, and they have to be mediocre.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption

The Wages of Fear: After reading Germinal the word that seemed most appropriate was 'cinematic,' since Zola put so much effort into rendering physical spaces and actions in the most epic terms. There I expressed some doubt that a movie could translate that sort of narrative pressure, since the novelist's great advantage is the time it takes to physically read the story: the action must crawl, even when it races in the narrative, and this ratchets up the tension. The Wages of Fear is a thriller whose action is best describable as novelistic.

It's one of those movies whose premise sounds ludicrous: four down-on-their-luck men are hired to transport nitroglyercin across a South American jungle. 90 minutes of the 150 minute run time follows them on this path. Verrrrrrry sloooowly. Even knowing the eventual fate of each of the protagonists--I am a sucker for spoliers on Wikipedia--it's still riveting material that can return to the same basic beats without becoming repetitious. 

In Which the AV Club Becomes the Slate of Pop Culture

"I Hate the video for 'Everybody Hurts' because I have never seen 8 1/2 and therefore don't understand it's a reference. R.E.M. is also not kind enough to explain the reference to me so I can feel cool for getting it, almost like they expect me to just have some basic pieces of cultural knowledge; I am therefore unable to glean any useful knowledge from Fellini that might contribute to my understanding of the music video. And, come on, am I supposed to have to think about a music video?!

...could I have some space on your nationally-trafficked website to broadcast my ignorance? Thanks."

Fellini:




R.E.M.: