Category Archives: Film

The Academy Awards

Film

Argo

Everybody seemed to agree that Argo would win the Academy Award for best picture so it was no surprise that it did.  I am OK with that; it was very entertaining and, because it seemed to be a lightweight movie that sort of wiggled into being a very good movie, it left a nice, surprising, aftertaste. That was Michele’s and my reaction, at least. We went in expecting a good movie and came out saying, Well, that was better than I expected. For no particular reason: it got good to excellent reviews but, somehow, it arrived without much buzz. I am not sure why. Maybe it is because Ben Affleck has been involved in alot of pretty crummy movies – like Pearl Harbor – and is not take very seriously, but he also directed The Town and Gone Baby Gone both of which were very good (IMHO).

Argo was  not my favorite movie of the year, however. There are so many good movies this year that weren’t even mentioned. Cabin in the Woods which was great fun even if it was almost a Joss Whedon parody. The Avengers, also by Whedon, was fun to watch but not very memorable (atleast by me). Moonrise Kingdom was delightful. I do think that all three of these movies, Cabin in the Woods, The Avengers, and Moonrise Kingdom had a certain unbelievablity that may have hurt them.

Django Unchained was another movie than came across as unreal but that seems to be Quinton Tarantino’s style. I think that part of it is that I have come to think of gritty, narrow focus, and quick cuts as more real than beautiful long scenes with deep focus.  So Zero Dark Thirty – which my neighbor, Mark, tells me is really pronounced Oh Dark Thirty and means too early to be up – seems much more real than it really was and the beautiful scenes in Skyfall and Django Unchained, not to mention Life of Pi, take away from the realness. In a way, the most outrageous movie, Beasts of the Southern Wild  seemed so real at times that it almost seemed like a documentary.

zero-dark-thirty4

berenice_marlohe_in_skyfall-wide

DJANGO UNCHAINED

life-of-pi

(Quvenzhané Wallis)

 

That is not to say that I like movies that feel real  better than movies that seem unreal. I don’t; I loved Skyfall, and Dark Knight Rising for that matter, and Django Unchained is one of my favorite movies of the year. I also loved Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Moonrise Kingdom and probably more movies that don’t come to mind. Looking back at it, it just seems like this was a great year for movies.

 

 

 

 

 

Zero Dark Thirty

Americana, Film, War

Michele and I saw Zero Dark Thirty Sunday night and we liked it alot. I was prepared to not like it, because of the torture controversy, and my general lack of enthusiasm for Hurt Locker (which won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, so what do I know). The best way I can describe the picture is that it is gritty and dense. I have never been to Pakistan – and, apparently, the picture hasn’t either having been filmed in  Jordan and India, which pissed off both the Pakistanis and Indians – but the movie fit my imagined picture of Pakistan exactly.

Driving through the streets of Lahore, it seemed like they were either using thousands of extras or they really were there. I loved Django Unchained  and Argo but, compared to Zero Dark Thirty, they seemed like cartoons shot on a set. Zero Dark Thirty seemed like the real deal. It was thrilling and, at the end, the audience cheered the winning team. Our Team! And I think that may be a problem.

The movie, sort of, presents itself as a documentary or fictionized documentary like Truman Capote’s True Blood. But it is not the real deal. It is not an objective look at what happened and today I am a little hung over from feeling so good while I watched the movie. There are several people who say it better than me, Jane Mayer and Matt Taibbi for example, and I think that I can best serve my point by giving a couple of quotes.

From Jane Mayer: In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, “Zero Dark Thirty” endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film’s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that “everyone breaks in the end,” adding, “it’s biology.” Maybe that’s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others—including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years—have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.

From Matt Taibbi: Mohammed Al-Qatani, the so-called “20th hijacker,” who may have been some part of the inspiration for the “Ammar” character who was tortured in the opening scene, might have been the first detainee to mention the name of bin Laden’s courier. But as Gibney points out, al-Qatani gave that information up to the FBI, in legit, torture-free interrogations, before he was whisked away to Gitmo for 49 days of torture that included such insanities as forcing him to urinate on himself (by force-feeding him liquids while in restraints), making him watch a puppet show of him and bin Laden having sex, making him take dance lessons, making him wear panties on his head, and making him wear a “smiley-face” mask, along with the usual sleep and sensory deprivation, arm-hanging, etc. In other words, the key info may have come before they chucked our supposed standards for human decency.

In the end, nursing my post movie hangover, the, movie makes me a little sad.

and one quote…From Jane Mayer: Knowing the real facts—the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week—I had trouble enjoying the movie. I’ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.” What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn’t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” should care a little bit more.

 

Watching Downton Abby and thinking about Tocqueville and the Golden Globes

Americana, California, Film

Michele and I are now watching Downton Abby and I am struck by the sense of noblesse oblige that the  the aristocratic Crawley family carry. They are responsible for the people working for them, for their well being, for their jobs. Because everybody’s place in the world of Downton, both high and low, are preserved in amber – in amber light, atleast –  by their birth, all the change seems to come from the outside. Improvement is not judged in change but in the perfection of the accepted status quo. The aristocratic patriarchs are noble because, in a way, that is their job. As an aside, in a similar way, Kate Middleton’s only real job is to provide an heir.

As I remember it – and I might not be remembering correctly as it has been about 52 years since I read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America which I had a hard time reading, even then – Tocqueville, while thinking that democracy was the future and that the aristocrats would fade away, didn’t think it was all a plus. In general he thought that the drive for equality was a good thing, even if problematical, but that it reduced everybody to just grubbing for money. He was in America during the Andrew Jackson era and thought America had lost – or, maybe more accurately, never had – a sense of noblesse oblige. 

As an Northern Californian, I was taught to think of Southern Californians – especially Hollywood people – as being superficial with no sense of the noblesse oblige that we superior Northern Californians had. All they cared about was making money and looking good – and that often involved boob implants –  and they had no respect for the past or tradition (after all Los Angeles was just a collection of mud huts when San Francisco was having a World’s Fair). I think that there is some truth to this, but it neglects to cop to the otherside of that coin which is that Southern California, especially Hollywood, is probably the biggest meritocracy on earth.

Watching the Golden Globes and I am not struck by any sense of noblesse oblige but I am struck by the diversity of the party goers, nominees, and winners. I first met Ben Aflect – so to speak – as the townie in Good Will Hunting who urged Matt Damon to get out of town. I know that is not exactly who he is was? – sort of – but to see the change from that lost kid in Boston to best director at the Gold Globes is to see somebody who got there on merit. The same goes for  Quentin Tarantino, a highschool dropout from Torrance, who won best screenplay for Django Unchained. Sure it helps if you are gorgeous, especially if you are a woman, and Hollywood – all of Southern California, really – is obsessed with beauty but, as shallow as it is, it is much better than being fixated on a person’s grandparents as a measure of worth as is the case in Downton Abbey and San Francisco when I was growing up.

 

 

 

 

 

Lincoln, Django Unchained, and the Civil War

Americana, Film

Ultimately slavery denied human beings the capability of being human. Walton Goggins

As an aside, I am not a Civil War buff, per se, but I am a admirer of General U. S. Grant – that may be an understatement, OK, that is an understatement – and, because I have a pretty good idea of Grant’s journey through life, especially the years when he went from disgraced Army captain to Commanding General of the largest military in the world, I have a middling knowledge of the Civil War and the despicable sin of slavery so I have eagerly awaited both Lincoln and Django Unchained. End aside.

Michele and I saw Lincoln about a couple of weeks ago and then we saw Django Unchained about a week ago (and then I saw Django again with Malcolm Pearson). Lincoln and Django Unchained seem so different but ultimately they are similar in that they are both radical takes on the Civil War. Radical in that they expose the Civil War as being about slavery. Up until now, the Civil War of the Hollywood collective memory presented each side as being equal in honor. These movies say No, the Civil War was about slavery (and Django actually says No! NO! the Civil War was about slavery. SLAVERY!). It shouldn’t have been so hard or taken so long, after all, the founding documents of the Confederacy start out with We . . . [are] dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates and seeking a confederation with slaveholding states, but, under the guise of fairness, the Hollywood Civil War has been presented as a sort of misunderstanding between brothers.

That has changed with both these movies. and it is more than about time. But, putting aside their common radicalness, they are very different movies. Lincoln is a small movie with almost an indie vibe – it could have been a stage-play made into a movie – pretending to be a big movie and Django Unchained is a big movie pretending to be B movie. To my sensibility  Django is the richer, more complicated, movie.

(Spoiler alert, if you have no idea who won the Civil War or have no idea of the theme of Django Unchained – and the title does, sort of, give it away – you might want to skip this.)

In the story arc of the movie, Lincoln doesn’t really change, he starts out as the Great Emancipator and ends as the Great Emancipator. Way before the war, Lincoln made it clear that he detested slavery, saying – among lots of similar statements – I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist. But it was not as simple as that and, as he also said, My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. By concentrating on a couple months towards the end of the war, the movie clouds that issue and, sort of, ignores the huge shift about the morality of slavery that went on in the North during the war. All that said, the movie is Spielberg at his best (which is to say, his most restrained).

In Lincoln, Lincoln is the great white father freeing the slaves and the slaves are passive pawns; none of the black people in the movie seem to have any agency in their own freedom except in an opening sequence showing a battle between black Union troops and Confederates. Still, black freedom is presented as a gift from above. There are some nice bits, however. One that struck me was a scene when southern embassaries come across the lines to meet with Lincoln and their northern honor guard is composed of black troops. I don’t know if this is accurate, but it is something that Grant might very well have done and it is a nice visual (and, with somewhat over 180,000 black troops in the northern army, it could have easily happened).

In Django Unchained, Django ultimately,  frees himself. I can not think of another movie in which this happens: always, the black guy is saved by the white guy. (Hummm… maybe I am wrong here, maybe Beverly Hills Cop would qualify and In the Heat of the Night). In Tarantino’s story, Django goes from being a helpless slave to being the most powerful man in the movie. The change is slow and subtle, but powerful. Throughout the movie, the south is shown as a society that is built – in all its institutions, large and small – around slavery. It is easy to see the helplessness – and hopelessness – of being a slave; the day to day terror. It is easy to see that there is no way out, that escape is fantasy, that slaves do as they are told or they die a painful death. The story arc is Django being unchained – duh! – but it is also about, maybe more about, Django growing into his humanhood.

I liked Django Unchained immensely and my only regret is that its violence will keep some people away. I know that much of the violence is needed to establish the horrors of the slave society and, while the violence against the slaves is sometimes hard to look at, it is necessary to both, set the tone of the slave’s absolute helplessness, and establish the horror of the day to day denial of their humanity – as well as set up the orgy of violence at the end – but it is too bad that there isn’t a G rated version because the movie deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A year of great B Movies

Film, Uncategorized

OK, maybe B Movie is not the best way to describe movies that costs somewhere between $150,000,000 and $225,000,000. But this has been a great year for big, overblown, Hollywood-blockbuster, movies. Movies that pretend to have no ambition to being art but – of course – are hugely ambitious.

About twenty years ago, the late, great, Robert Altman made a movie about, death, power, taste, and fame in Hollywood. A subplot concerned a writer pitching a movie that sounds great but mutates as it goes through the movie making sausage machine. It goes from being an art film to being a vapid blockbuster (with an implication that vapid and blockbuster are redundant). One proposed scene is of a vigil outside of San Quentin with each person holding a candle under a small, backlit, umbrella: the glowing umbrellas floating in the dark.  Of course, in the Altman movie, it gets cut. Almost at the end of Apocalypse, Captain Willard is floating up river to Kurtz with burning torches on the sides of the river.

Somehow, in Skyfall – the latest James Bond movie – both images are combined as Bond goes to a casino: standing on a slowly floating boat as it exits a lit dragon mouth. The whole scene is seemingly lit by glowing lanterns that float – and reflect – on the still, ink-black, water. It is a stunning scene, but far from the only stunning scene in the movie (and Skyfall is far from the only blockbuster with great cinematography). Somehow, Skyfall And it does this while keeping all the James Bond cliches and re-setting the Bond story. In one of the early scenes, Bond meets the new Q – who seems to be a very young 21 – in front of a Turner painting depicting the Temeraire – a  famous British warship being tugged to the scrapyard. In one of the last scenes, Temeraire is shown helping win the Battle of  Trafalgar won – of course, against all odds – by British resourcefulness and unconventional tactics. It could be the outline of the movie.

But Skyfall isn’t the only far-from-vapid blockbuster this year. It really has been a year of great blockbuster movies. In the summer, we had Prometheus by Ridley Scott which was not for everybody but, scene after scene, image after image, Prometheus is a stunning art film. Then there is the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, with its vision of a dark,  dystopian, Gotham rotting from the inside. My favorite line from Dark Knight  – and the most visible reference to today – whispered in Bruce Wayne’s ear by Anne Hathaway was There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us. 

Out of nowhere – meaning they were not part of a series – came the engrossing and suspenseful Argo which was every bit as much a comment on Hollywood as The Player (except it was much more optimistic; I suspect the floating candles would have stayed in Argo). And Looper, a surprisingly moving science fiction movie, with no floating candles but a twisting plot with an unHollywood ending.

Then there was Cloud Atlas that I think was trying not to be a B Movie and seemed to succeed in not being a blockbuster and The Cabin In The Woods, directed by Drew Goddard but, really, writer Joss Whedon’s art film pretending to be a B Movie. The Avengers, Whedon’s B Movie that almost become an art movie (except for the end).

I know that I have left off some winners, but the point is, movies are just better than ever.