Archives | Film
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Bits
This Terry Teachout article in Commentary could use a comment box. There is much that I emphatically disagree with. I would be curious to read the sober, thoughtful, corrective response that I’m too tired to write.
I watched The Big Red One for the first time two nights ago. Sort of like reading a stack of old St. Rock comics. Not as good as I had hoped, in other words. War movies from this period do not seem to be aging well. We are used to much more impressive spectacle, and the lack of it here means there is nothing to distract us from the fact that the screenplay is dull. Lee Marvin is always fun, but just watch Point Blank instead, if I’m not mistaken. I watched The Life Aquatic for the first time last night. Like everyone says, it’s no Bottle Rocket, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums. It’s OK. Willem Dafoe’s comic turn as Klaus was fine. Love the Portuguese Bowie covers. It’s a little hard to say why the funny bits didn’t come together. I think the problem is that Bill Murray is only good as a passive presence - a mournful affect-sink, to whom things happen. So he just can’t be an Ahab character - a mad captain after the jaguar shark that ate his friend. You might think that, since he’s only a mock-Ahab, the casting against type is brilliant. But no. He can’t do manic. Example. The scene where he goes nuts and attacks the pirates. It’s funny, but only because it is so completely unconnected to everything else he does. Murray is incapable of being the character in the scene who is more animated and enthusiastic than everyone else. (He was a really terrible Polonius in the Almareyda Branaugh [oops] Hamlet for that reason. Did you notice?) The result is that there are occasional funny lines in Life Aquatic, where Murray’s character announces crazy plans in hangdog deadpan. But it is impossible to follow up those jokes with a coherent story, since the understated delivery is only funny as an undercutting of the possibility of Murray actually being interested in going to kill the shark, save the bond company stooge. So he plays his role like he’s still playing his role in The Man Who Knew Too Little; that is, the role of a character who thinks his character’s action-packed role is just a role. I think the film would have been much better with someone like Lee Marvin cast as Steve Zissou. Now I’m going to watch National Treasure. It’s too late to stop me, so don’t bother trying.
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
Adaptive Traits
Terry Teachout posts about film adaptations. "Ought a critic to be responsible for examining the source material of the films he reviews?" What do you think?
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Saturday, May 28, 2005
Pazuzu and Inexplicable Taste
Most of you probably watched Exorcist II: The Heretic on AMC last night and got interested in the demon Pazuzu. I know I did. So while researching this entity in lieu of more pressing matters, I happened to discover that Pauline Kael, in her 5001 Nights at the Movies, prefers the film to the original (228-29).
I’m more or less sure that she’s the only person who’s ever held that opinion, and I immediately suspected the hand of Pazuzu in it. There is, of course, much Teilhard de Chardin in the film, and the use of the synchrotron combined with Pazuzu’s sphere of influence over the air led me to wonder if anyone had contemplated the potential demonic origin of much contemporary media theory. Videodrome certainly takes some steps down this path.
What other, preferably obscure, examples of inexplicable critical taste can you think of?
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Sunday, May 15, 2005
Continuity
Tim Burke is back! Easily Distracted has a new address here. Tim is nervous about Revenge of the Sith.
I’ll take this opportunity to set Levywatch bells ringing by passing on a discussion of continuity issues courtesy of Jacob. (Continuity issues in comics are an issue dear to my heart, he knows.) Jonathan raised the issue via this link in this thread just the other day.
Another quote courtesy of my steady passage through Theory’s Empire. From Roland Barthes, whose word for ‘fanboy’ is, apparently, ‘reader’:
The readerly is controlled by the principle of non-contradiction, but by multiplying solidarities, by stressing at every opportunity the compatible nature of circumstances, by attaching narrative events together with a kind of logical ‘paste,’ the discourse carries this principle to the point of obsession; it assumes the careful and suspicious mien of an individual afraid of being caught in some flagrant contradiction; it is always on the lookout and always, just in case, preparing its defense against the enemy that may force it to acknowledge the scandal of some illogicality, some disturbance of ‘common sense.’ (S/Z, p. 156)
Continue reading "Continuity"
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Thursday, April 28, 2005
Indirect Being
I just watched P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia. I thought it was pretty darn good. A genre question. The several-stories-intersecting-story is obviously a sort of story. Does this sub-genre have an accepted name or do you just call it an Altman-thingy, or an ‘it’s like Pulp Fiction‘ story? Or what? (I’ll bet it has a name.) It’s fairly definable: 4+ sub-plots, each with 2+ characters; all given approximately = dramatic/thematic/narrative weight (none is dominant); each sub-plot intersects with 1+ other, and all sub-plots intersect with every other in no more than 2 steps. This structure seems comparatively recent in origin. What are the pre-Nashville precedents? Is it indigenous to film? There are obvious reasons why it works in film. The camera can pass the eyeball from story to story very economically. You can provide the audience with a rich sense of the space of the action by weaving the threads together. But novelists are clever people, too. Did the novel get here first? (I have an itch in my toe that says I am forgetting something obvious.) The sub-genre has obvious connections with lots of older genres: reliance on coincidence makes a connection with picaresque and comedy. But it has tragic elements. Screwball tragedy. Tragedy might require a sense of fate, rather than accident. Tragedy should flow from character. But you finesse that by making it your fate - your character - to have accidents. Everyone is doomed to step on everyone else’s toes. This is a view of the human condition. Anderson plays with this ambiguity well: the more sheer the accident, the more it looks like no accident at all but a Portent, Sign or other means by which fate outwardly accessorizes; scuba diver in tree; rain of frogs. What does it mean? (Did you like the scene in which everyone is lip synching the Aimee Mann pop song in synch? “By now you know/It’s not going to stop/ It’s not going to stop/ It’s not going to stop/’Til you wise up” That was a risky thing, converting the cast into chorus for 3 minutes. If the film wasn’t working well at that point, it would have snapped in two. I think it worked.) The parallel stories make for a pathos like that of intergenerational tales, where similar things happen to different people over time. You just play the theme and variations across space. There is another thematic element (call it what you like): the ‘well, how did we get here?’ pathos of not being able to see either end of any of the causal chains of human interaction. This isn’t just a matter of accidentally killing dad at the crossroads. It’s a bit more modern. I’m reading Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Here’s the first paragraph of the book:
It is a paradox that all higher cultures of our type are structured so that the more they evolve the more we are forced, in order to reach our goals, to proceed along increasingly long and difficult paths, filled with stops and curves. Man is the indirect being and becomes more so the higher his cultural development. The will of animals and of uncultured humans reaches its goal, if that will is successful, in, so to speak, a straight line, that is, by simply reaching out or by using a small number of simple devices: the order of means and ends is easily observable. This simple triad of desire-means-end is excluded by the increasing multiplicity and complexity of higher life. Now the complex of means is itself turned into a multiplicity in which the most important means are constituted by other means and these again by others. So, in the practical life of our mature cultures our pursuits take on the character of chains, the coils of which cannot be grasped in a single vision.
Hence the appropriateness of the contrast between the hapless, aging William Macy quiz kid and Tom Cruise’s ‘seduce and destroy’ inspirational sessions. Macy is stuffed with useless, disconnected knowledge. “I used to be smart, but now I’m stupid.” He can’t make connections. “I’ve got a lot of love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” Or whatever he says. Cruise is striving to get back to good old animal desire-means-ends.
This might make the theme sound peculiarly modern. (You might note Simmel’s similarity to Weber, due to their shared Nietzschean heritage; you might quote a few bits about disenchantment.) But Simmel sees ‘modernity’, in this sense - ‘mature’ culture - stretching back to “Greco-Roman culture, specifically at the outset of the Christian era. At that time the systems of living had become so complicated, the units of acting and thinking so complex, and the interests and movements of life so manifold and dependent on so many conditions ...” So it’s a little unclear why we had to wait so long for Robert Altman & co. I’m probably just not thinking straight. (It’s not like I’m saying that four stories interlocked is the greatest thing ever, and everyone ought to do it. But it is distinctive. And, yes, I did notice the film is about forgiveness, and the need for forgiveness, not about the evils of instrumental reason or anything like that. The fittingness of the forgiveness theme fits with what I’m saying, although rather loosely.)
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Friday, April 22, 2005
WHEREAS, tater tots …
Life not only imitates but resolves in favor, with one absention.
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Friday, April 15, 2005
Reputation Economy
“You poor little earthenware pipkin, you want to swim down the stream along with the great copper kettles." I saw the film a few nights ago and enjoyed it. Through the art of screenwriting, Gabriel Byrne is spared the difficulty of calling Reese Witherspoon an ‘eathenware pipkin’, however. Try it yourself at home. Whether crockery or not, does she make a good Becky or not? Speaking of Thackeray: in comments there has been touch of Barry Lyndon blogging. The Kubrick version. Do you have an opinion about that?
One thing we need to do with the Valve is fill out our blogroll. It was haphazardly composed and we are sorry if you are not on it but should be. Several folks have emailed, politely requesting inclusion, and I mostly haven’t got on the case. So tonight - whether you have emailed with a request or not - please feel free to advance yourself with Becky Sharpish brass and alacrity. In comments, tell us about your blog. A few sentences; a short, winning paragraph. If you are in the blogroll, feel free to tell us about that post you wrote, your best, showing off your fine qualities; but no one noticed your need to be raised in the eyes of the world. If you feel a Dobbinesque devotion to someone else’s blog or post, that’s a fine thing to report, too.
As to whether you will get in our lofty roll? The criteria for inclusion are vague. We do contemplate some degree of quality control. A significant portion of your posts should be humanities stuff, literary studies-ish. Bookish. It doesn’t need to be academic though that helps. General cultural criticism stuff is alright. But if we keep going out and out we’ll let in everyone. That won’t do. I’m planning to add a few philosophy blogs. Because I am a philosopher. Where will it end? This isn’t your problem. It’s mine. “They say the honest newspaper-fellow who sits in the hall, and takes down the names of the great ones who are admitted to the feasts, dies after a little time. He can’t survive the glare of fashion long. It scorches him up, as the presence of Jupiter in full dress wasted that poor imprudent Semele - a giddy moth of a creature who ruined herself by venturing out of her natural atmosphere.” Poetically, I always identify with the moth rather than the Steyne.
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Thursday, April 07, 2005
Termite Attack!
While we’re talking high and low, Sanford Schwartz has a fine essay on the inimitable Manny Farber in the current New York Review of Books (subscription only, alas). Farber is the eccentric critical wonder famous for his early (’40s-’60s) defense of the “B” movie and for the legendary distinction he invented to support it: Termite (swarming pop culture) vs White Elephant (auteurist, pretentious, etc) art.
Farber was a fascinating guy for a number of reasons. For one, he always wanted to be, of all things, a critic. Thought it a noble calling apparently, and wrote furiously for The New Republic , Time, The Nation and others for decades. And like his somewhat likeminded contemporary Pauline Kael (with whom he shared a love not just of the accomplishments of the studio system, but an instinctive distaste for cant and a freewheeling rhetorical style), he was rewarded for his dedication with actual influence over an important generation of artists. (I’m sure I’ll mangle the details here, but I think I remember reading that the reason Scorsese got to direct Taxi Driver is that when he headed out to LA to track down Paul Schrader, Brian DePalma and Francis Ford Coppola were off on a pilgrimage to San Diego to meet with guru Farber.)
I first heard of Farber when I was in grad school in English at the very height of the Theory days, and I remember a friend patiently explaining the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of “minor literature” and the rhizome and thinking with relief, oh, that sounds like termite art. (I don’t know if I was right since I figured I didn’t have to read the D & G.) I never knew, though, that Farber was also a painter in his own right. Schwartz makes his paintings sound like his critical writing--charming, idiosyncratic, unplaceable. (Images here.) I’m sorry to have missed the recent touring show.
Without John Holbo it never would’ve occured to me, but Farber’s critical vision (and maybe his paintings too) look like straight, determinedly naive pastoral. The “B” movie and the studio system weren’t just good entertainment for him; they were a little outpost of a better world. In the long run he was no Kael. As Schwartz’s superb essay points out that might be because as a stylist he was too consistent with his own tastes--the suspicion of the monumental and the fascination for the minor, burrowing, aimlessness of the termite. Da Capo has a recently updated collection of his movie writing in press.
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