Film in 2007: A Medium in Flux

The past few years, I’ve made a bunch of posts about the changing relationship between cinema and television, and with each passing year, the visual works that have really amazed me have been more and more on TV. This year is being called a great year for movies, but I haven’t seen one movie that I really loved, a movie that I could wholeheartedly recommend to people as a great cinematic experience. We’re approaching the end of the year, and I haven’t seen one truly great movie, and only a few really good ones.

Last week, I saw No Country for Old Men, a movie that’s being called the best film of the year by a wide range of critics. Personally, I liked the film better the first time the Coens made it when it was a pop, scrappy B movie called Blood Simple. No Country isn’t a bad movie, but it never gave me a charge. The plot wasn’t predictable, but the film style was. Once I figured out there was no music, and they were shooting from a restrained, objective style, I just sort of settled in, and was never really wowed again. Was I surprised by developments late in the film? Yes, but the problem is, as a two hour film, it’s hard to make me engage with the characters in a way that makes me really care about that surprise.

It’s a loose connection, drugs mainly, but watching the film, none of the characters had half the pizzazz of even minor players on The Wire. The thing that long form TV shows can do that features can’t is let the characters just exist. In screenwriting, tightness is admired. If you put a gun on the wall in the first act, it’s got to go off in the third act. The mother in this film has to factor in later because she’s talked about early on. At this point, it takes a truly fucking amazing story to make me care about the characters in a film.

The thing that changed that was watching long form TV series. The best TV shows create fully realized world. In The Wire, a character can just be there, not serving a narrative purpose, rather existing until he’s needed again. Someone like Bodie doesn’t need to be in the show after the first season, but he’s an interesting character, and it’s nice to spend time with him. The gun on the wall doesn’t have to fire in the third act, maybe it just looks nice on the wall.

I think Bodie, to choose a random example, is a more interesting character than Welyn because Welyn is always subject to the needs of the narrative. Because the film is only two hours, shortcuts are used to show us who he is. We see the truck, we see his home life, we know the guy. But, we don’t really. We’re dropped in at a point in his life when something interesting happens. The longform nature of The Wire means that we can really become a part of the characters’ lives, and understand their entire world. There’s story that happens, but the real point of the work is to create a world.

Those shows have been so successful that they’ve turned narrative cinema as we knew it in the past into a second rate medium. It baffles me that a film like No Country could get so much enthusiasm, is a competently executed film enough to make people go nuts, to be ranked the sixteenth greatest film ever made on IMDB?! The filmmaking is solid, but solid isn’t exciting. I don’t get a charge out of watching a “well made” film because I can watch a well made epic in The Wire. On TV, there’s less of a need for showy craft because they can create truly interesting and fully developed characters and worlds. In a movie, just telling a story in well done way doesn’t do it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love movies, I just think they have to operate in a different way. TV has taken over stories, that’s gone as we knew it. What movies can do is tell stories in a way that TV can’t. That’s where style comes in. Wong Kar-Wai is the template for me, his films are not narrative based, instead they are about using film style to represent character emotion and create a really visual filmic experience. His movies could not be done on TV because they are about perfectly executed dazzling setpieces that immerse you deeply in platonic concepts of emotion. Looking at 2046, there is a narrative in there, but the specifics are stripped back to instead leave you with this overwhelming emotional force. It’s a perfect use of what only cinema can do.

Miami Vice is another great example of this, a film that also falls in the territory of The Wire. However, unlike The Wire, it chooses to dwell in an emotional place. The camerawork draws you into the characters’ lives and provides a constant string of visual spectacle. The visuals and music are entertaining, without any narrative attached to them, but the real purpose is to use these enveloping visuals to make us feel the relationship between Isabella and Sonny.

Looking at this year, the best movie so far has been Death Proof. What Death Proof did was decentralize the narrative and instead let us just hang out with the girls in the first half. The specifics conflict is not really spelled out, instead we just get the emotion of moments like Julia texting her boyfriend. And, throughout Tarantino is wowing us with the spectacle of his dialogue and the pitch perfect cinematography and musical choices. He is showing us a place and letting us hang out there. Narrative occasionally enters the film, but the real focus is the hanging out.

Planet Terror, its grindhouse counterpart, is another fantastic film. This was a movie that went so far over the top, the joy is in watching Rodriguez push his film to comical, grotesque heights. In both Terror and Death Proof, there’s so much joy in the filmmaking itself, such a love of the material, it’s infectious. It’s this pop fantasia that separates those films from most horror films.

Other than that, there’s not much to speak about for this year. I saw There Will Be Blood the other day, which I can’t fully review for a couple of weeks thanks to a press blackout, but I’ll just say that it lacks the pop dynamism of Anderson’s other films, and is marred by an awfully hammy Daniel Day Lewis performance. Rather than use film technique to let us feel character emotion, as in Magnolia, Anderson just lets Lewis go nuts, to the point that he completely loses touch with reality. I never at one point got the sense that this was not a performance, that it was a real person. It baffles me that he’s in consideration for a best actor award, the guy should get some cheese to go with that ham.

It disappointed me because there were some great moments in there, but again, critics are hailing Anderson for the film’s “maturity,” which is a code word for boring, unobtrusive filmmaking. When you can do much with the medium, just sitting back and letting things happen is pointless. I don’t want minimalism, I want filmmaking that creates stirring emotional moments, the sort of filmic crescendos you can only get in movies. Look at a moment like Pocohontas’s arrival in England in The New World, that is a just awe inspiring moment because of the full combination of screenwriting, shot choice, music choice and performance. You couldn’t get that awe if you used a more minimalist style.

To use Anderson’s own work, what makes Magnolia so special is the way cinematic technique is used to make us emotionally engage with these characters. Look at the audacious “Wise Up” sequence, that sequence gets to me so much, and just those elegant, silent push in shots of the characters do so much. Blood lacks that grandeur, it’s like Anderson saw his sets and decided he didn’t have to do anything more, just sit back and film it. Coming off the formal experimentation and virtuosity of his past three films, it’s distressing to watch him retreat to a more hands off style.

It’s not mature to make movies like that, it’s that adolescent notion that ‘realism’ is somehow more valid than fantasy. Wong Kar-Wai movies may not look like the real world, but they feel like my subjective experience of reality. There are moments in Miami Vice that feel like what I’ve done in my own life, and that’s what cinema can do, that TV cannot, capture our internal feelings. But, it can only be done through the use of film technique that can be considered “showy” or “intrusive.” But, believe me, the unreality of the “Wise Up” sequence pales in comparison to the unreality of Lewis’s film closing histrionics. It’s particularly disappointing coming off the lighter, but still magical Punch Drunk Love, a decidedly underrated film.

So, if this is a great movie year, what are the great movies? What do I need to see that I missed? People who’ve read the blog know my taste, so perhaps they could recommend this year’s Domino, the kind of crazy, but great film that can slip through the cracks.