Live8

It's been a bit of a slow start today, I've pretty much just been sitting around watching the Live8 conecrt event on AOL streaming media. The coverage of this event is really embelmatic of the changes going on in the way big events are covered by the media. I started watching the London conecert on TV, and they show U2 and Paul McCartney play Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band then cut away to Will Smith just as U2's set wsa about to start. So, I hopped online and got the London stream, where I was able to watch the U2 set. The TV coverage throughout the day is apalling, there's so many commercials and prepackaged segments, you barely see any of the music. But online has been great, I've seen The Who, Jay-Z, Brian Wilson, a-ha and a whole bunch of other acts.

But the whole reason I'm watching is for the reunited Pink Floyd, who are going on in about ten minutes. I'll be back with a report then, I never thought I'd see the real Pink Floyd perform togethere, but it's happened, and hopefully this'll lead to a tour or at least a few NYC gigs I can get to.

UPDATE: Well, I saw the performance and it was quite amazing. They sounded just like the album, but with enough interesting instrumental variations to make it a cool live experience. One thing that surprised me was just how good Gilmour is on the guitar, the solos on the record are unparalleled, so good that I couldn't imagine them being replicated, but he comes out and drops Comfortably Numb. Great stuff, and besides the songs, it was nice to see Roger reach out to Gilmour at the end. I don't know if there ever will be any sort of follow up tour, if there's not, this is an amazing way to go out, and for Floyd fans, this gig is going to be on the level of the rooftop Beatles farewell.

Coming soon on the blog, I'll hopefully get Six Feet Under episodes 3 and 4 soon, so I can review those. Also, I just saw Once Upon a Time in the West which rocked so damn hard, more on that tomorrow.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Yesterday, I rewatched 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the best movies ever made and #7 on my personal top 100 list. This is a film that's completely unique, an almost completely visual experience that uses the medium like no other movie. What movies are at their core is the fusion of visual and sound, that sound can be dialogue, but the medium is really best suited to moments that reliant more on music or sound effects to support strong visual storytelling. 2001's visual storytelling means that its narrative is more ambiguous than your average movie. Without dialogue to clarify things, it can be difficult to understand what is going on at the end of the movie. I know that the first time I saw the film, eight years ago when I was twelve, I immediately dashed onto the internet seeking some clarification of what I had just seen. After seeing it a bunch more times, I think I have an understanding of the movie that works for me, and more importantly, recognize that there is no definitive explanation for the end of the film, it's more about what you bring to it and finding what works for you.

But, besides the narrative, the most remarkable thing about the film is the visual storytelling. The first twenty-five minutes are dialogue free, and yet we are able to follow the story of these apes. The ape suits are still phenomenal, and this primordial world seems completely realistic. The use of music here is quite legendary, particularly in the sequence where the ape first discovers tools and his reverie is intercut with the animal bodies hitting the ground, the cuts making us aware of how the implications of his discovery.

The visual storytelling continues all through the film, and nearly every sequence in the movie has something amazing about it. I think Kubrick may have been a bit too much in love with the world he created, because the film does move at a very slow pace. I think it works well for most of the film, allowing you to get lost in the world, but the Heywood Floyd sequence could probably be speeded up a bit. Still, that's semantics, it works for me, but I know others who found the pace just too slow.

The whole HAL sequence is great, I love the production design throughout. The stark white environments and the streamlined suits, it's very visually appealing. It's astonishing how Kubrick is able to create a fully realized character out of just a camera and a voice, HAL is the most developed character in the film and even though he's the villain, you can't help but feel a bit sorry for him as he's disconnected, singing 'Daisy.' Basically, everything after the intermission is absolutely brilliant. Dave's slow journey to disconnect HAL, and then that video teasing you about what's to come. That sets up such anticipation, even on later viewings, because it signals the beginning of what I'd consider the best half hour of any film ever, the journey beyond the infinite.

The thing I love about that sequence is the way that it's purely visual storytelling, the only thing I can think of that rivals it is the last half hour of the final episode of Twin Peaks. The film becomes briefly abstract, presenting images soley for their aesthetic value, with questionable connection to the narrative. Rather than serving a specific narrative purpose, the images serve as a rorshach test for the viewer, you can see what you want in them. On this viewing, there were a lot of images that looked to me like the star child in utero, the colors were the same and the loose shape was much like what you see in photos of embryos in the womb. My favorite images in the sequence are in the journey through space sequences, the colors are so vivid and still dazzling. I love the diamonds of light that appear at one point.

Then, the 'hotel room' sequence is the type of sequence I love more than anything else, purely symbolic, drawing off what we know of a narrative, but totally open to interpretation. It's like the Twin Peaks red room, something where every single object has a meaning and it's up to the viewer to discern what that meaning is. I'm a huge fan of the way time passes, Bowman looking over and seeing an older version of himself. The entire sequence is so stately, and you get the strangest feeling watching it. This culminates in the incredible image of the star child, so simple, yet incredibly powerful. The ending of this movie absolutely owns and leaves you so alive with ideas to explore and discuss.

The most I've seen Kubrick say to describe the end of the film is this:

No, I don't mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.

What's notable for me is that this pretty much jives with my thoughts on the film, and I feel like I was on the right path in my analysis. Still, as Kubrick intended, I came away with my own interpretation of what happened in the film, an interpretation that's largely influenced by reading and analyzing The Invisibles a few years ago. I think 2001 was a huge influence on Grant's work, particuarly in the creation of Barbelith. In the Invisibles, Barbelith was a sattelite on the dark side of the moon that sent messages to select humans to help them evolve to the next stage of consciousness. In 2001, the monolith serves basically the same function. It appears at crucial times to provide guidance for humanity and help them progress forward evolutionarily.

The sequence that seems most periphery at first, but in retrospect is absolutely essential is the ape sequence. This is a microcosm of everything that happens later and is a good guide for understanding later events. Here, we see ape beings on the verge of evolution, but unable to make that leap. They are visited by a mysterious alien force, incarnated in the monolith, and this force gives them the impetus to use tools. This creates a schism in the ape community, the tool users go on the path to evolution, while those who don't use tools head for extinction. The use of tools is such a mind blowing leap for these beings, what seems commonplace for us is compeletely alien to them, but with this little nudge, they find their way to a higher mental plane.

Leaping forward thousands of years, we once again find ourselves with a humanity on the verge of a major evolutionary breakthrough, this time moving out into the stars. The Heywood Floyd sequence doesn't add that much to the thematic development, the most interesting thing is comparing the reaction of humans there with the apes in the past. There's still the same wariness about the monolith, but there's much more angst over what to do here, and when they finally do get there, the technological leap is less clear.

The HAL sequence is the most famous from the film and for good reason. HAL represents the limits of man's current evolutionary paradigm. What began with a bone has turned into a computer whose intellect arguably surpasses man's own. So, now rather than tools aiding man in his progress forward, it is actually limiting him, HAL sabotages the mission and this sabotage is indicative of the fact that man has lost control of what once aided him. This is why man needs to evolve, because the tools have become too powerful. This menace is implied in the cuts to the dying animal during the first sequence where the ape figures out how to use the bone as a destructive tool.

So, Dave uses his ingenuity to defeat HAL and in essence kills man of the present. Man has advanced beyond using tools, where can he go now? The answer lies beyond the infinite. What is it that happens during this sequence? I think Dave is transported to an alien planet, a completely different world, the light show is this journey, as he leaves behind earth and finds himself on another world. According to Kubrick, this is a 'zoo,' I see it more as a holding area, Dave must first leave behind his body before the alien intelligence can transform him into the new version of humanity. He sees his life passing quickly, and by extension, humanity itself grows older, eventually dying and transforming into a new younger version of itself, the starchild, a new type of being. This leap is as great as the intelligence leap between man and ape and the implications for humanity's future potential as great. I think we can only understand this jump by considering the leap from the bone to the spacecraft, that sort of advancement will be replicated. What this entails we can only speculate upon, apes couldn't guess what we'd be doing today, and we can't guess what this new Starchild race will be doing in the future.

Something else that should be addressed in the 'hotel room' is the breakdown of linear time. This is another idea that's quite similar to The Invisibles, the idea that when we evolve we will become 4D beings who are able to view our lives from a detached perspective, taking in the entirety of life all at once. In that room, Dave has that perspective. He finds himself aged by his journey, but then he ages a lot more, not in a linear fashion, rather he sees older versions of himself and then we transfer over to them. A question that lingers is whether the cut to the new version indicates a transfer of the current Dave's consciousness to an older body or if it's a leap through time. Dave himself may live thirty years in that room, but because he, and by extension us, are no longer bound by the conventions of linear time, we can just move through his passing much quicker. We don't get enough information to make a definitive statement, but that's what works best for me, the idea that the thirty years are there, but we don't have to see them because we have moved beyond the need to stay within time, it's just a part of the evolution into a higher form, first we're not bound by time, then we're not bound by a physical body.

The entire film is about this evolution, showing us man's roots, his present status and then his future. It's about our journey as a species towards higher and higher planes, leading to this eventual massive evolutionary jump. It's the same thing as The Invisibles 2012 event or the Promethea 'apocalypse,' they're all describing a move beyond simple physical reality towards a heightened existence.

There are very few films so ripe for analysis as 2001 and that's a large part of the reason that I love it. I think it's the sort of film that is a great reflection what your beliefs are, if you're looking for something in this film, you can probably find it, which isn't to say that it has no intended meaning, it's just that Kubrick created a film that is much about what the viewer brings to it as it is what's contained in the text.

As much as I love Kubrick's other films, I sometimes wish he would have made another film as abstract and cosmically concerned as this. Each of his projects is completely unique, but I think this is such a vital, pure filmmaking, I can't help but want more. Nearly forty years later, 2001 the year has come and gone, but 2001 the movie is more relevant to the world we live in than ever before, providing a vision of a humanity that could be if we finally get our act together and evolve.

Clean

Yesterday I watched the film Clean, which reunites the team behind the brilliant Irma Vep, director Olivier Assayas and lead actress Maggie Cheung. This is a film with quite a backstory. Sometime after filming Irma Vep, Assayas and Cheung got married, and he was writing this film as a present to her, but they ended up getting divorced, and while they were in the process of working out that divorce, they made this film together.

So, the film is prescient in its depiction of a woman struggling to make it on her own after her marriage falls apart, in the film, it's the death of her rock star husband that sets things in motion, and as the film goes on, she has to kick her heroin addiction, in the hopes that she will one day regain custody of her son.

What makes the film great is Maggie Cheung's performance as Emily. At the start of the film, she's a Yoko Ono type character, a woman who is blamed for her husband's musical decline. So, she is fiery and defiant, fending off criticism. But once he dies, she goes through a humbling process, we see her in jail, and even when she gets out, she's forced to give her son away and work through a series of menial jobs, all the time struggling with breaking her addiction. It's a totally different role than anything else I've seen Cheung in, that was a major reason why Assayas made the film, to give her a chance to play someone closer to herself in real life.

In most of the Asian films she's in, she plays a sort of chaste, idealized woman, regal and slightly removed from the dirty nastiness of reality. I would compare her to Nicole Kidman over here, someone who may play characters that may suffer, but always seems a bit ethereal, above normalcy. So, here, Assayas gives her a character who is inundated with problems, and unable to make things work. It's a stretch for her, but she completely pulls it off, she's utterly convincing in her role, all the more surprising considering she has to speak in three languages. I said it when I saw Irma Vep, I'll say it again, American directors are missing out on such a talent by not using her. Her English is great, and as an actress, she's one of the best in the world today. And even if you're not talking about the art, her presence would be a huge help in increasing international box office revenue.

In addition to Cheung, Nick Nolte as Albrect puts in a great performance. Most of his scenes are with a kid, but both he and the kid are great, and you really understand what he's feeling. Cinema isn't always dependent on an emotional connection, but the fact that you care about Emily, Albrecht and Jay makes the events much more meaningful. You want Emily to have her son, but at the same time, you want him to stay with Albrecht. The arrangement they work out at the end gives the film a great happy ending while staying within the bounds of realism.

Assayas' films always look good and are interestingly made; this is no exception. He uses a lot of handheld camera, with frequent jump cuts, and that does a good job of conveying Emily's mental instability. I really like the use of music, particularly the last scene.

This is the sort of film that works because it creates fully realized, sympathetic characters and then lets you follow them around as they struggle to find something more in their lives. I think that's a resonant struggle, even if you're not trying to ditch heroin, you can relate to Emily's struggle to make a better life, to improve her station in the world. The film doesn't judge the character, or become moralizing about the drugs, it's something that happened and now she has to move on. So, great performances, interesting filmmaking, emotional engagement with the characters, you've got yourself a great film right there.

Batman Begins

It's been some busy times lately, my sister graduated on Wednesday and I've been doing a bunch of work over at LMC to get ready for the camp. However, before this busy stuff happened, I was still guilty of one major film/comics related sin and that was not seeing Batman Begins until nearly a week after its release. The film was getting amazing reviews and everyone I talked to who saw it seemed to love it, so I was expecting something pretty good. However, I was still wary because I'm such a huge fan of the Tim Burton Batman films, particularly Returns, which is #8 on my top 100 films list. I think I might be the film's biggest fan in the whole world, it's just a transcendent piece of cinema, and I wrote a bit about it here, as well as in a 23 page paper on the film for my action cinema class.

Anyway, in that piece, I also wrote about my thoughts on the upcoming Batman Begins, saying:

And I feel like this film makes the upcoming Batman Begins seem so irrelevant. There's no way Nolan can top this film, and in making a Spider-Man style blockbuster out of Batman, he'll just embrace the commodification of Hollywood that is preventing really personal films from being made. Batman Returns is so unique because it's one of the most personal blockbusters I've ever seen. You can sense Burton's involvement in every level of this project, and maybe that's why the film wasn't successful. To make a film that some people will really love, you're going to alienate others. But, I'd rather have a film that a few people absoultely love than one that everyone likes.

Now that I've seen the film, I think I was a bit off in my assessment of it. It's a film that has actually ended up being pretty much loved en masse. The reviews are not of the grudgingly positive variety, they're raves and people out in the world seem to absolutely love the film. I would not qualify the film as a Spider-Man style accessible blockbuster, it's darker and less pop than that film. However, what it is not is a personal film, or a good film.

Watching Batman Begins, I admittedly went in with a bit of resistance, due to my love of Burton's films, but I was open enough to the film to love it if the quality was there. Then I watched the film, waiting for it to get good, to see what made people love it so much, and it just wasn't there. The whole movie went by and I was unmoved and unimpressed by a fairly generic post-Se7en neo-noir, that features a guy who dresses up in a bat suit instead of a newbie young detective.

This film really falls prey to the problems that mar so many contemporary action movies. The most important is in the pacing. I hate the idea that Hollywood executives like to lock a story into a three act structure with set emotional beats and character arcs, but this misguided rigidity is drawn from the basic storytelling principles that have worked for centuries. In order to keep the audience's emotional involvement, you have to put your hero through trials and have them changed 'by the fire.' The events of a movie should make an impact on the characters. In this film, Bruce Wayne has a pretty solid character arc for the first hour or so, he goes through changes and eventually decides to become Batman. This is a big step, but there, his journey basically ends. Once he is Batman, his problems basically stop, and other than a few minor injuries, everything goes extremely well for him at the end. There's no struggle, no sense that he earns the victory, and while this may have been intentional, it means that the entire second half of the movie is devoid of emotional stakes.

Even though it's not technically based off a comic, the definitive superhero narrative of recent years is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The key here is that she has all these powers, so fighting people isn't that tough, but when you bring emotions into the battle, it becomes much more complex. So, beating the Master in year one, very easy, beating Angelus in year two, agonizing, and the leap in quality is enormous. You need to have your hero in danger, and emotional consequences are actually better than physical danger, because the movie is called Batman Begins, we know he won't die. Admittedly, it's a bit unfair to compare a TV series, with so many more hours to build up the characters, to a film, but the basic storytelling principles are the same.

The entire movie is paced at roughly the same speed and emotional level. We get none of the ups and downs, there's no moment where we think Batman might lose. Cheesy and cliche though it may be, you really need your hero to have some problems and between his money and physical prowess, Batman can do whatever he wants. We never doubt him and that makes for bad storytelling. This movie really needed the moment where Batman is beaten, almost dead, then a swell of music starts and we see him pulling himself up, somehow mustering the strength to finish the job. Those scenes are in movies because they work on an emotional level, it may be cliche, but it's better than nothing. It reminds me of Terminator 3 in the way that a lot of events happen in the movie, but at the end you don't get the feeling that you actually watched anything of substance, it all just sort of passed in front of you in one block of footage.

The last battle between Batman and Ra's Al Ghul is completely devoid of tension, because Batman has no real conflict with the villain. Yes, they had the mentor relationship in the beginning, but he has no reason not to kill Ra's. So, without any emotional tension, we'd need Batman to be in some physical danger, and we don't get that either, or more accurately, we can't tell if he is because of the way the fight is edited. You have no clue what's going on because cuts are used to convey action rather than the actors actually fighting. The best action scenes rely on us knowing exactly what's going and being able to easily follow things. Look at the lightsaber duel in The Phantom Menace, wide shots make it easy to follow the action. Here, it's all quick cuts and then somehow Batman has won, we don't know how. But, that's not just this movie, it's a problem with many action movies today.

The other major issue I had with the film was the score. Most movies, you notice a good score and if it's a bad score, you don't even think about it. However, with the memory of Elfman's two phenomenal Batman scores, the absence of anything musically interesting here is glaring. This is another problem with action movies today, what happened to the theme song? Recently, the idea of having one piece of music that recurs throughout a film has gone out of style and it has hurt movies so much. Look at Revenge of the Sith, the score is so thematically developed, you could watch just the music and visuals and understand the emotional beats of the film. Williams has so many developed themes, he just has to choose the right moment for each one and he's got a brilliant score. Or for a more simple example, look at any James Bond film, the best moment is always at the height of an action sequence when the Bond theme starts playing, everything seems so much cooler. The theme is such an easy shortcut to make events seem important and this film's music is so generic, I was actually playing Elfman's Batman theme in my head, just to try to improve things a bit.

Why would a filmmaker not use a big theme song? Perhaps it makes things too easy, too emotionally manipulative, but when something works, it's never too easy. Music in film is like smell in real life, it's tied into emotional memory, and just playing the music can bring up a feeling. To not use the music in aid of the film is like deciding to speak without any adjectives, you might be able to communicate, but people aren't really going to care about what you say. It's so easy to make a theme song, why not just use it? If Terminator 3 had only used the Terminator theme it would have went up in quality by at least 25 percent.

Also, the film had a really generic post Se7en look. It's dark, seedy, rather ugly, and while that may have been appropriate for the story, from an aesthetic point of view, it's uninspiring. I did really like the look of Golden Age Gotham, with that elevated train, but both Burton films show that you can do dark and seedy and still have a little zest in the look of your movie.

So, I've been pretty harsh on the film, and I think a large part of that is due to my love of the Tim Burton films. Brian Singer is making a Superman movie that's pure homage to the 1979 Superman movie and he gets respected and applauded for that, when the Burton Batman films are so much better than the decent Reeve Superman film, and they get no notice from this work. Instead Nolan creates a pretty generic, impersonal film that has for some reason been embraced widely by nearly everyone. Batman Returns was the perfect take on the character and his sort, it came out thirteen years ago, there was no need for this movie to be made, and watching the film, I don't think it did anything that Burton's Batman films didn't.

I'm not claiming to be unbiased, but watching this film, I was waiting for it come alive and it never did. I really feel like I saw a completely different film than other people did, I just don't get how people could like it so much when this is a rather boring story and totally uninteresting filmmaking. Nolan may be getting the reputation as a golden boy now, but his films all fall into this sort of dirty, dark, yet uninteresting neo-noir genre. Memento had a solid gimmick, but watching it again, it's a standard story wrapped in a cool structure. Insomnia was uninspiring and Batman falls into that same sort of not bad, but not good limbo. I think people's expectations have been so lowered by the awful crop of films released this summer (and the lingering memory of Batman and Robin) that anything that doesn't talk down the audience gets kudos. It's what makes Clint Eastwood's competent, but uninspiring films, best picture winners and Batman Begins the hit of the summer.

People crack on Revenge of the Sith for having bad dialogue, but the pure emotion of the lava duel or the intercut birth/death sequence does more both emotionally and technically than Batman does in its entire run. I guess what I'm saying is that not having anything explicitly bad doesn't make a film good, and having flaws doesn't mean that a film can't still be a masterpiece. Batman Begins is competent, but that's not enough, particularly when the shadow of one of the greatest blockbusters ever made, Batman Returns, lingers. Just compare the emotional impact of the final half hour of Returns to the dull action sequence that closes Begins and tell me which does more with film, and which gets closer to the dual nature of the Batman himself.

We3 by Morrison and Quitely

Grant Morrison is my favorite writer, and probably the best creative person in any medium right now. Frank Quitely is the best artist in comics right now, the man has drawn the best issue of any comic ever, The Invisibles 3.1, as well as the brilliant miniseries Flex Mentallo, both written by Grant Morrison. So, I was understandably excited to read their new miniseries, We3, which just came out in trade earlier this month. The two of them together are a team unparalleled in comics, and We3 pushes the medium in uncharted directions, while at the same time telling a story unlike anything else Morrison has done.

Grant Morrison has a lot of pet themes that are present in almost all his work, the boundaries between fiction and reality, the evolution of humanity to a superhuman level, exploration of the nature of reality, and while I love all those themes, it does mean that it's pretty easy to recognize and understand a Morrison work once you've done in depth study of his major opus, The Invisibles. We3 is a major departure from everything else he's done before, it's like no story I've ever experienced before, and the thrill of discovery is always something I like to experience.

The book is about a team of cyborg-animal assassins, a dog, a cat and a rabbit, who have been trained by the government to kill people. They have been augmented and given the ability to speak, however, the team has become outmoded, prompting the military to end the Weapon 3 project. However, the animals escape and go on a search for 'home,' all the time being pursued by a military that needs to destroy them to prevent evidence about the project from getting out.

The work has two really notable things about it. One is the art which is some of the most dazzling I've ever seen. Quitely's work here rivals JH Williams' on Promethea in terms of how he invents an entirely new visual language for depicting events. Quitely has always been an incredible artist, the way he draws things is very cool looking, and even when he's working on a more conventional book, like New X-Men, his stuff looks better than anyone else out there, but here, he's in experimental mode, and it's a joy to behold.

The whole work is told from the animals' point of view, and to facilitate this, Quitely depicts almost all the human characters in fragments, just a mouth or legs, to show how animals would view them. This is really notable in the first scene where we see the team. We can see the animals' faces, but not any of the government people. Similarly the silent sequence that opens the book builds so much suspense, culminating in an amazing page in which we see a man being literally split apart.

The first issue also contains a great security camera sequence, with six extremely dense pages of eighteen panels each, almost all silent, a sequence that culminates with a double page spread of the animals breaking out. After the incredibly claustrophobic tight panel layouts, the double spread gives the reader the same relief that the animals feel.

In the second issue, we see the animals fighting and these sequences are the most violent, incredibly rendered things I've ever read. Quitely does a few layouts in which there's a big main image, with a whole bunch of little panels showing detail of the violence. The rendering on these details is so brutal and tells you absolutely everything you need to know. The violence here is genuniely disturbing and you feel the consequences much more than in a book like Preacher.

The third issue features probably my favorite layout of the series. On the left is a splash page of the cat leaping through the air, an archetypal superhero pose, and he is incredibly menacing. On the next page, we see him rip into Weapon 4, tearing his eye out, then pushing him out through a brick wall. The brick wall breaks into the next panel and their fall continues onto the next page, as they both fall onto a highway. The way the panel builds a structure is what's so cool, even the shape of the panel contributes to this. You really understand how this place is laid out and can easily see the physical element of the action.

But, more than specific panels, what's most notable about Quitely's work here is the way he makes the animals into characters. You really feel for them and that's because of the incredible facial experessions he gives them. His images are so visceral they produce an incredible emotional reaction.

And that emotional content is the other thing that's so unique and amazing about the story. Grant's work always affects me, but to read this book is to be immersed in an incredibly poignant, brutal story. I don't even like animals, but seeing the characters here and their utterly pure desire to find their home, you can't help but feel for them. Really emotional works are usually accused of being manipulative and melodramatic, but this work gets you without any cheap ploys, just the nature of the characters and their plight is enough.

A lot of it comes from the way they talk. The animals can speak, but they have a limited vocabulary, and most of the things they say are very simple, but the simple experssions of emotion almost subliminally tap into something basic in all of us, or at least me. Words and higher thought sometimes get in the way, but here, we just get the purest, unfiltered emotional thought. At the end of the first issue when the cat, Tinker, says "We3 no home now" it tells you everything you need to know and with that one sentence he experesses the extent of damage that has been done to him. As the covers show us, these critters used to be regular pets, but that life is gone, they've been used and now they've got nowhere they belong.

In the harrowing sequence at the end of issue 2, we see Pirate shot, not by the government, but by a civilian who's afraid of him. Quitely's rendering of the shot is explicitly violent, and showing the violence hammers home the pain they feel. Normally in movies, showing violence of this extent forces you to distance yourself from the work, and rarely do you see a creator merging violence and emotion because that may be too much to take, but Morrison and Quitely do it here and it works so well.

The final issue is the most emotional of them all, starting with the opening in which a homeless guy finds We3 hiding in a condemnded building, Pirate spouting mechanical nonsense. The man offers them food and for the first time, the animals are loved. The man gets taken away by government troops and it's an incredible scene in which Bandits tells them to wait there for him, because he said he'd be coming back. He has such a trust in people and believes exactly what they say. It's this pure desire to help mankind, something we also see in the scene where he drags a man out of a river, saying "Gud dog, help man," and at the end of the scene we realize it's just a corpse.

So, the final issue sees all hell break loose, as Tinker and Bandit duel with the military and weapon 4. The best scene in this sequence is when Roseanne, the woman who built them meets Bandit. Bandit tells her, with the saddest look on his face, "Doc-tor Rose-anne, No Dee-Comm-Ish We3," and we can see him prepare to die, but Roseanne jumps in front of him and takes the bullet. It's an incredible panel in which we see her ripped apart with Bandit looking on. It's ultraviolent, but it serves the story and conveys the brutality of these military people.

I already talked about the battle with Weapon 4 above, but in the context of the story that's such a high point. Seeing the cat go back to help Bandit, defying his nature in favor of friendship, is the perfect fusion of emotion and action. Particularly after the emotional drain of the previous scenes, this is such a catharsis, to see our heroes finally get one back and win.

The Doctor Roseanne meeting has Bandit thinking differently and after the leg of his suit falls off, he begins to question the nature of what he is. These animals had been programmed to believe that the suit was a part of them, they are inseperable, but Bandit, crying, says "Is Coat Not We," essentially interrogating his very nature. He doesn't have to be a killing machine, he can go back to the pure animal within, and that's what he does, stripping off his suit and Tinker's, and leaving them behind to detonate, providing cover for their escape. Bandit realizing that nature of the suit is one of those moments that Morrison does so well, where all of reality comes crashing down, and a character has to create a new paradigm, live in an entirely different world than they had before.

This leads to an incredible two pages in which the cat kills a rat and brings it to Bandit. Throughout the whole book, Tinker was only looking out for himself, but he's changed, and he brings food to his dying friend. On the edge of death, Bandit asks Tinker where they are, and Tinker says "Is Home," with the most incredible expression on his face. That one panel contains so much emotion, just the happiness on this cat's face after their journey, they have achieved their dream, and after that, they finally get a happy ending.

The finale was unexpected. Halfway through issue two, I thought for sure that they were all going to die, but instead we get a happy ending, one that I think is earned. Much like The Office, this is the sort of thing that could be cheesy in another movie, but because of the hardship, you can't help but be happy for these characters who have finally found the home they were looking for.

Ultimately what the book tells us is that love is the only thing that can really save people, a classic Morrison theme. Rather than trying to destroy them, they show them that they don't have to be weapons and save them. It's breaking down the manichean view of good and evil, just like in The Invisibles. In that way, the work is very close to the rest of Morrison's canon.

So, on the whole, the greatest thing about this book is the emotional impact. I was thoroughly drawn into the story, and desperately wanted the characters to avoid being hurt. There was no distance from the events, I was right there with them, thoroughly absorbed into the fictional world. Morrison has been on an incredible role lately, New X-Men was the definitive take on that property, Seaguy was thought provoking and really fun, and then this is Morrison's most emotionally immersive work to date, not to mention his best use of the medium, and Quitely goes above and beyond his already brilliant standards to redefine what is possible with the medium.

70s Cinema, Box Office Economics and Auteur Filmmaking

So, after watching The Dreamers yesterday, a film about cinema and societal changes in the 1960s, today I watched Midnight Cowboy, a film that is actually from the 1960s, and is a prime example of the social changes that were happening then. This is a film that was rated X, but still won the best picture Oscar. Admittedly, it's definitely an R by today's standards, but still, the fact that the traditionally conservative academy rewarded this film demonstrates the sort of bold social change that was happening in the cinema.

First, a bit about the film. I loved it, it still feels very relevant, and at the same time is such a great document of 60s lifestyle. It's in line with most of the characteristic of 1960s indie/art cinema, the quick cut montages of Buck's memories/dreams reminded me of the acid trip sequence in Easy Rider, and the minimal narrative and outsider heroes are also 1960s trademarks. I think those dream/memory sequences work brilliantly, giving us a hint of what's in Joe Buck's past. We know how he feels about it, even if we don't know exactly what happened, and that's enough. I'm glad there wasn't some big reveal at the end, clarifying his past. Those scenes add psychological complexity to what could have been a caricature.

This movie avoided the art film trap of being so non-narrative you stop caring about what's happening. When Buck gets swindled, first by the woman and then by Rizzo, I really felt for him, I was really behind this guy and wanted him to succeed. The film is admirably economical in its narrative. Huge chunks of time pass, and one image, like the frozen faucet, can tell us everything we need to know.

One of the coolest scenes was the party, really visually interesting and great editing was used to show us things from both Joe and Rizzo's perspective. Throughout the film, there were a bunch of Six Feet Under style imagined scenes which are then punctured by a cut back to reality. I love the device and, particularly in a film where time is short, they give us much needed insight into how the characters think.

It's interesting how the film makes us so concerned with this guy's quest to pimp himself out to middle aged women. When he finally does acheive his 'dream,' it's a really triumphant moment and the music at that moment really drives this home. The ending is rather ambiguous, but you get the sense that Buck has really moved on, he ditches the cowboy stuff and when asked, says he is from New York City. He's reinvented himself, he isn't that boy from Texas anymore, which means he acheived what he set out to do.

So, this was a top notch movie, but perhaps more important than the film itself is the context that allowed the film to be made. In the late 1960s, the Hollywood studio system was falling apart, and the films that used to be successful, like big budget musicals and costume epics, just weren't working anymore. With the box office in decline, films like Easy Rider changed the idea of what film could do. Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, draw a lot on the techniques of the French New Wave, the jump cuts, strong ambiguity in the narrative and location shooting for maximum realism. This is all chronicled in the excellent book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which discusses the era.

It's commonly held that these films paved the way for the 'Golden Age' of American cinema in the 1970s. I'm of two minds about this. I don't love that many 70s movies, and until recently, I'd always held that this idea of cinema's golden age was overstated. I would consider the late 90s, post Pulp Fiction, era of American cinema to be its high point. Directors like Tarantino, PT Anderson, Soderbergh, Jonze and others created a new template of what indie film could be in the same way that people in the 70s did. But, much of this was done in conscious homage to that 70s era, so examining those films is really a must to see why we ended up where we are now.

Obviously, I'm going on stuff I've read and deduced here, since I wasn't around in the 70s, but it seems like at that time, there really was a vibrancy in film culture and that's understandable because the medium was for the first time liberated from the very strict standards of the Hollywood studio system. I'd compare it to the shock of seeing The Sopranos for the first time, and understanding what TV could do without restrictions on content and style. There are great movies made under the studio system, but they have a layer of artifice that The Sopranos, or the films of the 70s movement don't have.

The commonly held idea is that there was a director-driven utopian era of cinema when challenging, adult-targetted films dominated the marketplace, and this was destroyed with two major events, one was the disasters filming Heaven's Gate and the other was the release of Star Wars. Heaven's Gate was a film by director Michael Cimino, who made The Deer Hunter. It was an arty Western that went way over budget and destroyed United Artists studio. The film was seen as an example of director excess, and it led to more studio involvement at all levels of the creative process, to ensure that out of control directors were not allowed to go over budget like Cimino did.

If you read a lot of arty film writing, you'll notice a high level of antipathy towards Star Wars, because of the commonly held belief that it destroyed that utopian film culture of the 70s and led to the current blockbuster based film marketplace. It created a division between art film and popular film and this is a bad thing. But, I think blaming the film for the marketplace that followed it is completely off base. First, Jaws was actually responsible for creating the blockbuster template that Star Wars is generally blamed for. That was the first movie to make more than $100 million dollars, and it caused a reassessment of how much money it was possible to make through film. However, Star Wars went way beyond that in terms of box office gross and probably is partially responsible for the box office culture we have now, but I find it disturbing that a personal, auteur film would be blamed for reviving tight studio control over movies.

George Lucas is actually the only person to achieve the dream of creating wholly independent films, free from studio influence. He put his own money on the line to pay for the Star Wars sequels and as a result, he was able to maintain tight control, and make the movies he wants, without concession to the marketplace.

In looking at Star Wars, it's crucial to consider the fact that this was a low budget movie virtually every studio passed on before one guy at Fox agreed to finance it. It wasn't a project people wanted to make, and yet, it became the biggest box office hit of all time. The tragedy of Star Wars is that studios didn't see this as a sign that the process of auteur driven films was working. Lucas was left to do his own thing and it led to a hugely successful movie. He did the same thing on the sequel and it led to an even better movie that was also a huge success.

However, the success of Star Wars, Spielberg's movies and others, put the studios on better financial footing, so the era of experimentation was over. It's widely held that big corporations are going to take the most creative risks when they're not doing well financially, just look at ABC in this past TV season for an example of this, and then they retreat to conservatism when they become successful. So, the success of Star Wars is just one small piece of the move towards financial success that ultimately doomed risky auteur filmmaking. The major thing it did was make the studio aware of the kid audience, and as a result, they began to make movies that targetted the whole family instead of just adults, as most of the major 70s films did.

Generally speaking, I'm more a fan of adult targetted movies, but I think Star Wars is a great example of the sort of film that can show younger people the power of cinema. It's not a kids movie, it doesn't talk down to the audience, but it is accessible to people of all ages, and I know in my case and for many other people, it was the gateway to a lifelong love of cinema. Look at the films in the 90s indie film renaissance, they're full of references to Star Wars, in really strong films like Clerks, Swingers and Boogie Nights. So, the film that 'destroyed' 70s auteur cinema ultimately inspired the generation that would resurect it.

But, the 90s indie film movement was quite different in that those films were never really popular. American Beauty cleared 100 million dollars, but some of the best films ever made, like Magnolia, were financial failures, and even though American Beauty won best picture, the academy generally still favored more traditional movies, like Gladiator or Titanic. I don't think those films had the huge cultural impact that The Godfather or even Easy Rider did. Those films were on the forefront of a cultural revolution, but in the late 90s, they were basically just there, and more people were talking about Godzilla than about Magnolia. So, great films were still being made, they just weren't as culturally important as they were in the 70s.

The reason this is on my mind is because of all the articles about the record box office slump that's going on right now. There's all kinds of articles about how the films that are supposed to be blockbusters just aren't performing like they should, and I think this summer's going to represent the end of the old paradigm of what works at the box office. There's such a need to presell movies that we have essentially no original films in the summer movie season. Last week was Batman Begins, a film that did get good critical notices, but is a 're-imagining' of a movie that came out in 1989, just sixteen years ago. Next week is Bewitched and Herbie: Fully Loaded, two sixties retreads. In July we've got films from two of my favorite directors, but they're both remakes of seventies movies. These films will probably have big opening weekends, but they're not going to get repeat business, because there's not going to be good word of mouth. You don't need to get word out on Herbie: Fully Loaded because everything about it is right there, whereas a film that isn't presold is going to get more repeat business as word about it gets out.

So, perhaps this summer will represent a nadir of creativity and studios will realize that perhaps audiences would be more receptive to original stories in their blockbusters. In the 90s, even though movies like Independence Day may not have been the greatest cinema, at least they were original stories, not just remakes of existing properties. But, the combination of audience apathy and the increased prominence of DVD will hopefully create a revolution in the movie business, and lead to a new Golden Age, like the 70s.

The Dreamers

Tonight I watched the film The Dreamers. It's a film about three people in Paris in 1968, at the time that the street riots of that era were just beginning. Proving that yes, you do use stuff you learn in high school, I recalled that these riots were basically the start of the student protest movement, and they spread to the US creating the primary cultural image we hold of the 'The 60s,' as a time of protest, of peace and love and cultural revolution. This movie is concerned with all of this, focusing on love, sex and cinema.

The first chunk of the movie is primarily about cinema. Seeing the movie you get a sense of a time when cinema was a really crucial social force, setting the tone for what youth culture was. Today, it's not like that, at least not in the circles I run in. I love cinema and I do see it as something that can change the world, but other people don't. People perceive movies as commercial product and rarely view the most important films and even if they do, there's not really a strong film culture anymore. Even at Wesleyan, a place renowned for its film program, there's a layer of irony applied when assessing anything, and judging from this movie, that just wasn't true in the 60s. These people believed that cinema could change the world, and that's something I'd like to get back to. But, I suppose it's easy to say that things were better back then, I doubt if I was alive in 1968 I'd be on the cutting edge of the art cinema movement.

Anyway, regardless of its veracity, I loved the picture of cinema the beginning of this film paints. Matthew goes to the cinema and it's a transforming experience, he becomes connected to the forefront of French culture, and when the Cinemateque is shut down, he finds himself with two new friends, Theo and Isabelle. During the cinema shut down sequence, it was very cool to see Jean Pierre Leaud in a current cameo, as well as vintage footage of Godard and Truffaut.



The majority of the film is concerned with the boundary pushing sibling relationship of Theo and Isabelle. Matthew finds himself unsure how to deal with the two of them. I love their early interactions, when the three of them recreate classic movie moments, basically trying to live the life they see on screen. They all hold these really idealistic views of life and society and together create an isolated community, apart from the world.

The movie is one of the rare films to actually take the NC-17 rating and in this case, it's clearly earned. The film's sexuality goes far beyond what we'd see in most American movies, and the characters are almost constantly naked for the last third of the film. I think the movie to some extent loses focus during this chunk. On the one hand, I could say that the sex scenes don't really add anything to the plot, but from an aestethic standpoint, it's certainly not a pain to have to watch Eva Green naked in scene after scene. I can see what Bertolucci is trying to do with these scenes, and there is some interesting exploration of the relationship between Theo and Isabelle.



What we realize at the end of it is that the two of them have a relationship that transcends anything they can have with an outsider. In the really striking scene where Matthew is in Isabelle's bedroom and she has a breakdown hearing Theo have sex we understand the fact that they are connected, like siamese twins, and the wall between them is too painful. They need to be together. That scene is also notable for the extremely striking image of her recreating the Venus De Milo by standing with black gloves in a dark doorway.

I really like the end of the film, in which the twins finally leave Matthew when he refuses to go along with their 'revolutionary action.' What the movie is about is the disconnect between their rhetoric and their action. They talk big, about their support for Mao and belief in change, but even when that change is happening right outside, they spend all their time inside, oblivious to the outside world. At the end, Matthew finally disconnects from Theo, and figures that Isabelle will stay with him. However, that is not to be. The two of them go off together, leaving him in a crowd of rioters. Their month long dream together is over and Matthew is the one left out at the end.

This is a film that I thoroughly enjoyed watching, but will have to give another viewing to determine just how good it really is. It's easy to embrace their ideals and believe in this view of a cinema that can recreate society. I love the recreation of moments from New Wave movies, and visually, the film is absolutely beautiful. The score is top notch too, it's only the fact that the movie slightly loses its way during the middle. However, I think everything's basically redeemed by the ending and after it all, we've got a top notch movie, one made with passion and a vision of a world much more alive with potential than ours today.

Review Revue

Summer moves along and so does the watching of films. Lately, I've been watching mostly older films, mainly because I've seen almost all the recent films that I want to see. There's some foreign stuff that I still want to see, notably Takashi Miike's stuff, but I've covered most American films of the 90s and 00s. What this means is I've been going through older films, mostly stuff from the 70s. I try not to be one of these people who automatically condemns older films, but watching them, I usually don't get the emotional impact that I do from more recent films. I'm a big fan of new cinema techniques, and the sort of intense emotional cinema of people like Wong Kar-Wai and Gaspar Noe. In the 70s, art film seemed to exist largely as a reaction to the excessively emotional films of classical Hollywood, and it can sometimes seem cold. Recent films have done a good job of synthesizing the art and the emotion. What that means is that while I can respect and enjoy 70s films, I usually don't love them as much as recent films. There are exceptions, notably Kubrick's stuff, but on the whole, the point stands.

Luckily, next week New York is having an Asian Film Festival, and I'll be able to check out a couple of interesting films. I've got tickets for Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon and Kim Ki-Duk's Samartian Girl. Suzuki is an eighty year old guy who made the brilliant Tokyo Drifter back in the 60s. I haven't seen any of his other films, but the trailer is really wacky and it looks like a film that'll be worth seeing. Kim Ki-Duk made The Isle, a really interesting, dark film, as well as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring, a pretty cool, arty film. He's a challenging filmmaker.

Lately, I've been trying to support more arty movies with my filmgoing dollar. I feel like the reason Hollywood doesn't make more intelligent movies is because people never go see them in the theater. Look at Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by this point, virtually everyone I know has seen and loved the movie, but when it came out in the theater, the box office was anemic, while bad horror movies and mindless action stuff gets huge opening weekend grosses. So, even though Eternal is better liked and might make a lot on DVD, the studios see those opening weekend grosses and decide that those big budget films are what people want to see. So, if I can support Princess Raccoon and Samaritan Girl at the festival level, maybe it'll make it out to more theaters. I'm going to try to see Mysterious Skin while I'm in the city also, a film I've heard good things about.

More than anything else, I really would like to see contemporary Asian film getting more exposure. Why do studios insist on remaking movies instead of just challenging audiences with the original? Hero was a big success, largely because it had such a good advertising campaign and a wide release. If you give the same boost to Oldboy, you can make more money than if you do a remake.

The entire concept of remaking movies infuriates me because it completely misses the artistic point of film. A film is more than its story, every single shot and acting choice is a part of it, and a remake misses those smaller things. I'd rather see filmmakers be inspired by the challening, original work coming out Asia to make their own new films, instead of just being inspired to make bad copies of Asian films.

Anyway, some of the films I've seen recently are...

Mr. and Mrs. Smith - I saw this last week. This is a film where the press coverage brings so much baggage to the actual film, it's hard to separate the public image of the actors from the characters they're playing, which in this case actually helps the film. Obviously the two main characters are good looking people, and up through the resolution of their conflict, it's a pretty solid film. Pitt and Jolie have good chemistry and the script is light enough to keep things entertaining. However, the movie peaks about 40 minutes before the end, when the two Smiths fight and destroy their house. After that, there's a stretch of weak action scenes. The film just kept going after its character arcs were done.

One From the Heart - This is the film that Francis Ford Coppola did after Apocalypse Now. Apparently, at the time it was a notorious failure that went way over budget and essentially destroyed Coppola's dream of building a 'live cinema.' Not bringing this baggage to it, I was able to enjoy it, even though it's clearly a rather flawed film.

The most notable thing about the film is its look. The film is shot entirely on stage and it's gorgeous. The opening title sequence is probably the best part of the movie. The camera moves through the desert into Las Vegas, the sand forming abstract shapes as we snake through interesting structure. Throughout the film there's these wonderful neon lit scenes, as characters move through dreamlike environments. The lighting is very theatrical, with heavy blues and reds intruding on the scenes, most notably in the sequence Hank and the acrobat are going around the used car lot.



The film is backed by music by Tom Waits. I wasn't a huge fan of the music, but there's some good moments. The dance sequences are very 80s, as evidenced by the presence of a man in tight, neon purple tank top. But, I think the 80s has passed from dated to classic, so the sequences work.

What doesn't work about the film is the main story. We're not really given a reason to care about the main characters being together. Most of the film is spent on the couple split up, being tempted by other partners, and these other partners seem much more appropriate for them. The Raul Julia character seems much better for Frannie than Hank, and because I felt this way, the film uses its emotional drive. You have to want the characters to get back together, if you don't then it just doesn't work. But the visuals are so good, it's still a really enjoyable film. It doesn't deserve the reputation as a colossal failure.

Mean Streets - This is Martin Scorsese's first major work, and notably, his first film with Robert Deniro. Scorsese is a filmmaker whose films I usually respect more than I enjoy. I really liked The Aviator and Goodfellas, but other than that I haven't really fully enjoyed any of his other movies. Scorsese's movies usually draw on a traditional view of masculinity, this idea that characters have to be tough and emotionally closed. They're always protectors or warriors, and this film seems to establish the traditional Scorsese protagonist.

Harvey Keitel's Charlie is an up and coming mobster who has to look out for Deniro's Johnny Boy, who's something of a loose cannon, with huge debts all around town. Charlie has a lot of extistential crisis about what he's doing, but it doesn't really go anywhere. It's an enjoyable film to watch, but there's not that much of an emotional connection to the characters and that makes the ending rather underwhelming.

I feel like The Sopranos has made almost every other mob story irrelevant. What The Sopranos does is really examine the emotional motivations of its characters and bring their flaws to the surface. This film tries to do that, but you don't care about the characters enough to worry about their problems. The genius of The Sopranos is the fact that the characters are completely normal people, except for one thing, the fact that they're in the mob. The characters in Mean Streets don't feel like normal people.

2046 Screening with Wong Kar-Wai

Yesterday I attended a screeing of 2046 with Wong Kar-Wai in attendance. I'd seen the movie two times before, but it was a completely different experience on the big screen. I'm not someone who usually makes a big deal about seeing a movie on 35mm in the theater, but this movie was a completely different experience in the theater than on DVD. I'd never seen a WKW movie theatrically before, and I'm not sure if all of them are like this, but it was almost too much, getting lost in this world that he built.

I've already written a whole lot about the film here, but it felt like a very different film theatrically. WKW's films always have very heavy atmosphere, and you can definitely catch that on the DVD, but in the theater, you get completely immersed in a different world. Because none of his films take place in the USA, they're all in sort of alien worlds, but 2046, with the future stuff, takes this to the extreme. In the Mood for Love is a move towards more traditional narrative, but 2046 takes this away, and is right up there with Fallen Angels as WKW's most abstract film. Most movies settle into a sort of routine, there may be a strange opening, but eventually, you get the idea of what's going on and the scenes all feel roughly the same. 2046 never does this, it constantly bounces between all sorts of events, musical montages, abstract images and the story within a story. The use of music is absoultely amazing, really enveloping you in this world. The scenes where Tony moves through the club with his entourage tell you everything you need to know in one image, and knowing what we know from ITMFL, we are aware of how unhappy he is.

Despite barely appearing in the movie, Maggie Cheung's Su-Lizhen dominates this film, no matter what he does, Tony can't escape her influence. Every action he takes goes back to his relationship with her in some way. People who say the change in character is inconsistent clearly miss the point of the movie, which is that as a result of losing his one true love, he has given up on love and decided to live a purely hedonistic lifestyle. Only when he sees something of Su-Lizhen in the women he meets does he give any serious thought to commitment, as in the relationship with Faye.

It's this sadness that makes Tony's character here much more sympathetic than Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild. Leslie seems to be cruel only because of his confusion about his paternity, but Tony has real deep wounds, and as a result, he is unable to reciprocate Bai-Ling's love for him, and in the process, he continues the cycle, and creates another person who is too scarred to love.

But, watching on the big screen what really gets you is just how beautiful the film is. The production design is phenomenal. Old Hollywood movies generally had a strong focus on being stylish, fantasies of what life could be if you were a star. WKW recaptures this fantasy element by making the coolest looking environments for his characters to move through and putting them all in incredibly stylish clothes. The future stuff is the best example of this, but the club scenes are also just saturated in beautiful design. This was one of the most immersive theatrical experiences I've ever had, the film completely pulled me in and let me get lost in its world.

I loved the film the first two times I saw it, but this viewing took things to another level. I would now place this as WKW's second best film, behind only Fallen Angels, and in a lot of ways, this is even stronger than that one. This is a film with an admittedly narrow audience, but if you've seen his other stuff, this is one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences you can ever have. I'll definitely be taking in a second theatrical viewing when the film is released here in August.

So, after that great screening, WKW came out to take some questions. I've read a whole lot about the film, so there wasn't that much new in the Q&A, but there was still some really good stuff. WKW was wearing his trademark sunglasses and pulled off the leather jacket despite it being pretty warm out. Most of the questions were actually continuity related, like whether this Tony Leung character is the same one from Days of Being Wild and whether Gong Li is the same character from 'The Hand.' Tony Leung is the same, and he went as far as to say that the last scene of 'Days' could actually take place during the scenes with Gong Li in 2046. That's why he made the character a gambler in this movie, to get a chance to do some of the material they would have originally done in the Days of Being Wild sequel. And, Gong Li is not the same character from The Hand, though they are connected in some way.

Strangely, he was pretty upbeat about his working relationship with Chris Doyle, I'd read that Doyle shot very little of 2046, but WKW made it seem like he shot the whole movie. Regardless, he claimed that he chose the framing, lighting and movement of the shots, though at times Doyle would ignore what WKW told him to do. I'm not sure if just went by quickly, but it seemed like he answered very few questions, and after the screening WKW wasn't around for one on one discussion. I guess I've been spoiled by my experience meeting Joss Whedon and Jean Pierre Jeunet, who was just hanging out in the lobby after his Q&A.

But still, it was really interesting to hear him speak. I liked how quick he was with his answers. Someone asked him if he was influenced by French film on 2046 and he just said "No." One word, straight to the point. Part of that may have been the language gap, but generally speaking, he seemed pretty solid conversing in English.

So, overall it was an excellent experience, I would have liked some one on one with WKW, but that was not to be, and he pretty much covered most of what I was wondering anyway. Sadly, no one asked him the obvious question about his next project, with Nicole Kidman. But, I'd assume there's not too much he could reveal that I haven't already read.

Six Feet Under: "Dancing for Me"

It's Monday and once again, there's a new episode of Six Feet Under. I know I said this last week, but it's so cool having a new episode to look forward to every week. I was so used to just having the whole series there, I never really considered what it would be like to watch just one episode a week. There are certainly advantages to the binge watch, namely the plots seem to move a lot faster, there's less impatience because you get the episodes so much faster. However, watching one a week makes each episode a bit more special, and it gives me a chance to look a bit deeper at what happens in each one. So, I'm fine with watching this way.

Anyway, onto the episode itself. The season premiere, while great, was largely an overture, setting up some general themes, but mainly playing off of what we already know about the characters. That, plus the novelty of having a new episode, made it a stronger viewing experience than this episode, which is stuck with the burden of having to set up in more detail the plot arcs for the season. That's not a knock on it though, it's still a great episode, and has me really curious about where things are going.

The most interesting storyline for me was Brenda's excursion into the free clinic. She's in a situation where she desperately wants to prove her mother wrong and break out of the image her mother has constructed for her. However, she just can't face what's at the free clinic. That gets to one of her main problems, she's putting herself in danger just to show up her mother, and it must have been very tough for her to get proven wrong, and have to get her mother to pull some strings for another internship. I really liked the way they had Brenda dressed in clearly expensive and stylish clothes, to make her stand out even more in the really grungy clinic.

I found the Nate storyline really interesting too, as we see the major contrast between Nate's life and where his friend ended up. As Nate said, he's been through a lot of shit and particuarly with his near death experience at the end of season two, he understands the transience of life. He's seen all the different ways things could have gone, and that's why he knows it's pointless to look back and try to recapture something that's gone. This is a stark contrast to his friend, who crosses into borderline pedophilia just to try to recapture the feeling of his youth. I really liked the way that scene was handled, because you can understand what the guy is talking about, while at the same time it's clearly crossing a line. He says that their days back in the high school was the best time of his life and that rings hollow to Nate. I think this plot showed just how well adjusted Nate is, and gave us an understanding of how he's been able to reconcile with all the bad stuff that's happened to him over the course of the series. That said, the best Nate moment was him and Brenda having sex and Maya jumping up and down imitating them, a really offbeat funny moment.



The David and Keith plot just sort of moves along. I really liked the awkward discussion with Claire about the eggs and the dream sequence was worth it for just how bizarre it was. That fake headed Claire was rather freaky and the music was great. The sequence goes beyond the sort of fantasy stuff we'd see in the early seasons, but I think it worked, even if only as a funny setpiece.

The Rico plot was solid this week as well, though his trying too hard was a bit tough to watch. I did like him telling Vanessa that Sharon died. It's clearly a bad thing to do, but in that moment you see him getting caught up in the story and he clearly feels this is a major breakthrough in how to deal with her.

The Ruth/George tension is already being brought to a boil, a bit earlier than I would have thought, but I guess that's better than dragging things out for too long. While everyone else on the show is looking to have kids, Ruth is desperately to be single or just happily married, without having to care for someone. She barely even contains her disdain for the situation she's in, and I'm not sure how that's going to make George feel.

The Claire/Billy stuff this week is mainly just a setup for whatever's going to happen next week, when he stops taking his pills, but it's still got good moments. What it comes down to is, to really be himself, Billy can't take the pills, those supress the artistic, unique side of him. Now, it might be better for him to live a normal life, as a teacher, something he's still good at, even though he struggles with everything else. However, the people around him have an image of Billy as this crazy artist, someone he's lost touch with. Billy's reminiscing with his friends is a nice parallel to Nate thinking about his own past. However, Nate is happy with who he's become, and Billy apparently isn't, or at least feels the need to validate his friends by being who he once was. So, the pills are flushed, and we'll see what happens from there.

Lot of stuff this week, and still, I always hate it when I see that final white fade out. That's the sign a series is working when you want the episode to just keep going.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts

A few years ago I saw the movie Magnolia and instantly loved it, repeat viewings only confirmed its genius, and it's found a place in my top 5 films of all time. In reading about the film, I frequently saw it called Altmanesque, particularly in reference to two of Robert Altman's films, Nashville and Short Cuts. So naturally, I was compelled to check out these films and see where Magnolia came from.

Last summer I saw Nashville, a 1975 film about a whole bunch of people who are in the title city for a country msuic event. Over the course of the film, we see a whole bunch of different stories, that are loosely connected, sometimes by shared characters and other times by just the appearance of one character in the background of another person's scene. So, it's a whole bunch of loosely connected events, which is similar to Magnolia.

After seeing this film, I sought out Short Cuts, which only came out on DVD recently, and saw that last night. Short Cuts was the culmination of Altman's resurgence iin the early 90s, a resurgence that began with The Player, a film I also watched this week. The Player was quite frankly a pretty bad movie. I think the novelty of an inside Hollywood comedy is gone following Larry Sanders, Curb Your Enthusiasm and countless other HBO series. And without that novelty, there just isn't much there. The score, despite being by Thomas Newman who wrote some great stuff for American Beauty, makes full use of dated synthesizer sounds, and the plot isn't particularly engaging. The only thing that still holds up is the film within a film, in which Bruce Willis rescues Julia Roberts from a gas chamber, followed by this dialogue.

Julia: What took you so long?
Bruce: Traffic was a bitch.

And then the credits, classic awful action movie line. But one good laugh does not a film make, and this film does not hold up.

However, Short Cuts does hold up, and doesn't seem particularly dated. Like Nashville and Magnolia, it chronicles a whole bunch of lives that occasionally overlap, but generally it's just people moving through the city, doing their own thing. There's a lot of characters, about twenty, and the film is 187 minutes, so you've got to be ready for a long sit.

The film has a great cast, to name just a few: Julianne Moore, Jack Lemmon, Tim Robbins, Peter Gallagher, Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, Lily Tomlin and Robert Downey Jr. Most of them play fairly engaging characters, and it's a fun movie to watch for the level of acting alone.

I should preface what I'm about to say by saying that I really enjoyed the movie, I can respect the craft that went into it and would reccomend it to people. However, looking at this movie after seeing Magnolia, I can't help but see its flaws. PT Anderson drew a lot from Short Cuts, but he did so much more with the style than Altman did.

Altman sticks fairly strictly to the definitions of art cinema, the idea that you've got to avoid artificial conflict and strive for realism in the film, avoiding the excess emotion of classical Hollywood cinema. This technique was necessary in the 1950s when the New Wave came about because classical Hollywood cinema completely lacks any sort of emotion realism. However, in responding to those perceived excesses, many art films went to far in the opposite direction, to create films that just drift along, without any sort of emotional beats for the audience. That's my problem with Altman's work, he seems so committed to avoiding narrative artifice and over the top emotion that the film becomes sterile, you just watch the film as an observer, never becoming fully engaged in the characters' emotional existence.

This is quite different from Magnolia, which isn't particularly narrative driven, but still manages to engage you with the characters emotionally. That's largely because of the filmmaking. Altman's camera very rarely draws attention to itself, you're kept at a distance, strictly an observer. The only really emotional moments are those in which Annie Ross' singing is juxtaposed with other events. Those scenes are the highlight of the film, but even those can't reach the level of the "Wise Up" sequence in Magnolia, which is emotionally devestating.

PT Anderson fits in with a new group of art cinema people, who reembrace strong emotional involvement with the characters. Other people doing this are Gaspar Noe and Wong Kar-Wai, both of whom use all the film techniques at their disposal to make you feel. Altman, at least in what I've seen by him, has never created anything that touches the emotional intensity of those directors' films. I guess it's not his goal, but it makes it difficult to love his films. Sometimes it's good to embrace narrative mechanics if it allows the audience to get drawn into the film. Short Cuts leaves you at an almost awkward distance watching the emotional scenes, like you're spying on these people and shouldn't be there, whereas Magnolia makes you feel exactly what the characters are feeling.

Now, admittedly it's unfair to compare this film to one of my favorite films. Up against most films it's a masterpiece, but I demand more from my films than to just be above average. Obviously, Altman's films were essential to the creation of PT Anderson's stuff, so for that reason alone, he deserves respect, and the films themsevles are top notch too. It's just that he touches greatness and doesn't quite make it there, that's what's so frustrating. In his effort to avoid Hollywood cliches, he goes so far in the other direction that his films become a bit too sterile.

Summer So Far

Well, I've been off for nearly a month, and I've been pretty much in relax mode, but I do have some stuff going on. I made enough money working at the lab last semester that I've been able to take the month off and still maintain my lifestyle (as in buy a DVD every week or so), as well as the extravagence of social activities like seeing Revenge of the Sith three times and eating at the diner more than once.

I did do some jobs for LMC. I taped an infotainment DVD on haircutting that will get packaged with R*Own haircare products. It was a fairly entertaining shoot and I was paid for it, so that was good times. I hadn't shot anything in a while and it was good to be back behind the camera. I also taped the LMC awards, where we won 'Best Adult Drama' for Tabula Rasa. That adult refers to the age of the people making it, not the content of the film. I was a little disappointed I didn't get to do an acceptance speech, to thank my agent, publicist, personal assitant and of course, God, but alas, that was not to be.

I've also been going around for LMC putting up fliers for our workshop, which starts on July 5. I think the workshop may actually have been my favorite job I've had. I've done a lot of jobs where you do nothing, and this job was actual work, but it was fulfilling. What I did was teach three workshops, one on broadcast news, one on film and one on documentary to a bunch of 12-16 year olds, and at the end we had three pretty solid finished products. The film especially is really entertaining, I was surprised how well that came out, and I think the people had fun making it. To be paid a ton of money to make a movie is the goal of my life, so this is a start.

In coordination with LMC, Jordan and I are running a summer film series at the library here in Mamaroneck. I always like bringing new movies to people so I'm really excited about it, with any luck, some people will turn up and we'll have some solid discussions about the films. It's at the Mamaroneck library community room, by the Emelin, and these are the films we're showing.

June 30: 2001: A Space Odyssey
July 7: Infernal Affairs
July 14: Safe
July 21: Oldboy
July 28: Waking Life
August 4: Fallen Angels
August 11: American Beauty
August 18: Irreversible

They're some of my favorite films, and I think there's a lot of stuff in there that most people won't have seen. There's definitely awkward moment potential with Oldboy and Irreversible, but if others really enjoy it, the awkwardness will be worth it. I don't know who's going to turn up, hopefully some people will, and if not, it's just an excuse to have LMC's projector to watch movies I like.

Speaking of LMC's projector, I've been running a 'screening room' with it in my house for the past couple of weeks. I've been watching a whole bunch of movies, mostly older stuff, because I feel like I've seen most of the stuff I want to see from the 90s and 00s. There's still a few titles out there to discover, but most of the movies that people mention as quality from the era I've already covered, which means it's time to go backwards, and that's what I've been doing. Over this summer, I'm going to try to see all the 60s and 70s American classics that I haven't yet gotten to.

Six Feet Under: 'A Coat of White Primer'

It's been eight months since I last saw a new episode of Six Feet Under, on September 25, I wrote:

"I think in the next season, Nate and David might actually get some happiness, but Claire and Ruth seem to be ready to take over with the pain. It's pretty obvious that Claire is heading towards a drug problem, and considering this show's fairly liberal attitude towards drugs, it's going to be interesting to see how that's dealt with. If Claire actually gets together with Billy in a relationship, there's going to be some really weird family dynamics between Nate/Brenda and Claire/Billy. Whatever happens,
there should definitely be more Billy next season.

Geore is definitely more interesting than he was at the beginning of season four. I don't see good things in the future for him and Ruth. While the stripper plot got a bit ridiculous at times, I really like the way it turned out. Rico living at the house is a good idea, since it makes it easier to keep him integrated in the stories. And we'll have the opportunity to see him as a single guy, which is something we've never got before."

Well, to be honest, I barely remembered what happened at the end of season four, I forgot that Claire and Billy had gotten into a relationship, I didn't really remember David beating up the guy in the sushi shop, or the Rico moving in plot. Watching this episode, I saw him walking in behind Ruth and I was wondering why there was some guy just walking around the house.

Without going into spoilers, I'll just say that this was a really great season premiere. I viewed in this a different way than I had the other season premieres, because I watched the rest of the show in a binge run, with no breaks between the seasons. So, this season premiere actually had to bring me back into the world after a pretty long break, and in that respect it succeeded. It's not as stunning as the series' best episode, season three's premiere, "Perfect Circles," but it's a damn fine piece of television nonetheless. I've been watching Gilmore Girls over the past month or so, and while that's a pretty good, entertaining series, watching new Six Feet Under shows you just how good TV can be. This one episode had moments that were absoultely hilarious, and also moments that were incredibly sad, blended together in a way that recalls the best of Buffy, and even goes beyond that in terms of emotional impact.

Onto the specifics. The death of the week was pretty good, and I think it addresses an interesting question that does thematically tie in to what comes later in the episode. This woman finds actually telling the truth so liberating at first, but there's certain people who apparently can't handle the truth. So, the opening raises the issue of how open people can be, if you tell the truth all the time, you'll end up wounding those around you, but if you're too guarded, it's impossible to relate emotionally. This ties in to the stories of almost all the characters, each of whom are trying to guard things, and cannot be completely honest with each other.

The post death first scene was phenomenal. We see Nate's wedding video, Lisa and Nate so happy, the whole world ahead of them, and we assume that it's Nate watching the video, reflecting on what his life was then versus what it is now with Brenda. However, things are twisted and instead of Nate, it's Brenda watching the tape. She mocks it, but looking at the scene on the beach with Lisa, it's clear that she envies Lisa's purity. Brenda is someone who guards her emotional vulnerability by making jokes and rejects what she really wants because she refuses to be 'cliche.' This comes out in her discussion with Nate about how stupid she feels for wanting her 'dream wedding,' she can't allow herself to enjoy normal things, she has to be different, and Lisa was someone who could clearly unironically enjoy her wedding.

This is one of my favorite themes from the series, the fact that these characters define themselves with respect to what they percieve as boring, normal cliches. Claire and Brenda in particular are all about not doing the expected thing and trying to prove they are special by rejecting things that others embrace. This is best summed up in one of my favorite scenes in the whole series, from season two, when Nate and Brenda are breaking up. She tells him not to throw his ring at her because that would be "so fucking cliche," she's more concerned about preserving her self image as someone who's original and different than being present in the emotional moment. Then, when Nate does throw the ring, it cuts her even more because she has to recognize that she is the same as everyone else, and she no longer has Nate. The Claire art school arc in year three and four is all about this too, she has a disdain for the world, and considers herself above everything, but where does this lead her. "And that guy with the fucking boy scout jacket. I mean is that supposed to be ironic?"

That basically sums it up, and I think she has a conflict about her position outside society. It's quite similar to the story of Angela in American Beauty, who wanted more than anything else to be extraordinary, because to be normal would be the worst thing. I think this appeals to me so much because I have the same sort of conflicts, part of me just can't give in and enjoy these moments which are cliche, I have to do my own thing, even though it means missing out on potential fun. This is the sort of issue that doesn't seem like it would make for great drama, but on this show it does, and it's one of the complexities that distinguishes Six Feet Under from more pedestrian soap opera.

Anyway, the funniest scene in the episode is when the three Fisher siblings go out on the porch and decide to smoke a joint, only to get in a fight over who has the best weed. The high pitched weed speaking is hilarious, but the scene reveals the underlying conflict between them. Nate and David don't approve of Claire being with Billy, and they each see him as a ticking timebomb, who's going to end up hurting Claire.



Clearly Claire has these feelings too, as we see in her dream sequence, when she imagines Billy stabbing her in the neck, claiming that Brenda will always be his, and there's a lot of awkwardness in the conversation at the end of the episode, when Claire and Billy discuss the fact that the two pairs of siblings are dating. I think the Billy/Brenda relationship is the most interesting on the show, and pretty much anything surrounding the two of them is interesting, so setting up these clear conflicts should lead to some great stuff later in the season.

On TV shows, there are certain characters who make every scene they're in interesting, people like Spike on Buffy, and here, Billy is definitely one of those. He places everyone slightly on edge and makes for really odd dynamics. A show like this needs those jolts to the system to keep things from settling into predictability.

Speaking of jolts to the system, the Ruth/George plot is another really interesting story. Ruth clearly feels gypped by the fact that she married this guy, and after only a couple of years, she has to become his caretaker. She's defensive about the fact, as evidenced by the scene where she slaps Claire, a really effective, shocking moment. I loved the ECT scenes, really jarring due to the great filmmaking.

But, the episode is really about Nate and Brenda. The miscarriage scene is harrowing, and the pall it casts on the wedding scene makes for a really interesting tone. It's a combination of extreme sadness and what's supposed to be "the happiest day of her life." As I mentioned before, I love the Lisa scene. It gets to the core of Brenda, her struggle to reinvent herself after a rather sordid past. Can she really change, or is she being punished because of what she did on the first go around with Nate? I love the scene with her and Nate, where he consoles her. Peter Krause and Rachel Griffiths are amazing, and I'm really glad that they're back together, and apparently at the center of the series.



And at the end of the episode, we see Nate finally break down after being strong for so long. He told David that he wanted the baby for Brenda, but clearly he wanted the baby also, and the fact that Brenda has to abort their child causes him extreme pain. Once Brenda leaves the room, he can no longer keep up the facade, he breaks down and cries. He, like Ruth, is forced to play the stable caregiver, and sometimes, it's much easier to just break down.

It's so good to have new Six Feet Under again, I haven't been this excited about a show since Angel was airing every week. Monday is now the highlight of the week, and I can't wait to see where things go from here.

The Sopranos

I've been doing a rewatch of The Sopranos with my dad over the past month, so far we've seen through season three's University. The show is one of my all time favorites and was actually the first really great TV series I watched. I saw the first three seasons of The Sopranos about a year before I watched Twin Peaks, but I guess I considered The Sopranos an anomaly, and thought that most TV shows weren't like it. And now having seen a lot more great TV shows, I would still say that there's nothing like The Sopranos.

The thing I love about the show is the high level of moral ambiguity, the characters are all incredibly flawed, looking out for themselves most of the time. While something like Buffy or Angel did have ambiguous characters, they were all at heart good, fighting for something bigger than themselves, and most of the time they didn't disappoint you. I hate it when people claim that only depressing stuff is realistic, but in this case, the series is very realistic because of how flawed the characters are.

As the episode I watched yesterday, University, makes quite clear, all the characters have many sides. In the episode, Silvio, a character who is usually used as comic relief, beats up one of the women who works for him, a shock to the audience because we had gotten used to seeing him as a pretty nice guy. There's a great cut from him beating this stripper to him eating dinner with his wife, making jokes about how he zones out in front of the TV. It's that juxtaposition of the really ordinary parts of these peoples' lives with the mob stuff that makes the series so effective.

I think the series really effectively captures the reality of suburban life in America, and even if Tony was not in the mafia, I think the show could still work as a really interesting portrait of generational conflict and people searching for purpose. However, by adding in the mob element to the really ordinary stuff, it makes the show so much more interesting. It's quite similar to Buffy, in that by twisting reality just a little bit it makes ordinary life into something grand and operatic.

The show is constantly forcing the viewer to consider ethical questions, and we're frequently disappointed when one of the characters chooses to do something wrong or bad. In the best episodes, you're left in a moral vacuum, where neither choice feels right. One of the best examples of this is 'Employee of the Month,' in which Melfi is raped, only to have the rapist be set free because of a technicality. She is faced with the question of whether she should tell Tony about the rapist and have him 'punish' this guy. You really want her to get Tony to kill this guy, even though you know that society's rules tell us that we should not sanction punishment by death. In the end, she decides that just the knowledge that she could have him punished if she wanted to is enough and she decides not to ask Tony to help her.

Another example of messing around with audience feelings is seen in one of the series' greatest hours, 'D-Girl.' Other than 'Funhouse,' this is my favorite episode of the first two seasons. It's one of the funniest, particularly Christopher's interactions with Jon Favreau, and his constant insulting of Swingers, as well as d-girl Amy's hilarious Hollywood speak. But underneath that is the story of two people at a crossroads in their lives, namely Christopher and Pussy. Christopher journeys into a world he's not comfortable in as he tries to sell his film script to Favreau. He is put in a position of weakness, and over the course of the episode he gets rejected by Amy, someone he opened up to emotionally in a way he never does with Adrianna. Over the course of the episode, Christopher is able to view a world completely different from the mob, and sees a way out of the life. However, after being rejected by Amy, he loses this out, and has no choice but to return to the mob, a decision he makes in a really amazing scene of Christopher just sitting outside, realizing that if he goes back in, he'll never be able to leave mob life.

This is intercut with Pussy sobbing in the bathroom. Earlier in the episode, we saw Pussy attacking his wife and being very standoffish to her. She can't understand why he treats her so badly, and that treatment can't really be excused, but we can understand why he is doing that. The pressure of wearing a wire really gets to him, and distracts him from his home life. The final scenes with Pussy in this episode are phenomenal because they first have him talking to Anthony Jr, telling him how Tony was his best friend, stayed with his dying sister in the hospital, conveying how great a man is, but at the same time, he is wearing a wire, betraying Tony and letting the feds build a case against Tony, so he can go free. That drives him to the bathroom where he cries because he's stuck in a situation where he has no out, he can't save himself and Tony, and in putting Tony ahead of himself, he betrays the brotherhood that is supposed to tie crews together.

There are no villains here. The feds should be doing whatever they can to arrest Tony, and Pussy should take whatever out he can to avoid a thirty year prison sentence, but at the same time, to betray Tony is just awful. This all comes to a head in the second season finale, where Tony is forced to kill Pussy. It's a brutal scene, as we watch Tony, Paulie and Silvio kill Pussy, someone who was family to them, but they don't have a choice. They can't let him live without endangering themselves.

At the same time as we are made to love these mob characters, we occasionally are reminded of the deplorable means by which they make their living. The final montage of 'Funhouse' brings this to the fore, as the happy family party at the Soprano house is intercut with scenes that show us the effect of all the havok they've reeked, and the destruction they've left in their wake over the season. This is emphasized in a discussion in 'Bust Out' between Tony and David Scatino, where Tony says how consuming businesses like David is his "bread and butter," they make their living by destroying other peoples' lives. That's why Tony allowed David to borrow the money to get in the executive game, because he saw someone he could use, and his business sense superceded his responsibility as David's friend. The mob characters find people at their most desperate and take advantage of this desperation to make money for themselves. This movement between personal and professional is exemplified by the David storyline, comparing personal Tony, who jokes with David at college night to professional Tony who assaults David to ensure that he pays off his debt.

I love entertainment that challenges you and forces you to draw your own conclusions about the work's morality. Tony is a character who is at times despicable, but at other times really sweet and that's what makes the show so good. We want them to get out, to do good, but they never will. One of the most heartwrenching episodes is the end of season five, where we're led to believe that Christopher and Adrianna are going to run for it, leave Jersey and start a new life, but Christopher can't do that, and he lets Silvio kill Adrianna. You want to believe that things will go well, but in that world, we know that doing good isn't what matters, and it's a question of how these people can deal with the immorality of their actions.