Best of 2007: Top 10 Films

10. Shoot ‘Em Up - This is one of the most underrated films of the year, primarily because its schlock genre appeal isn’t the kind of thing that most film critics respond to. The thing I love about the movie is the sheer excess of the piece, taking these gun battles to ridiculous extremes turns common action movie tropes into grand comedy. It’s a movie where you’re laughing not so much because it’s a joke, more because the movie is just so excessive, you’ve got to react in some way. I prefer a movie like this to a more grounded ‘realistic’ action movie because it embraces the pop craziness of genre and continuously goes for broke. This is the kind of movie the Quentin Tarantinos of tomorrow will be reviving.



9. Knocked Up - A movie that’s become the first victim of the Judd Apatow backlash, Knocked Up is actually a near flawless mainstream comedy that is both funny and heartfelt. I occasionally get into debates with people about how most people just want to watch movies to be entertained, that’s why an Adam Sandler movie has value. I don’t have any problem with wanting to be entertained by movies, every movie I watch I hope to be entertained by, but most of these movies that are supposedly entertaining are just awful and repulsive both cinematically and intellectually. Why is entertaining synonymous with shut your brain off? That’s why I like Apatow’s stuff, he’s able to make movies that are accessible, but still have a unique, off kilter sensibility. You can watch this movie without wondering why the filmmakers think the viewer is mentally deficient.

I do have some issues with the same Peter Pan narrative cropping up in countless works this year, but Knocked Up makes it work. You believe in the characters, and the actors just nail the film. Beyond the obvious comedy stuff, I love the bizarre digressions, like the acid trip scene, or the wonderfully executed women go to the club scene. It’s a shame that shit like Alvin and the Chimpunks and Transformers keeps making so much money, but at least Knocked Up shows that originality and being good isn’t going to turn the audience away.



8. I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK - Park Chanwook’s new film doesn’t match the grandeur of his past two movies, but that’s ok. This is still a fun, inventive movie that has some really fantastic moments. I love how he just runs with the bizarre premise, not commenting on the girl’s psychosis, instead letting you get drawn into her world. Scenes like the speech with the vending machine recall the slightly goofy, but still incredibly touching stuff with Tony Leung and the towel in Chungking Express. I don’t think the film ever fully congeals, but as a palette cleanser after the Vengenace Trilogy, it’s a success.



7. Across the Universe - This is another movie that’s flawed on a lot of levels, but has so many dazzling images and moments, it ends up a wonderful experience. The major issue with this film is that it’s another spin on the classic 60s narrative, suburban kids become hippies, get radicalized, get violent, go to Vietnam and come out the other side radically altered. It’s by no means an original story, but a story need not be original to work. The purpose of narrative in cinema is to produce an emotional reaction in the viewer. That reaction can range from laughter to tears to simply trying to wow you with action and effects.

So, even though the film was surely less original, and a less engaging story than something like No Country For Old Men, the movie had me more emotionally engaged. That’s primarily due to the image based storytelling, which produced some truly astonishing moments. I love the avant garde trippy interludes scattered throughout the film, and I really admire the way that, with only a few exceptions, music was used to advance the story, not just exist as spectacle on its own. There’s certainly some goofy stuff in here, but there’s also some of the most beautiful images of the year. People usually judge films on which have the least bad, when they should be looking at which are the most good. No Country is an essentially flawless film, the only flaw was it just didn’t hit me emotionally. This film did, and despite its flaws, it’s still a fantastic work.



6. Sweeney Todd - Todd is a thankful return to quality for one of my favorite directors. Probably his darkest film, it’s a wonderfully sealed experience. He creates a world, and the very simple narrative allows us to dwell in the deluded minds of these characters for the time they’re on screen. Depp is great as always, but the star of the film for me was Helena Bonham Carter, who played the whole film is a bizarre, immoral haze. She stole the film, and her exit was the movie’s most shocking moment. I’d love to see Tim tackle another musical since he clearly has a lot of aptitude for the genre, and making films that are simultaneously visually grand and emotionally focused.



5. Southland Tales - Another movie that’s far from perfect. There are sections of the movie that are just baffling in their meandering pointlessness, but there’s also sections that are so perfectly on, so beautiful and singularly odd that the movie demands attention. By no means does the film match the emotional preciseness of Donnie Darko, however its incredible ambition demands attention, as does its sheer bizarreness. The Justin Timberlake sings The Killers musical interlude is but one of countless scenes that just sort of happen as the film goes along. It’s a film that feels like a whole bunch of ideas, not a finished script, but many of those ideas are so fascinating, it’s not a problem.

What got the film this high on the list was the astonishing finale. The last 45 minutes or so of the film all work, and it goes out on a high note. The strange dance between The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mandy Moore is probably my favorite scene in any film this year, and the score by Moby throughout the film is fantastic. It probably could have used another pass at both the script and edit stage, but I think it’s encouraging that a film this bizarre made it out into theaters. The only sad thing is that it was so thoroughly rejected by both critics and audiences.



4. Planet Terror - Robert Rodriguez has made a lot of films that were really close to great, but just couldn’t quite make it. But, this one is outright brilliant, an incredibly fun pop movie that puts on a free clinic for horror filmmakers bogged down in torture porn and self importance. There’s a lot of things working here, but one of the most important is the characters. Freddy Rodriguez is a lot of fun to watch as El Wray, putting Six Feet Under’s Rico out of my mind. Jeff Fahey as J.T. also nails it, with the fun barbecue sauce subplot. But, the person who owns the film is Rose McGowan, who finally gets a role to match her wonderful work in Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation. It’s like those seven years on Charmed never happened. The machine gun leg was a concept so genius, it really doesn’t need to be expanded on. Most importantly, the film wasn’t just about cool concepts, I really bought these characters as real people and cared about what happened to them.

Along with that caring was the fantastic camera work and score from Rodriguez. From the opening frames, you knew this would be a good movie. I can see why Rodriguez left his wife for Rose McGowan, the opening go go dance is as close as you can come to fucking someone with a camera, and equally great is when he has her literally burn up the film during her sex scene with El Wray. Throughout, Rodriguez used slightly over the top, but effective zoom ins and tight framing to raise the tension. The Grindhouse premise gave him the freedom to do these over the top things without being criticized for it, and to be honest, I’d love to see him do this in every movie. I loved the craziness of the movie, Rodriguez used the genre and style to enhance our experience of the characters. Probably the best compliment I would have been happy to just hang out with these people for 90 minutes, even if there were no zombies.



3. Death Proof - Tarantino just barely tops his Grindhouse counterpart with a totally unique, and extremely fun movie. I think this is a really misunderstood piece. People talk about how Tarantino is retreating more and more into genre and away from realism when this movie is arguably his most real. What can you relate to more, six thieves whose heist has gone bad, or six girls who drive around going to bars and hanging out with people? Yes, the car chase stuff is a genre thing, and some of the style is a pastiche of 70s films, but the first half of the film feels totally true to me. I’ve been at bars like that, and Tarantino creates such fully realized people that it’s a joy to hang out with them for the time they’re on screen.

As with Rodriguez’s movie, the Grindhouse brand gives him the freedom to do some over the top emotional stuff we wouldn’t see in a ‘regular movie,’ most notably the scene where Julia gets a text message and the bar’s music is drowned out by this incredibly melodramatic piece of score. Yes, it’s a bit over the top, but it also tells you exactly how she feels using the language of movies. Despite consisting almost entirely of people talking, Tarantino makes the film visually dynamic and full of momentum. Again, I don’t even need the car chase stuff, I would have been cool if the film just spent the whole movie at the bar with the first set of girls. But, the car chase is admittedly pretty damn cool, and I absolutely love the absurdity of the film’s final moments. It’s a joyous pop confection from start to finish.



2. Daft Punk’s Electroma - Daft Punk show that they’re as skilled at cinema as they are at music, crafting an entire odd world in their debut feature. The movie is very simple, but shot with such gorgeous precision it lulls you into another mental zone. The images they present are as dazzling as anything you’ll see in cinema, from the stark white transformation zone to the gritty, nasty public bathroom scene. It’s abstract art, less about telling you something than about giving you ideas and concepts you can bring your own meaning to. But, that doesn’t mean it’s not emotionally potent. The apocalyptic finale is devastating and powerful. What Daft Punk do here is revive the midnight movie tradition of filmmakers like Jodorowsky. It’s never going to cross over to the mainstream, but for a certain audience, it’s a truly powerful, challenging film.



1. I’m Not There - Todd Haynes confirms his standing as one of the best filmmakers working today with this kaleidoscopic, innovative feature. Not so much a movie about Bob Dylan as a film about the formation of identity and process of reinvention that we all go through, it’s the most metaphysically significant work of the year. Haynes reminds me a bit of Grant Morrison in the way he uses existing pop culture icons as a way to explore the issues that are significant to him and humanity in general. Is making a film about Bob Dylan to explore the nature of identity any different than using Superman as a way to explore mortality? Both are pre-existing icons who serve to enhance the thematic points behind the project.

This film has a dizzying mix of styles and narrative approaches. While Cate Blanchett has been justifiably lauded, no one section jumps out over the others. I loved the Heath Ledger/Charlotte Gainsbourg stuff and the Richard Gere town of Riddle section just as much as Blanchett’s. It’s a really heartfelt, emotional film and one that’s quite substantial. It’s a film about the very nature of human existence, the way we live and how we evolve our concept of self to deal with the world. That makes it by far the best film of the year.

I'm Not There

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about how pathetic this year’s crop of films was. But, all the while, I was thinking of the fact that I still hadn’t seen Todd Haynes’s new film, I’m Not There. Thanks to a variety of factors, I hadn’t gotten to the film, so when I woke up today, I went to the first show, and finally saw the film. It’s easily the best film of the year, full of ideas and filmic innovation, a real masterpiece, and a great addition to Haynes’s previous music films, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine. Like those films, it uses a famous musician as the impetus for exploring a moment in time, and the nature of individual identity. I’m Not There is about Bob Dylan, it is about the cycle of human life, every single human life, from birth to death.

I’m not a particularly big Bob Dylan fan. I’ve heard his big hits, and am familiar with his mythos, but haven’t listened to many of his full albums. I don’t particularly like the quality of his voice, but I can certainly respect his writing and enjoy a lot of what I’ve heard. So, I was looking forward to the film more to see what Haynes would do than for any particular interest in Dylan himself.

I’ve heard people criticize the film as of interest only to hardcore Dylan fans, and inclusionary to people as a whole. I think this is totally off, for me, the film is even less about Dylan than Velvet Goldmine was about Bowie and Iggy Pop. It takes pieces of the Dylan myth, but other than Cate Blanchett’s Jude and Christian Bale’s Jack Rollins, the other characters are fairly standalone. I think you could easily enjoy the film without knowing who Bob Dylan is and without having any familiarity with the folk scene it explores. The film uses Dylan’s identity swapping as a jumpoff point to explore the way we all build up different identities over the course of our lives. It’s about the construction of self mythology, and our inability to live up to the image we put forth to the world. And, despite the fractured structure, this film is not six separate stories, it’s one story represented in six different aspects of the same person, following a life from childhood to old age, a life that need not be a famous one.

Right from the opening shot, I knew this would be a good movie, and I knew it would be a Todd Haynes film. The haunting POV shot tracking up to the stage is similar to the haunting POV shot that opens Poison. Haynes has an uncanny ability to create other worlds on screen, worlds that are at times so alien, they just freak you out. Superstar, Poison and Safe all scare me on some level, for the same reason Eraserhead does. It’s not what happens that scares you, it’s the alienness of the world. He’s not trying to comfortably draw you into a world, he’s opening a door to an other place, and leaving you there. This film has some of that otherworldly feel. Despite the big name stars on screen, you can feel adrift and odd. I couldn’t tell you what it is about that POV shot that unnerves me, but it really does.

But, when watching a film, I like to be unnerved. I like someone who opens a door into another universe and lets you stay there. The early section of the film focuses mostly on young Woody Guthrie, a kid who wants to be a blues singer, like his idol, Woody Guthrie. This is a kid who’s trying to be like someone from twenty years ago. He’s living the 50s, but behaves like it’s still the 20s, he has the concerns of an idol from previous times, and longs to live in the world that brought that music to life. Every kid wants to be like his idols, be they blues singers or simply his/her parents. Kids want to grow up, and by playing the blues, Woody is acting older than he is.

He gets mocked for trying to be like someone from twenty years ago, he gets thrown off a train, but he keeps dreaming anyway. He has this idealized version of Woody Guthrie, the older generation in his head. Here, I particularly like the surreal swimming through water sequence, which echoes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in its ingenious use of layovers. This is one of those moments that only Haynes does, weird and dazzling.

Young Woody eventually meets up with the real Woody, an old man dying in a hospital. This is part of growing up, to recognize the humanity of your idols. What’s left for you once you realize that the man you want to be is flawed? Do you want to take on his flaws, or do you want to be better? Either way, it’s jarring, and marks the moment of change from child to adulthood. With the loss of the older generation, the young man becomes old.

I’d argue there’s a pretty clear structure to the middle segments in terms of overall narrative. Woody’s childhood gives way to rise, as shown in the Jack Rollins stuff. Here, we see a human being getting turned into a myth. The kid who just wanted to sing, alluded to by Julianne Moore, has, by the time we see him, turned into an iconic personality. Using what we’ve just seen, we can understand the impulses that drove Jack to become a singer, the reasons that he decides to move on from the traditionals and start singing his own songs about his own times.

The documentary format here is the most direct throwback to Superstar, but it doesn’t make for the strongest section of the film. It’s notable that we get almost no time watching Jack rise, he goes from kid to success seemingly in an instant. Looking at the film, it’s clear that the old Woody Guthrie’s death leaves an opening for Jack, and he takes advantage. Society will always need a voice, always need controversial figures, and that’s what Jack becomes.

It’s interesting that young Woody talks about wanting to go to Hollywood and become famous, because the rest of the film is about struggling to deal with fame, and wanting to return to the simple pleasures of anonymity. In each of the stories, we see the Dylan surrogate running from something. In the first, Woody is running from his past in Minnesota, he’s not really a blues man, he’s just a kid from suburbia, and this traveling bum is the first persona he’s put on.

Jack Rollins becomes a mythologized figure, someone who means many different things to many different people. At the awards dinner, he disappoints the crowd when he makes a mistake and proves himself to be only human. He can’t really apologize for it, he can’t possibly live up to the messianic image people have of him.

That’s where the Robbie the actor and Claire story comes in. Here, Jack Rollins is a character, a role that can be put on and representative of certain aspirational values. I love the way the characters’ relationship is inextricably wrapped up in the Vietnam War. Theirs was a generation with an idealism that gradually fell apart. Robbie plays Jack in a movie, a movie that both Robbie and Claire put so much into. They want the film to live up to the man himself and be a revolutionary work. Everything starts to fall apart when they see the film and it fails to live up to expectations. This is another case where the reality fails to match up to the ideal. It’s not bad necessarily, just not what they hoped it to be.

The Claire and Robbie stuff was my favorite of the six milieus of the film. The look of the segment was deep and wonderful, the film technique giving us the story of these characters in a small amount of screentime. We don’t need to know all that they are because we can feel what they’re feeling in the moment. That’s what good filmmaking does makes you experience the world in a different way, and in this case, it was through the eyes of these two characters.

Probably the most honest, least affected scene in the film is the discussion about the differences between men and women. There, we get some raw emotion, and really feel the idealism of the 60s cracking all around. The love they had, born out of an oppositional counterculture movement, is dying at the same time as the war they fought to end is ending. The seemingly arbitrary end of the Vietnam War doesn’t match up to any counterculture activism, it just happened. The sense of futility that Robbie discusses here perfectly captures what a lot of people, including myself, feel about the Iraq War. It feels like there’s nothing we can do to stop the war. In the context of the film, that means that the music is futile, protest songs don’t stop a war, they’re just a way to feel less useless. That’s what Jude says at the press conference, and it’s that fatalism that alienates Claire.

Ultimately, the storyline is about the way our own memories of the past become impossible to live up to. Robbie constantly flashes back to his first meeting with Claire, which is starkly juxtaposed with the coldness they feel in the present. The makeup work on Charlotte Gainsbourg is really fantastic, showing the effects of aging. I also love the cinematography here, particularly during the sex scene, with its abstract close-ups. A lot of Hollywood sex scenes become more about watching famous people naked than watching characters in an emotional moment. The extreme close-ups here work much better than something like Tell Me You Love Me’s explicitness at conveying the emotion of the moment.

In the end, Robbie and Claire are a casualty of the post 60s loss of idealism. This story is the last tied to Dylan himself, it’s more about the impact of the work he did. As such, it’s the most emotionally relatable in a traditional way. It’s the probably the least essential for the film’s mission, but I’m thrilled that it’s in the film.

The storyline that’s attracted the most attention is Cate Blanchett’s performance as Jude, the 60s celebrity Dylan. At first, it was a little distracting, when they called Jude him, it jarred with what I knew about the actress, but once the storyline got going, I forgot about that and just settled in.

The examination of celebrity culture has a lot to say about the world we’re living in. It’s difficult to make a movie about movies and celebrity without seeming self congratulatory, but, from a human identity point of view, I think it’s fascinating to consider the lives that people like Britney Spears or Brad Pitt must live. They have literally no privacy, and are hounded wherever they go by cameras. What does that do to your concept of life, to know that any time you’re out in public, you could be being watched. I think most people would find it hard to feel bad for celebrities, after all, doesn’t everybody want to be famous? But, as in all things, you want what you can’t have. I bet Brad Pitt would love to just walk down the street and not have to worry about who might be watching, but he can’t do that. Would he give it all up for a normal life? Who knows, I’m sure there’s a lot of days when he just wishes he could run away from it all.

The Jude segment is about the way that celebrity can produce an increasingly warped reality. On a pure visual level, this is best expressed by the scene at the Warhol party, where Jude gets sick while looking at his own image projected on the walls behind him. Cate Blanchett looks the most like Dylan, and her segment is the one where the most notable real world event is folded in, the electric performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The impact of this is represented in the great moment of automatic machine gun fire on the stage.

The aftermath of the electric performance is where the film most explicitly recalls Velvet Goldmine. I think Goldmine is a stronger film, but it’s also more explicitly tied to its subject matter. That’s a movie about glam rock, this movie is more about the nature of individual identity. Goldmine focused on the movement and impact of the ideas on individuals. However, both films are ultimately about the social construction of identity. In Goldmine, individuals adapt the glam rock style as a fiction suit, a new liberating persona. That’s most explicit with Brian Slade becoming Maxwell Demon, killing him and being reborn as Tommy Stone, but throughout the film, we see characters who find liberation in glam rock style. It is all about transcending societal norms and expressing some deeper sense of self in the outrageous clothes and makeup. That’s what Christian Bale’s character tells his parents, that underneath, he is Maxwell Demon.

I’m Not There interrogates this process of identity creation. Jude Quinn is a construction, one that people enjoy. They like his outrageousness, and they want him to change the world. It’s not the person they like, it’s the personality. However, Bruce Greenwood’s character needs to see behind that, to puncture the persona and discover the real person. He asks Jude the questions that others won’t ask, and winds up revealing the truth about who he was.

In the end, Jude moves further and further away from reality, invoking the wrath of fans who loved his down to Earth, socially interested early work. The funniest bit is when Jude asks Jesus “Why don’t you play your early stuff”? Once a celebrity, he is constantly maligned for not living up to who he was earlier. Jude has lost touch with the spark that ignited young Woody Guthrie because he is not a common person. He hangs out with other celebrities, has relationships with models from magazine covers and is constantly hounded by the press. How can you write about the working man when you’re living like that?

The notion of an eighty date tour drives him over the edge, retreating into a dream. I love the image of Jude suspended on a string, not quite drifting away. It’s an 8 ½ quote, and a well used one. Even the character’s own dream life is bound by what’s been set out in pop culture. He is existing in an echo chamber, and rebels against his fans as a result. They want you to be the same as you were, but if you stay the same, they’ll criticize you for that.

Coming off the manic celebrity of the Jude segment, we return to Jack Rollins, who has become a Christian preacher. While this references Dylan’s Christian period, it also works as a logical progression from the hyper celebrity. Jude was an isolated character, constantly surrounded by an entourage, but with no real friends. To become a preacher is to become part of something larger than oneself, to recover meaning. Perhaps the best musical performance of the film is Jack’s song from the pulpit.

This brings us to the final segment of the film, and what’s apparently the least popular, Richard Gere’s William and the town of Riddle. It’s tough to engage with because the connection with Dylan isn’t immediately apparent. That’s true, but I think it’s actually a good thing. It’s the segment that broadens the film’s scope and makes it more universally relatable. In Riddle, it’s Halloween all the time. People can go there put on a different personality, and no one will notice.

That’s what our main character has done, once a renowned outlaw, he now lives a quiet life of anonymity. To understand this segment, you have to understand that everyone reinvents themselves, creates different personas for different purposes, and doesn’t necessarily want to be reminded of who they once were. People talk about how radical it is to have six people playing one character, but what it is is a literal representation of what we all do in our own minds.

Here, we follow an old man, who’s been through celebrity and chaos and now just wants to be left alone. But, it’s not so easy to change identities, memories and legends always exist, and people won’t just leave you alone. The highway is coming to Riddle, society returning to disrupt this haven. A central moment here is when Rimbaud Dylan is talking about the seven rules of disappearing. One is not looking at yourself, we see Woody Guthrie, the only time two Dylans meet, but William doesn’t look at him. That kind of self examination is not for him at this moment.

His desire to move on from the past continues when he encounters Pat Garrett, a man who is this realm’s incarnation of the Journalist, both played by Bruce Greenwood. The film is one story, and character types recur throughout. This is the most obvious one, a character who seeks to push through the secrecy surrounding this man, and find the truth. However, what the film makes clear is that the identities one puts up to protect him/herself reveal a lot more about the person than the strict facts. That’s why this film is so much more successful than a traditional biopic. We know the facts, facts don’t tell us anything. We’ll never know what things were really like for Dylan, and honestly, watching that story doesn’t matter.

Superstar broadened Karen Carpenter’s story into a wide ranging exploration of how society forces women to conform to certain images, it’s about the social pressures we all feel in our lives. A straight biopic, of either her or Dylan, would lose that universal relevance. I don’t know what it’s like to become famous, and I can’t really relate to that story in the way I can to the story of someone who constructs false identities, all in search of some idealized self.

In the end, Garrett interrogates William and a temporary stop along the way ends. He’s back on the run, just like he always was. He has gone from childhood to old age, gotten everything he wanted, and now is happy to be back in the same place, dusting off the old guitar and rediscovering what made him want to get into music in the first place. Bringing it full circle gives the film a strong finality. He will continue to reinvent himself, but at the core there is the music, and the hope that somehow, singing these songs will make a difference. It’s not about people hearing it, it’s not about being famous, it’s about the simple joy that playing the guitar can bring. Maybe this machine can’t kill fascists, maybe it can’t change the world, but it sure can affect people, and maybe making them happy is all you can hope for.

There’s a wonderful haunting quality about the final scenes, as William watches his dog fail to catch up to the train. He wanted to take part of that life with him, but it didn’t make it, and really he doesn’t need it.

I think this film is a linear narrative, just one that’s split across six different characters. It’s the story of one man’s growth, rise to fame and ultimate rejection of the role society tried to put on him in favor of a simpler, quiet life. Wrapped up in this narrative are five individual stories, each aspects of the larger whole. It’s a really interesting structure and one of the most ambitious pieces of screenwriting I’ve ever seen.

At the same time, Haynes’s nails the directing side of things. He’s got so much ambition, nimbly leaping from style to style, all the while keeping things unified. There are images in here that sear into your brain, and throughout, he manages to distill complex emotions and ideas into singular images. Watching the film, there’s always something cool going on, something you want to watch. There’s no scene in here that feels “normal,” no exposition to get through before the good part. It’s all good, and this is easily the best film of the year. It’s a movie about the way we all live, as exemplified by one specific life.

2007 Movie Preview

2006 was a pretty good year for cinema, a lot of my favorite directors had projects coming out, and most of them turned out quite good. And next year looks like it should have an equally exciting plethora of new films to delight and enthrall.

10. Electroma - This is Daft Punk's film about a robot's quest to be human. It's supposedly very experimental, and seems like the kind of thing that could be either great or tedious depending on your mood. But, I love the trailer and I'm very curious to see what they do as film directors. I'm not sure what the status of this is, it showed at Cannes back in May, but I havent' seen much since. Hopefully it will re-emerge and get a 2007 release.

9. Smiley Face - This year, Gregg Arkai became one of my favorite directors, and I'm eager to see some new work from him. that said, this one sounds like a much more straight ahead mainstream comedy than he's done in the past. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, as long as he maintains his own voice in there. The plot, surrounding a woman who eats some pot brownies and has a crazy day offers the potential for some Doom Generation or Nowhere style craziness. After the intense drama of Mysterious Skin, he's earned a lighter film.

8. Be Kind Rewind - Another director's lightening up for a more accessible mainstream comedy. However, with Gondry at the helm, it's sure to be idiosyncratic and full of weird, wonderful images. The premise, that a guy who work sat a video store gets zapped with a magnet, erases all the tapes, and has to remake them himself, is absolutely ridiculous, but full of comic potential. Jack Black is great in the right role, and this sounds like it has the potential to harness that School of Rock go getterness. The combination of him and Gondry should be brilliant.

7. Grindhouse - Tarantino has never made a film that's less than great, and he's only gotten better as time passed. So, I'm going to check out anything he does. That said, I feel like this film will allow him to indulge all his worst instincts, and the premise, a slasher film with a car as the killer, is pretty inane. Without considering the director, the Robert Rodriguez side of the project looks a lot more interesting, Rose McGowan with the machine gun leg is genius and we've even got Freddy Rodriguez, Six Feet Under's Rico, in the film. Ultimately, I think this will be a joycore film, full of so much love from the creators, you can't help but get caught up in it.

6. Sweeney Todd - Burton made a virtually unmatched run of quality films from 1988-1994, but since then he's been a bit underwhelming. After the good, but not great Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I said that he should do a musical, so I was excited to hear he'll be adapting Sweeney Todd. I haven't seen the show, but the subject matter fits perfectly into his visual world. Rarely do you see a musical that fully uses the possibilities of cinema, I'm really excited to see what Tim brings to it. On top of that, there's a fantastic cast, Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman, Sacha Baron Cohen and even Anthony Head. This has the potential to be Burton's best film in a long time.

5. I'm Not There - Normally, I would be disgruntled that we're seeing yet another musician biopic. These films are usually boring reenactments of culturally iconic moments that give no real insight into the person they're interrogating. The only two musician biopics that really worked were Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, both directed by Todd Haynes, and what do you know, he's directing this film as well. Haynes is a conniseur of pop culture, using cultural trends to examine the direction of society as a whole. Superstar and Velvet Goldmine are more about a time and place than specific people and I'd imagine this film will be the same. The fact that there's seven actors playing Dylan could potentially be gimmicky, but it makes me think this'll be a crazy, surreal film and that's a good sign. He's never made a bad film and I doubt he'll go wrong here. Plus, the cast is just fantastic: Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Heath Ledger to name just a few.

4. There Will Be Blood - Finally we're getting a new Paul Thomas Anderson film. Magnolia is the best film of the past twenty-five years, PTA the rare person who's equally adept at writing and directing. Paul himself said he didn't think he'd ever top Magnolia, and I'd agree, but I'm still eager to see new work. There's not too many details out on the project, but I've got to say, a period piece of this nature is not what I'd really want to see from him. Still, all his films are amazing in their own way, and someone with his talent is going to make films that are full of compelling details even if the whole doesn't work. I'm eager to see some stills or a trailer because right now I really have no idea that this movie will be like. It's just PTA's name that earned it this place on the list.

3. I'm a Cyborg (But That's OK) - After wrapping up the Vengeance Trilogy in spectacular fashion, Park Chanwook moves on to a lighter, but still odd, comedy. The premise of this one is great and I think it has the potential to be that rare kind of movie that is simultaneously very funny and very touching. It's difficult territory, but the hard edged sensibility of Park means we won't drift too far into melodrama. And, as the trailer shows, virtually no one working today can make images as striking as Park's.

2. Southland Tales - Many of my favorite films have been described as self-indulgent messes, so I wasn't too wary when Southland Tales got savaged at Cannes. I'm increasingly less concerned with narrative coherence, instead interested in seeing moments of cinematic transcendence, and even the bad reviews concede this film offers those. Kelly's Donnie Darko is one of the best films ever, even though every re-edit and comment he makes about the film makes it sound like he has no idea why it worked in the first place. But, I still believe in him, this one sounds so over the top weird, I can't wait to see it. If Inland Empire showed us anything, it's that a three hour, barely narrative piece of directorial self indulgence can be utterly satisfying. Of course, Kelly isn't Lynch, so this one could really just be bad, but there's only one way to find out.

1. My Blueberry Nights - Wong Kar-Wai is the best film director of all time, he has redefined the way the medium can be used, inventing a totally different, more emotional, language for cinema. No one works like he does, and no one makes films like his. So, a new Wong Kar-Wai movie is an event. 2046 was a great closer to one part of his career, and My Blueberry Nights offers a lot of changes. The major one is that he's shooting in America, in English, with an American cast. I love the Hong Kong cityscapes his characters usually inhabit, but Happy Together worked well in Argentina, pushing WKW to even more visual experimentation. Perhaps shooting in America will do the same. An article I read about the shooting made it sound like this will have plenty of classic Wong Kar-Wai moments, though they're taking place in a Midwestern diner instead of a Hong Kong fastfood stand. He's got a fantastic cast, and the way he works, he seems to push people to their best work. And, it'll be great to have my first viewing of this movie in a theater instead of on an import DVD.

In addition to films, there's a few other things I'm eagerly awaiting.

True Blood - Alan Ball's work on Six Feet Under is some of the best writing ever, and I was thrilled to hear he's doing another HBO series. This one involves vampires. A supernatural conceit like this should allow him to mix things up a bit from Six Feet Under. Rarely do you see a TV auteur like Ball do a second series, primarily because a series uses up so much story, how much can one man have left? Clearly, SFU was very personal, and I'll be curious to see how the way he reimagines his trademark themes to fit in this new genre context. I'm not sure if the show will actually premiere this year, but whenever it starts up, I'll be there.

The Sopranos - More HBO, we're going to finally see the end of The Sopranos in April. There are a select group of TV shows that I consider to be in the pantheon, the absolute best series, and The Sopranos is the only one is still on the air. I'm really curious to see what happens in the final season, will Chase continue the lethargic, introspective style of the second half of the sixth season or will things rev up and end in fire? I'd guess it'll be more of a fade away than a burn out, but we'll see. Even when it's frustrating, there's no current show that can match it.

New Babylon 5 - I've still got a lot of material to go through, but I'm happy that JMS is doing some new stuff in the Babylon 5 universe. The direct to DVD format has been much discussed as an option for continuing cult shows with a small, but devoted fanbase. I would love to see the movies become wildly successful, and possibly open the door for the Buffyverse direct to DVD movies Joss wanted to do. He claimed it came down to a budget issue, so maybe some success here would inspire Fox to do an about face and fund those movies. Maybe it's been too long, but if Babylon 5 can return after eight years, why can't Buffy after only three?

Buffy Season Eight Comics - Speaking of Buffy, if we can't get DVD movies, at least there's something coming in. I'll be picking up a monthly comic again for the first time in a while. It's been too long since I spent time with these characters and I'm eager to see what they're up to. The preview pages indicate we're still in a season seven millieu, which doesn't thrill me, but I'm sure there'll be some great stuff in there as well. I don't know that a project like this has ever been attempted, a canon continuation of a series in comic book form by the original creators. I'm excited to see how it works.

Morrison/JH Williams Vertigo series - This one is the most hypothetical. In a recent interview, Grant said he was working on an original series for Vertigo with JH Williams on art. The two of them did amazing work on the two Seven Soldiers bookends, in the first creating an entire universe of believable characters and then destroying it in only thirty pages. The second was a hypercompressed pop speed pill, one of the most dizzying, awe inspiring single issues I've ever read. Morrison's projects are frequently riddled with artist problems, the few times all has gone well on art, as with Flex Mentallo, We3 or Kill Your Boyfriend, he's made masterpieces. The thought of JH on a long term project with Morrison is almost too much to handle, I just hope that it happens.

Dottie Gets Spanked

Dottie Gets Spanked is a short film that Todd Haynes did between Poison and Safe. It's not his strongest work, but it's a really interesting piece that contains a lot of the themes and motifs that inform his later work.

One of the things I love about Todd's stuff is that all of them take place in a slightly skewed version of our reality, making the ordinary into something alien and disquieting. This is most notable in his early stuff, Safe and Poison both make you slightly uncomfortable, and Dottie Gets Spanked also has that slightly off feeling. It's a film that you don't enjoy in the typical way. Dottie feels very similar to Poison, and could probably even have been incorporated as another piece of that film. However, it's also clearer and more well developed than most of the stuff in Poison, and a bit more thematically dense.

I listened to the commentary included on the DVD, and that illuminates a lot of the motivation behind the film. The main character, Steven, is a stand in for Haynes, who went through most of the stuff that he does. Nearly all of Todd's films are concerned with the way that the typical suburban family structure is constricting and damages those in it, be it Karen Carpenter's cruel parents or Cathy's snarky neighbors in Safe.

Almost all of Haynes' films are concerned with troubled female protagonist, a tendency that first emerged in his childhood drawings, much like Steven's. What makes this film interesting is that even though the film is essentially about Dottie, it's the only Haynes film that addresses the suburban family from the perspective of the male child. Steven's mother may feel the same constriction that pains Cathy or Carol, but that's not what the film is about, it's about the development of this kid.

I admire Haynes for taking on tough subject matter. It's shaky territory dealing with childhood conceptions of sexuality, but this film pulls it off, and the dream sequences present things from Steven's uninformed point of view, while at the same time showing us the tendencies that will most likely inform his later life. He knows that his attraction to spanking is something to be ashamed of, but at the same time, he can't let go of it. This sentiment is eloquently summed up in the finale, when Steven buries the picture, with the assumption that eventually he'll return to that fantasy.

The film is very economical in the way it sets things up, to some extent, Haynes uses archetypes, the gruff father who's not able to understand, the overindulgent mother, but I don't think that hurts the work. Like Lynch, he takes this somewhat cliched suburban setting and then peels back its layers to reveal the dysfunction beneath.

The dream sequences reminded me of the scenes in Natural Born Killers which also used the laughtrack as an ironic counterpoint to onscreen action. To some extent, I feel like this sort of postmodernism is a bit passe. It's been done so much that it's not as shocking as it might have been back in 1993.

This doesn't hold back Dottie from being a really successful, haunting film. Haynes is a consistently intriuging and challenging filmmaker and I'm really looking forward to his upcoming Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan.

The Dottie DVD also included a short that Haynes produced back in the 80s called He Was Once. It's a dark parody of 60s TV show Davie and Goliath. This one suffers much more from the fact that this ironic deconstruction has been done a lot in recent years. However, it's still out there enough that it works.

I haven't seen the original material, so I'm probably not the best audience for the film, however, I'm aware of the basics, it's a moralistic claymation story of a boy and his talking dog. The first notable thing about this film is the great makeup and set design, which is designed to mimic the claymation aesthetic of the show. The actors move in an odd way, which contributes to the illusion. It's a very good looking movie.

It's tough to evaluate the film without having seen the show. I'd imagine the belt stuff is drawing out something implicit in the original material, that his parents don't believe Davie's story. Here it's turned into a sadomasochistic ritual which serves as the primary form of communication between family members. The thing that makes the film work is that it's not played as something jokey, the characters behave in an exaggerated way, but events are given gravity and played seriously.

The two dream sequences are fantastic, really dark interesting stuff. It's a good companion piece to Dottie because both explore the way that children rebel against their powerlessness in relationships with their parents. So, this was a cool film, definitely worth seeing.

Poison

A few days ago I watched Todd Haynes' first feature, Poison. Todd has been my most recent 'discovery,' and after seeing Far From Heaven a while back, I set out to see all of his films, a quest that is now complete. Haynes is someone who creates great, challenging films that are always a bit off. Everything he's made seems to take place in a world that's not quite our own, whether it's the 50s Sirk world of Far From Heaven or the slightly skewed 80s of Safe. All three of Todd's features that I've seen ended up on my Top 100 Films All Time list, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story surpasses even the greatness of those films. So, I was understandably excited to see Poison, and at least complete the journey through the filmmaking world of Todd Haynes.

Right from the beginning, Poison puts you in a really weird headspace. I'm not sure if it felt like that when it was first released, but this film just seems to come from another world, and the voice of that other world is the narrator of the Richie storyline. I think she narrated Superstar also, and it's the oddest, seemingly calm, yet disturbing voice. Combine that with the grainy file photo and the long shot of a child's hand reaching for something and I was in a strange place. And the film doesn't really leave that strange place. From a narrative point of view, and a thematic point of view, this film doesn't really make it, but where it does succeed is in sustaining an odd feeling for an hour and a half, and a lot of the time, that's more interesting than a classically structured narrative.

As I talked about in my piece on running a film series, a lot of people don't seem to enjoy the slow paced world building that Haynes did in Safe, and I don't think they'd enjoy what he does here, because from a story point of view, there's a ton of issues. The film has three seperate segments that are intercut, but there's no real connection between them, and in terms of style they're worlds apart.

One segment revolves around a prisoner who's jealous that the inmate he's in love with is hanging out with other prisoners. This makes it sound like a really bad teen prison show, but the way the feelings are dealt with is through a bunch of dream sequences and voiceover. The dream sequences represent the prisoner's time at a juvenile home, but they're set in an odd meadow type environment, and have a lot of bizarre, dreamlike imagery. These sequences are interesting from an aesthetic point of view, and the spitting scene is quite disturbing, but I'm not sure what the thematic point of them is. They work as a purely visual element, providing a contrast to the dark enclosed prison, but their position in regards to the narrative is a bit obscure.

This story has its moments, and is probably the most well made, but it's also the least entertaining. Going to the other extreme, we've got a story about a scientist who discovers how to turn the 'sex gene' into a liquid form, and accidentally ingests it, causing him to take on the appearance of a leper. I thought this was just a bizarre tale, imitating the style of 50s sci-fi movies, but reading about it online indicates that it was meant to be an allegory for the AIDS crisis. That makes sense, but I guess it shows how much society has 'moved on' from that crisis, even though it's still affecting thousands of people. It's just not part of our cultural consciousness at present.

Anyway, this story is entertaining, notably the overwrought acting, but its value as dramatic piece is questionable. I love the shots of a rotating black and white wheel intercut with all kinds of crazy things, and the way the piece seems to take place in a world that's kind of like the 50s, but not quite. Without viewing it as an allegory, it's rather nonsensical, but the ending works really well, and provides a nice thematic wrap up for the whole movie. So, again, narrative not a big concern here, but in terms of creating a mood it succeeds.

The final piece is told in documentary style, harkening back to Haynes' work on Superstar. The mockumentary format has been used to death lately, but it works well here, as the people who knew gradually construct a picture of Richie, the seven year old boy who killed his father. I love the visual of Richie looking in at his mother having sex with the gardener, staged in such a way that it's obvious the footage is film composited in the frame. It's great when the footage within the door actually zooms in, breaking any illusion of reality.

The ending of this piece is very enigmatic and leaves a lot of things unanswered, which works well. This isn't the kind of story where you want to find out that Richie ran off somewhere and died in a ditch, the entire power is in the fact that we're reconstructing this person solely from other peoples' impressions of him. It's a technique Haynes brings back later in Velvet Goldmine.

What prevents the film from working as a cohesive whole is the fact that these stories don't really have any discernable connections to each other. They all focus on some element of humanity's dark side, but other than that, the styles, tones and content are all vastly different, and intercutting these totally different stories doesn't add much to them, or produce any really interesting juxtapositions, which is the whole point of intercutting.

So, Poison was worth watching because of its alien atmosphere, and I definitely enjoyed it, but I don't think it's anywhere near as successful as the work that would follow. You can see the potential for greatness here, but potential alone doesn't make a film great. But I always love to watch people who experiment with the medium and try to do something different, and this film certainly does.

Running a Film Series

This summer, Jordan and I ran a film series at the local library. We used the projector from LMC-TV, and back at the beginning of the summer chose eight films to show people. I was expecting to get a twenty or thirty year old demographic, and chose the films accordingly. Also, one of the points of the thing was that there was a discussion afterwards, so we chose films that would be conducive to discussion.

Once the screenings started it became apparent that we were not getting the younger demographic. At the vast majority of screenings, we had people who were basically fifty and up. And in a lot of cases, the films we had programmed were not in line with their tastes.

The screening that went the worst was when we showed Safe, the 1995 Todd Haynes film. This was a film I loved, and hadn't heard about until this year, so I figured it was the perfect film to show and get more exposure for. However, the film is apparently glacially paced. It's not fast, but I didn't really notice any dragging, however at this screening, we had four old people in attendance and apparently they felt watching the film was not a good use of the time they had left on this Earth and an hour and a half into the film, one of them said "I can't take it anymore" and walked out. So, this was a low point.

However, the next week we were screening Oldboy. I was anticipating a lot of awkwardness, but this one went really well. We actually got a younger audience for this film, about ten people, and it hit the audience exactly as intended, getting a huge gasp at the revelatory moment at the end of the film, as well as a lot of "Augh"s during the nastier moments.

At Waking Life we got an older audience who were bored by the film, so we stopped it halfway through. They claimed it was too 'college' and left then. But, we did have an interesting discussion, so it was a success on the whole.

Then we screened Fallen Angels, the Wong Kar-Wai film. We had a big audience for this and the movie went over pretty well. People might not have loved it, but there were no walkouts and we had a solid discussion afterwards.'

The last film we were set to show was Irreversible. At the beginning of doing this, I was thinking that we could challenge the audience, show them this really challenging film and push the boundaries of the way people think.

I'd always wondered why TV networks didn't show more challenging program, and why movie studios pushed to make movies more likable. Now I can understand that mentality. Doing these screenings I saw slow paced arty movies fail to connect with an audience, who always seemed bored and on the edge of leaving. As time went on, I was wishing we had shorter films that would go over better with the crowd. I moved away from more challening stuff, and rather than thinking about showing the best film, I wanted to show stuff that would appeal to the audience. It's so easy to say in theory you want to challenge the audience, but when you actually have to sit there with them, it's not so easy.

So, Jordan and I had basically decided we couldn't show Irreversible. It was too graphic and intense for people. But, we arrived there and three people said they were there to see it and wanted us to show it. Unfortunately we also had three old women who thought we were going to show American Beauty. So, we decided to go through with Irreversible, after warning them that it was incredibly intense and that they could feel free to walk out if they needed to. I was expecting the old women to go sometime between the start of the Rectum scene and the scene where Pierre bangs the man's head in with a fire extinguisher. However, they stuck around, and I figured the rape scene would end it for them, but they sat through that.

We reached the end of the film, throughout which there was such palpable awkwardness in the air I couldn't even really enjoy it. I was stunned that the old women had made it through the movie, but they had and the three people who had requested the film liked it. So, it was a success and I had achieved my original goal of challenging people's ideas of film.

We may not have gotten that many people, but at the end of most of the screenings I felt pretty good about how it went, and if we bring it back next year, I think we will program a little differently, some more accessible, quicker paced films that can still challenge the audience. I guess you do sometimes have to make concessions to how the audience feels and not just show what you like.

Tomorrow: Look for my reaction to the final episode of Six Feet Under!

70s Cinevisions: Velvet Goldmine and The Virgin Suicides

The 1970s are widely regarded as the best era of Hollywood cinema, an oasis of art and creativity before video and a culture of blockbusters, as well as expensive failures like Heaven's Gate doomed the auteur movement in Hollywood. This whole era is chronicled in the really interesting book, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, a really fun read. However, while the era is gone, it lingers on in the memory of cinema, notably in two films I recently watched, Velvet Goldmine and The Virgin Suicides.

Velvet Goldmine is a film by Todd Haynes, the genius behind Far From Heaven, Safe and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, all films which I've reviewed previously here on the blog. All three of these films have a lot of depth, and, while they've all got great emotional beats, it's really the intellectual content that's most impressive. Goldmine is different in that it's much more about creating the atmosphere of a time and place rather than developing character or emotional lines. The film is about Brian Slade, a David Bowie analogue, and the 70s glam rock scene that sprung up around him. The framing device for the film is that a one time glam rocker goes back to investigate Brian Slade's mysterious disappearance from the public eye, and in the process brings back memories of his own experience with the scene.



The film is really unique in that it isn't reliant on a traditional character or plot driven narrative. We get to know the characters, but the film story is told through mixed media, like music videos, news footage and dream sequences, with almost constant musical backing. So, we very rarely actually hear Brian speaking, and there's no attempt to explore his psychology or what drives him to dress glam. Instead, we just observe him putting on the show he put on for the world. I love this sort of filmmaking, which places a stress on music and visual rather than being strictly tied to the need to convey a narrative. You really get the feeling of the period, and understand why people were so drawn to the person. The film keeps you slightly separated from the character, which makes you relate more with Arthur, the audience point of view character, the fan of glam rock.

The music in the film is crucial, and I was a bit disappointed that there were no Bowie songs in the film. A quick bit of research reveals that Bowie did not approve of the script, and as a result, refused his songs. However, Haynes did a great job of assembling a soundtrack that sounds like Bowie's stuff and captures that 70s glam rock feeling, with assistance from many artists, including Thom Yorke of Radiohead. I hadn't heard the songs before, but I felt vaguely like I knew them, and that's probably what they were going for.



The film draws a lot from Citizen Kane, and is structured in the same way as that classic. There's a lot of little references to Kane, mostly the shots in the nightclub with Mandy and the guy in the wheelchair starting the story. I really liked the framing story, which actually provides most of the film's emotional impact. The story of Arthur might be an obvious one, but after watching an hour and a half of tribute to glam rock, to see him make the decision to go for it and become part of the scene is great. The framing device gives us the film's basic thesis, that glam rock was an escape from normality, and gave us a glimpse of a completely different, liberated world, a world that was destroyed with Reagan and the neocons in the 1980s. Brian Slade's reinvention is the proof of the fallen culture.



Visually, the film is extraordinary. The opening with a UFO flying through Victorian England is dazzling, and the reprise of the UFO with Curt and Brian later in the film is even better. I love the whitescreen video Brian does, as well as the concert sequences, particualrly the death of Glam Rock one.

The film draws a lot of its structure from Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Besides the obvious similarities in subject matter, the mixed media style is almost identical. This film even plays out one scene with Barbie dolls, referencing that film. Ironically, Superstar is more effective at creating characters you sympathize with, despite the characters being plastic dolls. However, Superstar is intended more as a melodrama, while Goldmine is a celebration of a scene, and a more upbeat film.

I could see why people would dislike this movie, admittedly it is more style than what would usually be considered substance, but in this case, the substance is the style. The whole point of the film is to replicate the excess of the glam rock scene, hence the excess of filmmaking. I think a film can succeed in just creating visual moments, the story is sometimes secondary, and that's why this film works. I would say it's actually the best of Todd's features, though Superstar is still the best he's done overall. This guy is one of the best filmmakers working today, and everything he's done is inventive, unique and challenging.

Switching gears to something rather different, I also rewatched Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides. It's one of the best debut films I've seen for someone who isn't coming into the business with experience in music videos or commercials. She crafts a completely coherent universe, full of melancholy. The film is about a group of teenage boys who are obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, five girls living in a very strict household.

The best thing about the film is its combination of visuals and music. The score is by Air, one of the best bands out there, their music is extremely moody, perfect for a film. Combined with the gorgeous shots of the town and Lux in the field, it creates an atmosphere and feeling that reaches the audience directly. The story could have been a fairly conventional teen film, it's in the filmmaking that this film is elevated to greatness. The film's score is primarily based around variations of "Playground Love," Air's best song. I'd love to see them do some more film scores, but to date, this is it.



The other musical choices are great as well. The "Magic Man" montage introducing Trip Fontaine sets off the best segment of the film. Trip's quest to woo Lux provides for some great moments, particularly the awkward TV watching scene, followed by the great kiss in the car. You can crack on Josh Hartnett all you want, but he's great in this film, making Trip simultaneously charming and clearly so self involved you wouldn't actually want to know him. The dance scene is great, and really the climax of the movie. I love the use of Styx's "Come Sail Away."

After that, the film sort of cools down, and just coasts out, but I don't mean that in a bad way. It lets you revel in the atmosphere, even though the plot doesn't develop that much. It's more about the boys (and by extension, the audience) viewing the girls and trying to understand them, rather than about the girls themselves. So, they've already become legends, and the suicide crystallizes this. The actual suicide scene doesn't seem as shocking as you might think it would be. Sofia doesn't film it in such a way that you should be surprised, it's just something that should happens and the film continues along in the odd kind of funk that has presided over the whole thing.

I love the closing minutes, with the gas mask party and final voiceovers about the girls' legend. The film doesn't really depend on any characters, despite some good performances, it's much more about a feeling, and in creating a feeling, the film is extremely successful. In her next film, Lost in Translation, Coppola again creates a really moody, not really narrative film, but that one has much stronger characters, and that's why I'd consider it a better movie. But, this is still a really great film, and between the two, I would say that Sofia has surpassed her father as a filmmaker already, and I can't wait to see her next, a film about Marie Antoinette.

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

I just finished watching Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an excellent short film from director Todd Haynes, someone who has quickly become one of my favorite directors, after seeing this, Far From Heaven and Safe. The man's a brilliant filmmakers, and one of these people who has a really tight knit set of films, which build on each other thematically, so when I see another film of his, I appreciate the others even more.

So, before you read this, I would highly reccomend that you go here and download the film. It's on bit torrent and will probably take a few hours to download. It's a fabulous film, and you can see it for free, so you have no excuse. Once you download and view, you can return, and check out my thoughts on the film. Seriously, it's worth the download.



Anyway, Superstar was the first film Todd did, and it was made for his masters thesis while he was still in film school, so he was making this with basically no resources and minimal budget, which is tough when trying to tell the story of a major rock personality like Karen Carpenter. So, what he does is use a lot of stock footage, and for his main cast he uses Barbie dolls made up to look vaguely like the real people they are representing. It's the sort of thing that sounds really goofy, and as someone who made a few movies with action figures years ago, I know that it doesn't always work out, but here, Haynes pulls it off, and you really care about these doll characters.

As a result of having no budget, Haynes used all the songs in the film without obtaining the rights for them, so Richard Carpenter sued him to keep the film from being distributed, and Mattel did as well. The songs are so integral to the film, there'd be no point in releasing it without them, so this is a film that is destined to remain underground forever. However, thanks to the internet, I was able to download and view it, and after seeing it, it's tragic that this film isn't available in a better format, because the quality hurts on the download, and also this is a film that cries out for supplemental material from Haynes, and background on the real Carpenter.

Putting aside the issues outside the film, which could make a great film of their own, we've got the work, which stands as an absolutely riveting 43 minutes. The film actually prefigures the 90s/00s Behind the Music culture that would develop in the years after this film's release. This basically is a Behind the Music parody before Behind the Music even existed. While the idea of this mockumentary biography was still pretty fresh back in 1987 when the film was made, but now it's been done many a time, from Beneath the Dome: The R2D2 story to Pi: Behind the Number by my own friends Jordan and Steve. So, this is a form that was already getting a bit stale five years ago, and that might lead you to believe that this film here would not hold up. However, that is not the case, because despite seeming like a parody on the surface, the film is actually quite serious and very dark.

The film has the feeling that few films achieve of existing in a world completely its own, where you're just transported away to a new and different place, one that in this case is quite unsettling. The film that most did this for me was Eraserhead, which freaked me out solely because the world was so different. This film is similarly unsettling, as the Barbies interact, and all other sorts of footage are cut in. Haynes just immerses you in Carpenter's world, and despite the nondiegetic titles, you're always in the story, and it's just an odd world to go to. Most big budget Hollywood movies have a finished quality, a sheen about them, but when you go to lower budget stuff, things feel different, and this difference can be unsettling. That's why I think all horror movies should be grainy, low budget things, because something like Blair Witch or even Texas Chainsaw Massacre the 70s version, has this creepy alien feeling, and that's what this film has.

As the film goes on, you're still aware that the characters are dolls, but Haynes does such a good job of making them characters as well, you can see beyond their plastic makeup, and into their frequently plastic personalities. As Karen goes along, her story is tragic and disturbing, the film never moves into parody, it's always dark and foreboding.

The device of using the Barbie dolls, beside allowing for a lower budget, ties in to the story's themes brilliantly. One of the main points of the films is that The Carpenters' music was this completely artificial, syrupy pop reassurance that had no relevance to the changing society that they were living in. It was purely escape from the disturbing issues the 60s had brought to the fore. I would disagree with the idea that music should be required to make social commentary, I do like the fact that Haynes makes The Carpenters so vehemently anti-political, preferring to create this folksy down home image that is a conservative backlash against the strife of the 60s. So, having plastic dolls perform this plastic music based on a constructed image is perfectly appropriate. I love how Richard always has the same cheesy smile and perfect hair, even as he is getting angry at Karen.



The other area that the doll is the perfect device for addressing is one of the film's primary discussions, the idea of societal pressure on women to have their bodies conform to a certain expectation, one epitomized by the barbie doll itself. The film is primarily concerned with exploring Karen's anorexia and it does a really good job of making us understand her. Throughout the entire film, Karen is manipulated by her family to create the image they need for their music, and she has no control over herself, so she decides to take control of her body, but in the process, goes overboard and develops the anorexia that is her undoing. Anorexia is portrayed as something that makes her simultaneously powerless and powerful, because this is the only area where she can resist what everyone else wants her to do, if she doesn't want to eat, no one can make her, and even they do, that will only deepen her affliction.

By the end, she recognizes what she's doing is a mistake, but she just can't stop, she is addicted, her anorexia which started as something she chose to do has become a disease that controls her. It's almost paradoxical that you're watching this doll, and really wishing that she would just eat something and beat this.

The film has a ton of parallels with the other two Haynes films that I've seen, Safe and Far from Heaven. All three are about women who are living lives they are not in control of, and engage in societally unacceptable practices to combat the imprisonment. Karen is quite similar to both Carol and Kathy in that she doesn't have to think for herself, she just follows the rules and has an easy life, but she needs control. For her, this comes in the form of the anorexia, which becomes a disease just like Carol's problems in Safe. Both Safe and Superstar are drawn from the Disease of the Week TV Movie, in which we watch someone suffer through an illness that could in theory happen to us. It's all about the main character's suffering from something they can't control, and watching how it disrupts their normal life.

Karen's problems are actually treated in a similar way as Frank's homosexuality in Far From Heaven. All the characters around them don't understand why they can't just stop not eating or being gay. It seems so easy, but that's to ignore the fact that certain behaviors are deeply held and to sublimate them to is to destroy oneself. Karen can't just eat, she needs to overcome the deeper problems within her, and for Frank, he has to confront the fact that he cannot keep lying to himself and expect to be happy.

I think Haynes' biggest issue is with showing how characters who seem to have it all may in fact be the most unhappy. All of the three main characters here are forced by society to do things they do not want to do, and it leads to unhappiness and reaction against societal norms.

The film makes amazing use of music, contrasting The Carpenters' smooth sounds with the trauma Karen is undergoing. There's an early scene where they're recording Close to You, and she messes up, and is angry about it. It's startling to hear her anger come in the middle of this sweet sounding song. A similar scene is when she is performing and collapses on stage in the middle of one of their songs.



The film uses a lot of avant garde techniques, cutting to found footage, a repeated motif of a hand tapping to the beat of the songs, but the strong character arc and great use of music keep the film emotionally relevant, even with the avant garde stuff. So, you can ponder the meaning of cuts, but that's not all that the film is about. I think the editing is great, and what it does is place Karen's story in the context of society as a whole, particularly with the editing of Vietnam clips, and the scene where they sing for Nixon.

If I have any complaints, it would be that some of the titles are difficult to read because they are the same color as the background. Also, as I said before, I take issue with the idea that doing this sappy type of music during a time of war is somehow ignorant of larger societal issues. Not every piece of music need address politics and society, sometimes a good song is just a good song, and The Carpenters did a bunch of those. But, I'm imagine if Haynes did an entire film about Karen Carpenter, he has more than a passing affection for her music.

Ultimately, the film is a harrowing depiction of a disease that destroys Karen, despite her best efforts to beat it, as well as a society retreating from the change of the sixties and moving into a more conservative time, a return to 'traditional values.' In that respect, the film is as relevant today as it ever was, and the sort of clean cut, sappy image has moved from music to politics. I'm tempted to say that this is Haynes' best work, because of just how dense the film is, with fully drawn characters presented in a short running time.

And it's a shame that the film can't be widely distributed. Music rights, while they do protect the artist, are so annoying, and as a filmmaker, I wish that some sort of deal could be worked out to let low budget films use the music they want. It's very frustrating. But, that has only added to the film's aura, this is the film they don't want you to see! And, considering the way he is portrayed in the film, I doubt Richard Carpenter is going to be letting you see this one anytime soon.

Censorship

I was reading some articles on Safe that have made me reconsider my view of the ending a bit. Originally, I saw it as a really dark ending, that she was retreating further and further from the world, and now that she's in this bubble, there's nowhere left to go. However, what I failed to realize was the fact that throughout the film, she blames all her problems on society, the chemicals, and never actually looks at herself. Look at the psychiatrist scene, where she barely speaks. So, here, isolated from the world, she no longer has any excuses. There is no one there but herself, and when she looks in the mirror, maybe she'll finally see what she's become. Rather than being a retreat, what being in the igloo might force her to do is confront her problems, and then re-emerge, reborn and ready to face the world again, having taken care of her own problems. But, that's not definitive. It's definitely ambiguous, but there is an alternative explanation. That doesn't change the fact that I don't think Wrenwood works, she does have to confront the problem, and being at Wrenwood is running away from it. Maybe being in the bubble will let her finally confront herself.

Completely different topic. I was in the computer lab, reading my New York Times when I come across an article about the new head of the FCC, and how, backed by the Parents Television Council, plans to increase the power of the FCC, possibly to include ruling over cable channels. Now, this Parents Television Council is a pretty ridiculous organization, they're the people behind nearly every "indecency" related scandal you run in to was motivated by them, not masses of common people who were actually offended by something. This is an awful organization, attacking two of the most important things in the world, free government and free art.

I myself am a creative type, and a huge fan of TV and films, and I deeply value the crative autonomy of filmmakers, including those working for television. One of the shows that has been most attacked by the PTC is one of my favorite shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy was a show that portrayed the dark side of the world, and had many violent and disturbing scenes, but it is also a show that has deep moral convictions and a commitment to doing the right thing, something that is clearly missed by this group. Even though they've clearly watched many episodes, as you can see by the list of objectionable content the show contains, on their site. But they don't seem to get that when the show has a violent sex scene, like Buffy and Spike in "Smashed," it's not there for shock value, it has reprocussions that are addressed explicitly in the next episode and also throughout the rest of the series. The violence on the show is frequently disturbing, as in 'Dead Things,' when Warren attempts to rape, then murders Katrina, but they acknowledge that it's disturbing. That's the line, many shows present violence as consequenceless, here there are always consequences to violent actions, be they physical or emotional. Thus, even though it treads on the dark side, the show in fact has a deep sense of right and wrong.

But, to take it more general, the PTC has no right to take away creative freedom in order to protect 'the children.' If you want to see the extent of their bizarre campaign, check out this clip," in which we can see that they have combed over hours of TV programming to find the most offensive bits. It's odd to think of some guy sitting alone in a room watching tapes of Nip/Tuck and just marvelling at the immorality of it all. I wonder if sometimes that filter cracks a bit, and even though they started watching out of hate, they eventually get caught up in the story, and the exploits of Mcnamara/Troy.

So, stop trying to control other peoples' lives. If you don't want your kids to watch something, keep an eye on them, but there's no reason that challenging programming shouldn't be available for people of all ages. Maybe worry about whether a show is creatively fulfilling rather than how much violence or language is on it. 2001 and Irreversible are both great movies, one is rated G and one is NC-17, and both have an equal right to exist.

"Safe," Far From The Filth

Yesterday I watched the film, Safe, by Todd Haynes, the director of the brilliant Far From Heaven. Safe on the surface seems incredibly different from that film, but scratch the surface a bit and you can find a lot of similarities. The other work it reminded me a lot of is Grant Morrison's The Filth, which touches on a lot of the same issues as this film does.

Safe is basically a horror movie where the villain is modern society, the very air that we breathe. It begins with a really mundane life, as Carole goes around, running errands, going to exercise and supervising the installation of a new couch in her house. It's completely unremarkable stuff, and at that point, you're not really sure what's up with the movie.



Eventually, Carol has a coughing fit in a parking lot, and from then on, she gets gradually sicker. One of the things I really liked is the way Haynes revisits many of the mundane scenes from earlier in the film, but once you have an awareness of Carol's chemical illness, they take on additional meaning. At the beginning of the film, she's the best one in her exercise class, but later, she's struggling to keep up. The most obvious one is the dry cleaners, which becomes the site of her ultimate breakdown.

Even more than the constant pollution, the toughest thing for me about watching the beginning of the film is the fact that no one seems to really know Carol. As long as she stays in the role of wife/mother, and the talk remains on a surface level, she's fine, but once she gets in trouble, all her friends shy away from her, putting out that which is not normal. Their cheery enthusiasm from earlier turns to suspicion of that which is different. Even her husband seems uunable to relate to her once her symptoms start showing up.



The second half of the film is the more difficult to figure out. The 'safe' house that Carol goes to is a reallly odd world, and I'm not sure what the filmmaker's position on it is. I think what they're doing there is just indulging the psychosomatic symptoms that created the disease, and not helping bring people to a cure. I have the feeling that might be Todd Haynes' view as well, if you look at the scene where everyone is talking about what they think cured the disease, it all comes down to stress, rather than actual trauma.

The film is all about the world of 1987, and everything talked about in the film still applies to the present. Basically, these people have all given themselves a disease because of things in their life that they're dissatisfied with. Carol gets the disease from the excesses of materialism in her life. It's the new couch that does it. But, is it the society that is at fault, or is it her? As the film goes on, she moves increasingly further and further away from society, until the end where she seals herself in a small bubble that the world cannot come in to. So, she has found temporary repose there, but as Claire says earlier, Henry was fine until someone walked into his bubble, and Carol can't become better by retreating from the world. I found those final moments of the film horrifying, and I was left slightly disturbed at the end of the film because of the bleakness of that space. The cold grays and stark minimalism of it seemed so dead to me, she has gone from extremes of materialism at the beginning of the film to basically nothing at the end.

Safe, like Far From Heaven, stars one of the greatest actresses working today, Julianne Moore. This is her earliest work that I've seen and I don't think she's quite as good as in Boogie Nights, Magnolia or The Hours, or even Far From Heaven, but competing against herself is some of the toughest compettition. I mean, she's been in so many phenomenal films, and unfortunately the film most people know her from is The Forgotten. Anyway, she is still strikingly good here, she says more with her looks than with her words, and that's a sign of good character building.

This film has a lot in common with Far From Heaven, in that both films are about the effects of outside society on a housewife who seems to be living the American dream, but once she deviates from the norm, she finds out that she's really alone. Linda in this film is just like Eleanor in Far From Heaven, in that even though she seems to be a good friend, we realize that it's just a surface friendship, and once an outside element comes in, her whole circle abandons her. In the case of this film, Carol is exiled because of a problem within her, while in Far From Heaven, it's because of things she does. Ultimately, the point of both films is that society rejects that which is outside the norm, and people who attempt to challenge the norm cannot co-exist. The crushing mundanity of the everyday will destroy those who are different.

The Far From Heaven comparison is pretty easy, but the work this film reminded me the most of is Grant Morrison's The Filth. Both Safe and The Filth are about people struggling to navigate a corrosive modern world. The main characters in each work are exposed to the worst that modern society has to offer, but the route they take after this exposure is where the primary difference emerges.

The Filth was pitched as 'a healing inoculation of grime.' Grant Morrison's basic idea was that people are getting weak because they're afraid to engage with the dark forces in the world, only by confronting the darkness, the bad things in the world, can you stand against them and be stronger. Thus, rather than trying to get rid of an illness, you would work with the virus and turn it into a positive. Basically, the bad stuff is a part of life, and only by facing it can you become stronger.

In Safe, the Wrenwood rehibilitation center, and Peter Dunning, take the opposite tact. They completely insulate the center from any pollutants, and attempt to shut the outside world out. Dunning talks about changing his interior world to make the exterior world a better place, but in fact what he is doing is shutting out the outside world, as expressed when he says 'I stopped reading the papers,' because he didn't want to face the negativity. I think the thing he forgets is that running away from a problem isn't going to make it go away.



This idea is best expressed in what happens to Carol. She goes to Wrenwood to get better, and presumably be able to go back to society at some point. However, what happens is she becomes even more sensitive to the chemicals. One of the most striking scenes for me is when a car passes her and she nearly passes out. How does she hope to one day return to society if one car nearly destroys her. Over the course of the film, she gets worse, such that she thinks even fumes from the highway make it to her cabin and keep her sick. She tells her husband that she's going to be back home soon, but what she's doing is just retreating further and further from that which made her sick in the first place, culminating in her closing herself in the bubble at the end of the film.

The people in Wrenwood seem to know that the disease is brought on by stress, and therefore probably at least partially psychosomatic. Carol was looking for an explanation for her problems and found it from that organization, and the more she hears about it, the more she develops the symptoms of it. I think what it comes down to is she wants to find a reason for her unhappiness, considering she probably has the life she'd always wanted, and this disease provides as good an explanation for it as any. It takes the blame off of her and puts in on society, in such a vague way that she can always use it as a crutch for her problems, and that's what almost everyone in the center seems to do, use this disease as an explanation for other problems in their lives.

So, I think the treatment of moving away from the problem only makes things worse. In The Filth, the modern world may be shit, but at the end, Ned Slade realizes that he can use it to fertilize his garden. Bad things do happen, and you can either use them to grow or get defeated and retreat into a bubble, as Carol does. I don't see any cure in sight for Carol, she can't get any more isolated than the igloo-bubble, and eventually she wont' leave that bubble. Only by confronting modern society can she overcome her illness. She needs a healing inoculation of grime.

Does Todd Haynes think this? I'm not sure, I think it's pretty clear he doesn't agree with what's going on with Wrenwood, but I think he also has a more negative view of the world than I do. The film has this whole dirty 80s feel, with nasty clothes, fumes everywhere, and you do get the feeling that we're living in an apocalyptic place.

But, regardless of how Todd Haynes feels, it's a great film, and one that is so ambiguous and challenging, I'd love to see it again and analyze it deeper. One thing I didn't mention is the score, which sounded a bit like Blade Runner's, a huge compliment coming from me. It contributes to this nasty modern world feel, with its oddly artificial synthesizers. Ultimately, if I'm still thinking about a film a day after watching it, and I feel the need to write this much about it, and I've barely scratched the surface of what I could say, it's a total success.

Far From Heaven

The film watching on break continued with today's screening of Far From Heaven. But before that, I also saw some other stuff that's worthy of comment.

A couple of days ago, I watched Maria, Full of Grace. This was a good movie, with a really intersting story that's well told, but it didn't engage me. The style is very verite, documentary-like, and it works for the story, but it's not that fun to watch. There's some nasty moments in the movie, specifically the swallowing the drugs scene. If this movie tells you one thing, it's don't be a drug mule, the process is not a pleasant one. I liked the ending, but as I said before, it's a good movie, just not one that hit me in any special way.

Then, I watched The Road Home, a film by Zhang Yimou, the director of Hero. Like Hero, this was a really beautiful film, with some great visual acting by Zhang Ziyi. She didn't have too many lines, but just through her facial expressions, you could understand everything she was going through and it was heartbreaking at times. The story is very simple, but it's in the telling of it that the film works, and it does work. I like the contrast of the color of the past to the black and white in the present, even though the message of the film, like in Hero, is a bit suspect. He seems to be saying that village life and the past are inherently better than more modern life, and I can't agree with that. But, that's more an issue surrounding the film than something about the merit of the film itself.

Yesterday, I watched eXistenZ by David Cronenberg, which wasn't particularly good. It had some cool ideas, and I liked the way he played out video game conventions with real people, but ultimately, the twist at the end didn't have much meaning because he hadn't created characters you care about. It felt like a really elaborate Twilight Zone that had material for a half hour, not a feature film. The film just wasn't made in an interesting way.

However, Far From Heaven was an amazing film, and one I could wholeheartedly embrace. The film is about the issue of racism and homosexuality in the 50s, but it's addressed through the cinematic language of Douglas Sirk, director of 50s melodrama and the man behind the adjective Sirkian.

While I've seen one of Sirk's films, Written on the Wind, I primarily know him secondhand, through the filmmaking of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a great director behind the film, The Marriage of Maria Braun, and numerous others. He made the film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which was a loose remake of Sirk's All that Heaven Allows, and Todd Haynes' film is another take on the same story.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul was a great film, and I can see a ton of parallels between that and Far From Heaven, most notably the bar scene, which is almost a direct rip. I think Haynes surpasses both Sirk and Fassbinder. He's got a better handle on character development and style than Fassbinder, and he has a freedom to deal with issues that Sirk didn't have. It's really interesting to see a film set in the 50s, and produced in a very strict classical Hollywood style dealing with racism and homosexuality in the way that people in the 50s did. There's no trace of modern attitudes in the film, but as the viewer, we clearly bring a more modern view and that can make it frustrating to watch the film. You don't want the characters to behave in the way they do because they seem like good people, but are flawed.



The relationship between Kathy and Raymond was the core of the film, and it's really well played. You can see why she's attracted to him, and also how the pressures of a racially divided society ultimately destory their hopes. Julianne Moore is one of the best actresses working today, and this is right up there with her best performances. It's very similar to her role in The Hours, but is played in a different way, because of her relationship with Raymond. She pulls off the right blend of 50s inspired acting and more emotionally realistic methods. Dennis Haysbert is surprisingly good as well, and I really felt for his character. His speech at the modern art show perfectly articulates the essential question of the film, and that's is it the surface that matters or what's beneath. Can you see past the surface to the essence of something?



In many ways the real star of this movie is the style. It's gorgeously stylized. I love how their living room always has a heavy blue light when the lights are off, perfectly setting the tone for scenes like the one where Frank slaps Kathleen. Color is really emphasized in the film, and is well integrated into the story with elements like the lilac scarf. The score is great, both imitating classical Hollywood scores, but doing it without the excess of those scores. It compliments the emotional content of scenes rather than overwhelming them.



I could see people who would look at this film and see it as a pointless exercise in homage. What is the point of so slavishly recreating someone's style of filmmaking? I think it does what remakes are supposed to do, but usually don't, and that's take the essence of a work and present in a new modern light, thus exposing previously unseen potential within the work. In this case, Sirk couldn't address prejudice like Haynes does here, and by aping the style of the 50s film, Sirk is able to make you better accept that people could hold these attitudes.

I think the film is one of the best statements against prejudice put on film because rather than telling you that these attitudes are wrong, it makes you feel just wrong they are. The fact that otherwise nice and respectable people can hold these attitudes just drives home how easy it is to be prejudiced, and makes you aware of prejudice's negative effects.

So, I loved this movie, I think it's deep, challening, and beautiful. It engages you as a viewer, and makes you work and think. That's what a film should do.

Related Posts
Safe (3/28/2005)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (4/23/2005)
Velvet Goldmine (6/5/2005)