14.6.03
It's come time, mid-weekend movie orgy, to pause for breath and take a bit of film stock:
Almodovar's Talk to Her was nice. It was fairly colorful, somewhat touching, and had a pretty sheen to it. I still prefer the earlier, funnier, not-nice Almodovar, however.
Roman Polanski's The Pianist and Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone: A study in contrasts. The Pianist had a lot going for it, and it wasn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. Brody's performance was worthy, but not anything outrageously spectacular or unique. The film didn't shy away from the brutality of the Holocaust, but Polanski chose (purposefully, according to him) a true story of survival from which to make his film. The Grey Zone, on the other hand, focused on a more brutally unforgiving scenario (some Jews were bribed with a few extra months of life to aid the Nazis in their gas chambers and crematoriums; the film is mainly about a group of these) and hence was much more like the actual Holocaust then The Pianist comes close to being. It cuts much straighter to the heart of the very unsettling issues that this historical atrocity (unfortunately, in the long view, not really an aberration) brings up; impotence in the face of mandated, systematic slaughter, the way things like morality and conscience so quickly become luxuries when the inescapable natural law of self-preservation takes hold, issues that other Holocaust films (including The Pianist, fairly honorable though it was) attempt to sidestep or answer. Nelson seems to realize that the most difficult thing is that there was no answer, no explanation that could possibly account for the wholesale waste of so many human lives.
It's interesting that Polanski actually was there during the Holocaust, and Spielberg (Schindler's List, which he originally asked Polanksi, who politely refused, to direct) is Jewish, but, as far as I know, Nelson is neither Jewish nor a Holocaust survivor. It's certainly understandable that the closer one is to such a devastating degradation, the more one wants to find some optimism, some hope, a triumph of the human spirit (and in rare cases, obviously, these things really did exist). I find, however, that the objective view, unentitled by some standards though it may be, is truer and more important, because it's sobering and personally affecting. Unlike Pauline Kael and many of today's best film reviewiers, I think a movie can engage and be sobering simultaneously. For a filmmaker to show us something that makes us see and feel the world around us a little more clearly, or from a different perspective, is not an ignoble pursuit. Though some films are without a doubt preachy and self-righteous (and therefore inferior), not all films that attempt this can be dismissed as such.
On a lighter note (one benefit of watching two Holocaust films in a row: everything feels like a lighter note), Love Liza, starring the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, was better than expected. The script, involving a well-employed graphic designer who loses his wife to suicide and proceeds to ruin his life by refusing to read her suicide letter (much to the bitter consternation of his mother-in-law) and huffing gasoline, was actually written by Hoffman's brother and directed by Todd Louiso (who played the very cute shy/retiring record store clerk in High Fidelity. It's a fairly tragic but quite engaging story, more a rather true-feeling observation of human behavior than a narrative that concludes with any sort of resolution. The only actual gaffe was, I felt, the overuse of Jim O'Rourke's music. I know O'Rourke's work with Sonic Youth and was anticipating an odd instrumental score; unfortunately, most of the music had accompanying lyrics and was amplified over scenes that would've done better without them, perhaps even in silence.
I also rented Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity and Moonlight Mile. I was hoping for more from Personal Velocity, an anthology film about the lives of three very different women; a beaten wife (Kyra Sedgwick) who was once the school slut leaves her husband with their children after he beats her; a successful book editor (Parker Posey) finds her perfect marriage of emotional convenience painfully unsuited to her personality; a young waitress (Fairuza Balk) discovers she's pregnant and, on a panicky, turbulent road trip involving a wounded hitchhiker and a visit home to mom and stepdad, discovers her real feelings about the pregnancy. The performances are all wonderful, especially Posey's, and the stories are interesting and subtle. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, of the directing, editing, or music choices, which are all a bit too NPR-in-the-negative-sense; I'd be much more interested in reading the original short stories, also by Miller, that these films were based on than in ever seeing them again.
Moonlight Mile was an interesting study in expectations. The fact that it was directed by Brad Silberling, the man upon whom most of the blame for City of Angels can be placed, could mislead one into believing it'll be pure tripe, when in fact it was only maybe 25% tripe. The rest was quite conventional, and I didn't care much for what they gave Dustin Hoffman to do, but Jake Gyllenhaal and Susan Sarandon were quite fine, as usual, and Silberling's script (apparently based on his real-life experience) about a middle-aged couple and their future son-in-law after the senseless murder of their daughter obviously had some investment of thought and feeling. The structure, visual style, editing and many of the "moments" (and if the music was a problem in Love Liza, God save us from the bad, overwhelming bar-band music Silberling chose) were mostly circumscribed by the Hollywood "serious-emotions" cookie cutter, but this one had some tangy frosting and unusual sprinkles, which did help it go down more easily.
The treats of this particular movie marathon were, not entirely unexpectedly, some unwatched Criterion editions from my own collection: Peter Medak's The Ruling Class and Fellini's Amarcord. Amarcord is probably a minor Fellini work, but rapturously watchable. It's virtually plotless; just an episodic, barely veiled autobiographical account of Fellini's own childhood impressions from Fascist Italy (the film, with the exception of one episode involving the father character and some comical and relatively benign torture, is apolitical). Obviously a direct influence on Woody Allen's Radio Days.
The Ruling Class is a major work, however. Starring Peter O'Toole as an English aristocrat who first believes he's Jesus Christ and then, after being "cured," Jack the Ripper, it's a vicious, loony satire (there were actual musical numbers which had me helpless with laughter) of politics and class that stands with such towering films of that ilk as A Clockwork Orange and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
Jason and I also caught The Matrix Reloaded at a drive-in, which I found an enjoyably perverse lo-fi venue for such an absurdly overhyped hi-fi film. It wasn't bad. It works as a genre piece and even has a few blessed moments of intellectual and metaphysical heft. The conformity and free-will metaphors aren't exactly smooth, but neither are they so dumb as to be rendered ineffectual.
I spent Saturday morning chore-time revisiting an old favorite on the stereo, The Monochrome Set's Eligible Bachelors. One song on that wonderful album in particular, "The Devil Rides On," really challenges my frequently professed placement of importance on lyrics in the popular song. "A pop song does need a melody to be effective," I say, "but it needs a lyrical hook, too; a stupid lyric can undermine anything." Well, "The Devil Rides On" is sung in a foreign language (it sounds like Middle Eastern) which I don't understand a single word of, but it's one of my favorite songs on the album, and has a really beautiful, quick-tempo vocal melody. I'll just have to chalk it up as a rule-proving exception, I guess.
I've also been trying to get into the new Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief. Attempts beyond song 2 have so far proven unsuccessful. The album has by far the most brilliant cover of their entire catalog, however:
Almodovar's Talk to Her was nice. It was fairly colorful, somewhat touching, and had a pretty sheen to it. I still prefer the earlier, funnier, not-nice Almodovar, however.
Roman Polanski's The Pianist and Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone: A study in contrasts. The Pianist had a lot going for it, and it wasn't a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. Brody's performance was worthy, but not anything outrageously spectacular or unique. The film didn't shy away from the brutality of the Holocaust, but Polanski chose (purposefully, according to him) a true story of survival from which to make his film. The Grey Zone, on the other hand, focused on a more brutally unforgiving scenario (some Jews were bribed with a few extra months of life to aid the Nazis in their gas chambers and crematoriums; the film is mainly about a group of these) and hence was much more like the actual Holocaust then The Pianist comes close to being. It cuts much straighter to the heart of the very unsettling issues that this historical atrocity (unfortunately, in the long view, not really an aberration) brings up; impotence in the face of mandated, systematic slaughter, the way things like morality and conscience so quickly become luxuries when the inescapable natural law of self-preservation takes hold, issues that other Holocaust films (including The Pianist, fairly honorable though it was) attempt to sidestep or answer. Nelson seems to realize that the most difficult thing is that there was no answer, no explanation that could possibly account for the wholesale waste of so many human lives.
It's interesting that Polanski actually was there during the Holocaust, and Spielberg (Schindler's List, which he originally asked Polanksi, who politely refused, to direct) is Jewish, but, as far as I know, Nelson is neither Jewish nor a Holocaust survivor. It's certainly understandable that the closer one is to such a devastating degradation, the more one wants to find some optimism, some hope, a triumph of the human spirit (and in rare cases, obviously, these things really did exist). I find, however, that the objective view, unentitled by some standards though it may be, is truer and more important, because it's sobering and personally affecting. Unlike Pauline Kael and many of today's best film reviewiers, I think a movie can engage and be sobering simultaneously. For a filmmaker to show us something that makes us see and feel the world around us a little more clearly, or from a different perspective, is not an ignoble pursuit. Though some films are without a doubt preachy and self-righteous (and therefore inferior), not all films that attempt this can be dismissed as such.
On a lighter note (one benefit of watching two Holocaust films in a row: everything feels like a lighter note), Love Liza, starring the great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, was better than expected. The script, involving a well-employed graphic designer who loses his wife to suicide and proceeds to ruin his life by refusing to read her suicide letter (much to the bitter consternation of his mother-in-law) and huffing gasoline, was actually written by Hoffman's brother and directed by Todd Louiso (who played the very cute shy/retiring record store clerk in High Fidelity. It's a fairly tragic but quite engaging story, more a rather true-feeling observation of human behavior than a narrative that concludes with any sort of resolution. The only actual gaffe was, I felt, the overuse of Jim O'Rourke's music. I know O'Rourke's work with Sonic Youth and was anticipating an odd instrumental score; unfortunately, most of the music had accompanying lyrics and was amplified over scenes that would've done better without them, perhaps even in silence.
I also rented Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity and Moonlight Mile. I was hoping for more from Personal Velocity, an anthology film about the lives of three very different women; a beaten wife (Kyra Sedgwick) who was once the school slut leaves her husband with their children after he beats her; a successful book editor (Parker Posey) finds her perfect marriage of emotional convenience painfully unsuited to her personality; a young waitress (Fairuza Balk) discovers she's pregnant and, on a panicky, turbulent road trip involving a wounded hitchhiker and a visit home to mom and stepdad, discovers her real feelings about the pregnancy. The performances are all wonderful, especially Posey's, and the stories are interesting and subtle. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, of the directing, editing, or music choices, which are all a bit too NPR-in-the-negative-sense; I'd be much more interested in reading the original short stories, also by Miller, that these films were based on than in ever seeing them again.
Moonlight Mile was an interesting study in expectations. The fact that it was directed by Brad Silberling, the man upon whom most of the blame for City of Angels can be placed, could mislead one into believing it'll be pure tripe, when in fact it was only maybe 25% tripe. The rest was quite conventional, and I didn't care much for what they gave Dustin Hoffman to do, but Jake Gyllenhaal and Susan Sarandon were quite fine, as usual, and Silberling's script (apparently based on his real-life experience) about a middle-aged couple and their future son-in-law after the senseless murder of their daughter obviously had some investment of thought and feeling. The structure, visual style, editing and many of the "moments" (and if the music was a problem in Love Liza, God save us from the bad, overwhelming bar-band music Silberling chose) were mostly circumscribed by the Hollywood "serious-emotions" cookie cutter, but this one had some tangy frosting and unusual sprinkles, which did help it go down more easily.
The treats of this particular movie marathon were, not entirely unexpectedly, some unwatched Criterion editions from my own collection: Peter Medak's The Ruling Class and Fellini's Amarcord. Amarcord is probably a minor Fellini work, but rapturously watchable. It's virtually plotless; just an episodic, barely veiled autobiographical account of Fellini's own childhood impressions from Fascist Italy (the film, with the exception of one episode involving the father character and some comical and relatively benign torture, is apolitical). Obviously a direct influence on Woody Allen's Radio Days.
The Ruling Class is a major work, however. Starring Peter O'Toole as an English aristocrat who first believes he's Jesus Christ and then, after being "cured," Jack the Ripper, it's a vicious, loony satire (there were actual musical numbers which had me helpless with laughter) of politics and class that stands with such towering films of that ilk as A Clockwork Orange and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
Jason and I also caught The Matrix Reloaded at a drive-in, which I found an enjoyably perverse lo-fi venue for such an absurdly overhyped hi-fi film. It wasn't bad. It works as a genre piece and even has a few blessed moments of intellectual and metaphysical heft. The conformity and free-will metaphors aren't exactly smooth, but neither are they so dumb as to be rendered ineffectual.
I spent Saturday morning chore-time revisiting an old favorite on the stereo, The Monochrome Set's Eligible Bachelors. One song on that wonderful album in particular, "The Devil Rides On," really challenges my frequently professed placement of importance on lyrics in the popular song. "A pop song does need a melody to be effective," I say, "but it needs a lyrical hook, too; a stupid lyric can undermine anything." Well, "The Devil Rides On" is sung in a foreign language (it sounds like Middle Eastern) which I don't understand a single word of, but it's one of my favorite songs on the album, and has a really beautiful, quick-tempo vocal melody. I'll just have to chalk it up as a rule-proving exception, I guess.
I've also been trying to get into the new Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief. Attempts beyond song 2 have so far proven unsuccessful. The album has by far the most brilliant cover of their entire catalog, however:
...and I guess I'll just have to live with the fact that any Radiohead worshipper worth their salt will consider this dismissal of the music and undue attention to the album cover very superficial of me.
I continue to read How to Be Alone, which is slow going as I have to stop, on the average of once a page, to take out my notebook and distill a perfect quote from Franzen's marvelous essays, several of which grapple with the the rise of technocracy and the decline of such non-sleek, humanistic acts of introspection and concentration as the reading of novels. I'll leave off here with a particularly choice one:
"That the country's widely decried 'breakdown of civility' began at home, rather than in so-called urban jungles, can be confirmed at any movie theater, where audiences accustomed to watching videos in the bedroom have forgotten how to shut up."
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