Mike Miley Online

Review in Film International

2010-04-14T21:10:00.001-07:00

A review I wrote of Eclipse Series 11: Larisa Shepitko is on newsstands now. Subscription info at Film International.

New Review in SCOPE

2010-04-14T21:08:00.001-07:00

Here's a review I wrote of Haneke's remake of Funny Games: "Haneke's Home Invasion: Three Looks at Funny Games"

New Article in Bright Lights Film Journal

2010-04-14T21:07:00.001-07:00

"Deciphering the Indecipherable: Procedure as Art in Fincher's Zodiac".
Check it out.

The Coen Brothers' Mean Streak

2009-10-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

Something's happened to the Coen Brothers. Maybe it's success going to their heads (they've got my vote for Smuggest Oscar Acceptance Speech), maybe they're losing their touch, or maybe they're just plain cruel. This decade has been mostly uneven for them. There's O Brother Where Art Thou? (fun but lightweight), The Man Who Wasn't There (an underrated return-to-form), Intolerable Cruelty (intolerable, natch), The Ladykillers (forgettable), No Country for Old Men (strong moments in an overrated whole), and now there's Burn After Reading, which is the darkest and least gracious film of the Coens' careers. After watching it and No Country for Old Men, one has to wonder whether or not the Coens are growing misanthropic, nihilistic, and ugly in their middle age.

The Coens have almost always built their stories around idiots -- Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men -- and Burn After Reading is no exception. This assortment of "heroes" is the dimmest the Coens have ever created, and while that should be the recipe for Coen comedy gold, the Coens forget the element that makes their films work: sympathy. Sure, their films have always been slightly cold and self-consciously clever stunts about dumb people doing dumb things, but what made the films so engaging was that the film (and the filmmakers) seemed to have a genuine love for these people who had good intentions but lacked the brains to carry them out correctly.

The characters in Burn After Reading are short on both brains and good intentions, and the film offers them no sympathy or redemption. If the audience does get any kicks out of the film, they come from feeling intellectually superior to the characters and taking pleasure in their failure. In this film, the Coens seem to have contempt for the characters, monogamy, the government, and the general populace. They now look at goofiness not as something to smile at but as something to punish.

By the end of the film, it's uncertain whether or not the audience is lumped in with the characters -- we're given nothing except the feeling that everything we just experienced was really meaningless. In short, Burn After Reading doesn't give a crap about anyone in it or anyone watching it. As much as it pains me to say this about two filmmakers I admire, it seems as though the Coens have to make everyone in this film completely stupid and pathetic in order to shed light on the only geniuses in the film: the Coen Brothers.

This could explain the sudden ultraviolent streak in Burn After Reading as well as the overall nihilism of No Country for Old Men. The Coens have always used fatal violence in their films, and while it hasn't always been used seriously, there's something different, something meaner about the violence in their two latest films (Miller's Crossing comes to mind as a film that balances using violence for irony and drama). Burn After Reading (and No Country) seems to look upon suffering and gunshot wounds as the highest form of comedy. They even craft one scene that attempts to outdo the "I Shot Marvin in the Face" scene from Pulp Fiction. Death and misery have become a joke to the Coens because the people in their films are no longer worth their emotional attachment; they used to love these people, now they just love to laugh at the futility of their petty existence. The Coens have replaced the custard pie in the face with a gunshot wound as the biggest gag there is, and in doing so, they have become the kind of nihilist they mocked in The Big Lebowski.

By the end of the film, nothing is of any importance. Not the characters, not the plot, not the comedy, and certainly not the resolution. The Coens have completely upended the Hollywood storytelling formula here, only they have replaced it with a smug void. It's hard to tell whether or not they do this out of outrage for the ineptitude of the intelligence community or out of contempt for the human race. Sadly, the film makes a much better case for the latter, with characters so vain, cruel, deceitful, conceited, or just plain stupid that there is no room for a sunny outlook or a constructive statement. Like its title suggests, Burn After Reading is destructive and disdainful, and when it's over, there is little left to take home but smoke and ash.

Smells Like Teen Spirit ... and Tater Tots

2009-10-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

It was 1991, and I was in seventh grade, which meant that life totally sucked. One of the few bright spots came when Cathedral-Carmel Elementary decided to put a radio in the cafeteria and let us listen to KSMB, the KROQ of Lafayette, LA, at the time. Being a Catholic school, Cathedral didn't want us to enjoy ourselves too much, so they installed a decibel meter to monitor our volume. I am not kidding. It came in the form of a stoplight. Green meant we were talking at a reasonable volume (which a seventh grader cannot do), yellow meant we were in very close to being in deep trouble, and red meant the radio got turned off and we lost our recess. This was supposed to remind us that we needed to enjoy our privileges responsibly, but really it just told us that we were being watched ... by God.

This seemed to work out okay ... until this little band from Seattle finally made it to Cajun country. Sure, there was music on the radio I identified with, but there was nothing like "Smells Like Teen Spirit." This was a song that sounded like what was happening to my body: it was oily, messy, loud, and totally out of control. The lyrics didn't matter; I didn't even bother to learn them. It was better to think of it as pre-verbal noise, something primal, something true. After hearing something like Nirvana, nothing else seemed to cut it anymore. The world as this seventh grader knew it was dismantled.

This song started a near-revolution in the lunchroom. One moment, we'd be staring at the cafeteria's interpretation of shepherd's pie, trying to find the courage to eat it because they wouldn't let you make an entire meal out of tater tots and bread rolls. But then that immortal riff stormed into the cafeteria, and we'd all sit perfectly still like someone was about to sing the national anthem or lead us in a prayer. If we were allowed to wear hats, we would have taken them off.

That sense of reverence would crumble the second the drums kicked in. That's when every boy in the room started banging on the table and smacking things with his fork, easily taking the stoplight up to yellow. The teachers watching us tried to silence us by turning down the radio, but we didn't need to hear the song to know what was going on, because the song wasn't coming out of the radio; it was coming out of us. By the end of the chorus, the stoplight was in the red, and the assistant principal brought in a megaphone and blasted its alarm to let us know that not only were we not going to have recess tomorrow, but we were so going to Hell. At least there they'd play Nirvana without a stupid stoplight.

The next day, we tried to keep it together, but it's impossible to maintain any sort of decorum during a Nirvana song. So, again we got the red light, and again we stayed inside for recess. By the end of the week, the radio was gone, and the stoplight was too. It got replaced by the megaphone and a "silent" lunch. If you talked, you paid the price. Now and forever, Amen. Looks like Teen Spirit was no match for the Holy Spirit. So much for rebellion.

Every time I hear "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I am transported back to that cafeteria, then to that old Pontiac Grand Prix where I blasted all these tunes at maximum volume, to that wonderful bedroom of mine where I obsessed over this music and pressed my face against my Panasonic stereo as I made a new mixtape every week. Even though so much of the music is embarrassing (Live, Candlebox, 4 Non Blondes, The Offspring), I wouldn't trade it for any other era of music. The era really captured what it was like being a teenager. The music was shifting, confused, teetering between original and derivative, but filled with the desire to define itself. And while the music may have only succeeded in defining a new, "alternative" market, it reached for more, which is more than can be said for most popular music.

Bruce Willis: The Best Movie Star There Is

2009-09-25T04:15:00.000-07:00

Hands down, bar none, no question about it, Bruce Willis is the greatest movie star we have. A movie star is different from an actor, not lesser, but in some ways, bigger. A movie star is an actor who can only exist on the big screen, people like Clint Eastwood, Humphrey Bogart, and Robert Mitchum. We don't pay to see them play characters, we pay to see them. Put movie stars on the stage, and they'll stink up the joint, but put those mugs in front of a camera and they'll mop the floor with even the most veteran of stage actors. If you're a movie star, you don't need dialogue, you don't need movement -- all you need is your face.

Bruce Willis is this kind of movie star. He is impossible to ignore when he's onscreen, and it's all because of his face, which seems to age even better than a French wine. Every new crease and wrinkle -- even hair loss -- has worked to make Willis a better movie star. Like Steve McQueen, Bogey, or Mitchum, Willis has that haggard look, that face that tells us more about his character than any screenwriter could ever hope to. Any writer or director worth his salt should cut pages out of a script the minute Willis signs on. Because all those words don't mean squat up against the face of a movie star in close-up.

Bruce has always had this, but it really clicks for him in Pulp Fiction. The first thing we see of him in that film is his face, and we see it for several minutes. Up against that, what else is there to see? It's the face of a man who's seen it all, a man who's above it all. The pronounced lines flanking his mouth act like curtains, throwing the spotlight on our hero's tight-lipped superiority to whoever is speaking to him. Our man listens carefully, but he knows the answer already: you're wrong ... and stupid. He'd tell you, but what's the point? You'll only understand what a jackass you are after he breaks your nose.

You may say that George Clooney, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise have one over on Bruce as the greatest movie star of our time. Johnny Depp is an actor who's gotten as big as a movie star, Pitt's somewhere between actor and movie star (depending on the film), and Tom Cruise? Please. Bruno might sing blues of dubious distinction, but movie stars are allowed embarrassing side projects once in a while (see: Clint and a monkey). What movie stars are not allowed to do, however, is to jump on couches on daytime TV. Daytime TV couch-jumpers are the kind of people movie stars smack with baseball bats.

Clooney is a close call, but his charm is one-note: he's suave. That's the beginning and end of his range. It's a delightful one-note act, but it's one-note all the same. Bruce can do Clooney, Clint, and throw in some John Wayne swagger for good measure. Besides, the decision to put Bruce in Ocean's Twelve is really just George's admission that the grins upon which the Ocean'sMoonlighting or Die Hard? Designer clothes -- that's it. franchise is built were stolen from Bruce. And they are stolen from Bruce -- what's in Danny Ocean that isn't in

Like any classic movie star, Bruno is dangerous. He can crack a joke one minute, then kick the everloving crap out of you the next. Every movie star has to have this, which is why Tom Cruise is out: no matter how many times he tells Iceman that he really is dangerous before he kisses him, he's about as dangerous as Shirley Temple (he does kiss Kilmer, right?). As dangerous as Bruce is, though, he also has the class to star in a movie with Damon Wayans without killing him.

The real important thing Bruce has on past tough guy stars like Bogey and Mitchum is joy. Bruce has just enough Cary Grant in him to let us in on the fun. No, he'll never do something like Bringing Up Baby (though Hudson Hawk is an honest attempt at the Marx Brothers), but this sense of glee helps to make his aura infectious.

Bottom line: take any crappy movie, put Bruce Willis in it, and it immediately becomes 10 times more interesting (see: The Last Boy Scout, Oceans' Twelve, Look Who's Talking). That's the mark of a movie star. Sure, he's done plenty of crappy movies, but he's seldom crappy in them, because it's hard to suck when you're having a blast. And that's what endears Bruno to us: the guy just gets out there and has a good time; nothing seems precious to him. In an age of actors whose career choices are so calculated and deliberate, this kind of behavior is refreshing. Finally, a star who just goes out and does his thing. What's not to love about that?

Jeanne Dielman Comes to DVD

2009-09-16T11:09:00.000-07:00

Break out your shoe polish and dishrags, for one of the greatest films of all time is finally getting its video debut in the United States. The Criterion Collection is releasing Chantal Akerman's epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxhelles in a gorgeous 2-DVD set.

One of the greatest films ever made? A 201-minute structuralist/feminist film in which nothing happens except a woman cleans her apartment? A film shot almost entirely in medium shots, with no camera movement, few cast members, hardly any exterior shots, and even less dialogue? A film that merely chronicles the tedium of doing chores and running errands, seemingly in real time? What could possibly be so great about that?

With all that going for it, it comes as little surprise that Jeanne Dielman is just now getting a proper video release in the United States. It is difficult to explain the greatness of Jeanne Dielman to someone who is not up for the experience. The film is a complete slap in the face to traditional narrative conventions, a combination of Andy Warhol's epic films like Empire and Sleep and the film-essays of Jean-Luc Godard like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (also recently released on DVD by Criterion) that seems to want to make the audience feel little more than the slow passage of time. But this is what makes the film great: it sticks to its guns, audience expectations be damned, and delivers to the audience the most devastating depiction of the housewife's confined life in cinema (eat it, Revolutionary Road). If we think watching a housewife work for three hours is boring, try living her life.

In that sense, it requires a certain act of will on the part of the American viewer -- or any viewer, for that matter -- to "endure" the film. It requires us to meet Akerman more than halfway, and if you don't buy into her vision, you won't make it past the first 30 minutes. However, once you give yourself to the film and settle into its rhythms, all of that stuff about defying traditional narrative, courting boredom, and all the rest of it falls away. You get sucked into the story and the film becomes an edge-of-your-seat thriller, a ticking time bomb. Even though you feel like you have a pretty good idea of what will happen -- she'll run another errand, she'll clean some more stuff -- you're terrified of what will happen if something breaks Jeanne's rigidly designed pattern. And when that pattern does start to go unravel, the duration of the film serves to make the story all the more uneasy: we see the train wreck coming, but we don't know when, where, or how it will happen. We also can't do anything about it. We can only watch and wonder how it came to this, and as we think back over the events of the film, we can see how inevitable all of it is and how close we are to Jeanne's fate.

The film matches Jeanne's obsessively routinized day by being equally constrained in its visual structure. Every shot, literally every single one, is a flat, static shot set up on a perpendicular axis to the action at about five feet off the ground (Akerman's eye level). There are no close-ups and wide shots are saved for the exteriors. So while the camera placement in each scene seems totally arbitrary and "objective," nothing could be further from the truth. Designing a three-hour film around this visual strategy requires a clearly thought-out point of view. It also requires a truckload of determination and artistic restraint. Imagine the temptation to break the design, to make the film more interesting visually, to move the camera, especially when you know that these techniques would make the film more "entertaining." It takes someone with a steel rod for an artistic backbone to make such decisions and stick to them. The fact that Akerman was 25 years old when she made this film -- the same age at which Orson Welles began Citizen Kane -- only serves to make Jeanne Dielman a more tremendous achievement.

Jeanne Dielman is a film with the commitment and brashness of youth paired with the wisdom and restraint of old age. It is, in short, perfect, the kind of total work artists dream of making just once. It is a film that swings for the fences, no concessions, no compromises, and it remains true to itself and what it wants to say. Regardless of whether its style and themes are to our liking or not, one must admire such a success.

Until this DVD release, Jeanne Dielman was the kind of film you heard about for years before you found a copy of it. My copy was a horrendous fourth-generation bootleg from a VHS tape. I knew the quality was horrible, but until I saw a print of the film at LACMA last April, I had no idea how awful it was. For a film so devoted to small details, a crisp video transfer is essential, and the folks at The Criterion Collection have once again outdone themselves. And while I may mourn the aura the film acquired by being hard to find, it is comforting to know that new viewers can find this film and experience its power immediately.

The Virtues of Inherent Vice

2009-09-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

If you had told me one year ago that the most delightful beach read of 2009 would be written by Thomas Pynchon, I'd have stared back at you in disbelief, raised eyebrows in tow.

Don't get me wrong, Pynchon is one of my favorite writers of all-time, but when I think of reading him, beach chairs and daiquiris do not immediately spring to mind. What usually pops into my head are the stacks of other books I have to keep next to his latest novel in order to keep up with his many, far-ranging allusions to entropy, number theory, parallel time, and ... you get the idea.

But with his latest, Inherent Vice, good ol' Thomas Ruggles Pynchon has served up his most accessible, hilarious, page-turning novel yet. Inherent Vice is the noir-esque story of private eye Doc Sportello, a huarache-wearing, dope-smoking, hallucination-and-blackout-prone beach bum who gets in over his head faster than he can get an erection (and, when talking about Sportello, that's pretty darn quick).

It all starts in late 1969/early 1970 when Doc's ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, land developer-turned crazy philanthropist Mickey Wolfmann, disappear; and, like all of Pynchon's work, the story just gets stranger from there, encompassing everything from land use and gentrification practices, the internet, Manson, the reconfiguring of Las Vegas, secret societies, surf rock, Ethel Merman-singing hitmen, and the death of the Free Love era; all filtered through a haze of pot smoke and Pynchon-grade paranoia that resembles Robert Altman's adaptation of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski as much as it does The Crying of Lot 49. It almost seems like, at 72 years old, Pynchon is ready to take a break from pushing himself (and the reader) and just have a blast.

But don't let that lead you to think that Inherent Vice is lightweight airport novel full of "Mindless Pleasures" (TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow). No, Pynchon's not trading in literature for genre fiction. Inherent Vice is still as intricate and dense as any Pynchon work, only here the references are less obscure and the narrative is more familiar. In fact, the story seems to be told in fast-forward, as though Sportello and the reader are being propelled from one clue to the next, with little-to-no time to sort out any of the details. The huge cast of characters (over two dozen in 369 pages) and their shifting allegiances become so hard to keep up with that you eventually give up trying, let go, and just enjoy the ride. The only solutions to this problem are to keep a notebook handy (screw that; I'm poolside) or to read the whole thing in one sitting, which is more doable than you'd think (plus, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday).

What Pynchon also delivers in this novel are some jaw-droppingly poignant and awe-inspiring descriptions of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Just get a whiff of this description of the L.A. freeways on page 19:

"... the Eastbound lanes teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody's radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations, under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you'd call psychedelic could ever happen, or if -- bummer! -- all this time it had really been going on up north."

Such a panorama of the schizophrenic Angeleno melting pot actually manages to make being in traffic seem fresh again, even wonderful. If that's not successful writing, I don't know what is.

Although reading Inherent Vice feels like a gleefully crazy drive down the highway, what lingers over the novel is a deep sense of loss -- the loss of optimism, the loss of charity, the loss of intimacy, the loss of a generation's promise at the hands of drugs, greed, technology, and corporate land grabs. For Pynchon, it seems like all the good vibes from the 1960s got co-opted and paved over, turned into theme parks and strip malls, or, even worse, a Disneyfied combination of the two. Like the stoners choosing dope over reality, the land developers and the internet trick the public into exchanging the real for a hallucinatory simulation of it, costing us our cultural authenticity and interpersonal relationships. The final melancholy-but-hopeful paragraphs of the novel, in which a caravan of cars follow each other closely through a dense fog on the Pacific Coast Highway, encapsulates this feeling of dissolution, of a unity disintegrating as each member of the collective goes his/her own way. The passage, and the whole novel by extension, reminds the reader of that glorious moment in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where Duke looks out the window of his Vegas hotel and sees the evaporated dream of the 1960s and remarks

"We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ... and with the right kind of glasses you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back" (68).

It's a sentiment that could just as easily come from Inherent Vice, and it serves to remind the reader that for all of Pynchon's arcane references and postmodern gamesmanship, what he is at the end of the day is a writer of heartfelt sincerity who writes about the difficulty of being human in the modern world. If I may be so recklessly bold, I'd call him a romantic idealist, and say that his work aims to inspire readers to seek a more sincere and expansive level of interaction with their fellow humans so that the world no longer feels as lonely and incoherent. And the fact that he can do all that and still make us laugh with low-brow pot and boner jokes and goofy song lyrics just proves how vital a writer he is.

For those who have yet to be introduced to Pynchon, Inherent Vice would serve as a wonderful gateway drug to his more difficult work, though starting with Inherent Vice may be a bit misleading because his other novels are much more difficult (though more rewarding). On the other hand, those all-too-familiar with the rigor of reading Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon will delight in kicking back with a margarita and taking another trip with their buddy T.P. Either way you slice it, with Against the Day and Inherent Vice, it's clear that Thomas Pynchon still has it, and he's not going to let up.

LACMA Slaps Film Buffs in the Face

2009-09-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Los Angeles film community has been in a major tizzy since July 28, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced it was (for all intents and purposes) tossing its film program on the cutting room floor. The museum claims that the program was losing millions (over a ten year period) and not to worry: they plan on revamping the film program. Indeed. They're so committed to revitalizing the program that they knocked star programmer Ian Birnie down to a part-time consultant.

According to LACMA, the new film program will:

place greater emphasis on artist-created films reflecting the museum's growing relationship with contemporary artists and the contemporary art world. We will also continue to plan art exhibition-oriented festivals that will be presented in the context of the museum's overall curatorial program. These films will be presented in the Bing Theater occasionally throughout the year.

Great idea, LACMA. Those "artist-created films" really do pack the house, certainly more than The Adventures of Robin Hood. Nobody goes to see that crap. It's too exciting.

Scathing missives have hit the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times every week, penned by the likes of in-house critic Kenneth Turan, Time Magazine's Richard Schickel, and now the ultimate cinephile himself, Martin Scorsese. It seems like the message is clear: for film geeks, when the lights go dark on a cinema forever, the gloves come off.

LACMA's announcement not only royally stinks, but it also represents a major blow to the appreciation of film as an art form on equal footing with painting and sculpture. As corny as it may sound, when a major museum screens the best of American and world cinema in a welcoming and respectful environment, people tend to take the medium more seriously. It certainly worked that way for modern art.

Killing the LACMA film program also asks the question: if a serious museum film program cannot sustain itself in Los Angeles, then where can it survive? Are repertory programs as a whole doomed? If LACMA goes dark, what else will go dark with it? Will old movies only exist on TCM and our Netflix queues? And who cares?

I do, of course, though it's hard to explain the effect such an announcement has on someone who loves to see old movies on the big screen. I can say that I'm crestfallen, but will this make any sense to someone who doesn't feel the same way already? Probably not, and that's the problem. Those who care already will be upset and will find it hard to infect those who don't with their disappointment.

But let me try anyway. As a LACMA member and devotee of its film program, I can only describe this announcement as isolating. What I mean is that LACMA's theater going dark has made my film obsession more private. Nothing gives me a bigger charge at the movies than showing up to a screening of a 200-minute Belgian structuralist feminist film like Jeanne Dielman to discover that the theater is two-thirds full. That makes you feel like you're among your people. I know that no one else may care, but to someone who spent a great deal of high school and college watching films alone, LACMA going dark makes the world seem smaller, which, last time I checked, was not the purpose of art.

So what can we do about it? Well, we too can write angry letters to LACMA or the Los Angeles Times, but since we didn't direct Taxi Driver (or even Shutter Island-- in theaters October 2), our letter probably won't mean much to an organization with both eyes on the bottom line. We could go all Norma Rae on them and threaten to cancel our LACMA memberships and stop patronizing the museum and its Tupperware party art exhibits. That might get them where it hurts, but will it be enough to force a change? After all, isn't the lack of action on the public's part one of the reasons why LACMA is cutting its film program in the first place?

LACMA was well aware of the ruckus its announcement was going to cause. Yeah, getting chewed out by Scorsese's gotta sting, but LACMA will get over it so long as it can ride out the storm. Once everyone re-stocks his/her Netflix queue and abandons the cause, LACMA will return its attention to trying to run a large-scale, expanding museum at a profit. Good luck with that, LACMA.

In memory of the great programs LACMA has brought to Los Angeles, here's a short list of my five favorite film programs I was lucky enough to see at LACMA:
1. Heaven's Gate -- the full cut of Michael Cimino's unfairly maligned film, with a Q&A afterwards with cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
2. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxhelles - Chantal Akerman's masterpiece will never look as beautiful as it did at LACMA on April 10, 2009.
3. Satantango - how many theaters will screen a seven-and-a-half hour Hungarian film?
4. Veronika Voss & Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven - two wonderful films by the wonderful Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
5. La Belle et La Bete - Jean Cocteau's perfect fantasy.

But I can't act superior all day. LACMA's film program lost money because enough people did not attend their programs. That includes me. So here's a list of the films I missed that I wish I hadn't:
1. The Decalogue
2. Eraserhead
3. The Third Generation & Lola
4. Bigger Than Life
5. Le Cercle Rouge
6. L'Avventura & Red Desert
7. 1900
8. La Strada
9. War and Peace (1968)
10. Ivan the Terrible, Parts 1 and 2

For more information on the effort to stop LACMA from looking totally corporate and stupid, visit the blog Save Film @ LACMA.

The Hollywood Novel at Zero

2009-08-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

Most Hollywood novels are written by "legitimate" writers whose experience Out West has driven them to hate the movies. The novels read like the whiny, embittered diatribes that they are, craftless rants that seethe with resentment and make claims to providing the anti-myth to Hollywood's myth; however, they really only serve to reinforce a cliché in the reader's mind: that Hollywood is completely uncreative, petty, and full of abused, self-destructive narcissists. What a joy to read.

Steve Erickson's Zeroville destroys this cliché. After decades of novels about "Hollywood" and "the industry," Erickson has written a work that mixes the apocalyptic dread of Day of the Locust with the passion and heart of The Last Tycoon, thus capturing everything there is to hate (and love) about Tinseltown. It's a novel that not only reclaims the Hollywood novel from its dissenters, but it also reclaims the movies for its rightful owners: cinephiles.

This doesn't mean Zeroville celebrates Hollywood. On the contrary, Erickson gives West a run for his money when it comes to filleting the rich and famous. Zeroville is a Being There-esque tale whose central character, Vikar, appears (almost magically) in front of the Vista Theater in Los Feliz in 1969. He is a total cipher, his most identifiable characteristic being the tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from A Place in the Sun on his shaved forehead. Over the course of the novel, he encounters (and influences) all the movers-and-shakers in New Hollywood.

Erickson's novel wouldn't be the revelation it is if everyone in New Hollywood didn't come off looking absolutely reprehensible, John Milius being the delightfully strange exception. To most film freaks, the Hollywood films of the 1970s represent the pinnacle of American filmmaking, the anti-myths that exposed the classic Hollywood myths as fabrications. Erickson, however, paints the prophets of the New Hollywood as misanthropes more in love with themselves than with cinema, and their work is portrayed as poor, decadent imitations of great films. He turns the anti-myth itself into a myth, and it's a trick that may anger some cinephiles but it's one that makes total sense within Erickson's thesis: we're too caught up in the myth of the artist/celebrity and not engaged enough in the essence of cinema. For Erickson, the true peak of Hollywood storytelling came somewhere in the middle of A Place in the Sun, and it's been downhill ever since.

Erickson's tricks will work best on those whose knowledge of cinema borders on the unhealthy (Vikar himself is referred to as "cine-autistic"). The first half of the novel feels almost more like a film version of "Name That Tune," as Erickson describes films such as 2001 and The Passion of Joan of Arc without disclosing their titles. This guessing game only sucks the reader into the story further, as Vikar starts to uncover a secret that stands to alter the landscape of cinema.

Giving away that secret would be worse than criminal, but what is necessary to state is that Erickson does not call for a break from the past; rather, he calls for a return to it. He wants cinema to go back to zero. Not zero in the sense of abolishing technique or history, but zero in the sense of purity. Erickson wants moviegoers (and moviemakers) to reconnect with the pure joy of the cinematic image, to forget rules, stars, and money, and to remember what this magical medium is all about: communicating complex emotions and ideas.

Part Man. Part Machine. All Business (Part Three)

2009-08-21T04:08:00.000-07:00

The previous two installments (#1 and #2) discuss Robocop as a film that takes on Libertarian economic theory. This final installment shows how the two showdowns in the film settle the score.

Robocop, obviously, is the good guy, the young upstart created by a budding entrepreneur who had a better idea. Robocop may be just as violent as ED-209, but his violence is precise, engineered to save the innocent and punish the wicked with the largest amount of suffering allowed by law. His first night on duty is a tour-de-force of protecting, serving, and ass-whooping. He uses his targeting system to shoot through a woman’s legs and shatter an aspiring rapist’s balls. That’s Robo-justice, where Draconian measures and 21^st century technology form a synergistic alliance to deliver maximum dividends of pain for investors. This is totally Libertarian in its attitude, as righteous as it is callous. After all, it’s hard to argue with a mean servant of the people, especially after your crime rate has plummeted faster than Tom Cruise can go from zero to crazy. And we have no reason to argue with Robocop, because Robocop embodies the American Dream that talent and quality will win out over anything.

ED-209, on the other hand, is the poster robot for corporate pork, a bone-crushing bridge to nowhere. His main lobbyist, Dick Jones, turns ED-209 into the soulless attack dog of corporate interests, deploying ED-209 to wipe out the competition—literally—by setting its sights on Robocop, because he knows the First Rule of Robot Movies: you cannot have two robots appear in Act One without a knock-down drag-out robot battle coming in Act Three. They’re robots; they’re not here to help humanity; their sole function is to break shit while trying to deactivate each other. They are Motley Crue and the world is their deluxe hotel suite.

But leave it to the bad guys to try and rig the fight. Jones manipulates the market by sabotaging Robocop’s operating system. During Robocop’s creation, Jones stealthily encoded Robocop’s operating system with Directive Four, which shuts Robocop down if he attempts to arrest any OCP executive, giving new meaning to “executive privilege.” So here corporate interests interfere with the same free market they claim to love, honor, and cherish, weakening the quality and integrity of a product to eliminate competition, the thing that’s supposed to make the free market so wonderful in the first place. This makes Robocop something less than the ultimate law enforcement machine because he cannot enforce the law objectively.

Robocop doesn’t have much time to think about this, though. Right at the moment he learns of Directive Four, ED-209 bursts through the door and proudly announces that the robot showdown has arrived ahead of schedule, thanks to the efficiency of the capitalist system. In their robo-duel, Robocop separates ED-209’s nuts from its bolts, but his victory over ED-209 has almost nothing to do with the triumph of good over evil—that’s incidental—it’s really a battle of design and marketing. ED-209’s got the edge in marketing, but Robocop’s late arrival on the market is offset by his superior design. Robocop finishes ED-209 off simply by climbing down a flight of stairs. ED-209 tries to climb down, but he tumbles down and lands on his back, unable to get up. It’s the most riveting falling-down-the-stairs scene since The Exorcist. Robocop’s human action reveals how ED-209 is not designed for real police work, making this a battle not about endurance or might, but about product reliability. It’s an all-out free market war, and in a free market battle, the better product always wins.

But ED-209 and the drug lords are not the main villains of Robocop. Dick Jones is the archenemy, the man at the center of it all whose brand of corporate corruption and pork projects allow scumbags to thrive in Detroit. Dick Jones has to be stopped. There’s just one problem: Directive Four. Corporate criminals, they’ve got it all figured out. When the corporations get to run law enforcement in a Libertarian marketplace, how do you prosecute them if they break the law? Can they even break the law if they’re the ones enforcing it? The solution is actually pretty easy. If you want to “kill” a corporate villain, you fire the son of a bitch. Once OCP’s CEO fires Jones, he is fair game for Robocop to declare Chapter 11 on Jones’ soul.

Privatization would work tremendously well if all services were run by Robocop and his designers, but it only takes a couple of Dick Joneses to wreck the system and turn it into a corporate form of tyranny. So, in the end, Robocop shows us that it’s not the idea of privatization that’s good or bad, but how you use it. It’s not the economy, stupid—it’s the people. Good people using their talents for the greater good will meet with results beneficial to all, regardless of the economic system, just as a few bad apples can spoil an entire bunch, no matter what kind of basket they’re in.

Robocop’s violence got under the MPAA’s skin in its day, but today, the film barely gets mentioned. But now, years later, after all the blood has dried up and the hysterics have vanished, the film’s more enduring elements can be brought to light. Today the halls of power are overflowing with Reaganites who think ol’ Gippy was too pro-government, making Robocop seem more relevant than ever. Now we can finally examine what this film has always been trying to tell us, the things that remain even after all the violence has been edited for television and the film has been formatted to fit this screen, and recognize the film for what it really is: ahead of its time.

Part Man. Part Machine. All Business. (Part Two)

2009-08-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

The previous installment concerns my anticipation of Robocop’s violence in 1987 and the film’s secret theme: a debate of Libertarian economic theory.

At the start of Robocop, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has already taken over the police force. It preserves the basic operations of the police force, but OCP wouldn’t be a corporation if it wasn’t looking for ways to reduce spending, like firing people, or, better still, replacing them with machines. OCP’s big idea, its lasting contribution to the world of law enforcement, is to manufacture a robotic police officer that will make traditional cops (you know, people) obsolete. A robotic cop would be free of all the trappings of a normal cop. It wouldn’t have a family, it wouldn’t need sleep, it wouldn’t get scared, it wouldn’t bitch about overtime, or consume enormous quantities of coffee and donuts. Best of all, a robotic cop saves money while increasing productivity. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it’s a robot movie, so only, you know, everything. But things don’t go wrong for the reasons we’re used to. Robocop is clearly bored with the hackneyed clichés of other robot vs. human movies, all that touchy-feely kumbaya crap. This isn’t about how technology cannot replace the human soul, nor is this movie interested in pondering whether we control technology or if technology controls us. We call these things moral dilemmas. There are no ideals in Robocop, only blood, guts, and cash—what’s more American than that? thinks they’re cute; at worst, the philosophical equivalent of rocking out to Collective Soul: pathetic. There are no ideals in Ideals are for teachers, Little Leaguers, and Bono.

Robocop pawns off the existential crisis of the soul for an existential crisis of capitalism. If there is nothing worth saving, then let’s load both barrels of our free market shotgun with supply and demand, and blast our way to an IPO. With this new purpose-driven life locked and loaded, questions about economic theory arise, like how should the free market function in our lives? Can the private sector work for the public good? Is there such a thing as business without corruption? A different answer to each of these questions can turn the world upside down faster than an eight-year-old with ADHD can piss you off, and this is the lens through which Robocop looks at Libertarianism and asks, Is Privatization The Way?

Robocop puts the matter up for debate the only way that makes sense: staging a corporate war waged by heavily-armed robots. In one corner, we have ED-209, the front-runner. It’s like a freaking tank, guaranteed to pacify the streets of Old Detroit so that OCP can tear it down and begin construction on its lucrative urban renewal project, Delta City (read: luxury yuppie storage). But ED-209’s got one small problem: its seems to be wired to shoot first and screw the questions. ED-209 is the only robot in development at OCP’s Security Concepts Division until Division President Dick Jones’s unveiling of the prototype devolves into a bloodbath. The demonstration starts out wonderfully as ED-209 demands that a staffer lower his weapon, but then something goes wrong: ED-209 won’t disengage; he’s still counting down the seconds before he makes a direct deposit of lead into the pencil-pusher’s 401k. It turns into quite a killer presentation as ED-209 splatters the model for Delta City with a new coat of paint, Crimson Bureaucrat. At this point, OCP clearly has more than one major mess to clean up before Delta City can begin construction, but while everyone is still checking whether or not it’s okay to come out from under the conference table, an opportunistic underling goes over the head of Jones, his supervisor. He tells the CEO that he’s got a prototype of his own that is better, safer, and, most importantly, cheaper. He gets the green light and Robocop is born.

In theory, this is how the free market honors ingenuity and punishes fault: the better product wins out while the inferior one goes the way of the dodo and Carrot Top. According to the Libertarian vision of the market, ED-209 should get scrapped as OCP throws all its resources behind Robocop. No corporation, especially a new one with a large responsibility, wants to see a defective product roll-out, only that’s not what happens. Robocop gets developed, but ED-209 is not scrapped. Dick Jones has way too many dollars tied up in defense contracts to walk away from ED-209. Defective or not, Jones is going to sell ED-209 to the military. Now we have a flaw in the theory: what happens when human nature tries to go against the forces of the market? What happens when the corporation’s best interests do not match up with the best interests of the people? Of course, this goes against the Libertarian theory because it is not morally or ethically right, but people don’t always do what they’re supposed to do, especially when there’s money involved. Can the market police itself, or does this theory fall apart when corruption enters the picture?

TO BE CONCLUDED …

Part Man. Part Machine. All Business. (Part One)

2009-08-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

For the entire summer of 1987, I only had two things on my mind: robots and violence, for this was the year I heard my first morsel of “entertainment industry news”: Robocop was so violent that the MPAA was going to slap it with an X rating unless the filmmakers cut out an entire minute of footage. I couldn’t believe it. X-rated? Dirty movies were rated X, you know, movies with boobies and lots of other stuff I didn’t understand. If Robocop was going to be rated X for violence, then that meant it must be so violent it’s dirty, dirtier than sex, which, to an impressionable Catholic boy, was about as dirty as you could get. It must be the most horrific thing ever put on film, a monstrosity so grotesque that it made Satan wet his acid-washed jeans. By my logic, the R-rated version would be as close to X-rated as possible, a decimal point shy of hell-on-film, thus making it the closest I was going to get to a dirty movie for at least ten years. This was my shot at juvenile depravity. Nothing was going to stop me from seeing this movie.

When my Dad finally took me to see it, I was pleased and disappointed. I mean, the movie was totally awesome. Robocop is so amazingly bad ass that he makes Dirty Harry look like Rainbow Brite. In the time it would take Dirty Harry to get through all of his grandstanding “Do I feel lucky?” monologue, Robocop would have stocked every morgue in the county to capacity. Robocop reduces the action hero catchphrase to “Your move, creep,” but he says it only after he’s shot off the thug’s kneecaps, so it’s more like an afterthought. Finally, we had an action hero who was as brutal as he was just, a righteous avenger who refused to let criminals corner the market on pain. But even all of this couldn’t prevent me from being underwhelmed by it all. I was hoping I wouldn’t be able to take it. And here I was, seven years old, taking it like a man. I never wanted to be less mature in my whole life.

Of course, today the violence of Robocop seems almost quaint, like looking at some medieval fresco that was supposed to be controversial and seeing nothing to get excited about. In the tradition of films like The Wild Bunch and A Clockwork Orange, Robocop upped the ante for film violence, perhaps the first film to do so since Taxi Driver. While those films have endured and their legacy has been prolonged by controversy, Robocop is still looking for a seat at the table because it is viewed as being little more than just another ultraviolent shock piece. It hasn’t benefited from the critical support that’s been bestowed on these other films which are all far more violent than Robocop. Perhaps it’s because film critics have a hard time mentioning Paul Verhoeven in the same breath as cinematic masters such as Peckinpah, Kubrick, and Scorsese, or perhaps they’re not looking closely enough. There is substance behind Robocop’s explosive flash, and while it’s not as alluring as The Wild Bunch’s existentialism, A Clockwork Orange’s mind control, or Taxi Driver’s vigilante justice, it’s worthwhile all the same. Would any of those films have the sack to make an action movie about economics? While we were anxiously awaiting Robocop’s next shootout, we were being treated to a debate on Libertarian economic theory.

Robocop takes place in Detroit in 1997, in other words, hell. The world is so nihilistically harsh that the commercials on TV advertise Nukem, a Risk-style board game in which one tries to be the lone nation to survive nuclear Armageddon. Crime, death, and poverty are seemingly unstoppable forces. The citizens of Detroit have lost faith in their government. Government is wasteful, corrupt, unaccountable, they say, and they don’t see how new leadership could be any different. This film was made in the Reagan era, after all, and people who care about law and order know that when the government cannot do its job, it’s time to give private interests a chance to do it for them, so they prostrate themselves before the altar of the free market. The private sector, industry, corporations—these are the saviors of the modern world. Only they can protect us because it’s in their interest to succeed; the government has no incentive to succeed or to get its finances into the black because no one will put it out of business; but if a corporation doesn’t succeed, it’s out on the street or, worse, working for the government. So the citizens agree to turn over control of the Detroit police force to OCP, a seemingly neutral corporation that promises to bring state-of-the-art technology to law enforcement and deliver us all from evil.

This is classic Libertarianism. Typically a right-wing ideology, economically speaking, Libertarianism believes that the federal government should be as small as possible; almost all goods and services should be provided through the private sector under the indifferent and inerrant rule of the free market. It is the Libertarian belief that common public utilities such as water, electricity, telephone, infrastructure, education, health care and law enforcement would improve if they were controlled by the free market rather than by the government. A government-run business can run with a deficit, in direct defiance of the free market, giving it little cause to improve or even evaluate its effectiveness, which means that the citizen gets screwed over by having to deal with substandard goods and inefficient services. As anyone who’s ever been to FedEx Kinko’s clearly knows, this never happens in the private sector. In a Libertarian utopia, private corporations would bring their sublime reverence for the bottom line to these industries and pass the savings along to the consumer. Competition between two corporations providing the same services would drive prices down and quality up as these two giants fight over our money (because who would ever price gouge?). The goods get better, there is less waste and incompetence, and our lives get better in the process, because it is in the best interest of the corporations to keep us satisfied. When we’re happy, they’re happy, and the wheels on the bus go round and round. Sold yet? And why wouldn’t you be? (Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, all of 2008-09.) It all sounds perfect; the benevolent corporation will step in and set our world straight, working out the kinks in the system with awe-inspiring accuracy and style. Nothing bad could possibly happen; nobody could possibly get hurt. After all, why would a business steal from their own customers? (That’s totally rhetorical, in case you missed it.)

TO BE CONTINUED …

Bruno's Prejudice

2009-08-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

Sacha Baron Cohen is at his best when he’s at his most political. Taken together, his three characters from Da Ali G Show constitute a body of work more like the work of a muckraking journalist than that of a comedian, work that reminds audiences of the vital place of comedy in our culture.

Baron Cohen has positioned himself as a man unafraid of speaking truth to power with his balls out, quite literally. Borat’s cultural awkwardness brings out our geographical ignorance and prejudice towards those who are “not like us.” Ali G’s interviews with politicians and dignitaries serve as shocking testaments to how humorless, clueless, and out-of-touch our policy makers and elected officials are.

When we first met Bruno on Da Ali G Show, he seemed to be a combination of the two: his outrageous couture and unabashedly “out” behavior take Borat’s act to a more threatening place where people express entrenched homophobic views, while his interviews do for vacuous celebrities and fashionistas what Ali G does for politicians.

This quality endows Bruno with the potential to be Baron Cohen’s most provocative statement; unfortunately, however, Bruno limits its target to American homophobia, and while the events of the film do indeed expose prejudice toward homosexuals, they also reveal a fallacy at the heart of Baron Cohen’s work: Baron Cohen has some prejudices of his own.

Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles believe that every white person in the South (or perhaps America at large) is a gay-hating redneck Jesus freak. The film serves mainly as an attempt to confirm their preconceived notions. Of course they find what they’re looking for, just as anyone who goes looking in reality for evidence of stereotypes will if s/he looks hard enough … or if his/her prejudices are strong enough. We don’t see anyone in the film contradict this stereotype or surprise Baron Cohen and Charles with his/her tolerance because Baron Cohen and Charles aren’t interested in having their assumptions tested. That would complicate their simplistic worldview. Besides, they might add, that kind of stuff is not funny.

But actually, such an incident makes for perhaps the most hilarious moment of Borat. When Borat disrupts a southern woman’s dinner party by bringing his feces to her in a plastic bag because he doesn’t understand how to use a toilet, we laugh at the uncomfortable breach of etiquette, but we also are amazed by how hard the woman works to maintain her composure. What’s funny is not that she’s a small-minded bigot, but that she’s a big-hearted woman bending over backwards to help make a guest feel welcome in her home. We leave that scene thinking more of that woman than we did at the start, and we still laugh our asses off.

For a film that claims to fight against prejudice, Bruno fights it with a prejudice of its own. Is this revelatory? Is this progressive? Or is it simply trading one kind of blind disdain for another, albeit a kind more politically correct and culturally hip?

Baron Cohen and Charles are, to paraphrase Woody Allen, “bigots for the left,” and their comedy serves to reassure people who already agree with them that their dislike for the South, Christianity, and Conservatism are well-founded and not the stuff of prejudice or bigotry but rather fact. One could speculate that Baron Cohen and Charles may think it’s impossible to be both liberal and prejudiced, or, to put it more bluntly, liberal and incorrect. Part of their invincibility on-screen comes from their outright fearlessness, but part of it also comes from a supreme sense of superiority.

Both Borat and Bruno reveal Larry Charles’ and Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy to be deeply rooted in a cynical contempt for people. In this light, Baron Cohen’s playful embarrassment of that big-hearted woman from Borat turns sinister. Baron Cohen does not tease the woman because she’s a deluded politician, a complacent celebrity, or an unapologetic bigot; he antagonizes her simply because she is too sincere to get his jokes.

No one is above reproach for Baron Cohen and Charles; everyone is a total idiot, a total hypocrite, a total bigot, or all of the above. Everyone, that is, except for Baron Cohen and Charles. And while we might find their particular kind of contempt amusing, even hilarious, their intent and methods only differ from Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh with regards to politics, and that’s not funny at all.

Review @ Bright Lights Film Journal

2009-08-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

My review of Richard Brody's book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard can be found HERE.

Ten Fragments Regarding I'm Not There (2007)

2009-08-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

1.
... say for sure. I'm Not There might be Todd Haynes' best film. It's the film Velvet Goldmine had the potential to be and the film Across the Universe thinks it is. It's a rock film that manages to make clichés (the troubled pop star, the drug-addled tour, the unfaithful marriage) seem fresh again.

4.
... to see it twice in two days. It's one of the only films I've seen for which I can say that I wish it was 8 hours long. I would have sat there for days if it meant more time in the presence of one of the most unique and challenging American filmmakers to ...
26.
... full of acting revelations, the most understated and sublime of all is Charlotte Gainsbourg, who gives a largely wordless performance worthy of the greats of the silent ...

17.
... person or persons claiming the ability to be able to encapsulate a Todd Haynes film in a short piece is a liar. It takes 200 words just to explain the basic plot, leaving you scrambling to find something intelligent to say about the stuff that matters. It's impossible; I won't even try. You can find that stuff in other ...
39.
... following mathematical analogy: the narratives do not add to each other; it's more like multiplication, a problem filled with exponents and factorials and multiple variables, a rapidly expanding force that ... theory of any kind somehow stands dumb in its presence, doesn't it? And yet ...
42.
... say that his narrative device perfectly captures the fragmented personality of a scrutinized star like Dylan is both entirely accurate and completely superficial. Yes, it's true, but it's also so basic compared to the depth of treasures that Haynes has placed ...
51.
... thing to say about this film is that what each story lacks in clarity or fullness is provided by another story. The parts compose the whole piece, but the whole film is something far greater, a full statement, a complete and connected narrative.

8.
... as disarming and defamiliarizing as Dylan's music. While all of it looks like a movie (or five or six), it somehow never has the feel of any film that's come before it. You catch glimpses of the familiar, but as soon as you recognize them, they've changed on you into something much more uncomfortable, something much more dangerous, something ...

84.
... filled with some of the most heartfelt (and heartwrenching) moments imaginable. Gere's segment is the least accessible but also the most vital, and once your head is able to wrap itself around it, its implications for the whole piece go to work on you, and it's here where I became overwhelmed by the film's emotional statement. As much as everyone, especially the misunderstood artist, wants to retreat from the pain and superficiality of the world, the world is inescapable; there is no retreat; something is going to yank us out of fantasyland and into reality. For Haynes, and for Dylan, it is humanity that pulls us back to the material from the ethereal cabin in the woods. The emotions and the beauty of people are impossible to ignore, and even if the results of getting involved make us vulnerable to tremendous pain, we have no choice but to endure, for somewhere in all that mess lies the ...
0.
... will love this movie. People will hate this movie. But so what? In a cinematic climate that seems to demand accessibility, comfort, and simplistic perfection in its self-conscious "serious" films, I'm Not There is bound to ruffle some feathers. But it's the kind of feather-ruffling that is good for cinema. It's good to get pissed off at a movie that's trying something new. Nothing gets changed by having people tell us what we already know. Like Dylan, the film transcends opinion, replacing it with an integrity of its own, one that gives little thought to an outside response. After all, how can it be responsible for what other people think? It's hard enough for the work to be responsible for itself. This is the very essence of I'm Not There. How it manages to articulate something so elusive and confounding so clearly and with such emotion and deranged beauty I can't ...

Movie Pitchers: The Greatest Movie Theater of All Time

2009-07-25T10:03:00.000-07:00

When it comes to movie theaters, I can be a bit of a snob. I like places like The Egyptian and the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles, places that revere the movies and place them ahead of previews, rumbling subwoofers and high fructose corn syrup. This makes it all the more ironic that my Favorite Movie Theater of All-Time was as far from a snob’s haven as you could get. Sure, The Egyptian and the Dome may be the greatest places to see the greatest films, but they cannot match the carefree attitude and the dubious glory of Movie Pitchers.

Movie Pitchers was a second-run art/independent cinema in Mid-City New Orleans. It had four or five screens, but from the outside it looked like a video store and wasn’t much bigger on the inside. But what it lacked in grandeur it made up for in charm, economy, furniture, and, of course, alcohol.

You see, Movie Pitchers had draft beer and a mini-bar, and they didn’t give a damn about legal drinking ages or photo identification. They didn’t serve the stupid daiquiri garbage you see in other theaters in Louisiana—this place kept it real. They served draft beer: Abita, Fosters and the usual Bud/Coors. A pitcher was $7 and you could take it with you into the theater. They also served some surprisingly awesome sandwiches that you could order when you got there which they would actually deliver it to you during your movie. I have yet to see this kind of service at any other movie theater. Granted, this would usually involve someone walking into the middle of the movie, his/her torso blocking the projector, and shouting “Who had the ham and cheese,” but you really didn’t care, mainly because you were drinking beer in a movie theater.

The screening rooms were the antithesis of impressive. In fact, they would horrify most people, as in they’d probably get themselves tested after just looking at the place. But that’s all part of the charm. The screen was just one baby step up from a bedsheet, the sound was just good enough to be audible, and the ceilings and projector were so low that if anyone sat up straight his/her head would block half the screen. But you wouldn’t need to sit up, because all the chairs at Movie Pitchers were couches and lounge chairs, beautiful, comfy, moldy-ass couches that every freak in Mid-City had done God knows what on over the years. But when you’re 19 and drinking while watching Boogie Nights, you’re just tickled pink that you’re sitting on a couch. And these couches were nasty, and that’s probably why the house lights never came on, no matter what. After all, you wouldn’t want to find a rat smothered with a used condom or a syringe wedged in between the couch pillows like a loose change.

Yes, Movie Pitchers was a complete dump, but it was a film lover’s dump. For $5, you could see all the foreign and arty indie films that didn’t play anywhere else in town other than the overpriced Canal Place in the French Quarter … and you could drink while you were there. Magnolia, The Big Lebowski, Deconstructing Harry, Hands on a Hardbody - I saw them all at least twice at Movie Pitchers. Plus, they showed Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, which, if you don’t know, is a 3-D porno starring John Holmes (remember what I said about the couches?). It was disappointing, but it has one of the most messed-up flashback structures ever put on film.

How could a film lover not live at a place like this? Sure, a two-hour movie usually turned into three hours because the film would always break and it would take them at least half an hour to fix it, but that just meant you bought another pitcher and drank some more. It’s hard to ask for your money back when you’re wasted. Part of me suspects they broke the film on purpose. And they had their share of freaks, including the co-owner/ticket guy who never stopped talking to you and who had this weird tick in which his jaw would chomp down loudly about every five to seven seconds, but this is New Orleans after all: you pay for the service and all the crazy stuff is just lagniappe.

Movie Pitchers did the obligatory Rocky Horror Picture Show deal, which I love, but they also hosted an improv comedy troupe called Brown! Brown’s idea of improv comedy was to see who could go onstage the drunkest. You haven’t had a great time at an improv show until the guys onstage are giggling, blithering idiots who do all they can to work “fuck” and “shit” into everything they say. I don’t know if you can call this improv since the intoxication was entirely planned, but the show was fantastic nonetheless. Plus, if you wanted to see Dr. Ken Jeong before he played the OB/GYN in Knocked Up, Brown! was the place to see him.

Something this wonderful could only exist in New Orleans, but sadly, it couldn’t even exist there forever. In the fall of 2000, Sav-A-Center, a supermarket, began construction across the street. They bought the ground Movie Pitchers stood on so that they could build an overflow parking lot, somehow believing that shoppers would be willing to cross the street with their shopping cart and risk being mistaken for a homeless person. Since Movie Pitchers leased the building, there wasn’t much they could do. They tried to do something in the courts, but they got shot down right away. They didn’t have enough money to move elsewhere, and so the grungy cinematic utopia ceased to be.

Their closing was a strange shock to me. Just two days before their defeat in court, which they expected to win, my first short film screened in the theater. This wasn’t just important because one of my films was screening in a real theater to a paying audience - after all, it was just barely a real theater (my films have played in bigger living rooms). It was important because I had a film playing at my favorite movie theater, and two days later, it would have been impossible. And that’s what New Orleans lost when they lost Movie Pitchers: they lost a place where all of this and more was not only possible, but encouraged and embraced, all with a greasy spoon, a grimy couch and a Solo cup full of brew. I know I’ll love other movie theaters in my life, but I’ll never love one as much as that absolutely glorious dump on Bienville called Movie Pitchers.

Michelangelo Antonioni: Minister of the Interior

2009-07-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

It’s almost fitting that Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman would die within 24 hours of each other. Bergman’s death might have received nearly three times the amount of press coverage as Antonioni’s,* but what has been said about Bergman could just as easily apply to Antonioni. Both of them, perhaps more than any filmmakers in history, are responsible for turning cinema inward to focus on the existential angst of the modern, post-war world. That might sound like a steaming heap of pretentious garbage, but you’ll have to take a whiff: their contributions mark the greatest advancement of the capabilities of cinema since the introduction of sound.

Antonioni might not have been as prolific as Bergman, but he packed just as hard of a punch. With films like L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, Red Desert, and Blowup, Antonioni depicts a world spiraling out of control. The effects of two world wars have caused the world to lose its moral compass, and, left adrift in an increasingly industrialized and confusing world, his characters find nowhere to turn but within; however, the interior often proves to be an even more frightening and alienating place. Left with a spiritual dead-end, his characters become inert, lost in the landscape, disappearing, devolving, deteriorating, until the world swallows them whole.
Like Bergman, Antonioni was a master of composition. Even though he claimed he never plotted out his shots until the morning of the shoot, his framing has the look of carefully planned perfectionism. In contrast to Bergman, however, Antonioni’s compositions draw heavily upon the landscape to comment on the interior of the characters. He paints on a larger canvas, in the hopes that he can show how the industrial world bears down upon its inhabitants, how people cannot exist outside of their designed environment. Without architecture, an Antonioni film would feel empty and artificial. It’s the environment, that cold and vertiginous modern society, that provides the context for Antonioni’s psychological probing.
What he probed was what was happening to society right now. This was both a blessing and a curse for Antonioni, but usually a blessing. Films like L’Avventura and Red Desert hit the mark so strongly that they became timeless.** A film like Blowup is so prescient that it declares Swinging London dead and morally bankrupt almost before it started swinging. But, this approach can backfire, as it does with Zabriskie Point, a captivating but puzzling film about American counterculture that probably felt dated in 1970. Nevertheless, Antonioni was always able to keep with the times, and The Passenger, one of his last major works (and severely underrated), manages to capture the inertia and despair of the 1970s world in a way that makes many “serious” American films of the same era feel soft.
More than anything else, Antonioni was a master of endings. The final moments of L’Eclisse, The Passenger, and, best of all, Blowup, mark some of the most dazzling moments in the history of cinema, whether it is the terror of L’Eclisse, the entropy of The Passenger, or the relativism of Blowup, it is impossible to move after the end of an Antonioni film. You feel as though you have witnessed your own unraveling, and you fear that, even though the curtain has closed and the lights have come back on, Antonioni’s film has just begun.

Antonioni’s and Bergman’s era of internalized cinema isn’t gone forever, even though it may seem like no one makes films like theirs any longer. There’s hope yet. Thankfully, these two masters of the cinema left behind dozens of spellbinding works that will give audiences something to talk about for decades to come, and filmmakers an endless spring of inspiration and possibility. Cinema is an incredibly young art form, and their influence on it is just getting warmed up.

* Figures based on an incredibly advanced research technique (patent pending) that involved Googling “Ingmar Bergman dead” and “Antonioni dead” and comparing the number of hits: Bergman received 4.39 million hits to Antonioni’s 1.36 million. The painstaking process that produced these incontrovertible results lasted approximately 4.85 seconds and required a team of scholars working round the clock in between searching for a new mojito recipe.

** Two years after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, L’Avventura was chosen by Sight and Sound magazine as one of the 10 Best Films Ever Made.

Pretty in Pinko: John Hughes and the Proleteeniat Revolution

2009-07-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

In the mid-1980s, when Reagan was busy turning up the heat on the Cold War, America was being sabotaged by a Communist infiltrator who targeted our youth with saccharine Commie propaganda aimed at leading the youth to revolution. I’m talking, of course, about this man:

John Hughes.

Hughes is one of the filmmakers responsible for introducing the idea of high school as a microcosm of society, but while most filmmakers settle for exploring the cruelties of popularity, Hughes goes for all-out revolution. The man behind such teen angst classics like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles may have seemed to be harmlessly soothing the pain of adolescence, but he was really implementing a Three Year Plan (1983-1986) whose goal was nothing short of overthrowing the capitalist system with hot teenage class warfare.

What is the theme of every John Hughes’ teen movie? Our differences are meaningless. We are all alike in that we are equally oppressed by adults and the capitalist system. It is our job as teens to put aside our superficial differences and band together to fight the bourgeois parents and fascist school administrators who enslave us, who selfishly profit from the oil of our pimples and try to turn us against each other by telling us to know our place and take out the trash.

He started out subtly, writing National Lampoon’s Vacation, seemingly a love-letter to the biggest monument to capitalism there is: the theme park. But what happens at the end of this bourgeois pilgrimmage? Wallyworld is closed; the Griswolds have been exiled from the capitalist utopia. But do they sulk back to the suburbs of Chicago? No, the Griswold family revolts against the establishment by breaking into the park and taking what’s theirs: a respite from work that allows them to pour their hard-earned money back into the coffers of industry. It’s a failed revolution, but it marks the first step in Hughes’ Three Year Plan.

It’s when Hughes gets a chance to direct that his true colors show Red. Sixteen Candles wants to be concerned with materials like birthday presents and purloined panties, but, like Pretty in Pink, it’s all about dating outside your class. By the end of the film, the Geek snags the prom queen, and Molly Ringwald wins the love of a petit bourgeoisie. Even Long Duc Dong and the girl with the neck brace get some action. I know that Aristotle’s conception of comedy is supposed to end with everything in balance, but I don’t think either he or Marx were talking about equal distribution of booty.

In Weird Science, sexless computer nerds (read: the working class) realize what Marx had been saying all along: the workers control the means of production and should use it to their advantage. Of course, he didn’t mean cybernetically producing your own sex slave, but why get caught up in semantics? Gary and Wyatt use their superior technological skills to satisfy their desires, desires which society places outside their class. In doing so, they get the popular kids (read: the captains of industry) begging for their assistance. What they learn in the film is not that wrenching control of society from the elite is bad; rather, through power, they find self-confidence. They may not be ruling the school at the end of the film, but they are certainly no longer shackled members of the proletariat. If their revolution seems failed or incomplete, that is only because Hughes’ Three Year Plan won’t reach maturity until 1986.
The Breakfast Club could be seen as Hughes’ October, or at least his Reds. In this film, the message is that, after one day in detention (read: the secondary school gulag), five oppressed teens realize that they are trapped in a bogus class system. The culture of high school has brainwashed them into thinking they are separated by a rigid class structure, when, in reality, they are all members of the same class: the proleteeniat. Despite what capitalist society has been telling them, they discover that they are all “a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal.” What do they do with this realization? They convene a party congress (read: getting high and dancing to “We Are Not Alone”) before writing a manifesto that they hand to the principal like it was the 95 Theses. Is it an accident that the last image of the film features John Bender—a Trotskyite if there ever was one—raising a revolutionary fist in the air? Absolutely not. This is a message to the oppressed teens in the audience, an image that calls for permanent revolution not in the world of the film, but in the real world. What else could “Don’t You Forget About Me” possibly mean?

But who will emerge from among the proleteeniat to lead them in a revolutionary uprising? Only one character in the Hughes oeuvre can shoulder such a burden: Ferris Bueller. In the last teen-angst film he directed, Hughes leaves his audience with a model leader, a Marxist Messiah. What teen in 1986 did not walk out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off thinking that Ferris Bueller was the coolest film hero of all time? Why did we think he was so cool? Because he engages in open revolt against the system. But just what exactly is Ferris taking a day off from? Ferris Bueller is taking a day off from adolescent serfdom, and he wants all of us to join him. If John Hughes is Marx, then Ferris Bueller is his Lenin, perhaps even his Mao.
Bueller is the perfect leader because he transcends the illusory teenage social classes by appealing to every social strata: “the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wasteoids, dweebies, dickheads—they all adore him; they think he’s a righteous dude.” He works well with one-on-one encounters, but he also is capable of leading mass demonstrations. Bueller embodies the cult of personality, and his followers, assuming that their Dear Leader is threatened, mount an underground campaign to save him, thus spreading Buellerism all over Shermer, Illinois. By the end of the film, these Buelleristas are an unstoppable force, and we get the strong impression that Ed Rooney and his ilk will soon be liquidated.

But Hughes’ revolution never took place, and Hughes himself all but went underground by 1991. But perhaps Hughes’ revolution took place in a different, more subtle way. Due to the success of Hughes’ films and other films of the time, the culture industry directed all its attention toward pleasing the proleteeniat. Therefore, rather than overthrowing the capitalist system, Hughes brought the system to its knees and forced it to address the needs of the proleteeniat. As a result, the adults placed cultural power in the hands of kids, and the culture industry has never been the same since; every piece of cultural material for mass consumption has as its target the fourteen-year-old male. Look at it one way, and it’s a successful revolution, a paradigm shift; look at it another way, and the struggle became a commodity within the very system it was attempting to overthrow. Either way, the revolutionary message of the film endures, even if its real-world advances do not.