The Class

Dir. Laurent Cartet
2008
9.5




Middle school is hell on Earth. Any and all quiet respect for authority at that age (12-14) is thrown out the window. As a teacher, it is considered an achievement to get your class under control, never mind transmitting any knowledge. Where elementary school lays the foundation for a person's conception of education and high school develops on top of it a rickety framework of hyper-specific and compartmentalized spheres, middle school always seems to just be a big push out the door. Standards of behavior and learning are dismantled and reassembled into something between prison and playground. The years in middle school are some of the most confusing years of all, and not just for students. The Class, a 2008 French film by Laurent Cantet and recipient of the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, provides a stunning introspection on the commitments and contradictions of being an educator, as well as the duties and obligations inherent in the occupation. Culled from the personal experiences of an inner city Parisian teacher, Francois Begaudeau who also plays the film's protagonist, The Class is a beautiful, and at times uncomfortable, piece of honest-to-god filmmaking. Its clarity of vision, lack of pretension, and complete certitude allow, and in fact encourage, the film to evolve past being a simple conceptualization and reproduction of the uncertainties and trepidations of scholastics into a commentary on the oft-ignored dilemmas of modern education.

In theory the film presents a near impossible task: the development of a classroom of characters into a classroom of students: obnoxious, insular, obtuse but most of all believable. The film centers around Mr. Marin's (Begaudeau) eclectic class of middle school aged students, who range from Chinese, video game loving Wey to Malian, disciplinary nightmare Souleymane. The film begins formlessly enough, a tasteful choice on Cantet's part, allowing the viewer to become acquainted with, in all likelihood, an unfamiliar setting. The inner city and multi-national aspect of the film took some getting used to, not to mention the sheer intensity of the middle school setting with its blurring dialogs and extreme divides between hormonally engaged students and caffeine affixed, sometimes utterly disenfranchised teachers. The film presents its own themes literally, using questions posed by students and debates between teachers to elaborate on what is already being presented. Take a question by one student: What does condescension mean? As a maturing young adult its pretty clear how blatantly patronizing Mr. Marin is towards his students, knowing that they have yet to fully develop a sensitivity to his subtle jeers. They are not completely unaware though, as they occasionally chastise him for making fun of them or even insulting them, which they ironically find unjust. The question that develops out of this slightly detached introduction is that of who deserves what kind of treatment.

There is an emphatic conviction in youth that adults are infallible, unquestionable, and amoral. Their word is law. However, by the time a child hits the age of 13 that belief is turned on its head, and becomes instead the recalcitrance of the pre-teen years in which all authority can and must be questioned, to degrees which are often absurd. Development at this stage is a painful process, and in The Class the figurehead of such a crisis is Souleymane, who, after stepping in to defend two female students who Mr. Marin has just accused of “acting like skanks”, disavows all points of classroom law, pushing and shoving his way out the door after accidentally cutting open the eyebrow of a fellow problem student, Khoumba. The incident, which is the film's tense climax, results in Souleymane's expulsion from the school. All the while, and in fact since the film began, an ideological war is being waged between the teachers on how to best govern the school, which they naturally approach rather bookishly. These conversations, perfectly juxtaposed with the scenes in the classroom in which Marin's thoughts on education are put into profound praxis, edify the films' self-awareness and function as a more direct means of calling into question long since defunct prerogatives of teachers and the means by which they control education. In America, in the shadow of George W. Bush's “No Child Left Behind” doctrine, these scenes take on a quality of pain by self-realization. Many of us were educated, publicly and privately, under similar statues, and seeing them presented here in a confused frenzy of idealizations and total hopeless disillusion and the bitter conclusion that nothing is working, calls into question how any of us ever made it past the 8th grade. Better still it points to our own depressingly low level of education, with so many college students possessing only elementary grasps on grammar and syntax, never mind literature and politics.

All things considered, what makes The Class remarkable is not its criticism of educators, who have one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, but rather its acceptance of youth culture. It asks the classic insolent question “When are we ever going to use this?” and does so eloquently and with near perfect verisimilitude. It embraces the student perspective and integrates it into its final evaluation. That evaluation is not exact. It is not a precise suggestion. It is more a warm embrace of the possibilities of evolving educational standards and the part that children, who are the whole impetus of education, must play in that process. The Class reads like a textbook that might have a title like “How to Teach and Learn”. Its point is articulate and timely and owes its precision to an educator who saw himself not as a demigod, but as a human-being attempting to transmit the gift of knowledge to a group of young people who weren't sure that they needed or wanted it. It is a serious achievement in academic assessment, as well as an exquisite piece of cinema.

Artificial Intelligence: AI

Dir. Steven Spielberg
2001
7.5

As I understand it, based on a dizzying year spent as a Cultural Studies major (in plainspeak: an anthropological study of popular cultural/academia's rhetoric meets persistent-obnoxious hipster co-option of kitsch culture), a simulacrum is a recreation of an object that is in fact more perfect than the original. For instance, nowadays if you take an old photo of your grandparents sitting outside their farm smoking hand rolled cigarettes (the kind that didn't cause cancer), to a digital photoshop they could scan the picture and, using assumptions on coloring and texture, fill in pieces of the photo that have faded, giving you back a copy that looks almost new. Essentially for those who find history meaningful and imperfection an important means of discovery, simulacra is basically the anti-Christ. Steven Spielberg's 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: AI, in its opening monologue by Dr. Hobby, makes reference to simulacrum in mentioning how the new type of robots, or Mechas, that his robotics company is designing will be able to replicate the human emotion of love. These robots will always love, an idea that instantly terrified me. Always love? If everything in the world is understood based primarily on its opposite (what is down if not the antithesis of up?), then in making the assumption that anything can always love it must also have a subconscious and deep understanding of hate. This is essentially what the film is all about: a simulacrum's fall from grace; the self-realization of failure inherent in perfection. It is a quest that reveals some sinister beliefs of human beings, such as the the self-assured confidence that our consciousness, which we believe to possess over all other creatures, is a permanent excuse for overriding that very same compunction and committing atrocious acts of immorality against others (for those of you who are wondering if this film isn't at least in some small way about the Holocaust, the answer is “yes”; this is after all a Spielberg film). The film spins a large, tangled web of fable, mythology, and Christian doctrine and emerges, not entirely unscathed, as a modern allegory of humanity by way of robots.

What is immediately striking about AI is its vision of the future. In so many fictional, especially science-fictional, films that take place in the future the time period seems to either be presented as a cryptic and abstracted rendering of the present, so decontextualized that the viewer spends half the film trying to acclimate to their new perverse environment, or conversely a mirror image of the present, only flashier. Spielberg's screenplay, which is in and of itself a simulacrum (based on a previously written screenplay, which was based on a short story), nicely anticipates the future without the pretension or lack of inspiration of either aforementioned visions. His future is a reasonable one, where the human race has evolved slightly (technologically) but also devolved (emotionally). It is a full-bodied future. Spielberg takes into consideration not just the way things look (NYC is under water, cars are smaller, etc.) but also the way people act. The first part of the film in which David (Haley Joel Osment), the Mecha that a couple have adopted in place of their “real” son who is currently in the hospital, interacts with said couple is pretty painful. It would appear that Spielberg has assumed that without children (global warming has shortened food supplies, which lead to government regulations on child birth), adults will forget how to interact. A similar sort of assumption was made several years later in the book-to-screen adaptation of Children of Men, to a slightly more devastating end. David seeks to love, inhumanely. This means dogging after his “mother” until she accepts him. This “acceptance” is a code; an assortment of culturally loaded terms which Spielberg uses ironically as a means of adoption that is most divorced from humanity. Eventually the couple's “real son” returns home and David is abandoned. This is the film's first twist: the first ever robot made to believe it is human (when asked when David was built, he does not know how to respond) is left to fend for himself by a mother who he realizes cannot love him because he is not “real”. Thus begins an odyssey which mirrors the story of Pinnochio. A less scrupulous viewer might comment on how David's story is far more sinister, but that would be a discriminant viewpoint. David's miniscule understanding of the world does not allow him to fully comprehend what he sees at the anti-Mecha, Flesh Fair which is Spielberg's only real blatant finger wag at Nazism, during which robots are torn apart in sport as a celebration of life. Nor does it allow him to grasp how the Dr. Know, a digital guru, he seeks his answers from is a tourist scam. In fact it is not until the end of the film, when he comes to find out that he was the first in a line of Mechas, who all look like him and have his name, that he is not only not real but not unique either. The film's second twist is David's post-disillusioned attempted suicide, during which he discovers what he believes to be the Blue Fairy, which he has been searching for since being abandoned. After this the film launches into a Kubrick-esque time-odyssey complete with Spielberg's almost cliched use of aliens and a questionable ending that finds the famed director quickly tying together loose philosophical ends.

As a metaphysical sojourn and sophisticated, post-modern evaluation of human beings, Spielberg's film is mostly a triumph. However, as a piece of original art it falls on uncertain ground. A lot of people hyped AI for Stanley Kubrick's rumored post mortem involvement in the motion picture. The truth is that Kubrick in between making his two most widely recognized films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange, brought together a team of writers to begin working on what would become the base screenplay for Spielberg's film 30 years later. This mysterious and subtle involvement in the earliest stages of AI has been blown completely out of proportion, even by Spielberg himself who reportedly used Kubrick's secretive style of filming (I guess that just means never being seen in public/never talking about your movies) imitatively. It's one thing to find inspiration in another person's life and works, but it is entirely different to channel their creative reasoning for no other purpose then to promote a film. This news reflects poorly on Spielberg, who has always been a people's director, hitting an emotional and visual core with nearly every one of his films. Before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (speaking of the anti-Christ...) came out it was next to impossible to question Spielberg's consistency and status as perhaps the most well recognized director of the last 25 years. However, in a canon of easily digestible thrillers and ground breaking dramas, AI feels stuck somewhere between, on swampy ground unfamiliar to Spielberg. He wades through, plucking familiar items out of it, as well as foreign objects, and does what he can to connect them. The end result is a product that feels slightly hashed together, drawing perhaps on too many sources, inspirations and texts. AI is certainly not a bad film, but disappointing. It works the viewer up to expect something conclusive and unforeseen and ends up falling back lazily on pre-established notions. Ironically, if Spielberg was a younger, less prominent director he might have had a greater desire to make a film that took more risks; that was more singularly focused. Instead AI finds itself struggling internally between its idols and its insight, and failing to totally fulfill either.

Waltz with Bashir

Dir. Ari Folman
2008
7.6

The most important line in Ari Folman's 2008 film Waltz with Bashir is also its thesis. When speaking to Folman about the nature of memory, a friend tells him “Memory is dynamic.” Waltz with Bashir is a meeting of historic documentary and subjective/selective cognizance. It is a dramatic retelling of the 1982 Lebanese War told through a series of animated vignettes via individual flashbacks told by and to Folman as he journeys backwards through time to relive a part of his life that has been closed to him for over 20 years. When I say closed I mean that the basis of the film's narrative is that Folman is incapable of remembering his time spent as an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier occupying Lebanon, in particular his armies seige of Beirut. While the film attempts to back this dilemma up psychologically (an interview with a post traumatic stress doctor brings about and wistfully defines this neurosis as “dissociative memory”) it inevitably succumbs to its own terribly powerful story, leaving the reasons for it being told in the shadows of colossal human destruction and genocide. The intent is hardly sinister since Folman, as a means of communicating with a non-Middle Eastern audience, relies on emotive relations over a systematic understanding. Still, Waltz with Bashir is fecund with impressive visuals and sublime meditations on individual humanity in the face of war.

Folman's dreamlike film begins quite literally: in a dream. This dream which is being told to Folman, an ex-IDF soldier turned filmmaker, by an old friend releases a war-torn memory in Folman which triggers an almost instinctual desire to discover where the vision extends from. He begins seeking out various former fellow combatants and tells them about his dream and how he can't remember anything about the war. These becomes the pieces by which Folman's own story is told. The problem then becomes dissociating what is real from what has become real over the years; reality by association. Folman adopts the memories of the men and women he speaks to as his own and then, by an inexplicable magic known nominally as psychology, he begins to remember parts of the war. His visions are impressively concrete, given that their content usually involves close range death and mayhem. They are rendered immaculately by the team of artists who utilize flash, classic and 3D animation to bring to life, with impressive dedication to detail, the near hallucinatory visualization of war. Waltz with Bashir's vision of carnage and destruction contains originality bordering on Apocalypse Now's stimulating spectacle, but falls short of that “anti-war” film's impeccable restructuring of war as a personal journey. In that sense Waltz with Bashir feels more like a vicarious day trip rather than a cataclysmic deportation.

The problem is not how the film looks but rather how it moves which is choppy and fragmentary. While dubbed a documentary, the film eschews education of mass audiences in favor of sublimation of feelings as facts. Save the tantamount example of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, which in of itself exercises the use of raw stock footage of the weeping wives and mothers of murdered men, women and children, the entirety of Waltz with Bashir is presented in away where the viewer is lead to believe that what they are seeing is based on fact, but finds itself so twisted in its own self proclaimed idiosyncrasies that the viewer is hard pressed to discern a meaning. Was Waltz with Bashir meant to portray the total inglorious war or the mutilated personal war? It unfortunately settles for inconclusion and vagueness, where further development could have provided a much clearer vision.

As an artifact of history Waltz with Bashir is an original piece of cinema. Though somewhat rudimentary in its narrative presence, and at times distracting in its visual one, the film does manage to pose an important intrinsic question. That question is one of distance. Who can see more clearly the destruction of war? Those from afar, who are in no danger and can easily fall prey to apathy (see: Israel's party atmosphere in the 80s, in the midst of a foreign war) or those who are too close to make out the epic hugeness of the damage they themselves have caused? A fleeting reference is made to the Holocaust during the film, when Folman realizes that he may have very launched the flares under which thousands of Palestinians were brutally executed. I gathered that this reference was meant to signify an idea of implausible and totally irrational deniability, like the Nazis who claimed not to realize that the gas chambers in the concentration camps where they were stationed were used to kill Jews by the millions. War has always been an act which we as humans have been incapable of, and unwilling to see in its entirety, because we know that it signifies a total fall from grace. Where Waltz with Bashir succeeds is in confronting the totally inhuman aspect of war, and shouldering the responsibility of the deaths Folman and others caused. By the conclusion, the film is no longer a documentary but rather an exercise in cleansing. Though wrought with imperfections of voice and structure, Waltz with Bashir is a progressive work of personality coping with impassable history.

Watchmen

Dir. Zack Snyder
2009
1.0

Critical discourse on cinema is dialectically centered around an abstract concept of quality and its relation to success. The more a film is surrounded by advertising, hype, direct and indirect forms of attention, the higher the likelihood that upon its release and posterior analysis it will become something it is not. Take Synecdoche, New York for example. My favorite film of 2008 found critics praising its ingenious structure and unparalleled scope OR dismantling it as a piece of esoteric fiction, too personal to reach a mass audience and too precious to be thrown away. I remember in junior high school going to see some trashy B-list film (The Replacements...starring Keanu Reeves), and observing two middle aged people who entered the theater, sat through the preview of Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and left as soon as it was finished. That film, released in 2001, was my first introduction to movie fanaticism. A midnight showing the night it came out; teenagers and adults alike dressed in costumes; a strong showing at the Academy Awards that same year, et cetera. A few years later the “original” Star Wars trilogy was horribly mangled and shipped back into theaters, for the poor kooks who didn't get enough the first time and the pathetic borrowed nostalgia of wayward and lonely teens. Same deal, sans awards. I did not see Watchmen at its midnight showing. I did, however, see it the following afternoon. Good choice. The 6:30pm showing that followed had lines out the door and I saw several costumed Rorschachs. Jump back 6 months. I read Watchmen the graphic novel and am floored. The sophistication of its combatant philosophies, the pure ecstasy of its visuals, and the crushing brutality of its final conclusion (which finds its earliest links in the Platonic theory of “the noble lie”) were enough to get me more than excited, and suspicious, about a film adaptation by one of the rising stars of visual carnage: director Zack Snyder. In the months that followed, a countdown (which finds an ironic parallel in the novel's famed Doomsday Clock) to the film's release began and Watchmen garnered a zealous following. Rumors that Snyder and his screenwriters were using the original novel as a visual map were stimulating but reports that the novel's writer, Alan Moore, refused to have anything to do with the adaptation on the grounds that what was done in his and illustrator Dave Gibbons' work was untranslatable to the silver screen were worrisome. Now, 23 years after its initial publication Watchmen is a major motion picture. The near sexual pre-release tension has entirely dissipated and the only thing left to do is wade through the rubble of a masterpiece self-destructed.

There are several ways to approach reviewing a film that has been adapted from another medium. On the one hand a reviewer can assume that his/her reader is familiar with the original manuscript. This however is not always the case. On the other is just the opposite: take the film as a film and relieve it of its paralyzing history. Neither is entirely just. However, the legacy of Watchmen as a graphic novel and seminal piece of 20th century fiction cannot be ignored. Its transference to the cinemas of the world was not a mistake, but the film fails to compete with its brainchild on so many levels that it is sometimes painful to watch. On the whole, all points of the film are underdeveloped. Characters, moral philosophies, mayhem, politics, et all. Even essential plot devices and explanations are completely avoided or left out. A film that underwhelms so completely and still clocks in at over 160 minutes needs to take its inspiration from the sweeping epics of the 1960s. Where was David Lean's influence on tragic heroism? Where was Kubrick's ideas on odyssey and science? With such a tremendous opportunity to make a picture so impactful and profound it terrorizes the mind to remember the minute and a half long soft core porn scene after Sally Jupiter (Malin Akerman) and Nite Owl (version Dull Dan, aka Patrick Wilson) rescue a group of minorities from a burning tenement building. Seriously. What the fuck? Not only that, but their intimacy was as phony as Akerman's acting, which was cringe inducing at best. Her performance was as void of humanity as Dr. Manhattan's (Billy Crudup), only without the original intent for it to be so. In fact the only characters that took on any semblance of multi-dimensional presence were The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) even if his internal narration reads like a Godspeed You! Black Emperor text. Between these two characters a dull death rattle is blown and instantly drowned out by visceral and trope-ish Hollywood violence.

Having said all that, I'd like to now make a point that will seem to entirely contradict all those before it: Watchmen is the most iconic film of the decade. Not since The Matrix has a film been released that is surely to be parodied, impersonated, and gracelessly flaunted for its sheer visual presence. It really doesn't matter that the film was a near complete abortion of creative integrity or the fact that its original plot, with devices swinging wildly in huge, untraceable and gyroscopic movements is stripped of its inertia and forced into a linearity of which it can only toss and roll awkwardly unsure of where it's actually supposed to go, or that its characters are flimsy and lifeless, or that compared to The Dark Knight, which saw its own release less than a year before, it is a step backwards in the culmination of the long, painful history of filmic science fiction. That history began in the 1930s, saw a surge in popularity in the 50s (thanks in part to alien takeover becoming subconsciously equated with the threat of Soviet invasion), pinnacled with 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late 60s and since then has been sticking its head up every now and again (Blade Runner, Terminator, Solaris, and so on) to remind audiences that sci-fi is not a genre for nerds and engineering students, but rather a body of work that is both glittery and serious, in fact the self conscious realization of the best (but still sadly under-indulged) side of Hollywood: glamor and sophistication.

Here's another contradiction: Watchmen is not an abject failure, although its pretty damn close. As films go, it is a little too sure of itself, playing on its own absurdities (every punch comes with that ridiculous “whoosh” noise) and temperance (Adrein Veidt hung out with David Bowie...great...). It wouldn't have been a great or for that matter predictable choice on the part of Snyder to have made a film that didn't take itself seriously. For all its glorious action 300 can be really really boring, and that same kind of unmistakable triteness assimilated into Frank Miller's godawful 2008 film The Spirit (which tried desperately to cash in on the Watchmen hype by literally stealing visual cues from the novel). Snyder has the budget and Hollywood backing to make incredibly good looking pictures. A close friend likened his directorial style to Kinko's, insinuating that he makes a product look snazzy but adds nothing to its value as an object. Moving beyond that questionable fault, Snyder does seem to have a relative devotion to making these spectacles mostly enjoyable for his audience. In a sense he is very much a stereotypical Hollywood director but one that has, by no fault or appearance of effort, found himself ahead of the curve, producing the pictures that go on to affect the types and kinds of films that are subsequently released in theaters. In that respect we can all look forward to Watchmen knock-offs for the rest of this decade, which will only increase the film's undeserved reputation as a remarkable motion picture.

Regrettably I have to admit that as entertainment (read: stimulation) goes Watchmen is pretty top-notch. Its least impressive digital (and this movie is tres digital) effects cop directly from the formative action films of the last 15 years, but its most memorable are highly inventive and original, again excusing the almost certain cult like replication of the film's visuals in the near future. With any luck someone in Hollywood, preferably a high powered director with good taste (Hello? Is there anybody out there?), will recognize Watchmen's inherent faults as an adaptation from a still underrated and misunderstood medium, but also its potential as an incisive and intelligent film, and learn from it. Perhaps Watchmen will even prove to be the jumping off point for the public's true and final embrace of science fiction. Yes, and maybe Americans will learn to love anime...

On the whole, the dialectics of Watchmen are pretty cut and dry. Fans of the graphic novel will likely despise it, shamelessly, for not living up to the original. Action movie fanatics and young movie goers everywhere (especially those under the age of 18 who probably snuck in to see the film by the millions this past week) will be super stoked and buy the uncut, extended and ludicrously expensive special editions as they are released from now until the end of time. But most of all the critics will have no idea. I recently saw a web post with egregiously poor grammar that essentially said that it was the fan's decision whether the film was any good. This is pretty close to the truth. The truth is that it's anyone's decision, fan or not, and being a fan hinders the ability to judge fairly. Any personal connection, which is largely inescapable, hinders that ability (right Jon?). So the bottom line is that Watchmen, in its failure to live up to the iconic and philosophic standards set by Alan Moore and David Gibbons, and its success (thus far) as a big-budget Hollywood action film, will never be entirely understood. As viewers we can only watch as the legend (of which I am making the assumption that there will be) grows and covers any and all critical relations between the film and its viewership. In short, I think this is bigger than both of us.

Velvet Goldmine

Dir. Todd Haynes
1998
8.1

At what point does a life become absurd? When does a person quit being a human and become a persona or a personality, incapable of dissociating between their surrealist lifestyle and the likelihood that they are addicted to their own sense of escapism? In his brilliant 2007 fiopic on Bob Dylan, I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes theorized that this happens only when some kind of trauma forcibly slices and bleeds through into an existence that has evolved into a social and cultural lifestyle: forcibly crippling the gaping hugeness of exterior recklessness and waking an interior humanity that can be covered up but never entirely forgotten about. What made that film incomparable was its blending of realities, its fractal poster of one of the best, and at the same time in a more literal sense, least, known figures in contemporary music, and its ungodly collision of pure fantasy and debilitating reality. Stepping back 10 years we see the roots of Haynes' unique vision of personality and his theme of identity that he would further develop in the 21st century with Far From Heaven and I'm Not There. Velvet Goldmine, which centers around the life of David Bowie (known as “Brian Slade” in the film and played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his relationship with Iggy Pop (“Curt Wilde” played by Ewan McGregor), does not pulsate as far out or as deeply as I'm Not There, but instead tries to unearth (and in a manner highly reminiscent of Citizen Kane's detective-esque narrative about uncovering the truth behind an infamous and controversial pseudo-historical figure) some kind of truth behind the glittery facade of the 70s glam rock movement in England and its affect on two of its most well known icons.

As with I'm Not There, Velvet Goldmine utilizes healthy doses of fiction and fantasy. Haynes' masterful and amazingly careful control over the artifacts in his films allows for these fables to blend with the written and oral history he is essentially remaking to create a picture that is almost entirely aware of itself in ways that its protagonists can never be. Velvet Goldmine understands its own mythology, and uses that knowledge (in the form of UFOs, pearls from Oscar Wilde, and impossibly well-timed meetings and introductions) to both undercut and underscore its own vicious and amoral landscape. Haynes designs Brian Slade as a gawky, awkward and troubled youth who, after discovering a passion for music, is inspired by an early performance by Curt Wilde in which the singer is seen jumping around the stage, removing his clothes, being aggressively sexual (in general, not towards a particular gender), and causing a scene that would ultimately lead to the basis of his character, Iggy Pop, being called the Godfather of Punk. It is the late 60s and Slade decides to take that idea and transform it into something mostly unseen before. As the film progresses Slade falls further into the deep, dark passages of his alter ego and stage persona “Maxwell Demon”, based heavily on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust image, and as he does so becomes further infatuated with himself and his status as the penultimate pop icon of the time.

The film cuts between retroactive memories of Slade, as told by former lovers (his wife, one-time manager, and Curt Wilde himself) in order to, in 1984, discover “what became of Brian Slade?” Christian Bale plays an English rock journalist, Arthur Stuart, and Glam Rock devotee on a quest to discover, in the ten years since Slade faked his own shooting at a concert, who or what he is now. It's hard to tell whether Bale is remarkable in this role or entirely miscast, especially during his flashbacks as a sexually repressed teen in 70s England, working himself up to embrace the glam trend by buying Slade's records and dressing in a mostly asexual manner. It is revealed that through traumatic childhood experiences, which find a mirror in the experiences of Slade (beaten up at school, early exposure to vaudeville and homosexuality) and Wilde (electroshock therapy to “cure” him of his early signs of homosexuality), Stuart developed an entirely confused notion of sexuality and its relation to popular culture. In dual explorations of Slade's past and his own, he finds that their paths, both physically and psychologically, have met before and continue in a bizarre sort of parallelism. The film vaguely resolves its extrinsic plot line by concluding that androgenuous sex icon Brian Slade has transformed into a generic 80s arena lounge-ish star Tommy Stone, who falls somewhere between Rod Stewart and Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry.

If this all sounds very confusing, bordering on esoteric, that's because it is. Velvet Goldmine turns in on itself a few too many times and there are certainly moments where it is difficult to maintain a static concept of time and identity. While the film is, like all the films of Haynes' that I've had the pleasure of seeing, chock full of personality and iconography (Velvet Goldmine's version of the early 70s is one of the best and most authentic since Kubrick brainstormed what the future would look like in Clockwork Orange) and brings together a daunting number of literary (Oscar Wilde is quoted continuously) and cultural (was that Alice Cooper?) influences, the fact remains that it is too much for an audience to handle. It is not that the film loses focus, but more that its focus is so wide that it's difficult to see anything very clearly and instead the viewer is left with memorable scenes and impressions of the characters, rather than cleaving at the grit of the characters themselves. In retrospect I can safely say that Haynes perfected this unique film style, the fiopic, in I'm Not There; tightening up potential lose ends and further embracing duplicity and confusion to make a picture that was more wholly organic. I'm Not There embraced a viewer perspective of not only the history of its central character, Dylan, but also of the film's narrative, leaving mysteries to be solved independently rather than explained. That film was more a character study and less an attempt at a linear tribute to highly personalized concepts of historic events. Velvet Goldmine paved the way for this sometimes indulgent, but immaculately exceptional film style, but ultimately could not decide between embracing its own curious and occasionally confounding nature or attempting to explain away what it spent painstaking amounts of time building up to be enigma.

Janvier et Février en revue

A part of what I'd like to do on this blog is to keep a record of all the film's I watch each month. Sometimes I'll watch a movie and for various reasons of time, opportunity and/or determination I won't write a review for it. So at the end of each month (or the start of the most recent one) I'll post a list in which I'll highlight some of my favorite movies I watched, and maybe even some of my least favorite. This post is for January and February (in case you don't read very nice French). The posts from this blog began in February but some of the movies extend back to late January. Anyways here are the lists. In bold are my favorite films:

January:
Brazil – Terry Gilliam (1985)
Lost Weekend – Billy Wilder (1945)
Hiroshima Mon Amour – Alain Resnais (1959)
Young at Heart – Stephen Walker (2007)
Far From Heaven – Todd Haynes (2002)
Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton (1955)
The Gold Rush – Charles Chaplin (1942 version)
Chinatown – Roman Polanski (1974)
Doubt – John Patrick Shanley (2008)
Anatomy of a Murder – Otto Preminger (1959)
Day for Night – Francois Truffaut (1973)
Modern Times – Charles Chaplin (1936)
Stalag 17 – Billy Wilder (1953)
Stagecoach – John Ford (1939)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – John Huston (1948)
All About Eve – Joseph Mankiewicz (1950)
Sabrina – Billy Wilder (1954)
The Last Picture Show – Peter Bogdanovich (1971)
Spartacus – Stanley Kubrick (1960)
Milk – Gus van Sant (2008)
WALL-E – Andrew Stanton (2008)
Ballast – Lance Hammer (2008)
Sideways – Alexander Payne (2004)
A History of Violence – David Croenenberg (2005)
Spirited Away – Hayao Miyazaki (2001)
Before Sunset – Richard Linklater (2004)
The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson (2001
Flight of the Red Balloon – Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2007)
Eastern Promises – David Cronenberg (2007)
City Lights – Charles Chaplin (1931)
Sunrise – F.W. Murnau (1927)
The Battleship Potemkin – Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
L'Atalante – Jean Vigo (1934)
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer (1928)
The Wrestler – Darren Aronofsky (2008)
Zodiac – David Fincher (2007)
Yi Yi – Edward Yang (2000)

AND

February:
Rashomon – Akira Kurosawa (1950)
Ordet – Carl Dreyer (1955)
The Magnificent Ambersons – Orson Welles (1942)
La Strada – Federico Fellini (1954)
United 93 – Paul Greengrass (2006)
Jules et Jim – Francois Truffaut (1962)
2046 – Wong Kar-Wai (2004)
M – Fritz Lang (1931)
Ugetsu – Kenji Mizoguchi (1953)
Revolutionary Road – Sam Mendes (2008)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – Cristian Mungiu (2007)
Inland Empire – David Lynch (2006)
I'm Not There – Todd Haynes (2007)

Top 3 January Films:
1. The Last Picture Show - Peter Bogdanovich (1971)
2. A History of Violence - David Cronenberg (2005)
3. Far From Heaven - Todd Haynes (2002)

Top 3 February Films:
1. La Strada - Federico Fellini (1954)
2. Ordet - Carl Dreyer (1955)
3. I'm Not There - Todd Haynes (2007)

I was really only displeased with two movies I saw in the last two months, which I suppose is pretty good. In January I saw Young at Heart, a documentary about a senior choir in the Amherst, MA area. It wasn't such a bad documentary but I didn't find it all that engaging and shamefully thought the idea of senior citizens singing songs by The Clash, Sonic Youth, and Coldplay to be kind of a novelty. The prison scene was heart breaking, but it remains the only affective piece of the entire film. In February I saw Revolutionary Road. You can see my review here, to read how I felt about that. Besides those two missteps I'm enthralled with Todd Haynes (I've got Velvet Goldmine(1998), another fiopic about David Bowie and Iggy Pop, queued up right now), incredibly excited about a two month, every week screening of classic films at the Amherst Cinema and Pleasant St. Cinema in Northampton, and still scratching my head about Brazil and Inland Empire. Keep reading and I'll try to settle on a format for these monthly reviews that isn't so scatter brained.

Cheers,
Kevin

I'm Not There

Dir. Todd Haynes
2007
9.7

The crime of the century was committed last year at the Academy Awards when Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton beat out Cate Blanchett for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. That year Blanchett portrayed one of the many faces of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, a fictional biopic based on the singer's fragmented life. Blanchett stars as Jude Quinn or middle 60s era Dylan, full of vicious snarkiness and contempt for humanity. Along side her are various other incarnations of Dylan including a young black boy who's named himself after his hero, folk icon Woody Guthrie, a vain Hollywood actor who falls in love with a beautiful but notoriously unselfish French painter, and a young folk songwriter turned bible thumper, among others. While Blanchett's role is the most obvious and literal recreation of Dylan, the trickle down effect finds the viewer searching, sometimes desperately, for pieces of Dylan they recognize in the ensemble players. For those of us, such as myself, who know little about Dylan, the film in a way constructs a very true image: chaos. With so many different images, ideas, and emotions passing by at a lightning pace we are forced to conclude that all of the film, every tiny piece of it, makes up some integral part of the universal understanding of Bob Dylan. Which, in a far more daunting way, points to how we understand each other and ourselves. Every piece of contradictory evidence, every remote possibility, every muttered phrase are all cogs that grind towards the bigger picture. The truth.

While Jude Quinn was my favorite character in the film, or I should favorite version of one character in the film, s/he was also the most difficult to grasp. Along with Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Wishaw), who's scenes were more like philosophized interpretations of previously witnessed events with other characters, a sort of oblique narrative, Quinn seems almost inhuman at times. There is something so exquisitely pleasurable about self destruction and Quinn rolls in the thick mud of decay, delighting in its filth. Haynes' screenplay, which he wrote with Oren Moverman, is simply brilliant. It captures a callous youth, an arrogant aging, and graceful decline, each represented with equal care and thought throughout the film's effortless 135 minutes. There's a hugeness to I'm Not There, one that actively refuses to be understood. Its not in the obviousness of the film's refracted narrative, or the intentional slurring of reality and fiction, but rather in the way it painfully reflects how little we know each other. We hardly know ourselves and as Robbie (Heath Leger), the Hollywood actor, tells his soon to be girlfriend and wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) we are at the center of our own world. So intrinsically focused on ourselves that we forget that it is cultural appropriation, more often than not, or manners that cause us to give the facade of being interested about other people. Ideas are one thing, when they're divorced from the people who create them, but people come with so much baggage. This caring is translated into never being entirely honest, thinking that we're doing some kind of good because we aren't telling people how we really feel. Quinn tears down the idol (or idle) giant, and suffers for it. He almost seems to want to cause as much pain to others as he has caused himself. It was one of the more detailed and gross portrayals of the breaking of a man's spirit that's been captured on film. Quinn is Haynes' archetype, the truest of the Dylan's on screen, which is, of course, ironic since there is little truth to Quinn. Like a man dressed all in mirrors, you only see what you want to in Quinn.

I'm Not There is not an easy film. It's narrative is told in piecemeal, making digetic and visual leaps from one decade to another. It runs the gauntlet of complex emotions and occasionally dips into surrealism. But as one of the pioneering directors of the 21st century, Haynes is not satisfied by simply telling a story. If I'm Not There fully represents anything it's how stories can be entirely misleading, and that the story beneath the story (which some might call truth, or a purer form of it at least) is far more interesting. Haynes gets at the guts of what it means to be alive; to be growing and evolving and changing your mind, changing it back and insulting your friends and taking too many drugs, and loving, and fighting, and fucking, and, at the end of it all, accepting it for what it was. Life is not crystalline. It's not a diamond. There is really no guarantee that you're ever going to get it; that you're going to understand a thing. You can read all the books you want. What I'm Not There theorizes is that knowing would take all the fun out of living, and all the hardship. It begs you to keep in mind that there is nothing more vivacious then dropping everything and starting all over again, while you still have time.

Inland Empire

Dir. David Lynch
2006
n/a

My own theory about the works of Pablo Picasso, in particular this one, is that his genius extended from his dissemination of objects and scenes so as to allow them to take on an entirely different, unknown meaning as symbols. The work of Fabulists such as Italo Calvino and critical theorists like Roland Barthes attempts to subjugate the body of symbols that make up our visual, written and spoken versions of the world, also known as semiotics. Semiotics are built upon a kind of equation. There is the signifier, which is generally the spoken or written word. Then there is the signified which is the visual representation of the word. For instance, when we hear the word “tree” an image of a tree instantly appears in our brain. Between the two, the word and the image, is a certain formlessness which allows each person to come to their own conclusion of what is a “tree”. With Picasso, I believe, the idea was to destroy the symbol in order to give form to the idea of the symbol, rather than the symbol itself. This means decoding the values latent in the subconscious process of turning a word into a visual icon. David Lynch, as a film director, uses a similar process when constructing his films. He scientifically dismantles our fear in order to show us where it comes from. The result is abstraction; an unfamiliar body of symbols and signs that are as thrilling as they are difficult. The 21st century, thus far, has yielded two astonishing, surrealist works from Lynch: 2001's Mulholland Dr and 2006's Inland Empire. While Mulholland Dr entertained the idea of a linear narrative for about an hour and a half, it then proceeded to plunge deeply into a psychedelic and wholly upsetting universe of disillusion and abandonment. Inland Empire forgets structure altogether, choosing instead to weave its epic revolting grandeur through a series of twisted vignettes. The result is cataclysmic. Lynch defines fear by ripping apart everything that scares us and displaying its bloodied, maggot filled entrails. It is in this process that Lynch reveals the abstraction of terror.

I can safely say that Inland Empire was the most nightmarish film I've seen in quite some time. More importantly though is why. While Lynch certainly utilizes certain cinematic cliches to heighten tension (shadows, microtonal music, visible character fear) as an audience we don't feel a profound enough connection to our main character to be scared for her. In fact as she contorts and defamiliarizes, we actually end up becoming afraid of her. What scares us is Lynch's keenly subconscious understanding of uncomfortable objects or persons. A gun, a man with a lightbulb in his mouth, another man smiling menacingly, a light that blinks from white to red, a Polish women who speaks of evil, people in rabbit costumes. Separately each one of these symbols is uncomfortable, but in succession that lack of comfort builds into anxiety and then into fear. We desire resolution, an explanation as to why these images are occurring, and certainly some glimmer of hope for a happy ending. However, this is a David Lynch film. His endings are hardly ever even “endings” and even rarer are ones that, by contemporary standards, might be considered “happy”. The film is largely intangible, and you gets the impression that you've missed some terribly important detail that would string the plot together. In fact the only thing that really holds the dark sketches together is a rough sense of parallel structure, with certain phrases or scenes being repeated throughout the film, although generally obscured in location or meaning, which really only furthers feelings of being on the peripheral; far away from any kind of extrinsic meaning, but also dangerously close to some greater kind of understanding.

That understanding is the truth that fear, once alleviated from its symbolic and hyper specific circumstance, is still a terribly powerful force. Lynch is a master of cataloging evil in all its various incarnations, from curiously amoral to sinisterly other-worldly. Had Lynch arranged Inland Empire in such a way that it followed a discernible plot or structure the effect would not have been quite so powerful. The way he juxtaposes conversations about trips to Pomona by bus and girls with blond wigs, drug addictions and holes in their intestines with the bloody street death of our main character kills any sense of reality, but in place of reality a greater feeling of dread. If there was ever a work of art that deserved the title Kafkaesque, Inland Empire is truly it. Its radical design and deconstruction of Hollywood tropes of suspense and horror, and subsequent reassembly of those same tropes into new, as of yet untranslatable symbols defies reason.

Symbols take on meaning only after a general idea of what they stand for can be agreed upon. But even with the most common of symbols, personal taste delineates exactly what image said symbol conjures up. For “tree” any number of kinds of trees can be imagined, but it is their general characteristics (roots in the ground, some kind of leaves or branches, a trunk, etc.) that fill the remote region between the signifier (the word “tree”) and the signified (the image of a tree). In Inland Empire a new body of symbols for fear are produced, but we are at a loss at how to translate them. It is very exciting. Like being a child again, we are granted an opportunity to allow our first impression of these symbols to govern how we feel about their appearance in the future. By disdaining from concrete examples of fear and terror, Lynch has created a work that plunges deep into the mystic formlessness of those words and cleaves from that mass a totally unique and daunting vision of fear and a revolutionary means of communicating.