The Trim Bin #68

- That's what I looked like a few weeks ago when Jess and I found out another kid was on the way. The abbreviated version: big, highly improbable surprise, lots of incoherence and cursing out of both God and science, a more serious discussion of our options than anything in Knocked Up or Juno, more incoherence, and finally the decision to prematurely rob Luna of her only-child status (she loves other kids, at least). We're terrified, of course, but we couldn't ask for a better daughter and, as my friend Kate pointed out, our aggro-fertility will help combat an Idiocracy-like future. Plus, I get to name this one! Can't wait to meet you, little Mordecai or Cloris.

- Walter Chaw's latest post from The Trench: cranky, arrogant and genuinely provocative.

- CHUD's You Got It All Wrong series: cranky, arrogant and completely pointless.

- Culture Snob has a fascinating take on the elusive appeal of The Shining (thanks to Film Experience for the link). This is why The Shining is one of my very favorite movies - like most of my favorites, it continue to reveal itself to new interpretations and approaches many years after its release.

- Paul Clark's post on Amadeus, a part of his Movies of My Life series, perfectly sums up why it's more than the boring costume drama it seems to be written off as lately, and particularly why it means so much to people in Paul's and my demographic (for some reason Amadeus was very popular in my third-grade class).

- Tried to write a top 10 of the best transformation scenes per the request of my friend Michael, but I could only come up with 9 (and I only had much to say about 3 or 4). The list was exclusively made up of '80s movies, the golden age of latex, prosthetics and K-Y slime following the apex of the subgenre - when it comes to transformations, there's An American Werewolf in London and there's everything else. Any other favorites worth mentioning?

- Finally, with There Will Be Blood hitting DVD last week and a wider audience discovering its insane brilliance, the glut of Plainview parodies and milkshake jokes is only going to keep growing (see Patton Oswalt's prediction that Plainview will be the go-to impersonation for hack comics). This one is my favorite: it's simple, I couldn't tell you why it's funny, and I can't stop watching it:

Title Card #56

Such was McTeague.

Greed, like many of the silent film classics, is remarkable not only for its considerable cinematic qualities but also for everything it anticipates. As the definitive example of a deeply personal masterpiece butchered by the studios, Greed (like The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil and Once Upon a Time in America) cannot be viewed or discussed without committing the intentional fallacy. For a contemporary viewer, the experience of the movie cannot be separated from its troubled history; that the Greed which exists is only a fragment of Von Stroheim's original, destroyed vision forces us to consider what it isn't as much as what it is. In its 130-minute version (I hope to see the 1999 reconstruction soon), there are hints in nearly every scene of a bigger, stranger masterpiece; luckily, what remains is a stark, technically stunning morality play with a powerful emotional impact.

Erich von Stroheim's adaptation of the Frank Norris novel McTeague is an intimate epic, a simply plotted character study played out on a vast chronological and aesthetic scale. The story revolves dentist John McTeague (Gibson Gowland), his best friend Marcus (Jean Hersholt), and his wife Trina (Zasu Pitts), and the ways their lives are changed when Trina wins $5000 in a lottery. What begins as a romantic vision of human behavior - Marcus, who is courting Trina when Mac meets her, selflessly steps aside for his friend - quickly turns sour as Trina's money becomes a source of envy and distrust for all three parties. Even in 1924 it was hardly a new idea to trace the corrupting influence of money; what astonishes in Greed is von Stroheim's unsparing eye, which creates an emotional directness rare for the silent era. When an impoverished, bitter Mac responds to Trina's plea "Don't you love me?" by clocking her, the moment is so sharp that, even after eighty-plus years of far stronger and more graphic violence, one cannot help but wince. Von Stroheim observes his characters' spiritual decay with a clinical gaze, letting the story unfold with a methodical pace that gives every moment equal time and resonance; one can see in Greed the beginnings of a classical approach to cinema that anticipates the formal innovations of Welles, Hitchcock and Kubrick, among others.

Should it sound too much like a dry academic exercise, Greed is also filled with exuberant moments of cinematic play. Throughout the film, von Stroheim uses animals to underscore the cruelty of his characters, Mac's affection for birds culminating in an image of a cat pouncing at a canary that punctuates the news of his sudden misfortune. Von Stroheim is cynical but never dour, observing the psycholocial violence his characters inflict not with moralism but with a wry detachment. The film is also a visual marvel, Von Stroheim's preference for deep focus making each penetrating moment impossible to overlook. When the film arrives at its ending, set in Death Valley, Von Stroheim manages to reduce his drama to its most essential elements, with the external landscape mirroring the characters' internal emptiness. While I fear that comparing the final moments to those of a certain recent film involving drainage will make me seem like the archetypal 21st-century film student unable to decipher old movies without reference points to stuff I saw three months ago, I did make that connection and it only made me appreciate the remarkable ongoing influence of von Stroheim's nearly century-old film.

It's impossible to know what the ideal form of Greed might have been; certainly this one feels cruelly abbreviated in places, though nine hours honestly strikes me as an Empire-like exercise in tedium. Perhaps the ideal is somewhere in the middle, but the tragedy is that we'll never be able to make this decision for ourselves. And while the entire concept of a "director's cut" has been co-opted as a marketing tool - a way to screw the director and squeeze out more showtimes during a film's theatrical run while goosing DVD sales later - the disdain shown by MGM to von Stroheim is unimaginable today. Little did the studio execs know that, in cutting apart Greed, they were guranteeing endurance for a film that is as relevant as it has ever been.

Title Card #55

Pimps don't commit suicide.

Donnie Darko is arguably the best first feature this decade, a fusion of teen angst, metaphysics and late-80s junk culture. Thrillingly trippy and oddly moving even as it uncannily anticipates our post-9/11 paradigm shift, Donnie Darko deserves its cult status and signaled great things to come from writer/director Richard Kelly. My lingering affection for Kelly's debut was enough to shrug off Cannes audiences, critics and an indifferent audience in the hope that his second film would prove to be a misunderstood gem. And perhaps the failure of Southland Tales - and fail it does, miserably and interminably - is evidence that Kelly shares his audience's faith in himself. Southland Tales is the grating, self-satisfied byproduct of a second-time director attempting to live up to his premature "visionary" status and failing completely. I'm tempted to compare Kelly to Michael Cimino, except Heaven's Gate is at least a visually beautiful film, whereas Southland Tales is an ugly, obnoxious mess.

Meant as a Breakfast of Champions for the 21st century, Southland Tales has more in common with Alan Rudolph's disastrous adaptation than the book or any of Vonnegut's work (or the work of Andy Warhol or Thomas Pynchon, to name a few of the artists that Kelly has cited as influences). Kelly apes Vonnegut's self-reflexive narrative structure but cannot match the author's wit or humanity. The unwieldly story of Southland Tales, set in an alternate 2008 where WWIII is in full swing, is a portrait of the apocalypse as seen through the eyes of amnesiac action star Boxer Santoros (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), his porn star girlfriend Krista Now (Sarah Michele Gellar) and cop Roland Taverner and his neo-Marxist brother Ronald (both Sean William Scott). Their intertwining fates are set against a backdrop of an alternate LA populated by a cast of revolutionaries, celebrities, and partygoers tangled up in a plot that encompasses homeland security, the energy crisis, race relations and teen horniness in an epic venting of one budding auteur's spleen. It's possible that the collision of social commentary and disposable culture could make for a fascinating portrait of the zeitgeist (it already has - it's called Until the End of the World and it's great), but Kelly restlessly moves from one knowingly crappy setpice to the next before his ideas are able to take any discernible shape. Just as each location is defined by its sense of clutter, the scenes pile on top of each other in an increasingly abrasive manner; it's clear the approach is intentional, and this hyperbolic approach may be a smart choice for contemporary satire. The problem is Kelly's failure to connect his clutter in a cinematically meaningful way - lacking a coherent aesthetic sensibility, lumbering from one pointless scene to the next, stopping for the occasional inexplicable musical number Southland Tales is supposedly about chaos and meaninglessness but only succeeds in contributing to the endless stream of noise it supposedly skewers.

The biggest disappointment of Southland Tales resides in its most promising conceit, a cast populated by B-to-D-list celebrities ranging from Wallace Shawn to Zelda Rubenstein to Christopher Lambert. There's a wealth of satirical material to be found in my generation's curious veneration of kitsch, and I'd hoped Kelly's cast list indicated a deeper explanation of the connection between pop culture and regression touched upon in Donnie Darko's Smurfs debate. But the presence of sitcom and B-movie actors playing their roles straight not only condescends to the cast (Jon Lovitz, playing a racist cop here, was previously used in a serious role in Todd Solondz's Happiness to greater and more subversive effect) but only succeeds in reaffirming the hipster detachment Kelly is supposedly criticizing. He might as well have taken the joke further, into the realm of pure trash absurdism - picture a Mexican standoff between Jaleel White, Dom DeLuise and Elvira - but since there is no joke beyond the fact of the B-list ensemble, Southland Tales deteriorates into a series of derisive snickers of recognition while leaving open the question of what exactly Bai Ling is doing in the film besides smoking and posing (I guess the answer's in the question). Kelly reduces his entire film to the same "everything is crap" mentality, which begs the question of why we need this demonstrated for two-and-a-half mind-numbing hours; he's not the first artist to demonstrate contempt for his audience and medium, but he is the first to give the world Justin Timberlake quoting (and misquoting) T.S. Eliot and Revelations with a straight face.

Southland Tales does contain a few strong ideas - the home-movie depiction of a nuclear attack that opens the movie, Santoros' description of his self-penned screenplay The Power, Krista's hit single "Teen Horniness is Not a Crime" - that had me holding out hope until the very end that Kelly was going somewhere with all of this. Then the movie made a blatant attempt to tie itself to Mulholland Drive, reverted back to some leftover ideas from Donnie Darko, resolved its central conflict with a frigging rocket launcher and cut to black after the most laughably pretentious final line I can remember. If Kelly rebounds with his next film, an adaptation of Richard Matheson's The Box, than Southland Tales may be remembered as a blip in an otherwise interesting filmography. But the geniunely disconcerting comments by Kelly fans on his MySpace page ("Southland Tales is so amazing in every single way") concern me - is it possible that Southland Tales will ride the coattails of Donnie Darko to default cult status? Or, much more disturbingly, is there actually something in this mess that is speaking to the kids (further evidence that we increasingly need to be bludgeoned into submission in order to feel anything)? Whatever the case may be, when the emotional apex of a film consists of Mr. Dick-in-a-Box pouring beer on his head, something has gone horribly wrong.

Paging Mr. Herman

It's a weird thing to look at yourself on the big screen. Yes, it turned out my mug was impossible to cut from 21 - I'm all over the place, specifically in the two classroom scenes that bookend the movie. And despite my fear of following in the footsteps of Pee-Wee, my friends and family assured me I did an excellent job of sitting, staring, taking notes and laughing at Kevin Spacey's terrible jokes. It's been a year since I worked on the movie, and needless to say, a lot has changed. I'd still jump at the chance to do more extra work for the set experience and the stories I can share here, but lately I've been focusing way more on getting my friends together, getting some lights and microphones and (as Joel Coen put it so wonderfully) playing in our corner of the sandbox. Should we ever find success, I like the idea of my appearance in 21 as the work of a spy in the studio machine. For now, though, I'm just glad I made my Nana proud.

And make no mistake, 21 is every bit a product of that machine, calculated and predictable from beginning to end and engineered to appeal to a 14-year-old's materialism and horniness. It's pretty shallow, in other words, but also weirdly likeable - I could imagine it playing a triple feature with Hot Pursuit and Some Kind of Wonderful on "USA Up All Nite" one lazy Friday night in 1988. I know that's not the sort of recommendation that'll compel you to race to your nearest multiplex, but if you do see 21, make sure to keep an eye out for a brown-haired dude wearing a plaid shirt in the first classroom scene and a brown one in the second. That'd be me, a blogger and living easter egg.

Title Card #54

Play the Game (4/3/08)

I suspect that this month's screencap is pretty obvious if you've seen the film it's from (really, who could forget gloves like that?). My DVD-ROM crapped out on me a few weeks ago, hence the borrowed title cards and lack of gratuitous nudity. I should be getting a new one soon (paid for by Bush's bribe, if not sooner), but in the meantime I grabbed this from my wife's Letter to Paul Walker. Also, I haven't forgotten about Greed, Vodulus. VHS-only titles are getting harder and harder to track down, and it just arrived courtesy of the CW/MARS library network. I look forward to checking it out this weekend.

You try a stunt like that again and I'll braid your tits.

The following is my contribution to the 2nd Annual White Elephant Blog-a-Thon.

Susan George is awesome in Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. We first see her lounging on a motel bed after a one-night stand with stock car driver turned criminal Larry (Peter Fonda) in a shot that (perhaps deliberately) recalls Faye Dunaway at the start of Bonnie and Clyde - she's tense, restless, looking for trouble. It's this urge for sensory gratification that is at the heart of the road movies that populated drive-ins in the '60s and '70s, promising high speed and vehicular mayhem with a fast, cool car driven by a free spirit set adrift on the open road. While Dirty Mary Crazy Larry doesn't have the potent existential kick of Vanishing Point or Two-Lane Blacktop (films that it pretty blatantly steals from), it does have a certain goofy charm. Like most of the films from John Hough, it has a meat-and-potatoes approach to its material, delivering on its modest promises - sometimes, a pretty girl in a fast car is enough.

Like Two-Lane Blacktop, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is about a driver, his mechanic and the girl along for the ride. After robbing a grocery store, Larry and Deke's (Adam Roarke) getaway is complicated by Larry's most recent conquest, who repeatedly manipulates her way into going along for the ride. The first half of the movie makes clear what Quentin Tarantino was going for with Death Proof - there's little action, with most of the scenes focused on the tension between Larry (who constantly mocks Mary for being a chick) and Mary (who acts disgusted with Larry but goes along for the ride anyway). Much of this may be meant to pad the movie to feature length, but it's also an interesting little time capsule of gender relations in 1974. While I don't think Hough meant Dirty Mary Crazy Larry as a feminist statement, it's fun to watch a '60s icon (embodying the casual misogyny of the peace-and-love generation) meet his match in an unapologetically carnal '70s woman (recall the introduction of George, defiantly braless, in Straw Dogs). That gender politics made their way into a straightforward B-picture may or may not be representative of the paradigm shift happening at the time (certainly, tough-talking women existed in cinema before women's lib); either way, though, I imagine it at least gave the ladies who'd been dragged to the film by their boyfriends and husbands something to laugh at.

For any of its superficial nonconformist iconography, however, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is squarely a product of the establishment. Consider the character of Captain Franklin (Vic Morrow), an old-school lawman determined to catch Mary, Larry and Deke. Morrow was a pro at playing grizzled, miserable bastards, and Franklin could be the perfect foil for the protagonists. Except that the film makes the odd choice of making Franklin a different kind of antihero, rebelling against bueracracy and modernity (he hates computers) in his obsessive pursuit of the trio. By making Franklin and Larry two sides of the same coin - both raging against the tide of change - the movie never approaches the radicalism of its predecessors. In a sense, it anticipates the mainstream co-opting of a very independent subgenre, with Morrow's Franklin only a few evolutionary steps away from Buford T. Justice.

The most important thing, though, is the car chases, and on this definitely delivers. The film's second half is an almost nonstop chase that delivers on the tagline's promise of "PETER FONDA drivin' hard!!" Watching Larry's Dodge Charger evade cop cars and even a chopper, it's hard not to be filled with the basic, childish glee of seeing the bad guys get away. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is fast-paced, unpretentious fun, at least until its final minute. Looking around the internet, I see that the ending is quite admired for its unpredictability, but I was frankly thinking "wouldn't it be funny if - " when it happened. It's too much of an attempt to match the bleakness of Vanishing Point and Easy Rider, except that grafted onto a pretty light-hearted film, it's just hilariously arbitrary. As poetry Dirty Mary Crazy Larry leaves a lot to be desired, but it's pretty damn good pulp.

Title Card #53

I'll give you five dollars if I can throw a rock at you.

Despite my lifelong affection for '70s horror, I must admit I've never been a huge fan of The Omen. While it has some undeniably awesome setpieces (including one of the best decapitations ever), it's a little boring, largely because it never does much with the most disturbing aspect of its plot - the realization that one's child is, in fact, totally evil. Indeed, most of the "evil kid" subgenre is less concerned with the psychology of its characters than with getting Macauly Culkin to smoke and say "fuck." Joshua, a quietly unnerving evil kid movie, is an exception to the rule, its horror rooted in very real adult anxieties. It's the perfect movie for anyone who has ever wondered, in all seriousness, what they would do if their kid turned out to be a mass murderer.

The titular character is a well-mannered, preternaturally intelligent 9-year-old (Jacob Kogan) living in a posh Manhattan apartment with his stockbroker dad Brad (Sam Rockwell) and stay-at-home mom Abby (Vera Farmiga), both celebrating the birth of Joshua's sister Lily. But from the earliest scenes, there are ominous hints not only of sibling rivalry but also Abby's history of postpartum depression and both parents' slightly uneasy relationship to their very smart, very strange son. The influence of Polanski and Kubrick is evident not just in the Shining-inspired title cards but in the way Ratliff introduces a psychologically plausible scenario - dad's busy living in an adolescent fantasyland while mom unravels at home - then confounds our expectations in pleasurably disorienting ways. Like the increasingly discordant piece that Joshua plays at a school talent show, Joshua is built of small, curious details - the tension between Abby and Brad's born-again mom, Joshua's interest in mummification - that accumulate in impact as the extent of Joshua's malevolence comes into focus.

Much of Joshua's effectiveness can be attributed to its emphasis on character development, specifically the often terrifying experience of caring for a newborn. The scenes of Abby losing her self-identity and possibly her mind while Brad shrugs off the reality of his situation could make for an effective horror movie on their own, as they touch on emotions that most new parents experience but are rarely given voice in a culture that idealizes childhood to a mindless degree. Ratliff's work in documentaries (his previous film was the brilliant Hell House) serves him well here, his eye for detail and emphasis on emotional realism lending the horror-movie conventions of the film's second half a very credible sense of creepiness. This sense of verisimilitude also gives Ratliff's leads plenty of room to shine, with Rockwell darkly hilarious as a jockish dude increasingly suspicious of his son and Farmiga clearly relishing every frayed nerve and sudden emotional outburst. I was particuarly impressed by a brief, non-sexual moment of nudity as Abby distractedly uses a breast pump; it somehow seemed more vulnerable than any sex scene, and Farmiga allows herself to be so unself-conscious that it speaks so much to a new mom's fragile sense of self-identity.

Kogan isn't quite as effective, though this doesn't reflect the kid's abilities as much as it does the somewhat obvious choice of fitting Joshua into the soft-spoken ominous kid archetype seen in countless post-Shyamalan movies. Joshua does occasionally try a bit too hard, underlying elements of the story that would have best remained somewhat ambiguous. This is particuarly true of the last scene, which spells out what we've just seen a bit too much - it would have been more effective to trim the dialogue between two characters and allow the final image to speak for itself. Still, in a time when horror movies generally bludgeon than they frighten, it's good to see there's still room for the quieter, more internal brand of horror that truly gets under one's skin. In other words, this one's fun for the whole family.

Title Card #52

I'm gonna get my picture here.

The most impressive thing about Redacted is its anger. In a year of toothless Iraq-centric movies that already seem dated, Brian De Palma's faux-verite war movie is fueled by an outrage that gives the film a potent immediacy. Unfortunately, De Palma is never able to properly focus his anger, and this lack of focus extends to the film. The director's best films are political in a codified way, masking the director's contempt for institutions in bleak, perfectly crafted genre exercises; it's when De Palma takes the literal route that he falters, and Redacted is his most tone-deaf film since his last attempt at overt social commentary, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

De Palma's most successful stab at this sort of thing was 1989's Casualties of War, a film that Redacted is clearly patterned after. Both films are morality plays inspired by true stories, each dealing with a group of soldiers who capture, rape and kill a young woman, ostensibly to avenge the death of one of the their men (in both, a strong black guy who boasts of his invincibility before getting blown away). Whereas the earlier film is unforgettable for its disarming sense of empathy, Redacted is comparatively detached, following the earlier film closely in order to underline the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. The point is that history is repeating itself; fine, but by narrowing the film's scope to this fairly obvious observation, De Palma reduces his subject matter to a rehashed formal exercise. The director's tendency to quote his own work gets in the way here, with Redacted seeming at best De Palma's ultimate expression of the violated woman as an all-encompassing metaphor, and at worst the work of an angry old man ranting about how this whole Iraq mess could have been avoided if we'd seen Casualties of War.

The sense of emotional detachment is perhaps intentional - Redacted is the director's most Brechtian exercise, edited to resemble an assembly of YouTube clips, documentaries and the soldiers' own home movies. So it's a real surprise that De Palma, typically a technical virtuoso, fails to capture the aesthetics of DIY filmmaking. The scenes supposedly shot by aspiring filmmaker Pvt. Salazar (Izzy Diaz) are too orchestrated and clean to be believable, the hi-def images likely motivated by its HDNet-owning backers rather than the director's wishes. While scenes supposedly shot by a French documentary crew contain pretentious subtitles and music, they don't feel like any documentary I've seen, nor do they offer much of a contrast to Salazar's footage. The same goes for the YouTube scenes; as with the rest of the film, the attempts to simulate a lack of intentionality are undercut by their didacticism (a late scene with a war protestor ranting into the camera is perhaps the worst in the director's career).

This conflict extends to the characters, as De Palma cannot seem to decide whether to go for realism or representation with his troops; while the actors try gamely, their characters are never believable or particularly interesting. A shame, because the most controversial aspect of Redacted - its refusal to sanctify our proud fighting troops - is the strongest and most important statement the film makes. For as long as I've criticized this war, people will usually ask if I support the troops, to which my standard response is that I support the honest, hard-working guys who signed up with honorable intentions but not the assholes I went to high school with who were salivating at the chance to shoot towelheads as soon as the towers collapsed. Redacted works best when focusing on the banality of its characters; the rapists tell meandering, self-aggrandizing stories to justify their moral vacuousness while the presumed good guys can only react in stunned silence. I wish De Palma had pushed this contrast towards the darkly comic territory of his early films (it's both hilarious and chilling when one soldier refers to a dead comrade as "our own Private Ryan"), but Redacted never finds any suitable tone.

The most effective scene in Redacted is the montage of images - a parade of dead, disfigured bodies - that closes the film. Almost unbearable to watch, the confrontational nature of the images force us to consider the brutal reality of our five-year-and-counting occupation of Iraq. That the images themselves have been partly redacted by the moneymen only adds an extra layer of irony absent from the rest of the film. It's powerful enough that it justifies the rest of the film, reminding us of the director's fiercely uncompromising vision and finally allowing his anger to take a meaningful shape. If the rest of Redacted had been this clear-eyed it would be a masterpiece, rather than a noble failure hobbled by its own intentions.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."

Saved by Film

The upcoming Easter holiday has me thinking about the Merrimack Valley Christian Film Festival again, hence this reprint from the November 2004 issue of Images Focus.

Since November 3, the previously overlooked issue of moral values has been brought to the forefront of political discourse. Does the term refer to values such as compassion, equality and love, or is it just code for same-sex marriage and abortion? With churchgoers— particulary conservative Christians—voting in impressive numbers this year, it is perhaps useful to look at the values represented in Christian culture. Lately, I’ve found myself thinking back to the Christian Film Festival.

As a child, I attended a middle school run by a Baptist church. I am not Baptist, but I tried to approach the experience with both respect and curiosity. Every year, we would take a field trip to the festival, which took place annually during the week before Easter. There were cartoons with cheerful sheep that quoted the Bible in castrato voices; stories about gang members and drug addicts finding redemption through the holy spirit; and, of course, Jesus himself, preaching a message of peace, love and understanding through a soft-focus lens and backed by a ’70s synthesizer score. I liked that movie—it was Jesus-as-Dude.

The film that stuck with me the most, however, was called The Appointment, though The Appointment WITH SATAN would have been more accurate. It had all the subtlety of a Jack Chick pamphlet. In it, a woman is approached by a stranger and informed that she has 36 hours to live. The stranger urges the woman to take the opportunity to reevaluate her life and commit her soul to God. The woman resists, but as the time approaches, she is nearly picked off by one freak accident after another, as in the movie Final Destination. Finally, when she thinks she has cheated fate, she is suddenly run over by a fire engine. The movie fades to black, a verse from Revelations appears in blood-red text, followed by this message:

“WHEN’S YOUR APPOINTMENT?”

I didn’t sleep that night.

There are many values at the center of Christianity that could help make the world a better, more tolerant place. But the goal of the film festival wasn’t tolerance, it was intimidation. After each screening, the audience was invited to come forward and be born again. We were told that we were free to leave, but only at risk of eternal damnation. Truth be told, I got saved on three or four occasions, a combination of peer pressure and the desire to cover my bases. The organizers of the festival and the creators of The Appointment hoped to persuade us to accept their version of the universe through fear and insecurity. Unfortunately, fear
and insecurity are popular tools in the battle over the future of America’s identity. And, more unfortunately, they’re very effective tools.

Since writing the article, I've found out that the Jesus movie I cited is the most-watched film of all time, and the Christian Film Festival, which began at the tiny Salem Tri-Cinema, can now be found in six cities.

Title Card #51

This is not a Sam Shepard play.

I've seen the trailer for The Savages dozens of times at my night job, and each time I was looking forward to it less and less. A collection of audence-friendly one-liners and quirky moments scored with agreeable indie rock, it looked like the latest in an endless string of derivative exercises in sitcom dysfunction. While The Savages more or less adheres to the formula - there are no third-act shootouts or anything - it did manage to surprise me in several ways. The premise of a family growing closer during a critical moment is as old as dust, but when it's written and acted with as much honesty and wit as The Savages has, the result is almost affecting enough to excuse a dozen Family Stones (almost).

Writer-director Tamara Jenkins' previous film, the terrific Slums of Beverly Hills, was one of the first to start the current dysfunction cycle, so it's fitting that The Savages plays like a sequel to the earlier film. Siblings Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) are like grown-up version of that film's Natasha Lyonne and David Krumholtz characters, with dad Lenny (Philip Bosco) a darker version of Alan Arkin's storytelling pop reduced to raging against his failures by writing with his own excrement. Lenny has dementia, and as his long-estranged kids search for a nursing home for dad and struggle with the renewal of old wounds and resentments, Jenkins' screenplay expertly veers between laughter and quietly observed drama. Again, that sounds like the Sundance prototype, and it is, except that Jon and Wendy ring true as unique characters rather than types. Their emotional journey is charted not with big, showy personal revalations but through refreshingly understated scenes that suggest the strength of their relationship and the things they've suffered through together. Despite Jenkins' occasional overreliance on kitschy laughs (the death of an old woman at a nail salon particularly grates), when the film arrives at its inevitable moments of pathos, it's earned them.

Jenkins is aided tremendously by her leads - both Linney and Hoffman give their best performances in years. Just when I thought I'd tired of Linney's effective but familiar nervous screen presence (blame typecasting), she surprised me; Wendy is anxious, irritable and reluctant to grow up, but rather than playing her knowingly, Linney's performance hinges on the funny, sad notion of a very intelligent person who isn't nearly as self-aware as she thinks. Hoffman internalizes his performance, creating a character who constantly struggles to keep his emotions buried with more and more difficulty. A scene where Jon, spacing out on Percocet, sings along to "Salomon Song" in his car is the most quietly moving in the film (The Savages joins The Darjeeling Limited and Margot at the Wedding in its depiction of drug use among intellectuals). Hoffman and Linney play off each other beautifully as the siblings, one a playwright and the other a drama professor, analyze and agitate each other even as they grow closer over the impending death of their father and their own advancing age. Bosco is also terrific as their dad, communicating so much with his eyes as Lenny quietly slips away.

Like 2007's Away From Her, The Savages is refreshingly unsentimental in its depiction of aging and memory loss (both films, coincidentally, have a supporting character who works at the nursing home and offers the main character honesty and compassion). What could have easily been a two-hour spleen-venting session instead has a lot of insight to offer all of us who are eventually going to face taking care of our parents. Wendy asks Jon of her autobiographial play, "You don't think it's self-important and bourgeois?" And The Savages is arguably both of those things, yet somehow, improbably, it works.

Title Card #50

Gideon and Jagger!

One of the common threads in Bob Fosse's short but unforgettable filmography is how performance, both onstage and in life, is in some ways a denial of our own mortality. In All That Jazz, a grinning emcee (Ben Vereen) eulogizing soon-to-be-deceased choreographer and Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) spells this out: "Like, for this cat, the only reality is death, man." The astonishing feat of All That Jazz, as with much of Fosse's best work, is how its director transforms his morbid cynicism into something vital and exhilarating. Though the story of All That Jazz is an unbroken trajectory towards an inescapable end, few films feel so wholly alive. How is it that a story about a hard-living, womanizing, self-loathing liar is, without a doubt, one of the most inspiring movies I've ever seen?

Fosse introduces us to his surrogate with a burst of Vivaldi and a rapid montage of Joe as he pops Dexedrine, tries in vain to conceal the aftereffects of a long night and, looking into his bathroom, announces "It's showtime!" with an enthusiasm betrayed by his weary eyes. This sequence of image is repeated several times throughout the film, underlining the constant state of momentum that defines Joe. Drawing its inspiration from a particularly chaotic moment in Fosse's career, All That Jazz finds Joe juggling a new Broadway musical, the editing of his feature The Stand Up (patterned after Lenny) and the many women in his life, his seemingly ceaseless energy and creativity only just keeping imminent physical and emotional collapse at bay. As with Fellini's 8 1/2 (it would be almost as perverse to not reference Fellini when writing about All That Jazz as it would be to leave Hitchcock out of a discussion on DePalma), Fosse weaves his protagonist's life and art together in a complex tapestry so that the two become inseparable. As Joe sorts through his memories with a mysterious, teasing angelic figure (Jessica Lange), Fosse nakedly examines his own life and relationships - with his estranged wife (Leland Palmer), his girlfriend (Ann Reinking, more or less playing herself) and especially his beloved daughter (Erzsebet Foldi) - through moments of performance (most moving is an impromptu dance number staged by his daughter) that boil down their complex emotional meanings to something essential and indelible. These moments are seen through the broken mirror of Fosse's work, with Pippin's sinister ringleader, the sexual gymnastics of Cabaret and Lenny's self-destruction taking on new and surprising meaning. Not only does Fosse succeed in anticipating any volumes devoted to analyzing his work, he also offers one of the most frank, unsparing self-portraits of an artist's inner life in cinema or any medium.

Fosse is greatly aided by his star - Scheider not only demonstates a comendable lack of vanity, he makes Joe at once virile and contemplative, a welcome refutal of the notion that real men don't do musical theatre. He navigates both the stage and the bedroom with such effortless cool that we begin to see how Joe's art and his personal excesses stem from the same compulsive place; when Joe says he needs to go home to figure out a production number and Fosse cuts to him seducing a dancer, it's clear that Joe wasn't lying. All of Fosse's work is a seduction, and few filmmakers are at once so sensuous and cerebral. This is evident not only in how Fosse celebrates his dancers' physical perfection but in how the cinematic apparatus becomes another performer. In scenes such as the celebrated opening audition number, each shot and edit not only frames the action but becomes a part of the action, the cuts constrasting and complimenting the constantly probing camera in such innovative ways that they become partners in an invisible dance. Both Fosse's masterpieces and his merely very good films (he never even made a "just okay" movie) demonstrate a prodigious understanding of montage, jumping between different chronological points with a seeming effortlessness. Indeed, All That Jazz's influence can be found everywhere today, but with disappointinly shallow returns - MTV and the Simpson/Bruckheimer school of filmmaking have repicated Fosse's style but not his aesthetic rigor.

Fosse himself acknowledges this perfectionism in my favorite scene, which finds an apoplectic producer (Max Wright) rambling about budget and schedule overruns while a distracted Joe scrutinizes a scene from The Stand Up on a KEM. We've seen an earlier, so-so cut of the scene earlier; as Joe leaves for another rehearsal, the producer exclaims, defeated, "It's better." Fosse has inserted a brief tutorial on editing into the narrative, and All That Jazz is indeed required viewing for any aspiring filmmaker. Though my own directing experience is limited, many of the details - the constant gaze of performers waiting for direction, the sting of a bad review, the constant, calculating pressure of investors - definitely touched a nerve. All That Jazz is inspiring because it nails how odd and alienating it is to be a director, to inevitably have even the people closet to you constantly scrutinizing your motives, and yet it insists that a director must be probing, uncompromising and painfully honest. The famous "Take Off With Us" number shows Joe antagonizing his writers and producers by taking a cheesily titillating number and transforming it into a kinky, Bacchanalic paean to the joys and complexities of sexual desire; this should be the goal of any artist, to find the truth in any moment totally and without apology.

It'd be easy to dismiss All That Jazz as a colossal monument to the ego, and indeed its protagonist is knowingly narcissitic. But it's more than an act of omphaloskepsis - it's a thrillingly revealing look at the mind of a director and one of the most compelling arguments for the virtues of excess (in this sense, it's also a perfect epitaph for the 1970s). It's also incredibly fun, with Gideon's final reflection on life and the ways he created his own meaning coming in the form of a jaw-dropping final number that transforms the fact of death into a pure pop high. For Bergman the ultimate metaphor of death is a cloaked figure leading a mournful dance across the horizon; for Fosse it's spandex-clad dancing cadavers, Ben Vereen, a robot band and silver lame as far as the eye can see. There's room for both in this world.

Play the Game (3/6/08)

Oh God, I feel like 9/11 right now.

"Boston seems like the most forbidding city in crime movies. There are lots of movies about criminals in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and points between, but somehow in Boston the wounds cut deeper, the characters are angrier, their resentments bleed, their grudges never die, and they all know everybody else's business. " - Roger Ebert

Anyone who has lived their life in Boston, or really in any part of New England, can tell you that Ebert is right. This isn't to say that I could tell you what is at the root of the city's persistently brooding character - as my friends and I enter adulthood, our conversation frequently returns to the complex, perhaps impenetrable code of values and conventions we struggled to understand as children and now wonder if we're destined to inherit. I suspect this is true no matter what part of the globe one calls home; Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck's directorial debut, is a film about Boston, but also about this process of disillusionment, of discovering how we are both defined and separate from the place we call home. An expertly made mystery, it's also an uncommonly strong first feature, a work of surprising moral complexity and an evocative portrait of a city.

Adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone is a stronger representation of Boston than even the previous Lehane adaptation, Mystic River (a very good film that could have been set in any number of cities). Affleck, who famously grew up in Boston, finds an effective tone from the start, with a montage of everyday life in Dorcester becoming a series of portraits of hard-living, world-weary faces. We see this particularly rough part of Southie through the eyes of Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck), a young private eye hired to find a missing 4-year-old girl by her aunt and uncle (Amy Madigan and Titus Welliver). Dismissed by older, venerable cops Remy Bressant (Ed Harris) and captain Jack Poole (Morgan Freeman) for his youth and moral idealism, Patrick is also tied to the drug dealers and criminals he has known since childhood. Patrick describes in voiceover the very Catholic struggle to be in the world but not of the world, and Affleck (in one of two great performances of 2007) brings this inner struggle to life as Patrick's investigation forces him to deal with the moral ambiguity that defines his world, even as this conflict strains he is relationship with his girlfriend and partner, Angie (Michelle Monaghan). While Gone Baby Gone works wonderfully as a tense procedural, it is ultimately about the tough choices at its heart; to the elder Affleck's credit, he doesn't attempt a shootout-driven resolution, instead letting the questions his story raises continue long after the stunning final fade-out.

Affleck is also smart in his casting - both Harris and Freeman, as the city's representatives of moral certainty, bring to their roles an authority that can't be faked. Affleck's obvious respect for these giants lends credibility to his protagonist's sense of being outweighed, and gives Patrick's maturation added gravity. An argument between Patrick and Remy about doing the right thing takes on the weight of a Socratic dialogue, largely thanks to Harris' ferocity. For all the big names Affleck landed, however, it's Amy Ryan as the missing girl's mother who steals the film. A mean, dead-eyed druggie, Helene could have easily been a caricature, but Ryan creates a nuanced, insightful portrait of a woman who has survived unknown abuses by hardening herself against the world. We pray for her to redeem herself even as we know how improbable that is; a lesser actor would have played this dynamic for shallow pathos, but Ryan is so believable and compelling that this conflict becomes the film's heart.

Perhaps it took returning to Boston for Affleck to make a film on this level - even Good Will Hunting doesn't begin to suggest this film's maturity. The occasional visual misstep (most likely a result of the first-timer's desire to impress) aside, Affleck creates and sustains a somber, contemplative tone that sets Gone Baby Gone apart from other procedurals. While a story centering around a missing child practically invites a sensationalistic, ripped-from-the-headlines approach, Affleck uses it to explore our idelization of youth and our underlying cynicism - when, late in the film, a character says "I love kids," the line is devastating for everything it implies about what motivates the choices we make everyday. John Toll's hard-edged cinematography and Harry Gregson-Williams' mounful score underline the film's mounting sense of uncertainty. When Affleck does give us one answer, in the perfect final scene, we can only say to ourselves, "Well, what else can you do?" Gone Baby Gone is filled with questions like that, and in its refusal to give us easy answers, it's as hard-headed and indelible as the city itself.

Title Card #49

Where is the fifth crew member?

Sunshine is a visual marvel. The searingly bright, seemingly alive star contrasted against the inky blackness of space has rarely been realized so vividly; turn down the sound and play some Radiohead, and I imagine the movie would be quite a trip. It's clear that director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are aiming for the heady, serious sci-fi of 2001 and Solaris, and Sunshine's images match their influences. Strange, then, that for all its awesome images the film is a maddeningly opaque failure. Sunshine looks like a masterpiece, but for all its ambition, as a work of storytelling it's strangely airless and hollow, at once a triumph of design and a failure of imagination.

An early scene of the crew of the Icarus II, on their way to deliver a nuclear payload and jump-start the dying sun, sitting around a breakfast table is unmistakably reminiscent of the same scene in Alien. Even the kitchenware is identical; the only thing missing is the believable, cohesive ensemble. The cast never sells the idea that they've spent many months together in a confined space, and their emotional response to the seriousness of their mission ranges from mopey to bummed. This is partly due to Garland's fatally self-conscious dialogue - even an actor as talented as Cillian Murphy can't help deliver lines like "Eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb. My bomb. Welcome to Icarus II" without sounding like a character in a graphic novel. The same excuse can't be made for Chris Evans, whose character seems to be inspired by Hudson from Aliens but feels closer to Cookie from Forbidden Planet. The rest of the cast, even usually reliable actors like Michelle Yeoh and Cliff Curtis, never get to make much of an impression; when the film turns into a space thriller and characters start to drop off, we've never been invested enough to care.

That shift from straight sci-fi to deep-space boo movie is the biggest of Sunshine's problems. The film teases at its muddled philosophical concerns while, at the same time, contriving a number of action setpieces straight out of 2010. Danny Boyle can't come close to Kubrick or Tarkovsky because, in his insecure need to entertain the kids in the audience, he violates the purity of his own concept. 2001 and Solaris are arguably boring, but their protracted scope is completely intentional and ultimately rewarding for the attentive viewer; Sunshine is like the Cliffs Notes version of those films. The film irreversibly jumps the shark when - well, I won't spoil it, but you'll know it when you see it. For all that Sunshine promises, it devolves into a generic, incoherent slasher movie, like the final reel of Adaptation played straight.

Boyle and Garland's previous collaboration 28 Days Later had many of the same problems, but that film worked, our investment in the characters and the inventive digital cinematography overcoming the weak action-movie climax. The pure kinetic high that propels that and all of Boyle's strongest work is absent here; you never feel Boyle engaging with Sunshine on anything but a vague intellectual level, and the result is a surprisingly dour space opera. When the film reaches a climax that is clearly meant to be awe-inspiring, I felt exhausted and relieved. Maybe some Radiohead would have helped.

The Trim Bin #67

- So this makes two years in a row where a genuinely great movie wins Best Picture and the Academy demonstrates general good taste. Weird. Whatever minor quibbles I might have, any night where Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton and Daniel Day-Lewis are winners, future trailers can read "From Four-Time Academy Award Winners Joel and Ethan Coen" and the cute couple from Once beat the Disney machine is a pretty sweet one. As for the show itself, aside from a few funny moments and the wonderful decision to defy the indisputable wisdom of Bill Conti and let Marketa Irglova speak, it was so-so. The lack of bloat was welcome, but there just wasn't anything in the show itself that could compete with this.

- The Oscars may be over but the Muriels (which got a nice mention from Jim Emerson - way to go, Paul!) are running through Friday. Most recent is the award for Best Cinematic Moment ("My straw reaches acroooss the room..."), with comments by yours truly.

- Sight and Sound charts the intersection of "a prolific American generation of comedians and wry auteurs. " Great to see The Cable Guy finally getting its due.

- I can't quite make up my mind about a certain trailer. Sure, it plays the nostalgia card a little heavily, but it's snappy, broadly funny, and proudly analog - in other words, it feels like Indy. If it weren't for the memory of The Phantom Menace's awesome trailer, this wouldn't feel like the year's biggest question mark.

- This, however, is no question mark. Two, please:

Title Card #48

A goddam helluva show

Everyone has their "loss of faith" moment with the Oscars - for me, it's the historic 1987 snub of Anne Ramsay (screw you, Olympia Dukakis). The Oscars aren't really for cinephiles, but for people like my Nana, who looks forward to the show all year for the celebrities, the dresses, and the hope that someday she'll be watching her favorite grandson thanking her from the stage of the Kodak Theatre (working on it, Nana). For the rest of us, the Academy Awards are like a bad relationship, fueling our dependence no matter how many disappointments we endure. This year, however, looks to be different; while it's hard to say that the nominees truly represent the year's best given the complete absence of Zodiac and the possibility of a Norbit win, the Academy's slate does justice to the year's rich offerings, with two masterpieces up for the big prize. So despite the honest-to-blog threat of a dark homeskillet in the running (at least it's not Crash), the memory of Scorsese's long-overdue win is still fresh, so I'm just going to enjoy the ride.

I don't bother with predictions, because I'd just be copying the wisdom of prognosticators more in the know than I. These are the movies and people I'll be rooting for on Sunday:

Best Picture: There Will Be Blood by a mile. But if front-runner No Country for Old Men wins, I won't complain. It's ridiculous to pit two perfect movies against each other and declare one superior, and these two films represent the strongest one-two punch the Academy has seen since Chinatown and The Godfather Part II. One will win, and both will be discussed and remembered for many years to come. As for the rest, Michael Clayton is a socially conscious, sharply made legal thriller with a great cast working at the top of our game, but it sort of bored me. Atonement has a fabulously sexy first hour, then suddenly turns into a real cock-block for the sake of a metatextual twist that thinks it's smarter and more devastating than it is (I'm told the book works better). As for Juno: it's funny and endearing, but it's a 90-minute sitcom pilot. Drained dry, Juno. So sorry.

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood Again, I'd be just as happy to see the Coens win. But one of the highlights of the year was seeing PTA's formidable cinematic talents finally recognized. Tony Gilroy is good, but it's too early. I admired The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on some levels, but it felt calculated and, at moments, a bit obvious. If Jason Reitman beats the Coen brothers, the distant popping noise those of you on the West Coast will hear is the sound of Dennis Cozzalio having his Scanners moment.

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood What is this nonsense about Day-Lewis' supposed hamminess and overacting? Does everything require a backlash? A strong category all around - Clooney, Depp and especially Mortensen all do some of their best work, and Tommy Lee Jones is good in a movie I didn't really care for. But Day-Lewis' work is unparalleled, working not only in broad strokes but with meticulous detail to invest his corrupt oilman with a Satanic power - it's an unforgettable performance, one for the ages.

Best Actress: Julie Christie, Away From Her For some reason, my favorite female performances of the year never seem to make it into the top five, and this year is no exception, with Carice van Houten and Nicole Kidman the worst omissions in a category that tends to be relentlessly middlebrow. I haven't seen The Savages or Elizabeth, Ellen Page is a good actress who will hopefully be in better movies, and La Vie en Rose actually made me hate Edith Piaf. That leaves Julie Christie, whose win would be a worthwile testament to one of the most challenging, provocative bodies of work any actor can boast of, as well as a tribute to her understated, devastating performance as a woman losing her memory but not her humor or strength.

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men It's nearly impossible to choose between Bardem's poker-faced angel of death and Affleck's simpering, serpentine assassin, two pitch-perfect performances that are great for completely different reasons. I'll go with Bardem because Anton Chigurh scares the bejesus out of me. I haven't seen Charlie Wilson's War, I wouldn't completely mind if Tom Wilkinson won (his batshit lawyer was the most entertaining part of Michael Clayton), and I would have preferred to see Holbrook win for Creepshow.

Best Supporting Actress: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone I just saw Gone Baby Gone last week, and it really surprised me - it's an uncommonly intelligent, philosophical procedural, and much of its emotional weight can be attributed to Ryan's complex, startlingly authentic portrayal of a coked-out, miserable excuse of a mom who nevertheless loves her missing daughter (the Southie accent is perfect, too). I love Cate Blanchett's take on Dylan and would like to see I'm Not There win something, but my heart tells me to root for Ryan. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing Tilda Swinton win - isn't she the coolest? I wouldn't really mind creepy, horny Briony Tallis taking it either; come to think of it, this is probably the year's strongest category (though I haven't seen American Gangster).

Best Original Screenplay: Ratatouille While I imagine Diablo Cody's acceptance speech would be the most entertaining of the night (I've known a few strippers, and they tend to be entertaining cats), I'd rather see her win once she's honed her craft a bit more. No offense, Diablo - I'm working on it as well, but then, I don't think they should give me an Oscar either. Ratatouille's the clear standout here, perfectly constructed and capable of surprising depth - with all the noise about mo-cap and 3D as the wave of the future, it's Pixar and Brad Bird's mastery of storytelling that leads the way in animation. Haven't seen The Savages, Michael Clayton is okay and Lars and the Real Girl is as much of a sitcom as Juno, only way crappier.

Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men While I think There Will Be Blood is the (slightly) better-directed film, nobody writes better than the Coens when they're at the top of their game. Staying close to the Cormac McCarthy novel while still finding room for their own distinctive voice, the Coens' script is a masterpiece of economy and pacing, working perfectly as an old-school thriller even as it proves to be formally audacious. Away From Her, Atonement and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are all good but suffer from the same problem - they're all too concerned with being clever to really have any emotional impact.

Best Cinematography: In a category filled with worthy candidates, I'll go with Roger Deakins' beautiful, delicate work on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Best Editing: The Coens' career-long collaboration with the elusive Roderick Jaynes reaches a new high with No Country for Old Men. There isn't a single cut in the entire movie that you could imagine happening a moment later or earlier. It's perfect.

Best Art Direction: There Will Be Blood The interplay of man-made objects and the foreboding landscape achieves a stark poetry. Jack Fisk rules.

Best Costume Design: Atonement That green dress really is something.

Best Makeup: Pirates of the Caribbean, I guess. This category kinda sucks this year.

Best Original Score: Without Jonny Greenwood, this category feels pointless. I'll go with Michael Giacchino's typically nifty score for Ratatouille.

Best Orignal Song: It's Once versus a whole lot of nothing.

Best Sound: If you were to close your eyes and simply listen to No Country for Old Men, it would retain much of its unbearable tension.

Best Sound Editing: Same goes for There Will Be Blood.

Best Visual Effects: Ugh. One area that 2007 was sorely lacking in was big-budget effects showcases that didn't make you feel like an asshole for watching them. I'll go with Transformers, but I'm not happy about it.

Best Animated Feature: I just saw Persepolis and found it quite charming, but I'd still have to go with Ratatouille.

Best Foreign Language Film: Why isn't Persepolis here? I haven't actually seen any of the movies nominated. Let's end on that note of ignorance. Woo, Oscars!

I see you need a firm hand.

Belle de Jour is a film of interiors, from the cold, stylish apartment occupied by young bourgeoise couple Severine (Catherine Deneuve) and Pierre (Jean Sorel) to the deceptively mundane hallways and parlor rooms of the brothel where Severine works every afternoon to the lurid sadomastic fantasies that comprise her interior life and which increasingly blur with the film's reality. While sex is omnipresent in cinema, it is too often merely titillating, its possibilites as a form of communication and artistic expression rarely explored. In Belle de Jour, Luis Bunuel uses signifiers of sexual desire to communicate his protagonist's interiority, Severine's fantasies and attempts to enact them revealing her as a character lost in her own mind. A landmark work of erotica, the film revels in its constructed sexuality even as it uses its more provocative moments not to bring us closer to understanding Severine but to make the source of her mysterious, implacable desire more and more elusive. Its eroticism lies not in what it shows but in everything it leaves hidden.

Chief among the film's exquisite surfaces is the perfect, porcelain face of Catherine Deneuve, whose refined sexual persona was subverted throughout the 1960s by directors like Bunuel, Jacques Demy and Roman Polanski. In Belle de Jour, Severine's cool elegance masks a highly active fantasy life comprised of banal pornographic scenarios involving her rape, torture and degradation. Severine's air of propriety - she complains about flirtatious family friend Henri (Michael Piccoli) that "I don't like the way he looks at me" - is punctured when, after an offhanded mention from Henri of the city's secretive upscale brothels, she finds herself in the home of Madame Anais (Genevieve Page) asking for a job. Bunuel contrasts the bored, idle chatter of the other women at the brothel, whose motivation seems more economic than sexual, with Severine's more urgent need. Afraid at first, Severine is soon drifting from client to client with a dreamlike detachment, any inner conflict demonstrating itself not in big emotional scenes but with smaller moments, as when she peers at another prostitute at work, claims disgust and then turns back to continue watching. We're given flashes of Severine's childhood - an incident of sexual abuse, a Catholic moment - but they're not meant to explain her, and Bunuel avoids any overt psychoanalysis. At the heart of all of Bunuel's films is an inexplicable mystery; here, it's the source of desire.

Also key to Belle de Jour is the way that individual desire becomes codified, particuarly for women, whose sexual fantasies are inevitably projected through a distinctly masculine lens. Severine's fantasies are straight out of the yellowing paperbacks of the period, the main difference being that we are made to identify with the tortured rather than the torturer. Her own attempts at realizing her fantasies are filtered through the very particular fetishes of her johns, enacting fantasies of sadism, humiliation and even necrophilia. It seems as though Bunuel is saying that female desire - and, by extension, female identity - is inextricable from the male gaze. This blurs into Severine's everyday life - the husband who remains oblivious to her afternoon job (hence her work name) so long as she's waiting when he returns from work, the older man turned on by teasing her propriety who loses interest when he learns of her carnality, the gangster (Pierre Clementi) who aims to own Severine both at work and at home. Bunuel retains his bemused perspective, leaving us to sort out the film's complicated sexual politics. When Severine seems to finally find what she's been looking for, in the famous scene involving a Japanese businessman and his mysterious black box (written about in greater detail by Belle de Jour's number-one fan Paul Clark), the film reveals the most even as it becomes ever more elusive. Foreshadowed in young Severine's rejection of communion, Severine's ecstatic gaze, the sense that she has crossed an invisible line, is a sensual refutation of the Eden myth; it is only through the unknown, the thing which cannot be codified or explained away, that Severine can finally come.

Though Belle de Jour is a very sexy film, there's very little skin on display. Its success lies in the way that it tantalizes our imaginations in the same way that Severine is compelled by the promise of unknown experience. As is often the case with Bunuel's work, its ambiguities and deliberate confusion of reality and fantasy exposes our own absurd adherence to convention even as we desire to break free. Its final scene, with its masterful collision of images and sound, suggests that Severine has only scratched the surface of a need that will never truly be fulfilled. It's a perfect representation of how desire is bound to identity and leads us to reflect upon our own fantasies and how the stranger they are, the more they define us.

Title Card #47

true romance

I intended to write a straightforward top 10 for Valentine's Day - kisses, perhaps, or screen couples - but the more I thought about it, the more it wanted to be something different.



Start thinking about the most romantic scenes in film and your mind will wander. Moments tend to blur together, becoming intertwined, each moment reflected in another. Love most vididly expresses itself in moments seemingly gone before they've arrived, and cinema is made of stolen moments. When a movie manages to capture true romance, there's the sense that something priceless has been preserved - the scene will go on, like a perfect memory, both exhilarating and sweetly sad.



Some of these moments achieve a sort of transcendent artifice. The idealized Hollywood love stories leave no room for the complexities of the real thing, but this is not necessarily dishonest. In their carefully orchestrated serendipity we can trace the origins of our own longing, our need to believe in something eternal. When they work that well, no matter how improbable they may be, we can't help it - they send us.



Others confront the complications of real relationships head-on, mirroring our own experience. What they say about love is sometimes reassuring, other times not. In these films there is the acceptance of people as they are - fucked-up, insecure, oblivious - and the hope that, ultimately, love will triumph no matter how many times we shoot ourselves in the foot.




Many focus on love in the face of death. The worst ones reduce the tragic, beautiful truth of our need to love in the face of inevitable loss to inane, condescending Hallmark cards. The best ones remind us how love itself can be an act of bravery.



Some celebrate love that cannot be expressed but refuses to be silenced.



Some celebrate romance in the most unlikely of places.



Some are funny.



Some are creepy.



Some are crazy.



Some are totally fucking sexy.



And sometimes, they remind us of everything love can bring out in us - trust, understanding, acceptance - inspiring us to, at last, be everything we've always wanted to be.



So for those of us who count the movies among our first loves, we return again and again, hoping to be moved, to believe in the power of the moving images to speak to us, to live in those perfect moments.

Smile, you son of a bitch! (Roy Scheider, 1932-2008)

Roy Scheider was the kind of actor you don't see much of anymore, a virile, rough-edged everyman whose performances are remarkable for their physical intelligence without ever sacrificing believability. Scheider was never larger-than-life, which is perhaps the key to his success, easy as it is to imagine him hanging out with dad down at the V.F.W. Much of the success of Jaws can be attributed to what Scheider brought to the role of Chief Brody, portraying the character's anxiety, sense of displacement and sexual insecurity - I love the moment during the "let's compare scars" scene when Brody searches for a scar worthy of competition, than wordlessly decides against it. Scheider anchors our emotional investment in the story - when audiences went wild at the film's explosive ending, it was his triumph as much as Spielberg's.

That seemingly effortless authenticity can be found in all of Scheider's best performances - consider the haunting reveal of Dustin Hoffman's brother at death's door in Marathon Man or his deliciously venal pimp in Klute. I'm particularly fond of his nefarious Dr. Benway in Naked Lunch, a role that gave him the opportunity to use his defintively hetero screen presence to remarkably subversive effect. I must admit that I haven't seen All That Jazz yet, but Netflix predicts I'd give it five stars, so I look forward to checking it out this week. It will be a welcome opportunity to celebrate an truly undervalued star, the kind they just don't make anymore.

For an excellent tribute to Scheider, head over to Sunset Gun.

Title Card #46

I don't think that really qualifies as Reaganomics.

Stoner comedies are populated by jocular male protagonists whose red-eyed triumps are designed to provoke blazed audience members into paroxysms of self-congradulatory hi-fives. Jane F. (Anna Faris), the perpetually high protagonist of Smiley Face, is notable not only because of her gender but as an avatar not for the Cheech and Chong demographic but for the pothead whose addiction is a symptom of the user's sense of alienation. While Smiley Face is lighter and less didactic than director Gregg Araki's previous movies, it shares with them a sincere empathy for its fucked-up heroine. Whenever Jane apologizes for her behavior by explaining "I'm really stoned right now," it somehow seems like a completely reasonable self-defense.

Like the journeys in many stoner movies, Jane's is a meandering and often incoherent one. Already taking bong rips at nine in the morning, Jane's situation is complicated when she devours a plate of cupcakes intended for her creepy roomate's (Danny Masterson) sci-fi convention - unbeknownst to her, they're pot cupcakes, and Jane finds herself extremely stoned (this is, like, the best plot summary ever). Barely functional, Jane sets about completing a list of goals for the day, including buying more pot to replace the cupcakes, going to an acting audition (Jane lives off of residuals from one commercial) and somehow finding the money to pay her overdue power bill and repay her angry dealer (Adam Brody) so that he doesn't take her beloved bed. Needless to say, Jane quickly strays very far from the plan, repeatedly scaring the straights, fleeing from the police and inadvertently stealing an original copy of The Communist Manifesto. The story will be very familiar for anyone who has seen previous stoner comedies (or anyone who has smoked a lot of weed), but even as Smiley Face nods to audience expectations - retro cameos, kitschy soundtrack, trippy animated titles - it also works as an insightful character study. Like the smiley face Jane writes in the sky that suddenly transforms into a screaming skull, the movie's deceptively dopey antics mask the character's underlying social anxiety.

During an argument about Reganomics with her dealer, Jane offhandedly reveals that she studied economics in college but, she explains with a shrug, "economics didn't really work out." Faris does an excellent job with a deceptively one-note performance; in Jane's dialated pupils we can discern traces of a serious-minded young woman driven by disillusionment into the security blanket of a permanent purple haze. Besides pot, Jane seems to care mostly about corn chips and her comfy bed; she seems indifferent, even apprehensive about sex and relationships, partly using pot as a way of shielding herself against any meaningful human connection.

Her apathy is understandable given the hostility directed at her - rather than the square-jawed, ineffectual narcs that usually populate these movies, the norms Jane encounters treat her with genuine contempt, one character telling her, "You creep me out, lady." When Jane does attempt to voice her ideas, railing against corporate injustice (in the funniest scene in the movie), we're first given Jane's quite articulate and passionate inner monologue, then what she actually said. It's a hilarious, perfect illustration of the stoner paradox: the emergence of a wealth of insight that the user is then completely unable to communicate in any meaningful way.

Smiley Face falls apart towards the end, arriving at its conclusion a bit too soon - whether this is the result of budget cuts or a shortcoming of Araki's (The Doom Generation was similarly abrupt) is unclear. The relationship between Jane and her dorky secret admirer Brevin (John Krasinski), set up in a weirdly endearing falling-in-love montage, is particularly shortchanged. These flaws sort of work for the movie: as with The Big Lebowski and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the narrative's gradual dissolution mirrors the drug experience ("Wait, what?"). Smiley Face doesn't really match those movies, which were brilliantly stupid; Araki's occasional tendency towards an obnoxious literal-mindedness keep his film from reaching those heights. Those moments are smoothed over by Faris, an actress who has done hilarious work in dreck and, it seems, was waiting for a part this rich to show what she was capable of - few performances in 2007 were so layered and subtle while also excelling at pratfalls and funny faces. Smiley Face isn't a great film, but Faris provides it with a heart, and you don't have to be stoned to see that.

Play the Game (2/7/08)

The Trim Bin #66

- A rare, non-movie-related political moment (I promise to limit these): is anyone else feeling a tad less cynical today about living in the US of A? First, whoever you're supporting (Obama for me - duh) or what your political leanings may be, it's nice to have three front-runners who probably won't bring about the literal apocalypse. Second, for the first time in memory, people want to vote - complacency and obligation have given way to an election year of substance and urgency, perhaps, we've finally snapped out of our seven-year fatalistic trip and started believing in possibility again. Way to go, America, for finally giving a shit. Now keep it up.

- A reminder that the Muriel Awards - the pics for the year's best in film in a diverse set of categories founded last year by Paul Clark and Steven Carlson - start February 13. Last year's choices were actually stronger and more interesting than February's other, slightly higher-profile awards ceremony.

- Starting tomorrow, and continuing every first Thursday of the month, I'll be restarting the screencaps guessing game that's been dormant around these parts for well over a year. But now, there's a prize (of sorts): the first person to correctly guess the image gets to assign me a film to review. Whether its brilliant, stupid, obscure or obscene, I'll write about it (it can't be Hardbodies, though - I already wrote about that).

- As part of his 8th series, Nathaniel at Film Experience writes about Ennis Del Mar's eighth closeup in Brokeback Mountain, the post expanding into a meditation on celebrity the often jarring relationship between private and public grief (the discussion that follows in the comments is worth checking out as well).

- Oh, Juno. When my friends and loved ones talk about how Juno McGuff's story moved them, I find it impossible to pooh-pooh a movie that has clearly touched a nerve (especially not to pose Bill Chambers' pointed question, "What's the fuck is it about?"). I want to feel the Juno love, but then, as in this EW cover story, its own creators spoil it for me. I don't know what's harder to stomach - the talented but increasingly insufferable Ellen Page comparing Juno to The Catcher in the Rye, a studio exec's BS claim that box office expectations were low due to the noncommercial material (like it was directed by Stan Brakhage or something). Worst of all is the article's dismissal of Heathers and Ghost World (both of which Juno borrows from copiously) as films about "weirdos," whereas Juno McGuff is some sort of pioneer female antihero. To which I can only say, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.

Title Card #45