I don't really get any pleasure from tipping sacred cows. Okay, I kind of do, but what I mean is that I want to like every movie I see. So it's with some reticence that I report that Jason Reitman's new Oscar-bound dramedy Up in the Air, which is currently rocking an 82 (that's "Universal Acclaim") at Metacritic, didn't really do it for me.
I've read interviews with Jason Reitman, and I can tell that he's a bright guy who genuinely wants to make good movies. Fine—I'll keep seeing whatever he comes up with. But there's something almost insulting about the way this dude has been hagiographed by the press in the months since his new movie premiered at Toronto. Some asinine movie bloggers even made the laughably hyperbolic statement that Reitman is "the new Billy Wilder," or some such bullshit.
Whatever his strengths—and I'm not convinced that he has any definable ones, other than picking good projects—Reitman is a decidedly unambitious filmmaker in an era (or at least a year) in which original American voices are flourishing in cinema more than the press would have you know. 2009 has seen a string of remarkable films by authentic, talented young American directors: Lynn Shelton, Rian Johnson, Robert Siegel, Duncan Jones (a Brit, but humor me); not to mention more established names like Steven Soderbergh, James Gray, Richard Kelly, the Coens, Tarantino. But none of their films are going to make the awards-season splash that Up in the Air was poised to make before it even opened. So that's where I'm coming from when I say that Up in the Air is not worth getting excited about, and why I'm slightly offended by the hero's welcome it and its creator have received (and will continue to receive all the way through Oscar night).
Now, the movie. It's not bad. The actors are appealing, the script has its share of clever exchanges. But for a movie ostensibly about alienation and regret, it feels fundamentally hollow and unaffecting. In her astutely skeptical review, Karina Longworth opines that the film's "inherent brightness [is] tinted blue but never significantly darkened." Yes. The main problem with Up in the Air is Reitman's inability to fully engage with the pain and melancholy that gradually overtake its protagonist's life. Reitman wasn't the right man for the job; imagine what a more emotionally nuanced filmmaker could have done with this material—someone liked the aforementioned James Gray, perhaps. Reitman attempts an unhappy ending—the twist (I'll be cryptic to avoid spoilers) is that, even though Clooney has the standard big third-act epiphany, he can't act on it. This is an improvement on Juno's cloying exeunt, but it doesn't sting the way it should—not by a long shot.
And what of Clooney himself? In recent years, the mega-star has proven himself a resourceful and inventive performer; consider the range between, say, his hilariously goofy mugging in Burn After Reading and his classicist composure in Michael Clayton. But this strikes me as a regression for him—for the first time in years, he's relying on movie-star charisma rather than acting chops, and the film feels shallower for it. It's the women of Up in the Air who come close to redeeming it: neither Vera Farmiga nor Anna Kendrick is a household name, but they probably will be once this film's Oscar campaign is over. Farmiga knocks it out of the park in exuding the smoldering mystery that entices Clooney, and when the painful truth behind that mystery is revealed, Farmiga's consistence retroactively sells it. Young Kendrick steals all her scenes as a more grounded-in-reality version of Election's Tracey Flick; the lone scene that Clooney shares with both these women is perhaps the most interesting segment of the movie.
One reason the ending (and by extension, the whole film) doesn't go down like the jagged little pill it should have is that Reitman tips his hand with a montage of recently laid-off employees extolling the importance of family and close relationships (y'know, the stuff Clooney doesn't have). The intended irony is obvious, but the schmaltzy montage itself seems truer to Reitman's softie nature. All I could think of was that episode of King of the Hill where ditzy Luanne, having taken over as the local TV weatherperson, warns of an incoming storm and exhorts her audience, "Hug your babies tight!" Reitman wants his own exhortation to be more complicated (complete with gestures toward way-we-live-now portent), but he can't disguise his true calling as a maker of slick, harmless, reassuring entertainment. And let's not forget that his visual sense is about as sophisticated as Kevin Smith's. Embrace it, Jason—you're not a poet of solitude. You're just a guy who's about to win a bunch of Oscars.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
sand, sky, gun, hat
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Jerry's America
Today, a fascinating confluence of three things I love: (1) Jerry Lewis, (2) Dave Kehr's DVD column in the New York Times, and (3) 1960s culture. It seems there's a new DVD set collecting sketches from The Jerry Lewis Show, a TV show that aired from 1967-69 and that I didn't even know existed. Kehr covers it here, and this is the paragraph that really fascinated me:
"The most interesting sketches in this collection find Mr. Lewis confronting [the social changes of the late '60s]. A two-part parody titled “My Bonnie Lies Over the Clyde” offers Mr. Lewis and Audrey Meadows as the outlaw couple played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 film, which had come to symbolize the “new Hollywood.” Presented by “Nice Clean Pictures,” the sketch begins by satirizing the unprecedented level of graphic violence that “Bonnie and Clyde” had introduced to American movies: Mr. Lewis’s Clyde enters a bank, mows down a dozen extras with a machine gun, and announces, “Nobody move and you won’t get hurt.” But with his Bogart lisp and “Scarface” tuxedo, Mr. Lewis is playing a gangster of Hollywood’s old school, not Mr. Beatty’s stylish new model, and a revealing disconnection sets in."
My curiosity about this may not be strong enough to actually track down the DVD, but I like the idea of Jerry as an avatar for the Mad Men generation of formerly hip gents watching their own obsolescence in slow motion. There's something poignant about the idea of Jerry fucking up his attempt to engage with the changing times, as per Kehr's latter observation about the outmoded gangster impression. Jerry's richest artistic period—his run of self-directed films from 1960-1965, in my estimation—was also, as far as I can tell, the last time he was really taken seriously as an American cultural institution. Once the proper-noun Sixties began in earnest, so too began Jerry's descent into public ridicule; as early as '67, Roger Ebert was already indulging in that now horribly clichéd practice: making fun of the French for loving Jerry Lewis.
Incidentally, Lewis's influence can currently be seen in multiplexes, as Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (a disappointment, but that's another subject) uses the same Jerry-derived visual trick that he borrowed for The Life Aquatic—the "cross-section" shot, used to show the boat in the earlier film and underground tunnels in the new one, was deployed by Lewis in his 1961 film The Ladies Man to show all the busy rooms of a house. JERRY 4 LIFE.
"The most interesting sketches in this collection find Mr. Lewis confronting [the social changes of the late '60s]. A two-part parody titled “My Bonnie Lies Over the Clyde” offers Mr. Lewis and Audrey Meadows as the outlaw couple played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 film, which had come to symbolize the “new Hollywood.” Presented by “Nice Clean Pictures,” the sketch begins by satirizing the unprecedented level of graphic violence that “Bonnie and Clyde” had introduced to American movies: Mr. Lewis’s Clyde enters a bank, mows down a dozen extras with a machine gun, and announces, “Nobody move and you won’t get hurt.” But with his Bogart lisp and “Scarface” tuxedo, Mr. Lewis is playing a gangster of Hollywood’s old school, not Mr. Beatty’s stylish new model, and a revealing disconnection sets in."
My curiosity about this may not be strong enough to actually track down the DVD, but I like the idea of Jerry as an avatar for the Mad Men generation of formerly hip gents watching their own obsolescence in slow motion. There's something poignant about the idea of Jerry fucking up his attempt to engage with the changing times, as per Kehr's latter observation about the outmoded gangster impression. Jerry's richest artistic period—his run of self-directed films from 1960-1965, in my estimation—was also, as far as I can tell, the last time he was really taken seriously as an American cultural institution. Once the proper-noun Sixties began in earnest, so too began Jerry's descent into public ridicule; as early as '67, Roger Ebert was already indulging in that now horribly clichéd practice: making fun of the French for loving Jerry Lewis.
Incidentally, Lewis's influence can currently be seen in multiplexes, as Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (a disappointment, but that's another subject) uses the same Jerry-derived visual trick that he borrowed for The Life Aquatic—the "cross-section" shot, used to show the boat in the earlier film and underground tunnels in the new one, was deployed by Lewis in his 1961 film The Ladies Man to show all the busy rooms of a house. JERRY 4 LIFE.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Comedian's manifesto
"To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone—uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?" —Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
Friday, November 6, 2009
Mad worlds: Richard Kelly's THE BOX
Though it lacks the vividness and depth of feeling that made Donnie Darko a contemporary classic, The Box belatedly confirms Richard Kelly's gift for creating mind-bending tales of both personal and cosmic disorder. Like Kelly's debut and its colossally misguided follow-up Southland Tales, this is a confusing film that I wish came with a user's manual; I'll have to see it again before I can determine if its narrative convolutions make some kind of sense or are merely red herrings. I suspect it's a little from column A and a little from column B, but it hardly matters. Kelly has crafted a deeply involving, unnerving, and singular sci-fi/horror film—and he's done it, for the first time, from within the trenches of the studio system.
When I heard that Richard Kelly was adapting a Richard Matheson story for his next film, I thought it would be an opportunity for him to take a back-to-basics approach and rein himself in after the miserable excesses of Southland Tales. Yes and no. While the what-would-you-do morality drama of the premise does ground Kelly to a certain degree, expanding the original story to feature length gives him ample room to explore the stratosphere of his own vast imagination. After the expected tension produced by Matheson's set-up—Frank Langella (deliciously creepy in the tradition of genteel, matter-of-fact monsters) shows up at a nice family's house with the button that'll give them a million a dollars but ensure a stranger's death—Kelly's script veers into bizarre blind alleys and ambiguous sci-fi conspiracy-theory madness. His obsession with water imagery (remember Donnie's weird projectile liquids) shows up in a breathtaking sequence that verges on the psychedelic. The middle portion of the film resembles a fever dream.
And yet, because this is a studio film—or maybe just because Kelly learned his lesson after last time—this weirdness doesn't sink the movie. The key to The Box's success is that it's filled with relatively traditional scares. From the first reel Kelly plants little suggestions that some malevolent forces are intruding on the characters. Kelly's tone is one of dread, of perpetually creeping mystery and terror. Here is a film in which the simple pleasures of old-fashioned horror storytelling rub up against the wild eccentricities of an outré fantasist. The result is ungainly at times, but it works, and as more than just a prepackaged cult commodity.
As in Donnie Darko, Kelly is committed to evoking the suburban details of a particular time, in this case the 1970s. Steven Poster's cinematography bathes the characters in a halo-ish glow that signifies at once nostalgia for a bygone era and the presence of cosmic forces interfering in the lives of ordinary people. Kelly's framing is precise and chosen for maximum creepiness; he seems to be in total control, even when the plot runs off the rails.
If there's something missing from The Box, it's the absence of Donnie Darko's emotional richness—the one area in which Kelly doesn't seem to be operating at full potential. But this is somewhat rectified in the film's haunting, if not exactly unpredictable, conclusion. Kelly has at last made a worthy follow-up to his debut: once again, the dreams in which he's dying are the best he's ever had.
When I heard that Richard Kelly was adapting a Richard Matheson story for his next film, I thought it would be an opportunity for him to take a back-to-basics approach and rein himself in after the miserable excesses of Southland Tales. Yes and no. While the what-would-you-do morality drama of the premise does ground Kelly to a certain degree, expanding the original story to feature length gives him ample room to explore the stratosphere of his own vast imagination. After the expected tension produced by Matheson's set-up—Frank Langella (deliciously creepy in the tradition of genteel, matter-of-fact monsters) shows up at a nice family's house with the button that'll give them a million a dollars but ensure a stranger's death—Kelly's script veers into bizarre blind alleys and ambiguous sci-fi conspiracy-theory madness. His obsession with water imagery (remember Donnie's weird projectile liquids) shows up in a breathtaking sequence that verges on the psychedelic. The middle portion of the film resembles a fever dream.
And yet, because this is a studio film—or maybe just because Kelly learned his lesson after last time—this weirdness doesn't sink the movie. The key to The Box's success is that it's filled with relatively traditional scares. From the first reel Kelly plants little suggestions that some malevolent forces are intruding on the characters. Kelly's tone is one of dread, of perpetually creeping mystery and terror. Here is a film in which the simple pleasures of old-fashioned horror storytelling rub up against the wild eccentricities of an outré fantasist. The result is ungainly at times, but it works, and as more than just a prepackaged cult commodity.
As in Donnie Darko, Kelly is committed to evoking the suburban details of a particular time, in this case the 1970s. Steven Poster's cinematography bathes the characters in a halo-ish glow that signifies at once nostalgia for a bygone era and the presence of cosmic forces interfering in the lives of ordinary people. Kelly's framing is precise and chosen for maximum creepiness; he seems to be in total control, even when the plot runs off the rails.
If there's something missing from The Box, it's the absence of Donnie Darko's emotional richness—the one area in which Kelly doesn't seem to be operating at full potential. But this is somewhat rectified in the film's haunting, if not exactly unpredictable, conclusion. Kelly has at last made a worthy follow-up to his debut: once again, the dreams in which he's dying are the best he's ever had.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Catch.
Barb said, “The catch. Don’t tell me there isn’t one. And don’t tell me these tickets to Vegas aren’t part of it.”
Pete stashed his piece. “Are you saying that two tickets was being optimistic?”
“No. You know I’ll never leave you.”
Pete smiled. “There’s some fuck-ups I wouldn’t have made, if I’d known you better.”
Barb smiled. “The catch? Vegas? And don’t make eyes at me when we have to run for a plane.”
Pete shut his suitcase. “The Outfit has plans for Mr. Hughes. Ward’s putting some things together.”
“It’s about staying useful, then.”
“Yeah. Stay useful, stay healthy. If I can get them to bend a certain rule, I’d call it a lock.”
Barb said, “What rule?”
“Come on, you know what I do.”
Barb shook her head. “You’re versatile. You run shakedowns and you sell guns and dope. You killed the President of the United States once, but I’d have to call that a one-time opportunity.”
Pete laughed. Pete made his sides hurt. Pete leaked some wiiiiild tears. Barb tossed a towel up. Pete wiped his eyes and de-teared.
“You can’t move heroin there. It’s a set policy, but it’s probably the best way I can make the Boys some real money. They might go for it, if I only sell to the spooks in West Vegas. Mr Hughes hates jigs. He thinks they should all be doped up, like he is. The Boys might decide to humor him.”
Barb got This Look. Pete knew the gestalt. I fucked JFK. You killed him. My craaazy life.
She said, “useful.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Barb grabbed her Twist gowns. Barb dropped them out the window. Pete looked out. A kid looked up. The blue gown hit a ledge.
Barb waved. The kid waved back.
“The Twist is dead, but I’ll bet you could get me some lounge gigs.”
“We’ll be useful.”
“I’m still scared.”
Pete said, “That’s the catch.”
— James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand, pp. 68-69
Pete stashed his piece. “Are you saying that two tickets was being optimistic?”
“No. You know I’ll never leave you.”
Pete smiled. “There’s some fuck-ups I wouldn’t have made, if I’d known you better.”
Barb smiled. “The catch? Vegas? And don’t make eyes at me when we have to run for a plane.”
Pete shut his suitcase. “The Outfit has plans for Mr. Hughes. Ward’s putting some things together.”
“It’s about staying useful, then.”
“Yeah. Stay useful, stay healthy. If I can get them to bend a certain rule, I’d call it a lock.”
Barb said, “What rule?”
“Come on, you know what I do.”
Barb shook her head. “You’re versatile. You run shakedowns and you sell guns and dope. You killed the President of the United States once, but I’d have to call that a one-time opportunity.”
Pete laughed. Pete made his sides hurt. Pete leaked some wiiiiild tears. Barb tossed a towel up. Pete wiped his eyes and de-teared.
“You can’t move heroin there. It’s a set policy, but it’s probably the best way I can make the Boys some real money. They might go for it, if I only sell to the spooks in West Vegas. Mr Hughes hates jigs. He thinks they should all be doped up, like he is. The Boys might decide to humor him.”
Barb got This Look. Pete knew the gestalt. I fucked JFK. You killed him. My craaazy life.
She said, “useful.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Barb grabbed her Twist gowns. Barb dropped them out the window. Pete looked out. A kid looked up. The blue gown hit a ledge.
Barb waved. The kid waved back.
“The Twist is dead, but I’ll bet you could get me some lounge gigs.”
“We’ll be useful.”
“I’m still scared.”
Pete said, “That’s the catch.”
— James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand, pp. 68-69
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Adventures in aspect-ratio geekery, or, why I love the internet, or, leave it to Bogdanovich
So I saw a 35mm print of Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai tonight at the Music Box, and of course it was glorious. But I noticed something very strange. During the legendary climactic funhouse-mirror sequence, the aspect ratio appeared to change from the standard 1.37:1 Academy ratio (the square shape of all pre-1953 Hollywood films) to a rectangular ratio, with the screen letterboxed (black bars at the top and bottom), looking closer to 1.85 or 1.66:1. This was shocking because widescreen ratios weren't a thing in Hollywood until CinemaScope arrived in 1953. At first I thought it might just be a projection snafu of some kind, or a quirk of the print that wasn't supposed to be there. But that wasn't a satisfactory explanation; I wondered if Welles was up to something.
So I poked around on the internet.
What I found was a thread on Wellesnet.com addressing this exact topic, originated by a poster who had my exact experience: he saw a theatrically projected print of Lady From Shanghai, noticed some letterboxing funny business in the funhouse scene, and wondered what the hell was going on. Some speculation followed, and then another poster delivered the goods by transcribing a comment made by Peter Bogdanovich on a DVD commentary track:
"In some scenes - it's noticeable particularly in the funhouse scene, in the mirror scene at the end, but there are other places where you can see it - he actually changed the aperture in the camera when he shot, so that sometimes the image was narrower than normal, top and bottom. He did that on purpose in a way that in fact DW Griffith did, changing the shape of the image by masking the top and bottom or the sides or whatever, something that Griffith did. Orson brought that into sound pictures, something that very few people did. He was amused that he'd done it and nobody'd ever noticed it."
Well I noticed it, Orson.
It does make sense, really, because creating a wider image gave him more room to convey the scope of the funhouse and all the mirror doubling. He probably figured that you couldn't quite get a full sense of the visual distortion in the square ratio.
What I'm wondering now is if this has any implications for the ongoing, vociferous debate over the correct aspect ratio for Touch of Evil. It's all very involved and confusing, and there's no definitive proof either way, but a lot of people got upset when the recent DVD special edition of the film presented it in 1.85:1, even though by 1958 almost all theaters were projecting films in some kind of widescreen ratio. The argument, or one argument, goes that Welles hated the widescreen processes and composed his shots in 1.37:1 even knowing that they would eventually be masked for 1.85:1, or something like that. But to me his experiments in Lady From Shanghai indicate that he was interested in playing around with aspect ratios and widescreen effects. So it adds another layer to the debate. Or rather it would if any of those people read my blog.
So I poked around on the internet.
What I found was a thread on Wellesnet.com addressing this exact topic, originated by a poster who had my exact experience: he saw a theatrically projected print of Lady From Shanghai, noticed some letterboxing funny business in the funhouse scene, and wondered what the hell was going on. Some speculation followed, and then another poster delivered the goods by transcribing a comment made by Peter Bogdanovich on a DVD commentary track:
"In some scenes - it's noticeable particularly in the funhouse scene, in the mirror scene at the end, but there are other places where you can see it - he actually changed the aperture in the camera when he shot, so that sometimes the image was narrower than normal, top and bottom. He did that on purpose in a way that in fact DW Griffith did, changing the shape of the image by masking the top and bottom or the sides or whatever, something that Griffith did. Orson brought that into sound pictures, something that very few people did. He was amused that he'd done it and nobody'd ever noticed it."
Well I noticed it, Orson.
It does make sense, really, because creating a wider image gave him more room to convey the scope of the funhouse and all the mirror doubling. He probably figured that you couldn't quite get a full sense of the visual distortion in the square ratio.
What I'm wondering now is if this has any implications for the ongoing, vociferous debate over the correct aspect ratio for Touch of Evil. It's all very involved and confusing, and there's no definitive proof either way, but a lot of people got upset when the recent DVD special edition of the film presented it in 1.85:1, even though by 1958 almost all theaters were projecting films in some kind of widescreen ratio. The argument, or one argument, goes that Welles hated the widescreen processes and composed his shots in 1.37:1 even knowing that they would eventually be masked for 1.85:1, or something like that. But to me his experiments in Lady From Shanghai indicate that he was interested in playing around with aspect ratios and widescreen effects. So it adds another layer to the debate. Or rather it would if any of those people read my blog.
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