Cloverfield

Cloverfield is a movie with many, many problems—and although I saw it only a few hours ago, it is not aging well.

The premise of the movie is simple: Godzilla meets Youtube. This premise is also stupid, as a few seconds of thought will show: a special-effects picture sits uncomfortably within a very up-close portrayal of a group of friends. Take away the gimmick (everything on screen is "found" footage taken on video camera), and one is left with the not-so-bad idea of a monster movie which focuses more on personal tension and group dynamics than the monster. There are films like this, no? I'm thinking of Night of the Living Dead especially, but experts in the genre will doubtless name more.

The most obvious precursor of this film is The Blair Witch Project, which I admit I rather like, but which is, in the most important way, nothing like this film. Blair Witch is not a special effects movie in the least. Cloverfield balances a Bruckheimer scenario with a structure inimical to that scenario. Granted, that is the "angle" here—but it doesn't work. The counterintuitive remains so.

The best shots in the film are the glimpses of the monster down long avenues, partially blocked by buildings, and of destruction that cannot be made out very clearly. Basically: the film does chaos very well. This is to be expected, as even a wedding video made on handheld camera can be very disorienting and chaotic. But—and here's the catch—the handheld camera totally fails to make interesting the kind of personal interactions that become obligatory within that format.

For what it's worth, I also did not like the monster. And the film's knowledge of New York City was annoyingly wrong.

Now, the first thirty minutes of this film, derided by Manohla Dargis in her uncomprehending, pretentious review, happen to be the best in the movie. At times, I wish I had written it. The initial scene-setting—here's what genius—fails to set up anything of interest. The characters are vacant, their problems are petty, they lack all insight, etc. Ms. Dargis sees this as somehow a mistake, an accident. If we are supposed to care about these characters, then, yes, it's a mistake—and there are signs of "feelings" that crop up later in the movie that suggest, yes, this film has made a serious misjudgment of my investment in it. Nonetheless, the bland, at times pitch-perfect inanity of yuppie dialogue is (although a bit theatrical) among the better writing in recent films. It's a party I'm glad to leave, and a group of people I don't mind seeing killed (although the women are unbelievably beautiful and also a bit of a liability for the film's realism)—but as a 30-minute short film about idiots and their lives, Cloverfield's opening scenes are a kind of accidental genius.

Unlike I am Legend, Cloverfield never made me feel like New York City was the very scary place that in reality it is. Nor did I feel, as with The Birds or Dawn of the Dead, as though the monster(s) not being there would have still left an interesting drama (maternal issues and suburban capitalist brain death, respectively). If in I am Legend, I felt sometimes, "I wouldn't go into that doorway even if there weren't zombies there!", Cloverfield failed even to make a swarm of subway rats frightening, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

Oscars-- Thoughts

So, the nominations are out. Here's how I think things should fall into place (although everyone knows the best game is statements like, "the academy really likes [the fourth time around, actors at X in their career, films that came out on a Tuesday, soundtracks with vibraphones, etc.--a game we can play later).

Maybe we can have a little forum about the main categories, one by one?

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men

Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Actress: Laura Linney

Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem

Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton

Best Director: PT Anderson

Best Screenplay OG: Juno

Best Screenplay Adapted: No Country for Old Men

Editing: There Will Be Blood

Art Direction: There Will Be Blood

Documentary: No End in Sight

Cinematography: There Will Be Blood

Score: this is such a rip-off, how did There Will Be Blood not get nominated??

Sound Editing: No Country For Old Men

Animated Feature: Persepolis

It is my opinion that the most important technical category is "sound editing." If there is one thing that Antonioni teaches us...

No Country For Old Men

So late? Can anyone still care about this film? Are there really people who need a "review" of this venerable, perhaps already-dated film?

Because I try to see every movie the week it comes out, these were my questions when I went to see No Country for Old Men a second time. (My first viewing of the movie predates this blog--has it been so long?) Surprisingly, the show was nearly sold-out, and my cavalier attitude ("The theater will be empty!") resulted in some crappy seats. Anyways, enough about that, but I am as surprised as you are that some people wait more than a month to see the best-reviewed movie of the year. And in New York! Well, as Derek pointed out, maybe they were all re-watching it, too. Let's pretend that's true. Enough throat-clearing.

*

No Country for Old Men:
*is a period piece
*does not make me want to read the novel it is based on
*has no score/soundtrack
*contains gut-turning violence
*improves on second viewing
*is simultaneously an action film (a la The Terminator) and a genuinely philosophical thought-piece

All of that deserves a lot of print, especially the first two bullets, but the only interesting question for me right now is,  is this a better film than There Will Be Blood? For many viewers, this will come down to the endings. No Country ends with Tommy Lee Jones, who is underutilized through most of the film, relating a very poignant dream about his father. It is an abrupt ending, though I'm not sure why, because it is such a classic "modernist" ending. There Will Be Blood's ending alienated many viewers, because it neither concludes the story happily, nor gives a precis of its "meaning," nor shows character growth, and is petty, brutal, and tonally abstruse. 

One has to ask, how would we feel about Oedipus' freak-out at the end of Oedipus Rex, on a movie screen today? Or, worse--Oedipus at Colonus? If we don't think about "story," and focus on...affect? irony? catharsis-- There Will Be Blood ends much better than it first seems. Compare the final shot of the Godfather, Part 2: the flashback to the complete family around the dinner table---that is not "part of the story," you see? Not that the film succeeds at the high level of those masterpieces, but I think this is the logic.

No Country For Old Men, however, is philosophically more troubling, and its refusal to take itself as seriously as There Will Be Blood lets the dialogue breathe more--it is less didactic. If the monster in There Will Be Blood dooms himself, there is no satisfaction in No Country that we are walking out of the theater into a safer world than that onscreen. As a defunct blog remarks, "this is the real virtuoso shit." That could be said for both films, but No Country for Old Men is positively Shakespearean, while There Will Be Blood is ultimately only Faulknerish. If PT Anderson wants us to "unblinkingly" observe this nightmare life, the Coen brothers have put more thought into their "world." And, I think it bears saying, our world. 

Addendum to "Berlin Alexanderplatz" exhibition-review

Derek's review of the screening of Berlin Alexanderplatz at PS1 may be taken as my opinion on the matter, as well. A 15-hour film is not an occasion for gimmicks which have the opposite effect of the film's monumental length: to produce tape loops only of the most "artsy" and irrelevant sections, to de-narrativize it into a wall of stills or a kaleidoscopic panopticon. I object to treating a great film as an occasion for misunderstanding it, and for misunderstanding cinema. It is my belief that opera *exists* only in the opera house, that theater exists only onstage, and that cinema exists only on the movie screen. There is no Platonic or Shelleyan "true" version of, say, Berlin Alexanderplatz, other than what happens in a movie theater. The original German TV broadcast was marred by the black & white TV sets of the time, and the DVD (while very nice) does not supply what is missing. Suffice it to say, the exhibit is insufficient, despite its claims of thoughtfulness and the purported "room which simulates a movie theater" (nothing could be farther from the truth). This is no place to start watching this movie--it does not start at a set time, the seats are uncomfortable, and the ambient sound and lighting from the museum are distracting. However, I am in truth obliged to print that the projection difficulties which Derek reported have been fixed, and the projection was fine yesterday. Nonetheless, I do not recommend the exhibit unless one knows the film already, in which case the jumbled presentation may be stimulating. If one has seen the movie already, watching it unfold simultaneously on 14 different screens is a great experience. But, as this exhibit is meant to introduce the film to American audiences, it comes across as poorly thought-out and a wasted opportunity. One looks to MoMA's screening practices as rather more exemplary.

Persepolis

The inevitable adaptation of the graphic novel into the feature-length animated film. As with all adaptations, it is best to proceed with a kind of double focus. I am not of the school that adaptations should merely "succeed on their own," because I take the translation between media seriously, nor am I made of stone.

Many will wonder why an animated feature, already dubbed into French, could not have been recorded by English or American actors for our shores. The only justifications are 1) money-saving, 2) the prestige of a "foreign film," and 3) artistic necessity. Probably it was a mix of all three. Many of the lines are clearly intended to be delivered in French--it is not, that is, the Persian of Marjane Satrapi's childhood which is being translated into French; the *emotions* and tics here are decidedly French. But, most of that is lost in the subtitles. An idiomatic English-dub would have preserved more than is lost. As it is, if you cannot understand some French, you will likely find it a bit Babar-esque.

The animation itself looks fantastic: it is the graphic novel "come to life." One never feels far from the paneled world of the comic, and yet the movements and scenes are gorgeous and not at all "sketchy." Most animated films today (and this should still be said) are ruined by computer-animation and "rendering" techniques that miss the whole point. Persepolis at least understands what it is to be a cartoon. This is all the more to its advantage, because the illustration does cute kid, puppet shah, sexy 20-something, riot/massacre, and historical summary all very deftly, in different styles but without seeming to be so.

Alas, the movie is too long, and runs out of steam fairly early. As with the graphic novels, part one (her childhood in Iran) is more interesting than part two (an adolescence in Europe and early 20s in Iran). Because it is a memoir, I suppose I can't critique the narrative structure so much, but the pay-off here is very slight. And although adult Marjane has the best scene (an inept, heavily-accented singalong to "Eye of the Tiger" w/ training montage), she mostly loses out to her earlier, cuter incarnation.

In short, I have read three graphic novels in my life, and the other two (Fun Home and Maus) were both better than Persepolis. They probably could not be made into as successful films as Persepolis, because Fun Home treads the same narrative territory over and over, and Maus is split into two stories forty years apart, but overlapping. Persepolis is straightforward and lends itself to this sort of thing (a film version), and if the film captures nearly all the charm of the graphic novels, it also keeps their flawed structure and the drifting of the audience's sympathy and interest.

Slow week for movies in New York

The problem with seeing every film that one wants to see, the moment they come out, is that when the film release schedule hits a dry spell, as now, one really is out of options. I've already seen There Will Be Blood and Juno twice, and Be Kind Rewind and Cloverfield are still a week away. These are desperate times.

This week I hit up the Preminger retrospective at Film Forum. The movie I saw, Saint Joan, is held by no one to be among Preminger's best work. It is an ill-conceived adaptation of Bernard Shaw's play, and like many stage-to-screen productions, does not know where to proceed, and is framed awkwardly. I hesitate to make a sweeping judgment on Preminger's ouevre without having seen very many of his films, but aside from Laura, I have not liked what I have seen. More damningly, I think, the casting of Jean Seberg here (in Saint Joan) is a debacle. She cannot deliver the dialogue at all. While Jean Seberg is astonishingly good-looking, her acting is distractingly bad. Apropos another Preminger/Seberg film, Bonjour Tristesse, one is forced to read Truffaut's remark that it is "Preminger's love poem to Seberg," as "he must have been fucking her." Which, whether it is true or not, is basically the only excuse for the shoddy Saint Joan.

And I ponder aloud, is there any justification for our "revisiting" Preminger? As a corollary to the oft-asked "Is nothing sacred?", we might propose an alternate, "Is nothing assuredly and definitively hacky?" Must we constantly revive such second rate bodies of work? Preminger=a director whose talent I am willing to leave as a question settled in the negative.

Is Persepolis the only game in town this week, then?

There Will Be Blood

In a way, it's a shame that Mr. Strick has not yet seen this movie, because I am more interested in his thoughts on it than my own, but it is becoming criminal that we don't have a review of it yet, so here is my review:

As many know, I am a big fan of western movies, and over the past few days I have re-watched Red River and Destry Rides Again, both fine classic westerns. There was a recent New York Times Magazine article about the return of the Western to Hollywood, by which was meant 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, There Will be Blood, and No Country for Old Men. I don't know if that is a meaningful trend: even if one includes The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Brokeback Mountain,The Proposition, and Open Range, well...well, then that actually does start to look like something.

Among the films just listed, several are in the Sam Peckinpah/spaghetti western vein of extreme violence: The Proposition may be the most violent film I've ever seen, and even the middle-agey Open Range and the art-house Jesse James were notably brutal. And, albeit in a different way, No Country for Old Men is not a film I would let my mother see even five minutes of, it's so violent.

If I was like John Ruskin, tallying up the number of deaths in Dickens' Bleak House, There Will Be Blood would have a relatively low "body count." But the movie is violent not in the sense of being-rated-R-for, but in the sense of a violent jolt, a violence-against-nature--in the sense of being physically intimidated for 2 hours. Violence is done to the viewer; you get up a bit shaken.

Many people have remarked and will continue to remark on Daniel Day Lewis' performance in this film. Deservedly so. His posture alone, in the scene where he meets his brother, deserves an Oscar. So does the score--No Country for Old Men brilliantly dispensed with any score; the intense and eerie score here seems the only possible convincing response. Like No Country for Old Men, the editing is superb and not at all new-fangled. And if Daniel Day Lewis is channelling John Huston (in Chinatown) here, PT Anderson is mining the Kubrick of Full Metal Jacket and Barry Lyndon here: epic discomfort.

I can't give a "reading" of the film without giving a great deal away, so I will stop at saying that, with some faults--mostly of excess--this is a unique accomplishment and completely blows away both the glossy Best-Picture-winning and navel-gazing indie films that have dominated American cinema since...let's tentatively say since The Silence of the Lambs or the previous Coen Brothers triumphs, Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. I may be getting carried away, but everything certainly looks weak and vain next to this movie. Especially bad in comparison is The Gangs of New York, or a film like Training Day. Here really is a film with superb editing, great dialogue, virtuoso acting, a perfect score, and a vice-grip on its story line. These differences between this film and the usual critically-lauded prestige picture lead one to honestly ponder when and why we came to expect anything else.

The Orphanage

This is a Spanish "horror" film produced by the director of the overrated and meaningless Pan's Labyrinth. But it has less in common with that film than with a recent pair of (a term I am coining here) "maternal horror" films: The Others and Dark Water. I'll come back to that later in the spoilers section. For now, we can say that these films draw primarily on The Turn of the Screw (or its brilliant film adaptation, The Innocents) for their premise, combined with a too-keen awareness of "empty nest syndrome" as having possibilities for horror. The best part of The Innocents, of course, is the weirdly virginal OCD of Deborah Kerr, so half the game is lost when you have the mother *be* a mother.

Which, technically speaking (and this comes out like 5 minutes in), the woman here (Belen Rueda) is not. Her (ridiculously adorable) child is adopted, but that seems to have no bearing on anything else in the movie. Is there some trope I'm unaware of, where orphaned children can't have children of their own? So, that doesn't signify anything. And neither do many other aspects: there is a great boring swath running through the middle of the film, until the movie abruptly snaps back into the concerns of its early scenes.

Many people will think that a film all taking place in one location, Aristotle-style, will add to its intensity: The Innocents, The Haunting, Die Hard, etc. This is not true for The Orphanage. I got bored with the location fairly early on.

The first hour of this movie is pretty solid, but only because it handles things in a manner alternately relaxed and contemporary, then "classic," then Hitchcockian (one scene only: see spoilers), only occasionally sliding into a "nowadays horror" vibe. Everyone seems to want this film to be the anti-Saw, the anti-Hostel, the anti-Rob Zombie. But that seems to me to be apples/oranges. What ought to be remarked upon is how very *2007* the film is: the editing, the title screen, the numerous production companies involved, the boring music, the CGI, the casting, the reliance on spooky children still lingering from recent Japanese horror exports, etc. It is definitely a post-Amelie movie, and no one will be confusing it with The Haunting or The Innocents.

****SPOILERS****
Obviously the filmmakers thought they had a good Freudian scare going here. The central mystery, the search for the HIV-positive (this also signifies nothing for the film) child turns around another mystery-axis, namely the return of something unwanted and unsearched-for: the parallel death of a deformed child years earlier. To spell it out, the deformed child was "hidden away" in the past, and so it's return is specifically the return, not just of any ol' dead kid, but of something that had better remained hidden. But the movie drops the ball here, as after a tasteless (read: wonderful) scene in which the frantic mother begins to tear the (inexplicably-provided) masks off of a number of retarded children on her lawn, searching for her son, but then never builds on that real breach of propriety and only gestures wholesomely towards the theme (of disturbing and creepy special needs kids) afterwards.

The Hitchcock moment is the recognition of the "social worker" in a different town altogether, on the street, just before the best shot in the film. It is truly unexpected and yet (for a split second) not at all "scary"--the street is well-lit, the woman is going about her business in a way we figure she has been for months, and she seems *not to recognize* "us" either.

About the ending: The Others, Dark Water, and this film all end the same way. The mother is "united" with her children in an afterlife of maternal bliss. The "real world" is escaped so that the fantasy can be carried on endlessly, spectrally. I do not see the cinematic or signifying appeal here; that could just be me.