Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part Two (2011)

One should be very skeptical of the well-worn cultural valuation which says that characters should "have depth" and "develop" and that emotional complications and psychological gestures are signs of great art. There are very good reasons to prefer The Pickwick Papers to Anna Karenina.

The Harry Potter series has been applauded by critics and "adults" for taking the embryonic and juvenile characters of the early novels and plunging them into an ever-darker world, showing us their growth and loves and loyalties and adolescent torments. As a reader and a viewer, this has always felt painfully obligatory and even perfunctory. It would be different if, at a deeper level, these stories were "about" adolescence, in the way that Teen Wolf or Twilight obviously are... but they aren't. Harry's problems were never mine, and the confidence he has in mission (revenging the death of his parents and destroying absolute evil) is only ever superficially challenged.

At the same time, the Harry Potter universe is so huge and cool that you can pour pretty much anything into it with a palatable result. The forgettable minor characters, the incoherent political resonances, the comic relief, the uncomfortable racial pluralism (on par with George Lucas'), the needlessly complicated lore of patronus spells and horcruxes and elder wands... none of this can overshadow the basically brilliant premise of a secret wizard world beset by a dark conspiracy.

Through everything, the most interesting thing has been seeing how the present generation is only ever living through the bitter memories, allegiances, and secrets of the last one. Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sirius Black... this is all more lively than anything involving the Weasley twins or Cho Chang or Neville Longbottom. This last film really makes something of this (by now fairly dense) network of past survivances... but at the total cost of the Hermione/Ron element. These characters completely fall out of this last installment. Sure, they kiss. But I don't believe it for a second.

Rather, like an unstoppable behemoth, the narrative leading up to the final confrontation levels everything in its path: explanations hang in mid-air and are never taken up, emotional bonds are foreshadowed and never returned to, and the mythology (the most interesting part of the previous movie) is only confusingly alluded to. Instead, we get on one hand a lot of CGI battling, which is not well-managed enough to hold my attention--and on the other hand, a momentum-wrecking lecture by Dumbledore about the power of imagination... This is one of the worst scenes in film this year. But when it is over, we are immediately back in the action.

I guess I'm saying that the great strength of the Harry Potter universe, being JUST the universe itself, means that any narrative resolution, any climax, will not come up to the level of the conception itself. (This is what any child will tell you: they don't want to leave this world.)

But I should qualify this: one character's arc, Alan Rickman's Snape, has been riveting from start to finish, and the final revelation about his role is given appropriate attention and is the best thing in the movie. This is one of the few story lines that has persisted from installment to installment, and the closure is deeply satisfying.

Still, the franchise rests upon what is fundamentally not-story and not-character: the magic, the premise, the geography, the array of good and evil wizards, etc. Built into all of this is a Manichean conception of right and wrong that is substantially less interesting than even Star Wars. When the line is drawn in the sand, and Voldemort demands the allegiance of the Hogwarts students, only the most despicable character crosses the line to join the forces of evil.

These actors may now be able to grow facial hair, but their "world" has not grown up--the basically-decent, shopkeeping, quirky, democratic English who "don't want power" (see the last scene), versus the French-named Voldemort, the openly fascistic and self-proclaimedly evil Death Eaters, whose ideology is the world's clumsiest allegory of racism... The transparency of this obvious divide is Rowling's greatest fantasy, of course, and I wouldn't stop there: this is "bad" for our children, in a way obviously missed by Christian protesters of the novels.

Finally, we don't have "depth" or "development" here--that was covered in Part One--we have stern lectures from Dumbledore plus stuff blowing up. That these are dialectically identical should be obvious to any schoolchild: this is strictly good cop/bad cop stuff. The fantasy that we are "deeper" and more "conflicted" than our (unquestioningly ideological) enemy means that blowing stuff up is only our (regrettable) duty following from our higher conscience. In this sense, Rowling's redemption of Snape is only tossing a bone of humanism (he can cry!) to the other side: Voldemort's betrayal of Snape is the ultimate badge of honor, since Snape learns too late that he was wrong.

When I was a youngster, I would watch the last scenes of Bridge on the River Kwai and Return of the Jedi over and over: I couldn't get enough of these scenes of a suddenly conscientious act of self-destruction. "My life is worth less than what is right." This isn't a possible thought in Rowling's universe, for all of the reasons gone into above. It is, in the last reckoning, super-important that Harry live and that Snape be "taught a lesson."

Every readerly or cinematic trip to Hogwarts is also always going to school.

Bill Cunningham New York (2011)

One of the recurrent narrative elements in this character-sketch is the imminent closing down of the Carnegie Hall artist studios where the film's subject, New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, has lived for many decades. The filmmakers interview the other remaining tenants, who are a batty crew of old lady photographers and choreographers... perhaps this dying artists' colony was initially even the focus or premise of the film. We are supposed to find it a cultural tragedy that, e.g. a place where Andy Warhol or Marlon Brando once stood will soon become a corporate office, because that pays higher rent than the rent-controlled artists' studios.

But Bill Cunningham does not care about this part of his life. His studio is not a cultural landmark. It is a mess of filing cabinets, a twin bed, a couple of clothes-hangers, fashion books, and more filing cabinets. What is there to be nostalgic about? He muses that wherever he lives next will probably have a kitchen and a bathroom (his studio has neither), and his response: who needs 'em? This man does not have a "home life." Doubtless the artists' studios are a beautiful and sadly bygone idea... but Bill Cunningham treats his spartan private quarters as so much square footage. "I have never 'dined in,'" he says.

This is a man without a personal life, a workaholic. Everything that is not photographing clothes, simply doesn't exist for him. The movie provides ample fodder for a Freudian reading of sexual "sublimation"--all of his energies go HERE instead of ELSEWHERE. Yes. 100 % true. But this isn't interesting: what is interesting is that there is nothing "behind" the door marked "Bill's psyche." What is interesting is his practice; his opinions are secondary to his practice, his whole life is secondary to this practice.

Most touching moment of the film for me: everyone around Bill, including the filmmaker, is making a big deal about his having to move into a new apartment. He shrugs it off, is annoyed that this will be an inconvenience. "You can't let that interfere with your life," he says.

Hold onto that thought for a second. Isn't that the exact opposite of what we mean by "life"? Where we live, whom we live with, where our money goes, errands, our stuff... isn't that "life"? And doesn't Bill Cunningham mean... work? How could he have made such a confusion!

Many people will see this film and read it (correctly) as about journalism, or New York, or a curmudgeonly character. It's all of those things; and it is well-paced and punchy and I left the movie feeling better than I have in a long time. The line outside Film Forum has become the stuff of legend, but please brave the dreary weather and the line and go see this movie. It's all of those things... but for me, this movie is the ultimate rebuttal to something like the Youtube sensation of "The Last Lecture," or "Eat Pray Love," or any insipid bourgeois pablum about how life is about who you love, and how much you enjoy yourself, and thanks for the memories and the grandchildren. "Bill Cunningham New York" is a beautiful picture of life--I don't think you can walk away from it without accidentally saying to yourself that Bill Cunningham is an "artist"--but it is a picture of a deeply anti-social, stark, all-consuming obsession, too. What Bill is obsessed with is... life, social life, expression. What he regards is that which makes the world less dreary, more colorful--Walter Benjamin's "wide-eyed facticity" (Adorno); and like Benjamin he is a quintessential flaneur. But make no mistake: it takes an enormous amount of personal courage to live this way, and to do this work. Or: not to live, except by doing this work.

It's an exhilarating challenge on how to live, and all the more so when cast in the reflected light of fashion's ephemera, and the Heraclitean fire of the flash bulb.

Toy Story 3 (2010)

Although a number of movie sequels have been better than the original number--Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part II, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wrath of Khan, The Dark Knight, and of course Toy Story 2--this is possibly the only #3 which is better than the original. Maybe this is because Toy Story 3 is under no obligation to remain in the same genre as its predecessors; in fact, the bulk of the movie is a pastiche of the classic prison-break film (with special reference to Cool Hand Luke), with healthy borrowings from the James Bond and Star Wars series. To the filmmakers' credit, these references never reach the cynical, empty allusiveness of other Disney movies, most notoriously that of Robin Williams' Genie in Aladdin. Rather, the creators seems as enamored of "movie magic" as the rest of us; witness the countless small touches that populate the mise-en-scène: Buzz Lightyear's walk, Barbie and Ken's wardrobe, the texture of a toy's yarn-hair, or the way that garbage bags are accorded much more verisimilitude than the human face. While Pixar's Wall-E was endlessly compared to Chaplin and Keaton silent films, Toy Story 3 cries out for remarks about the influence of Kubrick and Welles, masters of the painstakingly conceived minor detail.

Like the robot protagonist in Wall-E, the Toy Story films are simultaneously high-tech digital products and bearers of an imperiled, almost corny humanism, a paradox which is also a variation on the familiar media/message dialectic. On one hand, here is a series of films whose protagonist is a quaint, stitched-together cowboy doll, Woody--a relic of 1950s culture which cites Roy Rogers, Howdy Doody, and Gunsmoke--while on the other hand, the animation is produced using the most advanced 21st century computer technology by Pixar, the brainchild of Apple Computer's Steve Jobs. But at this point perhaps the paradox dissolves; after all, Apple's products really are meant to be cradled, cherished, treated like one of the family. And, once they are superseded in their technology, they don't become "obsolete"--like classic toys, they too become kitsch. But is this to say that the Toy Story films are basically feature length versions of the (already adorable and charming) Apple commercials that screen on TV or in the banners of our favorite websites?

I mention all of this, not to condemn the Toy Story films as subliminal purveyors of consumer culture, reconciling us to commodity fetishism under the premise of children's entertainment, but rather because the films are so smart that they have already envisioned and inverted this criticism. Instead of a fruitless "critique" of consumer culture and materialism--one which will in any case continue to be pursued by a spellbound postmodernism--the films eschew dwelling on what is, philosophically, a naive appropriation of facticity, and, entertainment-wise, not very promising. Toy Story instead shows how our objects think us through, or even--this is Marx's sense of "commodity fetishism"--do our thinking in our place, in the way this very "material" takes on unconsciously metaphysical, fanciful properties in the margins and traces of its movement through our social lives.

Of course, as a basic allegory, Toy Story 3 is about not about toys; it is about "us"--our culture of shoving the dying, aged, and useless out of sight. There is a unmistakable, poignant perversity in representing the plight of human mortality and aging through children's toys. At this level, it is staggeringly powerful, and I was very glad to be wearing the 3-D sunglasses when the movie was over, to hide eyes that were very red from crying. I won't make myself ridiculous by waxing on about the "complexity" of the movie's villain, a pinkish-mauve Lots-o'-Huggin stuffed bear (memorably voiced by Ned Beatty) who smells like strawberries. "Lotso's" spurned, defensive villainy, which manifest itself only as cynical, equivocating self-preservation, is one of the triumphs of recent screenwriting. The cliché would be to laud its improvement over the Manichean idea of evil found in most children's movies, from Snow White to the Harry Potter movies, but of course we learned from No Country for Old Men that "pure evil" is anything but a simple consolation, safe only for children. The best moments in the film are parallel speeches about the disposable nature of human relationships; the first speech is greeted with warm approbation by the toys (and the audience), while the second is a horrific "unmasking," dramatically scored, which leads to Lotso's downfall. But the content of the "good" and the "bad" sides of Lotso is identical.

Ultimately, while Toy Story 3 is a great and moving film, the fate of the toys--the concluding message--is unsatisfactory. The allegory has to eventually collapse back into its ostensible subject, I suppose. In the last analysis, the toys have it easy: they are there to be played with. But here I can no longer find myself in the film. Woody (Tom Hanks) has his owner's name written on the sole of his boot: his destiny is marked. And while the difficulty of living up to that responsibility, and the vicissitudes of fidelity, make for great cinema, in life our destinies are never so clearly marked (not even in crayon). And here it returns to being a "kids movie"--children don't have *this* problem. The toys can't become... anything, other than what they are. On the other hand, this--becoming other than what one is--is the entire problematic of Pixar's The Incredibles. But it really isn't a theme that could be exhausted. That these questions have been almost entirely abdicated by serious cinema--say, by the empty, pretentious formalism of Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker-- and can only be smuggled in under the floorboards, as it were, of these Disney movies, is perhaps even more troubling than anything onscreen here.

Rebecca (1940)

For those who know something of dreams, the famous opening of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940)--"Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again," intoned by our heroine (Joan Fontaine) over gauzy images of a long drive leading up to a magnificent estate--contains a subtle but foreboding surprise. The dream that we are witnessing, of a nocturnal return to Manderley, knows itself to be a delusion: the lights in the windows are only lights cast by the passing moon; the full shapes of its towers, only the aggrandizing effects of shadows. Because this is emphatically not a dream of returning to Manderley, for reasons still to be spelled out. Our anonymous heroine is in fact dreaming of--willing, fantasizing about--Manderley's ruin, its quietude as it lays in ruin, succumbing to the overgrowth of the surrounding wood. And as the scene changes, and we come face to face with the innocent, awkward narrator in earlier days, this dream of ruin becomes a curious one to impute to her fresh youthfulness. And, as dreams tend to, this one too fades away into waking life: I have watched Rebecca a number of times without registering that the opening "gives away" the ending entirely.

Rebecca was Hitchcock's first American film, produced by David O. Selznick fresh off of his success producing (but really directing, writing, and editing) Gone with the Wind (1939). Although Hitchcock had already directed two absolute classics in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and The 39 Steps (1935), the larger Hollywood budget allowed for the casting of the world's greatest living actor, Laurence Olivier, as Maximilian de Winter, as well as for the Manderley set (and its destruction) and an overall less-closeted feel than in Hitch's British films. "Maxim" de Winter is one of Olivier's best roles: a peremptory, moody, haunted Mr. Rochester figure. We first see him evidently contemplating suicide over a cliff's edge at Monte Carlo, with vertiginous images of crashing waves that Olivier would reprise to great effect in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in his Hamlet (1948). Joan Fontaine somehow manages to seem both newborn and twitchingly neurotic as an insecure commoner whom de Winter does not so much seduce as command, liberating her from her demeaning job as a paid companion (to a scene-stealing Florence Bates) and installing her as mistress of the immense Manderley.

Or, she would be mistress of Manderley, except that the mansion is ruled by the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter (the title character, though never seen) and the eerie, domineering housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, whose allegiances are entirely to the (apparently drowned) first wife. Here we have one of Hitchcock's great themes: the place one finds oneself occupying, which one is manifestly an impostor. Just as Roger Thornhill finds himself being chased "as" Roger Kaplan in North by Northwest (1959), or the impostor Madeleine finds herself compelled by Scottie to dress as the part she plays in the first half Vertigo (1958), or Norman Bates' role as his own mother in Psycho (1960)--though the last of these is scarily effective--the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself installed in a position, a name, and a life which have already begun. In Hitchcock, one is constantly made to acknowledge how much of our lives are willing impostures. What remains is not so much escape (where would we go?) but a battle for dignity, with what little personal force one has at one's command. If Rebecca and Vertigo especially are great films, it is because they express the truth that yes, we are compelled (by the tyrannical eccentricities of an Olivier or a James Stewart) into these ill-fitting roles, but behind this compulsion lies a palpable desperation.

A word about Mrs. Danvers. What makes this woman so terrifying? For many of us, it must be that the suspicion that "British people are really like this"--icily rude, leading us into faux pas, suffocating us with etiquette. Jokes aside, Mrs. Danvers is one of Hitchcock's great villains because her motivation, a servant's faithfulness, would otherwise so obviously be a virtue. Villains in film, if they are of the mustache-twirling variety and motivated by callow selfishness, or of the Darth Vader variety and essentially following orders, may be "bad" enough. But Mrs. Danvers, like Norman Bates, is even scarier: these villains have set up inside themselves that to which they are faithful and of which they are so protective (the first Mrs. de Winter, Mrs. Bates), but with no distinction between "outside" and "inside." The location of evil here, really terrifying evil--and this expressed at the height of Nazi power in Europe--is not blind obedience to an external power, or hateful intolerance, but rather more subtly, the voice of conscience and secure continuity that we set up inside ourselves, what Freud would call the superego. And so it is fitting that it is in dreams of returning to Manderley that even the meek heroine of Rebecca repeatedly secures and masters the end of Rebecca's reign, as though even absolute ruin and decay were still a rather tenuous victory.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

This movie has one of Woody Allen's favorite devices: the appearance, half-way through a movie, of a character who has been much-talked-about for the entire first half, but has remained unseen. For example, Wallace Shawn as "Jeremiah," Diane Keaton's sexually-superpowered ex-husband, in Manhattan; or the uncle played by Tom Wilkinson in Cassandra's Dream. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz plays Javier Bardem's ex-wife, but the twist when she actually shows up is no twist at all: she is *exactly* as crazy and beautiful and violent as everything said about her up to this point. The scene is wonderful for the way, without any dialogue, Allen captures Scarlett Johansson's feeling upon seeing Cruz: oh shit, there's no way I can compete with this woman. And then the way the film resolves this situation is similarly wonderful.

Rebecca Hall is channeling Mia Farrow here, as the mousy, neurotic woman who is suspiciously good at "getting what she wants" (that's my reading, following Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives). She is just sexy enough to be believable, and her nervousness is easily its own equivalent of the volatile energy of Cruz.

What I like about this movie: it takes an interesting situation, and slowly unfolds it through several developments and a small twist. One could compare it to Bergman's last film, Sarabande, in the way that a few characters are walked-through complications in their desires, without any big action or false resolutions. Husbands and Wives would be an excellent reference within Allen's ouevre.

Whether one likes this film or not probably depends on your tolerance for the voice-over narration. To my ears, it was pure Flaubert: ambiguous, falsely even-handed, arrogant, but completely banal. Anyone who tells you the narration was "obtrusive" is just telling you they haven't read Madame Bovary.

The Human Condition (1959)

This 10-hour film played recently at Film Forum in NYC, and since I am lucky enough to not have to work, I was able to catch all three parts over several weeks. It is a very good film, and occasionally profound--however, its insights are not enough to sustain its length. On the other hand, in terms of "sheer" watchability, the plot *is* sufficient, and the movie is rarely tedious or bloated.

My point is simple and almost a truism: the bigger an artistic work is, the more it has to offer "big" truths. This is why an excellent TV show like The Wire (a 1-hr program) is fundamentally lacking the depth of a merely "good" 2 hr film. It is not a matter of entertaining us for a set length of time. It is a matter of ambition and statement. Believe me, 2 hours of the Wire packaged together as a feature-length film would be sorely disappointing.

I feel silly dwelling on this aspect of common sense, but I suspect it is a bit elusive in its logical result: the best movies will be (those which "pull off" being) the longest, the best books will be the biggest, the greatest operas will be the most uncomfortable to sit through, etc. The "finely made" little thing has to be *that much* more finely made to compare. Thus, epic poetry > lyric.

Put in those stark terms, few are likely to agree with this "common sense" any more. Indeed, many are apt to get defensive. But again, these truisms have their logic: War and Peace, Paradise Lost, Wagner, Proust--are these not the great achievements of their respective forms?

Probably the finest made "little" film is The Rules of the Game. It says a lot about French society, but by way of types and microcosm. A movie like The Human Condition tries to say a lot by showing the "whole thing" itself. And the amount shown here is astonishingly vast. Nonetheless, the insight (which The Rules of the Game or The Leopard excel in) is a bit flat here.

This is all a bit abstract. Frankly, the movie is too long to review as a movie. It consists of the destruction of a conscientious and moral man by the combined brutality of selfish or cowardly individuals and society's merciless exploitation of other humans. It would be simple to say that the movie's hesitations about Marxism are its blind-spot, but in 1959 a Marxist film would have been so "Soviet" as to be worthless in another direction (i.e.-the great Soviet films are much earlier). In short, the panoramic viewpoint of the film contains a jarring number of false notes, which are but poorly reconciled.

Morally, however, the film is supreme. I was frequently moved to tears. Technically, it is a great accomplishment, and the direction and Nakadai's acting are phenomenal. Almost the *only* thing lacking is some unifying penetration into the real state of things, the human condition, which would justify the length of the the film and reconcile its individual portraits.

One's ten hours are "well spent" watching this film. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and it does not compare favorably with Berlin Alexanderplatz or War & Peace. Perhaps this is why I have heard of those novels, and not the novel on which this film is based.

The Dark Knight

This movie is easily 40 minutes (the equivalent of one villain) too long, has some awful dialogue, pretensions to ethical "complexity," and a cluttered supporting cast. These are problems, but they are all problems of ambition--of trying to make a *real* movie, and not a cartoon. I don't necessarily applaud that ambition, because it seems misplaced and at times pretentious, but the resulting flaws are at least forgivable on that account.

What is that ambition, exactly? Weirdly, it seems to be to tell a story about a *city*--where most movies today are blandly "topical." This gives Gotham much more time and attention than one would expect for what is usually a faceless Chicago/New York hybrid--touching on city politics, geography, the way personal lives run into our jobs when we don't live in the suburbs and compartmentalize these things, media spectacles, etc. It doesn't have a lot to say about these things, but they are there, along with the dominant motif that the film links with the urban setting: hope and faith in our public servants. This theme produces the over-long Harvey Dent/Two-face plot, which is a kind of tumor clinging to the much-more-interesting Joker plot, but the film clearly feels it welded these together more than it really did. Two-face is supposed to be the "ultimate" mechanism in the Joker's plan for destabilizing Gotham: throwing the city into chaos, and exposing the noble and normal for the frauds they are. But that summary is much more succinct than anything you'll get in the movie.

Batman/Bruce Wayne (the chiseled and unreadable Christian Bale) gets less screen time than his deformed, villainous counterparts--proving the tired cliche that villains are more interesting than heroes--but if I can turn this cliche on its head, isn't the point of Batman that he has this interesting dark side? So actually that truism explains nothing, because of all superheroes, Batman is the closest to being a villain--a point taken up IN CONTENT by the film's plot, but not at all IN FORM (i.e. it is still much more interested in the "real" bad guys).

Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart are really great here-- Oldman disappears into the role, while Eckhart perfects the way charming and charismatic (blond) people can really annoy you. I wasn't very moved or sympathetic with Dent's tragedy...for whatever reasons... Maggie Gyllenhaal did nothing for me... Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman seem like one too many old actors for basically the same role... Again, the film obviously thinks it has some real drama here, but for the most part it doesn't. Why does Hollywood think that *we* will care as much about these characters as the director does?

The centerpiece of the film is a long car chase through the underground thoroughfares of Gotham--when most of the threads of the plot are drawn into the outcome of this one sequence: it's completely riveting. The other contender for best scene is when the Joker blows up a hospital---there's an incredible long take that is uncannily real-looking and disturbing; it's not shot like an "action film" at all. And that is the film's greatest strength--when it succeeds at being "not just a comic book movie" it is really astonishing; but because these (for the most part) aren't geniuses at work here, some really great shots and situations sit amid a lot of bloated could-have-been material.