The problem with The Hurt Locker, in the view of Newsweek‘s Seth Colter Walls, is that it has no political inquisitiveness and is therefore way too opaque.
“Artists were put on earth to…give us insight and catharsis, not merely riff on the free-floating tensions that already dominate the mass consciousness,” he says. “The conventional wisdom is that Iraq War films have foundered at the box office because we have no appetite for them, but it might be that our appetite for them has been slight because they offer precious little nutrition. Nearly all of them are telling us pretty familiar war-is-hell narratives, even if those narratives are skillfully rendered in a technical sense.
“The Hurt Locker gives us not only no context but no hint that the context is missing, since it mines the adrenaline of combat without mussing itself in the viscera of anything as dangerous as ideology. It’s a rip-roaring piece of suspense cinema, but decidedly no more than that.”
Now the potential Polanski extradition situation seems to have temporarily swung in the direction of his being flown to the U.S. and facing a California judge. Polanski attorney Chad Hummel explained today that a reason that Polanski has not surrendered is because “he does not trust this system.”
I was on the Gaspar Noe boat after seeing Irreversible, but after seeing Enter The Void — a visually over-indulged and thoroughly sleazy after-death fantasy film — I’m totally off it until further notice. I’ll always admire Noe for being the go-for-broke provocateur — intensely opposed to typical shooting and cutting modes, pushing the boundaries as it were — but provocation in and of itself can get very old, especially when there’s next to no story being told and the characters are spiritually empty, pill-popping nowhere heads.
Noe has used, in these two films, an audacious, swirlygig crazy-bold shooting style. The camera rises and rotates and floats along and around, watching characters dealing or doing drugs and having sex (lots of that) from above, and flying over roofs and passing through walls and diving into gross toilets and bullet holes and squishy vaginas. But this camera language, if you will, is wildly undisciplined and grows tedious very quickly. Yes, it plays the visual panache card like few others films or filmmakers have ever dared or dreamed. But it’s essentially masturbatory.
I am going to take my time seeing the next Gaspar Noe film — that’s a promise. He’s no longer a must-see filmmaker.
Enter The Void is basically about the spirit wanderings of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a youngish kid who get shot to death inside a grimy toilet stall in a Tokyo club called The Void. His reason for lingering on earth is a pledge made to his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), a stripper/faux-prostitute whom he’s been living with in Tokyo, that they would never part, “no matter what.” So he floats and hovers over the people and places he knew in life.
But it all adds up to zip except for the initial intrigue of taking a ride with Noe’s camera, although that intrigue, as stated, goes out the window after 20 or 30 minutes. And then it becomes its own hell. For 156 minutes. People who take ecstasy and snort coke are deathly boring.
I missed Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low in Toronto but finally saw it this morning. It’s a first-rate backwoods American drama with a touch of whimsy. Superbly acted by Robert Duvall , Bill Murray, Lucas Black, Sissy Spacek and Bill Cobbs. An eloquent, plain-spoken, true-heart thing about values, friendships, backstories and buried business. My next film, Gaspar Noe‘s Enter The Void, starts in two minutes. Later….
IFC.com’s Stephen Saito recently reported on last Saturday’s Martin Scorsese/LACMA event. Somone asked where Scorsese stood on film grain, and he might as well have said, “Uhm, I kind of get where Jeffrey Wells is coming from on this issue and he’s not altogether wrong. The grain monks have staked out a position that is perhaps a little too purist, too extreme,”
Saito recorded most of the conversation and has sent the full quote from Scorsese on film grain. Read it and weep, residents of the Abbey of St. Martin! If Scorsese isn’t with you, you’re finished.
“I think it’s an interesting point,” Scorsese began. “Some of the grain, in certain cases, I think it’s been…like Jack Cardiff, who when he was still alive was able to comment of course on all the restorations of Black Narcissus and all the other films begin made and I think in certain films in certain sections, they would’ve liked it better if the grain was less. They would’ve liked it better if the dissolves…the internegatives didn’t look like dupes. And we just have to settle. They had to settle.
”And I think to a certain extent, they would’ve liked it cleaner. Don’t forget too that the instance of three-strip Technicolor, look at that…they did a few years ago, they had a color film at the Academy and they showed a few seconds of Robin Hood digitally restored and I do know…I really believe that the cinematographer would’ve preferred to have it cleaner at the time. There’s no doubt.
“I happen to like grain because I’m used to seeing it, but when I see it cleaned up, it’s a whole other experience. I talked about the grain, for example, we were talking about lusting after those Red Shoes 16mm prints — even with the grain, it didn’t matter. But to see it in a new form, I think that’s what the filmmakers really would’ve preferred in most cases, unless it was a stylistic choice to go with grain.”
Variety‘s Todd MCarthy has described Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Howl as “an admirable if fundamentally academic exploration of the origins, impact, meaning and legacy of Allen Ginsberg‘s titular landmark poem, it is also an intriguing hybrid of documentary, narrative and animated filmmaking, one that needed to burst through the constraints of its conceptual origins as a docu to express everything on its mind.
“That said, how many remotely commercial films have ever had the nerve to build themselves around core sequences consisting of long swaths of poetry being read to eager listeners, whose rapturous reactions are recorded in enthusiastic detail? Even if the shock that Ginsberg’s bluntly sexual and provocative words carried then can’t possibly be felt the same way 55 years later, anyone who revels in the pure pleasure of the spoken word will receive rare gratification here.”
And Marshall Fine has called it “an imaginative and thoughtful work, one that illuminates a fascinating moment of cultural history and one of America’s great writers. Whether it will appeal to a mass audience — or even an arthouse crowd — is another question altogether. After all, before the screening last night, the directors thanked their producers for allowing them to make ‘a movie about a poem.’ Which is what they’ve done.”
I spoke to director Bryan Singer at last night’s cool but over-crowded Howl party, and he told me about a chance meeting and a very long talk he had with ex-president George W. Bush on a jet back from South Korea last October. They talked for roughly six hours (with a nap break in-between), and literally about “everything.” Singer says he’s posted an account of it on his Facebook page along with a photo or two, but I haven’t been verified.
Singer was on his way back from a visit to the Pusan International Film Festival. Bush, who’d apparently given some kind of speech-for-hire in Seoul or wherever, began the conversation by asking Bryan what he did and so on. I couldn’t hear every word due to the incredible noise factor at the party, but I think I heard that Bush told Singer he was an X-Men fan, and that he and Bush ’41 had watched one of the films together.
In a 1.20 Huffington Post-ing, psychologist, neuroscientist and Emory University professor Drew Western has explained the Barack Obama problem — his stunning failure to show a semblance of balls in his dealings with Republicans — clearly and concisely,
“It is a truly remarkable feat, in just one year’s time, to turn the fear and anger voters felt in 2006 and 2008 at a Republican Party that had destroyed the economy, redistributed massive amounts of wealth from the middle class to the richest of the rich and the biggest of big businesses, and waged a trillion-dollar war in the wrong country, into populist rage at whatever Democrat voters can cast their ballot against.
“All of this was completely predictable. And it was predicted. I wrote about it for the first time here on the sixth day of Obama’s presidency, and many of us have written about it in the intervening year.
“The President’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that we have a two-party system, his insistence on making destructive concessions to the same party voters he had sent packing twice in a row in the name of ‘bipartisanship,’ and his refusal ever to utter the words ‘I am a Democrat’ and to articulate what that means, are not among his virtues. We have competing ideas in a democracy — and hence competing parties — for a reason. To paper them over and pretend they do not exist, particularly when the ideology of one of the parties has proven so devastating to the lives of everyday Americans, is not a virtue. It is an abdication of responsibility.
“What happens if you refuse to lay the blame for the destruction of our economy on anyone — particularly the party, leaders, and ideology that were in power for the last 8 years and were responsible for it? What happens if you fail to ‘brand’ what has happened as the Bush Depression or the Republican Depression or the natural result of the ideology of unregulated greed, the way FDR branded the Great Depression as Hoover’s Depression and created a Democratic majority for 50 years and a new vision of what effective government can do? What happens when you fail to offer and continually reinforce a narrative about what has happened, who caused it, and how you’re going to fix it that Americans understand, that makes them angry, that makes them hopeful, and that makes them committed to you and your policies during the tough times that will inevitably lie ahead?
“The answer was obvious a year ago, and it is even more obvious today: Voters will come to blame you for not having solved a problem you didn’t create, and you will allow the other side to create an alternative narrative for what’s happened (government spending, deficits, big government, socialism) that will stick. And it will particularly stick if you make no efforts to prevent it from starting or sticking.”