“This has gone back all the way down to Shakespeare’s days. When there’s violence in the street, the cry becomes ‘blame the playmaker.’ And you know, I actually think that’s a very facile argument to pin on something that’s a real-life tragedy.” — Quentin Tarantino on the cultural interplay between (for one example) the casual, cine-stylish, mock-ironic violence in Django Unchained and the real-life slaughters that are happening daily in this country.
The fact that Shakespeare resolved his dramatic conflicts with third-act violence is hardly analogous to the way Tarantino soaks his characters (and, in Django, the walls of his sets) in blood and brain matter. Tarantino’s blood baths are done with a wink, “referenced,” in no way earnest. They’re a jape, and yet underneath that jape is a message that says two things, in my view. One, bullets slamming into a long line of racist bad guys is at the very least amusement for jaded cineastes, and if I, Quentin Tarantino, could think of some way to make blood, entrails and brain matter more amusing, I would. And two, the slaughter of a long line of Southern racists is justified payback for the sins of slavery, and so I can go to town all I want because I’m wrapped in an anti-slavery, anti-racist cloak.
This To The Wonder trailer is five or six times more engaging than the film itself, and Javier Bardem‘s narration (the content of which is wise and dead-on) is something close to the sum total of his dialogue in the whole magilla, and with more clarity as his voice is much softer and mixed down in the feature. As I said in my 9.11.12 Toronto review, To The Wonder “doesn’t precisely fart in your face.”
“The Olympian indifference and almost comical current of fuck-you nothingness that runs through Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, which I saw last night at the Princess of Wales theatre, carries a certain fascination.
“I was prepared for it, having heard from Ben Affleck in Telluride that it “makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers” and having read the Venice Film Festival reviews. So it was hardly a shock to encounter a wispy, ethereal thing composed of flaky intimations and whispers and Emmanuel Lubezki‘s wondrous cinematography with maybe 20 or 25 lines of dialogue, if that.
It’s basically The Tree of Life 2: Oklahoma Depression. It’s Malick sitting next to you and gently whispering in your ear, “You wanna leave? Go ahead. Go on, it’s okay, I don’t care…do what you want. But you can also stay.”
And that’s the thing about this film. Malick gives you so little to grapple with (at least in terms of a fleshed-out narrative and that thing we’ve all encountered from time to time called “speech” or “talking” or what-have-you) that it’s pretty much your responsibility to make something out of To The Wonder‘s 112 minutes. It’s all about you taking a journey of your own devising in the same way we all take short little trips with this or that object d’art in a gallery or a museum. The film is mesmerizing to look at but mostly it just lies there.
Well, no, it doesn’t “lie there” but it just kind of swirls around and flakes out on its own dime. Run with it or don’t (and 97% of the people out there aren’t going to even watch this fucking thing, much less take the journey) but “it’s up to you,” as the Moody Blues once sang.
To The Wonder doesn’t precisely fart in your face. It leads you rather to wonder what the air might be like if you’ve just cut one in a shopping mall and there’s someone right behind you, downwind. That’s obviously a gross and infantile thing to think about, but To The Wonder frees you to go into such realms if you want. It’s your deal, man. Be an adult or a child or a 12 year-old or a buffalo. Or a mosquito buzzing around a buffalo. Naah, that’s dull. Be a buffalo and sniff the air as Rachel McAdams walks by! You can go anywhere, be anything. Which is liberating in a sense, but if you can’t or won’t take the trip you’ll just get up and leave or take a nap or throw something at the screen. Or get up and leave and head for the nearest mall.
I went with it. I wasn’t bored. Well, at least not for the first hour. I knew what I’d be getting into and I basically roamed around in my head as I was led and lulled along by Lubezki’s images and as I contemplated the narcotized blankness coming out of Affleck’s “Neil” character, who is more or less based on Malick. Or would be based on Malick if Malick had the balls to make a film about himself, which he doesn’t. If Malick had faced himself and made a film about his own solitude and obstinacy and persistence…wow! That would have been something. But Malick is a hider, a coward, a wuss. He used to be the guy who was up to something mystical and probing and mysterious. Now he tosses lettuce leaves in the air and leaves you to put them all into a bowl as you chop the celery and the carrots and the tomatoes and decide upon the dressing.
I came out of it convinced that I will never, ever visit Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where the film was mostly shot.
There’s a kind of mad breakout scene in the second half in which Romina Mondello, “playing” an Italian-born friend of Olga Kurylenko, who “plays” Ben Affleck‘s French wife, says “there’s nothing here!” and you’re sitting there in your slumber and going “no shit?” But it’s not just the place — it’s the emptiness and the nothingness that Affleck and Kurylenko, who have become lovers in her native Paris (just as Malick fell in love with and married Michelle Morette in the mid ’80s), bring to their blah-fart activities in the film — wandering around, making love, playing kid-wrestling games, staring at sunsets, moving this or that piece of furniture from one room to another or lifting it out of a cardboard box, etc. These are people who are investing in their own torpor. People who bring nothing to the table. Deadheads.
Kurylenko and McAdams did a brief q & a after the film, and Kurylenko talked about how her character is supposed to be a little “crazy” — unbalanced, obsessive. Except there’s nothing in the film that persuades you of this, or even hints at it, really. Her character is passionate and emotional and has no real compulsion in life — nothing to do except twirl around, make goo-goo or fuck-you eyes at Affleck, take care of her 12 year-old daughter, sleep, make love, wonder about stuff, prepare meals, wander, daydream.
I raised my hand and asked Kurylenko and McAdams if Malick ever talked about how the film is largely based on his own life and how this was at least a key part of the fabric of it all, and they both kind of looked at each other and then at the floor and more or less said, “Ask Terry…that’s his affair.”
From the TIFF press notes: “As Malick liberates himself more and more from the restrictions of conventional narrative and pursues a more associative approach, he gets closer to eliciting pure, subconscious responses from his viewers. It is gratifying to note that the same man who long ago wrote an uncredited draft of Dirty Harry now finds freedom in the transcendental.”
While writing last night’s near-rave of Jack Reacher I was reminded of Matthias Stork‘s brilliant Indiewire video essay (posted in August 2011) called “Chaos Cinema.” Not because Reacher exemplifies this trend — far from it. To the contrary and to its credit, it exemplifies bare-bones Clarity Cinema.
“Trying to orient yourself in a work of chaos cinema is like trying to find your way out of a maze, only to discover that your map has been replaced by a reproduction of a Jackson Pollack painting,” says Stork.
It’s must-viewing, this piece. It articulates and clarifies a lot of things that many of us have been feeling for a long while. “The only art here,” Stork declares, “is the art of confusion.”
Action films of the late 20th Century embraced classic cinema language, he explains. They were “coherent, understandable, riveting, economical, stabilizing — classical cutting. But in the past decade that’s gone right out the window. Commercial films have become faster, over-stuffed, hyperactive. Rapid editing, close framing, bipolar [something or other] and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial action films.
“Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action films, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload…a film style marked by excess, exaggeration, over-indulgence, a never-ending crescendo with no spacial clarity…chaos cinema. The new action films are fast, forward, volatile, an audio-visual war zone.”
Stork approves of the cutting in The Hurt Locker. I’m sure he also admires the way Drive is thrown together.
Within the last week I read a comment about Chris McQuarrie‘s Jack Reacher (Paramount, 12.21) being “a ’90s urban actioner,” which the commenter intended, I gathered, as some kind of putdown. Well, take out the negative inference and he’s dead right — Reacheris a kind of old-fashioned actioner in a ’90s or ’80s or ’70s vein (can’t decide which) but in a highly refreshing, intelligent, follow-the-clues-and-watch-your-back fashion.
It has no digital bullshit, no explosions, and none of that top-the-last-idiot-action-movie crap. Jack Reacherbelieves in the basics, and I for one was delighted even though it doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel.
Honestly? I was fairly satisfied but not that blown away by the final 25%, but the first 75% plays very tight and true and together, and Tom Cruise, as the titular character, has the confidence and presence and steady-as-she-goes vibe of a hero who doesn’t have to reach or scream or emphasize anything in order to exude that steely-stud authority that we all like. Reacher is just a bang-around Pittsburgh dirty-cop movie with a kind of Samurai-styled outsider (Cruise) working with a sharp-eyed, straight-dope attorney (Rosamund Pike) trying to uncover who stinks and what’s wrong and who needs to be beaten or killed or whatever.
It’s just an unpretentious, elegantly written programmer that’s nowhere near the class or depth of Witness, say, certainly not in the matter of departmental corruption and general venality, but it does move along with an agreeably lean, get-it-right attitude. I love that Cruise’s Reacher doesn’t drive a car or carry an ID or even a modest bag of clothing and toiletries. He washes his one T-shirt and one pair of socks every night in the sink.
I somehow got the idea that the Jack Reacher character, as written by Jack Grant/Lee Child, was some brawny badass who strode around and pulverized the bad guys like he was Paul Bunyan or something, largely because he was a mountain-sized 6′ 5″. I’ve never read a Reacher novel but the movie is not some brute kickass machismo thing but a largely cerebral whodunit that believes in dialogue and playing it slow and cool and holding back and pausing between lines and all that less-is-more stuff. It has a bit of a Sherlock Holmes thing going on between the beatings and threats and car chases.
Jack Reacher basically delivers what urban thrillers used to deliver before John Woo came along in the early ’90s and fucked everything up with flying ballet crap and two-gun, crossed-arm blam-blam. It has a little bit of a nostalgic Walter Hill atmosphere going on, particularly in the fashion of The Driver (’78). It also reminded me of the stripped-down style and natural, unhurried pacing of John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73), which starred Robert Duvall (who plays a small but key supporting role in Jack Reacher). If you know that film, you know what I’m talking about.
Reacher actually uses a plot that adds up and makes sense. It might be a little too old-fashioned in the final act as a feeling takes over that the gas is running low, but at least it doesn’t feel as if it’s been thrown together as a series of wild-ass digital set pieces with an indecipherable editing scheme. It has a brain, and it trusts that its viewers do also. I’ve just decided that Jack Reacher has been written and shot in the spirit of 1979…okay?
I’ll finish this tomorrow morning, but Jack Reacher is/was a modest but very pleasant popcorn surprise. Cheers to director-writer McQuarrie and producer-star Cruise and Pike and costars Werner Herzog (cash that paycheck!) playing a husky-eyed, Russian-accented baddie plus Richard Jenkins and David Oyelowo and others. Cheers also to the straight unfussy lensing of dp Caleb Deschanel.
But there’s still another version to come — a narrative drama from Atom Egoyan called Devil’s Knot, based on the 2002 true-crime novel by Mara Leveritt. Same story, same characters, same everything…except performed by Colin Firth as Ron Lax, Reese Witherspoon as Pam Hobbs, Kevin Durand as John Mark Byers, Bruce Greenwood as Judge David Burnett (original judge of the 1st murder trial), Elias Koteas as Jerry Driver, Stephen Moyer as prosecutor John Fogelman and Alessandro Nivola as Terry Hobbs (i.e., the likely culprit).
I’m mentioning this because two nights ago I was offered a chance to catch a couple of research screenings of Devil’s Knot — one scheduled to happen last night or tonight in West Hollywood, I was told, and one in Pasadena. I don’t attend these types of screenings, of course, but if it’s being refined now…well, it’ll probably debut at the Toronto Film Festival, right? Egoyan being Canadian and a mainstay of that gathering, etc. Or it could turn up in Cannes. The only question is “how many times are the people who would normally be receptive to a smart, grade-A true-crime film…how many times will these folks be wiling to go to the West Memphis Three well?”
Imagine that two years ago director Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner and actor Daniel Day Lewis decided to make a film about the conflicted and largely failed presidency of Andrew Johnson instead of one about Abraham Lincoln‘s passage of the 13th Amendment. Johnson would have told the story of a decent and principled man who was in some ways his own worst enemy and who caught hell over the failures of post-Civil War Reconstruction, and who ended up being impeached by the House only to be acquitted by the Senate.
Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States (1865-1879)
Imagine what the response would be if Spielberg had brought his very best game to the table and if Johnson had turned out to be just as good a film as Lincoln is — superbly acted by DDL, rich in period atmosphere, thoughtful, stirring, well-researched, great supporting performances, first-rate production values. You know that Johnson wouldn’t be as much as a hot Best Picture contender as Lincoln seems to be right now, and you know that people wouldn’t be saying “yeah, I guess you’re probably right — at the end of the day the Best Picture Oscar is probably going to be won by Johnson.”
And you know why, don’t you? Because the presidency of Andrew Johnson doesn’t stir us like Lincoln’s. Because we haven’t been taught since we were six or seven years old that Johnson was perhaps our greatest president ever. Because Andrew Johnson wasn’t assassinated. Because he isn’t on the five-dollar bill. Because Johnson’s contentious presidency is widely regarded as a muddled, frustrating thing, and marked by derision, discord and controversy.
I’m just making a mild, even-handed point about Lincoln, which is that deep down much if not most of the acclaim for Spielberg’s film is about our lifelong embrace of the legend of Abraham Lincoln. Is it a good film? Yes. Is it a very good film? You could argue this. But if Johnson was just as good as Lincoln and perhaps in some ways a little bit better (you can’t beat that Senate vote on impeachment for a third-act climax), you know it wouldn’t be the same thing. Be honest and ask yourself — how much of the Lincoln acclaim is really about the film itself and how much of it is about the worship of a great man and a great historical figure? You know what the answer is. You know it.
“I’ve taken a lot of hits in my career — they bounce off. The armor was built so long ago that I now assume everyone else in the public eye can handle it when they’re shot at. But the outcry over the Bigelow tweets was eye-opening to me in a way that nothing else has ever been. I got it. I heard it. I looked back at what I was doing with those tweets (quickly, unconsciously, hurriedly, drunkenly) and I have to admit they simply back-fired. Which is why I’m writing this. No one asked me to write this. I simply write something like this when I’m in pain. And I’ve been slowly feeling a painfulness when reading all of the articles reacting to those tweets.”
“The American press’s reaction to the Bigelow tweets was swift and overwhelming. Without reading the news I could still feel it swirling in the air because everyone around me was talking about it. It was by far the most sustained attack on anything I had tweeted about. What was odd about the collective anger was that the tweets were solely about daunting, glamorous Kathryn Bigelow — they were not directed at women everywhere, yet women united and seemed to bond over what they perceived as both a much broader and more personal “attack” (a word used often in the articles in the days that followed).
“No one likes being wrong — I mean really wrong — about something. And in some of the cases where I’ve been attacked I really haven’t cared, because I’m not an example. I don’t represent. I’m just a lone voice and not a teacher. And I refuse to make my Twitter page one; it is what it is, take it or leave it, follow or unfollow, enjoy it or let it piss you off. But I’m taking a bit of a break from Twitter — not fully, not all the time, just over the holidays — until I see Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie.
Hollywood Elsewhere disappeared about an hour ago for about 25 minutes because of a tiny little spam post about pepper spray that was included in a comment thread under a 3.10.09 HE article called “Mumblecore Plus,” which was a review of Joseph Swanberg‘s Alexander The Last. Well, not specifically due to the spam itself but…here’s how it went down.
All is well now but I can’t believe that anyone in the world can be as anal or petty as the guy who started all the trouble, a Jacksonville merchandiser named Joseph Morris. Except I was the cause of the shutdown — make no mistake. It was me. Nobody else. But Morris was the instigator and the nitpicker.
Somewhere in that “Mumblecore Plus” thread an underpaid schlub from Estonia or China posted a piece of spam about a pepper-spray product. Which ants, worms and maggots, if they could read and could operate a computer, wouldn’t give a damn about.
Six days ago I received a letter from Morris, who runs a Jacksonville-based company called Buy Pepper Spray Today. (Which I’ve been blocked from visiting within the last hour or so.) His letter complained that the March 2009 spam post was infringing upon his legal URL copyright, and that he was prepared to “seek the removal of the infringing material” and therefore block any website hosting this spam, and that he would do so under Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
I read Morris’s letter, and rather than act like an adult by removing the offending spam and alerting him that I had done so, I wrote him the following: “Are you serious? A fragment of a post from 2009, or three and three-quarter years ago, was copied onto my server by some person working from a Chinese or Estonian spam sweatshop, and you’re telling me to do something about it? This is what you do with your life?”
I guess I was also thinking about the product itself. Pepper spray has been used by cops to disperse Occupy protestors, or so I’ve read. So I sitting there thinking, “He’s selling an ugly product so eff this guy.”
“Why weren’t you concerned about this three years ago?,” I continued. “Or two years ago? Why did you wait nearly four years to complain? Are you really being this anal? Are you reading my reply with your thumb lodged inside your anal cavity as we speak? — Jeffrey Wells.”
That took a little energy to write — a little energy and some time to think it through and make the editing decision to not write “thumb up your ass” but instead “thumb lodged inside your anal cavity.” I mean, I could have simply deleted the pepper-spray post and informed Morris of same in half or one-third the time that it took to tell him he was being a huge pain. It was after midnight and I guess I was tired or irritated or whatever, but the bottom line is that it seemed, at that moment, more important to tap out a smartass reply than simply man up and take care of the problem.
And so Morris, obstinate fellow that he is, wrote my server, Softlayer of Houston, and sent them a properly constituted letter about the offense and cited Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). And then Softlayer sent me two letters about this, which I ignored because I don’t read at least half the crap that comes into my inbox because…I don’t know but it probably has something to do with feeling overworked and frazzled, especially in the wee hours. I regard any piece of mail that comes into my inbox that’s not personal or business-related as something to swat or wave away.
So around noon the Softlayer guys blocked the site. I hit the roof, called them up and screamed that this issue was about a single piece of spam that was posted nearly four years ago, etc. They lifted the blockage after a half hour’s worth of ranting, and I finally removed the spam post and it was duly recorded on a Softlayer trouble ticket. I feel like a jerk for not having acted in a more practical-minded way, but that’s how I roll from time to time, especially late at night when I’ve been at it for 16 or 17 hours.
“I loved you in Drive, you got robbed at the Oscars, I paid for the socks.” This was taped (or aired) on 12.6 so it’s ancient. But even after the horrors of Newtown, it’s funny.
Last March I explained two things. One, that I’d read the script for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis. And two, that Oscar Isaacs’ titular character in this matter-of-fact dramedy set against the backdrop of the early ’60s folk scene in Greenwich Village “bears no resemblance whatsover to the ’60s cafe folk-singer Dave Van Ronk,” or at least the Van Ronk I’ve read about over the years.
And yet today (12.18) Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedmandescribed Isaac “as a stand-in for real life folk musician Dave van Ronk”…Jesus!
Look, maybe there were two Dave van Ronks back in the early ’60s. One was this large, hulking troubadour guy who knew everyone, who organized West Village musicians so they wouldn’t be exploited by cafe owners and who “was heavily committed to folk music, to the musician community, to his troubadour way of life and to everything that was starting to happen in the early ’60s…if nothing else a man who lived large.” And the other Van Ronk was this smallish, morose, Latin-looking guy (like Isaacs) who lived and thought small, and was no spiritual match for the hulking Van Ronk…a guy who was glum and vaguely pissed off and resentful, and tried to make it as a folk musician but wasn’t much of a go-getter and who slept on a lot of couches. And the Coens sat down and said to each other, “You know what? Fuck the real Dave van Ronk…let’s make a film about his doppelganger.”
Friedman was writing about a recent friends-and-coworkers screening of Inside Llewyn Davis in Manhattan. His source tells him that Carey Mulligan‘s character is “romantically linked” to Isaac’s — not true. She’s pregnant by him and needs to get an abortion, but in no way are they romantically linked, at least not on the page. Mulligan’s character can’t stand Isaacs’ character. Nothing but bile and bitterness.
Friedman writes that “the film got raves from those who saw it, but it’s also said to be unlike most Coen brothers movies — no violence, no sex, no weird irony.” That sounds like the script I read. Very plain and low-key and untricky.
One viewer tells Friedman that Inside Llewyn Davis “made me cry”….bullshit. The Coen brothers have never made films that anyone has wept over, and they never will. They make cinematic, camera-rich movies with feisty performances and sardonic undertones that you can smirk or chuckle at if you want…but forget weeping or sniffling. Not in their wheelhouse.
Inside Llewyn Davis could possibly travel to Cannes five months hence, Friedman writes…and if you ask me it probably will.
