the movie club
The Year in Movies
A Cry in the Dark
Updated Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 5:20 PM ET
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: What I Missed
Posted Monday, Jan. 5, 2004, at 11:20 AM ET
The problem with listing 34 movies and inviting feedback is that you get it, oh boy—and you realize that, after opening the gate so wide, you forgot to let in a few more horses. I inadvertently omitted Man on a Train, The Barbarian Invasions, and My Architect, all of which are certainly worthy of recognition. I still haven't seen Peter Pan, which I'm told by a few correspondents—and my 5-year-old (although not her great aunt)—is really something to see. (Today, maybe.) My tape of the documentary To Be and To Have, which just won an award from the National Society of Film Critics (without my help, obviously), is sitting in a FedEx office in the bowels of Brooklyn. My worst-of list was patchier. Why no comments on Gigli? I suppose because it has been beaten up so badly, even by its own stars, that further abuse would be ugly. (I almost wish I could make a case for it, but I'm not that perverse.) I didn't catch Bad Boys II. The one I repressed was The Life of David Gale, which is maladroit even for Alan Parker. But it could be a great midnight movie. Imagine men dressing up as crusading TV newswoman "Bitsy" and women as the lurking Puccini-loving cowboy. Imagine lethally injecting Parker in effigy.
Several readers have challenged my airy dismissal of the number 10, which does indeed have a correlative in nature if one examines one's fingers and toes. (Thanks, Jim Emerson and others, for the anatomy lesson.) My brother, the Orthodox rebbe, informs me that it has great significance in Torah as well. My apologies to homo sapiens and the Almighty. Also, I pushed some buttons in my aside on Glory and am grateful for the very civilized objections. I am persuaded that, statistically, African-Americans did not fall in greater numbers in Vietnam. But I can think of at least a couple of warmongering white world leaders who strongly supported the war but preferred to let others do the dying.
Out of a couple hundred e-mails, less than 10 were abusive—surprisingly. Those that were suggested the omission of Mystic River and inclusion of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was reason enough to cancel their Slate subscription. Refund's in the mail. I have written too much about Mystic River to rehash it all here, but I was taken to task by some readers in October for liking it too much and now am scorned for withholding accolades. A lesser man would stop opening e-mail, but I say, "Bring it on!"
Only one person quarreled with my omission of Cold Mountain. He asserted (irrefutably, I think) that critics used the occasion to attack Harvey Weinstein's hankering for another Oscar instead of reviewing the movie. I poked fun at Harvey—he's irresistible—but have quite a few Miramax movies on my list and would have loved one more.
Many, many rebukes for the failing to mention Seabiscuit. I'm on record as being underwhelmed: You'll have to read my review. As for Whale Rider: Yes, I cried, the filmmaking was elegant, and the girl extraordinary. But I'm increasingly impatient with a certain kind of cheap movie mysticism—the kind that goes into overdrive whenever Maori show up. I realize that In America, which turns on the transmigration of life forces, is among the most cornily mystical of films this year. Yet I think that every movie makes its own rules (hence my love for Kill Bill, Vol. 1 in spite of my impatience with the vigilante motif), and In America has plenty of realistic (borderline tragic) elements to serve as a counterweight.
The love in some circles for Big Fish I don't get—and Tim Burton is among my favorite American directors, at least when he stays antic and/or mean. Although it's based on a semiautobiographical novel by Daniel Wallace, I think of it as Burton's pre-emptive justification for not paying enough attention to his kids (all those fantasy worlds to explore, etc.). The film opens wide this week, so the volume of my hate mail might swell.
Reader Pam Inglesby asks whether documentary and fiction films have been borrowing more and more from one another—with good results. I think that's a great point. Even fairy tales like Lord of the Rings and In America are incorporating hand-held cameras and limited points of view, and this year's good zombie flick, 28 Days Later, learned the most important lesson from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which often resembles a newsreel. Documentaries, meanwhile, are consciously going where fictional films these days won't, posing questions with no clear answers and positively reveling in the ambiguities. Stranger than fiction, indeed, they are saying. They also serve as a ferocious rebuke to the vapidity of most TV reporting. There is no more potent metaphor here than the one in Bus 174, with its drama unfolding in front of TV cameras that see only a fraction of the picture.
"Please discuss Mel Gibson's Passion," writes one reader. I can't: I haven't seen it. And I'm frankly dreading its release and the pots of anti-Semitic mail I'll doubtless get if I respond in any way except religious conversion. I don't doubt Mel Gibson's belief, his—if you will—passion; but I also think he has a bit of a fixation on excruciating martyrdom. He's all but crucified in his Lethal Weapon movies, and in Braveheart he gets to be drawn and quartered while shouting "Freedom!" I suppose I betray my Jewish psychiatric roots here, but I'd love to hear him think aloud on this subject.
If there's anyone I haven't pissed off, here's a question for J. Hoberman. You wrote, in your review of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "Its hobbituary denouement is gayer than anything in Angels in America." Dude! Having speculated on Mel Gibson's fixations, can we move on to the erotic life of hobbits?
Fondly,
David
From: Sarah Kerr
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, and A.O. Scott
Subject: My Top 10 List*
Posted Monday, Jan. 5, 2004, at 12:26 PM ET
Dear David, Manohla, Jim, and Tony,
Hearty hellos to all and thanks as always to our host David, whose list and commentary last week and this morning is so rich and packed with goodies (and one or two wrongies, like Kill Bill) that it will take all week and more to respond to it. David, it's great that you'll keep us up to speed on reader complaints and contributions. Whoever wrote in to complain about that women-don't-like-The Lord of the Rings piece in the New York Times has my sympathy. Whoever wrote in to say that Peter Pan is a new classic also has my sympathy, for being, to my mind, sadly mistaken. I thought it was some of the dullest storytelling of the year, not to mention inappropriately sexualized.
Anyway, Happy New Year—the more so, from my point of view, because this past year was a real crap shoot for films. True, there were memorable accomplishments to appreciate. There were so many brilliantly executed feats of craftsmanship that the general mediocrity was at times hard to perceive. And, yes, there were documentaries. I liked those a lot, too. But they were a consolation prize: I would be more than happy to slide them down the list in return for feature films with, say, wittier wit or more bracing cultural news to deliver. So, my list arrives with a great big asterisk stapled to its side. Several films on it I liked with reservations such that I didn't expect to remember them come the end of the year. But time passes; the thing comes due, and here we are. I would trade a number of the following in to have one entry I loved as much as last year's top five:
The Lord of the Rings
Spellbound
Bus 174
Lost in Translation
American Splendor
Thirteen
Man Without a Past
Être et Avoir
Cold Mountain
Big Fish*
Station Agent/Swimming Pool/Master and Commander
Now, since we first started doing this a few years ago I have cut down on my tendency to spin out grand themes from the mere fact of a release date. So, some movies came out this year and they weren't quite as good as last year or the year before. So what? But I do want to start off by pointing out a pattern that many others, too, have noticed but still bears more discussion:
Revelatory movies about children (Spellbound, Être et Avoir, Thirteen, and Bus 174). Weird new formula in movies about adults. You made a great point, David, about films that exploit dead kids in your review of 21 Grams (a film I liked better than you, because the gorgeous acting and the charisma of Gonzalez Inarritu's direction triumph, barely, over the depressive O. Henry setup). The problem started a few years back. It was especially noticeable in the season of In the Bedroom and Monster's Ball; and the success and coming film adaptation of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones would indicate that missing or killed children have their role to play in modern fiction and could be with us for some time. But what is with the shocking number of films this year in which the plot or the character's sole motivation—indeed, the reason said character is even a person of interest—involved either fearing or grieving the loss of a child, or (more rare) a parent? It's not just 21 Grams—not at all. It's The Station Agent, Finding Nemo, The Missing, In America (tomorrow I'll explain why I think this is lovely in places but overrated), Mystic River (a good film in many respects, but ditto), The Son (ditto ditto), and Pieces of April.
I think we're talking about something more than a device resorted to by cynical or sentimental screenwriters here. I think we're talking about a cultural neurosis, or perhaps a new degree of influence on the cinema by the conventions of TV melodrama. In any case, to my mind it indicated a weird laziness, a temporary impoverishment, when it came to storytelling. The threatened family member as a kind of placeholder for a plot. I often got the feeling at the movies this year that the filmmakers' imagination had atrophied. They couldn't really think of anything else to say that would feel important enough, yet they couldn't give up the idea of being important. This may be a reason why something like Lost in Translation—not a great film, but wonderfully comfortable with its slightness and grieving-mother-free—seemed so fresh. In the other direction, there were films like Master and Commander, which had almost no plot (though the few brief moments of emotional engagement did resort to dead children) and strove instead to create a kind of enveloping, diverting, moment-to-moment virtual experience. I missed the space in between these two poles—the space of interesting, economically told stories.
That's it for now—back later, and can't wait to get overwhelmed by the torrent of preferences and provocations you all unleash. Next time I'll try to explain why neither Bad Santa nor A Mighty Wind did much to solve one of the gravest crises our nation currently faces—our great comedy deficit.
Best,
Sarah
*Since I'm not thrilled with this list anyway, I confess to including Tim Burton's father-son-reconciliation fantasy Big Fish in part just to tweak you guys, since if I'm not mistaken none of you could stand it. And part of me thinks you're right: It's garish, with major Southern accent issues and several episodes that feel like they came out of a can. And yet: Through all the corniness the film is quite moving at the end. And I appreciated its warmth and defiant non-realism in a year when so many big releases opted for gloomy verisimilitude.
From: A.O. Scott
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr
Subject: Top 10 Lists All Around!
Posted Monday, Jan. 5, 2004, at 6:07 PM ET
Dear friends,
As I was waiting for your e-mails this morning, I happened upon this piece, in which Louis Menand breezily mocks the conventions of year-end list-making (without, of course, deigning to suffer what he rightly calls the "anguish" of making his own list). The piece is funny and well worth reading, if a bit glib. He seemed troubled that the Times published three separate lists this year, containing 24 different films (none of which made all three lists) and that the three critics in question (Elvis Mitchell, Stephen Holden, and myself) amiably argued, in the pages of the "Arts & Leisure" section, about some other movies, a spectacle he likened to "watching your parents fight."
All I can say is, if his sensibilities are ruffled by disputation and multiplicity, he'd better stay off the Internet in early January. If that page of "Arts & Leisure" was like a parental quarrel, then this Movie Club may well resemble the family reunion where your grandpa backed the Lincoln into the swimming pool and your great aunt pulled a gun on your second cousin. Not only that. If three list-making critics give Menand vertigo, what will he make of the 10-best lists compiled at moviecitynews.com? There are around 200 from every imaginable newspaper, magazine, and Web site, and they've all been digested into an unreadable but nonetheless fascinating chart that has occupied my attention for much of the past two weeks.
And it also obliterated any sense I once had of my own individuality, since even my most obscure choices show up on at least 10 other people's lists. On the other hand, I find myself drawn into strange communities of taste, in which I find myself agreeing with some of the people I think of myself as having least in common with, and violently at odds with some of the critics I respect and admire most—like, um, you, Manohla, and you, Jim.
I guess my point is that our conversation, which tends to be the high point of my year, is part of a much larger, endlessly contentious, and chaotic movie discourse. Louis Menand finds this dismaying—a further Zagatization of a culture that above all needs authoritative criticism—but I can't agree. Especially when this year has produced so many movies worth arguing about. You may be right, Sarah, that the overall quality was weaker than last year, when we had Talk to Her and The Pianist and Spirited Away and Punch-Drunk Love, but this deficit may have been made up for in intensity of debate. There were more movies out there this year that seemed worth fighting about—not just politely admitting to differences in opinion over, but really defending or attacking, tooth and nail. In the past few months, I've had heated exchanges, verbally and over e-mail, with friends, colleagues, and readers, about Mystic River, Love Actually, The Triplets of Belleville, Elephant, Fog of War, Something's Gotta Give, Kill Bill, In the Cut, and 21 Grams. That's quite a range of movies to be vexed about, and the disputes have covered just about every aesthetic, ideological, and moral base imaginable. I must say I'm looking forward to more, in particular to defending Barbarian Invasions from Jim's disdain.
Meanwhile, Sarah, I'll take your Big Fish bait. In a year of dying parents and imperiled children, this was one case where I wished the man would just hurry up and die. The narcissism of Edward Bloom was so suffocating, and so thoroughly endorsed by the movie—which made the poor, decent son into the deficient one in the relationship, rather than his monstrously selfish dad—that I wanted Billy Crudup to slap a pillow on Albert Finney's face and be done with it. Would you really want to spend two hours in the elder Bloom's company, much less marry him or be his child? I also found the movie's conflict-free nostalgic Americana oppressively Gump-y. (Gosh, Alabama in the '50s and '60s sure was a swell and happy place!) In America, of course, was in its own way just as sentimental, and just as prone to a slightly soft magic realism, but I minded it much less (actually I really went for it, though less rapturously than some), because of the acting, the modesty of the direction, and because I'm a sucker for romantic views of New York, for precocious children, and for anything to do with E.T.
The child-in-peril theme is certainly the dominant one this year, and by the time I got to House of Sand and Fog I felt thoroughly oppressed by it and found myself thinking back fondly on movies that viewed children as resourceful and resilient as well as scared and anxious and that showed their relationships with adults to be more complex and two-sided than protector/predator and prey: I'd mention Spellbound and Finding Nemo and Être et Avoir, and also Holes and Freaky Friday. Spellbound and Friday (which did have a dead parent, I realize, but only because divorce has lately become a renewed source of skittishness in Hollywood and because the plot was already plenty complicated without a Dad in the picture) showed that the parent-child relationship is full of dramatic potential even—or maybe especially—when there is no mortal peril. Those movies also affirm what the others deny, which is that most American children live in cocoons of safety and privilege, or are at least fed, sheltered, and encouraged to believe that they can accomplish great things. Of course, there are reckless drivers and sexual predators and serial killers and brain tumors (and, for all I know, white-slaving Indian brujos as in The Missing), but to look at Bus 174 or In This World or The Magdalene Sisters is to be confronted with an inequality that some of those child-in-peril melodramas actually, though inadvertently, work to deny, which is that the lives of children elsewhere are imperiled not by random evil or ill fortune but by structural and institutional cruelties that we can hardly imagine.
But on to the comedy deficit! This is ground we've gone over before, but I think things looked up a bit this year. Also, Sarah, I love your No. 10 pick. What was your favorite part, the bit where Ludivine Sagnier performs topless brain surgery on Patricia Clarkson or Russell Crowe's uncanny impersonation of an angry French dwarf?
All the best,
Tony
From: J. Hoberman
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott
Subject: Hobbitsexuality
Posted Monday, Jan. 5, 2004, at 6:21 PM ET
Hi, all; and thanks, David, for inviting me,
Since you asked, I'll be glad to wax personal on The Lord of the Rings. Back in his critic days, Truffaut wrote something to the effect that when a movie achieves a certain success, it becomes a "sociological event" and the question of quality is secondary. That's how I feel about the Rings trilogy, which is surely the greatest thing of its kind since Titanic (and certain to win Jackson an Oscar). It's not that I don't understand the movie's appeal. I discovered the trilogy when I was 11 and became a total Tolkien nerd—I saved up and ordered the books from England (this was a few years before the unauthorized Ace paperback) and have them still, although, as I discovered when I attempted reading them aloud to my kids, the thrill was gone.
So, too, the movie(s), which I didn't find boring, exactly, but which I knew too well to really take seriously. (Was it Oscar Wilde who said that nothing is more ridiculous than the actions of a person one has ceased to love?) I would have liked them better if the effects and art direction had been more restrained—closer to black-and-white epics like Andrei Rublev or Marketa Lazarova or even The Seventh Seal than some William Morris notion of Medieval Times. My taste is still nerdy but it has evolved! Favorite movies released last year in New York include Peter Watkin's five-hour evocation of the Paris Commune, David Cronenberg's very creepy Spider, Bill Morrison's ode to composition Decasia, and two movies by the brilliant young Chinese director Jia Zhangke (Platform and Unknown Pleasures). You can find my list here. The highest-ranking commercial movie is probably The Fog of War which, to my mind, is a more historical version of the Lord of the Rings starring Robert McNamara as Gollum.
So, to come back to Truffaut, I guess that I'm more interested in why The Lord of the Rings should be interesting now than I am interested in the movie itself. 9/11 clearly helped create a climate for The Fellowship of the Ring (as it did Black Hawk Down)—and that's even without the title Two Towers. When I reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring I went off on a riff about the book as an old acid-head hippie text and speculated on how it might have played as a late-'60s period piece in which the Fellowship has to make their way from a rural Vermont commune through the coffeehouses of Cambridge down to some fetid Mount Doom on the Lower East Side. Readers hated this. The movie's queer subtext (which I am hardly the only person or even the first to note) may be in the original or at least inherent to the material—the trilogy is blatantly homosocial although not particularly erotic.
I do know women who love Tolkien, but it still seems like more of a guy thing—the way Titanic was, in some ways, a chick flick. In any case, I'm told that Ian McKellan, a most uncloseted performer, was calling himself Gandalf the Gay on the set and trying to get the hobbits, Pippin and Mary—sorry, I mean Merry—to kiss goodbye. The queer stuff is actually more resonant in X2 (an underrated if overlong movie) in which McKellan is far campier. I had just seen the HBO Angels in America, hence my hyperbolic comparison between Tolkien's epic and Tony Kushner's—Angels was a far more engrossing fantasy quest (even though it really is marred by an unnecessarily "positive" ending). And there were some really ripe performances.
What's next?
Jim
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Peter Jackson and Jean Renoir
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 12:06 PM ET
Hey ya:
Very late Monday greetings from the other coast. Sorry for the delay, my friends, but after a few days of not writing I was feeling way rusty. Plus, I have been trying all day, on and off, to write about Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, which I highly recommend. If nothing else the film is a welcome corrective to that art-house exploitation flick Monster, in which yet another Hollywood actress tries to prove that beneath the va va va voom lies the soul of what Jon Lovitz would call a thespian.
Some random and unorganized thoughts:
Thanks for that link to that Louis Menand commentary, Tony. I have thought many different things about you, Elvis, and Stephen Holden, mostly flattering (really!), but I never once thought of you guys in a parental light. I generally enjoy Menand's work, despite his silly ideas about Bonnie and Clyde and a tone that sometimes seems, as with this piece, so utterly world-weary it's a wonder his words don't slide off the page from exhaustion. Somehow I imagine that if David Denby and Anthony Lane assembled top-10 lists Menand would not broadcast his condescension toward us lowly movie critics in quite the same way.
In any event, what's wrong with arguing about movies, as long as everyone refrains from (really nasty) name-calling and keeps fists tightly coiled in pocket? To me, the most depressing thing about the critical reception of The Return of the King is that so few reviewers took even slight issue with the film. I mean, it's a fine movie—overlong, occasionally boring (well, very boring), predictable, et cetera, but to judge by the reviews you would think that most American critics had just seen the face of God or at least Jean Renoir. Which leads me to another grievance: critical hyperbole. After all, Jackson's film isn't Rules of the Game, much less The Wizard of Oz. Maybe it's not just hobbits smoking da pipe weed?
And for the record, my ho-hum reaction to The Return of the King has nothing to do with my gender, and I can't believe I feel the need to even write this sentence. For starters, if I were that squeamish about gender and movies I couldn't work as a full-time critic, especially in this country. I loved The Fellowship of the Ring and was mixed on The Two Towers (which I kept calling "The Twin Towers" while writing my review, btw); alas, this last film seemed interminable. By the end, I felt as wiped out as Frodo and ready to board that ship to the hereafter; instead, I just jumped in my car and headed for home and a drink. It was boredom—and my fabulous taste—not my ovaries that determined my reaction.
And while I'm flitting along from thought to thought: Do you think that a lot of (American) critics have become reluctant to deal with movies politically for fear of being labeled "politically correct"? I ask because it's been on my mind a lot, especially since reviewing The Last Samurai and Cold Mountain. Believe it or not, a reader accused me of being politically correct because I mentioned that in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain Ada (the character played by Nicole Kidman) exploits slave labor. The idea that mentioning slavery—in regard to a Civil War movie, no less—makes me politically correct (and therefore a liberal scold) is, I think, pitiful. I wonder if this kind of reaction explains why I sometimes pull back on matters of race and gender—that and the fact that I don't want to repeat myself. I mean, how many times can I write that this week's movie is sexist, racist, or—even in the year of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy—homophobic? (I felt the same way when I was writing for the LA Weekly.) Still, that all these "isms" now seem to be off the table seems strange, don't you think?
OK, this is way longer than I meant to write, but much more enjoyable than thinking about Aileen Wuornos. So, one last thought in regard to what Sarah and Tony wrote about dead kids. I think that mainstream narrative movies, which, after all, rely heavily on melodrama, have always used dead children as a plot device, so I'm not sure that anything new and (particularly) untoward is afoot. There are dead children in films by D.W. Griffith and a dead child is central to George Cukor's wonderful 1950s multiple-hankie weepie The Marrying Kind. I don't usually like the way children, dead or alive, are treated in movies, and even good directors are susceptible to exploiting death. I didn't like how Kieslowski used the death of a child (and a husband) in Blue for that very reason, and I loathed how John Woo exploited the murder of a child in Face/Off. I wonder if the recent rage for dead children (sorry, I realize how awful that sounds) doesn't have some sort of metaphoric resonance, wherein the dead children, the ultimate innocents, stand in for the grown-ups both making and watching these movies? It is, after all, a comforting illusion that in the great drama of life we (Americans) are innocent.
Speaking of death, I have got to get back to Aileen Wuornos and "old sparky," so that's it for now.
Your pal,
Manohla
P.S.: Here's the link to my top 10.
P.P.S.: Oh, yeah; in regard to Jane Campion's In the Cut and David's comment about my "entertaining" review: David, I would much rather watch a movie that tries to break new aesthetic and thematic ground, that aspires toward the condition of art (rather bravely, too, considering Meg Ryan's trout lips), than yawn my way through the middlebrow, cello-accompanied tastefulness of a movie like Master and Commander. Campion may finally fail with In the Cut, but unlike Hollywood-hire Peter Weir she has the soul and genuine talent of an artist, and I'd rather watch her fail spectacularly than watch Weir try, yet again, to win his Oscar. I did like Russell Crowe's ponytail, though—sweet!
From: J. Hoberman
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Child Deaths? What About Parent Deaths?
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 12:23 PM ET
Thanks, Manohla, for invoking Rules of the Game—there should be a rule that someone has to. (Anybody care to compare it to the most recent Robert Altman film?)
I'm on jury duty, and the scales of justice are weighing heavily. Sarah's observations about emotional manipulation seem particularly relevant: The death of a child was a subject of pathos in the 19th century, when so many infants (and women) died in childbirth or soon after. Contemporary movies, particularly those set in a suburban safe haven, exploit the death of a child as the most dreadful thing that can befall a happy middle-class family. These movies are not Greek tragedies (for that, albeit in ironically diminished form, you need my widely disliked cause célèbre Spider).
For me, there's a pornographic quality to 21 Grams—although less so, I think, than in González Iñárritu's first movie. The problem for filmmakers is how to terrify the audience and still achieve the comfy cliché of closure. This is why the granola Death Wish of In the Bedroom strikes me as such a crock. Closer to real tragedy, Mystic River at least acknowledges its vigilante pandering. The Son is one of the few movies that truly address the loss of a child; to this nonbeliever, it seems a religious parable about Christian forgiveness. The Lovely Bones promises to be the worst. (The most American thing about the recent poll that reports something like 94 percent of us believes in heaven was that only 1 percent thinks they're going to hell.) Elephant at least has the grace to show that heaven on earth.
The death of a parent is, of course, a near-universal experience. For middle-aged filmmakers this provides an exercise in self-actualization: the ludicrous New Age Big Fish or the smugly self-congratulatory The Barbarian Invasions with its feel-good cancer death. (The only thing I can say for the latter is its implicit humanist argument to provide terminal patients with heroin and hospice care.) Elephants, spiders, fish, barbarians—it's really the carnival of the animals! I'm saving the donkey for last. Speaking of justice, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar had its belated opening in New York this year, and even The Son seems a bit trivial by comparison. Although I'm neither a Christian nor an animal-lover, the grandeur and absurdity of Balthazar's death never fails to move me to tears. But that's filmmaking at its most exalted.
Well, it's off to Foley Square; if I'm cast for the Martha Stewart jury, you'll be the first to know.
Jim
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Have at Ye
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 12:59 PM ET
Well done, Manohla. Your first entry and already I want to use my repressive patriarchal mockery to curb your sassy feminist ire. Which brings us back to In the Cut, doesn't it? I like your theory that the movie "tries to break aesthetic and thematic ground" (that "tries to" leaves a hell of a lot of room), but in Campion's work I saw all that arty abrasiveness in support of a gruesomely reductive and stereotypical view of male and female relationships—rather more elemental, in its way, than that Rita Mae Brown-scripted hack-'em-up The Slumber Party Massacre. Since you brought up Meg Ryan's swollen new smackers, I'll add that I actually found them the most convincing illustration in the movie of what fear of male rejection will do to an otherwise beautiful and well-adjusted woman. The spectacle of actresses dieting down to their newly ropy limbs and puffing up their lips to conform to male (and, alas, female) Hollywood executives' ideas of what's beautiful (or to use a word I'm told is frequently employed in casting sessions, "fuckable") is far more chilling than anything in that porny, overwrought fantasia.
I can't speak to Jim's experience of The Lord of the Rings—I never could read the damn thing, and I tried harder than I did with Finnegan's Wake. But I don't see what's wrong with acclaiming great spectacle: It's not highest on the list of Aristotle's requirements for great drama, but it's on there all the same, and I'd like to think he'd have recognized its value in movies (and been first in line to see the upcoming Troy). I know there are those who think Jackson has tried and failed to measure up to Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Welles, Olivier, and, for that matter, Spielberg (whom he clearly reveres). And they'd get no argument from me: With a couple of exceptions (reader J. Michael Short mentioned the suicidal charge of Faromir accompanied by Pippin's plaintive song—I loved everything in that sequence except the too-obvious shots of Denethor stuffing food in his mouth), the violence in Return of the King doesn't have the moral weight of the battles in Intolerance or Chimes at Midnight or Kagemusha or Ran. But, my God, what a curve we're grading on. As for it being too long, well: I saw it after the extended cuts of the first two parts and thought it was too short. Fellowship and especially Two Towers feel shorter to me in their longer versions because they breathe a little more and give the characters a little more complexity (which, yes, they need).
I have more to say today—and more readers' questions and opinions to transmit. (And I still have to see Peter Pan.)
David
From: Sarah Kerr
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, and A.O.Scott
Subject: Situation Tragedies
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 1:11 PM ET
Dear all,
A number of interesting points to respond to! I am squeezed between a deadline and a screening and will have to file longer this afternoon. But quickly: Jim, thanks for understanding the point I was clumsily beginning to make about children in film this year. Manipulation isn't quite what I was getting at—or rather, I hope I wouldn't be so obvious as to argue that manipulation involving children is in any way new. God knows it's not. But as Jim points out, what a dying child meant in the 1850s was different from the 1950s is different from now. What does seem relatively recent in film and, for me, uncomfortably significant in its accumulation this year, is the number of arthouse films (forgive the catchall term) that have used lost children as a kind of shortcut to learning and caring about an adult character—a frame for understanding that explains all, a quick and impossible to resist entry point for our sympathy. Jim puts it well: This is a story that shoves other stories out of the way, because nothing else could be this important, and nothing else could be so clear. We don't even have to lay eyes on the child for this to work (The Station Agent). We don't have to think much about how the parents were as parents, when their grief (in Mystic River or In America) feels so real. The lost child is not the awful culmination of the story but its almost casually enabling situation. Yesterday I suggested that some of these films borrowed from the conventions of melodrama on TV (i.e., the soap opera, as opposed to older melodrama from Dickens to Mildred Pierce). I was thinking of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of 21 Grams, who put in time at the world headquarters of soap opera—the Televisa network in Mexico. But though TV plays a key part here, on reflection I realized that comparison was not quite right.
As the better big-budget films this year often felt influenced by video-games aesthetics—I'm thinking of the engrossing, atmospheric, impersonal sequence of almost lived experience in Master and Commander, for example—a number of intimate arthouse films, despite some truly masterful acting, felt smaller and ever more like TV. Together, they seemed to constitute a new genre, with recognizable conventions and relatively predictable triggers for the audience. My concern here isn't how we think about or treat children. That problem will never go away. My concern, if I'm right that some of our leading filmmakers have started to turn out Situation Tragedies, is with diminished imagination in film.
Best,
Sarah
From: A.O. Scott
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, and Sarah Kerr
Subject: The Politics of Movie Reviewing
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 2:46 PM ET
Comrades,
To Jim's carnival of animals I would add Bruno, the soulful, stalwart doggie from Triplets of Belleville, who dreams, in black and white, of slow-moving trains and who obligingly serves as a spare tire when Mme. Souza needs him to. Though come to think of it, Triplets is yet another child-in-danger movie. Hmmm.
But I want to address Manohla's question about the apparent reluctance of critics to discuss the political implications of movies we write about. In October, when I pointed out, in my review of In the Cut, Jane Campion's habit of using nonwhite men as signifiers of sexual danger and/or exotic eroticism, I received an e-mail chastising me for holding Campion and her characters to too-stringent standards of political correctness—an e-mail I bring up now only because it came from my pal Manohla Dargis. (As for that movie, I'll say only that there's a fine line between aspiring to the condition of art and pretending to it, and that if we're comparing Australian-based directors I'd like briefly to wave the flag for Christina Jeffs, whose fierce and literate Sylvia was too hastily dismissed and too quickly forgotten.) I've also recently received the widely circulated e-mail calling for a boycott of Cold Mountain on the grounds that it almost entirely erases black people from the history of the Civil War. (There are, if I recall, those silent runaways, the girl Philip Seymour Hoffman is about to throw in the river, and Nicole Kidman appearing on the porch with a tray of refreshments "for the Negroes.")
I do think that there is a political dimension to a great many movies—that is surely part of their importance as sociological phenomena—but I also think that trying to establish it too early or evaluate it too dogmatically makes for dull and predictable criticism. More often than not, in any case, the political implications of movies are either muddled (The Missing, The Last Samurai) or opaque, and their connection to the world of actual politics becomes clear only in retrospect (as Jim's new book about the '60s rather breathtakingly shows). This was a year of war and also of war movies, but most of the attempts I have read to connect those two indisputable facts have seemed pretty facile. Is Cold Mountain, an account of war-weariness, senseless cruelty, and home-front hard times, therefore an antiwar picture, and, if so, is it against any particular war or just war in general? Does Return of the King, with its martial sweep and its clearly demarcated lines of good and evil—racial lines, by the way, albeit drawn between imaginary races—stand as a mirror for our own times? Is The Last Samurai, as David and others have suggested, an inadvertent apologia for the Taliban, or for Japanese imperialism, or for the American Confederacy? Is The Missing more offensive for the way it demonizes its Indian villain, for the way it treats other Indians as vehicles of spirituality and higher wisdom, or just for how bad it sucks?
Such questions are always more interesting to pose than to answer. Of course, our own political beliefs inevitably inform how we think about movies, as much as our age, taste, gender, sexuality, or anything else—but also with as much complexity, incoherence, and unpredictability. Trying, as some opinion journalists do, to divide movies along ideological lines is as silly as trying to divide them along gender lines. I have to confess that I find my own political opinions alternately incomprehensible and boring, and that, perhaps like Jim with his secularist's devotion to the spirituality of Bresson and the Dardennes, I take a perverse but completely genuine delight in works of art that brush against the grain of my own beliefs. (I also like to be a bit coy about just what those beliefs are, as a way of dispelling my boredom and camouflaging my muddle-headedness.) I thought that Master and Commander, with its blunt embrace of military virtues, its indifference to contemporary egalitarian mores, and its celebration of hierarchy and ancient custom, was perhaps the most thoroughly conservative movie I'd ever seen, and conservative in a way that has more to do with 19th-century Britain than with the 21st-century United States. It also took the top slot in my 10-best list. Mystic River, for its part, expresses a pessimism about human nature that I can't bring myself to accept, but it was sufficiently rigorous and unsparing in advancing its worldview that it acquired a tragic force missing from other movies aiming at similar gravity and grandeur.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Angels in America, which seemed devoted above all to affirming what it assumed its audience already believed. I say this all with a heavy heart, since I saw Tony Kushner's play on Broadway three times in its entirety and count it as one of the transforming artistic experiences of my life. But that's just the problem. When I tried to teach the play, about 10 years ago, in a freshman literature class, my students responded to the characters much more than to the themes. (And the characters, so vividly impersonated by, especially, Jeffrey Wright, Meryl Streep, and Mary Louise Parker, retain their vitality even when the intellectual machinery they are embedded in starts to creak.) What's the play about, I remember asking one day, and the response was that it was about how things were "back in the '80s" when everyone was greedy and homophobic. That the play seemed, to students a scant decade younger than I was, already dated is testimony both to its power and to its limitations. It did contribute, to the extent that any elite cultural product can, to changing the world. Prior's speech at the end—the promise that "we will be citizens"—has the ring of cant now precisely because the social arrangements it envisions have come closer to being realized than anyone at the time could have predicted.
But the play's political effectiveness is precisely what has dated it, so that watching the Mike Nichols production on HBO was a little like watching Gentleman's Agreement or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. You felt comforted, rather than challenged. And, as Dale Peck argued in Slate, the grand theatrical gestures that gave Angels such unexpected sublimity on stage didn't quite work on screen; nor did the rhythm of the prose, with its live-theater/sitcom beats. But the HBO version also exposed some intrinsic weaknesses in Kushner's design. The climactic gesture is Prior's refusal of revelation, which means that the play's grand cosmological apparatus is a straw man, built to be demolished so that we can learn to muddle through in the secular world, without the help of angels and grand theories of history.
The thing is, who's arguing? I was quite content to muddle through in the secular world beforehand, and I suspect that a similar view of things is pretty close to universally shared among Kushner's presumed audience, who can also congratulate themselves for having had the good taste to hate Ronald Reagan. Kushner is a brilliant anatomist of the self-delusions of the left—the exchanges between Belize and Louis remain the richest, squirmiest parts of the script—but he is in the end unable to overcome the tired habit of demonizing the right. Republicans in his play receive scorn and, sometimes, pity, but they are systematically denied sympathy. In Kushner's utopia, they will not be citizens. This is, above all, an artistic failure, and it undermines the play's otherwise clear-eyed view of recent history by essentially mystifying modern American conservatism, which is something more than a conspiracy of bad people. Isn't it?
Barbarian Invasions, it seems to me, is in the end less sentimental, less self-congratulatory, less complacent—or, if you prefer, more dialectical—in its analysis of recent North American history. This is a movie that attempts—within the same conventions of accessible, upper-middlebrow conversational comedy that Kushner is working in—to search the face of global capitalism for human features, and to ask whether, in a world dominated by market values, filial loyalty, fellow-feeling, and decency are still possible. Amazingly enough, it turns out that they are.
In solidarity,
Tony
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Here's Your Sassy Feminist Ire!
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 2:53 PM ET
I have to go into the office for a meeting (Sundance looms, alas), so this will be a quickie. I hope more will follow later this afternoon. First, glad to oblige, David. Since you insulted me not once, but twice, in your first dispatch, I thought it only appropriate to take, gobble, and immediately disgorge your bait. (I do love the idea the idea of a smackdown between your Patriarchal Repressive Mockery and my Sassy Feminist Ire, even if the latter sounds like a bad shampoo.) I'm not interested in getting into a fight about In the Cut, especially as I don't think it's a full success (though nowhere as bad as most reviewers insisted). And I do agree that it is an overwrought, porny fantasia, but, dude, I don't see that as a bad thing—do you? I mean, so is Last Tango in Paris and any number of other male-directed movies, including the vast majority of Brian DePalma movies, good, bad, and indifferent. Meanwhile, Tony, I will address my objections to your In the Cut review (including your comments about Campion and race) later this afternoon ... gotta go strategize on Sundance.
Love,
Manohla
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Movie Clubbing the Night Away
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004, at 6:20 PM ET
The speed of this medium is dizzying. I'm having to juggle dead kids, missing Negroes, Meg Ryan's lips, the Brooklyn starting times of Peter Pan, and scores more e-mails about all the subjects (and movies) we're failing to address. And I appreciate that, as I write this, Jim is on jury duty, Tony at a screening, and Manohla en route to her paper to concoct a Sundance strategy. Sarah—are you out there?
I feel, Manohla, that it's only fair to tell our readers that my "insulting you not once but twice" in my first dispatch must be seen in the context of having begged on the cyber equivalent of bended knee for you to honor the "Movie Club" with your presence, and I hope that my opening provocation will be regarded as a spirited ice-breaker. (Fifty years ago, I'd have used the word "gay" in place of "spirited," but as that adjective has been appropriated by hobbits. …) I'm also glad to hear that you share my view that the new Aileen Wuornos documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer is both a remarkable film and a useful antidote to the tawdry, B-movie universe and stunt casting of Monster.
Tony: I don't believe, Jim's wonderful book notwithstanding, that it's "facile" to regard Cold Mountain as an antiwar picture with a political message in this era of apotheosized battlefield deaths—of gloriously romantic suicide clinches and heavenly ascensions. Minghella's film is, as I have written in Slate, the only time at the movies in years I've heard the words from Henry V in my head: "I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle. …" Perhaps the most striking proof of this is that Cold Mountain takes place in a political vacuum in which the war serves largely as an impediment to the reunion of its central movie-star lovers. As in Malick's The Thin Red Line (which sought to portray the journey from heaven to hell without pausing to weigh anything so mundane as the rise of a world fascist order that needed vanquishing), the absence of a political context (say, the abolishment of slavery) is itself a political context. (I am grateful to Jason M. O'Connell, who wrote me: "Is there a more noble cause than dying to end slavery, a giant, immoral, systemic cancer in your own country? I had a similar problem in The English Patient when Count de Almásy surrenders the maps to the Nazis ... he became quite the opposite of a hero for helping the purest evil of the 20th century. Is Minghella's point that love trumps even defeating genocidal fascism? I want no part of that 'vision,' complete with its unthinkable consequences.")
Nothing I have written above is meant to reflect my thoughts on the justice or injustice of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But that is, of course, behind everything I write about war these days, somewhere. How could it not be? I found myself (like you, Tony) stirred by the manly chivalric conventions of Master and Commander and The Return of the King precisely because I had no need to grapple with the messiness and ambiguity and, yes, fog of war that I read about daily in the newspaper and online. (Perhaps I loved Kill Bill for similar reasons: It took place in a moral—and, often, physical—vacuum in which none of my niggling questions about violence and vigilantism were relevant.) Yes, it is a fault of Weir's film that he nowhere allows his characters to muse on the imperialism of the British Royal Navy: It is ze French who are ze wiley devils. This one-sided view of the conflict (and of history) knocks the movie down more than a couple of pegs. But what a rattling good escape. (A more narrowly political critic would celebrate the discipline and patriotic fervor of the film or deride its jingoistic single-mindedness. On the other hand, I just wanna have fun.)
The ideal, of course, is a war epic that—no matter what its maker's politics—finds the right balance between the forces of history and the fates of individuals. Apocalypse Now had the big themes right, but much of the execution is ludicrous (and doubly so in the unfortunate Redux). Three Kings is a start. Cold Mountain doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.
Jim and Sarah: Thanks for eloquently chiming in against the killing of kids onscreen as a cheap narrative hook. (What should be our acronym? Moviegoers Against Dead Darlin's? Already taken, I guess.) As you might remember, Jim, I think In the Bedroom is a great film and regard the phrase a "granola Death Wish" as unfair to both it and granola. But I'm not going to get back into that mosh pit. I think your assessment of The Son (also on my 10-best list) is dead-on, and I'm sorry the film (one of the purest expressions of grief and reconciliation I've ever seen on the screen) has not been widely distributed. (To readers who haven't seen it: It is, as I wrote in my intro, an exercise in sensory deprivation, shot largely from behind the rather unprepossessing ear of its protagonist. It will be a challenge to stick with on a TV screen—but I urge you to do so.)
The Menand article was rather fascinating for its subtext: the perception (and, indeed, the role) of the New York Times for so many years as a monolithic and quasi-scientific arbiter. This is—what?—the fifth or sixth year of the Movie Club and the third in which you've honored us with your participation, Tony. (Your superb colleague Elvis Mitchell took part the year before.) Every day, as you've said, the finer points of books, movies, plays, etc., are debated on the Web and in the pages of alternative papers employing more than one critic. But Menand—a powerful intellectual and the author of a powerful book about powerful intellectuals, The Metaphysical Club—is disoriented by a dialogue in the New York Times in which he is presented with a variety of opposing viewpoints instead of being told what to think. As if this were the Village Voice! Help!
Speaking of opposing viewpoints, I'm off to read my mail. More later.
David
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Is Jane Campion Really a Racist?
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 10:38 AM ET
(This post was filed last night.)
So, I'm back from our Sundance strategy meeting. Hold the presses: We decided that the vast majority of American independent films suck and that far too much attention is paid to this festival, therefore, we are not covering it at all. Nothing, nada, rien. Kidding! OK, I've had three cups of coffee and am a bit giddy. I guess I really am trying to pretend that I'm just writing these dispatches for the entertainment of four movie-crazed colleagues and not the entire Slate readership and beyond. (Which is a feeble pre-emptive attempt to excuse/rationalize/justify any factual error, spelling mistake, and off-the-cuff, what-the-hell-was-I-thinking comment.)
Getting back (briefly) to In the Cut and Tony's remarks about that e-mail I sent him. First, Tony, remind me never to share anything with you (including my irritation) without first indicating that what I'm writing to you is off the fucking record. If I'd known that you would share what I wrote to you with the entire Web, I would have phrased my argument more carefully and with greater intellectual precision. As it stands, I read your review, got irritated at you for dismissing one of my favorite filmmakers—in the New York Times, no less—and fired off an e-mail. I don't want to rehash your review; this isn't the right forum, and, frankly, I'm not interested in rehashing any of our reviews. But since you raised my objections here's what I was trying to say. I didn't have a problem with your suggestion that Campion may be racist in the way she represents nonwhite men in both The Piano and In the Cut. I don't think she's a racist, but I do think she's naive and that she likes to explore (sometimes at her peril and, again, naively) a lot of uncomfortable, "unsafe" territory, including white female sexual desire for nonwhite men. I just wish that you had engaged this as problematic; I think she deserved better from one of the most important film critics in the country.
As to the issue of politics: I agree with David, though it kind of kills me to do so. (And, David, if that's begging … jeesh.) The absence of political context is, of course, political. My own politics are a big confusing jumble, which means that I don't look at movies through a specific political lens. Yes, I'm a feminist (surprise!), which just means that I believe that women should be treated equally, and I think that the richest country on Earth should feed and house every one of its citizens, but that's about it. But when I look at movies, I don't check my sense of ethics or vague politics at the door—how could I? So, for instance, I was offended that at the end of Bad Boys II the two stars drive a Hummer through a Cuban shantytown, mowing down one shack after another. I noted that this was certainly a remarkable image of American capitalism mowing its way through the Third World (and received the usual hate mail as a consequence), but I didn't write that the two stars also use the word "faggot" liberally throughout the film. Was I a coward because I didn't write that I was offended? Maybe. But I never want to write a review with some sort of (political) checklist in hand. I also think you have to pick your battles and reserve your outrage, and then there's the fact that I also enjoyed a lot of the movie. (I'm a sucker for blowup movies in which sweaty men run around shooting guns.) Which made me feel kind of bad, but that's part of being a movie critic, right? Honestly embracing your pleasure even when it makes you feel like scum.
Last, I don't really want to put anyone on the spot (OK, I do), but I wonder if Sarah feels as depressed as I do about women and American film, both in how women are represented in front of the camera and what's going on behind the camera. The fact that I actually enjoyed Something's Gotta Give somehow seems like evidence that things are very, very bad ... or that I am getting really old.
Love,
Manohla
From: J. Hoberman
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Turning Japanese
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 11:04 AM ET
Good morning everyone,
This is being dashed off so early in the a.m. it's bound to have some free-associational interest. I appreciate Tony's illuminating juxtaposition of Angels in America with The Barbarian Invasions—though I'm more convinced by criticism of Kushner than praise for Arcand. Perhaps I'm missing the richness of Arcand's dialogue; I also miss an absence of visionary excess. The allegory is too constrained—given Arcand's background and early interests, the failure of Quebecois nationalism (and not just the '60s) has to be his great unacknowledged subject.
Angels can be dangerously sentimental and has more than its share of straw men and women, but Invasions is blatantly mawkish as well as a virtual reservation for the dimensionally impaired. Say what you will about Kushner's villains, his Roy Cohn is a sensational character and a red-meat role—witness Pacino's lip smacking perf. Anyway, since this isn't the Made-for-TV Movie Club, I'll digress. Like much of what appears in The New Yorker, Louis Menand's "Talk of the Town" meditation on year-end 10-best lists struck me as earnest clucking. (Consider the hilarious evisceration that could have been written on the subject by a true stiletto man like James Wolcott.) But then, it wasn't my 10-best list Menand deigned to critique. The whole thing reminds me a wonderfully egregious Socialist Realist painting showing a trio of heroic workers taking their lunch break and avidly reading a single newspaper. The title is something like They're Writing About Us in Pravda! (I warned you this would be free-associational.)
Having already been denounced twice—although not at this particular free-for-all—as part of the all-male dog pack that mugged the noble hind of In the Cut, I have no particular desire to revisit, jackal-like, the scene of the crime. The movie's flaws are as evident as its ambitions; it seems likely that partisans may love it precisely because of those flaws—which is one definition of a cult film. (Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary is another. Any takers?) Elsewhere on the correctness front, I'm wondering what y'all thought of the front page piece in last Sunday's "Arts & Leisure" section—a perfect trifecta, dissecting the exploitation of Japan and Japaneseness in The Last Samurai, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Lost in Translation. The writer made many good points but, unless I missed it, failed to note that, judging from these examples, American cultural superiority is quite tenuous. Each in its own wistful way, these movies attempt to re-energize American pop by appropriating the vitality of East Asia.
Since The Last Samurai is walking around with a big, self-affixed "Kick Me" sign, I won't revisit its operetta politics. (Gen. Douglas MacArthur would be a rabid Communist in Ed Zwick's looking glass.) Like David, I enjoyed Kill Bill although I was left disappointed. Quentin Tarantino is still the smartest filmmaker in Hollywood, albeit obnoxiously anxious to let you know it. For the first time, however, he seems a victim of the system. Cut down to size and pathetically deprived of structural complexity, Kill Bill can't help but seem trivial—even if it does become the greatest "director's version" DVD cult movie of all time. Lost in Translation, which handily won the Village Voice alt.critics' poll over Elephant, is a more mysterious creature. To judge from responses I've gotten, critics have definitely oversold the movie (perhaps because they themselves were pleasantly surprised). Frankly, I expected to hate it and was completely disarmed—it even worked on a second viewing.
Sofia Coppola's bratty sense of entitlement is undeniable—but so is her claim to dramatizing this particular sort of father-daughter love story. The "lip my stocking" scene is gratuitously stupid—but the movie is remarkably subtle, and Japanese, in basing its narrative in unacknowledged feelings. (My review hyperbolically invoked Naruse.) Even more amazing is Coppola's decidedly un-Tarantinian pop culture romance. I think Tony has noted this, but I'll ditto: For me, the most poignantly self-reflexive, emotionally complicated moment in any Hollywood movie this year was Bill Murray's (or rather, "Bill Murray's") decade-collapsing, sincerely off-key karaoke version of "More Than This."
Party on,
Jim
From: Sarah Kerr
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, A.O. Scott
Subject: Is Mystic River Overrated?
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 11:19 AM ET
Hi folks,
How about some truth in advertising today—i.e., we take up one of the questions Slate had slugged on its cover all day yesterday. Is Mystic River overrated? To me, alas, yes. I don't mean this in a snarky contrarian spirit, and because at least two of you (Manohla and Tony) love it so dearly, I wish I didn't have to pick this fight. I enjoyed the film up through the penultimate act, admired the stateliness of its craft, thanked it for answering the annual need for an honorably ambitious Hollywood film for grown-ups. (Unlike House of Sand and Fog, a Situation Tragedy if ever there was one. Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley are good and even have a few grand moments, but the characters they play—an exiled Iranian lackey of the Shah whom we're supposed to pity because he pissed away the $250,000 he came to America with and a paralyzed child-woman with the judgment of a bottlecap—seemed to me jerks without precedent in recent film.)
In a way my quarrel is not so much with the film, which is mostly solid and professional and clearly one of the better entertainments of the fall, as with its reception. I can't see a single aspect of Mystic River that approaches greatness, and none of the eloquent cases made for it have convinced. Critics have tended to praise the film's feeling of inevitability, the inexorability of the tragic sequence of events. I didn't feel this. Or rather, what I felt every step of the way was Clint Eastwood behind the curtain whispering: Inevitable! Inexorable! and flipping the lever to give a suitable cloud-and-thunder effect. Not that he isn't sincere—one of the genuinely moving things about the film is its evident sincerity. Eastwood just wants to help things along, make sure we get the message.
Anyway, the mere feeling that "the things happening on screen are inevitable" does not seem to me a guarantee of quality or even a sufficiently meaningful statement. I'm sure we could come up with a list of plays, films, and TV shows, ranging from Sophocles to crassly negligible sitcoms, in which the sequence of events obeys a fairly rigorous logic of inevitably. If I'm not mistaken, it was the New Republic's Stanley Kauffman who pointed out that the plot of Mystic River conveys the same feeling of gritty inevitability as the investigative, Jerry Orbach half of a Law and Order episode. This seemed apt to me. Again, I do not mean this as a takedown. To rank among the really powerful, convincing episodes of Law and Order would be, in my book, reasonably high praise.
But great cinema it ain't. Off the top of my head, reasons why Mystic River strikes me as overrated:
I knew way too soon, well before Eastwood revealed it, who was responsible for Sean Penn's daughter's death. The way Eastwood films said person and a certain recognizable pattern from detective fiction—the red herring here, process of elimination there, who-are-we-overlooking-game—gave it away.
Sean Penn is near-great, fierce and mesmerizing—as he sucks the air out of the room. He compels our attention with a diva's self-consciousness that is impossible not to be impressed by—but as with a diva, this drags you out of the story into awe for the performer. Watching him, I got distracted and started thinking about the history of various schools of acting, and what's it like for the naturalistic guys in this scene with him, and how did he prepare? (With regard to the strange meta-acting quality of Penn's performance, a friend of mine had a similar experience and called me to talk about it. "At first," he said, "I thought I was reminded of James Dean when he would start to go too far. But I realized that's not it. What Penn was reminding me of was Frank Gorshin's classic impression of Kirk Douglas when he would start to overact.")
Developments as we near the end feel so thinly prepared. Kevin Bacon's sudden lack of professionalism. Kevin Bacon's reconciliation with his wife (which wife, you will remember, is represented at only a few points in the film, and always as a pair of lips speaking into a phone. Again, I say: television.) And Laura Linney's 11th-hour metamorphosis into Satan's consort—where'd that come from?
The whole feeling of inevitability itself. What exactly is the truth being conveyed here? How generally does it apply? Is it merely that Southies are this violent, repressed, and corrupt? American men? American women (God help us if we're either skittering mice like Marcia Gay Harden or vampires like Linney. I guess we can but hope to be the dead girl or the disembodied lips)? Peoples around the world who, despite a veil of modernity, continue to live as tribes? Humans from the dawn of time? I don't really have any idea. But in any case, while it is an (obvious) universal truth that human beings have the capacity for violence, is it really a universal truth that they all will collude in unleashing it? Always? Inevitably and inexorably?
It's Clint Eastwood's prerogative to think so, but I think that's a preposterous notion. It is as preposterous, and sentimental in its own way, as a filmmaker propounding the universal truth that all communities will in the end be guided by compassionate love, always. I get the feeling there are many human capacities (humor comes to mind) that Eastwood simply doesn't understand as well as violence, or know how to dramatize. Which would be fine—how many great directors only know about one thing?—except that violence is the truth of choice for so many critics. This is understandable, because violence is so cinematic, and explorations of violence can feel moral and important. But I think it leads to a distorted, unexamined critical consensus about what is important, and what is truth.
Gotta go for now. Any takers?
Best,
Sarah
P.S. Looking this over, I fear it looks like a trashing of the film, and that is not an accurate reflection of how I feel. In fact, except for calling it "morally wobbly" or some such I gave it a positive review, in the following sense. I think it works quite well as entertainment, and on the level of entertainment it does clearly have the power of a well-rendered whodunnit. What I've tried to explain here are a few of the factors that prevent me from feeling really devastated by it—and devastated is how you would have to feel to think it a masterpiece.
From: A.O. Scott
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, and Sarah Kerr
Subject: Japanophilia
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 12:19 PM ET
Mes amis,
A short, early post today, given how long I went on yesterday. First of all, Manohla, my apologies for disclosing the contents of your e-mail on my review of In The Cut. And next time I dismiss one of your favorite directors (which I don't think I did, by the way), I will try to do so in a more obscure venue. (Also, David, this is my fourth Movie Club. Time flies. We're all getting old.)
Yesterday I went to my first screening of the New Year, Tokyo Godfathers, an anime feature directed by Satoshi Kon, whose astonishing Millennium Actress nearly edged out Triplets of Belleville for the foreign animated slot on my 10-best list (see below). The subject of this picture, which seems to have been inspired by John Ford's 3 Godfathers, is—wouldn't you know it—an abandoned child, who is very nearly thrown from a skyscraper roof. The last words from Sarah's post were ringing in my ears as I watched the Tokyo skyline swaying to the beat of a techno-disco Japanese-language version of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." I think Kon might qualify as one of our leading filmmakers, and Godfathers certainly flirts with the melodramatic tropes you identify as Situation Tragedy. On the other hand, it's hard to say that his cinematic imagination, every bit as prodigious and strange as Sylvain Chomet's and twice as much as Pixar's, has diminished over the course of three movies.
The movie also reminded me of the electrifying and bloody anime sequence in Kill Bill, and of the mini-wave of Japanophilia (or –phobia, or just general slightly freaked-out fascination) that appears to be sweeping through Western movies from Lost in Translation and Last Samurai to demonlover and the Australian Japanese Story, which opened in L.A. last week and arrives in New York on the 16th. As you say, Jim, what is going on does not so much involve representations of the other (yawn) as an excitingly other style of representation. The three movies discussed in Motoko Rich's "Arts and Leisure" piece don't only depict Japan, they quite consciously and deliberately appropriate Japanese cinematic styles, from Ozu and Naruse and more recent studies in urban anomie (Coppola) to Kurosawa (Zwick) to yakuza and samurai B-pictures (Tarantino). I've never been to Japan, but I think part of its allure for Americans lies in the sense that its culture seems so completely alien and yet at the same time so modern—in some ways even more modern than our own.
But back (briefly and a little obliquely) to politics. I found 2003 to be a year of especially polarized opinions, with more movies than usual provoking ardently divided responses. My list of the most hotly contested movies of the year would include Irreversible, Elephant, 21 Grams, Capturing the Friedmans, Johnny English (but that's between me and Dan Savage) and, of course, Mystic River, Sarah's eloquent and thoughtful dismantling—or, rather, diminishing—of which just arrived in my in-box. Television, you say? Law & Order, you say? Frank Gorshin doing Kirk Douglas, you say (I admit that made me laugh out loud)? Them's fighting words! I will try to respond later in the day. In the meantime, let's you and Manohla fight.
Sayonara for now,
Tony
P.S.: I notice that readers wishing to read my list on the Times Web site must now pay to do so. In the "show me yours and I'll show you mine" spirit, here it is:
1. Master and Commander
2. Mystic River
3. The Son
4. Spellbound
5. Barbarian Invasions
6. Man Without a Past
7. The Triplets of Belleville
8. Finding Nemo
9. Bus 174
10. A Mighty Wind
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A. O. Scott
Subject: Politics and Religion
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 12:34 PM ET
I see I have to get up a lot earlier in the morning to keep up with you guys—like, before I go to bed, even. Manohla, I agree with you that Tony was wrong to share that private e-mail. But I'm so glad he did, because I love you both and am extremely energized by the way in which you're sorting through the political issues that come up every day in what we do. And Jim: I wish I could free-associationally dash off the way you free-associationally dash off. It seems as if sitting in a courthouse all day has sharpened your senses. (Have you been picked, by the way?)
I'm still wrestling with Barbarian Invasions, a smooth piece of mainstream art-house fare that got under my skin like itching powder. I don't entirely share your disappointment with Arcand's "lack of visionary excess." We know from such films as Jesus of Montreal that Arcand has the ability to create surreal and slightly mad allegories. Choosing to tell this story within the confines of a cozy domestic ensemble comedy-drama (with a teary father-son rapprochement at the center) is a pointed attempt to chart vast social changes within a deceptively conventional structure. I suppose you would strike the word "deceptively" from that sentence and substitute something like "tiresomely"—and, in truth, Arcand doesn't test that structure enough for my taste. (I came of age admiring the enormous mytho-poetic force just under the surface of Ibsen's prosaic drawing-room plays.) But there's something enormously witty about Arcand's containment. My problems with the movie are, frankly, political. I don't think Arcand gives enough credit to the ideals of the ex-lefties he's so affectionately satirizing; and I think the scene in which the dying professor, Rémy, reminiscences about a beautiful Chinese professor who responded to his extravagant praise of the Cultural Revolution with the bitter revelation that she'd spent it cleaning pigsties was just a little too easy. (Are there any Maoists left to argue that the Cultural Revolution was a good thing? I mean, that aren't institutionalized?) All ideology here—but especially the ideology of leftist academia—is portrayed as fickle, as so transient as to be farcical: What really matters, finally, is family, gourmet food, a lake house, and the power of the global capitalist son to cut through the absurdist red tape of socialized medicine. I don't mean to sound like a frothing leftist here: I think a lot of Arcand's criticisms are hilariously on target. But I resent that he doesn't give his characters enough stature to find some middle ground between their former ideals and the lessons that life (and capitalism) has taught them. (If the elephant in the room—to invoke that suddenly fashionable metaphor—is the feeling of impotence in the wake of the failure of Quebecois nationalism, then I agree that ought to be acknowledged in there somewhere.)
I also want to underline your point, Jim, about Lost in Translation, Kill Bill, and The Last Samurai: "Each in its own wistful way, these movies attempt to re-energize American pop by appropriating the vitality of East Asia." I guess in a nutshell that's why you're a critical hero of mine: It exemplifies the way your writing transcends the Party organs in which it sometimes appears. (No: I'm not Voice bashing. I love the Voice. Proud to have been associated with it. But I recognize, like Denys Arcand and Bill Murray singing "More Than This," that "self-reflexive emotional complications" are good things to allow in from time to time.)
Later today I plan to introduce the following topics: Elephant. Peter Pan. Mystic River. Digital video. Documentaries, especially Capturing the Friedmans and the timely questions it raises about exploration versus exploitation.
Best,
David
P.S.: to Sarah and Manohla: Along the lines of Manohla's last question to you, Sarah, what do you guys think of the Mimi Swartz article on the "new" complexity of middle-aged women in Hollywood movies? I didn't go for Something's Gotta Give as much as some of you did, but Diane Keaton was a turn on in ways that went beyond the physical. (So, for that matter, was
Frances McDormand in Laurel Canyon, although the movie gave me a stomachache.)
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Critical Gush
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 1:11 PM ET
Dear cine-friends,
Of course, since I wrote my last dispatch about Tony, my divulged e-mail and In the Cut, I have been anguishing over the fact that I probably insulted him and he won't want to sit with me at the next Cannes. What people may not know is that a surprising number of film critics are friends or at least friendly; some, of course, are sworn enemies, but a number are engaged in regular discussion. The only reason that this is worth sharing is that it helps explain, if only a little, how criticism works in this country. (I'm fond of showing people what's behind the curtain.) There are all sorts of pressures, many unspoken and unacknowledged, that come with being a movie critic. There are agendas, ideologies, career factors, grudges, et cetera, at work. And, indeed, part of the reason I chided Tony about Campion is that I'm all too aware that what I write can affect someone's career. I hate that. I don't want to think about a filmmaker's mortgage, children's college funds, whether they will ever work in this town again. I just want to write a review, no strings attached. It's a fantasy, but one I cling to fiercely.
Excuse my rambling, but until this morning the discussion, though very interesting (and addicting), has been all over the place. Given the past year and that there were no major touchstone films or great big bones of contention, I guess I'm not surprised. But I am a bit worried. We can knock movies until we drop, but if we can't collectively get fired up in favor of a particular movie, much less "the movies," what does that say about the state of the art? I had a really tough time coming up with a top-10 list this year because I didn't feel terribly passionate about the new movies I saw. Sure, I liked and even loved a few films (a very few), but I only swooned hard for Au hasard Balthazar and Le Cercle Rouge. Both are wonderful (and I'd seen both before), but Balthazar was released in 1966 and Cercle in 1970. I resist the notion that movies (especially American movies) were better, say, in the 1970s than they are now, because beneath my hardboiled exterior beats the heart of a true believer. I really want to believe that a great movie awaits me, if not at Sundance, then surely at Cannes.
Which leads me to Sarah's most recent dispatch. Tony, I know that many men love a good catfight, but I'm not going to fight with Sarah. And, Sarah, I'm not going to defend Mystic River. Many people have written eloquently on the movie, and all I would be doing was matching your tit for my tat. (That doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean.) In the end, whether you like the movie or not (and I believe that David also likes it) just comes down to taste—you know, different strokes, blah blah blah. What I'm more interested in is the point you raise in this sentence: "In a way my quarrel is not so much with the film, which is mostly solid and professional and clearly one of the better entertainments of the fall, as with its reception." No shit! I loved Eastwood's movie when I saw it at Cannes and wept copious tears (while sitting next to the N.Y. Times boyz, let me add gratuitously), but when the reviews and the gush started to pour forth, I just winced. What movie—even a movie as fine and as occasionally powerful as Mystic River—could live up to that hype? I understood when my non-critic friends started complaining, "Well, it wasn't that great." Cuz it ain't, and neither is Lost in Translation, the other most overrated movie of the past year. Nice movie, even if it owes nearly its entire look, flow, almost-love-affair and that last unheard whisper to Wong Kar-wai.
Which makes me wonder: Why did Tarantino get hammered for ripping off a zillion other filmmakers when Ms. Coppola got a free ride?
Meanwhile, don't you all think that the Japanese influence we've seen in American movies this past year has a lot to do with the fact that the center of the cinematic world—the thrilling and unexpected center of the cinematic world—has in the last few decades shifted East? Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and my beloved Wong Kar-wai, along with Tsai Ming-liang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the occasionally insufferable Takashi Miike, and a host of other filmmakers from Taiwan, the People's Republic, Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand are what make attendance at foreign film festivals an absolute must these days. Like us, Tarantino and Sophia Coppola have clearly been paying attention.
That's it for now. I've got to go review Dog Days, an Austrian movie with a lot of naked, pasty white people in it, but when I return later this afternoon I will try to take on Jim's formidable posting.
Love,
Manohla
P.S.: My pal Wesley Morris, a film critic for the Boston Globe, sent me an e-mail last night that I wanted to share. (I asked for and receive his permission to quote him, btw.):
It's late, and I need to sleep, but this is the only way to get my two cents in. But to answer your question: I think a lot of critics do fear dealing with movies' politics. I'm not sure if it's the muddle that Tony describes or some kind of editorial pressure, but as movies are inherently political, we have a responsibility to consider the politics. Why should that be any less our goal than assessing its entertainment value? I'm a black, gay man, and I'd like to think my filter tends to allow less bullshit to pass without seeming enslaved to notions of political correctness. Then, I'm someone who actually liked Cold Mountain for daring not to go into the slavery business. I mean I just don't think Minghella's smart enough and the movie he's made big enough to parse out the politics.
To the film's immense credit, slavery is this non-philosophical, abstract condition that seeps into the movie. The subtext without no name and no face, much as some wagers and opponents of the Civil War tamped slavery into the conflict's subtext. Moreover, it's necessary to remember that the strains of personal history that the movie fantasized—soldiers straining to make it back to their women—was real and this movie realizes it in a manner I found moving. Would I like to see the Civil War from the blacks' point of view? More than anything. But who's going to tell that story?
And here's where I get frustrated: not in the telling of Cold Mountain, but in the dispiriting lack of alternative perspectives. And that is the heartbreak of going to the movies this year: the utter homogenization of everything. There was a diversity of stories, but so few diversity of people. I really wanted, for instance, to like In the Cut just for its balls, but it was hard for me not to see Meg Ryan's student lover as a sex-threat because that's how movie ended him up, after promising to make a more complex figure of him. Campion pushes him into a box of black male virility that goes largely unredeemed, so that by the time we've left him he seems less than human, and I think Campion baits us into thinking about his function as sexualized-racialized concept, which, again, is brave but insane. But forget that: what about the nasty use of Derek Luke in Pieces of April or Japan in The Last Samurai or Cuba in Bad Boys 2? Although I'm still trying to figure out why Benny was the most virile-seeming male in Elephant. Kill Bill, Vol. 2, with its mongrelizing, was amazing in small part for its multiculti interfacing. Still, this was another terrible year for non-whites in American movies—although you might argue it was a bad year for whites, too, but, hey they at least had their bad time on screen.
From: A.O. Scott
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, and Sarah Kerr
Subject: Which Critical Wave Are You Riding?
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 4:25 PM ET
Dear friends,
This is all moving very quickly, and I'm torn between the desire to go back and respond to various challenges, ripostes, and asides and the urge to forge ahead. So I will split the difference and use this post to respond, before the conversation surges forward and buries some of these threads. So:
In some ways, Sarah, your critique of Mystic River is unanswerable, except that I did find it devastating, magisterial, and all the other overwrought adjectives, while also finding it a superior piece of pulpy genre entertainment. As I said before, I don't entirely buy Eastwood's notion—and I think it is his, rather than Dennis Lehane's—that human beings (OK, men) are governed by a remorseless propensity for violence, but I found the rigor with which he pursued this idea, and the way he pushed it away from sentimentality and toward a pessimism so radical as to be positively un-American, to be very powerful. More concretely, I loved what he did with the characters, allowing us to see different aspects of their personalities as the circumstances shifted, so that Laura Linney's apotheosis, while surprising, was less a left-field shocker than a startling reversal of perspective, forcing you (or me, anyway) to see everything that had come before in a different light.
But I don't want to rehash what I've already said about the movie, which I've written about quite a bit already (including in this coming Sunday's "Arts & Leisure" section). I'd rather defend, against both Sarah and Manohla—and also against numerous friends, readers, and Internet movie bloggers—the tone of enthusiastic praise that I and others brought to our reviews of it, and more generally to defend the critic's prerogative—scratch that, the critic's duty—to give voice, even hyperbolically, to passion. I agree that as breathless reviews pile up, and as the studio marketing departments exploit them, the expectations attached to certain movies become almost ridiculously high, at which point a backlash inevitably kicks in. All of us, I think, have at various times been part of both waves—the "wow" phase of a movie's reception and the "eh" or "whatever" or "what the fuck are these people talking about?" phase—and I think there is a fallacious belief that it's better, or at least cooler, to be part of the second phase. The preferred critical stance often seems to be one of skeptical nonchalance. It makes us feel smart, gives us more opportunities for wit, and it minimizes the risk of being embarrassed by seeing our innermost thoughts splashed across full-page ads and festooned with exclamation points. And of course part of the job is to be skeptical, to steel ourselves against hype and provide our readers with a disinterested alternative to it. But just for that reason it is also part of the job not to deny ourselves or our readers honest and unguarded expressions of excitement. As I recall, many of us who saw Mystic River near the end of the abysmal Cannes Festival were glad, at the least, to be reminded of what a good movie looked like—a well-directed, solid piece of cinematic storytelling, a little old-fashioned, unstintingly earnest, with big performances, and a rich, engrossing narrative. In that context, it felt like a masterpiece, but festival impressions are notoriously distorting, and it took a second and third viewing, and much thought, to persuade me that it might actually be one. Others (like Sarah) were not so persuaded, but I would have been untrue to myself and unfaithful to the muse of criticism if I had tempered my admiration for fear of making Manohla wince.
As for Barbarian Invasions, I'm not sure what you mean, Jim, by "dimensionally challenged," but I think Arcand is very sly in his use of sentimental narrative conventions to advance a jagged and provocative view of history—he's a curious hybrid of Neil Simon and Bertholt Brecht. I think that the fate of Quebecois nationalism—or, more precisely, of French-Canadian cultural identity—is not so much the elephant in the room as the subtext. Remy and his pals are of the generation that underwent—or perhaps instigated—the swift transformation of Quebec from a highly repressive Catholic society into a cosmopolitan, secular, and sexually liberated one. The aftershocks of this process (called laicization) are evident throughout the movie, from Remy's furious ranting at the nun who is caring for him to his memories of being turned on by the movies about saints and martyrs that were the main pop cultural fare of his childhood to the haunting scene in the basement of the church, where Gaelle breaks it to the monsignor that his dusty collection of chalices and statuary is without value on the international art market.
All of the -isms to which Remy and his cohort attached themselves were substitutes for this vanished religious authority (here is perhaps where Arcand crosses paths with Tony Kushner; both of them are fascinated by the entwined histories of religion and socialism in the 20th century). These serial ideological enthusiasms also hid, behind various banners of Third World anti-colonialist solidarity and transnational New Left romanticism, the real transformation that was taking place, which was that people like Remy, a working-class kid from the remote provincial city of Chicoutimi, were turning into comfortable bourgeois individualists. It is not so much that these folks betrayed their ideals as that their ideals turned out not to be what they had at first seemed. Far from abolishing the democratic-capitalist state (and its international, imperial successor), Remy and Co. were helping to perfect it, by humanizing it with their lofty ideas and reckless self-indulgence. I think the middle ground you find missing is there, David, in the reconciliation between Remy and Sebastian, and in the installation of Nathalie in Remy's book-filled apartment.
So maybe movies are, as Wesley Morris says, "inherently political," though I must say that sounds to me like a truism. What is clear from his e-mail (and all of ours) is that their politics can be quite slippery and ambiguous—and, as often as not, reflections of the political inclinations and rhetorical skills of the people watching them. I thought Wesley's defense of Cold Mountain as being, after all, really about slavery was an elegant response to the charge that it ignores slavery altogether, and in some ways a persuasive one. One of the interesting things about the story is that it's set in North Carolina, the last state to join the Confederacy and one—especially in the western mountains—where there was great ambivalence about the Confederate cause (and even substantial support for the Union). (You hear this expressed from time to time in the movie when people complain about fighting for "the rich men's niggers.") These mountain folk are, in some ways, the mirror image of the Irish immigrants in Gangs of New York, whose alienation from rich Northerners found expression in a torrent of racist violence during the draft riots. What's curious about these two movies, taken together, is that they suggest that the Civil War, which we are used to seeing as a matter of race and section, was also about class. Remove some letters from "Miramax," rearrange a couple more, and what do you get? "Marx." Interesting, no?
That's enough for now. More tomorrow.
Your pal,
Tony
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Rivers of Perception
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004, at 5:19 PM ET
A few weeks ago, the editor Michael Caruso (who works in the same building as Slate's New York office) enunciated for me a formula about good movies and hype: When you see them before everyone else, your instinct is to blow the trumpet and herald a great masterpiece. When you see them later in the curve, your instinct is to say, "Well, that was overrated." It is the job of the critic to steer a surer course through these rivers of perception, and I'm proud to say I do—at least half the time. Sometimes my rudder wobbles.
Sarah and Manohla: I found myself, like both of you, in the funny position of liking Mystic River hugely but being thrown into reverse by some rave someplace or other. No, it wasn't Tony's. It must have been the one by my old friend David Denby. (It often is, come to think of it.) I recognized some of my own thoughts on Eastwood's migration from Dirty Harry to Guilty Harry but so hyperbolically expressed that I thought, "Whoa, Nellie." Seeing the movie for the second time, I was fascinated by Eastwood's blend of manly laconicism and ham-handedness, by all those casually framed scenes that ended with moodily self-conscious flourishes—the Eastwood touch. And don't get me started on that woman's damn mouth. (Didn't anyone preview this movie?) But I disagree with you, Sarah, in dwelling too much on the shots meant to evoke the inexorability of fate. In between them, there's a lot of chewy psychology—the kind that doesn't often make it into big-studio movies, let alone mysteries.
The bedroom scene, often referred to with reference to a certain "Scottish" play, is the one that I'm always asked about—as in my colleague Fred Kaplan's succinct e-mail "Re: the bedroom scene in Mystic River. What the *&%#&?" I had the unfair advantage of having read the Dennis Lehane novel, so I knew it was coming and recognized the portents in Laura Linney's performance—a performance that seems unusually subdued if you don't know what's coming. Her husband, Jimmy (Sean Penn) had not only committed the unspeakable crime of murder but the murder of an innocent man. (Well, not entirely innocent: Swept under the carpet, morally speaking, is that Dave—overacted by Tim Robbins—has beaten to death a convicted pedophile receiving a blow job from a teenage boy, an offense that merits punishment but hardly vigilante execution. I guess Dirty Harry ain't dead yet.)
How, we wonder, can Jimmy possibly live with himself? Years earlier, he'd committed a murder and then gone straight and opened a grocery store and tried to set an example for his daughter. (He also sent money to the murdered man's family, anonymously.) Now he has lost that daughter—thanks, in part, to the psychological ramifications of that earlier killing. He is morally dead. This is when his wife moves in to ease his conscience and to show him that she's hot for the king he will become. Not only, she suggests, must he accept his destiny, he must embrace it. The movie ends with the radiant new king (and damned human being) facing his old friend/new adversary, Sean (Kevin Bacon), from opposite sides of a parade in which American flags are waving: There's that great I'm-gonna-get-you mimed gun blast from Sean and the "What? Who? Me?" mock-innocence of Jimmy as the pair become the stuff of a movie myth.
You say it's from left field? The screenwriter Brian Helgeland might agree with you: He left that scene (right from the book) out of his first draft, and Eastwood (taking his cue from Lehane) asked for its reinstatement. But I agree with Tony's "startling reversal of perspective." What we have witnessed is not just the death of a moral human being, but the birth of a sociopathic gangster—soon to be a mightier pillar of his community.
Tomorrow, I'd like to get to the real elephant in the room, which is Elephant, and Capturing the Friedmans—and Peter Pan, which I'll see tonight, I swear. But since we're all so self-reflexive this year, I thought I'd share an e-mail from Robert Ridout: "The one thing that always strikes me about the yearly Movie Club is how much movie critics enjoy discussing their opinions with each other. I cannot imagine quite the same sort of roundtable discussion with a group of book critics. I wonder if it is because books are a much more personal experience while movies are best experienced (and evidently lend themselves to be critiqued) as a group."
I'm thinking it has something to do with the number of times we've gone out after movies together and gotten loaded, but that's just me.
David
From: J. Hoberman
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Gus Van Sant's Experiment
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 11:48 AM ET
Hi guys, and good morning cyberspaceland. You'll be fascinated to know that my civic duty has, for the moment, been discharged and now I'm looking at a mountain on my desk of displaced yadda-yadda (not yours, mine).
Tony, I salute you: How do you manage to turn out these cogent, erudite posts at a rate of two a day? Plus, sardonic off-group asides—and don't you readers just wish you knew what they were? I dared you to find a political subtext for The Barbarian Invasions and, embarrassingly for me, you did! (Why couldn't I have steered the conversation around to La Commune?) I love your notion that the movie puts the "Marx" in "Miramax." You've identified Arcand's hitherto unnamed tendency: Miramarxist. (Are there others? Would the hateful City of God be an example?) Describing Arcand as part Brecht, part Neil Simon is also choice, although for me he's more a cross between William Inge and Norman Lear or maybe Albert Camus and the people who write Friends. When I called the characters "dimensionally challenged" I was looking for a fancy way of saying "flat." Life is less a school than a schoolyard. I am confounded by your sense of history and impressed by your argument, but it doesn't make me like the movie any better—rather it leads me back into the murky realm of subjective response. (As one of those Romans said, "I love and hate and who can tell me why?") The last word, should you care to have it, is yours. A final absurd rhetorical question on history, ideology, and the movies: Would it not have been neat if, rather than French, the enemy in Master & Commander was, as I believe to be the case in one of its source novels, American?
Sarah, please accept my punch-drunk apologies for not plunging into Mystic River. Rather than your thoughtful response, I experienced something like the masterpiece-overrated syndrome David described right there watching the movie in the Palais. I liked it well enough—which is to say I welcomed its melodramatic brio and old-fashioned movie values—but, blinkered by the unique viewing experience that is Cannes, I could see it only in festival context. The passionate enthusiasm that greeted the movie seemed a form of mass relief. Something had finally arrived to challenge the dread Dogville! (Now there's a mix of Brecht and Neil Simon or perhaps Clifford Odets and Alfred Jarry—whatever, me like it.) French and Americans could unite in a new cinéaste international behind Clint. But juries move in mysterious ways, which brings us to the enigma of … Elephant.
David, I hope I'm right in sensing that you plan to start the ball rolling on this one and, as ambivalent as I am about it, I'll be grateful to follow your lead. One thing I would like to get to is the remarkable persistence of film experimentation—by which I mean Van Sant, Guy Maddin, and (in your extremely perceptive analysis) Christopher Guest—as well as the great gift I say (in respectful defiance of MC alum Roger Ebert, to whom I send all good wishes) of DV. Hopefully, I'll be able to post again later (much later) today. As for Peter Pan … I'll see that one when I grow up.
Manohla, as always, I await your latest missive with exquisite anticipation. Don't pay any attention to those snoids in the Fray: Jack Black is only a demigod. You rool!
Yours truly,
Jim
From: Sarah Kerr
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, A.O. Scott
Subject: Quentin Tarantino's Celluloid Masturbation
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 11:57 AM ET
Dear Manohla, Tony, David, and Jim, I saw a really interesting film last night—Korean director Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... And Spring. Witty, bluesy yet puritanical fable of a monk's progress from boyhood through adult love, sin, contrition, meditating, and getting kickass at martial arts in middle age, and raising a new baby monk to start the cycle again. It's out in April. What with this and The Return and Lars Von Trier's loathsome but brilliant Dogville (tune in next January for a fight on this one—me like, too, Jim), I'm starting to think (and pray) that 2004 could be a more fertile year.
On Manohla's question about women in film, I actually haven't given much it as much thought this year as in years previous. Am I complacent or are things a little better? No doubt my job protects me a little, in that I don't have to see buddy junk like Bad Boys II if I don't want to—not priority No. 1 for the Vogue audience. But let's see, outside of Hollywood bloaters (a big caveat, true) I'm heartened by the number of projects this year in which women brought stories of women to the screen—and, more important, the films more or less worked and got seen. There's Lost in Translation, Whale Rider, Thirteen, The Company (Neve Campbell, producer and driving force), Sylvia (Tony, I totally agree with you that this is underrated—not as an exploration of the Plath-Hughes relationship, which it handles cornily, but as a disturbingly sensual portrait of depression—that scene of Gwyneth Paltrow on a boat hurtling out to sea, heedless and dead-eyed!). For characters, there's Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, cursing her corset, and Miranda Otto in LOTR joining in the fight. And the adorable girl whiz kids, Angela and the winner Nupur, in Spellbound. And the Calendar Girls ladies, and Diane Keaton. Did I love love love any of these films? Not exactly. But often the men couldn't seem to get too far either. What depressed you most of all about women in front of or behind the camera this year? What occurs to me is the Monica Lewinsky rehash in Love, Actually, but I'm sure there's a better example. Actually, while I cried at the end of Barbarian I thought the women in it were gruesomely weak; Tony's beautiful defense of the film almost, but didn't quite, erase the memory.
That said, I stand with you on In the Cut, my sister. The film just isn't anywhere near bad enough to warrant the scorn heaped on it. More than scorn: desire to crush like a bug. With heavy heart I remember going to dinner in Toronto with 10 or so men and enduring Neanderthal riffs on Jane Campion. "Everyone knows she's the biggest bitch in international film, with the thinnest skin, and the bitch thinks she's an artist!" one charmer went on and on.
Oh I tell you, it was a delight. I could never entirely dismiss this film, because Mark Ruffalo's performance so triumphed over the lurid, indulgent mess around him. Just so you know where I'm coming from, the first piece I ever published about a movie was a long essay against The Piano called "Shoot the Piano Player." In no way is Campion of my favorite filmmakers, but the woman deserves—no, has earned—a hell of a lot more respect.
On to Kill Bill for a moment. Jim, do you really think Tarantino is a victim of the system? I think we're a victim of his not writing a screenplay, indulging in a quite boring obsession with his leading lady, and essentially masturbating on screen, with the gall to invite us back for a second installment. I hated Kill Bill not in a tsk-tsk, scolding way but because it induced boredom to the level of panic—a desire to flee the theater—and self-pitying rage that work required me to stay put.
Which brings us to Peter Pan, a movie David seems set to go to bat for. I'm waiting for you, David (though prepared to salute the little actress who plays Wendy—she's a wonder). Also readying for Elephant, which Jim's post, just arrived in my box, paves the way for. And hoping to get to a few comedies this afternoon.
Till later,
Sarah
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: To Neverland and Back
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 3:51 PM ET
Hoo boy, so much to cover, and later today I'm going to serve up some samples of the best e-mails I've received. (I've yet to visit the Fray, Jim, which this time of year traditionally consists of people posting variations on, "Blah blah blah. Boring windbags. Who cares about critics? Movies are about entertainment.") As the tendentiously brilliant (and brilliantly tendentious) Armond White put it recently, "You don't need that in your head."
Yesterday I staggered through the 15-degree evening to see Peter Pan, all by my lonesome in a Brooklyn theater heated to a toasty 45 degrees. (I wore a heavy coat, hood, and gloves throughout, being too embarrassed as the only person in an empty theater showing a kids' movie to complain.) When I wasn't busy curling and uncurling my toes to prevent frostbite, I was transfixed. The movie is marvelous. I'm struck by Sarah's "inappropriately sexualized" comment in an earlier post, because the pinch (and that's a pinch, not a dollop, Sarah) of Angela Carter/Company of Wolves-ish psychosexual spice is one of the things that struck me as so exciting. (The other is simply that, shot by shot, P.J. Hogan's direction delighted me. Some of it is in a league with Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alfonso Cuarón's A Little Princess.) Wendy is on the brink of the "change," and that's precisely the point at which kids look longingly forward and backward (the latter, perhaps, less consciously, in fantasy). The cocky Peter, here a laughing, feral child, is potentially her first lover yet someone whose special powers are connected to the fact that he can't or won't be.
I don't mean to get all Psych 101 here. But Peter Pan reminded me of some modern, revisionist A Midsummer Night's Dreams by Peters Brook and Hall and Alvin Epstein that aggressively excised the Mendelsohn influence and made the fairy-forest world mysterious and frightening—a manifestation of what Camille Paglia ritually refers to as "cthonian nature." There's even a pinch (that's a pinch) of Lord of the Flies. Lest I make this sound too grown-up, I'm talking about undertones here. The colors and compositions at times recall Disney; and while Capt. Hook begins as a rather Byronic, hypermasculine character—in contrast to the rather fruity Cyril Ritchard (my first Hook, in the musical)—he quickly reveals himself to be as much Peter's childish playmate as his deadly nemesis.
I dunno, guys: Throw in that scrumptious Wendy and only slightly less of Ludovine Seignier than in Swimming Pool and what's not to love?
Random notes:
1) Have you seen the new Mystic River commercial with Eastwood on-camera saying, "It's not about special effects"? Cute. Is this the first political attack ad in an Oscar commercial? Any suggestions for an LOTR counterattack?
2) On comedy: Two of my favorite movies this year were broad slapstick affairs, Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Duplex. Both were treated with contempt by most critics and indifference by audiences. (The former featured the inspired Steve Martin of old. The flaccid "family" Steve Martin stands to have one of the highest-grossing movies of the year with Cheaper by the Dozen.) What gives?
3) I like the chick with swords thing going on this year. Even Wendy in Peter Pan gets to do some fancy blade work. To paraphrase the little psycho in Kill Bill, we want to skewer them but now they get skewer us.
4) Sarah, you wrote that the upcoming Dogville is loathsome and brilliant, and I agree enthusiastically with at least 50 percent of that description. I think here—and not with Barbarian Invasions—is where we bring in Brecht, Tony: Brecht at his rock-bottom worst, the Brecht who wasn't a voluptuist and lover of women and supreme poet-dramatist but a fatuous misanthropic reductionist who liked to construct quasi-mathematical proofs that demonstrate the inevitability of injustice (especially toward women) in a free-market society.
5) My final word on the opportunistic use of dead kids is to note that in Seabiscuit (the wholesome entry in this year's Oscar sweepstakes), the auto magnate's son, maybe 7 or 8, climbs into his father's car and drives off the road. In real life, the man did lose a son, except he was a teenager in a car with his friends. What kind of people would seek to make a tragedy like that even more horrifying?
Now, to Elephant, the dead kids movie made with something like integrity—but also this year's cinematic Rohrshach blot. Is it possible not to be ambivalent? In the course of those endless, free-floating shots, does Gus Van Sant intensify your empathy with those school kids or does he etherize you? Is it all a giant video game or is it more like real life than any fiction film this year—or is life a giant video game these days? The incisive architecture/film blogger Greg Allen says, "It's got that fiction-meets-doc nonprofessional actor thing that runs through Victor Vargas back to Battle of Algiers, of all things." Is it, indeed, this year's crossover point between fiction and documentary? An attempt to use the techniques of documentary to wipe out the distance that makes watching any work of fiction, no matter how kinetic, an arm's length experience? I felt that way about Bloody Sunday, which employed the rhetoric of an on-the-fly documentary, but isn't Van Sant aestheticizing like crazy?
Talk not so quietly amongst yourselves.
Later,
David
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Thanks for the Wank
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 5:19 PM ET
As is often the case, Sarah, you nail Kill Bill but you end up on the wrong side of the equation. You say that Tarantino is "essentially masturbating on screen, with the gall to invite us back for a second installment." I say it's rather entertaining to watch this guy's masturbatory fantasies, especially when they're epic. N.B.: This is NOT a general principle, but for some artists, masturbatory fantasies and art are very close-knit.
Fondly,
David
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott
Subject: Suicidal or Just a Whore?
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 7:02 PM ET
Hello, my friends,
For those who care, last night the Los Angeles Film Critics Association held its annual vote for the best movies and performances of the past year. You can read the results at www.lafca.org. It's incredible to me that anyone could believe that American Splendor is superior to, say, Mystic River or Elephant (much less Unknown Pleasures and Platform), but, hey, as the very smart Matt Zoller Seitz recently wrote in the New York Press: "I've gotten to the point where I now read critics not because I trust their opinions, but because I feel that I've gotten to know them well enough to be able to split the difference between their opinions and mine, and make a decision on whether to see a particular movie (or watch it again). When a critic steers me wrong, or fixates on particular details for reasons that strike me as counterproductive, I don't feel mad or betrayed. I remind myself that everybody is different and every day and every week is different, and that if that critic had written the review in a different frame of mind or experienced a different upbringing, his verdict might not have been the same. (If you think critics don't occasionally pan movies because they saw them after having a nasty fight with their significant other or writing a big check to the IRS, you are naive indeed.)"
Anyway, Jim, you wrote yesterday, "Elsewhere on the correctness front, I'm wondering what y'all thought of the front page piece in last Sunday's 'Arts & Leisure' section—a perfect trifecta, dissecting the exploitation of Japan and Japaneseness in The Last Samurai, Kill Bill Vol. 1, and Lost in Translation. The writer made many good points but, unless I missed it, failed to note that, judging from these examples, American cultural superiority is quite tenuous." You're right, of course, that the article didn't note that American cultural superiority is tenuous, but, as we know, these kinds of daily paper pieces are generally stripped of opinions, which are seen to be the provenance of critics. Sure, the article felt worthy and correct, almost dutiful, in how it approached the issue. But someone has to write pieces like these, in part because the overwhelming majority of film critics are white, male, and come from (I assume) comfortable middle-class backgrounds. As such, these critics may not be interested in or even notice if, say, Lost in Translation is mildly if unintentionally racist (or, more charitably, just offensive), because they may not be looking at the film through the eyes of the Japanese characters/caricatures. That's cool. We each place our identification with different characters (or not); there are many movies that hold no point of character-identification for me but that I dig nonetheless because I'm grooving on the theme or the camerawork.
As it happens, I identified far more with Murray's character—his regret, desire, absurdity, and exquisitely sad-funny alienation—than I did with Scarlett Johansson's self-indulgent mope. (I kept thinking, "Get out of the hotel, you idiot!") Still, despite my love for Murray's deep waters and my appreciation for how young Coppola has absorbed the influence of Wong Kar-wai and his talented cinematographer, Chris Doyle, I was bummed by how often she trotted out the wacky Japanese stereotypes. Yes, other people's accents are funny (my Manhattan accent is a hoot after a few glasses of wine), but after the third, fourth, ad nauseum, gag about funny "R's" and "exotic" behavior, the whole thing just didn't seem funny. I don't think that's a "politically correct" reaction, by the way; it's just my personal reaction, one partly formed by some familiarity with Japanese culture and an ability to identify with both Japanese and American characters, even in the absence of fully rounded Japanese characters. I understand what Coppola was trying to do—to convey the sense of estrangement in a foreign country and so forth, mixed in with a loose (and, again, very Wong Kar-wai-style) narrative about a dissolving marriage and roads not taken—but it just didn't work for me. My guess is that a lot of critics—who rack up many lonely hours in hotels because they attend film festivals abroad—went easy on the film because they too have stared into a television at 3 in the morning, missing home. And I bet more than a couple critics dug the film's older sensitive man-younger needy woman fantasy, especially since it was, finally, such a guilt-free trip.
Which isn't to say that Lost in Translation isn't good. It's a nice movie and I look forward to her next one. But I still think it has been overrated. Let me be clear, Tony, I was not thinking of you when I mentioned how Mystic River (a film, remember, that I love and put on my top 10) had been terribly and unfortunately overrated. I was thinking about another critic I admire (OK, David Denby), but I was also thinking about myself. (Solipsism seems pretty forgivable in such a solipsistic forum as this one.) When I talk about critical hyperbole, please understand that I am also always talking about myself and my uses and occasionally abuses of all manner of adverbs and adjectives. I have banned the word "stunning" in my own reviews for this coming year, for instance; I used it and abused it last year, and I just need to remove it from my vocabulary for a while. After all, how many times was I really stunned by a movie last year or any year? (Stunned: "1. To make senseless or unconscious, as by a blow; 2. To daze or stupefy; shock deeply; astound; overwhelm ...") When I read those definitions I have to admit that I haven't been stunned all that often at the movies; so, I was stunned—no, taken aback—that I used it in a few reviews. (I did almost faint while watching the creepy French feature Under My Skin, so I guess that film did almost stun me in a second definition sort of way.)
The larger, more important point is whether we serve the films we love by overselling them. When I re-read the likes of James Agee or Graham Greene, I am stunned, stunned I tell you, at how temperate their language seems, specifically their praise. Of course, one big difference is that when they were writing they didn't have to compete against the din of the entertainment industrial complex. Every week and month, we struggle to be heard through the roar of the publicity and marketing machinery, competing for attention (and respect) against a celebrity-saturated media that we are (irony of dreadful ironies!) also a part of. So we jump up and down, wave our arms in the air, and shout, "Hey, here's a wonderful Iranian or French or Taiwanese movie you will love, I promise!" (It's sad how much harder we now have to work when it comes to foreign-language films.) We shout with intelligence, grace, and talent, but there's always an element of hustle when it comes to reviewing. But do we do our beloved movies any good with this shouting? Among the perils of selling movies too hard is that we set up false expectations in the audience and ignite reaction formations among our peers. I now think that Clint Eastwood and Mystic River have been denied awards by a number of prominent critics groups because of the praise the film received on its release. And I say this as someone who was part of the hard sell at Cannes and afterward.
Last but not least, to answer Sarah's question about why I'm feeling less-than-cheerful about women both in front of and behind the camera: I liked Sylvia, too, and was happy to see Gwyneth Paltrow actually working again rather than just smiling and swanning through a role. It's worth noting, however, that film was produced by British companies; and director Christine Jeffs, who made a fine feature debut with Rain, is a New Zealander (like ... Jane Campion). What really bothers me is the representation of American women in film. I would much rather watch a movie about a brilliant poet who put her head in an oven than sit through another movie about a heart-of-gold, ass-of-alabaster prostitute (unless the prostitute movie was a better work of art), but what a choice—we're either suicidal or whores? I still see too many movies in which the women characters are either a side attraction (Jessica Lange in Big Fish, among others) or on tap for visual booty call (insert Eva Mendes movie here, though she was fairly delightful in Stuck on You). As to directors, if the best we can come up with is a sprout like Sophia Coppola and a hack like Nancy Meyers (and I say this as someone who enjoyed Something's Gotta Give), then that is bleak.
That's it for now. I'm going to ponder the various comments on Elephant, yet another movie I loved (and probably oversold), and maybe I will go see Peter Pan, though I once swore I would never, ever watch another shrieking P.J. Hogan entertainment. To paraphrase Armond White again, I don't need that in my head. Speaking of not cluttering your head with nonsense: Jim and David, rest assured that I stopped reading the Fray when I saw posts that called me PC-fascist or some such silliness. It's been my experience that the people who accuse me of being politically correct—a designation, mind you, that I try to employ only with ironic derision—are those who want us to shut up, sit back, and pretend movies have no meaning beyond their entertainment value. If they really believe that, why are they reading Slate?
Love,
Manohla
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: The E-Mail Gaze
Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2004, at 7:24 PM ET
As we approach the end of the Movie Club (no, not yet, don't leave: tomorrow), I want to acknowledge the hundreds of people who've e-mailed and to apologize for not answering every letter at length. The level of engagement (at least, ahem, outside the Fray) is extremely gratifying. Thank you. My instinct is to end with something ironic and deflating of the sentiment here, but it should stand as is. (That said, mentioning my impulse to be ironic and deflating is itself a kind of ironic deflation, and going on about it moves us further from—yet paradoxically, I think, closer to—the original sentiment. Thank God we're not discussing Adaptation this year or I'd have a stroke.)
Many people want to know why we're not discussing Pirates of the Caribbean. I'm not sure that that enjoyable movie (which is about 45 minutes too long) needs elaboration, although I have enjoyed watching Johnny Depp (here and in the atrocious Once Upon a Time in Mexico) move to a new, Brandoesque level of virtuoso weirdness.
Now to some of the letters:
Vince Keenan wants us each to pick "one critically drubbed or largely ignored film from the past year and make an impassioned case for it." He remembers my case for Gun Shy, and cites Hollywood Homicide: "It's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination. Just an enormously entertaining one, an attempt by Shelton to illuminate different aspects of the lives of Los Angeles police officers. There's a direct line between this film and the work of Joseph Wambaugh. And Harrison Ford gives a terrific comic performance." I couldn't agree more and want to mention again Looney Tunes and Duplex. And Gun Shy.
Sudhir Muralidhar, film editor at the Columbia Daily Spectator, wants to know why Capturing the Friedmans "hasn't gotten more respect." I respect it, and I note that Jesse Friedman is going back to court with an appeal and say, "Godspeed." Manohla, I know you disliked the movie: Care to take on Sudhir?
Sean Gallagher thinks it's great that directors "knew how to use pop songs in movies again. This isn't just people like Richard Linklater (School of Rock) or Quentin Tarantino, who are acknowledged fans and were making films where music was already an integral part of the movie. I'm talking about all the musical moments in Cold Mountain (OK, that's old folk music, but it's done by modern artists), or the wonderful karaoke sequence in Lost in Translation or Sarah Bolger singing her heart out on 'Desperado' in In America, and even Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci making out to Journey's 'Don't Stop Believing' in Monster. … In an age where most studio executives still see music in movies as a marketing tool instead of an artistic statement, it's nice to see movies which see otherwise." Amen.
Here's scholar Jeanette Zissell on the tabloid antics of Sam and Frodo: "The intense relationship between Sam and Frodo, for example, is exactly of the same kind as Patroclus and Achilles, or Roland and Charlemagne. These men were extremely close, bonding in situations where their lives depend on each others' actions. Their relationships read as verging on the homoerotic to a modern reader, and yet fall short of actualizing that tension. In Sam and Frodo's case, as Tolkein was a devout Catholic, this relationship also reflects the communion between believers, and the respect, self-sacrifice and love they owe to each other. And while such sexual tension may or may not be present in any instance, each has a theme of friendship it is easy to miss. If these were stories of women, would we be so quick to discount feelings of loyalty and sentimental love in this way? As a culture we are often uncomfortable with male sentiment, something medievals had no difficulty in expressing. And while I understand your assertion and to a large extent agree, I would bring attention to the complications of these concepts that modern culture does not understand. We could well benefit from an inspection of that kind of bonding, and to look further at the self-assurance and lack of shame at male feeling that it involves." Bravo. Gimme a kiss, Jim.
Richard Kim thinks that Wesley Morris couldn't be more wrong about the absence of non-whites in movies and gives too many examples to list.
Alice Aixel lauds our colleague Roger Ebert as "the last groovy white guy who liked Kill Bill as well." Hey, what about me? She goes on: "The female sexuality in In the Cut is perverse and dank. What about some strength and sexiness à la Uma Thurman's Bride? Kill Bill is like rock 'n' roll, seemingly dangerous but really just good clean fun all the way."
Kareen Rampy wants to know if I'm "satisfied with the smallness of [my] love muscle" and suggests some Web site that features a product with a peculiar name that I can get at a big discount. Hmmm. I guess I'm not wholly satisfied, Kareen, but to enlarge my love muscle would lessen my reliance on the masturbatory fantasies of people like Quentin Tarantino and hence affect my criticism—for the worse, as I think my readers (but maybe not Sarah) would agree.
M. Rantanen asks: "When can a movie character or story be just about that particular character or story and when does the character or story have to represent its respective group (gender, race)? I then ask when does the politics of a movie be called into question? In other words, is it possible to have a movie about women or African-Americans without said characters having to represent its own identity? Does every woman or black character in a movie have to represent all women or all black people? I'll answer my own question and say that it all depends on the person doing the criticism. That's where the politics really exist." I have a hunch we would all find reasons to refute this. Someone please do so.
Casey Tourangeau has read through the Fray (I haven't) and says: "I can't believe how angry people are at the mere discussion of movies. What's baffling to me is that people aren't reacting to your takes on specific films, but that they're upset that you're discussing them at all. It's as if the mere notion of criticism has become a target because it interferes with their care-free consumerist lifestyle." Hey, I have a care-free consumerist lifestyle, but I love to talk movies!
On that note—more letters tomorrow.
Good night, all.
David
From: Sarah Kerr
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Requiem for Capt. Hook
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 10:50 AM ET
David,
I love your take on Peter Pan, and though it doesn't yet make me retroactively enjoy the film, I think you're totally right about P.J. Hogan's ambition and the interestingness of that ambition, and you've convinced me to give it a more open-minded second viewing. I want to say more, but first I'd like to hang my head for a moment in chick-critic shame. There's nothing like speed writing with no time to consider or revise and then getting stuck traveling all day on Amtrak with nothing but time to mull over one's own rhetorical excess. After being too harsh on men who were too harsh on Jane Campion (Neanderthal is a loaded, uncool word to use), I turned around and dumped too harshly on Tarantino (revealing my own tendency to want to squash what troubles me like a bug?). Aargh, self!
Anyway, might I like Peter Pan more with someone besides Jeremy Sumpter—so insipid beside the very alive actress who plays Wendy—as the boy who wouldn't grow up? I think so. And I'm curious, given your theory about Hook ending up as Peter Pan's playmate, what you make of the way Pan finally defeats him. He leads all the little kiddies in an insulting anthem that crushes Hook's spirit. Something like, "You're old! Alone! And all washed up! Old! Alone! And all washed up! Old! Alone ... etc." The kids get all giddy and whipped up and triumphant as they repeat it. I can't help but wonder about this, the climax of the film. I mean, sure, it's intellectually interesting to make more explicit the primal, dangerous subtexts of fairy tales, but the audience for this film is 6- to 8-year-olds. Call me square, but do you really want to teach kids that being old and alone are grounds for scorn—even for a kind of fun sadism? Maybe this is where you see Lord of the Flies come in. In this context, though, it strikes me as emotionally coarse.
I haven't seen Looney Tunes or Duplex, but you do make me want to see Duplex. Unfortunately, I did see Steve Martin in Bringing Down the House, in which he plays a stale-archetype repressed guy opposite bug-eyed prison escapee Queen Latifah, who is used like an appliance to perform a variety of useful functions—practice sex mannequin, nurturing mammy to his children—all so that he can get his wife back, and lots of money. This may be my worst movie of the year.
Also David, you laid down the ambivalent point of view on Elephant beautifully. I'm with you there, in the middle of all those question marks.
Manohla, just got your post and must absorb. But briefly, even if you didn't swoon over American Splendor, do you take heart from Hope Davis' character: the abrasive, neurotic, and adorable Joyce Pekar? In terms of women on film, I mean. I thought Davis was wonderful, although her charisma almost overmatched that of Paul Giamatti's Harvey.
Best,
Sarah
From: A.O. Scott
To: David Edelstein, Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr
Subject: McNamara vs. Morris
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 11:06 AM ET
Dear Friends,
Sorry I wasn't able to post today (it's now Thursday night, though I guess this won't be up on Slate until Friday). I spent the day bouncing from one thing to another. First to a screening at Film Forum, where I ran into Jim, freshly sprung from jury duty, and then later to the other end of Houston Street to revisit Fog of War, which I hadn't seen since Cannes.
The second viewing left me even more befogged than the first, and it struck me that a lot of last year's non- and quasi nonfictional films were concerned not so much with clarifying reality as with reminding us of how muddy, ambiguous, and opaque the real world can be. I suspect that Errol Morris started out with a certain set of assumptions about what kind of a man Robert McNamara was and found those assumptions parried, undermined, and complicated in the course of their long interviews. The movie is full of dissonance, both cognitive and aural: McNamara's flat, pugnacious voice rubs against Philip Glass' melodramatic score like gravel on satin, and you swerve from marveling at the man's intelligence and candor to recoiling from his arrogance and self-deceit. It's strange (McNamara's middle name, by the way) to feel that you're simultaneously learning an enormous amount about history and politics and having your ability to form clear judgments about what you're learning clouded and compromised.
It's also a little frustrating, because it seemed to me that Morris, figuring he could entrap McNamara within his own web of duplicity and hubris, underestimated his subject, and what you witness is essentially the subject and the filmmaker fighting to a draw. But at the same time, the ambiguities in Fog—McNamara's intractability, his ability to be absolutely direct and completely evasive in the same breath, his stubborn particularity—are what make the movie so valuable. Which links it, in my mind—to connect this long tangent to issues the four of you have raised recently—with movies like Bus 174, Capturing the Friedmans, American Splendor, and Elephant.
What all of these movies do, or at least attempt to do, is illuminate a knotty human problem (a bus hijacking, the collapse of a family, a school shooting, the condition of being Harvey Pekar) without simplifying it or resorting to facile explanations. Bus 174 and Friedmans each unpack a traumatic, tabloid-ready event (using a combination of retrieved footage and postmortem interviews and implicating the viewer in the tawdry spectacle) and turn it into a social tragedy. You leave both movies knowing a lot—about street kids in Brazil and a middle-class Long Island family—but without a clear, comforting sense of why these terrible things happened. The problem I have with Elephant (which, of course, differs from the other two in being the fictional evocation of an actual event), is that it pushes this refusal of analysis too far—or, rather, seems to give up too soon. Van Sant does not so much discover that an event like Columbine is inexplicable (which may ultimately be true) as proceed from the assumption that it is.
I think that makes Elephant a scarily anti-intellectual film, as well as a beautiful one—"aestheticizing like crazy," as you said, David. And in that I think it's oddly similar to Kill Bill, though it plays the lurking expectation of violence for maximum shock and dread, rather than turning the display of violence into affectless kinesis. Am I making any sense? Did I just say "affectless kinesis"? I meant "ass-kicking balls-out tedium." Sorry. It's been that kind of day.
David, I'm glad you like Peter Pan as much as I did—if not more. I don't have much to add to your wonderful analysis, but I will say, Sarah (not to get all empirical or anything), that I saw it in the company of two 7-year-olds and a 5-year-old, all of whom loved it. My own children watched it with an awed, slightly scared, edge-of-the-seat attention that I've witnessed in them only rarely, at Finding Nemo and also at The Wizard of Oz. The movie's sensuality and its bittersweet theme—that to decide to grow up is to choose (or at least to accept) the fact of mortality—go over their heads a little, but I think that's part of what makes the experience of the movie so magical and intense. That sense of subtext—of big stuff going on at the far edge of your understanding, in the big words whose meanings you have to guess and the loaded statements whose significance you struggle to intuit—is what makes reading (and moviegoing) such a deep and uncanny pleasure when you're young. I was glad both to rediscover that and to witness it happening in a new generation.
I'll sign off now and try to come back tomorrow (that is, later today) with some thoughts on women and comedy, subjects dear to my heart about which I find it hard either to generalize or to argue.
Yours,
Tony
P.S. to Jim: You'll be relieved to hear that the ushers at Film Forum found my lost glove.
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott
Subject: Witness to the Masturbation
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 11:21 AM ET
One last, later-night posting: Sometime this year, I plan to write a piece about all the movie images that I wish I had never watched, including the shot of the guy with the lit candle stuck (deep) in his ass in this queasy-funny Austrian movie, Dog Days. To this list I think I need to add words I wish I had never read, including David's short post: "As is often the case, Sarah, you nail Kill Bill but you end up on the wrong side of the equation. You say that Tarantino is 'essentially masturbating on screen, with the gall to invite us back for a second installment.' I say it's rather entertaining to watch this guy's masturbatory fantasies, especially when they're epic. N.B.: This is NOT a general principle, but for some artists, masturbatory fantasies and art are very close-knit."
Dude, I did so not want to go there—either in your posting or Tarantino's movie. I don't want to watch anyone's masturbatory fantasy unless I've specifically skulked in and out of my neighborhood video store or am watching pay-for-view in my lonely Lost in Translation-style hotel room and have nothing better to do. (And to that I must add that I really don't want to think about your love muscle, David.) I guess that was part of the problem with watching Tarantino's fantasies (from now on the word masturbatory will be assumed): Watching other people's jerk-off fantasies is generally about as fun as watching someone else's coke/dope/junk high, meaning not very. And, no, for those who care (probably just me, Sarah, and some gray-haired bluestocking crone cackling away in a corner), I don't find anything hopeful about the character played by Uma Thurman. Not only because I think her character is a guy in drag (the revenge fantasy seems very "male" in an AIP kind of way to me, as do those ugly toes), but also because there's something scarily masculine about Thurman now—she's whittled all the femininity off those bones. Give me Lucy Liu, Dragon Lady clichés and all, any day. That chick is fierce, but she's also a chick.
As to some of the readers: Alice Aixel writes that the "female sexuality in In the Cut is perverse and dank." And your point and problem is what, exactly? Me like perverse and dank—in the movies, that is. Meanwhile, M. Rantanen writes: "When can a movie character or story be just about that particular character or story and when does the character or story have to represent its respective group (gender, race)? I then ask when does the politics of a movie be called into question? In other words, is it possible to have a movie about women or African-Americans without said characters having to represent its own identity? Does every woman or black character in a movie have to represent all women or all black people? I'll answer my own question and say that it all depends on the person doing the criticism. That's where the politics really exist."
Of course, movies can be just about specific characters and stories, and characters don't have to "represent" their own identities (though I'm not sure even what that means since everyone I know is far more complex than any one "identity"). I just would like better, more diverse, and a far more human aspect to movie representations, you know, women who aren't just whores or ornamentation, black women who aren't judges, and gay men who aren't fabulous and neutered. And, yes, the critic certainly, in part, defines a movie's politics. But there is a political dimension to even the most ostensibly nonpolitical film, just as there is a political dimension to clothes (Made in China ... by slave labor!) and food (McDonalds or Slow Food-approved). There is a political dimension to how movie money is raised, what screenwriter and director are chosen, how many and what kind of theaters a film opens in, and it is naive to believe otherwise. Everyone decides what is important to them—how much compromise he or she can stand, and what he or she does with their contradictions. That's why I try to fess up to the compromises I make and embrace rather than flee my contradictions, and why, too, I will always hold a special place in my heart for Jerry Bruckheimer.
That's it for now, so good night my friends.
Love,
Manohla
From: J. Hoberman
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Hands Off QT!
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 11:53 AM ET
Rewinding the discourse a bit, I must say I never thought that I'd be defending Kill Bill, a movie that I gave a mixed review at best and wasn't anywhere near my 10 best. I'd much rather defend Spider, or champion Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, or explain why Bus 174 is hundred times better than City of God. Anyway, to answer Sarah's question regarding Tarantino's victim status—which I admit probably sounds as absurd as calling Donald Trump a victim of the system (like a certain MS)—as well as Manohla's off-group assumption that I characterized QT as "the smartest filmmaker in Hollywood" in jest: I wasn't kidding, but I should have been more precise. My point is that there's no Hollywood filmmaker with better chops, no one with a more acute sense of how a soundtrack works, no one more in love with his actors, no one more clever—and sometimes brilliant—at reworking generic expectations in the service of his own particular, obsessive, arguably narrow cinephilia. (Not exactly synonymous with wanking. …)
To state the obvious, Tarantino loves movies. It's touching that he recently articulated the desire to retire from filmmaking and program a movie theater: His own private cinematheque. The great humanitarian Spielberg is often cited as a cinephile—his love, like Hitchcock's, is invested less in movies than their power. (Thousands of dollars for a Citizen Kane prop but not a penny for The Other Side of Midnight; Oscar speech praising Irving Thalberg for having the courage to mutilate Greed; I won't even mention the Six Million.) Tarantino, however obnoxious, is closer to Scorsese; he's a purist, even a utopian. He's also a specific kind of filmmaker. His movies may thrive on one-liners and hilarious, disturbing, amoral bits of business, but, if they succeed, it's because they are essentially architectural—based on sturdy, intricately worked-out structures.
It's not the script that's missing from Kill Bill, Sarah, it's the edifice. As a sentimental auteurist, I blame the producer or, if you prefer, the system for trivializing the movie. That Tarantino was compelled to truncate his original, no-doubt grandiose conception—and worse, perhaps that he was being a canny realist to do so—is what makes him a victim. The same thing happened to Scorsese with Gangs of New York—a tragic failure that in ultimate cine-utopia would have been as long as La Commune. Applied Miramarxism? You be the judge. (For the voluptuous pathos of cinephilia, see Bill Morrison's wonderful Decasia, just released on DVD.)
Let Tarantino be Tarantino. In any case, he seems an unlikely candidate for reinvention a la Soderbergh or, even more remarkably, Gus Van Sant. Initially an innovator, then a hack, Van Sant wore the hair shirt of Psycho and exiled himself to the wilderness of Gerry, to return with Elephant. How bizarre that this "aestheticizing" gloss on Kubrick (and, as Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out in his review, Bela Tarr) should also be cast as that most shameless of modes, the made-for-TV topical docu-drama. What could HBO have thought? Elephant is by no means a documentary, but neither is it simply a poem. Van Sant's use of non-actors, real high-school kids, is an audaciously cornball search for some sort of emotional truth—on film, yet. Elephant has its obvious lapses, but it is also the only movie in this carnage-haunted year that sets out to "document" ephemeral existence—which is what I tried to say a couple of days ago when I wrote that movie was concerned with heaven on Earth. Whether or not Elephant ultimately works, whether it successfully explains the inexplicable, whether it rises to the awful event that occasions it doesn't seem relevant to me—I'm far more taken with the crazy seriousness of the experiment.
Well, I'm not as marinated in the avant-garde as I once was, but I do want to cite a few movies that pushed the perimeter. The year 2002 brought a remarkable number of innovative DV-based movies: The Fast Runner, Russian Ark, The Lady and the Duke, Michael Snow's Corpus Collosum, Godard's In Praise of Love, ABC Africa. This year Kiarostami's Ten uses DV as a means to rethink movie acting and (non) direction, and each in his way, Guy Maddin and Jia Zhangke use DV to make possible their recent experiments in dance documentary and neo-neorealism, respectively. (Scratch neo-neorealist. Let's say it all together now: "Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke.") DV is, as we know, pretty much now identical with doc, and Criswell predicts that if CGI is the future of commercial movies, DV is the future of everything else.
Warm cyber kisses and manly hobbit hugs to all but especially to our genial host. Thanks, David, for inviting me to the club.
Jim
From: Sarah Kerr
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, and A.O. Scott
Subject: The Last Word on Quentin Tarantino
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 11:53 AM ET
Dear gang,
Manohla, I just got off the phone with the gray-haired, blue-stocking crone cackling away in the corner. She wants us to come by around lunchtime for gruel. Later we have that meeting of the Hurtful Speech Patrol, and don't forget: Tonight we move into the convent.
Wait a minute, though. How did I start off Monday wanting movies to quit the formulaic gloom and lighten up and end the week as the group scold? It's hard to get this across, but I really did just feel put-upon and bored while watching Kill Bill—and, OK, a lot of distaste. But no Joe Lieberman,we-have-to-stop-this-guy stuff. Just mostly: can't wait till this is over. Also, and how unclear this must be from my intemperate outburst yesterday, I love Tarantino. Or rather, I have loved him and hope to again. I agree with you, Jim, about the guy having better chops than anyone in Hollywood. Yesterday you called it being smarter. I'd go so far as to say he's more of a genius. That doesn't mean he's very tapped into his intelligence these days. Larissa MacFarquhar's delightful but too determinedly empathetic profile of him in the New Yorker painted the same pure and counterintuitively lovable picture you give. But I also got a musty impression from that article, as if he were in danger of turning into a pale Vincent Price figure, walled for a decade inside his library of schlock. I didn't want to warn him to steer clear of the system—I wanted to say, Get out of the house once in a while! Live!
I could go on: The cannibalism and reordering of old pop imagery seems a staler pursuit than it used to, less in sync with this stressful year than with the '90s, when it seemed for a naive moment like history had ended. That (and the fact that nothing else made a compelling claim) is basically why I put Lord of the Rings at the top of this year's list, even though it suffers many of the flaws Manohla points out, and, I have to admit, crushes Mystic River in the overhyped department. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy it, but it seemed in conversation with the times. Hard not to sound like a cliche machine here—but it said something about dread and uncertainty and the need for hope.
Speaking of which, David, though we rumbled a little more this year I so hope we are not really on opposite sides of the equation. If I came across as grumpy at times, it's because I agree with Tony's statement about the honorability—and the soul-sustaining necessity—of critical enthusiasm. And I'm blue that I didn't feel so enthusiastic this year. (Whereas last year I loved The Fast Runner and Spirited Away and happily waxed too-enthusiastic over About Schmidt, Adaptation, and others.) I'm determined to close on a positive note, though. Herewith: praise.
Eugene Levy: best saucer eyes and hopping eyebrows in the business. Tony, I'm sorry we didn't have time for that comedy conversation.
Pirates of the Caribbean: It spoke to the times in its own way, by offering straight-up fun. Weird to think how few other films even tried.
David and his readers: Can I just say, David, that you have built a following and an engaged relationship with your readers here that seems like a genuinely new thing? This doesn't happen often. Plus, I am ever more aware of your generosity and behind-the-scenes grace in running this show. I wish I could see reader Richard Kim's list of non-whites in (key, non-degrading) roles in film this year. I bet Bend it Like Beckham is in there, and deserves to be. Without the list, though, I'd be inclined to second Wesley Morris' point about non-whites in the movies. But you are right to police our policing.
Male colleagues: Love you! Sorry about yesterday! My shrill bad. And despite my defensiveness, I can't really say you're wrong about Campion's film. So there to me.
Tony, Jim, Manohla (and David, again): It has been, as I'm sure many readers would agree, my privilege to be included among you. Me honored to have been in your company and me wish you all a superb 2004.
Sarah
From: Manohla Dargis
To: David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, and A.O. Scott
Subject: Out Here in L.A.
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 1:43 PM ET
Dear Sarah, Jim, Tony, and David,
I will be out of the house for much of the day attending screenings of the anime film Tony mentioned earlier, Tokyo Godfathers, and the latest (I think) from Guy Maddin, The Saddest Music in the World. Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary was one of the highlights of my past year; it's amazing how fresh and innovative his witty gloss on pre-studio system filmmaking looks. Another highlight was Unknown Pleasures, and following Jim's advice, I will now chant its director's name—Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke. But I want to point out that the film's American distributor, the redoubtable New Yorker Films, didn't bother to open it or another of its better recent acquisitions, Abderrahmane Sissako's Waiting for Happiness, in Los Angeles. Likewise, Women Make Movies chose not to open Jennifer Dworkin's remarkable Love & Diane, arguably the best documentary of last year, in my city. Living in the boonies really can be a drag.
Jim, I wish I could read your piece that pits Bus 174 against the loathsome City of God, yet another exploitation flick in art-house drag. I guess you could level the same charge against Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but I was too floored (yes, stunned) by the movie to agree that it's purely (or impurely) exploitative. In some ways the film just doesn't make "sense" (among other things, the Bela Tarr influence is both obvious and inexplicable), but I was smitten by the film's beauty and its elegiac, heartbreaking tone. For me the film is, at heart, about the devastating loss of these beautiful children. I don't think Van Sant has a clue either why Columbine happened (I share his ignorance, despite that bully Michael Moore) or what can be done to stop another similar tragedy, other than ridding this country of easily accessible guns and, well, loving one another much more. Van Sant isn't an intellectual, but there's no doubt in my mind that he's one of our most important filmmakers.
Until now I've avoided jumping into the Tarantino discussion, in part because I was really depressed by Kill Bill—Vol. 1. It gave me no pleasure to give that film an unenthusiastic review. I think that Tarantino is capable of greatness, which he proved with his best and most unfairly received film, Jackie Brown. But I have always thought that most if not all of his movie-genius, such as it is, exists more on the page than on screen. Like Steven Soderbergh, one of my favorite American filmmakers, and unlike Paul Thomas Anderson, whose work alternately thrills and dismays me, Tarantino isn't a natural born filmmaker. He has some wonderful (literal) moves, but he's still learning where to put the camera, and there's a kind of forced, awkward quality to his mise-en-scène, as if he were trying to remember some great shot he once watched and loved. I have no problem with that—he certainly can hit the cinematic sweet spot—but I don't think his work has the flow and grace of either Anderson or Martin Scorsese. (Yes, Anderson cribs from Scorsese, among others, but he's also a natural.) I think Tarantino's genius is for dialogue, for situational black comedy, for violence, and for something more intangible—he makes his movies and "the movies" seem exciting. There is something about a Tarantino film that feels really electric—waiting for one of his movies to start reminds me of being at a rock concert and waiting for the guitarist to let out the first lick. And because Tarantino does love movies, he wants us to feel that love as strongly as he does—he works hard for our pleasure.
I love that about Tarantino, but I don't think that has anything to do with how smart he is, cinematic or otherwise. And I still believe that Steven Spielberg is the greater, better director, even if he does love himself more than he does "the movies"—perhaps because he mistakenly believes he is "the movies." I wish that Spielberg worked as hard to make us happy as Tarantino does; with Spielberg, I feel as if I'm supposed to take it on faith that he's a genius. There's much that I don't like about Spielberg—paying thousands for one of the sleds from Citizen Kane while refusing to write even one check for Orson Welles, and the gas-chamber that poured water, not Zyklon B, in Schindler's List—but I love him nonetheless. And I think that he's been pushing himself in really interesting ways these last years; if you lop off the idiotic, sell-out ending of Minority Report, there's a future masterpiece waiting for you/us. But back to Tarantino: I think he has been damaged both by his success and his own self-mythologizing. I don't think the filmmaker-as-rock-star thing was good for him; I don't think all the articles, the books, the magazine covers (some of which I wrote, alas) were healthy. Certainly they were not conducive to his growth as an artist. There's something a little bit charming and something very dismaying about him retreating into B-and-Z movie fandom after Pulp Fiction, when he went around lecturing on the genius of the likes of William Witney, who directed some Roy Rogers flicks. The geeks lap this nonsense up, in part because the democratization of movies is very comforting—in this view, everyone is a genius and every movie is great. I don't buy that, and I don't really think that Tarantino buys this, which I believe Kill Bill—Vol. 1 proves. The most interesting thing about the film is that it's his attempt to make the ultimate movie of its kind, which is why I think Uma is really Quentin in the film—she/he is going to kick the ass of every cinematic stand-in that comes her/his way. She/he is going to kick Vivica A. Fox/Pam Grier's ass and Roger Corman's ass and Seijun Suzuki's ass and Kenji Fukasaku's ass.
I wish I could go on, but Tokyo Godfathers await. Thank you, David, for inviting me into your cool club, and thanks to you and Jim and Sarah and Tony for putting up with my rants, bad jokes, and meandering missives. It's been an honor and a privilege.
Love,
Manohla
From: A.O. Scott
To: Manohla Dargis, David Edelstein, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr
Subject: Not Available for Preview
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 3:38 PM ET
Dear Friends,
I join you, for the last time, having just completed one of the grimmest tasks in the daily newspaper critic's repertoire of chores, the Friday-for-Saturday review. (Count yourselves lucky, you weekly, monthly, and Webbily employed.) Every so often, a motion picture comes along of such exquisite quality that the releasing studio decides that to show it to critics in advance would spoil its delicate beauty, and so said critics must rise early on opening day, sit through the masterpiece in question (in this case My Baby's Daddy), and then hurry off to write the review in time for the next day's paper. In some ways, I suppose, this is a throwback to the old days, when movie critics, like their theater-reviewing colleagues, would attend the premiere and then rush back to the newsroom at midnight (often still in their tuxedos), decoct a pitcher of martinis, and pound out their considered judgments on manual typewriters in time for the morning editions of the paper.
Were those days better? Some would say so, but there was no Movie Club back then, which can only mean that the lives of movie critics (and, whatever some Fraymooks might say, their readers) could only have been duller and sadder. I know that mine will be when this is over and we all make our lonely ways through another year of unexpected delights and inevitable disappointments. I can hardly wait to fight about Dogville, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and whatever else 2004 has in store for us. But in the meantime, a few final thoughts on the year just ended and on what you all had to say about it.
Jim and Manohla, I would happily join in your chant in praise of Jia Zhangke if I could pronounce the man's name or stay awake through his movies. Actually, I did admire Platform for its attempt to dramatize the slow, incremental process of historical change (one of my favorite things for movies to do). But the glum remove of its characters was off-putting and began to seem, in Unknown Pleasures, somewhat mannered. I did love Guy Maddin's Dracula and Decasia, and I'm struck by the persistence of an avant-garde at once embracing the new capacities of digital video and rediscovering old stuff like silence (or near-silence, as in both Maddin's film and the classical, Keaton-esque sight gags in Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention), black-and-white, the stationary camera (Tsai Mingliang's Goodbye Dragon Inn and also, of course, the Paris Hilton sex tape), and the materiality of celluloid. Perhaps the emblematic instance of this was the Criterion Collection's loving and scrupulous release of Stan Brakhage's work on DVD, which will make his work accessible to more people than ever before and also, to some degree, betray it since Brakhage famously despised video. (It was his determinedly anti-video technique of dabbing coal-tar based pigments onto celluloid with his bare hands that probably caused his death).
As for Mr. Tarantino, I found Kill Bill in some ways impressive but ultimately not very interesting. Yes, he does love movies, and he has a marvelous skill at refreshing and recombining them, but I'm more than a little wary of your testimonials to his genius and your professions of love for him. I certainly admire his absence of cynicism—Kill Bill is as pure an expression of cinematic ardor as you could wish and an earnest attempt to communicate delight—but there is also an absence of genuine emotion, of connection to anything outside his pop universe, that deadens the joy. Yes, Jim, Scorsese possesses a similarly obsessive love of the medium and its touchstones, but his movies work best when his feverish immersion in the movie past allows him access not only to the formal accomplishments of old movies, but to their living content. It also helps that the movies he is most devoted to contain a deep strain of humanism, something that can't really be said of QT's canon. So Scorsese uses I Vitelloni, in Mean Streets, as a way into the question of male friendship, just as he uses Visconti's costume melodramas and John Ford's epic westerns in Gangs as a way of thinking about the dynamics of historical change. Still, I have to say that for my money, Spielberg is a better filmmaker than either Scorsese or Tarantino, though perhaps we should postpone that argument for next year, when all three may well have movies ready for the club.
Sarah, I'm also sorry we didn't get around to comedy but be assured that your grumpiness has been, for all of us, a source of delight, thanks to your unfailing wit and intellectual precision. Manohla, I'll save you a seat in the Salle Lumiere, but in the meantime I'm setting up a Web site where I can post all your private and confidential e-mails. Jim, you are both a genius and a mensch and, as such, a credit to the cause of Miramarxism.
And above all, David, thanks for hosting us, once again, at the best party of the year and for being such a great critic and such a great guy. Your next 100-proof Manhattan is on me.
Until next time,
Tony
From: David Edelstein
To: Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman, Sarah Kerr, A.O. Scott
Subject: A Cry in the Dark
Posted Friday, Jan. 9, 2004, at 5:20 PM ET
I can't believe this is the last post of the 2003/2004 Movie Club, which I've enjoyed more than any other.
Manohla: I don't think it's wrong to dwell for a moment on masturbatory fantasies since they are intimately connected with many movies. Obviously (too obviously to spell out, I thought), it depends on what you do with them, and also whether the artist is willing to challenge or test their foundations. Also obviously, that is not what Quentin Tarantino does in Kill Bill, Vol. 1—although I think he gestures toward it in the opening battle, in which the Bride kills Vernita Green in front of her young daughter and acknowledges that she has just become the villain in the little girl's own revenge melodrama. This is given another wrinkle when we learn, from the movie's inspired anime section, that the villain O-Ren also grew up as the heroine in her own revenge melodrama.
At the risk of yanking your chain one more time, Manohla (especially when you're not around to yank back, at least publicly), as reader Josh Martin notes, you "inadvertently set up a contradiction" when you denounce Tarantino's male revenge fantasies in one paragraph, then go on to say you "like it 'perverse and dank' when it comes to female sexual fantasies involving dangerous males." He concludes, "We likes what we likes."
Ain't it the truth. That said, for a critic, the words "de gustabis non est disputandum" might be the most horrifying in any language: If we didn't believe in a hierarchy of taste, we wouldn't (and shouldn't) do what we do. So we will always, in discussions like this, arrive at a "me like" versus "me don't like" moment—and we owe it to ourselves not to shrug it off but keep barreling ahead to get to the bottom of it all.
I agree with Jim that the structural complexity of Tarantino's films is their most original and tantalizing element, and that the structure of Kill Bill (so far) is more one-thing-after-another than usual. But on the second viewing I was surprised by how often Tarantino doubles back on himself, as well as by the number of nifty interpolations (like that anime, which comes between the Bride's decision to move her big toe and the toe's response). And I'm sorry, Tony, I felt there was a ton of genuine emotion in the movie, the kind of feeling you find in dance musicals in which the free-wheeling use of space and montage is an end in itself. Which brings me to my final defense: Tarantino has never done pure action. In Jackie Brown, he kept the violence off-screen or at a distance, and the killings in Pulp Fiction are shocking not for how they're staged but for where they erupt in the narrative. (For a thriller audience, they're like Haydn's "Surprise" symphony.) So I don't think there's anything wrong with him wallowing in this particular orgy—either to get it out of his system or add the ability to stage and shoot this stuff to his filmmaking palette.
Jim, I'm sorry we spent so much time debating the frankly junky Kill Bill and not Spider, which I thought an honorable failure. I wanted more typically David Cronenbergian yucko visions (or else David Lynchian surrealism) and less clinical distance, but I loved Miranda Richardson's three faces of Mom. I shared Manohla's response to the heartbreaking beauty of Elephant, although I longed, in the end, for a little more interpretation. Still, here and in Gerry, Gus Van Sant has become a truly experimental filmmaker again, and our movies are richer for it.
I am surprised we haven't addressed American Splendor, which has won so many critics' awards—although mostly, I think, because it was the one film on which everyone could agree. It might be that this and not Elephant is the real fiction/documentary missing link, the film that captures eloquently our longing to make art out of—and confer glamor on—the mundane stuff that holds our lives together but hurtles by so quickly.
Speaking of which ...
I wish I had time to acknowledge a lot more e-mail. OK, a few more letters, with apologies for missing some good ones:
Jerry Oh thinks we should be citing 28 Days Later as a DV event because, while it was transferred to celluloid, it plays to the strengths of its medium. He also, provocatively, sees the limitations of DV "as an honest quality, and closer to the way we see life than film." (Somewhere, I like to think, Roger is reaching for his keyboard.) And Anna Poe asks if Sofia Coppola's public humiliation of her estranged husband Spike Jonze in Lost in Translation didn't make that the real female revenge movie of 2003.
Paul De Zan writes: "The majority of critic-haters interest me, because I think they are seriously deluded about their own motivations. Although they tend to decry critics as enemies of popular choice, most ... are, in fact, hyper-authoritarians. The attitude I have encountered, time and time again [is]: 'How dare you question the work of people who are above your station in life—the demigods who write, direct, and act in movies? They are more famous, more wealthy, and more powerful than you are—if they are not entirely above criticism, they are certainly above criticism from you.' No real comeback for that, ehh? It's often said that what Americans really want is a monarchy; one need look no further than the Entertainment Complex to see that the specification has already been met."
Peter Sattler writes to defend Lost in Translation against charges of racism: "The feelings of strangeness are entirely in the American characters. The camera records beauties—cultural and natural—that the 'lost' visitors are unable to register or understand. ... In the movie, Japanese culture estranges you from American culture—makes American culture look strange and dubbed, as much as the other way around."
He goes on—respectfully, I should add—to criticize this year's Movie Club for "self-congratulation, glad-handing, and tiptoeing" around some disagreements. I'd like to plead guilty, with extenuating circumstances.
We live in a different culture than the one that was around when I began scribbling about movies—one with (happily) a lot more voices and (unhappily) a lot more vitriol. There are bloggers and alternative newspaper columnists who routinely refer to "idiots" and "morons" who disagree with them, or are quick to label political opponents traitors or "fifth columnists." Star poster twifferTheGnu reminds me that not everyone who posts in the Movies Fray is uninterested in debating ideas, but even he acknowledges that most of the postings there consist of dashed-off, semiliterate abuse. I used to read classical music and opera boards on the Internet, but gave up because I couldn't take hostility—I can only imagine how it gets on boards about politics.
Meanwhile, critics and critics of critics attack one another at every turn, more interested in one-upmanship than in recognizing or building on the work of their colleagues.
I'm very pleased if, in the Movie Club, we have come off as liking and respecting one another too much. I'm honored to have J. Hoberman, one of the giants (and true independents) of film criticism here, and I've been honestly dazzled by the thinking and writing of Tony, Sarah, and Manohla even when I've disagreed with their opinions.
More important, I've wanted to set an example for talking about the things we love and hate. I don't believe that critics are a different species, lower or higher. In the Movie Club, we're just doing what everyone does when they go out for a drink after a movie or play or gather together once a month in someone's living room for a book club. A work of art doesn't end after you consume it. It has a finish, like wine (or bourbon—and my Manhattans, Tony, are made with 126- not 100-proof whiskey). Sometimes that finish is quick and sweet, and sometimes it's bitter and lasts for years. Sometimes it upsets your stomach. In all cases, exploring our own responses—and bouncing them off people we like and respect—is among life's greatest pleasures.
People often criticized Seinfeld for being about a bunch of vapid, self-obsessed people talking about nothing—so often that the series' final episode was virtually destroyed by incorporating that point of view. To me, it was the most optimistic show on television, because even those raging narcissistic freaks could find solace in one another's company, no matter how much they got on one another's nerves. I loved that they could drop in on one another any time, much as in a college dorm, and shock one another out of their solipsistic reveries. I find that way of living so hopeful, and this raging narcissistic freak has felt more alive mixing it up over movies in this space. My New Year's wish for everyone is to make your own Movie Club, complete with glad-handling and self-congratulation. It's really such a blast.
It feels funny to be alone again in the room, with only the Fray for company.
Come back!
David
Each year, film critics gather in the "Movie Club" to chew on the year in film. This year's group includes Manohla Dargis from the Los Angeles Times, David Edelstein from Slate, J. Hoberman from the Village Voice, Sarah Kerr from Vogue, and A.O. Scott from the New York Times. Hoberman is the author, most recently, of The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2093274/
