AA-Ooooooooooooooooooo! (Or, whatever.)

My quick and dirty thoughts after seeing Where the Wild Things Are:

Really, who hasn't, in some fit of rage or other such tantrum, ripped the arm off his or her favorite stuffed animal and later tried to repair it with a stick, or a sock, or something else stupid like that. But it's never the same, and no matter what we do it's like that forever, and it just goes into the bin with all the other things that, one day when we're sifting through old trash, reminds us of some moment in life we can't have back.

For everything that Where the Wild Things Are does well--visually, tonally, the constant apt manifestation of everything that goes on inside a kid's psyche, and the incoherent hodgepodge of what they've managed to internalize from a world they don't understand--what works best for me is this looming motif of the sun burning out. Because, really, childhood is always a world in some sort of constant state of dying; after all there's not one state of 'childhood' but endless iterations that are constantly fading away and developing into something new. And that's good, I guess, but it also necessitates constant loss. No fort ever quite lives up to the grand visions we had for it, so we have no choice but to tear it down, because what the hell is the point of reality if it can't mirror our imaginations. But then, our imaginations can't live up to our imaginations, and our fantastical escapes wither along with everything else.

It's telling that the only time we see a wild thing apart from Max is Carol rooting through the cave before running to see Max off at the beach, since obviously he IS Max (well, they all are, but Carol is clearly who Max identifies himself with), and embodies what Max's return home is supposed to be. At the end Max, smiling at his mother, isn't some touched child who has learned a valuable lesson by a literal experience with wise, mystical creatures, he's just a regular kid who got upset and had to spend some time inside his own mind until he got over it. Like any kid, he depends on fantasy to get him through his childhood, but it's still just fantasy, and clearly the viewer experiences this film as something far more depressing than Max himself does. Years later he may think back in some nostalgic reverie about the imaginary worlds of his childhood he can't get back, but for the time being it's just something that played its part, and now he gets to eat cake.

It came in the night, it came in the night, it came in the ni-i-ight

Grievances and faint praise for Paranormal Activity, from the October 22 issue of SEE Magazine. The best thing about this movie, probably, was that it reminded of the incredibly catchy "It Came in the Night" by A Raincoat. That song can be found on one of the versions of Kenneth Anger's "Rabbit's Moon" or, more accessibly, here. But on with the review:

Paranormal Activity is the sort of movie you talk about making with your friends upon realizing your hallway is kind of creepy. Familiarity is this film’s watchword, from conception to casting to execution.

Micah (Micah Sloat), a day trader and totally average douchebag, shares a San Diego home with his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston), who has been haunted, off and on, by unexplained phenomena ever since the age of eight. As the film opens, Micah has purchased a fancy camera to document the activity, which have recently started up again. Much to Katie’s chagrin, Micah begins filming everything, including their bedroom at night.

This is a mockumentary along the lines of The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, wherein all the footage has supposedly been filmed by the characters themselves. The entirety of this micro-budget film takes place inside the couples’ house, and it relies on the claustrophobia of the space and the banality of the setting to creep out viewers, though it’s only moderately successful at doing so.

Relying on hyperrealism for scares, Paranormal Activity plays on audiences’ fears of something alien entering the supposedly safe haven of their home and bedroom. But without creating a fully imagined cinematic world, the film must rely primarily on the viewer’s belief in demons, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. If your belief is nil, you probably won’t find Paranormal Activity very scary. It seems to play solely to the fears of people sitting in a dark theatre rather than anything larger, which is what better horror films tend to do.

The most successfully creepy moments are the ones that aren’t necessarily paranormal. One of the more unsettling things that the couple captures on video during the night is Katie rising in a sleepwalker’s trance and standing at the side of the bed for several hours, facing Micah’s sleeping body. By playing this scene in fast-forward, an eerie, otherworldly time-lapse effect is created. It’s far more effective than the scenes which involve slamming doors and footsteps, for example — those bits are startling, sure, but they don’t do much except make you jump.

First-time filmmaker Oren Peli has a good grasp on how to escalate tension, and the pacing is excellent. Without anything meaningful to ground the scares, though, the film ends up being mostly a collection of tense moments. The conclusion is fairly satisfying (more so than, say, The Blair Witch Project) and gives the story a satisfying sense of completion. Paranormal Activitydoesn’t live up to its hype as one of the scariest films ever made, but if you go in with moderate expectations, it will probably work as an entertainingly frightening night at the movies.

Proof that I still write.

Some quick house cleaning, hopefully more interesting posts to come.

Thoughts on The Cove, District 9, The Stoning of Soraya M., Three Monkeys, You, The Living, and The Boys Are Back.

I should have a piece on the new Mad Men up on The House Next Door later tonight, so I'll be posting a link to that shortly.

Also, here is an Inglourious Basterds piece I co-wrote with Paul Matwychuk, which is probably what you should read if I bore you too much to click on more than one of these links.

...And introducing Zooey Deschanel as "Anal Girl"

Luke and I have some thoughts to share on (500) Days of Summer, again published in SEE Magazine. The more this movie sits with me, the less I like it, to be honest. The best parts work very well in the moment, but the stuff that isn't so great is what stays with you. If I were still trying to be cutesy now, I would compare that to a bad relationship. And speaking of things that make you cringe, one thing that I didn't get a chance to mention in the piece is how much the very end (oh, say...the last three words) of this movie sucked. Anyone and everyone who wants to write, please never sacrifice the premise of your film/book/whatever to be cute. Duh. Read on:

Clara: (500) Days of Summer, the latest twee romance from Fox Searchlight (Garden State, Juno), chronicling a doomed relationship, is really targeted at twentysomethings like us. The content is a bit weighty for teenagers and the references just aren’t as pertinent to those who are older, though I’m sure it will have fans of all ages.

Luke: Right, and for here-and-now iconography, you could certainly do worse than Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel prancing through an Ikea. Even references to such things as The Pixies or The Smiths or, hell, even Ingmar Bergman come across less as throwbacks than as nods to contemporary hipster culture. Somehow, there’s something entirely 2009 about bonding over “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” playing over an iPod in an elevator.

Clara: Yeah, and compared to, for example, Juno’s cultural touchstone, the hamburger phone — well, I didn’t know anyone who had a hamburger phone until they saw that movie. (500) Days doesn’t create a fantasy world or promote its own quirkiness; it carbon dates a culture I think we’ll recognize if we reflect back 20 years from now, and that’s rare and refreshing. The story, unfortunately, doesn’t work as well.

Luke: You’re right, sadly. We’re told the film — 500 asynchronous days of Gordon-Levitt’s Tom being in love with Deschanel’s commitment-phobic Summer — is “not a love story,” but the script fails to live up to this promise. “Happily ever after” is simply replaced with a forced personal growth narrative, weakening whatever the movie has to say about the inexplicable frustrations of relationships.

Clara: The movie often betrays its own premise, and it’s also tonally inconsistent. There are a bevy of stylistic flourishes, some good: the Bergman spoof is hilarious, and the scene that split-screens Tom’s expectations versus reality is quite effective at showing his idealization of his relationship. But other things are too much, like the whimsical narration, reminiscent of Lemony Snicket or Pushing Daisies. It pushes a movie that’s already busy over the edge. Further, an omniscient voice is just a lazy way to tell us that Tom’s ideas about love are based on a misreading of The Graduate. Worse is Tom’s precocious kid sister — enough with the all-knowing children, Hollywood!

Luke: We agree that Gordon-Levitt is great, though. From broodingly belting “Here Comes Your Man” with a karaoke mic in one hand and a beer in the other, to pontificating about pop culture and greeting cards as a generational crisis, he really has a lot to sell. This could have been a full-on disaster coming from someone lacking his skill.

Clara: That greeting card scene is full of clichés, but Gordon-Levitt plays it with believable sincerity. He pulls off a pretty emo character by tapping into adult angst without making him seem like a petulant teenager, and that’s a tricky balance. I’m becoming quite the fan, and his career as an adult actor is really progressing, from Brick to (500) Days to ... erm, G.I. Joe?

Luke: Whoo!

Clara: I like Deschanel too, but she’s disappointing here, though it’s not really her fault. The script is semi-autobiographical, and I get the impression that the writer never understood why the girl Summer is based on left him, and thus the character isn’t fully realized or three-dimensional. We’re seeing her from Tom’s perspective, but a woman afraid of commitment is an interesting role that would have been great to see Deschanel really tackle.

Luke: The ubiquity of the male-perspective can be frustrating (cue new Judd Apatow movie), but that criticism may be misplaced with (500) Days. Sure, Summer is, as The A.V. Club suggests, a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Girl, serving little function beyond invigorating the brooding male protagonist. But the film is very aware of this, playing off Deschanel’s persona to create a character largely presented to us as Tom’s naïve, Graduate-inspired fantasy.

Clara: Going back to your point about iconography, Deschanel’s most successful in the role of Zooey Deschanel: Object of Every Hipster’s Desire. That’s something the movie seems aware of.

Luke: She’s a clever meta-reference to herself in a film attacking expectations fueled by greeting cards and pop culture; what self-respecting indie kid doesn’t dream of dating Zooey Deschanel? But this just makes the film’s failings as an anti-love story all the more disappointing. The cultural criticisms ring hollow when everything goes to serve Tom’s personal narrative regardless.

Clara: Ironically, some viewers may wind up misreading the film just as Tom misreads The Graduate, and come away dreaming of a tumultuous affair with some hot, aloof chick like Zooey.

Luke: Hell, I know I am!

Clara: Of course.

If you can't afford LSD, try Godard's new Criterions

Luke and I certainly have a lot more to say about Godard than this (ask us, ask us!), but alas, word limits. Here is a 'conversation' about Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, both released by Criterion on Tuesday. This was published in this week's SEE Magazine:

Luke: We both adore Jean-Luc Godard, French New Wave star and one of the most important directors of the ‘60s. But before getting too excited about Criterion releasing Made in U.S.A. and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a warning to the Godard-uninitiated is in order: do not start with these films.

Clara: I agree. Two or Three Things, particularly, is a stylistic mash-up of Godard’s earlier films, such as Masculin Féminin, Vivre Sa Vie, and Breathless. In Breathless, Godard, ever the film historian, had Jean-Paul Belmondo dangle a cigarette from his lips, emulating Humphrey Bogart; in 2 or 3 Things, Godard has become his own point of reference, so having a grasp of his style and his place in film history will be pretty helpful.

Luke: Even having seen those films, Made in U.S.A. was hard for me to make sense of at times. I get that Anna Karina solves her ex-lover’s murder to the sound of (I think?) missiles. Jean-Pierre Léaud makes a delightfully bizarre appearance doing ... something. And it’s communist, or whatever. But as usual, the madness is a stylistic joy to watch.

Clara: 2 or 3 Things certainly shares its politics with Made in U.S.A., and it can be equally incomprehensible. It cuts between a Parisian woman working part-time as a prostitute, and abstract elements that depict the changing world around her. Godard uses shots of cranes, sounds of machinery, “interviews,” advertisements, comic strip panels, and the whole Godardian kitchen sink, to express the saturation of information that the modern person faces. That’s one of the most daunting things about Godard’s work in this period: he was really striving to make films about everything in the world at that moment.

Luke: It’s a daunting but important period. As paradoxically both a historian and an iconoclast, consuming the world around him yet critiquing it relentlessly, Godard’s development during the ’60s feels like a Marxist dialectic; these films are approaching synthesis. In the following year came the May ’68 general strike, and Godard’s decision to become an obscure pinko propagandist after divorcing Karina and making a movie about yuppie cannibals. Though not always good (or even bearable), Godard’s transformations were in his very nature as a filmmaker.

Clara: I love how 2 or 3 Things sits on the peak of that major transformation and shows all of Godard’s various sensibilities, from high to low to pinko. It features both banalities of everyday life, and the cosmos being recreated in a cup of coffee, and has a lot to say about both. The dialogue ranges from things like “Style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms” to “My sweater is blue.” Though what really sets this film apart for me is that it feels like one of Godard’s most personal. He narrates it himself, often talking about the limitations of language and the impossibility of communication, but he whispers as if confessing secrets straight into the viewer’s ear. Godard is not warm and fuzzy, but I get strangely choked up by lines like “I can’t tear myself away from the objectivity that crushes me, nor from the subjectivity that isolates me.” You get a glimpse of some emotional core, I think — he’s just really French about showing it.

Luke: For all this talk of cosmos and emotion, the best reasons to love Godard are superficial, which is why of his many changes, these films represent the most tragic. Made in U.S.A. is the last of his films to feature Anna Karina — my pick for cinema’s most beautiful woman — and 2 or 3 Things is the beginning of his career without her. And really, for all his lofty credentials, is there anything Godard does quite so well as film a pretty girl?

Clara: No, and that’s the real reason I’m excited for these Criterion editions: pretty people in high-definition digital transfers!

In which Béla Tarr becomes accessible (relatively)

I had forgotten to post my review of the Jancsó retrospective. So here's The Round Up and The Red and the White. I also caught Red Psalm, which surely is one of the most aesthetically stunning films I have ever seen, yet I'd still be terrified to write a goddamn thing about it.

...

I have to confess that I find Hungarian cinema slightly intimidating, something I blame on Béla Tarr and his seven-hour-long Sátántangó. (I’ll finish it soon, I swear!) So Metro Cinema’s four-film retrospective of Hungarian master Miklós Jancsó is a formidable viewing experience indeed. But after screening The Red and the White and The Round Up, I can say that it was well worth the effort. In fact, such a singular directorial voice as Jancsó’s is well served by a retrospective that allows uninitiated viewers such as myself to become acquainted with his unique aesthetic over the course of several films.

Both The Round Up and The Red and the White are fascinating simply as period pieces showcasing a history not commonly known among westerners. Though they make strong statements about communist rule in Hungary, the films work well when viewed with little to no knowledge of their context. The backstory ultimately matters little, as Jancsó instead draws our attention to the absurdity of human conflict.

The Round Up (****1/2), Jancsó’s 1966 breakthrough, is set in a 19th-century internment camp housing the final members of an uprising against Habsburg rule. It’s clear from the opening scene that Jancsó offers the very best in black-and-white cinematography, with aggressive, high-contrast lighting complementing the bleak prison colony and Hungarian plains in impressive wide shots.

The Austrian guards of The Round Up constantly engage in tactical games and power relations with the prisoners, working them against each other and offering accused murderers pardons for turning in someone who has “killed more.” Both the prisoners and the guards move in and out of the story, and would-be protagonists are introduced only to be unceremoniously killed offscreen. In the film’s most difficult scene, a local girl is stripped naked and tortured, causing several prisoners to hurl themselves from a rooftop in protest. Yet while this would be a climactic moment in a different film, Jancsó merely moves on to the guards’ next attempt to elicit information.

Jancsó built upon this style with 1967’s The Red and The White (*****), a film that, while originally commissioned as a celebration of the October Revolution, was later banned by Soviet censors. The film is set at the end of World War I, as communist (red), and tsarist (white) forces struggle for dominance in rural Hungary. The politics of the war, however, quickly take a backseat as the film follows a number of fleeing red Hungarian fighters looking for refuge in a local hospital.

In both films Jancsó’s beautifully fluid camera often begins its long pans prior to the motion onscreen, creating a sense of detachment from any particular characters or actions during the slow, methodical long takes. One scene in The Red and the White features a solider forcing a young peasant girl to strip and ordering his men to rape her. The scene is reminiscent of the torture in The Round Up: It’s difficult to watch as the girl is dragged offscreen, but by the time a superior officer arrives to stop the attack, the camera has moved on, refusing the audience any chance at psychological attachment.

Jancsó’s unaffected style and aversion to any notion of glory make The Red and the White a true anti-war film, which is rare in a genre known for brutal yet hopelessly sentimental films that often double as recruitment propaganda. Yet both The Red and the White and The Round Up work best as farcical existential allegories, in which human beings struggle senselessly against each other without any sort of grand narrative. We follow characters long enough to recognize them, yet they are ultimately interchangeable, each person merely trying to survive.

The banners under which the characters fight and the ideologies to which they adhere are superfluous, and are never given a moment’s consideration. We never learn what, exactly, anyone is fighting for, or what drives these men beyond self-preservation. There are no heroes or villains, just instances of bare humanity in a nonsensical and ultimately meaningless situation.

These are challenging films, but they are undoubtedly the work of a great filmmaker. And though held in high esteem, Jancsó’s films are not widely distributed. Metro’s retrospective offers a rare opportunity to view several of his films in beautiful 35mm. Film fans should not pass up the chance to see as much of this retrospective as possible.

From the people who brought you Baconnaise

My review of Food Inc. at See. Though I still think the Onion's food issue got its point across better.

I confess to feeling more than a bit uneasy during the opening sequence of Food Inc., which features ominous-looking animated businessmen walking toward their jobs at, presumably, evil corporations. I’m partial to the film’s message, being a fan of the recent wave of food activism, spearheaded by people like Jamie Oliver and Michael Pollan and in which this film takes part, exposing the negative impact of the corn and meat industries and urging people everywhere to move away from processed foods. But at the same time, I’m a little gun-shy when it comes to “issue” documentaries in general, fearing at all times the toxic influence of Michael Moore that has turned a proud artform into the craft of douchebag polemics.

Scary businessmen aside, my worries were happily unfounded. Food Inc. has nary an overbearing personality or villainous caricature, and everyone who appears onscreen is given an honest-to-goodness fair shake. It’s a good thing, too: this is far too important an issue to be tackled by the likes of Morgan Spurlock. Food Inc. is not a film that alienates people by making fun of “fat Americans,” nor a left-wing echo chamber calling for socialist takeover. Its argument cuts across social, political, and class boundaries, featuring Republican families fighting for the safety of their children, undocumented workers being exploited by factory farms and slaughter plants, and lower-class “obese” Americans whose minimum-wage jobs leave them dependent on cheap processed foods. Director Robert Kenner deserves a lot of praise simply for discussing the problem of food consumerism while avoiding any trace of the sneering classism all too often directed at Wal-Mart shoppers. Even Wal-Mart itself is given the time of day, and comes off looking better as a result.

Overall, Kenner provides a simple, straightforward documentary that’s interested mostly in providing information and letting its subjects talk. The message comes through loud and clear, but it’s presented as something inclusive, stressing that “how we eat,” and the nastiness of factory farming and processed foods, are problems that affect all of us, be it in terms of health, worker safety, the environment, or simple culinary taste. Conscientious consumerism and political action on food are not inherently divisive issues; Kenner recognizes that there is a genuine possibility for consensus-building here. (Hell, what cause could better unite organic-farming hippies and free-trading market economists than ending corn subsidies?)

But don’t let all this nice talk fool you: the film is every bit disturbing as it is elucidating. It’ll surely ruin your appetite for the next week or so as it documents the troubling change food has undergone over the past 40 years, from whole foods into unrecognizable manufactured products. Food Inc. will make it difficult for you to sit down for a meal without first considering the chickens bred and force-fed into such an unnatural state that they can no longer support their own body weight, or feedlot cattle packed shoulder to shoulder for months on end, being fed processed corn and meat by-products as they stand knee-deep in feces.

None of this will be news to readers of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, who both appear in the film and whose books (Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation) provide its intellectual backbone. In that respect, the film itself provides little in its own right, and there are times when Food Inc. comes across — if you’ll forgive the metaphor — as a fast food version of the material on which it is based. It repeats the findings of journalists, but never manages to become investigative journalism itself.

And it is perhaps because I find the information presented in Food Inc. to be so important that I am disappointed it does not deal with some of the easier objections to its

argument. I’m sure we’ve all heard these things at various social gatherings: How is organic farming supposed to feed billions of people? What about the hungry people GMOs could help us feed? How am I supposed to afford a three-dollar banana at the local organic food store, anyway? It’s entirely possible that these are answerable questions, but I wouldn’t know, as Food Inc. just never addresses them.

Perhaps that’s expecting too much, though. Food Inc. isn’t here to solve all of the food industry’s problems, it’s here to shed some light on a very important issue and stir up some dialogue, making it essential viewing regardless. And if all it manages to accomplish is bring the work of Pollan and Schlosser to a new audience, all the power to it.