...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.

A pug's life.

I'm really just here to post stuff like this.

And you're welcome.

Because, really, isn't the military so macho it's sorta gay?

Like that movie, 300!

Anyway, I like this guy for two reasons:



1) He's fighting for a noble cause that's far past due.

2) He effectively shoots down this notion that it would be great if Obama treated executive power just like Bush did. Only this time with, you know, liberal issues. I mean, why do we all hate Bush so much, anyway? Because we disagreed with him? Sadly, that happens sometimes with democracy. I thought we hated him because he stretched his own powers at every opportunity and had that whole disregarding the rule of law thing going on. Which reminds me, why isn't John Yoo in prison, again?

Future companion robots

You'd think they'd be less creepy, right?

But then I remembered: Japan.

Anyway, me struggling, to write a spoiler-free Moon review:

For such a slow-moving film, it’s surprisingly difficult to discuss more than ten minutes of Moon without spoiling something major. Anything I can in good conscience reveal to you is already apparent from the trailer: Sam Rockwell plays a glorified custodian who maintains a mining outpost on the far side of the moon. At the tail end of his three-year contract, and with the HAL-inspired computer Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) as his only companion, he’s beginning to go a little batty.

As the film’s tagline so vaguely declares, it is under these strange conditions that Rockwell comes to ‘find himself’. This turn of events (less introspective than, well…literal) sets in motion a plot compellingly mysterious, and of which I dare not speak further. Yet the ‘reveals’ are never the focus, and in many respects the mystery serves only as a set-up. Director (and progeny of David Bowie) Duncan Jones surely includes a fair share of twists and space oddities, but he is always more interested in creating a thoughtful science fiction mood piece.

Moon is essentially a one-man show, so Sam Rockwell haters need not apply. He does an admirable job, however, considering what’s asked of him. It’s certainly a challenging role—on top of being in literally every scene, Rockwell is required to play variations of the same character, which fluctuate depending on what stage of stir-crazy he’s entered. Perhaps even more importantly, the film often avoids explication, especially in terms of Rockwell, who doesn’t really have anyone else to explain himself to. Instead his character internalizes much of what happens, and Rockwell must present his development through the subtleties of his performance, rather than long lines of dialogue. And more challenging yet, both Rockwell and his robot pal Gerty are at the centre of a crisis of identity, and he must wrestle with the themes and underlying questions of the film, despite that these are never quite made explicit (until, perhaps, the film’s final scene). The result is something quiet and reflective, calling to mind the smarter brand of sci-fi that uses the genre as more than a mere setting for explosions and shape-shifting robots.

In its headiest moments, science fiction provides a medium to explore questions of what it means to be human in the face of advancing technology. Threads of this theme can be found in everything from Frankenstein to the recently completed Battlestar Galactica series, both of which serve, to some extent, as statements on humankind’s tumultuous history with its own creations. In Galactica’s finale, a character reflects on such a history (including the show’s central war with artificial intelligence), commenting that, “our brains have always outraced our hearts.”

In perhaps an even more direct manner, Moon is also about our complicated relationship with technology and the ethical dilemmas approaching us. It is interesting that Rockwell’s facility mines Helium-3 from the surface of the moon, an element which—based on a little bit of real-life research in fusion—has come to replace conventional fossil fuels and lead the world into a new eco-friendly era. It’s the dream scenario: the damage caused by technological advancement has been solved by better technology. But here, as in Galactica, minds outrace hearts, and with one ethical dilemma solved several others rise to take its place.

This is not to say that Moon is a film for technophobes, nor is it the classic story of humankind falling victim to its own creations. The danger is not so much technology as the way in which it is put to use. To this end Jones walks the fine and difficult line of making Gerty a character both sympathetic and threatening. Spacey often overdoes the creepy monotone voice (which may say a lot about Spacey’s work in general, considering Gerty more-or-less sounds like Kevin Spacey), but his performance is effective enough to craft Gerty as a send-up and response to HAL.

The problem Moon addresses is not robots or science or any of the machinations of the human imagination. The lasting truth that our technology is always outracing our moral reasoning is not the fault of technology but rather our own technological view of the world. Through developments such as Helium-3, we may fix certain problems, or repair errors in the machinery, but what really matters is that we remain stuck viewing our world and our handiwork merely in terms of what can be weighed, measured, and, most importantly, put to use. As much as this is evident in our management of natural resources, in Moon we see it in the treatment of people, and even in the treatment of a creepy computer program voiced by Kevin Spacey.

On why New York makes you gay

A little bit late, but my Whatever Works review. My review for Moon should be up tomorrow:

Whatever Works would be an easy film to hate. After a hilarious opening fifteen minutes, much of the humour is lost. The characters come off as poorly conceived caricatures whose development ranges from absurd to borderline offensive. But this assumes these characters are to be taken at face value—highly specious considering the film begins with Larry David befuddling friends by interrupting a conversation to address the audience.

The story is basic Allen: David plays a former physicist retired into a life of elderly curmudgeonry. He meets Evan Rachel Wood, a dimwitted Southern girl who has run off to New York to escape her overbearing parents, and marries her despite his contempt for her limited intellect. The somewhat-happy arrangement is quickly complicated by the arrival of Wood’s estranged parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.), each a textbook case of sexual repression hidden behind an absurdly religious and well-to-do façade.

The characters are all farcical types, which can be off-putting since Allen’s so capable of giving us vibrant personalities. The Southern family may be a bunch of dimwitted hicks who abandon all sense of red-state virtue upon seeing the bright lights of New York City, but the New Yorkers themselves are pretentious hack philosophy professors and bloviating actors trying to live out some absurd romantic ideal. Each fits their mould equally well.

Of course a special place is reserved for the Allen-type, a role in which Larry David is wonderfully typecast. David manages to take his persona to such an extreme that he effectively strips away the ‘lovable’ from the ‘lovable Woody Allen misanthrope’. This might explain why the movie stops being so funny: David’s jerk antics become bizarrely cruel when he marries Wood only to continue belittling her and insulting her intellect.

Yet Whatever Works is a feel good movie, despite David’s emphatic claims to the contrary. And this slippage is easy to explain: none of these characters is particularly real. The whole film is set up as a tableside story, but Allen takes it one step further, having David acknowledge it as a movie.

David claims that he alone can see the ‘whole picture’, complaining that he is ‘surrounded by microbes’ with myopic worldviews, who are unable to see that the universe is flying apart, and that all will inevitably come to nothingness. It is telling that the cosmic musings of a precocious child in Annie Hall are transposed here to a self-described “Nobel level” physicist. The New York crowd takes seriously David’s ‘theory’ that ‘life is meaningless,’ treating it like something novel, as if the problem of nihilism is new. David causes the devout Southerners to question their entire belief system by merely informing them that God does not exist, as if the poor, ignorant religious folks had never before pondered such a possibility. He continually refers to himself as a genius while berating others, yet he never really offers anything profound. In fact, he’s outright trite.

Really, if Woody Allen was serious with half of this, the movie would be terrible. But, as is often the case, he isn’t. Sure, he’s honestly trying to work something out, but it’s all filtered through several layers of self-effacing awareness. David’s misanthrope is the ultimate caricature, and every bit the ridiculous ‘type’ Allen portrays the Southerners to be. David’s misanthropy and worldview are mundane, and though he constantly chastises Wood for speaking in clichés, he is one.

Ultimately the use of clichéd characters helps Allen isolate something they hold in common. Certain neuroses led Begley to his love of the NRA, or Clarkson to sticking her young daughter in degrading beauty pageants, just like certain neuroses drive David to being a misanthropic asshole. And really it’s all the same. Allen addresses the audience through his lead actor, yet never quite expresses exactly what David is saying. He’s just letting us in on the joke, letting us know that it’s all bullshit, as most pretences are, and really that none of us are all that different, no matter what roles, personas, identities or type characters have been attached to us. We’re all just people trying to carve out whatever we can in an otherwise senseless existence. Next to that our differences are just sort of trivial and insignificant.

Which is cliché, of course. But as Wood says in a scene where she manages to get the better of David: “if the shoe fits, wear it.”

Going once, going twice, dead.

I recently went to a silent auction. Why had no one told me how entertaining they could be? Witness, for sale:



A beautiful hand-made, door-hangy horsey thing? Not quite: