Filmmaking from The Handsome Camel

take a letter, maria

2008-07-03T15:23:03Z

I don't usually do the normal blog thing, but two really cool items came across my screen today. First, by way of Kevin C. Murphy at Ghost in the Machine, Zeit magazine in Germany is reporting the discovery of a complete print of Metropolis from 1928, which had apparently floated around in private collections in Argentina for 80 years. I haven't seen Metropolis in years, and unfortunately it was the rock-and-roll "Moroder version." I remember finding it confusing and sleep-inducing, but according to the article, several key scenes have been restored which make it much more sensible. So I'm excited to see this when, as I'm sure will happen, the Criterion people get their sticky fingers on it, make it beautiful again, add some sweet commentaries, and charge $90 a pop for the DVD.

Speaking of which, I just came across this guy, who's made it his goal to watch and write about the entire Criterion Collection. I thought watching and reviewing the whole Cassavetes box set was a job, but the scope of this dude's ambition makes me feel very small.

a completely irrational reason for liking a movie

2008-07-02T16:01:26Z

I'm a sucker for films that use live recordings of pop songs on their soundtracks. If you're willing to admit, through applause, cheering, and a singer's off-the-cuff remarks that the whole idea of adding pop songs, or indeed any music, to a scene is inherently artificial, then I feel like you're operating on a more honest level. Somehow a little acknowledgement of the artificiality of the process has the potential to inoculate the audience against the sudden, jarring disbelief that too much technique and formal play can induce.

And so when Hancock opened with the crowd-pumping monologue of what sounds like a classic funk or soul singer (oddly, I couldn't find a complete listing of the soundtrack online), I was charmed rather than put off by what followed: a transparent jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold plot applied to the superhero genre. Will Smith, nasty but not too nasty as the titular alcoholic superman, is at this point probably a given quantity for audiences -- as with Jack Nicholson, you pretty much know what you're getting. But he nails the exasperated, self-important patience of a slovenly and half-assed crimefighter, and it's fun to watch the reactions of an ungrateful public during the first half of this film. When Hancock rips through the city recklessly doing good, it's quite clear, he often wrecks as much as he saves, and the citizens of director Peter Berg's golden, shiny L.A. aren't shy with their criticism. There's plenty here for a convention-tweaking, but ultimately conventional, super-powered light comedy. Which is really all I was expecting.

So when Hancock saves an idealistic, unsuccessful PR man (Jason Bateman) from a train and is invited home for dinner, it's pretty obvious where this buddy thread is going. But what are those meaningful looks from the PR man's wife (Charlize Theron)? Theron goes full-bore on the simmering subtext, and Berg helps her out by shooting these scenes like an aggrieved indie drama, all long-lens closeups of brooding and confused faces, with Bateman ably playing the straight man as he obliviously explains spaghetti night.

Well, hold that thought, because just as the scruffy-hero-shapes-up thread is running out of steam, and we're expecting to soon be checking our watches during a noisy but boring tear-'em-up climax, the film slips smoothly into another mode. Or maybe not so smoothly. This second half has been hammered by both the mainstream press ("The jaunty, jokey riff on the screwed-up inner emotional life of a... superhero becomes... the icky lesson in the importance of personal responsibility, loyalty, and continued family togetherness." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly) and the alternative ("Telegraphing surprises, however, isn't as disastrous as the surprises themselves, which are so nonsensical that they sabotage any potential inquiry into the burdensome responsibility of, and sacrifice required by, heroism." -- Nick Schager, Slant), but I'm forced to agree with Roger Ebert, who calls the revelations of the second half "odd and penetrating." And I hate agreeing with Roger Ebert.

But I like agreeing with my friend Chris Dahlen (of Pitchfork, Paste, and The Onion A.V. Club), who recently wrote a defense of Pixar's underappreciated Cars. That film, he noted, has some fairly conventional points to make, but:

It’s a given that in the big race at the end of the flick, the way McQueen races will be more important than whether or not he wins. And it’s a given that McQueen will “do the right thing.” But I didn’t really see the ending coming.... I admired the fact that McQueen did the right thing. But it was also a significant choice. It would’ve been easy for him to wrap up the race and then go back and check on the King, and still come off as a pretty good guy. He didn’t make a choice between a bad act and a good one; he left a good outcome for a noble one.

And similarly, I like the end of this movie for its clear moral stakes and its straightforward presentation of three people doing the hard, right thing. I'm okay with that lesson -- it didn't feel "icky" to me. I don't want to spoil the surprises, but I'll say the following:

-I like that Hancock's super-origin is only partially and vaguely explained. There are no flashbacks and only cursory exposition. Good. I don't need it, and the more precisely you spell these things out, the lamer they usually are.

-There are a million wrong ways to have your non-super save your super at the climax of the film. This film doesn't take one of them.

-There aren't really any villains. Being super, in this world, is destructive enough. People trying to do right by each other often end up making things worse -- a nice complicating factor that's treated humorously in the first half (Hancock's inadvertent devastation of property) but that's made an explicit part of the franchise's magical lore in the second half.

I've avoided Peter Berg's films like the clap since sitting through the aptly-named Very Bad Things, and there are still some weak moments here (some macho posturing in the opening sequence and an unaccountable obssession with heads up asses -- literally), but along with writers Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan he seems willing to let implication and undercurrent do a lot of the work here -- which may be why so many fans and critics are complaining about the largely unexplained climax. If you don't know what's going on or what the moral tensions are, you haven't been paying attention, and they're not going out of their way to explain it to you. Fine with me.

Also, just as the opening bit of sonic deconstruction charmed me, I was pleased to hear The Roots' "Here I Come" over the credits. Not the first movie to use this song -- and Superbad made it ironic and funny rather than playing it straight -- but still, it's one of my favorite badass songs, and I'm glad it's getting so much mainstream play.

the quality of mercy

2008-06-15T07:04:15Z

I mark the American show's departure from the British original around the middle of the second season, when, in the episode "The Client," Michael Scott suddenly veers sharply away from David Brent, perpetual loser. Although Michael is as erratic as ever, the episode reveals that in the right environment Michael is actually an effective networker and salesman. This solves one of the major structural flaws of the original series -- how did this baboon ever get promoted to management? -- by making Michael a victim of the Peter Principle (employees tend to be promoted further and further until they reach a job which exceeds their competence). But this revelation, logical as it is, changes our relationship with the character -- suddenly he's a whole lot more like a traditional protagonist. This Michael, while he doesn't violate the character we've come to know previously, fundamentally transforms him. Sympathetic, funny, even capable, it's no wonder he gets laid at the end.

COTMC, pt. 5

2008-05-26T06:59:05Z

It's challenging to maintain empathy with the character, or even to believe that a person would behave this way. Of course, behavior in Cassavetes films is frequently extreme, hyperbolic. But such behavior is usually justified by extreme circumstances -- the collapsing marriage in Faces, the tremendous class anxieties and emotional incompetence of the characters in Woman, the deadly cat-and-mouse games of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Here the precipitating problem is a lousy play, and that makes it a little harder for the audience to follow the character through her outlandish permutations, a little harder for us to sympathize with someone who's clearly putting everyone around her through a great deal of trouble and concern.

This is a serious problem. Perhaps it's the audience's problem -- perhaps part of what Cassavetes wants to point out to us here is that art is as important as marriage, as important as defending your life. And perhaps I succumb to the old American prejudices that art is not "real work," and that artists are essentially playing at life. I admit that's possible. But I find myself unable to get around my feeling that the drama is out of proportion to the root conflict. This is the first film in the series that I really had to force myself to watch again, and it's the first one that I didn't really feel like reviewing. And this despite the fact that I ultimately ended up enjoying it very much.

COTMC, pt. 4

2008-04-21T00:43:14Z

It takes a peculiar kind of audience to be interested in both strands of this story -- the dumpy, pathetic theatre family of the the strip club, and Cosmo's personal night odyssey as he first carries out the assassination and then deals with the aftermath. The nightclub side of the story is sad, heart-breaking. Cosmo arranges all the numbers -- and what dreary, painful numbers they are! His singer and MC, "Mr. Sophistication" (Meade Roberts), is a balding sad sack with sweat-streaked make-up, and while his girls are large-breasted and without question beautiful (Cassavetes used real strippers and models in the roles), there's something odd about them, too: one girl has a squeaky voice, while another is only 5'2", which she notes is a couple of inches "under the limit" for dancers at other clubs. This theatre is a last stop for all kinds of failures, and their shows, which weirdly blend titillation with desperate stabs at art, are almost certainly Cassavetes' funhouse mirror view of his own not-quite-good-enough but completely personal showmanship. If you can watch the "Paris" show and not want to turn off your DVD player, you're a better man than I. (The hipster look of the crowd, too, suggests that the patrons come here more for irony and amusement than sexual excitement.) But Cosmo's passionate devotion to the nightclub family drives the whole film, in the way that a man's love for his nuclear family would drive the action in a more conventional man-against-the-mob thriller. He's always protecting them (at one point he sends the doorman inside when the mobsters show up on the sidewalk in front of the club), and it's unlikely that, without that motivation, he would have found the strength to finally meet the gangsters on their own ground.

girl power on the fringes of legality

2008-04-16T22:35:49Z

The undermining of "hotness," and the reclaiming of the gross-out aesthetic for women, goes on throughout the film. Throughout the film, McCarthy interrogates the process by which she and her girlfriends achieve hotness, spending inordinate amounts of time on things like waxing, facial masks, hair, etc. She goes to some phenomenal lengths to neutralize her own sexual allure -- my personal favorite is an extended bit in which her date, a Woody Allen doppelganger, vomits into her cleavage at a fashion show. She runs out of the club and has a complete shit-fit on the sidewalk outside, during which her breast falls out of her dress. When she notices (the Carmen Electra character helpfully points out, "Girl, your big ole titty's hangin' out!"), she just gives in to the situation, takes out her other vomit-covered breast, and shakes them furiously in the faces of all the looky-loos, shrieking at them in contempt and irritation, "They're just fucking gobs of FAT!" This is not, trust me, sexy. And it's the only time you see those famous boobs, or any boobs, which is quite an accomplishment in this kind of film.

COTMC, pt. 3

2008-03-26T23:01:10Z

Cassavetes is willing to present characters who are so, as he says, socially and emotionally inept that it's impossible to be around them, and we retreat from them instinctively. And we'd like to put them into more comfortable or familiar categories, even if that makes them more loathsome than they really are. For us, as the audience, it would be easier if these characters were somehow so immoral or beyond acceptability that we could hate them. So, for example, this review at culturevulture.net seems to me very much to miss the emotional and philosophical tensions at play in the film, and to reduce them to easy moral/judgemental categories. The author, Dan Schneider, calls Mabel a "deranged cocktease" and "clinically insane" and a "flaming nut case," and sees Nick as a "clueless, bigoted bastard," while unaccountably referring to the children as "bratty." There's a real anger to that kind of phrasing that suggests a total alienation from these characters. And they are alienating, but no more so than many essentially harmless but inept people are alienating. They are unable to make others comfortable or to do the right thing -- they are terrible at soothing, at the little gliding movements that make social intercourse possible.

COTMC, pt.2

2008-03-07T08:38:10Z

When I was on the independent scene in Atlanta, I heard people speak with reverence about a guy who had shot an entire film in a single day, using a single location and breathtaking logistical finesse, shooting several scenes at once on the same location and hopping around so he could shoot one while changing setups on another. I also once heard a guy bragging that he would shoot at a ratio of 1.5 or 2 to 1, never allowing himself more than two takes per setup.

There's an astrigent virtue to this kind of exacting planning and control, and I sometimes used similar methods in my own video work. I was able to shoot movies for less than $100 a minute, and the exercise was useful in teaching me to go in with a plan and think things through, especially on the technical side. But there was another kind of filmmaking that I think we in the Atlanta scene didn't do enough of (I only remember it happening once in my group), the kind where on Monday somebody says, "We should make a movie," and on Wednesday somebody throws out a scenario and on Saturday afternoon you're making props and on Saturday night you're shooting in somebody's apartment, and you don't have a schedule -- you just have an idea of some things you want to see on screen. Sometimes planning a film too completely can kill it, and sometimes giving it some space can bring out some surprising things.

Welles once said that "a director is someone who presides over accidents." Cassavetes' great virtue, apart from the cooperative, familial atmosphere he seemed to generate with his cast and crew, was that he knew how to get out of the way of the accidents.

COTMC, pt. 1

2008-01-23T05:38:26Z

It's not that the film turns out not to be about race. But race is only one thread in this meandering but compelling story, albeit the most electric and painful thread. It's also about bored young men getting around town, the brutality of show business, the fascination and the superficiality of art culture in New York in the 50s, how men seduce women, violence in ordinary life, and the garish beauty of Times Square. And by branching out into all these other threads, it avoids the numbing single-mindedness of other "race" films of the period. Rather than laboring awkwardly to prove that black people are human, too!, it takes this rather bland point as the obvious fact that it is, and proceeds to examine how racism poisons our collective human nature. Yet Cassavetes is not remotely pessimistic about the effects of racism -- both black and white characters in this film are capable of rich, full, hilarious, fascinating lives. The film bursts with life, with weird and unexpected moments, with sheer enthusiasm.

lost in the woods of error

2007-12-27T06:42:13Z

Lost is, before anything, an amazing spectacle, on the order of the greatest tall tale ever told, a nonstop act of invention that just keeps topping itself, layering whopper onto astounding whopper, keeping us laughing with delight at its endless novelty, the sheer bravado of its impossibly complex plotting.

But all that manic plate-juggling serves a purpose beyond the sheer wonder of it. The constant switchbacks in Lost, the reversals of polarity in relationships between characters, the undermining of previous givens, the seemingly limitless reassignment of meaning to events, phrases, symbols, and objects, the expansion into every corner of experience -- past, present, and future -- of an ever more finely meshed web of interconnection -- these are not mere rococo elaborations of a straightforward plot. They serve to create in the viewer all the hallmarks of paranoia -- a sense that the common reality can't be trusted, that people can never be fully known, that whatever "reality" you think you've discovered is at best a contingent one, to be undermined by the next set of connections and unmaskings.