The Handsome Camel

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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There's nothing in this season -- at least the first two discs, which is as far as I've gotten and may be as far as I ever go -- that came even close to making me laugh as hard as the collective guy-dumbness of Peter, Chris, Brian, and Stewie drinking ipecac for the hell of it, or Stewie's "Doing a little writing, huh?" taunting of Brian (both, I think, from the previous season). But more crucially, nothing in this "volume" has disturbed me like the Golden Turd mini-film from American Dad or Peter's ongoing fight with the giant chicken or Herbert the pervert's heartbreaking musical paean to Chris (delivered from a ladder outside Chris's bedroom window). Horror has always lain side-by-side with the humor on Family Guy; that Herbert has become a colorful, almost genial minor character who raises not one goose bump is just the most obvious example of the loss of real electricity in the show. What used to be unsettling, creepy, or at least giddily disorienting has become comfortable, almost predictable. At this point, the "This is worse than the time I..." setup is so hoary and worn-out that I almost find myself looking away when the inevitable wacky flashback comes.

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I haven't seen Gilmore Girls since its first season, many years ago, back when I used to watch TV with my much-younger sister. She and I went cheerfully through Xena and Buffy and reruns of Pee-Wee's Playhouse together, though we squabbled over less hip and witty shows like 7th Heaven and Roswell. Gilmore I watched quite willingly, though I suspect that, as was the case with Xena, our motives were somewhat different. Gilmore Girls, as I noted in my blog at the time, was the first show I ever watched where I was more interested in the mom than the daughter.

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But there's another reason I've always been hesitant to watch The Sopranos. I think I've always been secretly afraid that perhaps the critics are right -- that perhaps it is the best show on television. I wouldn't be surprised -- it's on cable, where most of the best shows are these days, and some very smart friends of mine love it. But I've been concerned because it appears to be a straight-ahead drama whose biggest twist is that it's about mobsters -- ER, but in the Mafia. This bothers me because I have great love for television as a medium, and if its flagship program, the best it has to offer, is a well-constructed but fairly conventional drama, then I'm frustrated and disappointed.

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The dialogue is clean and sharp as cracked ice, and the writers nail three subtly different variations on rapid-fire patter: the acid-laced argot of Martin Blank (John Cusack) and his arch-rival (the Aykroyd character), the uneasy, searching wit of friendships rejoined after a long time (Jeremy Piven slips easily into the role of co-conspirator at the godawful reunion), and the magic and soreness of returning to a love long-lost but never abandoned. This is all very lightweight -- the moment you start to think about it, it floats away like a dream -- but that makes the elegant handling all the more impressive.

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In the books, on the other hand, we frequently dawdle in Harry's thoughts -- and for the most part his thoughts reveal someone thoroughly unlikeable. Harry is quick to take offense and enjoys a good stew -- he stews about the Durzleys, which is understandable, but also about Ron and Hermione, about Sirius, and always, always, always about Dumbledore. He doesn't trust his friends a whit, assuming the worst of them whenever his feelings are chafed: when the other students don't write to him over the summer, he assumes they've snubbed him; when Dumbledore doesn't disclose every aspect of his plans to Harry or, at times, avoids contact with him, Harry immediately believes the old wizard is slighting him, although Dumbledore has shown time and again that he does nothing without good reason. Even when the reason for something has been thoroughly explained to him, as in the case of his occlumancy lessons, Harry can't help seeing it as a punishment and an oppression. Well into the seventh book, long after every major character has proven both smarter than Harry and doggedly devoted to him, he can't simply go with the flow and trust Dumbledore's plan or his friends' motives.

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I almost didn't see Georgia Rule -- only the brutal heat of Iraqi summer and the boredom of waiting for flights at Balad Air Base chased me into the theater. I was anticipating the worst, a seriously bad time, treacle on the order of Thomas Kinkade; the trailer makes it look like the worst possible edition of the annual or semi-annual going-back-to-grandma's-makes-everything-better tradition in Hollywood. (What self-loathing there must be among screenwriters and producers, that they compulsively, repeatedly send recalcitrant teens -- their younger selves? their own obnoxious offspring? -- to the country to shed their urban, media-saturated ways and re-learn the good old-fashioned virtues of hard work, courtesy, and love for family!) From the trailer, one can see all the key elements aligned exactly as they must be in one of these self-flagellating pageants -- the brittle, wisecracking teen, the mom with problems of her own, the stern but patient grandma, the handsome love interests for both mom and daughter, the uptight townspeople who reject the girl, lessons learned, catchphrases used like hammers against the temples of both naughty adolescents and weary audience members.

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We are used to characters showing up in action movies just to move the plot forward. Some are more interesting than others, but we accept their quirky behavior and improbable characteristics because, after all, somebody has to explain how you can get dinosaurs out of tree sap, and somebody has to get past all the computer locks in the Nakatomi building vault. What's interesting about Transformers is that Bay&Co. have gleefully jumped past that old architecture -- irrelevant, wacky characters as supports for the plot -- and into the brave new world -- characters and scenes which forward no plot, MacGuffins all, yet set adrift, Sam Witwicky no less than the cube, all equally pointless, all sewn together with the inarguable emotional logic of anime, where characters pose in absolute stillness for long seconds, then hack each other to bits, for reasons as fluid as loyalties in a dream. Do we need the 19-year-old Australian beauty who works for the NSA and is improbably also friends with Anthony Anderson? Do we need John Turturro hamming it up as the ultimate Man in Black? Do we need to know that Mikaela's dad had a criminal past? Indeed, is there anything in this film that could even reasonably be marked, "Point A" or "Point B" -- let alone actually lead from one to the other? Who cares? Each scene, each bit of business, succeeds or fails on its own. And a surprising number of them succeed.

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To take a single example, throughout The Philadelphia Story people, especially the Katherine Hepburn character, constantly refer to the Cary Grant character by his full name, "C.K. Dexter-Haven." Hepburn rolls the name around in her mouth, "C.K. Dexter-Haven... C.K. Dexter-Haven..." for full comic effect -- and it is a funny name, but every time she says it, of course, it becomes a little less funny. The joke is reduced with repetition; it hasn't got the mass to carry it through a whole film.

In Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, the two main characters are forever barking each other's perfectly ordinary first names -- "David!" "Susan!" Again, it can be argued that this is a maddening, irritating to the very hilt -- in that same Filmspotting episode, Sam van Hallgren did a very funny off-the-cuff parody of this seeming stylistic crutch. But, on the other hand, the very plainness of it, the simplicity of the repetition, the everydayness, makes me think that the irritation is perhaps a little intentional. David and Susan, though the time-frame of their relationship is compressed, come to frustrate and annoy one another just as much as if they had been married for 20 years already. Who hasn't experienced the annoyance of hearing one's own name again from the mouth of someone he loves? Bringing Up Baby is a carnival stuffed inside a clashing mechanical monkey, and it's not for everyone. But by many small details, director Howard Hawks and his writers anchor all the madness in a real piece of emotional earth.

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What's fun here, as is so often the case with these kind of movies, are the action scenes, as a Rainbow Coalition of good guys unload ridiculous numbers of rounds into previously-loved ones, and the odd thumbnails of characterization that provide most of the humor -- the thermometer-chewing doctor, the color-coded anaesthetist, the stripper who loses a leg but gains a grenade-launcher. Rodriguez isn't afraid to go tasteless to get a laugh -- a sequence with a small child left alone in a car is brutally, horrifically funny -- and he makes no apologies for the story not holding together all that well. Instead, God bless him, he resurrects Michael Biehn and Jeff Fahey to remind us that even B movies turn on the ability of good actors to sell tricky emotional textures.

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There's a real disregard for not just the tactics, but the feel of real warfare in this film. The filmmakers seem to treat the mundane details of a warrior's life with some contempt, feeling, perhaps, that audiences will more readily identify with an oily superman than a real soldier. The film is thoroughly imagistic, all golden wheat fields and scorched cloudscapes, but its images tend to be recycled and less thrilling than the filmmakers think; and meanwhile they have abandoned any verisimilitude which might have lent richness to the bronzy picture-making. The "300" gather outside the city wearing only capes and loincloths and carrying only spears and shields. In what ought to be a catastrophic failure of military planning, not one of them has so much as a knapsack or a skin of water; neither is there any hint of a supply chain. Nonetheless, when the filmmakers want to show Leonidas as jaunty and confident, he strides among the piled-up corpses eating a fresh apple, although the landscape at Thermopylae is completely barren.

This is not nit-picking. I like an iconic clash of great warriors as well as the next person, and a movie about war doesn't have to be The Things They Carried to have merit. Despite the assertion attributed to Samuel Fuller that the only way to make a war movie "realistic" (and therefore not romanticize war) would be to fire a machine gun into the audience, war is not automatically off-limits as the subject of grand entertainment. War can be funny, or thrilling, or glorious, just like every other aspect of human experience. It baffles civilians and those of us who have yet to go there, but many soldiers re-enlist while in the combat zone; many report that they enjoy doing the work they were trained to do more than simply sitting around in garrison.

But war is a serious subject, and no one who makes films about it or writes about it can avoid the enormous stakes of it. There's nothing wrong with making warriors larger-than-life -- Homer, the great-grandfather of all Western war poets, certainly didn't write them small. Gary Payton-style trash-talking alone probably makes up a third of the bulk of the Iliad. But he also had respect for man's natural unwillingness to die for political causes, and he further had respect for the ordinary considerations of war planning -- ships, soldiers, carpenters, cattle -- precisely because it is those elements which generally determine the outcome of a war.

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