Chromatic March: Alice in Wonderland review and discussion

My review of Burton's Alice in Wonderland is up at BlogCritics.

Burton knows how to be colorful. Colorful characters, colorful landscapes, bright, clashing, quirky performances by exaggerated actors and actresses... saturation was the name of the game in this rendition of Carroll's hallucinogenic classic. And though the environment was surprisingly dark and stormy, bathed in the atmospheric ashes of the Wonderland fires, Depp and Carter and their supporting cast still managed to bring out the highlights of a strange and spectacular fantasy world.

Color choices go hand in hand with textures and atmospheric elements. Color almost never exists on its own... it's a disposition of a surface, which is characterized by its roughness and reflectivity. Burton's Alice in Wonderland is inundated in the metallic textures of decadent fabrics, marred by wear and tear and time and grime. Thus, it scans like a cross between a tailor and an armory, tarnished and sooty and shimmering just a little at the edges.

Alice enters this world in an iconic blue dress, and her baby blue, the pastel color of innocence and naivety, immediately engages her in a landscape of chromatic icons. Never mind the minor characters, the silly animal caricatures and the literature cameos... the real players here are Alice, the Hatter, the Red Queen, the White Queen, and Stayne, the knave of hearts. These characters are neatly distinguished by color, with Alice as a bit of an exception. The Hatter is a festive orange and green combination, like we all remember from the movie posters; the White Queen is pure, colorless, crystalline white, almost to the point of being sanitized; the Red Queen is a ruthless, unpredictable, bloody red bobble-head of a character. Stayne is less important than these others, but he is always in black, with that little red eye-patch. He is enforcement, wrought-iron determination, and death.

The war between Red and White is an effective way for Tim Burton to condense the vast Wonderland mythos, which included a Queen of Hearts (Alice's Adventures), a Red Queen, and a White Queen (both in Through the Looking Glass). Though Helena Bonham Carter's character is called the Red Queen, she's clearly actually the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures; so whereas Carroll's two books were each based on a specific parlor-game, Burton's reimagining is actually an unlikely conflict between two different games: on one side, cards, and on the other side, chess. Both games have a "black" component, and in each case, this component is ignored... the sisters are the White and Red, skill and chance, strategy and psychology. They represent a collision of worlds, with Alice and the Hatter and a bunch of talking animals caught in the middle.

By the way, that paragraph was entirely written from Wikipedia cheat-sheets on the books. It's so easy to make yourself sound smart these days.

Anyway, there's something to be said for Burton's treatment of Alice. As she rides to her engagement party, she dons her classic blue-bonnet-style dress that we're so familiar with. This is, if anything, a symbol of her innocence, the childlike nature that she still has leftover from the classic literature (which comes to her in nightly dreams... if I were her parents, I'd be worried). However, during the course of her journey through Wonderland, she takes on a number of different outfits, and a number of different personas. Many of these are custom-made to fit her when she grows and shrinks... as tiny Alice, she wears something billowy and metallic, somehow salvaged from her original blue. However, she also infiltrates the queen's company, and becomes the Queen's "new favorite" (the writing here is strangely endearing, as we see the evil dictator act like a capricious little girl). While Alice is tenured in the Red Queen's castle, she wears a burnt orange number, which is apparently her color of deceit, and her subtle show of solidarity with the Hatter.

Of course, Alice has to undergo one more transformation before she concludes the narrative: she needs to put on a symbolic suit of armor, an inspiring assembly of luminous platinum plates, and she has to step forth with her bleached-white Queen to face her foes on the field of battle. I may be reaching a bit, but I'd like to suggest that the "colorless" nature of a mirrored suit of armor suggests that Alice has not only become a champion of Wonderland... she's actually grown up beyond its exaggerated reds and greens and oranges and whites, beyond these figments of a wild imagination, who are noble, but little more than dramatic exaggerations. They will remain as they are in this fantasy world: the monochromatic embodiments of single traits, like madness, or peace, or anger. She has become adaptable, responsive, reflective -- a polychromatic adult ready to face the world.

I admit that the above conclusion may be a bit of a stretch.

At any rate, it certainly seems like the blue of Alice's dress represents her innocence and childish refusal to accept responsibility. As she takes greater risks for those around her, showing more courage and loyalty, she has to don other shades: an orange dress provided by her adversary, a silver suit of armor to prepare her for battle. We can leave it to Burton to turn an interesting concept into a vast spectacle, and to lay bare his own irreverent, vivid, impossible imagination.

Palette: "Acrid"

Chromatic March Kickoff Post

Maybe you knew this, but I didn't: color processes have been with motion pictures from as early as the 1910's. I learned this from Wikipedia, of course, which also summarized the subsequent developments: the old additive processes of projecting a film by projection three different colors simultaneously; the first subtractive color process, invented by Kodakcolor, which greatly improved the quality of color images; the immense expense of creating a color film before Technicolor revolutionized the process in the 1930's. I didn't know any of these things. If I'd had to guess, I'd have said color motion picture technology wasn't invented until around the 50's and 60's. I also wouldn't have known that it was actually the television, with its massive reach and entertainment value, that really pushed film into full acceptance of color.

Considering how long color has been a part of movie culture, I'm surprised by how little attention it gets from critics and reviewers. Doing a quick scan of reviews for The Crazies and Shutter Island, I saw very few references to color (none at all, actually, but that's not necessarily the final word). I assume The Crazies is carefully styled, with a gray ghost-town punctuated by splashes of red. Horror films all seem to do this now: it's either black and white (Let The Right One In) or deep blue (the Ring), and there's always an emphasis on the sudden bursts of red, because that's what indicates the intervention of the horrific. Horror is almost universally designed to trigger a few precise emotions: despair, alarm, and disgust. The color palettes tend to reflect this focus with pinpoint precision.

The "colorless except for red highlights" theme isn't just a horror cliché... it's heavily, sometimes tiresomely prevalent in modern film, where style has become so important. American Beauty is one of the most oft-cited narrative pieces to employ this trope, but make no mistake... it's everywhere. Check out the poster for Repo-Men, or the iconic little girl in Schindler's List. Also check out the current Apple Trailers page, where at least nine movies have dark or neutral color palettes, with a hard-hitting red element to draw focus. There's something about a red element on a moving canvas that captures in the mind of a stylist.

Call me a cynic, but I'm tempted to call the red-element trope a "trick"... a simple but undeveloped concept that provides an easy answer to what should be one of the toughest questions in making a film: how do I handle the colors in this world? How will they immerse the viewer, evoke an emotion, or represent the real world as closely as possible?

Luckily, some film stylists can generate more complex answers to that question. Avatar wasn't my favorite movie of last year, but at the very least, it was daring in its use of color: blue and green and gold, with touches of orange for body paint, were the iconic hues of a threatened forest world. If I needed a word to describe Cameron's palette, I'd call it "lush." Contrast that with Scorsese's use of colors in his new film Shutter Island, his most stylish to date, as far as I've seen. Here, he uses the concrete gray and faded green of an overcast island to contrast with the colors of hallucinations, bathed in the glow of a house-fire, envisioning the warm summer dresses and golden hair of a remembered wife. These colors are "overcast" versus "lurid," marking the contrasting mental states that the film balances.

Scorsese's use of a strong, mixed palette actually highlights the degree to which he abandons the classic horror/suspense tradition of emphasizing blood. When blood appears on Rachel's dress, it hardly even prompts a reaction, immersed as it is in a hallucinated world of rich, dark colors. Dr. Cawley's study is a deep red as well, and if it's blood Scorsese was trying to evoke, it wasn't the sudden splash of a gunshot... rather, it was the engrossing, pulsating bloody red of a womb. This is not a torture movie or a flashy horror piece. It's a series of paintings, rendered from Scorsese's imagination and passed in front of a camera lens.

It's worth emphasizing: creating a robust palette with a complex emotional presence, and being able to evoke multiple, often conflicting reactions at the same time... this is a difficult task. This month, I'll be seeing films whose color choices really say something, whether it's subdued, dreamlike, manic, depressing, or gilded. For each movie I see, I'll try to give the simplest descriptor possible for its essential color palette, although I'm probably going to stretch this rule significantly.

I'm going to start with Alice in Wonderland, which I'm excited for, especially now that I have a critical perspective through which to focus what will certainly be a mind-boggling experience. I'll also try to see I Love You Phillip Morris, The Eclipse, and maybe Repo Men and/or Clash of the Titans. I'll also go back to some classics, which may include any of the following: The Color of Pomegranates, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Excaliber, The Red Shoes, Ashes of Time, Days of Being Wild, and something by Yasujiro Ozu.

As a final word, and a segue between Gritty February and Chromatic March, I offer the following, the palette review of Shutter Island.

Palette: "Overcast" / "Lurid"

Gritty February: Shutter Island, Ghost Dog, and wrap-up

The most recent post that fits into "Gritty February" actually never got cross-posted here at Benefit of the Doubt, because I kept wanting to write something more elaborate, but just didn't get around to it. That was my review of Shutter Island, here: Shutter Island Review at BlogCritics

The film was less a rugged concrete block than a twisting, tight-gripping puzzle box of deceptions and hallucinations. I'd love to see it again, but I won't get that chance right away. Specifically, I want to review some of the loose ends: who was the first patient Teddy interviewed, and was he a piece of the larger picture? What were George Noyce, and the disembodied Rachel, trying to tell Teddy? Was each of them, respectively, urging him to escape the cell of his insanity? Or were they trying to draw him deeper into it? Rachel tells Teddy to "find Laeddis, and kill him"... does he do this by discovering the truth? Or by finally retreating from it? I can't spin out any real meaningful commentary on this cat's cradle of a film, but see tomorrow's post for at least a little more discussion.

Grittiness: 3
Scorsese has abandoned the American realism of his gangster movies in favor of broad strokes and rich stylization. It makes for a deep and involving film, rich in twists and hidden meanings. This doesn't make it gritty, though... in a gritty movie, the meaning is superficial and accidental, rather than semantic and significant and hidden, as it is in Shutter Island. Also, it loses points for breaking with the gritty work of a classically realist director. But make no mistake... it's still an awesome movie.

Also, I saw Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai last night, the last night of Gritty February (and, incidentally, the last night of the Olympics). I can't give you an overview of every reaction I had, but I can at least present a capsule review of my reactions. Jarmusch, a man who does amazing things with a limited range of tools and technical tricks, is so shameless that he's almost quaint... but this belies the passion he has for interesting lifestyles, cultural differences, and amazing snatches of dialogue and behavior. Ray Vargo's line, coming out of left field, that Ghost Dog speaks in "poetry – the poetry of war"... this is a perfect example of Jarmusch's ability to craft a cinematic moment.

Grittiness: 8.5
Though there's the New York intellectual baggage of quotations and literature parallels and theatrical wordsmithery, Ghost Dog is held up as a gritty film by its setting alone. This is the dirtiest and emptiest Jersey City I've seen in a while, full of characters you'd expect to find if you just talked to the random people who hang out on New York street corners. It evokes both the crudeness and needless cruelty of street crime, and the beautiful and strange halo of street spirituality that surrounds the New York metro area.

So here's a chronicle of the month:

THE SHINJUKU INCIDENT – Grittiness rating: 7.5
THE SALTON SEA – Grittiness rating: 8.0
ELECTION – Grittiness rating: 8.0 (adjusted)
WOLFMAN – Grittiness rating: 6.5 (adjusted)
KING OF NEW YORK – Grittiness rating: 9.0
LA FEMME NIKITA – Grittiness rating: 7.0 (adjusted)
SHUTTER ISLAND – Grittiness rating: 3.0
GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI – Grittiness rating: 8.5

I think I did pretty well here. It's surprising how many of these neo-noir urban tales are cut through with symbolism, stylization, and literary-style self-reference. Sometimes (as in the case of The Salton Sea) they seem to cheapen the truth value of the affair. In other cases (La Femme Nikita) they seem to heighten it, in a strange way, by evoking the sentimentality that we actually experience in our day-to-day emotional lives.

As a certain classic school of American filmmakers, represented by people like Abel Ferrara and Martin Scorsese, move away from movies about real-life humanity and the cruelty of circumstance, so new filmmakers from overseas may be moving in to take their places. The Japanese and Chinese approaches to crime are still mysterious and complicated (at least to us Americans), and even in this century, they've been obscured by the hyper-stylized and romanticized cinema of the samurai and handgun ballet. Only now, with auteurs like Johnny To, the reality of Triads and crime family politics are being reimagined and represented. Election may not have been crusty, but it felt palpably real, and for that, I actually adjusted the original grittiness rating I gave it.

Suspense and horror? Not so gritty. The metamorphic dreams of The Wolfman and Shutter Island were certainly solid and imposing, but they were channeling too much dualistic emotional content and symbolic sensibility, with too much second-level meaning and scripted self-awareness, to really be counted among the rock-hard tradition inherited from noir and fetishized by Taxi Driver.

At any rate, it's been a beautiful month of hard times and unflinching experiences, and I hope next month is just as fascinating. Check in tomorrow to see what our next theme is going to be.

Gritty February reflect: La Femme Nikita

WARNING: I WILL SPOIL THE SHIT OUT OF THIS MOVIE. I could say this before every analysis... now is as good a time as any to start.

Nikita inhabits at least three roles in the course of the film. First, for a while, she is a defiant, destructive junkie, burnt out on her own energy. In this stage, she reminds me of Sid Vicious... the drug addiction, the violent outbursts, the short black hair and drawn face... and it makes me wonder how Sid would have fared in the program she entered. Presumably not so well, because Sid was not particularly intelligent, whereas Nikita has some sort of hidden potential that only Bob can see. With the personal interest he takes in her, one wonders if he hand-picked her from a bunch of hardcases he was following.

In fact, Bob brings us one of the most unique and poetic moments in La Femme Nikita, the dinner scene with Maria and Marco. Bob apparently improvises a whole life history for Nikita, which is heartbreakingly tender:

At 8 she was so pretty. She had golden hair in a pigtail. There was a cousin called Caroline. Only Caroline could touch her pigtail. No one else. She wore a ribbon and always had white dresses.

I only saw her when the family rented a farm in the summer. With the cousins and neighbors, there were kids always causing trouble together. Marie had her specialty. She imitated frogs. She'd squat by the pond and jump into the mud, going, "Croak, croak." That cracked the other kids up. She'd come back soaked to the skin, but always with the same excuse: "I slipped," she'd say, in her quiet little voice.

It's never made clear whether he's projecting his love for Nikita into the vision of a young girl, or whether he's remembering his own life from before the agency. Nevertheless, it seems that here, where he's called upon to play a role, he can finally reveal the emotional stake he has in his protege.

Her second role is Josephine, which is the covert-ops sleeper agent. We see this personality born and gestated during her time at the training facility, which is highly compressed. In fact, most of our insight into this period is into her transition from Nikita to Josephine... her outbursts, her confrontations with authority, Bob's paternal guardianship, and her acceptance of responsibility. From that point forward, Josephine has to live between the lines, a vicious operative kept hidden away until she's needed.

Her third personality, Marie, is the "normal" life, created to fill the blank pages in Josephine's empty, purposeful world. Marie is an experiment with contentment, a game of autonomy within a space provided by her "employers." She is a ruse, an instrument of deception, but this is also the only life that gives Nikita/Josephine/Marie a chance at happiness. In this sense, Josephine is a prison for Marie, more so than the locked training facility was for Nikita.

Nikita says she is named after a song. She never says what song, but presumably it's the Elton John song of that title. It's a truly fitting lyrical piece for this character:

"Oh I saw you by the wall
Ten of your tin soldiers in a row
With eyes that looked like ice on fire
The human heart a captive in the snow."

...

And if there comes a time
Guns and gates no longer hold you in
And if you're free to make a choice
Just look towards the west and find a friend."

This is an ode to a woman who's the captive of her destiny, and it echoes with the voices of the men who love her but can't keep her. This is probably the most boring possible observation about La Femme Nikita, but reflecting on it makes the film come together, and reminds us how Luke Besson has a rare thing: a flair for action, and a healthy touch of sentimentality.

From the middle of the movie on, I wondered something about Nikita: why is it named after that first personality, the volatile junkie, when the character only has that name for about 10% of the film? The title started to seem inappropriate after a while, like an echo of the first few scenes, chosen without much regard for the actual arc of the character.

However, I think there's a reason to name the movie after Nikita: I think, through Josephine and Marie, Nikita is absolved of her sins and given another chance. It's important to hold out this hope... because when she leaves Marco, the character is leaving behind Marie, and when she leaves Bob, she leaves behind Josephine. At the end, she is alone, just as she was in the first moments of the movie, struggling through the throes of withdraw. Thus, there's no name left for her to return to but Nikita, purged in the fires of physical and emotional trauma, but at last allowed to start over.

Grittiness: 6

Nikita gets credit for starting out in a nihilistic criminal world, but ultimately, it turns toward covert ops action within the poetry of everyday life. Nikita goes through a merciless training program, and she herself is merciless, so the whole thing gets some points for that... but ultimately, it turns more toward personal drama than unflinching realism, and this is to its credit, I suppose.

Two Sides of Cynicism in King of New York

King of New York: Christopher Walken as Frank White, recently incarcerated drug lord returning to the streets... a powerful role for Chris W. He's a tall, almost monstrous figure, shockingly white with piercing blue eyes, and his voice is ice cold. "... my feelings are dead. I feel no remorse." Indeed, Frank doesn't seem to feel anything but grim, purposeful determination, occasionally punctuated by a violent outburst. However, this coldness belies his more complex role in the course of the film, which is an ambiguous twist of violent criminal and icon of redemption.

King of New York, like any story of crime and pursuit, is about an asymmetrical moral universe. We're asked to see through both sides of the glass... on one side, the criminals live in a purely opportunistic world, and if they have any ethics at all, it's the ones they've hand-picked for themselves. Their criteria for success is loose: they want power, but ultimately, they just want to survive and stay on the outside. On the other side, the cops instigate and infiltrate. Burdened with the codes of law and bureaucracy, they pursue a purely adversarial goal: to get the criminals out of New York City, and to get people like Frank White off the streets.

Frank White is a man with a code. It may be twisted, a janky justification for his power-hunger, but at the very least he plays by a set of rules: the laws of nature and karma, that a life by the gun leads to death by the gun. Frank's code manifests in other ways, too... he seems to acknowledge the difficult lives of the people he exploits, and (at least according to him) he tries to be a better ruler than his slain competitors. He is no Robin Hood, but at the very least, cruelty and murder are just his tools, and not his ends. In this, he contrasts subtlely with his underlings, who seem to take a juvenile joy in violence (Jimmy), or at worst, who are prone to betrayal and greed.

Roy the aging lawman is Frank's mirror image in a number of these respects. He alone among his fellow cops sees the importance of operating within the strictures of law and police procedure. He is a patient adversary, conflicted about his job and his methods, but always vigilant and committed to his job. When he asks Dennis, "Are you going to kill everyone you can't arrest?" it may seem like resignation at first, but you should note an echo of faith in the remark...faith in the system to take these monsters down with method and principle. Roy is willing to do whatever is necessary to stay within the bounds of the law, the system that he serves. As he demonstrates in the course of the movie, he is also willing to travel to the ends of the Earth in pursuit of his quarry.

Cynicism is a way of protecting yourself from complete failure by projecting that failure out onto the world: "If things aren't how I wanted them to be, it's because of the world, not because of me." Dennis is the great cynic of King of New York. He allows his frustration with the system to infect his methods, and at last, he hangs up the standard of decency to chase after victory and self-satisfaction. In this, he is an important foil for Roy, who always confronts Frank diplomatically, according to the constraints of law and self-respect. In this, Roy is a rare kind of hero: he would rather accept defeat than become a cynical victor.

In this respect, Roy reminds me of some other senior law enforcement officers of cinema. In their AV Club essay on King of New York, The Onion writers compare him to Tom Bell of No Country for Old Men. I can see where they're coming from, but he may be more akin to the noble Detective Prendergast from Falling Down, another gritty film par excellence. These officers of the law, representing the old ways in a vicious new world, have a healthy fear of death and uselessness, and no hatred for their enemies. They both seem to impart their wisdom largely in the form of questions: Roy's "You expected to get away with killing all those people? Who made you judge and jury?" to Prendergast's "Is that what this is about? Is that why my chicken dinner is drying out in the oven? You're mad because they lied to you?"

The "grizzled cop" staple leads us to see other similarities between King of New York and Falling Down. Both films primarily follow a criminal with a streak of moral indignation, and both films evoke visions of a city through these criminals' eyes. Both Bill Foster and Frank White are responding to a viciousness in the world that they just can't tolerate, and even as they rage against it, they come to reflect it. But Roy and Prendergast, the guardians of order, are experienced enough to see through their adversaries' twisted vision. They've been through the valley of cynicism, and they've come out on the other side, and from there they can see that Frank White and Bill "D-FENS" Foster aren't transcendent symbols of a fallen world... they're just sick, broken bastards who have to be taken out of circulation. Roy and Prendergast are two great realist-idealists of the crime genre.

Frank is ruthless, but in a strange way, he too is an idealist. In a romantic mano-a-mano showdown with Roy, Frank justifies himself and articulates his dubious code, which gives him a sense of legitimacy. His attempts to fund a hospital are further expressions of his self-contradictory worldview: a life of violence is less of an abomination if it is tempered with mercy. This makes Frank unique among the criminals we come across, as he is eager to point out. Artie Clay is a crass racist with no respect for cooperation; Larry Wong is a cold businessman who (according to Frank) exploits Asian refugees. Even Jimmy Jump has given up on respect or dignity; he lives by the law of hedonism, acting on whatever immediate impulse overtakes him.

It is this idealism, a beacon of hope in a cynical New York City, that allows us to sympathize with both Frank and Roy at the same time. The final confrontation and resolution of the film is tragic, but necessary... with the failure and victory of two protagonists tightly entangled, imploding on the reign of a dubious King.

Grittiness: 9

Like Taxi Driver, King of New York is all about the grime and grit of crime in the city. Frank White lives a high life, but he's never afraid to handle a gun, and he's an active citizen of the underworld, negotiating dark clubs and backrooms where narcotic and sexual pleasure are always being consumed. These cops and criminals express themselves with piss, spit, and bullets; these gunfights are sudden explosions of blood and shattered glass on the sidewalks of a degenerate New York City.

Gritty February: The Wolfman (2010) review and analysis

My review of Johnston's new film The Wolfman can be found here at BlogCritics.

While my review was negative (I couldn't call this a successful film, I'm afraid), it doesn't preclude me from digging into it a little more, and in doing so, discovering its minor triumphs. One of these was definitely its reimagining of the original Wolfman backstory, replicating a few key characters but wisely tightening the screws considerably.

After all, if you look at Lon Chaney Jr's 1941 film, the family history was pretty sparse. Lawrence Talbot was visiting his father, who acts the wise skeptic, and he's grappling with his brother's death, which isn't explained. Their mother is gone, also with no explanation, and Gwen Conliffe is just an engaged local girl who catches the creepy Lawrence's eye. This backdrop renders the main plot events - the bite, the transformation, the guilt, and the loss of humanity - mere workings of circumstance. The family and the estate were contexts, and nothing more.

Johnston's The Wolfman takes some serious liberties with this arrangement, overlaying a complex, intertwined heredity. First of all, Gwen isn't just a local vixen... she's Ben Talbot's widow, making her an honorary part of the family. Lawrence's family issues include tortured memories of his mother's death and a strained relationship with his father, but as we come to learn, they don't end there. The Talbot family and estate are afflicted with layers upon layers of misfortune, and it takes no time at all for us to get caught up in their web of dysfunction.

Here's a failed tangent: it occurred to me, as I was reconsidering this movie, that the core emotional dynamic is made up of five players: Lawrence Talbot, his brother Ben Talbot, their father Sir John Talbot, their dead mother Solana, and Gwen Conliffe, the brothers' shared romantic interest. This seemed to relate, in some mystical way, to the five points of a pentagram... it's not mentioned in Johnston's version, but in the original Wolfman, the pentagram was the symbol for the werewolf, marking his next victim. I even tried mapping out the love, paternity, and marriage relationships between the five characters, to see if I could get a pentagram out of it. My semi-successful but ultimately irrelevant attempt accompanies this paragraph.

It's rather miraculous that this familial mess eventually distills into a sort of Hamlet retelling, the story of a son carrying out vengeance upon a father figure who has destroyed the household from within. Gwen may have initiated Lawrence's homecoming, but by the time he has been turned into a wolf and undergone "treatment" in an asylum, he's ready to set aside his low-key love affair with her in order to undertake his patricidal mission. She is an Ophelia, the scorned lover cast aside by a son with revenge in his eyes. Also note the theme of misconstrued madness which unites the two tales: two sons, each harboring a particular breed of quiet rage, each condemned as a madman while they search for a road to redemption.

And Lawrence has changed, too, between 1941 and The Year of Our Lord 2010. In 1941, he was the whipping boy of a cruel destiny, terrified of himself and adrift in the throes of his affliction. In Johnston's 2010 picture, though, Lawrence comes to terms with his uncontrollable rages and bestial nature... most fully, and most clearly, when he bristles to the assembly of doctors: "I ... WILL KILL ... ALL OF YOU!" It's a raw, dangerous, compelling moment, a surprising pinprick in a generally blunt film. It also resonates with a beautifully ambiguous note of self-awareness, hovering somewhere between a helpless warning and a beastly promise.

And Lawrence does kill. A lot. But as with all noble barbarians, he finally redirects his rage back into the darkness, toward the source of these troubles that he helps perpetrate. Lawrence's confrontation with his father is not only a departure from the 1941 text... it's actually a reversal, with the son turning a murderous hand upon the father that once killed him with a silver cane. In these 69 years, Lawrence has gained control of his body and his mind, and John has lost his compassion and control. In 1941, Lawrence was put down by his father, so in 2010, he returns and wreaks vengeance, not merely for the deaths of his mother and brother, but for his own murder, as well.

And so, even if Johnston failed in many of his key directorial duties, he should get credit for the romance and mystery he's squeezed into the margins of an old tale.

Grittiness: 8.5

This lacks the authenticity of a gritty cop, drug, and/or war movie, but it makes up for it in intimacy and intensity. It's a film at the intersection of horror and noir, packed tight with textures and fluids and reminders of the flimsy cohesion of our bodies. There's something especially degenerate about the old Victorian asylum to which Lawrence is consigned... The Wolfman takes place in a twisted, dirty world that may renew your appreciation for your sanitized 21st century.

Gritty February analysis: The Salton Sea (2002)

The Salton Sea: it seems like the whole world missed this movie. Seeing it this weekend as part of Gritty February (seriously, it had "gritty" in the Netflix description), I found it full of questions and interesting angles. I also found it strangely disjointed... a movie that's not really about what it's about, that seems to miss its own point, and whose greatest strength seems to be in its unnecessary details. But like always, I thought about it some more, and it's become clear to me why I liked it.

Our first scene is a glimpse into an apocalyptic neo-noir world, a framing narrative of burning money and jazz music. This story vanishes almost immediately. You can forget about it for a while, but you can't lose it entirely. It should stay in your mental notepad, dog-eared so you can come back to it when it's called upon.

Now, we're dropped into another film, a hyperactive little story of a tweaker named Danny Parker. Danny is a familiar character, a non-conformist who's so confident that he seems to have the upper hand in every situation, even when everything else is out of control. He's also a snitch and a traitor whose only redeeming quality seems to be his dishonesty.

If Danny's over-edited, wacky drug world seems like a cheap knock-off of Trainspotting, at least it's got some interesting characters. Danny's best friend Jimmy the Finn, played by Peter Sarsgaard, is sad and beautiful, the antithesis of Danny, the man of intrigue. Jimmy may be strung out, but he's painfully honest and loving (in a bromance kind of way). His tattoo of his best friend might be creepy, if it wasn't so unselfconsciously loyal.

And let's not forget the other major player in Danny Parker's story, Pooh-Bear... a towering performance by Vincent D'Onofrio... whose shadow looms over Danny's whole world of tweaking, selling, and selling out. He's terrifyingly unpredictable, but calculated enough to be ruthless. His house is filled with things that don't make much sense, the errata of someone who can't keep his thoughts together... pigeons and a pillbox hat, a badger, scrambled eggs... but as you get to know the man, you realize something: these are all strange accessories to his cruelty, the little totems of violence that he's fetishized.

Make no mistake, Danny has a real story. It doesn't seem as fleshed out as a good drug story should be, and the difficult consequences of short-sightedness isn't interrogated. Even so, he's a convincing character, and his supporting cast is intriguing. In this story, he's a snitch for Gus and Al, two sneaky narcotics agents who may be a bit opportunistic, but who at least offer Danny this opportunity to be dishonestly moral, and to rat out his suppliers and get some of the meth and speed off the streets.

But then, as we sit through Danny's narrative, we get to see another story bleed through. This is the framing story of Tom Van Allen, a broken and distraught saxophonist whose life is imprinted on Danny Parker's back in a tattoo that says "The Salton Sea." And at the crucial structural moment of the film, we discover something important, the detail that justifies the existence and interaction of two half-formed storylines: we discover that Danny's story is fake, an adopted world and a constructed narrative, created to erase and overwrite that sad story that Tom Van Allen was supposed to tell. And suddenly, all the elements take on a new meaning. You just zoom out one level, and you get to see an unfamiliar landscape.

In Tom Van Allen's story, Jimmy and Pooh-Bear aren't important characters... they're just extras. For Jimmy, this is especially sad: he's an important character in a side-story, a loyal friend to a guy who doesn't really exist, except as a Macguffin for Tom Van Allen's revenge. More importantly, in Tom Van Allen's story, Gus isn't an ally... he's an enemy, the corrupt cop who interrupted a blossoming love. And for Tom Van Allen, the drugs that Danny finds so important are hardly note-worthy. They're just a distracting justification for the existence of a paper doll, the instrument of a minor betrayal that's ultimately in service of a greater one.

Betrayal: this is, of course, the factor that links Danny and Tom, the fake second personality and the real, but effaced, source character. Danny uses betrayal to get close to Gus, and Gus and Al think they're experts in using it to their advantage. However, what makes Danny such a powerful tool, and Tom Van Allen such a guru, is his mastery of betrayal. He's the meta-snitch, the best rat in the sewer, and he's ready to use "betrayal" as a weapon against the men who killed his lover. His deception works on so many levels, it can't be contained: he convinces the tweakers that he's a junkie, and he convinces the corrupt cops that he's a snitch; he even convinces Internal Affairs that he's on their side, when in the end, he's just using them to get into a well-guarded house and pull a gun out from under a table.

As I said, Danny's story doesn't just accompany Tom Van Allen's story – it erases it, replacing it with a fake-out hallucinogenic haze of freaks and self-indulgence. For this reason, Danny's story isn't that well-developed... but neither is Tom's story, which only glows a little in the cracks. Tom's story has been erased by a fantasy of revenge, built on layers of betrayal, and ultimately, these stories come together and destroy one another.

This destruction comes in Danny's apartment, which is actually Tom's apartment, where his identity has been sequestered away in a little box. It doesn't come from the poetic gesture of suicide... rather, Tom/Danny's death is at the hands of another side-character, one of the victims of Danny's snitching and Tom's moral self-righteousness. The perpetrator is a violent addict, a karmic weapon that brings Danny/Tom's betrayal back to kill him. This burning apartment is a place where lies and deception self-destruct, and destroy the truth in the process. Appropriately, it is only Danny's "true friend," the trace of his compassion and honesty, that appears as an angel of mercy.

It's a beautiful detail that this Tom/Danny character, who finally becomes nameless, is saved by his best friend from his inauthentic inner narrative. Jimmy the Finn is a fantastic foil for the violent, vengeful, and deceptive hero we've been following through his framing narratives. I don't think this final moment is the key to the film, though. I think the key moment in the film is that first scene, where everything burns around Tom Van Allen, and the framing narrative is watching itself be destroyed.

And ultimately, DJ Caruso, Val Kilmer, and Vincent D'Onofrio have made a movie that I won't forget.

Grittiness rating: 8

A drug movie plus a neo-noir framing narrative, with a cool-cat protagonist and one of the creepiest, most ruthless side-characters in movies. This film screams "story of the streets," and yet... it's a little too disjointed, a little too conceptual, to compete with the real killers of the genre. Sometimes its dirty aesthetic becomes a little too stylized, and because of its postmodern tendencies, it looks a little artificial. Even so, it deserves its place in the month of grittiness, and I'll defend it to the end.

Gritty February cross-post: The Shinjuku Incident

I don't usually do this, but since this is a themed month, I figured I'd call attention to a review I posted over at BlogCritics:

Movie Review: The Shinjuku Incident

Just to throw it out there, you should check out this movie if you want to see Jackie Chan's chops in a sweeping yakuza film where he doesn't do any comedic over-acting or kung fu whatsoever.

Grittiness rating: 7.5

The fight scenes are mean and the morals and politics are ambiguous. However, it doesn't reach the heights of cynical intimacy that seriously mean, gritty movies can attain. It gets an extra boost because it involves the yakuza, and because it didn't pass Chinese censors... and because of the occasional dismemberment.

Gritty February Kickoff at Benefit of the Doubt

So in honor of a streak of dark, atmospheric, crusty February movies (perfect for Valentine's Day!) I'm doing this month as "gritty February." I'll write BlogCritic reviews of cynical street movies as often as possible, and I'll be using this blog to talk about some classic gritty films, some of which you've probably seen, and some of which you haven't. For now, I guess it's time for an overview and a couple thoughts on the theme as a whole.

"Gritty" is a strange little literary term. Dictionary.com has no idea that it means what I'm using it to mean, although urbandictionary gets a lot closer. Presumably, it once referred to an actual texture, and the first association would be with gravel and corn-meal. However, I think, when we got obsessed with tone and atmosphere in our books and movies, we adapted it to refer to those places where texture tends to adhere: surfaces, rust, dirt, and cities. It subverts the artificial gloss of modern life, reminding us that as soon as we look away for a second, nature reclaims our stuff.

Texture as a fingerprint of nature, reclaiming the human artifact for the Earth: seems like a good start. By gradual inflection and implication, "gritty" has become an adjective meaning "naturalistic," but implying urban, as far removed from the pastoral as possible. Gritty movies are about difficult lives, lived in the throes of poverty, crime, and questionable morals. This is the product of a certain setting (generally urban), and a certain scale: close and intimate and uncomfortable, entangling the characters and the viewer in tension and hardship. It's an abstract, pervasive stylistic thing that probably ultimately qualifies as a "tone" or an "atmosphere," but that actually dictates the approach to content enough that it could be called a "style" or an "aesthetic."

I suspect Gritty Hollywood got its start in American genre film, especially film noir and (to a lesser degree) Western. However, it's propagated from there into a number of other cinematic spaces: drug movies, gangster and mob films, neo-noir, and even sports films. You can call a lot of films "gritty," if you just look at it as meaning "takes place in a degenerate world, or a city with a lot of dirty stuff"... and by taking this as a starting point, you can fake "gritty" pretty well. However, Benefit of the Doubt would like to adopt a more ambitious definition. To us, "gritty" means an intense narrative with an edge of realism, so the intrigue and drama are offset by a genuine real-world unpredictability. This is how the world looks through eyes of cynicism and uncertainty: our attempts to make things spiritual, meaningful, and sensible are frustrated uphill scrambles as the inevitable landslide of frustration drags us down.

I'm not sure I've seen a movie that epitomizes this quality as strongly as Scorcese's Taxi Driver.

Travis Bickle is a tortured, unhinged third-shift driver in a crusty, cynical 70's New York City. According to his own testimony, he is a Vietnam veteran, and the trauma of the war seems stamped upon his personality: he overreacts and undersleeps, reveling in his own obsessions and unable to control his paranoia. Bickle's moral alignment can't really be articulated... he certainly isn't an outright evil character ("evil" is generally shorthand for opportunistic and sadistic), but his sense of right and wrong is skewed and reactionary, only coming into relief at moments of stress and anger. He projects his frustration into unlikely targets, and channels it into unhealthy obsessions with women. He is completely out of control of the listing and jarring narrative of his everyday life.

Bickle also loves guns, and has an uncritical fascination with images of sexuality. As such, 70's New York City is almost a perfect place for him... he's surrounded by crime and violence and spectacle, and cheap sexual displays are readily available to him. Many... perhaps all... great cities have been showcases of grime and cynicism, since the aesthetic became such an art: 70's New York, 80's Los Angeles, 40's Chicago, and occasionally Boston -- these are the gritty cities where American filmmakers have discovered their criminal undergrounds. Kurosawa found it in Tokyo (Stray Dog) and Danny Boyle found it in Edinburgh (Trainspotting). With The Wire, it was Baltimore.

As for me, here's where I'll be looking. In theaters, I'm watching for Shutter Island, The Wolfman, The Shinjuku Incident, and the Red Riding trilogy. I'm also considering seeing Edge of Darkness and From Paris With Love, although those two aren't such high priorities.

At home, I think I'll watch some of the following, though I'm sure not all: The Salton Sea, King of New York, Gone Baby Gone, Pickpocket, Bicycle Thieves, and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. I know not all of these may qualify as "gritty," but I'll make the call when I see them... and I'll be sure to write about them here.

Hope February has gotten off to a badass start for you all.

The great "Sevens" of film, and the what it means to move slowly

Every so often, while I mentally review the films I've seen, it occurs to me that there are three truly iconic films that all feature the number Seven in their title. I'm proud to say that as of tonight, I've seen all three.

I don't remember when I saw Se7en, the most recent of these films. For years, I'd heard it mentioned, and it seemed that its reputation was growing, because every time somebody mentioned it, it would sound a little more reverent than the last time. When I finally got around to seeing it, it was every bit as harrowing as its reputation suggested. Fincher's bleach bypass colors and uncomfortable intimacy with the killer and his victims -- these were the groundwork for a vicious, merciless film experience. Despite the gruesome imagery and shock tactics, it's still the conclusive conceptual twist that I remember best... perhaps the only payoff that could have lived up to the film's escalation.

To me, this is the essential Fincher movie, and the most successful Brad Pitt has ever been in playing a (deadly) serious role. It's also one of Kevin Spacey's major achievements, as he becomes the case study for soft-spoken introversion as something purposeful and terrifying.

There was an element of expectation involved in my viewing of Se7en, but not nearly so much as there was with the other two Great Sevens, Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal. These two totally definitive films are burdened with a common weight: the reputation for being impossibly slow and difficult to sit through. Having finally seen both of them, I can say definitively, I find this characterization to be a little unfair.

Now, if you're not used to old movies in general, you need to know: the current pace of filmmaking has changed dramatically in the past forty years, and even more so in the past ten. So honestly, you may find any movie created before 1980 to be rather slow, and as for the ones created back before 1960? Until you've learned a little bit of patience, those might seem totally insufferable.

But I'll tell you straight: Seven Samurai is a heavy undertaking, but it isn't slow. And The Seventh Seal, even more so, is totally misunderstood... for something jam-packed with existentialism, it actually moves along pretty evenly.

Of these three Great Sevens, Seven Samurai is the most epic, the most adventuresome, and the most heroic. It's also reputedly extremely difficult to sit through, possibly because it's almost three and a freaking half hours long, including an intermission in the middle. Make no mistake: it will take up a chunk of a day, and if you want to see it, I'd recommend setting aside a whole afternoon, with some buffer time to take a break or two, stretch, get food, and pee. This is how I got through it in essentially one sitting... I made the space for it, and I made myself comfortable.

However, don't let the bad press fool you... Seven Samurai doesn't have the ponderous slowness of Brown Bunny or 2001, which are replete with atmospheric shots of objects moving through space, people sitting in reflective silence, and other sorts of cinematic images that may as well be still photos. Seven Samurai has a story that always moves.

So it's 207 minutes long, and yet it moves along the whole time? Well, if distance=rate times time, and the movie moves at a good clip for 207 minutes, it must mean it covers a hell of a lot of distance. This is, in fact, the case: this story is extraordinarily elaborate, with copious numbers of important characters, all working out minor relationships and developments. This is the kind of in-depth plot and rising action that we, as modern consumers, are only used to seeing in serial television. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the film being broken into a nine- or ten-episode series, and each episode being accessible and engaging.

This far-reaching story, revolving around the complex personal politics of the medieval samurai, provides ample space for the central dialectic of the film, a discourse on loyalty and individualism that engages Western sensibilities of heroics, leadership, and subversion with Eastern ideals of commitment and self-sacrifice. Any mention of the film will always immediately evoke its final image... a reflection on an ensemble of warriors, united in duty and divided by fate.

The third "Seven" movie is the one I saw tonight, The Seventh Seal. Like Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal has the universal reputation for being extremely slow, artsy, and pretentious. In Seventh Samurai, this reputation is partly because of the length and complexity; in Seventh Seal, it's harder to explain. The movie clocks in at a lean 96 minutes, and it's essentially a story of a veteran knight of the crusades, traveling home through the European countryside, and discovering the human spirit within the wasteland of the plague. He only makes it as far as he does because he distracts Death with a game of chess... so yes, there's some "symbolism" here, and some reflection on the nature of good and evil and faith, but this is not a philosophical tract over a game board. This is a movie about some good people and some not-so-good people, and about their adventures.

Perhaps The Seventh Seal has been pigeon-holed as a slow movie because it's also been characterized as an artsy movie... which is probably because the main character, a knight having a crisis of faith, tends to ask his philosophical questions very directly. He likes to talk about God, the devil, and the failure of faith, and he occasionally uses the other characters as sounding boards to make dramatic speeches. As Roger Ebert pointed out, this is historically equated with over-philosophizing, and with the kind of comedic melodrama that invites parody after parody. However, it's worth noting that the film is actually among Bergman's most accessible... for me, it beats out Persona, which is intimidatingly cryptic, but also such meandering dramas as Wild Strawberries and The Hour of the Wolf.

Funny that a brief movie, full of small adventures and entertaining characters, is so widely considered slow and pretentious; or that it's considered cryptic when it addresses its themes out in the open, with no obfuscation.

Daybreakers: A survey of a science fiction world

“Any sufficiently advanced technology something something magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke, apparently

Remember when Vampires were good ol’ reliable devil worshippers and hosts to evil spirits? When Vlad was the last word on Vampirism, even up into the goth Vampire The Masquerade / Anne Rice days, a world with vampires was pretty much a world allowing for supernatural events and inhabitations. Sexy, bloodthirsty vampirism was justified by symbolism and folkloric mysticism, and didn’t really depend on empirical verifiability. Has anyone noticed how this has been changing?

Daybreakers is one of the recent movies that's displaced vampire lore from Victorian superstition to post-apocalyptic science fiction. This is a film that starts with a very interesting premise: the world is populated almost entirely by vampires, and their supply of fresh human blood is dwindling… they’ve tried farming, but it can’t keep up with demand, and they’re consistently failing to produce an acceptable blood substitute. The desperation is causing serious civil unrest. It’s tempting to read it as an environmental/sustainability metaphor, but don’t… it just makes it boring.

However, even resisting this impulse, you won’t be able to help seeing this as a very modern premise, based on the sciences of economics and scarcity, and the logic of technological solutions to chronic biological and ecological limitations. It’s an extension of a folkloric monster, operating within a scientific discourse. I Am Legend and Blade both work this way, as well. Compare this with the original, sourcebook vampire legends, Dracula and Nosferatu: in these, the vampire was a predatory master of a supernatural world, governed by laws of the spirit (I’d argue that the Anne Rice and White Wolf vampires are the modern inheritors of this tradition). Also, for arguments’ sake, compare with the image of the vampire as spirituality-on-the-margins: the vampires that represent an inexplicable supernatural presence, but that coexist with modern society, albiet at arm's reach. This is the vampire lore of Twilight and Let The Right One In: vampires don’t represent some ominous, ever-present “other world” so much as the mysterious exception ("the other") to rational society. Whereas the classical vampire represented a threat to “normalcy,” these new vampires are outcasts, representing a sentimental nostalgia for folklore and mysticism.

Kay, typological tangent over. Back to the vampire world of Daybreakers.

So in Daybreakers, we have a "virulent" vampirism that's infected the entire population, save a few straggling individuals. Way cool. Vlad the Impaler probably had the same disease, which happens to have "immortality" as a fortunate side-effect. And it makes the host vulnerable to sunlight, which causes total immolation. That's cool, too... you might call it "ultraviolet photosensitivity." And also, they have to drink live blood, which has some combination of nutrients that vampire blood doesn't have.

And if the vampires lack this nutrient for too long, they start to degenerate, physically and mentally, which is one of the deliciously awesome twists that Daybreakers brings to Vampire mythology. It might be even better than "torpor," which was Vampire: The Masquerade's state of hibernation for underfed vampires.

In an even more fascinating stylistic twist, the vampires that don't get enough blood tend to follow a reverse evolution, from Stoker-esque white collar vampire studs to Murnau-esque creatures with bald heads and huge, ragged ears. In fact, Daybreakers is the first vampire movie that I've seen combine the two dominant vampire images. Only Vampire: The Masquerade has done this before, using the Nosferatu clan to fudge in the deformed subspecies. The mental degeneration of these Subsider vampires is harrowing, as they revert to deformed scavengers with no instinct but to feed. The fact that this condition is brought on by feeding from other vampires, and feeding from oneself, associates it with sexual perversity, on top of the addiction and devolution implications.

These rules lay the groundwork for a fairly satisfying science fiction world, mostly rationalized, but with a glaze of mysticism. My main critique of the narrative space is that the Spierig brothers tried too hard to reference the older, folklore-based vampires of Victorian gothica. This goth loyalty resulted in a couple useless details: first, that the vampires are apparently invisible in mirrors; second, that they explode in flames when impaled on a stake.

We all know how various wavelengths of light affect the rods and cones of the eye, and it's a far stretch to assume that the same reflected light that reaches our eyes can vanish when it touches a mirror. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine a biological reaction that incites immediate combustion, but only from the heart, and only when it's impaled on something as inert as a crossbow bolt.

First, I admit, these are details. I'm a big supporter of this movie, and if you need confirmation of that, read my review over at BlogCritics. However, that review will also tell you that in my opinion, it's the innovative conceptual treatment of vampires and society that really makes this a good movie. The silly narrative tropes and campy lines are offensive, but they're also easy to write off as a sort of action movie syndrome. But those inconsistencies in the beautifully-rendered universe of Daybreakers... they're cracks in the core merit of the movie. They break up the texture of a well-rendered world, and thus they merit mention.

Still, it was an easy world to get caught up in, and I give the Spierigs credit for that. The future was not only vampire-y... it was frigid and lonely, disconnected, and desperate. For the vampire citizens of Earth 2019, the world is poised on a razor's edge between the empty stasis of immortality and the suffocating catastrophe of implosion and violence. It's a future wasted, partly by greed, but moreso by the same cruel hand of fate that gave mankind so many gifts and so few promises.

Shared Worlds: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

It's been about a week since I saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Over the course of this week, I have almost entirely lost my mental grasp on the world of the movie. It was so overloaded with stimuli, so awash in hallucinogenic imagery, and so random and fanciful that I can't call back the feelings that it evoked. Maybe this is the type of thing you just can't hold onto... a world that exists only within the space of the movie, and can't subsist anywhere else. This is a world that vanishes, even from the memories of the viewers who experienced it.

The sheer randomness of the movie actually lost me at times, creating empty enigmas and blasting me with discordant imagery. For a while, I was actually a bit irritated at the total lack of cohesion that I saw as the only unifying element to the narrative. I've chilled out on that, though... a fair number of critics (like Mr. Ebert) were willing to forgive it, and even I was able, almost right from the start, to excuse these narrative excesses and oversights in favor of an uncontrollable directorial vision.

In looking back, though, I've realized that I've seen this world before. Even as it slips from my memory, it's registered something, recalling another movie I only remember in fragments. This is Gilliam's previous phantasmagoric sideshow, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and the more I think about it, the more I'm sure of it: these two films took place in the same universe.

So what happens in this universe? What kind of a bizarre, dwarf-populated, uninhibited place is it? Well, first, it's a place where the Earth and the cosmos are built on non sequitor and whimsy. It's a universe that only exists because its story is being told, as the young Parnassus so kindly informs us, and thus it's a world defined by its storytellers and reenactors. It's a world where powerful ideas manifest, whether they're personifications, like the King of the Moon and Vulcan the Fire God, or the living sparks of confused imaginations, like the inner worlds of Parnassus's mirror. It's a shared world, but at any one time, it issues forth from the voice of its storyteller, like a tree growing from a seed. It's a world that can be saved from war and ruin by the Baron's ability to tell a tale with a happy ending.

This is a world divided into the common people, a naive and unruly lot, and the heroes, the redeemers of daily life. These commoners are well-meaning, but just tend to get themselves into trouble, whether by falling prey to Tony's empty promises, or by shouting down the Baron himself. It's always a world on its way to ruin, sinking inevitably into normalcy, but generally barely held aloft by the heroic efforts of its heroes and hopefuls, who lift it up by its own bootstraps, even as they fight off their own inner demons.

Interestingly, this is also a world of singular beautiful women, the radiant centers of their universes. Whether they're Roman goddesses or flirty daughters of immortal drunkards, they're inevitably impossible to contain, and they always seem to become the stakes in showdowns between supernatural powers. Venus, played by a noticably naked Uma Thurman, pioneered this role, catalyzing the rivalry between the Baron and Vulcan. However, Valentina, played by Lily Cole, took the archetype to a new level. Her love was not only a point of contention between Anton the rascal and Tony the undead con man, but between her father and the devil himself.

I often wonder about the strange process that results in a half-formed world within the imagination of a culture. These worlds... the world of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, the world of 2046 and In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, the world of With Honors and Good Will Hunting (I'm convinced that all three of these constitute self-contained worlds)... these are mysterious and robust, and in their incompleteness, they seem almost more complete than our confusing, disorderly everyday universe.

To these we can now add the world of Baron Munchausen and Doctor Parnassus... a harlequin universe of mythical figures engaged in cryptic games of life and death... and it's a universe that will keep growing, because its story is still being told.

Cinephiles and Consumers: a meditation on film and the elitist/populist debate

Cinematical posted a reflection on the difference between "informed" and "uninformed" film-goers.

All these discussions about film snobbery and validity of taste... they tend to gravitate around certain points, and totally miss others. This is true of all sensitive topics... just look at gay marriage, which has bizarrely coagulated around the question of whether homosexuality is "natural," rather than considering the basic question of human rights that's implicit in the issue. The "film snobs versus pop culture apologists" debate has its own gravitational centers, and they're a bit distracting from the key topics that underlie the debate.

One of those gravitational centers is "What exactly is a 'good film'?" This leads to clashes between the relativist position of the pop culture apologists versus the aesthetic and technical purism of the film snobs. Another one is, "_____ are biased against _______ films," which each side fills in to their liking. Pop culture apologists say, "Film snobs are biased against popular films," and film snobs say, "Mass consumers are biased against thought-provoking films." These kinds of claims are false... they're really just a way of converting merit-of-taste arguments into populist ad hominem arguments.

Let me try this from a different direction. Maybe I can avoid these ideological pitfalls altogether.

First, I'm going to reframe the two groups we're talking about into cinephiles and consumers. A consumer is any person who sees movies casually, in equal proportion to other amusements and entertainment. Cinephiles, by contrast, are people who identify one of their primary interests as "film" or "movies," and back it up by meeting at least one of two qualifications: they see a disproportionately large number of movies (like, three or four a month at minimum), or they make an appreciable effort to see movies outside the Hollywood mainstream.

I'm obviously taking some fuzzy factors here and turning them into some really artificial distinctions. Still, it's an important starting point for this kind of discussion, because so much of it rides on the distinction between people "in-the-know" and people who aren't. At times, the pop culture apologists advance the idea that taste can't be universalized, so how "educated" you are (whether formally or informally) shouldn't factor into the discussion... effectively treating all audience members as equally-informed. This approach doesn't hold water in our cultural universe.

Pretty much every discussion of the merits of mass culture, high-brow versus low-brow, the abundance of bad movies in major theaters, etc. is actually about the cultural divide between consumers and cinephiles. Consumers rarely, if ever, make public assertions of their opinions on various films – they generally just talk about them in private conversations, or by recommending or scoffing at movies, or by going to see certain films a second time. There are MANY more consumers than cinephiles, and they exert a much more powerful force on Hollywood, because their money speaks for them. Cinephiles carry out a much more explicit, public debate about film, but they aren't a big enough demographic for Hollywood's investment. Hollywood isn't looking for acclaim... it's looking for a return.

Most bloggers and commentators (including Cinematical, above) want to ask whether the opinions of "film snobs" are somehow "more valid" than the opinions of average movie-goers. In fact, confusion over this question has led cinephiles to be called "elitists" and taste-fascists. When you step back to think about it, though, everyone... cinephiles, consumers, fanboys, etc... we all prioritize our own tastes, and hold those who share those tastes in higher esteem. I don't ever remember a cinephile demanding that an opponent relinquish his or her personal "favorite movie" designation. Cinephiles are more enthusiastic about films, so they may be more likely to assert their own preferences and challenge the preferences of those who disagree with them. This isn't a pretense to superiority, though. It's just a higher level of intensity, both of loves and of hates.

We have to give up this question of whether or not cinephiles have a more valid opinion, and instead look to see where that opinion is coming from. By definition, a cinephile is a person with distinctive experience in film-watching. The opinions of cinephiles will therefore be based on comparisons between films, and on an appreciable background of cinema experience, much more than the opinions of consumers. This will tend to result in a wider range of opinions, whether those opinions tend to be enthusiastic and positive (which tends to be true of cinema-lovers like Roger Ebert) or nit-picky and negative (which tends to be true of graduate-student critics and people who bitch on movie forums). Will cinephiles have a greater tendency to complain about certain movies? Yes, because of the wider range and intensity of their opinions. Are they inherently biased toward "blockbusters"? Absolutely not. Virtually every cinephile has a significant knowledge-base of movies, and they will identify most blockbusters as unexciting, but they will hold a few in very high regard. This doesn't represent a bias, so much as a representative cross-section of their taste in movies as a whole: lots of unimpressive stuff (whether among blockbusters or classics), and a few treasured gems.

So is the reverse true? Are consumers biased against thought-provoking movies? I don't think so... I frankly don't think we have any particular evidence to that conclusion, because thought-provoking film hasn't been promoted on a large public scale for a while now. There are certain cultural forces that dictate what movies get the most funding, the most publicity, etc., and these forces generally favor the most eye-catching, sense-overwhelming movies possible. The opinions of consumers, also more or less by-definition, will be dictated by the general habits and preferences built up from the individual's exposure to all media. Consumers will factor in certain characteristics that cinephiles weigh less heavily: franchise loyalty, ideological agreement with the movie's message, and sensory and sentimental reaction.

To be fair, a certain subset of cinephiles can elevate some things that consumers don't appreciate as much... ambiguity of form, for instance, which I blogged about a month or so ago, and formal experimentation and technical achievement, whether within the scene or in terms of the crafts of editing and cinematography. These criteria are especially important to film students and professors, because in studying the history of film, they become acutely aware of each technical method: its invention sometime in the golden age of cinema, its increased use in a certain country or a certain era, its resurgence in a certain genre or a certain director's work. The fact that consumers tend not to notice these things does indeed demonstrate difference between these ways of looking at the film, but it proves neither the superiority, nor the aloofness, of the cinephile approach.

This editorial piece has turned into an attempt to defend cinephiles without resorting to elitism, so I'll continue in that vein for at least one more paragraph. Before you go and accuse your local film buff of being "snobby" because they throw around harsh criticism, note that there is another type of film person who does this: the genre afficianado. This is the guy who has seen every samurai movie, or the girl who knows the detailed history of the Brat Pack and has seen every romance movie with any of the original members. For my money, these people fall squarely into the "cinephile" category, rather than the "consumer" category, and I think they're an important group to consider... they have strong opinions, based on a comprehensive background, but they're not snobby -- in fact, they often appreciate the lowest of the lowest-brow with intense enthusiasm. If you're a pop culture apologist, and you have the urge to equate strong, unapologetic tastes with elitism, make sure you consider these fanboy types. They are the strongest argument against that corroboration.

It seems to me that within this context, we get a new picture of the role of movie critics, as well. Movie critics are basically socially-empowered cinephiles... the outreach program for people who consider movie-watching a primary interest. Their opinions aren't necessarily privileged, or accurate, and you may find that you consistently disagree with critics (a sign that you may be a subversive cinephile, bravely swimming upstream against your own group's tendencies). Nonetheless, a good critic is a public representative of cinephilia -- (s)he evaluates movies based on what other movies are doing, and what other movies have done before, and (s)he forms strong opinions in accordance with her/his role as an enthusiast.

Should consumers be more like cinephiles? Should cinephiles just relax? Honestly, these questions are unnecessary. This is a social difference that we can discuss without making some sort of moral or prescriptive claim. I think this can potentially bring some clarity to the elitist-versus-populist flame wars... although admittedly, clarity may make those shouting matches a lot less amusing.

Avatar: Some Possible Alternate Endings

The reviews have come in. It’s groundbreaking – a masterpiece of motion capture, a triumph of space jungle world-building. Record numbers of people didn't feel like they were just watching James Cameron play a very expensive video game. And I have to give it props for the pacing and cinematic technique, which made the story stick... Cameron has a knack for making a narrative seem interesting and profound.

Still, my opinion of the film in general is strongly in the camp of Elisabeth from Cinematical and Annalee Newitz from io9. I had fun, and cheered at the big hits, but my troublesome critical brain couldn’t stop saying things like, "Why are the aliens so much like African/Native American/Aboriginal people?"

But as they say, don't criticize if you can't come up with an alternative. In that spirit, I hereby offer some suggestions on other ways Avatar could have played out… maybe with fewer clichés, or less obvious about its white guilt fantasies, or even just less predictably. When I see the movie again, I'll be hoping the ending magically transforms into one of these. So without further ado, wouldn’t it be awesome if:

(WARNING: SOME OF THESE MAY CAUSE "SPOILAGE" OF THE ACTUAL ENDING A LITTLE)

1) The humans drop a nuke on Home Tree, and Sully, having foreknowledge of this plan, is the only one able to escape. He becomes the sole bearer of the Nav’i legacy, and through his influence, the Earth eventually learns of its crimes. However, failing to find solace in his own lifetime, he dies destitute and frustrated.

2) The Nav'i do what makes the most sense when they find out Jake was always with the humans: they cut off his head, eviscerate his body, and send the remains back to his comrades. They then disappear into the forest, abandoning Home Tree, and use their planet’s neural network to mount a grueling, two-hundred year guerilla defense against the human invaders, which is ultimately successful in driving them away.

3) The Nav'i reveal to Jake that they not only invented their own modern weaponry… they’ve fully evolved past needing it. When the invaders arrive with ships and tanks, the tribal elders simply dismantle the metal with their secret psycho-kinetic powers, and the human invaders are left naked in the woods to be eaten by giant cats.

4) The Nav'i and Jake Sully escape, and the humans occupy Home Tree and the Ancestor Tree (or whatever it is), only to discover that the Nav'i aren’t the dominant species on Pandora after all... the trees are actually the most intelligent species, and they use the non-sentient animals as appendages. The "animal assault" from the actual movie then ensues, but without the Nav'i even bothering to help; the planet just uses its various indigenous animals to pound the human invaders into tapioca pudding.

5) With Jake's help, the humans destroy the Nav'i, and then discover that their psychic connection with the surrounding plant-life was generating a centripedal force that was keeping the planet in orbit. Within hours, Pandora drifts off its orbit and crashes into the nearby planet, killing everybody there.

6) When Jake tames his Banshee and becomes initiated, Neytiri realizes that humans are, in fact, superior to her own race (after all, he did in months what it takes them their whole lives to accomplish). She asks him to bring her back to the military base, where she informs him that she’s defecting, and together they help the humans crush and enslave the Nav'i. She then has an affair with Colonel Quaritch. When Sully finds out, he challenges the Colonel in single combat, and kills him using the skills he learned as a Nav'i. Neytiri sees her old lover, now a Nav'i warrior, murder her new lover, the human champion; she subsequently realizes she contributed to the genocide of her own race, and commits suicide by jumping off the back of her Banshee a thousand feet above the ruins of the Ancestor Tree.

7) When Jake enters his Avatar and attempts to lead the Nav'i to war, the simulation suddenly ends. A human military psychologist informs him that Pandora is actually a training facility, and the "Avatar" experience was a virtual reality evaluation of his conviction and patriotism; as he followed the call of nature on an alien planet and the glory of being a champion to the locals, he has obviously failed. He has to return home with a dishonorable discharge.

8) After the destruction of Home Tree, Jake becomes an advocate for the Nav’i, but he’s written off as a fanatical hippy with PTSD. The humans start second-guessing their militaristic approach and regretting their cruelty to the natives, but only after they’ve killed most of the Nav’i, or shuttered them into small encampments and denied them any good education or representation. Eventually, all that remains of Nav'i culture is cheap stereotypes, cottage industry hand-crafts, and casinos. Two hundred years later, one of Sully's great grandsons makes a movie about their plight, but reimagines it with a human leading them to victory and freedom.

^1] Orson Scott Card ending
^2] Battle of Algiers ending
^3] Ian Banks ending
^4] Gaia Theory ending
^5] I don’t know where I got this idea.
^6] Greek Tragedy ending
^7] Wizard of Oz ending
^8] Just completing the implicit analogy here

A quick reflection on David Cronenberg's The Brood

I just saw The Brood, a Cronenberg film from 1979, just preceding his much-lauded Scanners and Videodrome. What a movie... what issues. This body horror opus is a tangle of neuroses about motherhood, psychotherapy, parents, parenting, and physical wholeness. It doesn't provide a particularly fair representation of either mental illness or the mental health profession, and its climatic scene does what Cronenberg is famous for: it uses sickening effects to express deep psychological anxieties about flesh... creating an aversive bridge between body and mind, which are so brutally separated in Western society.

In this way, Cronenberg's work could be read as a critique of Cartesian dualism and the longstanding mind-body difference that infects Western culture. Dr. Raglan's techniques are based on an essential opposition to dualism, asserting that we can't get the body out of the mind, or vice versa. In a practice that was fixated for some time on the idea of unearthing hidden memories and experiences, what could be a more complete method of exposing those repressed feelings than by manifesting them on the body itself? Psychoplasmics seems to be based, at least in part, on the idea that psychological damage can be treated more easily as physical damage.

If this is true, then Dr. Raglan's biggest problem is that he assumes "expressing" these anxieties automatically solves them... that by creating welts on his body, Mikey is fixing the underlying damage that those welts are expressing. The film makes it clear that this is simply not the case: expressed anger and anxiety, left untreated, are just as damaging as repressed anxiety. Again, this could be read as a critique... in this case, a critique of psychoanalysis itself.

Psychological trauma aside, there's something about this movie that makes it relentlessly uncomfortable, and I think it's 70's aesthetic. The Shining benefited from the same effect... the grainy film, the earth tones that seem to suggest mud and soil, the red and yellow accents that suggest body fluids, and the shadows that seem ready to swallow you whole... there's something creepy about that decade, isn't there? In my opinion, it beats the hell out of a lot of our highly-saturated horror movies, shot through blue filters with conspicuous red bursts here and there. The houses in The Ring and Drag Me To Hell feel like they were build ten minutes before the movie was made, and the space feels too scripted. The woods and wooden shacks and attic apartments of the 70's... these are spontaneous, empty spaces, quietly genuine in their loneliness.

For a bit of a longer reminiscence on this topic, mentioning a few of the same concepts that I mention, but with more information on the actual technical qualities of the film: Q Branch on The Brood. Also, this is where I stole the picture.