Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind

'Contagion' a weak virus.

2011-09-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

It's very strange that Steven Soderbergh's hip remake of Outbreak would be oddly appropriate viewing for the 10-year anniversary of September 11th, but Soderbergh is a director who has always surprised me, and his versatility is a major reason why he's among the most exciting American filmmakers working today--and I'm crossing my fingers that he keeps on working, too. His coolness is written all over this film, from the visual little details of everyday physical nuances to Cliff Martinez's throbbing score. Contagion's greatest strength is 48-year-old Soderbergh's pulse on 21st-century communication. However, unlike his great Traffic, Contagion can be sterile like the sky is blue because of its devastating lack of detail to character.

Weaving multiple storylines spanning all over the world, the film starts with a cough. A cough businesswoman/wife Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) shrugs off as jet lag--until it becomes a seizure, and then much worse. Considered patient zero for a highly contagious virus, the virus claims victims exponentially, becoming an epidemic. The cast includes Matt Damon as Paltrow's widowed husband, Jude Law as a San Francisco-based blogger/conspiracy theorist, Laurence Fishburne as a CDC manager, Kate Winslet as the doctor Fishburne hires to investigate the virus, Jennifer Ehle as a disease expert racing to find a cure, and Marion Cotillard is sadly underused as a WHO epidemiologist who travels to Hong Kong, believing it to be the source for the virus. You only need to have read three of the actors to know this is an incredibly well-cast film, and all the actors do admirable work; there isn't a bad performance in the whole movie, with many of the cast having to perform scared and sick (Paltrow in particular does a great seizure). But the problem with a cast this big, no matter how talented, is that it produces character overcrowding. There is absolutely nothing remotely interesting to be found in Winslet's Erin Mears or Marion Cotillard's character ($10 reward if you can remember her name without the aide of IMDb). Both of these characters, doctors who are investigating the source of the virus, albeit in different continents, should have been combined into one character, because at least then it would have allowed some room for, oh I don't know, knowing whether or not they put their socks on before or after putting on their pants. It's especially vexing for Cotillard because she's not only incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly talented, and after Chris Nolan forced her to chew the scenery in Inception (no doubt by starving her first), it's distressing to see her character here dropped unceremoniously for what feels like the last half of the film. Indeed, it's a very telling note of the screenwriter's regard for his characters that when someone in this movie serves their purpose, usually expository reasons, they are dropped like a fly.

As such, those who do shine in Contagion don't have to work very hard; Matt Damon continues a professional winning streak as a widowed father concerned for his surviving teenage daughter--his portrayal of sudden grief at his wife's death is genuinely affecting. And as a widowed husband/surviving father, he is the face of humanity in the film. Jude Law has the benefit of portraying the most fascinating character, a "freelance journalist" who seems to nail the government's secretive acts while trying to eradicate the epidemic. It's through him that the film's title not only refers to a disease, but viral communication. I find it through these two characters that I draw the parallels to 9/11--in the years after, there are two emotions most deeply felt: humanity and anger. The blogger's hipness does much of the actor's work in gaining the audience's attention, including mine: I grew up north of the San Francisco Bay Area and know all too much about the free media. Where the screenplay takes the blogger I found disappointing to the overall message, but nothing's perfect, certainly not this film.

Be more 'Crazy,' less 'Stupid,' and we might 'Love' you. Also, learn proper punctuation, you sound like a schmuck.

2011-08-03T20:37:00.000-07:00

Crazy, Stupid, Love. doesn't like you. You might try to like it, but like a guy that hits you over the head with his supposed knowledge of fine wines and French literature, this movie just doesn't know when to stop following a guide-book on romantic comedies when all we want is total honesty. I feel I should go apologize to guidebooks now for having insulted them.

Steve Carell and the always-luminous Julianne Moore are Cal and Emily, who have been married for about 25 years, having been high school sweethearts. Now Emily wants a divorce and Cal is left dumbfounded, in a pool of his own self-pity. Lucky for him, of all the (presumably many) gin joints in all the towns (presumably Los Angeles) in all the world, smooth-talking ladies man Jacob (Ryan Gosling in his sexiest role) overhears Cal's sob story to anyone who will listen, and decides to take Cal under his wing, giving him a new wardrobe and teaching him the tricks of how to seduce women. Meanwhile, Jacob meets Hannah, a young lawyer (played by Emma Stone, who always has a delightful glitter in her eyes) who rebuffs him upon his initial seduction and therefore must be his soulmate. Cal and Emily's 13-year-old son thinks his 17-year-old babysitter is his own soulmate, not knowing that she has a crush on Cal, his own father. Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei also pop up as potential love interests for Cal and Emily. Bacon is great fun, playing his role with a surprising amount of genuine charm and warmth, but with just enough of a hint of deviousness to make us question if he'll snatch Moore away for himself. Marisa Tomei is not allotted that dignity, for one reason or another, overplaying her role to the point of becoming a cruel caricature of a desperate, needy woman.

This movie has a wonderful cast, and their only fault is signing onto a project that is clearly beneath their talents and failing to allow very much honesty (the film's moments of genuine charm or catharsis is few and far between). Steve Carell spent 7 years on The Office playing a man whose outlandish whims were intensified by a devastating insecurity; most of the time the show felt like a game of "What Can Make The Audience Most Uncomfortable?," but Carell's finest moments of real vulnerability has made me excited to see him stretch his acting choices now that he's free from The Office. But despite moments of genuine catharsis as I've mentioned earlier, all of them involving Julianne Moore (if I'm making it sound like Ms. Moore can do no wrong, it's because she couldn't even if she tried), the role feels like a rehash of some of the most awkward moments on The Office combined with makeover scenes from The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Julianne Moore has made a career out of playing adulterers, but despite her lovely gravity, the only thing that made her stand out was how often her character wears high-heels. I mean, really, it's so noticeable you'd think this role was written for Sarah Jessica Parker. Emma Stone is wonderful but her part is too small to make an impression. And even if Ryan Gosling hadn't put an iota of passion into his role, he couldn't fail if he tried--his abs are just so marvelous, even the camera is in love with them.

No, a quick trip to IMDB will tell you who to put the blame on, and that is screenwriter Dan Fogelman. Why am I so quick to blame the writer? Because this is the first thing he's done that's gotten an MPAA rating over PG. He's the man who penned one of the worst-reviewed Christmas films (Fred Clause), Pixar's weakest film (Cars and its sequel Cars 2), and has also penned Tangled and Bolt. All of these are children's films which makes it suddenly understandable where all the worst cliches of the film come from: the misunderstandings which come to merge at a family gathering, the children too precocious for their own good, the climactic speech in front of an audience which nicely wraps up the film's message and makes everyone happy again, even the rain after a harsh argument which makes Cal say, "this is so cliche!" Screenwriters, making a meta-film reference doesn't make your script any less of a cliche, it just highlights your failure to create anything original.

If the film had not busied itself with so many subplots (honestly, the son/baby-sitter/father crush-triangle went to very uncomfortable places) and focused not on Moore and Carell, who are very capable actors but didn't seem to have much chemistry but on the budding romance between Stone and Gosling, who do have a lot of chemistry, it could have reshaped the movie into something much more delightful. After all, any guy who can work Dirty Dancing into a seduction deserves more screentime. Ryan Gosling and especially his abs deserved a better screenplay. Crazy and stupid, I know. But true.

Girls Just Wanna Help Autistic Kids!

2011-07-11T01:25:00.000-07:00

The great thing about house-sitting, especially with a massive DVD collection, is that you get to watch movies you would never in a million years actually want to watch other than having a morbid curiosity as to whether or not the two critics for At The Movies actually got it right. There's no paper trail from the library, no comments by a video store clerk that might arouse a blush and tarnish your image as a film snob with impeccable taste. Now, I consider myself a gal with a good taste in movies, but I also realize that from time to time looking outside the box can have beautiful consequences, if anything just to realize how great a good movie really is by comparison. So here's a brief rundown of the more fluffy "chick flicks" I viewed on a particularly lovely house-sitting weekend.

Eat Pray Love (2010, Ryan Murphy). Based on the best-selling memoir of a woman who overcame a crisis brought on by divorce by traveling to Italy, India and Bali to find her center in life, the film version, despite some truly moving moments, cannot overcome the bad casting of Julia Roberts; As an actress famous for her million-dollar smile, Roberts simply cannot personify self-pity or depression because even frowning makes it look like it takes all her effort. As a result, the film is less a story of a woman's realization of her self and happiness than another rich American who travels abroad and heartedly laughs at how Italians uses hand gestures to kiss off others, then has the cathartic moment when she travels to a more poverty-stricken nation that everything does *not* revolve around her.

Dear John (2010, Lasse Halfstrom). Nicholas Sparks may be one of the worst authors to ever be printed, and the fact that he is an internationally beloved best-seller is only proof that the terrorists are winning. As such, the only reason why any film adaptations of his works succeed are because of the commitment of the female leads. Rachel McAdams put her heart into a role that was very beneath her in The Notebook, and her Mean Girls co-star Amanda Seyfried follows in her footsteps for Dear John. As the girl who is so angelic she's practically a saint (she doesn't drink, smoke or sleep around but she does admit to "swearing constantly in [her] mind"), Seyfried is so good that she nearly makes the utterly wooden Channing Tatum seem engaging just by looking into his eyes. As Savannah and soldier John, they have a beach summer romance as typical in a Sparks story, then things get overdramatically complicated as typical in a Sparks story, in this case John enlisting immediately after 9/11 and their continued relationship via snail mail. Both roles are too good to be realistic (in addition to Savannah and her dream to open up a horse camp for autistic children, John is written as a sometimes badboy with a heart of gold, and by the film's end, the only career soldier not to swear, drink or get PTSD), but despite this I really was with the film until the last third when the plot manipulation needed to throw the couple into an emotional climax threw me off because it relies far too much on Savannah's goodness to a point where it really, truly did become unrealistic and even uncharacteristic. But nothing wrong with the film is anybody's fault, not even the dull leading man or the director known for his overly warm-hearted fare, except the screenwriter who was too dumb or too scared to change Spark's book.

Letters to Juliet (2010, Gary Winick). Another summer Seyfried romance involving letters! This time Seyfried gets a better character to play with, in this case a young fact-checker for the New Yorker named Sophie who discovers a long-lost letter to "Juliet," really a group of female secretaries who answer letters written by the love-lorn in Verona, Italy, and decides to set out and set things straight. The writer of that letter, Claire, played by a still-luminous Vanessa Redgrave, never forgot her first love and sets out with her grandson Charlie and Sophie to see if her love is still out there. Even though Sophie is engaged to a workaholic chef and Charlie's so cynical he's clearly hiding a heart of gold in plain sight, the two become attracted to each other. I might have been able to forgive the predictability of their blossoming from animosity to love had the ending been a little more real. I fast-forwarded through it, but believe me when I say it involves a balcony of some sort. The real heart of the film lies in Claire's search for her long-lost love (the fact that he is played by Franco Nero, Regrave's real-life longtime love, only adds to the story's genuine spirit), because it's a rare chance to show love between seniors in a very warm and real way. If only someone had had the courage to make it all about her.

It's Complicated (2009, Nancy Meyers). I like Meryl Streep, I love Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will always have a very special place in my heart for portraying The Jerk's Navin Johnson, the man born a poor black child. I thought all of this would overcome the fact that Nancy Meyers shoots romantic comedies as though they were an ad for The Olive Garden. It didn't, and unlike Letters to Juliet (and much like Meyer's earlier Something's Gotta Give), it turned the depiction of a romance between people over 25 into a never-ending parade of sex jokes. By the time Meryl and Steve were lighting up marijuana I blew this joint.

No Strings Attached (2011, Ivan Reitman). It turns a depiction of a romance between people barely over 25 into a parade of never-ending sex jokes....and somehow it mostly worked. Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are a pair of friends who decide to have a friends-with-benefits relationship, not knowing that they will eventually fall in love with each other. Shakespeare once coined this phenomena of the audience having the upper hand as dramatic irony; we call it predictable writing. Or art imitating human nature. Portman and Kutcher are not actors I usually enjoy, Portman for her acting choices and Kutcher for his personality, but I found them surprisingly winning together; this comedy allows Portman to breathe and have fun while Kutcher is genuinely down-to-earth and likable. It's also very rare for a film to depict a woman as an utter non-virgin (it is Portman's character who proposes the sexual relationship) and who has to go through the journey of truly listening to her heart. Not every joke lands in this film, especially not Kevin Klein's scenes as Kutcher's dad, but pull a few of your judgmental strings and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Terrence Malick's Big Bang Theory

2011-07-11T00:10:00.000-07:00

And so our thirst has been quenched, if ever so momentarily before another potential drought, by the arrival of a new Terrence Malick film. And so the never-ending debate has been resparked of the notoriously reclusive director's status as a master filmmaker or a pretentious hack. The utter disregard for linear storytelling, the scope of his story and his questions, the whispy voice-overs in favor of dialogue, the years--literally, years--of editing in which Malick has a chance to leave no permutation of sequence uncharted. As a fan (albeit apprehensive) of Malick's films, I never find it easy to wrestle with the tireless existential questions his films ask about human beings and our place in time, nor have I even found it easy to be completely engaged as was the case with The Thin Red Line and The New World. But I'd rather watch a film that tries to be great and asks more questions than it answers over a film which strives for nothing and succeeds.

"There are two ways through life in this world--the way of nature, and the way of grace" intones Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain, who is the stunning image of a young Liv Ullmann in more than just looks). Malick, I believe, given his trademark of the relationships between humans and their environments, is more in line with the way of nature. In a stunning, utterly surprising turn, Malick includes a 20-minute sequence in the second reel of The Tree of Life depicting the beginnings of the universe, from the big bang to dinosaurs. In the hands of any other director this could have been preposterous, but Malick uses this sequence to demonstrate that every life, every family, goes through their own life and death, and shows how miniscule our place as humans has been in the grand scale of time. Every triumph and failure can be seen as gargantuon or miniscule depending on how you look at it. Much of the film takes place in the 1950s as the O'Briens (Chastain is the mother and "way of grace," while Brad Pitt turns in a surprisingly restrained turn as the more complex father who takes a Darwinistic approach towards parenthood) and their three sons as they experience a loss of innocence, a tiny spot in the place of the world but a universal story of a family's loss of innocence.

Malick uses many, many different layers and allusions, from fairy tales to The Book of Job, and a Fellini-esque ending which may or may not be the afterlife--I really don't want to get into all of that, because I know that whatever answers I may come up with may not will not begin to scratch the surface of the film's many mysteries. Maybe I just don't know what the hell Malick was trying to say or prove. But I do know that although I don't think Malick will ever reclaim the focus of his 70s work, I was hooked on every minute of the film's 2 1/2 hour running time in a way that I haven't been since Malick's Badlands. Many people may tack the word "pretentious" onto Malick because he asks more questions than he answers. If only they knew it was far, far more pretentious for a filmmaker to ask questions than to claim to have all the answers.

I kinda want my time back from 'Cashback'

2011-04-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

The protagonist of Sean Ellis' Cashback sees work as a form of trade. "I give them 8 hours, they give me money." This raises a similar question about the watching of movies: we give the enigmatic "them" two hours of our time, and in return what we receive can range from an enlightening moral awakening about humanity to propaganda and everything left, right and in between. That we are never sure what to expect from a movie is part of what makes each fresh viewing so seductive.

Ellis' Oscar-nominated short film Cashback was extended into a feature length film less than two years after production, and if you look at these two together, it's impossible to tell the difference, to the point where I can only think that shots from the short were inserted and mildly tweaked into the feature film (the same cast and crew is used for both films). They both tell the same story, of an art student who develops insomnia after the break-up of his recent relationship and while working the night shift at a supermarket, finds a sort of magic in everything around him, from a spilled package of peas to his co-worker Sharon, while flashing back to the moments in his life which would shape his desire towards women. But despite being nearly shot-for-shot similar, the difference in length is where this difference is most noticable: While the short at 18 minutes packs just enough laughs and character introductions to make for an amiable pilot for a TV show (how anyone could expand the story each week is someone else's problem), but as a feature Ellis seems to have been in a same dream-like state in the writing stage in the same why his protagonist is--and that compliment is only a back-handed one.

Ellis' visual style, though perhaps stealing a page from a famous scene of Tim Burton's Big Fish in its depiction of time slowing down or completely stopping, is lovely. Even in a setting as mundane as a supermarket, the colors are saturated as though they came from a Wong Kar-Wai film (the usage of the exact same recording of the phenomenal opera piece"Casta Diva" proves Ellis has viewed the master's 2046). Some of the time-manipulation scenes are quite beautiful, especially the final scene when used as a declaration of love, but these scenes happen so frequently that after the second time the magic wears off and questions about this space-time continuum arise (is the sleep-deprived Ben Willis simply imagining this or is he actually walking through the world as time stops? Ellis never seemed to have made up his mind about this and created plot holes in the process). In the most well-known of these time-manipulation scenes which appears as the film's poster, Ben stops time so he can draw nude women shopping in the supermarket by undressing them in the middle of the shampoo isles. Despite narrating about his love of the female form (he's an art student, after all!) deriving from a Swedish nudist roommate as a youngster, by the time this scene is over you mostly just wonder how this guy ever got laid in the first place when he takes advantage of women's bodies with this "superpower."

Alas, as a story is often told in film criticism, the beautiful visuals nearly overshadow a lacking script, but not quite enough. Extending a short film into a feature can give a filmmaker more time to shape the characters, but this attempt is quite lackluster--the protagonist, perhaps because of his insomnia, is quite pedestrian at best and there is nothing registered in his face to suggest anything is at stake in this young man's life. There's a colorful cast of supporting characters, but none of them are developed to be anything beyond brief comedic relief, and none are ever truly funny at that. Throwaway moments, including the manager giving an inappropriate touch to the beautiful Sharon, could have been a glimpse into these people's histories but do not appear again in the remainder of the film and makes their very inclusion seem more important than they actually are. The best performance comes from Emilia Fox as Sharon, Ben's love interest, whose role is nearly a Xeroxed copy of Pam from "The Office," but Fox shades the role with enough nuances to elevate her thin role to something more deft than the rest of the cast can manage (the fact that she's very beautiful doesn't hurt, either).

While Ellis' film urges looking closer at the beauty in every day life, it's strange to write that Ellis never slows down enough to have this beauty develop organically in front of the camera; Ben's flashbacks alone take up about 1/3 of the movie, which is the same amount of time we spend in our lives sleeping. The result is a film which is much more slower than it should be, and which, despite all its good qualities which I hope Ellis will overcome in subsequent projects, was ultimately not worth my invested 2 hours.

But enough with this; it's 11:53 pm and I'd rather be dreaming.

Beware of the Men with Magical Hats: On 'The Adjustment Bureau'

2011-03-10T17:28:00.000-08:00

When detailing the plots concerning 87% of romance movies today, there's always a conflict in which fate, in one plot device or another--economic differences, war, geographic distance, parents, icebergs--to keep two lovers apart. In George Nolfi's The Adjustment Bureau, it's quite literally Fate, if Fate came in the form of bureaucratic angels and played by a quartet of solemn-looking, fedora-wearing actors (including John Slattery of Mad Men, who at times appears to have walked straight off the set of the 1960s-set drama in costume and script on hand). "We're the guys who make sure everything happens according to plan," one of them mentions, saying that they work for God, here called the Chairman--in other words, they're a Democrat's dream of constant regulation. Now, this self-referential meta fiction seems charming on paper, but it also leads to many clunky scenes of exposition, the same kind which all but weighed down Chris Nolan's Inception with self-important glibness, and nearly threatens to do the same here.

But where Nolan's film failed is where Nolfi's film flies, and that is in the handling of the central love story. Politician David Norris (Matt Damon) first encounters ballerina Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) in the men's bathroom at a moment of extreme vulnerability, and is smitten enough he makes the first honest speech of his campaign trail to a rousing crowd. Despite how good their chemistry is supposed to be, it's still astonishing just how great it actually is, and all that credit has to go to Emily Blunt; from her first entrance she breathes life and vitality to the film despite the limitations of what is essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Girl role (the fact that the romance scenes are a break from all that nutty exposition also adds welcome). In the same manner in which Audrey Hepburn put a spell on Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, Blunt actually makes the usually somber Damon look like he's having fun and their witty banter lends the film its whimsical heart as well as its best moments.

So how do you keep two lovers apart who are not "meant" to be together? You send a bureaucratic angel to try and physically keep them apart by means which include spilling coffee on him (so he can't catch that bus where she happens to be seated) and burning the card her phone number is written on, of course! There are two problems with this: first, and more diegetically, David is determined to see her again and in fact does pursue her despite the obstacles put in his way. Second, once these so-called angels reveal themselves to David by explaining their role and why David and Elise can't be together (because their love will destroy their promising careers), they don't seem to do a very good job of either staying a secret or keeping these two lovers apart; despite having magical fedoras which allow them to enter through portals which are merely doors to mere mortals, their tactics eventually resort to physically trying to outrun David through the streets of New York--and even angels have to break a sweat every now and then. And when they're not running, they're standing still, looking at a book which looks suspiciously like the Murauder's Map from the Harry Potter books and making a commentary about what can or cannot happen because the Chairman (read: screenwriter) says so.

From then, the film follows David over a period of about four years from the time he first meets Elise. The angels make it clear that if he tells anyone about their existence, they will effectively lobotomize him, and meets her again by chance (basically a bad angel job, actually), enjoys a relationship with her before fearing her safety, then 11 months later when he decides to get back into her life with the help of a sympathetic angel (played by The Hurt Locker's Anthony Mackie), who shows him the ropes of how to use a magical fedora in a by-the-numbers training montage set to the monotonous score of Thomas Newman (formerly one of our finest film composers, his scores now sound like Brian Eno reject pieces).

The Adjustment Bureau has had a long journey to the screen. It's based on a short story by Philip K. Dick originally published in 1954. The movie was filmed in late 2009, and its original release date of Fall 2010 was postponed when it was decided more re-shoots were needed, including the ending, which remains the weakest part of the film because of its inability to be anything less than safe and preachy, never a good combination. If the film has a goofy center, it's occasionally weighed down by a preachy ending, too much dead air due to the long timeline and action scenes which should feel more exciting and improvised than they actually are. Underneath the endless exposition, corny dialogue and a lackluster buildup of suspense, there's actually an interesting existential romance with some fascinating set pieces involving the door portals. With a little adjusting, The Adjustment Bureau could've been as daring and exciting as it aspired to be.

Simone Wilson, LA WEEKLY blogger, Dim-Brained Repeatedly Amid Lara Logan Controversy

2011-02-16T20:15:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask me who my heroes were, almost all the answers would be journalists. Edward R. Murrow, Amy Goodman and the fictional Hildy Johnson (as portrayed by the crackerjack Rosalind Russell in Howard Hawks' seminal His Girl Friday) all inspire supreme admiration from me. Even though I believe that the media did not handle reporting of the Iraq War the way it should have--with a more sensitive bullshit detector, that is--I know how the endless red tape, government tampering, censorship and occasional danger can damper the best intentions I believe true journalists have.

However, I also believe that like Isaac Newton, for every action there is an equal and negative reaction. If you believe in God, you gotta believe in Satan too, and for every Murrow there is some writer without tact, class or even a basic understanding of research. One of these such creatures is Simone Wilson, a writer for LA WEEKLY, whose piece on Lara Logan's physical and sexual assault in Egypt reeked of sexism and a vile attempt at making the assault seem to be Logan's fault. Even her heading is completely absent of any attempt to sensitively portray Logan's assault, in favor of using this tragic event for sensationalism, reading "Lara Logan, CBS Reporter and Warzone 'It Girl,' Raped Repeatedly Amid Egypt Celebration."

There are several glaring problems with just this headline, the least of which is how shocking and nonchalantly it uses the 4-letter R word, my least favorite word in the world. I find it startling how it attempts to make Lara Logan out to be a celebrity with the moniker "Warzone It Girl" like she was another of Hollywood's party girls out for no good (unfortunately, this is not the last of Wilson's accusation). Secondly, sensitivity issues aside, it is completely off to state Logan was raped, because it's just coming out that rape may not have been part of the sexual assault, despite how the euphemism frequently covers that awful crime. Wilson's headline alone shows shallow reporting and sensationalism for the sole purpose of grabbing attention on the basis that bad news sells. And looking into her other headlines, Logan wasn't the only victim of Wilson's feeble attempt at sensitivity--"City of Bell E-Mail Fun: Officials Called Themselves Fat Pigs, LOLed," "One 'Gate' Too Many: L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar Devoured Alive by Opponent Rudy Martinez, LA Times, Gleeful Citywatchers" and "L.A. Homeless Count Gets Off to Morbid Start: Dead Guy Found Outside Criminal Court" also grace her author page. There's also a very strange fascination with subject's physical appearances, including "South Gate Man With Dragon Tattoo Kills 10-Month-Old Baby Daughter" and "LAPD Officers Kill Man Wearing Only Boxers In Playa Vista," as though there should be a warning against people wearing only boxers and exposing their dragon tattoos (Lisbeth Salander, cover yourself up lay and off the Marky Marks if you ever visit LA).

As if Wilson's headline wasn't, er, truthful enough, her background description of Logan as "known for her shocking good looks and ballsy knack for pushing her way to the heart of the action, was brutally and repeatedly raped while a crowd of 200 celebrated..." Like Wilson's strange headlines earlier sampled, there is no earthly reason why someone's physical appearance should make any difference in the overall story or have any effect on Logan's reporting. The fact that these two tidbits, which Wilson apparently sees as important samplings of Logan's personality, come just before the first mention of Logan's assault, with extreme wording and inappropriately in bold font no less, only leads me to think Wilson believed Logan deserved her assault from her envelope-pushing reporting and good looks combined.

The single photo of Lara Logan supplied in the piece is also troubling and only adds to the strange, almost perverse fascination Wilson has with Logan's good looks. While most other news sites have used pretty de-glamoured pictures of Logan, including some of her in the heart of combat or profiled from the neck-up, Wilson apparently believed the only accurate portrayal of Logan was one in a low-cut dress (taken from the Gracie Allen Awards). Is this the kind of anti-feminist thinking that any woman would want to have thought of her? Wear a low-cut dress and you're asking to be sexually assaulted? That you deserve to be? Ms. Wilson, you don't do that for the same reason you don't have a headline reading, "21-Year-Old Wyoming Student Found Brutally Tortured, Killed" and feature only a picture of Matthew Shephard kissing a gay lover--because you never, ever want to think anyone with, for lack of a better phrase, a socially different outlook having a horrible hate crime done to them deserved it at all or they had it coming to them based solely on how society judges them. This kind of thinking can only reveal a hideously old-fashioned, out-of-touch personality. People are people and any hate crime, from sexual, physical and emotional abuse to murder should not be tolerated or thought to be deserved, and adding embellishments leading one to think otherwise is completely tasteless.

Wilson's "reporting" on how Logan was attacked is about as heinous as the crime itself:

Logan was in Tahrir Square with her "60 Minutes" news team when Mubarak's announcement broke. Then, in a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protesters apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter.

Did Wilson think she was writing a Jack London novella when she chose her words? If I am ever sexually assaulted, I pray to a God I don't believe in that nobody uses the phrase "a rush of frenzied excitement" to describe how my attackers went after me as though a man forcing himself on a woman should be given the same titillating description of a Michael Bay movie. Then there's the question of the word "apparently," which is thrown around callously to describe the Egyptian protester's reasoning for assaulting Logan. Nobody even knows if it was exactly the protesters who attacked Logan, erroneously referred to as "blonde reporter" this time by Wilson (Two questions: First, is Ms. Wilson at all related to the Janitor from Scrubs, and two, should we include "blonde" in the pantheon of Physical Traits To Get You [Justifiably] Attacked According to Simone Wilson?), and despite the gravity of this crime and my hope that Logan's attackers be brought to justice, it's far too early and there are too few details to instigate this name-calling.

Thirty-nine-year-old Logan has long attacked Hollywood-lite reporters for their dumbing down of overseas violence -- at the same time using her Hollywood good looks and spotlight to push a more hard-hitting agenda.

And what about a blogger who exploits other people's tragedies (and erroneously underlines her subject's ages) in order to get more hits for her pieces? Logan's desire to "push a more hard-hitting agenda" stems from not seeing war covered the way it should be and having government interference censoring her--which, frankly, is just a woman wanting to do her job. Of course Ms. Wilson wouldn't know that, not being a real reporter and all...

But Wilson's most unforgiving mention comes in the form of bringing up Logan's personal relationships, of all places shortly after quoting MoFo Politics with this morsel of poetic wisdom: "OMG if I were her captors and there were no sanctions for doing so? I would totally rape her."

Although one could argue that Wilson's self-referential style is just a way of showing other medium's reactions, the syntax of her piece is as poorly placed as an American Airlines ad during a commercial break from the pilot episode of Lost. A person's romantic/sexual relations have absolutely no place in an article primarily concerning said woman's sexual attack, and certainly not after the quote from someone who believes rape to be acceptable as long as there are no sanctions. "Nobody's invincible" proclaims Wilson, yet numerous times in her pieces she demonstrates that while nobody is invincible, some are less invincible than others.

The backlash of Wilson's article, posted yesterday (February 15, 2011), was enough to warrant a follow-up comment and a feeble attempt at an apology, though even this is laden with more accusations than genuine remorse; mostly her additional comments make snide remarks to other pieces which attacked her own original article, including the good people at Salon.com, whose article about the pointedly sexist backlash against Logan's attack heavily quoted Wilson's original article, and rightly so. Wilson's counterattack was this: "Salon.com, apparently looking for its own hard-hitting approach to the day's biggest story, did choose to take that angle -- meanwhile reprinting about half our story on its own pages (enough said) -- but that was another blogger's choice."

That's the second time she's used the word "apparently" with such utter callousness, and this time it's just undeserved. While Salon.com might not be hard-hitting when it comes to the news, it certainly has more dignity and journalistic integrity in one article than Simone Wilson can ever hope to imagine in her entire life. It's also downright hypocritical for Wilson to criticize Salon.com's article for "reprinting half our story on its own pages;" While author Mary Elizabeth Williams certainly quoted Wilson's article for journalistic purposes, it certainly wasn't half the article. And you know what? Williams' quoting was fucking basic good criticism and journalism which anyone in an AP English class could grasp. Wilson might want to take a few notes from Williams' article, since her own leans heavily on excerpts from Esquire, The New York Post, and MoFo Politics--and of all those, only a brief mention from an LA Times blogger actually mentions Logan's brilliance in her career instead of her personal relations.

Lara Logan has a long emotional recovery ahead of her, and I sincerely doubt she would have wanted her own tragedy exploited for the agendas of victim's fault or anti-Egyptian sentiments. She deserves far, far more from her peers than to be derided as "blonde journalist," and deserves a sincere, goddamn apology from Simone Wilson, who still cannot stop ridiculing Logan's good looks, as evidenced here: "...hopefully well on her way back to fighting the good fight for truth, journalism and girls who happen to fall on the gorgeous side of the fight for truthful journalism."

Whatever issues Wilson may have with her self-esteem (was she teased by a blonde bully from Journalism class in high school?), it's no excuse for her callous words. Logan put her life on the line to go to Egypt so the world could get a story, and so hateful women like Simone Wilson could write sensationalized follow-ups to it behind the safety of her computer screen. She's a disgrace to the importance of the written word as well as womanhood and she is not, nor will she ever be a truthful journalist, and she should follow in Nin Rosen and Mubarek's footsteps and resign from her post; There is, apparently, no tact left in journalism.

You can read Wilson's original article as well as Salon.com's rebuttal below:

Simone Wilson: http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/02/lara_logan_raped_egypt_reporte.php

Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/index.html?story=/ent/tv/feature/2011/02/15/lara_logan_rape_reaction

You Always Hurt The Ones You Love

2011-02-10T22:59:00.000-08:00

The tragedy in every relationship lies in the short (emotional) distance between the rushed high of first love and the cold turkey withdrawal at its end. Director Derek Cianfrance understands this all too well, and as a result his feature debut film Blue Valentine is framed in two narrative threads braided over each other; the first depicts how working-class twenty-somethings Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) fell in love and became a family, and the second travels about six years down the road where they have hit the ground and pick up the pieces of their broken dreams, their quivering despair at what their love has become. Like the popular (500) Days of Summer, Valentine is presented out of chronological order--sort of. The two time periods (the couple's courting shot with a free-wheeling, hand-held 16mm, the frozen present scenes are shot digitally and as static as the emotions it captures) are technically sequential but cut back and forth. Some have complained that the lack of a middle hurts the overall emotional wallop of the film by not showing exactly how or why the relationship went sour, but I think it works because like Marc Webb's considerably lighter film, it understands how memory works, that when a relationship wilts we first want to go back to the beginning when the heaps of happiness overwhelmed us. When my ex told me (quite abruptly) he wanted to slow things down, nearly every day for months, even after we more or less sutured back together, I would spend some time looking over our old instant-messaging when there were only the sweetest promises and the kindest terms of endearment, and I would wonder, "Where the hell did the man I love go and who is this person who's hurting me so much?"

But no matter what one thinks of the film's off-kilter narrative, the acting is almost too painfully real to watch. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are two of our generation's most talented actors who have shown time and time again their willingness to explore the dark pockets of the human soul (for further proof of their talents and their maturity from teenage drivel to adult actors to be reckoned with, see Half Nelson and Wendy and Lucy). Both actors were attached to the script for years before it finally got off the ground (both receive an executive producer's credit), and it's impossible to think of anyone else in the roles. Cianfrance's way of extracting their very palpable chemistry goes far beyond Method acting; during the filming hiatus between the two narratives, Cianfrance had Williams and Gosling living together in a rented house, buy groceries, pick fights and then go play with the child actress portraying their daughter. Given both the emotional and physical dimensions of their chemistry, I would not at all be surprised if they had a brief affair at Cianfrance's suggestion. Williams has even compared the making of the film to being on the life-taking machine from The Princess Bride--and that's painful just to think about.

If there is one flaw in the movie, it's the complete discontinuity between the young Dean and the older Dean. Now, I know I made a case how the black and white states of being in love and falling out of love worked for the film's narrative, but the disbelief worked to the advantage of the emotions, whereas the acting just made me think there two different actors a la That Obscure Object of Desire. I don't want to place too much fault on Ryan Gosling since he technically does both believably well, but he goes so far in the opposite direction when portraying older Dean that he becomes unlikable in the process, which is heartbreaking considering how the young Dean's easy-going charisma is like an indie version of Lloyd Dobler. The fact that he's given glasses to shade his eyes and seems to have taken notes from Stanley Tucci's unbearably loud performance as the child murderer in The Lovely Bone doesn't help matters, either. Strangely, the "present" Dean bears a striking resemblance to director Derek Cianfrance, and it makes me believe that Cianfrance put all of his emotional turmoil into this character that he didn't once ask his actor alter ego to hold anything back, and it hurts Gosling's performance in the process.

It's shown in subtle ways that both Cindy and Dean come from broken families--Dean's mom left the family and Cindy's parents have lost whatever love they once had to the point of regular violent outbursts. Both have dealt with this in very different ways, and although the film doesn't underline any one reason, it's clear that these issues will contribute to their eventual separation. Dean's masculine prowess makes him lash out out of both love and the fear of losing it. Cindy, on the other hand, has seen much abuse and cowers away at the love she so desperately wants in favor of meaningless sex with undeserving men. She doesn't know how to speak her mind, nor what a healthy relationship would feel like if it fell upon her like a bag of bricks. When they first meet, Dean supplies Cindy with the affection she wants and deserves, and their happiness is insurmountable.

But nothing, not even happiness lasts very long as Celia Johnson once lamented. No, eventually their unspoken frailties eventually, inevitably crack their hasty attempt to become a family. Their inability to understand themselves and their self-worth plays a huge part in their self-betrayal and hatred of each other. When Anais Nin, an expert on the complex dance between eroticism and emotions, once wrote this morsel of broken-heart wisdom, she could've been referring to the disillusion of Cindy and Dean's relationship, and indeed all relationships which bite the dust with nothing but the passing of time: "Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

Great (Adam) Scott and Four Fine Other Discoveries of 2010

2011-01-16T21:17:00.000-08:00

Ah, the end of the year. Oscar-hopefuls will be arriving in limited release in New York and LA, expecting to expand in January to the sticks, critics' 10-best lists arrive on the internet airwaves, and Yahoo! will post the year's best celebrity haircuts which I will inevitably glance at and forget just as quickly as I read it on my way to checking my email.

As I've said before, I don't go out to the movies very often, but even I was aware of the abysmal year 2010 was for movies; the few fine performances I witnessed, including Casey Affleck's tour-de-force in The Killer Inside Me, will probably not see the light of awards season as they so badly deserve, except maybe inside this self-contained film blog. So here is a list of the best epiphanies at the cinema that I've experienced this year, and hope others will as well.

1. Adam Scott (Actor)

Adam Scott is a kind of actor who has already achieved a cult status despite his young career; his TV series are usually canceled prematurely, his leading roles in movies do not typically find distribution, but he has already proven to be one of our finest and unsung actors. I first noticed him in April when he joined the cast of "Parks and Recreation," one of the finest sitcoms on TV but endangered due to low ratings; we'll see how it does this January when it returns as a mid-season replacement, and how Scott's role as a government man is expanded. Then in July I had my first taste of HBO's "Tell Me You Love Me," which debuted with sound and fury concerning the painfully realistic sex scenes, then died in silence when it ended after a season. In it, Scott played a married thirty-something tired of being treated as a sperm machine by his wife, desperate to conceive. It was not a showy role, but Scott underplayed it perfectly, nailing the nuances of a man nearing the end of his rope. A month later, however, was the paydirt which imprinted Scott's name into my memory. I did an internship at a film festival, and was asked to watch The Vicious Kind and write a review for the program book. The movie is nothing astounding; a loose remake of East of Eden, it recycles the family comedy/drama style of film seen in more Sundance indies than I have fingers. However, Scott steps up to the plate and delivers a home run as a broken-hearted man who deals with his pain by developing an acidic, misogynist view of women. There is no way of saying this without sounding hyperbolic, but it's both a role and performance which reminds me of Marlon Brando's cry of wounded masculinity in Last Tango in Paris. The film debuted at Sundance but wasn't picked up for distribution; before I finished my internship, I shipped the 35mm print to a drive-in film festival in New Jersey. And finally, during Thanksgiving my family and I gathered around the TV to feast on the delicious wit and heartfelt sincerity of the gone-too-soon "Party Down," about a catering company and their attempts to make it big in Hollywood. As failed actor Henry Pollard, Scott infuses Henry's deadpan antics with a sad, often mournful and unspoken frustration at his failure--and when we finally do see him act, he's actually good, which only adds to our frustration that he hasn't succeeded, just like my own opinion of Scott. He hits all the right notes, he's easy on the eyes, and I can't wait to see Scott cemented as one of this generation's most versatile actors, getting on a good show that is able to stay on the air (crosses fingers for "Parks and Recreation") or a challenging lead under a renowned director's guidance. What's a non-gay way to ask him to go camping with me?

2. The Rain People (1969, Francis Ford Coppola)

Coppola's most renowned films typically feature male protagonists and their emotional descent into darkness; it was therefore a wonderful surprise to discover one of his earliest films is about a woman running from her life, trying to navigate her way through her marriage. Shirley Knight is luminous as Natalie Ravenna, a pregnant Long Island housewife who gets into her car and drives off without a destination when she wakes up and can't feel freedom anymore. She first drives to her parents for guidance or support but their old-fashioned outlook towards femininity and marriage blinds them to her dilemma. Her collect calls to her husband, which seem to be echoed in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, also offer little emotional support. Little is explicitly stated about who Natalie is, but the perfectly placed flashbacks allotted to Natalie and the two broken men she meets on the road manage to fill in the blanks just enough to paint a picture of how their choices in the past have made them the damaged people they are now. Taking place just before the counter-culture of the 1970s, it reflects the post-Friedan crossroads of femininity; there was a desire for freedom to be more than a housewife but not the social support to let women know that their conflict and emotions were completely, utterly humane. Coppola's film plays like a female version of Five Easy Pieces, but it's so much more than that, including perhaps the most sympathetic film he ever made.

3. Greta Gerwig in Greenberg

It would have been easy for Noah Baumbach to create the role of Florence, romantic foil for Ben Stiller's emotionally off-kilter title character, as a "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," a girl whose sole function is to be wonderfully optimistic, have a quirky taste in fashion/music/the English language and inspire the sojourn young man to be the best version of himself. Thankfully, Gerwig chose not to go down this route, and her Florence is a wonder to behold. Insecure and fresh out of a long-term relationship, she jump-starts the film by not wanting "to go from just having sex to just having sex," and sadly she does let people walk over her, including Greenberg. It is her face, solemnly looking onto the road while she drives, that mattes the film's opening credits. Gerwig never draws attention to herself, never tries to make us like her because of her quirks, she's not a size 0--she's one of the most real love interests in recent memory. In so many ways, it's her journey more than it is Greenberg's of self-reflection that makes the film a joy. Watch this, and you'll like her more than you realize.

4. Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me: Or, Affleck is really fuckin' intense.

Perhaps had I seen Affleck's performance in The Assassination of Jesse James, the revelation of the dark places Affleck is willing to go as an actor might not have been such a surprise to me; I saw a short clip of him in that movie during the Oscars and to be frank, I thought his resembled a mentally challenged person. But I know that nothing could have prepared me for the depths he dove to portray an amiable small-town cop whose mask slowly comes off to reveal a cruel, sadistic rapist and killer. There are some actors who could have been willing to go into that dark place and there are some who would have been convincing as a serial killer, but there's a miniscule overlap for those who could do both. In the end, it's not the fact that Lou Ford physically abuses lovely ladies (played by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson) to a bloody pulp that's most terrifying; it's how comfortable Casey Affleck is inside Lou's skin.

5. Barbara Romaner in Mahler on the Couch

Of everyone on this short list, Barbara Romaner and her respective film are probably the two things you've never heard of; Father-and-son directing duo Percy and Felix Adlon's film has not received distribution outside film festivals, including the one where I interned at (Napa-Sonoma Wine Country Film Festival). But mark my words: Ms. Romaner, whose looks and graceful presence reminds one of a German Marion Cotillard, is destined for great things. Alma Schindler, something of a real-life Catherine from Jules and Jim and original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, was only 22 when she married Gustav Mahler, 19 years her senior and a fledging composer. Though they were very much in love, he made her give up her dream of composing if she was to become Mrs. Mahler. After 10 years of an emotionally stifled marriage and the death of one of their two daughters, Alma sought an affair with architect Walter Gropius, and this revelation lead Mahler to seek the professional guidance of Sigmund Freud, an event which bookends the Adlons' film. The film itself is tonally schizophrenic, possibly the result of having two directors; the half concerning the Mahler marriage is like has a bohemian joie de vivre which would've made Truffaut smile, the sequences with Freud lift Woody Allen's neurotica. But it's Romaner which gives Alma, and the film, the vitality it needs to fly, for it is Alma's love of life which will set everything into motion. The scene in which Alma reads a page from Gustav's Fifth Symphony and the camera simply lingers on her face as she reacts to her husband's letter of love to her, is astonishing. This role is, amazingly, Romaner's first role in a film after a long history of being on the stage, and the beginning of a beautiful career.

Nothing New, Much Borrowed: Notes on BLACK SWAN

2010-12-28T23:27:00.001-08:00

Darren Aronofsky's latest attempt Black Swan can be mirrored--quite literally, given the film's recurring visual motif--in the flaw of ballerina Nina Sayer's (Natalie Portman) technique: It goes through the motions but not the emotions of what it takes to make art. That this is not where the film's problems end is the more discouraging part of my personal viewing experience.

Despite the accolades the film is receiving, it's appropriate that few to none of them are calling it original, because it ain't--in fact, the film has received more comparisons to other films than I've read in recent memory, from a classic masterpieces The Red Shoes and Polanski's Repulsion to Paul Verhoeven's slightly less prestigious Showgirls. Even without the constant references in print reviews, I nearly found myself pointing out the film's thievery with the same gusto of a child reading a Where's Waldo? picture book. Although it is a truth that artists steal constantly, it's not where you take things from--it's where you take them to. So here is my back-tracking of Black Swan's origins and why Arononfsky desperately needed a map to know what to do with them.

Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
How it Compares to Black Swan: Both involve women who fear they will change into an animal (a leopard and a swan, respectfully) once they become sexualized.
Why The Original Is Better: Aronofsky can do many wonders with his visuals, from the flowing long-takes to the microphotography used to create the space oddity of The Fountain, but Tourneur knew that it's what you don't show that reveals the most. By keeping keeping the "transformation" and the animal in the dark for the entire film, the question of "Is she or isn't she?" becomes more pertinent and mysterious.

The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
How It Compares to Black Swan: Ambitious young ballerina gets the lead role in a new, visceral ballet and finds her life mirroring the dance she is to perform; is forced to choose between her two extreme loves/identities; camera movement of POV during a twirl....is that enough or shall I continue?
Why the Original Is Better: Wow, where do I begin....Powell and Pressburger were like the cinematic equivalant of Bernie Taupin and Elton John, the perfect harmony of writer and presenter which produced a long and artistically fruitful contribution to their medium. Although Powell is usually given more credit and fame of the two because he made the successful solo effort Peeping Tom (despite their shared directing/writing/producing credits, it is more or less accepted that Powell directed while Pressburger wrote), Pressburger was one of the finest screenwriters ever because of his sense of storytelling, aided by Powell's astounding visuals when at the director's chair. While both Black Swan and The Red Shoes contain stories within stories which mirror one another, The Red Shoes is far more glorious because it doesn't rely on exposition like Black Swan does (Vincent Cassel's only function is exposition and yelling at Nina to be more fuckable)--it SHOWS us the very tight connection between a character and a performer's life in a 15-minute dance scene which plays like a live-action sketch from Fantasia. While it would be useless to try to top this (one simply cannot), that Black Swan doesn't even try is perhaps most disappointing of all; the performance scenes don't have the artistic flourish that make the endless amount of pre-production worthwhile. No character in a Powell/Pressburger movie is a "function" for anything, and even though it does contain a somewhat black-and-white climax in which dancer Vicki is forced to choose between her career and her marriage (as visualized by pitting her between her mentor and her husband), it was a very real choice women had to make in the years after WWII, and that the ballet of The Red Shoes is based on a fairy tale is not made a secret by the filmmakers. If Vicki's personal choice seems old-fashioned by today's standards, at least it doesn't have a ring of misogyny which Black Swan does, in which a man manipulates a woman into being both the virgin and the whore and condemns her to madness because of it.

All About Eve (1950, Joseph Mankiewicz)
How it Compares to Black Swan: The friendship/rivalry of two women from the stage.
Why The Original Is Better: All About Eve's beauty is that it's far more than a movie, and Margo Channing is more than a movie: it was a reflection on Bette Davis's career as an actress, and a pinpoint of where she was as an actress at that moment in her life, struggling with insecurity about her age and her choices and her future. With this character, Mankiewicz proves why he's considered a rare male writer/director who "gets" women: he doesn't shy away from Margo's insecurities or flaws, which makes her personal triumphs all the more earned and sympathetic. The same can't be said for the women of the film, including the blink-and-you-miss it cameo by Winona Ryder as a disgraced dancer whose only mistake is growing older. Her limited amount of screentime is only matched by the depth of which the character is written, which is as deep as a paper cup; the only thing Ryder can do to make it memorable with it by overacting, which she does, and it's even kinda fun to watch.

Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)
How It Compares to Black Swan: The final delusion(?) of grandeur
Why The Original Is Better: While I don't think Wilder's film is a masterpiece everyone else makes it out to be--the film is only saved from being a cruel exercise in watching all its characters, especially the strung-out has-been Norma Desmond, fall towards a kind of hell, by a desperate but ultimately poignant and very good re-interpretation of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp by Norma--much like All About Eve, the casting of the leading lady couldn't be more perfect if they auditioned all the women in Hollywood. If Mankiewicz's casting of Davis and Wilder's of Gloria Swanson was a perfect eclipse of character and actress, the casting of Portman does little to enhance the character or her performance; Portman has always struck me as a female version of Leonardo DiCaprio: she's consistently good and sometimes even very very good, but she's far too mannered and controlled to ever surprise me, which includes her role of Nina. Despite the constant talk about Nina being in her late twenties and nearing the end of her prime, I never felt that the stakes were very high enough to make me want to root for her big performance which serves as the climax of the film. And when the final close-up comes, the irony of Wilder's twisted vision of fame's distant glow serves as a more cinematic end than Aronofsky's.

Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski)
How It Compares to Black Swan: A woman slowly but surely grows mad by visions brought on by sexual frigidity.
Why The Original Is Better: Aronofsky appears to only have three colors in his palette: mirrors, bleeding fingernails and doppelgangers (including Nina's rival Lily, her mother and ultimately herself) are the continuing and constant motifs to demonstrate Nina's descent into madness. They're tiring and more than reminescent of Nicolas Cage's happy-go-lucky hack brother of Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, connecting the dots of someone's outline of what symbols tie the themes together (see link below for a more humorous rendering of this concept). Carole's visions of her descent are frightening precisely because they make little sense, becoming closer to the terrifying non-sequetor of real dreams. The moment when dozens of hands break through the walls is dazzlingly poetic beyond Aronofsky's wildest dreams.

So Aronofsky, the next time you mentally take notes while watching someone else's film for future reference, at least infuse your version with daring questions which made even your most preposterous The Fountain so fascinating and original.

Scenes I Love: Harry Potter and the Dance to Nick Cave

2010-12-10T00:22:00.000-08:00

Although I do not go to the cinemas all that often (I average a modest once a month), and although it has become second nature to look forward to a raw indie romance like Blue Valentine over Christopher Nolan's latest venture, I will always make an exception to see the latest Harry Potter film in theatres. I have seen every film of the franchise in theatres, beginning when I was 12 years old and counted down the days until November 16th. When the day came, I had my hair in hippie braids, wore a one-shoulder top and was escorted by a dear family friend (a near surrogate stepmom) to the majestic and utterly old-fashioned Raven Theatre in Healdsburg, California. For ten years I've matured at the same pace that the books have--and, later, their respective films. With each new director, the franchise was chiseled into something closer resembling the deft combination of escapism and darkness, of political allegory and British humor, of childhood wonder and emotional maturity that made J.K. Rowling's novels more magical than dragons, goblins or golden snitches. And with all due respect to the more light-hearted efforts of Christopher Colombus and Mike Newell, we all know it was the more character-charged and tonally dark visions of Alfonso Cuaron and David Yates which shaped the Harry Potter adaptations into what we love today.

And with much greater respect to Alfonso Cuaron, who is the most artistically successful director outside of the Potter franchise and one of my favorite working directors, I believe David Yates to be the best director of the Potter series--if it was Cuaron who finally got the trio into street clothes, it was Yates who truly treated them as ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. Under his guidance, the films found the perfect balance between visual magic and poignant character development (for this reason, the teenage actors' performances have blossomed beautifully to the point where they truly hold their own against the pro adult actors; in the opening montage of Deathly Hallows Pt 1, all three captivate the screen without any dialogue). When it was announced that the adaptation of the final book would be split into two, I scoffed that it was just the studio's way of making more money, not knowing the tricks of Yates' sleeve which would make the latest film the greatest adaptation from Rowling's series.

After the first half hour in which every scene feels like an excuse for a high-adrenaline action scene, the movie settles into a near post-apocalypse road movie with Ron, Hermione and Harry as the weary travelers with Horcruxes, home and heartbreak on their minds. It is in their scene and their turmoil which the film is at its strongest, and by freeing up the time restrictions by splitting the movie into two parts, it allows for moments of striking vulnerability and unspoken emotions which momentarily make the film stand alone from its franchise and become a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking. Has Harry Potter become an Ingmar Bergman movie? Not yet (unless you count the first book's very real chess game as an homage to The Seventh Seal), but this amount of character-driven scenes is rarely found in a fantasy franchise, let alone one mass-made for a younger audience.

The most beautiful moment of which I write involves probably the first inclusion of previously released "Muggle" music in a Potter film. Ron has left, jealously believing that Harry and Hermione have become an item. Alone in a tent and missing their friend, Harry fiddles with a radio (just as Ron did to calm his nerves) until he settles on "O Children" by Nick Caves and the Bad Seeds. Trying to lighten the melancholy mood, Harry wordlessly offers her his hand for a dance. Though not in the mood, she accepts somewhat begrudgingly; after a few awkward steps, the soundtrack rises at the chorus, depicting images of the fragility of childhood and faith found (the voice! The choir! The deep bluesy voice of Nick Cave!), and Hermione and Harry are able to smile again. For a moment, their eyes lock and though a certain amount of chemistry is there, they deny it out of the love they feel for other people (Harry misses Ginny perhaps more than he realizes, and Hermione in fact reciprocates Ron's love for her as well as his inability to admit it). The strength of their characters--and friendship--has never been more maturely or poignantly realized than in this moment, and one which would never have seen the light of day if the seventh book had been adapted into one movie instead of two.

At the cinema, my dad leaned over to whisper in my ear with a somewhat mocking tone, "Was this in the book?"

"No," I whispered back, still jazzed at what I was witnessing on the screen, "And that's exactly what makes it so special."

Through a camera lense, noirly

2010-11-29T23:39:00.000-08:00

Gloria Grahame's acting was like sex: even when it was really bad, it was still pretty fucking great. Maybe it was her pouty, cotton-stuffed lips. Or her eyes, which alternately purred, "Yeah, I know what you want," then in a blink contradicted themselves with pleas of a better life. Eddie Muller said recently in his introduction of Fritz Lang's Human Desire that "you were never quite sure whether she was going to mix you a cocktail or slit your throat." But the best way of explaining the appeal of Gloria Grahame is to understand something Humphrey Bogart told her while they were filming the seminal noir love story In a Lonely Place: "Stay in the shadows and let the camera come to you."

Grahame claimed to be a descendant of British royalty, but the closest she came to royalty was the mistress of Noir City, her mark in Hollywood history. Neglected at MGM, who didn't know what to do with her, her contract was sold to RKO, with included films at Colombia for Harry Cohn. She won an Oscar for her most anemic performance, the trademark of many classic Hollywood stars. Her star faded nearly as quickly as it arrived, fizzling out by the end of the 1950s when she moved to England and turned to Broadway (imagine her Lady Macbeth). A decade after her death, Annette Bening's performance as a sexy but dim con artist in The Grifters was nominated for an Oscar, a performance which Bening herself said was modeled after Gloria Grahame from The Big Heat. Her likeness has been used on hardcover novels. Although no longer a household name, Grahame's influence on art and culture is still with us today.

And yet, for such a beautiful, earthy actress who made her mark in film noirs, it's astonishing how few times Grahame played a true femme fatale. There is, of course, her conniving turn as a woman attempting to kill Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, possibly her only turn as a true fatal woman. Lower on the danger thermometer are her roles for Fritz Lang in Human Desire and The Big Heat, where she tries to take justice into her own hands, but Grahame remains the most sympathetic character in both films, and her attempts at vengeance are justly deserved. She was icy in Macao and The Good Die Young but was used more as decoration and had little to do with the crime of each respective film. Violet Bick of It's a Wonderful Life was nearly a prostitute in Pottersville, sure, but for the vast majority of the film, she's little more than the innocent town flirt. Most sympathetic are her performances full of world-weary loneliness as prostitute in Crossfire (her favorite performance), and a failed actress still hopeful for a brighter future in In a Lonely Place. The contradiction visible in nearly all these performances is between Grahame's superficial flirtiness and her inner vulnerability. Her characters might've been open to a night of passion, but at the end of the next morning, all she really wanted was be taken care of.

So let's begin with her breakthrough performance, as Ginny in Crossfire. Just as George Bailey inadvertently saves Violet Bick from a life of prostitution, Frank Capra's casting of Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life saved her from boredom and gave her her first small breakthrough, which included being on the cover of LIFE magazine in 1946. And it's really prevalent that Grahame's contract should've been sold after only 2 credited film appearances from the wooden glamor of MGM to the darker shadows of RKO, for RKO's reputation as making some of the best film noirs allowed Grahame a chance to show more of her weary soul than her youthful body. By the time she was cast in Crossfire, a military noir about anti-Semitism, she had all the experience of having dreams dashed away. Even as her career was about to take off, she still couldn't forget the wasted years at MGM where nobody knew what to do with her. This longing made her the perfect candidate to play weary prostitute Ginny (or as I like to think of her, the Pottersville version of Violet), where Grahame perfectly brings deft gravity to what could easily have been a cliched role in the wrong hands--just watch her eyes as she hesitates into accepting a dance asked only out of gratitude and not by a desire for sex. She was nominated for her first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and by some contemporary opinions (such as yours truly), given the competition she should have won.

After an unsuccessful 3 years at RKO, Grahame was given her finest role when her then-husband, Nicholas Ray, thought she would be perfect for the female lead in his latest film. The movie was hauntingly titled In a Lonely Place. Grahame would be playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who was also the producer. The role was one she could only understand all too well: A failed, somewhat hardened actress who's spent too many sunrises in Tinseltown and not enough film credits to prove it. She meets and falls in love with a dysfunctional screenwriter named Dixon Steele, an alter-ego for the director Nicholas Ray. But like the name of the character she portrays, christened Laurel Gray, Grahame transcends the black-and-white conventions of a femme fatale; Laurel Gray's actions--fluffing Dix's pillows, nurturing his artistic needs, providing emotional support--have no ulterior motive. They are done purely and simply out of love and a need to love someone in the lonely place that is Hollywood.

I will never be able to write without bias or passion for Ray's film. I can't. I think it's the most exquisite, romantic, emotional, personal film ever to have come out of Hollywood. No other film can warm my heart in the hope that Laurel and Dix will overcome their flaws and find hard-earned happiness in each other's arms, and then shred it on a cheese grater when I see their chance slowly fall apart. It's the kind of heart-breaking love story I love: two people who are a perfect match for each other but their own adult neuroses and vulnerabilities are what cause complications and road blocks, not the four-letter "F" word which screenwriters love to use as a plot device to get pretty people to crash into each others' lives. Nicholas Ray and his duo were too wise to belittle their audience, and anyone who first watches In a Lonely Place will understand this, and be grateful. As the doomed lovers, Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame play off each other marvelously, and together they carry the weight of a fragile love affair--and all the emotions that come with it--from the first frame of Bogart's eyes aimlessly watching the road on a lonesome night like many before, to Grahame's tear-stained declaration of love walking out the door.

Although In a Lonely Place should've been Grahame's breakthrough to better projects, the film wasn't a spectacular box-office success and when she went back to RKO to literally ask Howard Hughes for better roles, he admitted that he never watched Ray's film and refused to loan her out for choice projects such as Born Yesterday and A Place in the Sun. She toiled in supporting roles which required little more than to be beautiful decoration that, when Nicholas Ray did uncredited re-shoots for Macao, she actually told him she wouldn't ask for a penny of alimony if he could get her out of that movie (time has now proved that Ray didn't succeed).

But some of her best work was yet to come, and it was Fritz Lang who gave her two of her most memorable and fascinating roles in film noir. The first was 1953's The Big Heat, perhaps Grahame's most famous role of a gangster's moll who takes a hot pot of coffee to the face, in the process transforming her from shallow opportunist to vengeful anti-heroine. With one role, Grahame isn't just terrific, she became immortally cinematic--and cinematically immortal--as the one woman who didn't back down to Lee Marvin. Her much-deserved revenge has agelessly survived as one of the best and delicious examples of a woman scored ever burned into memory.

Her second and final film for Lang is the gem Human Desire, in which she is reunited with her Big Heat co-star Glenn Ford. Like the trio's first outing, Grahame's role begins as a somewhat dim woman in the wrong relationship, but by the end she enters the gray area between traditional femme fatale and a woman who deserves her revenge. Grahame portrays Vicki, a woman in a dreadfully unhappy marriage to Carl (played by Broderick Crawford, which is the first sign this character's a schmuck). But Carl is not nearly as benign as Mr. Dietrichson of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity; in the first 30 minutes, the recently laid off Carl manages to convince his wife into "talking" with his boss (her former lover) into getting his job back, beats her when he finds out she did more than talk, kills his boss, forces her into helping disposing of the body, and then blackmails her with proof of her involvement. This guy's not gonna win Husband of the Year anytime soon.

It's only natural that she would take up with the more stable and age-appropriate returning vet Glenn Ford, who is drawn enough into her spell that he agrees to take part of her plan to murder her husband after she reveals her black-and-blue bruises. But unlike The Big Heat, her revenge is not one of maniacal laughs, but one tinged with utter sadness and despair. In fact, the film evades the pattern set by Double Indemnity by NOT having Ford go through with the killing of Grahame's husband, thereby leaving her without an exit. I have never felt more sympathy towards a character who is designed to be a femme fatale than I have for Grahame's Vicki, and if the true femme fatales of WWII summoned the dark demons of the working man's ideal of an American Dream, the noir females of the 50s revealed a suffocated look at the suburban housewife. In the end it is Vicki's sad knowledge of this that leads her to ultimately entice her husband into ending her life, in a conclusion that reminds one of the finale of In a Lonely Place, though without a sense of irony or haunted loss that poetically infused Ray's film.

Grahame's film career all but fizzled out by 1959, when she bowed out and returned to the stage, with at least one more scandalous marriage and divorce in her future and a trail of men in her past. One of her more memorable final roles was as Robert Ryan's sultry neighbor in Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, in which she memorably steals the precious moments she's in, but by that time her vocal cadence had come to a point where it sounded like she was trying desperately to get over a stutter; although this could be considered a character quirk Grahame came up with, it's probably more likely due to her numerous attempts to make her lips appear bigger, and her insecurity about her body would indirectly contribute to her death--when she learned she had cancer, she denied being sick and refused treatment that would alter her physically for the worse. She would die of cancer at the age of 57.

But like Vicki's own reasons for torturing her husband into killing her, Grahame's end only mirrored the sultry image she forever left on the screen: Gloria Grahame tempted Fate, and Fate accepted.

When Sirk met Stanwyck...

2010-11-23T00:32:00.000-08:00

Whenever I feel I need to come up with a satisfactory reason to explain why Barbara Stanwyck is my favorite actress, the best answer I can come up with is because there was nothing this woman couldn't do. She could play in screwball comedy as though double entendres were her first language. She was as comfortable on a horse as John Wayne or Bathsheba Everdene when acting in a Western, long the boys club of genre cinema. A horribly fake blonde wig could not stop the icy realism of her performance as Phyllis Deitrichson, one of the defining femme fatales of noir. And when it came to melodrama, she waltzed through the genre with a gravity that transcends the so-called unnatural quality that is cynically applied to the genre.

I first became acutely aware of Stanwyck's comfort acting in melodramas with Fritz Lang's Clash by Night, from 1953. The movie, based on a Broadway by Clifford Odets, still bears its stage roots with some unbelievable dialogue laden with metaphors (Sample: "Jerry's the salt of the earth - but he's not the right seasoning for you.") and sometimes resembles a lower-budget version of A Streetcar Named Desire. However, it's the strong acting by Robert Ryan (never sexier), a pre-star Marilyn Monroe (never more natural), and Stanwyck that makes this an odd but hugely enjoyable gem. The one scene that still captivates is when Stanwyck's bored wife and mother asks her husband to kiss her before he leaves for work. "You don't like me to kiss you in the morning," he reminds her. "I...I'd like it this morning," she replies, earnestly, perhaps even desperately. After he leaves, she paces the living room, her own personal cage, contemplating the fact that she felt nothing at all from that kiss, and does not love her husband. She tries so hard to keep it in, but it all comes pouring out in sobs when she pours coffee. Crying in melodrama is as inevitable as a horse in a Western, but it's the sheer realness of Stanwyck's sobbing that is so memorable--there are no background music or operatic strings to lean on, no "sexy crying" where a single tear softly rolls down her cheek, no soft focus. It's a full-out outburst of emotion and pain that confirms Stanwyck as one of the most modern actresses in classic cinema. Barbara Stanwyck could ache just like a woman, but she broke just like a little girl.

In the 1950s, she made two films for maestro Douglas Sirk. The first, made only a year after Clash by Night in 1953, is All I Desire. Naomi Murdoch, a failed stage actress, returns to the family she abandoned 10 years ago to see her now teenage daughter perform in a stage play, and must deal with the stigma of the town's tabloid-like curiosity with her, the revived interest from an ex-lover, and most personally the pain of coming back to the family she left. There are many familiar trademarks of Sirk's films--the sympathetic view of the professional ambitions of women, the deconstruction of family values, and the personal self contrasted with the public's perception of the self (the lush black-and-white cinematography pays particular attention to the shadows cast upon the characters, reflecting the theme of presentation and self-consciousness). But even at its best, it still feels little more interesting than an early, eager reach for the depths which Sirk would reach 6 years later with Imitation of Life, also about a young mother's attempts at becoming an actress. The lack of development in Stanwyck's two teenage daughters and the curious decision to focus on Stanwyck's ex-lover essentially blackmailing himself back into her life are noticeable flaws which take their toll on the slender film, which runs at a swift 79 minutes.

There's Always Tomorrow, however, is a real treasure. If I may be so bold, it is Sirk's first true masterpiece. Sirk reunited Stanwyck with Fred MacMurray for a third time; prior to Sirk's melodrama, they had made a screwball comedy (Remember the Night, penned by Preston Sturges), and, more famously, a film noir (Double Indemnity). Though Wilder's film is viewed by many as a perfect film noir, its many triumphs are hindered by what I perceive as an incredible lack of chemistry between Stanwyck and MacMurray, whose unsuccessful attempts at making the term of endearment "baby" sound anything other than awkward threaten the everyman attitude that made him so right for the part. In Tomorrow, however, they're older and wiser--the reckless love they so desire is now tinged with regret. MacMurray is Clifford Groves, a successful toy manufacturer with a family that doesn't know how to show affection for him, reconnects with former flame Norma Vale, who is now a successful clothing designer. The sparks still fly from the moment they reconnect; especially beautiful is the scene where Norma's purse falls over, revealing a 20-year-old photo of her and Clifford at a company picnic. It's the sign both Clifford and the audience have been waiting for: the undeniable proof that she still loves Clifford.

Like Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause and Minnelli's Some Came Running, There's Always Tomorrow is one of the great 50s movies concerning the generation gap and the blurry definition of what defined happiness in a nuclear family. Although some scenes involving Clifford's teenage children blatantly trying to end their dad's love affair with Norma seem heavy-handed, it can be attributed to the sociological uneasiness between parents and teenagers at the time (Sirk's taking the side the the adults is a move that might've made Nick Ray slap his forehead as it's so anti-Rebel). It's also recalls how the career women of Sirk's films often find themselves "going up and up and up!" but neglect their loved ones in the process, as a sort of pseudo-martyrdom of the 1950s...or is it merely emotional cowardice?

The ultimately heartbreaking choice which Norma makes is the film's piercing conclusion (the image of her standing by the raining window would be more famously echoed in Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood but the image's poignancy is not lost in this film), and Stanwyck does it beautifully despite some awkward lines in her monologue, but it is MacMurray's dramatic dexterity that is the film's greatest gift. MacMurray's dignity is never lost and finds a masculine sorrow where many others would have played the role as pitiful or weak. Clifford may see himself as a robot, but MacMurray's performance is anything but automatic in a film that is anything but unnatural.

Unwritten: Books I wish my favorite directors had chiseled into movies.

2010-10-29T18:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a question for God: ~~Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot he himself could not eat it?~~ If everyone complains about the unoriginality of Hollywood these days, why aren't there more adaptations of great books? The incredible amount of coverage on remakes/re-imaginings/reboots/sequels, even to movies less than a year old (as was the case with Let the Right One In), has been astonishing, but even the media machine doesn't always equate to box-office gold (Jonah Hex sank faster than the Titanic at the box-office). Like these remakes, adaptations already have a built-in audience, but the sad truth is that in these bad economic times, movie studios are making fewer and fewer small, original movies for adults and more and more tentpole movies and remakes/re-imaginings/reboots/sequels, which arguably have a larger built-in fanbase than, say, Edith Wharton's novels. But I'm still not gonna quit wishing upon cinematic stars and the artists who are the reason I go to the movies. So here is my dream list of the perfect marriage between movies and novels, with my favorite directors as the ordained minister.

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (based on the novel by Milan Kundera)

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"

Philosophy? Check. Politics, particularly regarding Communism? Check, check. Passionate sex? Triple check. Kundera's most famous novel, about a Czech doctor's conflict between his womanizing ideals and his deep love for the sweet Tereza against the backdrop of the Communist takeover of the Czech Republic, couldn't have been more tailor-made for Bertolucci if Kundera owned a design store. Even a key moment where Tomas compares the tale of Oedipus' plucking out his eyes to the naivite of the Czech Communists, draws great similarities to the allusion of Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Bertolucci's The Conformist. Kundera's novel was adapted in the 1988 (only a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and, effectively, Communist power in Eastern Europe), and although it did keep the novel's main plot points and featured excellent cinematography by the world-renowned Sven Nykvist (famous for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman), it was at the cost of removing the cerebral quality that I love so much about the novel, and in retrospect, makes Kundera's work so hard to adapt. But I know Bertolucci would have weaved an intimate, epic and ultimately cinematic movie while remaining true to Kundera's words. And I also believe he could have pulled a far better performance out of Daniel Day-Lewis, who seems very unsure of himself in his first starring role as Tomas.

Nicholas Ray's Revolutionary Road (based on the novel by Richard Yates)

"The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place."

The idea of making Richard Yates' classic novel of suburban loneliness had its inception as early as 1967 when John Frankenheimer (of Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate) purchased the rights, but it took 40 years and Kate Winslet to get her husband, director Sam Mendes, to get the wheels turning with Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the starring roles as the idealistic but doomed young suburbanites. 9 years previously, Mendes had made a huge splash with American Beauty, his directorial debut and Best Picture winner, which time has not been kind to, for good reasons. Revolutionary Road is much better than American Beauty, in large part because one feels Mendes has far more respect for his protagonists. But there's still a distance in Mendes' direction that I feel could have been closed had a more passionate, American director could have achieved. Frankenheimer would have made a fine choice; his great sci-fi parable Seconds featured a man who literally changes his body and identity, only to find disillusion in the jet-set; Vincente Minnelli also could have made a special and utterly cinematic adaptation. But in part due to favoritism, I best imagine Nicholas Ray taking on Yates' novel, because he's the one American director I can think of who best understands the effects of a harsh environment on the human psyche. His intimate noir romance In a Lonely Place, which similarly traces the beginning and end of a passionate but doomed couple in a paranoia-filled Hollywood, shows an immense love for his protagonists that is always missing from Mendes' films. In one regard, it's useless to imagine Ray taking this project--his own tale of an American nightmare, Bigger Than Life is more biting, cinematic, and, yes, bigger in its depiction of broken suburban dreams than Yates' novel could ever imagine.

Francois Truffaut's Women in Love (based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence)

"I want the finality of love."

To be fair, Ken Russell's 1969 adaptation is fine with lovely performances by its quartet of actors, even if some of the 60s trademarks don't age very well. But after seeing Truffaut's Two English Girls, which, given its story of the complicated lives of two English sisters, might as well have taken Lawrence's title, I know he could have made a lush adaptation. Later in his life, Truffaut had moved away from the free, improvisation-heavy films of his youth and made films which were perhaps a bit more studio-friendly and certainly more scripted. However, this was hardly the kiss of artistic death for Truffaut; many of his later films reveal a much more mature, understanding man behind the camera. This best manifests itself in Truffaut's depiction of his female protagonists--the young man whose adoration and frustration for Jeanne Moreau's impulsive Catherine infused every frame of Jules et Jim probably would have shrugged off Adele Hugo, whose desire is ultimately both her physical self-destruction and her personal strength, as a loon. As such, the same year that Russell made the adaptation of Lawrence's book would have been the best time for Truffaut to have taken the helm, for no matter what time of his career he was working in, his understanding for the confounding variables on the human heart were always evident in his films.

Steven Soderbergh's Zeroville (screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Steve Erikson)

"Someone dies when the movies get into your dreams."

Erikson's hallucinogenic, magical rendering of the changing tides of American filmmaking in the late 60s and Vicar, the bald, ex-Calvinist architect who rode on the New Hollywood wave as a rising film editor is one of the strangest--and best--books I've ever read. It's also a feast for the cinephile, as there isn't a page that doesn't mention a great movie or literally have Vicar interact with some of the movies and stars of the era. I'm sure that as the protagonist is loosely based on screenwriter/director Paul Schrader, he could be another great choice, and I can imagine a lot of people wishing for Quentin Tarantino, the godfather of cinephilia, to take a stab at it. But I'm not terribly a huge fan of either director like I am for Soderbergh, the most interesting and profilic director working today since Godard, and probably the only director with the intellectual vigor, the right absurd sense of humor and visual panache to make to make a film of Erikson's novel as fascinating as the book itself.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Little Prince (based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

"Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

In their entire run as a directing team, The Archers made few actual adaptations from books. There was no need; they created some of the finest films from legends (Powell's solo effort The Thief of Bagdad), fairy tales (The Red Shoes), a comic strip (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), or a true story of a man's hallucinations (A Matter of Life and Death). Many of the mentioned adaptations were very loosely based on their original source material; the magic was all in The Archers' expert dialouge, memorable characters, perfectly British sense of humor, deep political and religious themes, and their use of Jack Cardiff's cinematography. As such, it seems unlikely that a producer would have let them adapt such a beloved children's book if they thought it was going to be a loose adaptation. But with or without a line-by-line, cut-and-paste adaptation, I know they could have made a beautiful film and like A Matter of Life and Death, also about a WWII pilot who brushes with fantasy, the vastness of the setting and the otherworldly dimensions would have been a greatly intriguing undertaking for the team. Just imagine the very first shot, a wash-in to an endless desert, with voice-over narration that goes: "This is the desert. Big, isn't it...?"

Max Ophuls' The House of Mirth (based on the novel by Edith Wharton)

Men have minds like moral flypaper. They will forgive a woman almost anything except the loss of her good name.

This proposal means absolutely no disregard to Terrence Davies' masterful 2000 interpretation, which in some ways I prefer to Scorsese's adaptation of The Age of Innocence; there is enough time in the history of film for two adaptations of Wharton's classic novel, and Max Ophuls should have adapted the book at some point in his career, either during his time in America or France (indeed, Lily Bart more resembles Lola Montes or Louise de... than any heroine from Ophuls' tenure in America). Like Francois Truffaut, Max Ophuls spent most of his artistic career as a director making emotionally wise and visually stunning films about women and their romantic struggles. And these themes are right up his alley, especially when one looks at his penultimate and grandest film Lola Montes, also about a woman's fall from high society, which is as biting in its satire as it is a feast for the eyes.

Jane Campion's The Lovely Bones (based on the novel by Alice Sebold).

“At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.”

There isn't enough time in the world or space on this blog to list everything that is shockingly wrong about Peter Jackson's take on Sebold's hugely popular novel, both as an adaptation and as a stand-alone movie. The simplest thing I can say is that Jackson was absolutely the wrong director for this book; the novel was closer in tone to The Ice Storm but Jackson turned it into Gone Baby Gone cross-cut a heaven that at times resembled a Claritin commercial. Before Jackson came aboard, the film was originally going to have a modest budget of $15 million with an unknown Scottish director named Lynne Ramsay in the canvas chair. Ramsay's work is still greatly unknown to me (aside from one glance on YouTube of a scene from Morvorn Callar, in which Ramsay turns an innocuous scene in a supermarket into a haunting and strange look into this woman's dire existence), but it was the right choice to have a woman directing, especially one with experience in intimate character studies. And if Ramsay couldn't have done it, Kiwi director Jane Campion would have been a wonderful second choice. Like Ramsay, she could take the ordinary and turn it into something strange and poetic (remember those shots of John Keats in Bright Star resting on the treetops almost as though he were floating?), and her long history of crafting wise character studies about the emotional and sexual conflict of women in love makes her perfect for this movie.

He Said, She Said, and I Tried to Listen Over the Oldies.

2010-09-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

Rob Reiner's Flipped represents a nostalgic, PG-rated filmmaking which hasn't been seen in a long, long time, and for this reason I wanted to like it much more than I did. After all, I might have a penchant for dark, complex adult stories, but like everyone else I'm a sucker for a cute kid. The two stars of Flipped are likable and look like they were plucked straight from a Sears catalogue. Bryce Lowski (Callan McAuliffe, who's a native Australian but you'd never know from his flawless accent) and Juli Baker (Madeline Caroll, not to be confused with the 30s Hitchcock blonde) are two kids in the 1960s who fall in love at very different times. Their opposite dreams, families and way of life create multiple misunderstandings over the years, not to mention convenient plot devices.

There really is a lot to like about this movie: The adult actors are in top form, particularly Aidan Quinn as Juli's artist father, full of naturalism and strength that reminds me so much of Gregory Peck. The kids are likable, though I never thought Caroll made Juli's activist passion believable enough (the girl refuses to come down a condemned tree a la Julia Butterfly Hill). The biggest problem, and alas what ultimately makes the film sink, is the script, which is clearly a cut-and-dry adaptation of Wendelin Van Draanen's young adult novel. The reliance on showing both perspectives of this love/hate relationship for nearly every single scene is what causes a 45-minute movie to be agonizingly stretched out into a 90-minute feature length movie; it's like a puppy-love Rashomon but without the excitement. And when taxing the awkward scenes of adult seriousness which seem to be from another movie (ever since Mad Men debuted, the 60s are no longer safe when it comes to exploiting family values) and the need to have John Mahoney as Bryce's father come in to churn wisdom, Flipped ultimately amounts to a movie that never trusts its audience enough to let them really understand and like the characters, in the same manner in which Juli and Bryce never seem to be able to fully appreciate the other until the unbearably predictable and obvious final scene.

Does this camera lense make my pores look fat? The best close-ups in film

2010-09-05T22:46:00.000-07:00

Gloria Swanson was ready for it.

Why?

Because she knew an actor's face--particularly a fearless one such as Swanson herself--had the power to open the door to a world of contradicting, complex emotions. It's funny that in a world where editing is getting quicker and quicker by the year (my own YouTube fan videos make me a hypocritical lemming of this fad), the most affecting scenes I think of when I think of truly memorable cinematic moments are the ones where the camera lingers on an actor's face for an extended period of time (and probably a tripod as well).

Why?

I can't come up with a particularly satisfying answer to that question, except the one that satisfies me: because although the recent box-office hits don't conform to this hypothesis, I believe that characters should drive the plot of a film forward and not the other way around, and thus an actor's face is the most valuable instrument one can use in this situation, even more so than any brilliant piece of dialouge.

So here are the most moving moments in film where I can watch on mute because every actor is performing at the highest level one can possibly achieve: they are understanding the camera, and using it to their fullest potential.

The Film: Queen Christina

The Actress: Greta Garbo

The Moment: The final scene

Why It's Great: Greta Garbo may be the most notorious enigma in Hollywood history, and this scene is a confirmation of that. This moment captures everything that made Garbo legendary: her beauty, her aloofness, and above all her awareness of the camera (I mean that as a compliment). It's been reported that the director Rouben Mamoulian told her to make a blank face and let the audience color outside the lines based on their own opinions of the prior 97 minutes. As for me, I see a woman smiling as she looks into the hopefulness of a new chapter in her life--and great potential for a sequel that sadly never materialized.

The Film: The Passion of Joan of Arc

The Actress: Maria Falconetti

The Moment: The whole damn film.

Why it's great: Most actors earn praise for putting their whole body into a role, but Falconetti is an exception because we rarely see below her neck; the entire film is, more or less, close-ups of this one-of-a-kind actress giving the only notable screen performance of her career, and of all time. We witness her maturity from a scared, terrified teen to a woman understanding and accepting her fate as God's choice in startling clarity because Falconetti's huge eyes do all the talking in Dreyer's silent masterpiece.

The Film: The Godfather Part II

The Actor: Al Pacino

The Moment: The very last shot

Why It's Great: It was a fateful day in September--September 11th, 2008, to be exact--when my friend Cecilia and I ditched school to take a bus to San Francisco's legendary Castro Theatre to see one of our favorite films on the big screen, restored and at the best movie palace we have still ever known. I remember the big blue wool sweater I was wearing, that I had a bad cold, that there was a very brief audio glitch early on during Pacino's delivery of the line, "Now, the price of a gaming license it less than $20,000," which was so perfect it was as though a professional had censored it out. Most vividly, however, was the memory of witnessing the final scene in all its glory, of watching this man slowly push away, watch die, or kill everyone who could truly love him, and of literally forgetting to breathe when the close-up revealed this man's damnation to hell. If there's one reason why The Godfather Part III is deemed unworthy, it's because this last shot is the real ending Michael deserves, and finally got.

The Film: Zodiac

The Actor: Jimmi Simpson

The Moment: "The last time I saw that face was July 4th, 1969. I'm *very* sure that's the man who shot me."

Why It's Great: I have seen this scene far more times than I have seen David Fincher's film all the way through, perhaps obsessively so, and every time it has given me shivers down the spine. Every. Time. I'm still struggling to find the exact words as to why it makes such a dent on me, and the biggest reason is because when Mike Mageau identifies Arthur Lee Allen as the infamous Zodiac killer, it's a moment which would be the biggest closure when in fact it's anything but: Allen suffered a fatal heart attack before his arrest could be made, and later DNA evidence did not match Allen as the Zodiac killer. Mageau's haunted eyes put a face on the dreadful feeling of the film: That every determination was met by a dead end, that innocence could never be brought back, and finally the incredible hopelessness of Fincher's world.

The Film: Ace in the Hole
The Actor: Kirk Douglas
The Moment: Overhearing the Last Rites
Why It's Great: For the last 90 minutes, we have been treated to a cookie full of arsenic courtesy of director Billy Wilder and his alter-ego, Chuck Tatum, at once the most diabolical, cynical and truthful of all Wilder's concoctions. From the first scene where disgraced journalist Chuck rides in on a towed car, he establishes himself as the smartest and filthiest person in any room, which includes the dusty cave where Leo Minosa, a helpless explorer, lays trapped as Chuck milks the story for all it's worth. It is only when Leo's health begins to fail him does Chuck really try to save him and do something morally right for once. As he overhears Leo give his last rites to a priest, Chuck's eyes fill with something finally resembling tears, sorrow and remorse. Without an ounce of sentimentality both from Wilder and Douglas, we too realize that this man has a heart, however many moments far too late to make it worthwhile.

The Film: They Live by Night
The Actress: Cathy O'Donnell
The Moment: The final fade-out.
Why It's Great: Nicholas Ray's debut film is full of daring, often brilliant touches which establish the beginning of a born filmmaker. From the very first shot, of two lovers gazing into each other's eyes (just before the first-ever helicopter shot in film history), we are aware that this will be one of the most poetically romantic of all film noirs. The very last scene serves a sad bookend of this elegiac opening shot: Instead of two lovers, only one will remain by the film's end (since this is a film noir I don't feel a huge amount of guilt from this spoiler since it is all but etched in its genre). The look on Keechie's face as she realizes how much she loves Bowie is enough to melt any cynic's heart, and proves that Nicholas Ray's films would always begin and end with the characters he fiercely sympathized with as though they were his children, his siblings, or himself.

The Film: Casablanca
The Actress: Ingrid Bergman
The Moment: "Sing it, Sam."
Why It's Great: I am in the minority who not only believes the script to Casablanca is *not* the greatest of all time, it is also incredibly overrated. One nagging flaw I have with it is how underwritten the character of Ilsa Lund is (does her dialogue honestly consist of anything more than saying how much she loves Rick and Viktor?), and it's probably the main reason why Ingrid Bergman was less than enthused to be part of this film. But Ingrid's proof of her incredible greatness was her ability to turn an insignificant part into the film's emotional center, the acting equivalent of turning water into wine. No moment best demonstrates this than the moment when Ilsa listens to that old love song, and the memories come flashing back. She barely moves a centimeter on her face, and yet she slowly but surely reveals the depths of a woman full of love and regret and longing, before we are even presented with a flashback montage of Ilsa's happiness with Rick in pre-war Paris. And you have to ask yourself, "Who wouldn't take this woman back?"

The Film: It's a Wonderful Life
The Actors: Donna Reed and James Stewart
The Moment: The Phone Scene
Why It's Great: There are many a logical reason why romances today seem to be lacking in a certain chemistry between the two stars; my own personal reason is because films have become less economic with editing; we always cut from reaction shot to over-the-shoulder shot back to reaction shot, which serve more to keep up with our ever-decreasing attention span than helping us understand why these two people should be together. In Capra's magnum opus, the centerpiece to long-suffering George and sweetheart Mary's romance is an extended sequence which remains uncut for nearly 2 whole minutes as they listen on the same phone as an old friend talks on the other line. What he talks about could hardly make any difference to the audience, or to the couple; they are too caught up in the conflicting emotions they feel for each other, as well as the forced feeling that this tight shot creates (not long before they had quarreled, so the friction only adds to their chemistry), where George is so close he can literally smell her hair. There are, quite simply, fewer moments in any film where you can simply look at any still shot from this moment and understand that these two people are deeply in love and almost feel their burning desire as well as their reluctance to admit their true feelings, for marrying Mary would confine George to his entire existence in Bedford Falls, the town he desperately wants to leave. This passion can only erupt sooner rather than later, and when it does, it's sexier than most sex scenes, more romantic than most melodramas, and better than anything Frank Capra ever created.

44 Candles and Top 5 Cusacks

2010-08-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

John Cusack has drawn comparisons to great classic actors including--but not limited to--Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum, yet his own brand of natural coolness is wholly original. Introduced into film by way of The Brat Pack in the late 80s, Cusack found a way to successfully mature into an adult starting with the great neo-noir The Grifters in 1990. Although his choice in film roles hasn't always rivaled Daniel Day-Lewis and for a while there in the 2000s he seemed to choose the same romantic comedy script simply copied and pasted all over again, his down-to-earthness, his indisputable charm, and his way of simply looking at something with a deadpan face and inflicting laughter from the audience (or, at least, me) is incandescent.

Plus he's a damn sexy man, which never hurts.

So, in honor of his 44 candles blown yesterday a month ago (hey, it's been a busy last month. Cut me some slack, Jack), I'm here to loudly proclaim my Top 5 Favorite John Cusack films.

5. The Thin Red Line (1998, Terence Malick)

I think it was Jean-Luc Godard who said that there is no way to make an anti-war movie, because no matter how many different angles or ways you shoot warfare, you always end up glamorizing it in some way, that there will always be a part of the audience dying to really feel the action portrayed on-screen. Terence Malick ended a 20-year hiatus to make the most visually and aesthetically poetic war film since Apocalypse Now, a vignette of soldiers stationed in the Pacific islands during WWII who all suffer, in some way or another, the loss of the soul as a consequence of war, which he did it in such a way that one never questions the horrors of war even as John Toll's camera lushly captures the beauty of the Pacific islands and its inhabitants. Done with less plot (and as a result, far more moving) than that other 1998 WWII film by Spielberg, The Thin Red Line might not have the "completeness" of Malick's first two films, but his return to filmmaking was a welcome one, and anything he makes is always far more absorbing than most of what is on the marquee today.

4. 1408 (2007, Mikael Hafstrom)

In 2007, the notorious Harvey Weinstein publicly stated he would build up the never-nominated Cusack a huge Oscar campaign for his work as a war widower in Grace is Gone, but Cusack's turn in a similar role as a grieving father in Hafstrom's thriller is what should've been his meal ticket to warrant an Oscar nomination. It would've been impossible, as horror films are today judged negatively before they are even viewed, but Cusack had the challenge of creating essentially a one-man show in a house room of horrors (it's based on a Stephen King short story), and the range he expressed, including an unexpectedly deep sadness, resulted in his strongest dramatic work to date. And Hafstrom's Sartre-esque vision of what happens when a man is left alone with his demons warrants a viewing as well.

3. The Grifters (1990, Stephen Frears)

After a successful run of Brat Pack hits, Cusack wanted a change, and Frears' Freudian neo-noir was the beginning of a brilliant new turn as an adult actor. Cusack's con artist Roy is the tip of a triangle which includes his mother (played to icy perfection by Angelica Houston) who wants him to go straight and his sexy girlfriend (Annette Bening, clearly having a ball channeling femme fatale icon Gloria Grahame). Cusack hits all the right notes, equally convincing as a smooth con artist and the conflicted young man trying unsuccessfully to release himself from his mother's shadow. Naturally, he was overlooked for an Oscar; Bening and Huston were deservingly recognized for their compelling work as sexy, independent women.

2. High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)

You read this in writing: John Cusack should have won an Oscar for his portrayal of Chicago-based, music-obsessed, romantically challenged, semi-failing record store owner Rob Gordon. It's not just because the Best Actor competition that year was duller than yesterday's Pepsi (this included but was not limited to Russell Crowe running a gamut of emotions from A to B in Gladiator); Cusack is brilliant walking a thin tightrope between a sensitive man coming of age and self-obsessed jerk. In many moments, he is both extremes at the same time; breaking the third wall certainly adds a unique view into Rob's life, and Cusack holds our attention with a charm and dexterity which can only be attributed to the talent of a great actor.

1. Say Anything... (1989, Cameron Crowe)

Even if you haven't seen the movie, you've seen the image. The one of John Cusack (as passionate optimist Lloyd Dobler) in the trenchcoat, hoisting a boombox into the evening air, blasting Peter Gabriel's classic "In Your Eyes," outside the house of his beloved girlfriend who dumped him for reasons only the audience knows. In any other director, actor and era, this iconic moment would warrant laughs and a restraining order. In the hands of writer Cameron Crowe making his directorial debut, the paen to young love is as achingly sweet and honest as the best John Hughes movie of that period, but is elevated by the stellar presence of John Cusack. This is the role he was born to play, and he infuses it with such incredible passion, he makes every seemingly overdone romantic gesture soar with belief and conviction, it's no surprise that Lloyd Dobler has become the cultural touchstone of great cinematic boyfriends--and, given the dubious obsession over Edward Cullen, I can safely say that Lloyd still has no competition even 20 years after the film's release.

Spotty 'Harry'

2010-06-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

In a scene from David Fincher's marvelous Zodiac, detective Dave Toschi and cartoonist Robert Graysmith attend a screening of Don Siegel's film Dirty Harry with unease; Siegel's killer of his film, The Scorpio, was based directly on the Zodiac Killer, who was still at large (and in fact was never caught) at the time of the film's release. Toschi (who worked on the Zodiac case for years) and Graysmith were not alone in their discomfort--I too sat on my purple couch with the similar expression, but my excuse doesn't come from a real-life connection to the killings seen on-screen: I just found the whole film to be ineptly made. In fact, it commits the worst cinematic crime of all--it's simply not all that interesting.

I know that just by being born with a uterus I have a lot of cards stacked against me, but before the reader writes me off as an angry feminist bored at the overflow of masculine outrage (personally I think Harry's .44 Magnum is compensating for a shortcoming) and dismayed at the lack of a reasonably written female character (they are all either topless eye candy, rape victims or wives who don't know how to stand by their cop husbands), allow me to say that the amoral views expressed and actions taken by Harry Callahan are really the least of the film's problems.

Given the rich origin story of the then-still at large Zodiac Killer, it's astonishing how poorly conceived the Scorpio Killer is on paper, and then how poorly executed he is on-screen. This isn't a fault to actor Andrew Robinson, whose eyes do express a wildfire craziness I haven't seen since Kathleen Byron saw red in Black Narcissus. But to only have a killer be crazy for the sake of craziness isn't enough, no matter how chaotic and shattering the early 1970s were becoming. The cat-and-mouse game is very flat since the Harry Callahan sees Scorpio very early in the film and in fact seems to start sabotaging Scorpio's killings by the 20-minute mark, leaving any trace of shadowy mystery in the dust. And although the Scorpio's actions of writing to major San Francisco newspapers asking demands in return for sparing lives is taken directly from the real-life Zodiac Killer, the Scorpio doesn't have the meticulous nature or mystery of the Zodiac Killer, which destroys what could've been a fascinating cat-and-mouse-game. However, I still think the mere notion of a killer who remained uncaught, had many contradicting identities/sightings and an uncanny ability to disappear into the night fog is far more scary than any moment in Siegel's film.

But if the killer is a letdown, the anti-hero isn't a whole lot better. Yes, it is fun to see Clint Eastwood spit out those biting lines, but the script's insistence at having unbelievable moments to make grand soliloquies about the glory of a .44 Magnum threatens to turn the iconic speech into camp. Harry's backstory, of having a wife who died, isn't examined in an engagingly enough way, and maybe exploiting it would've been the wrong direction to go down anyway, but if you have to give the audience emotional exposition, at least do it in a unique way, please. Harry's near-vigilante views might've had a better response in the 70s when there was a lot more tolerance given the unrest in the US, but today it feels more dated, not just because it's not the 70s anymore, but each time Harry encounters a more straight-laced law enforcer who goes by the (law) books, they are either shouting their lines or they seem to be so weak they eventually agree with Harry ("I think he's got a point" is a response to Harry's reasoning of his "I shoot the bastard" policy; no wonder it looked like Toschi had an ulcer in Fincher's film); as much as many will credit this to Eastwood's commanding performance, I only see this as another shortcoming of the script, which doesn't trust its audience enough to make up their own minds about Harry's methods, another nail in its coffin.

In the end, when Harry has fully resigned from the notion of true justice and paid homage to the end of Fred Zinneman's High Noon, after he has bookended his "Do I feel lucky?" speech with more satisfying results (at least to Harry and the audience), the film pretends to end on a note of moral ambiguity, but in fact the film's sense of finality is more disappointing than it should be; by having the film take its plot points from A to B without much originality or even believability, the irony of Dirty Harry is that it's, if anything, not messy enough for its own good.

Id vs. Super-ego: Truffaut's THE WILD CHILD

2010-04-25T15:58:00.000-07:00

In desperate attempts for us young students to evoke clarity in our essay writing, my elementary school teachers would frequently use the analogy, "If aliens were to read your paper and knew absolutely nothing about (fill in blank noun/verb here), how would you explain this to them?" I don't know about extraterrestrial life, but I know that if aliens were to come to Earth and one film would be shown to reveal what sociologically makes us human beings, Francois Truffaut's The Wild Child would do exactly that, because its very story is about an alien who finds himself integrated into human society.

The alien in question is a feral child found in the Aveyron forests, seemingly having been left to survive on his own devices his entire life. Dr. Itard (played by director Francois Truffaut in a role which mirrors his later acting performance in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the same spiritual and human intellect), a doctor of deaf children, takes an interest in the child's case and attempts to socialize the child with the help of his housekeeper Madame Geurin. Little by little. the child learns to walk bipedally, put on shoes, eat properly with a fork and knife, learns the correct order of the alphabet, and is given the name Victor.

But the real journey is in learning how to emote. Last year, I took a sociology class (my first despite being a psychology major) called "Self and Society" because I needed to fill my class schedule and it sounded interesting; it ended up being my favorite class of the semester. The accumulation of what I learned is that people learn how to emote by spending time with other people. How else would one know how to laugh at a joke? Or cry at times of sadness? There is something to be said for living as an anti-conformist and abhor the unspoken codes and rules of society which Edith Wharton wrote about, but severe isolation has its tolls on the human psyche. By showing Victor how humans behave in everyday social ways, Dr. Itard reveals morality and emotions. A real-life anecdote not seen in the film states that when Madame Guerin's husband died and she wept out of grief, Victor stopped what he was doing and consoled her.

While Truffaut doesn't mean to say that society is always in the right (scars on Victor's body hints at signs of abuse at the hands of others, making him not a genuine feral child but an abused, neglected victim who might have suffered a worse fate had he stayed with his family), Truffaut's filmography celebrated human relationships and interactions, be they romantic (as they often were with Truffaut, the man who loved women) or platonic. He knew that compassion is what made us human, and it's a privilege which is learned, not inherent.

To any aliens reading this (or English teachers of Christmas Past), I hope I have created a clear picture of why we're human--and why Francois Truffaut was one of the best of them all.

Marriage is an institution: Robert Bresson's UNE FEMME DOUCE

2010-04-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

"There is no such thing as love, only proofs of love." So began my introduction to Robert Bresson's unique vision of the crazy things people do for the sake of love (or is it only the proof of it?), in his near-fantasy Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, written by Jean Cocteau and borrowed by Bernardo Bertolucci in two of his films. Perhaps the lines would become more pertinent in his little-seen 1968 adaptation of Doystoevsky's short story A Gentle Creature, which opens with the sudden suicide of a beautiful young woman, and a question: Why couldn't love unite these two people, who need a connection more than most cinematic creations ever made?

These two people are left unchristened by a name, known only as "She" and "He." In the opening moments, She commits suicide, poetically visualized by a white shawl falling in the wind, her life and innocence gone forever. Her husband is left to pick up her body, and the pieces of their marriage, via flashbacks. A near-destitute student, she comes to His pawnshop to sell what little possessions she has. Pitying her, he buys everything she brings, even obviously worthless objects ("I'll only do this for you" he commandingly reminds her). As a pawnbroker, the husband sees himself as a sort of Faustian alter ego, having the power to do good as well as evil through his handling of money. When he asks her to marry him, he probably does so in the belief that this proof of love is a good-doing, not so much because he truly loves her. She accepts his proposal. Bresson reminds the viewer that this marriage is little more than a practicality on both sides by visually comparing the signing of a marriage certificate and the receipt of a barter made at the husband's pawn shop.

In many ways, the marriage resembles that of Tippi Hedron and Sean Connery in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie, one of commodity rather than love, with a beautiful blonde suffering from her trapped cage. Although the first few days of marriage show nuggets of happiness, including a moment of an impulsive hug ("She loved me then," the husband assures himself in the present), the marriage is still little more than a business transaction--the husband sets rigid rules for their lifestyle and limits the amount of money they may give away through the pawn shop. Knowing her prior life of near-destitution, the wife rebels against this, causing friction, jealousy and even an attempted homicide. When the wife becomes seriously ill with fever, the husband has a change of heart and promises a more positive change. When the wife recovers, she agrees to this radical new life, but jumps off their balcony moments later.

Why didn't love unite these two? Surely they're two characters in need of redemption--the pawnbroker's capitalistic ways would've been softened, and the girl's need to be taken care of would've been sated. The man claims he wants to love her, but the girl defensively states that he only wants to marry her, not to love her. (This line, juxtaposed with the image of the couple behind a wire fence at a zoo, cements their trapped natures) Their marriage is one of occasional mutual respect and admiration, but not one of communication and understanding, the fatal flaw in the business transaction of their marriage. The man does not know anything about her other than he wants to help her; his action might be "proof of love" as Cocteau once wrote, but his lack of heart and thought--the exact place where the love should've come from--is the defining nail in the coffin.

Bresson's film remains a close adaptation of Dostoevsky's short story, though lifts some of the misogonist undertones to make the wife a more sympathetic character, deletes what little bit of a past the wife came with, and shifts the setting to then-present day Paris. His actors color the enigmas that are their characters, particularly Dominique Sanda as the wife. Of all the actors Robert Bresson worked with, Sanda went on to have the most successful film career, receiving cinematic immortality as the second coming of Marlene Dietrich in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. In her film debut, which she serendipitously received simply because she called Bresson on the phone inquiring about his latest film, she channels the innocent waif of Joan Fontaine to very moving results. Sanda is an actress whose face is always taking note of something, who is always thinking and observing beneath the beautiful surface. As the wife, Sanda continually reminds us that there's so much more intelligence and emotion underneath her seemingly unmovable facade. In fact, given Sanda's professional relationship with Bertolucci, one can almost see this as a prequel to Last Tango in Paris, in which a similar man is left with unanswered questions after his wife's sudden suicide. Sanda had helped Bertoluci develop the idea and was expected to play the female lead, but her pregnancy prevented this from occurring. Had she been able to play the role, not only would the film's male/female battle been more equal, but the film could've added another layer in which Marlon Brando's widower Paul acts out sexual release with the image of his dead wife, only to be killed by her all over again when he tries belatedly to understand this beautiful creature.

I'm tired and I want to go home: Nicholas Ray's THE LUSTY MEN

2010-04-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Ray was one of the greatest, iconoclastic directors in American cinema. He saw passion in creativity, horror in conformity, and beauty in doomed love. Therefore, it's no surprise that he was able to take a fairly routine RKO script and weave it into a passion project about the loneliness of being homeless, one which both director and star Robert Mitchum were able to look back on with love for what they had created.

In Ray's films, it feels that the luckier a person is at their job (which serve as a sort of surrogate home, just as Ray's directing gig was himself), the unluckier he is at love, and vice versa--Bowie's downward spiral of a crime spree is tempered by his love for Keechie; Dix's screenwriting comeback is accepted at the exact moment when he loses his grip on his girlfriend; Tommy Farrell loathes being a dishonest mob lawyer but finds a soul mate in dancer Vicki. In the opening moments of The Lusty Men, this paradox is evident, as Jeff McCloud shines as a rodeo star in front of a cheering audience of thousands, but only a cross-dissolve later, the other side reveals itself. Jeff gets an injury, and his career is all but over. He walks across an empty arena, newspapers blowing in the wind, the crowd's cheers silenced and long gone home.

Just as he loses one home, he visits the first one he's ever known: the house he was born in. Jeff's first stop on a hitch-hike to a steadier life is to the house he grew up in. The body language and heavy eyes of Mitchum reveal the weight this place in time has on Jeff. Almost as though he's never left or ever grown up, Jeff crawls under his house, fumbles around in the dark, and finds mementos of a childhood he's long left behind (or has he?)--a toy gun, two nickels and an old newspaper. Memories of a time when he felt the ground beneath his feet.

By this point you might not think there's much of a plot in The Lusty Men. There is a plot, concerning Jeff's mentoring of a young farm hand Wes Merritt into a rodeo star while falling for Wes' wife Louise, played with snap by Susan Hayward, but Ray's heart is more concerned with the characters he loves so much rather than a typical 3-act structure. Ray was very proud of his ability to "wing it" on the making of this movie (the script was more or less being written as filming progressed, usually with the support of his lead actor), and it was a small miracle he was able to do so at RKO for the notorious Howard Hughes. At 2 hours, the film works slowly and gracefully, with exciting scenes devoted to the rodeo games and special attention going to the rough-and-tumble men who participate in these games. In other words, this is the kind of script which would decidedly NOT get someone into film school, but the themes which Ray finds fascinating--how every scar tells a story, or how American masculinity in the 1950s was marred by the lack of a real home--make their way into the film with real intelligence, and the watermark of a natural-born film maker.

Ray once took great pride in "taking the gun away from Bogart" in Knock on Any Door, and in The Lusty Men, he does the same with Mitchum, an actor so well remembered for his laconic masculinity and his enigmatic worldliness in equal measures as his off-screen bad boy image and his seemingly nonchalant disinterest in acting. It's very difficult to imagine anyone else playing Jeff McCloud, because Mitchum puts his whole body into this role (that devastating little gimp...), and like McCloud, Mitchum only wore the stoic mask to hide a desire and a tenderness that could become so misunderstood if revealed. This is the same actor who wrote poetry, played saxophone and released a calypso album, among other side passion projects. Given Ray's unique trademark of guiding personally revealing performances from his actors, it wouldn't be a surprise if there was a lot of Jeff McCloud in Robert Mitchum. Or maybe I just don't want to imagine the real Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell's real-life counterpart.

In the sad end, it is homelessness which kills Jeff McCloud, who begins his journey revisiting the first home he's ever known, and he ends it in the last one he's ever wanted, in the arms of the woman he loves and shares his longing for a gravitationally-bound life. It might not be much, but it's proof that frankly, Mitchum did give a damn.

The 'Broken' and the Beautiful

2010-03-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

If Francois Truffaut were still alive today in a perfect world, he would praise Pedro Almodovar's latest as a masterpiece valentine to cinema, and its lovely leading lady Lena (Penelope Cruz in the performance which should've been her meal ticket to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar instead of Nine) as his ultimate female alter ego, a woman who would risk her body for the sake of a director's vision. So bah, humbug to the critics who incessantly pointed out this was a notch below Almodovar's finest--although the supporting characters might not be as vividly written as Agrado from Todo Sobre mi Madre (then again, how many characters are?), Almodovar's aching passion for cinema is evident in every frame, from a loving cross-dissolve connecting a rolling film reel with a winding staircase to a visual quotation of Roberto Rossellini's beloved Voyage to Italy (seriously, is there one European filmmaker who doesn't love Rossellini's drama of remarriage?), and the director is wise enough to mix in splashes of visual color, humor and a truly tragic love story which stops Broken Embraces from being bogged down by its own nostalgia as the immensely popular--and overrated--Cinema Paradiso did. Instead, Almodovar chose American melodramas from the 1950s which highlighted the dark side of the Hollywood dream in equal balance with the alienating passion of artistic integrity, Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place as inspiration for his palette of desire--desire for a kept woman, desire to see, desire for cinema, desire for escape.

The entire sum of these desires is best evident in a sequence set to Cat Power's haunting "Werewolf", itself a tale of a woman's aching desire for a changing man as he once was, where director Mateo Blanco and his leading lady Lena, an abused, kept woman for a mogul doubling as the film's (within this film) producer, flee the emotional and physical tolls of making their film to the Canary Islands. On the impossibly heavenly beaches, her wounds heal and the lovers can finally breathe without constraint. It is in this sequence where Almodovar visually quotes Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, which plays on the TV as Mateo and Lena support each other on the couch. Lena cries openly looking at the anguished face of Ingrid Bergman, herself looking at the remains of a couple who died together in the volcanic eruption of Pompeii. It's an incredible synergy to watch one actress take notes with her eyes from one of the absolute goddesses of film (both as Penelope Cruz and her cinematic alter ego Lena), with Lena fully understanding the sincerity of love, and Mateo mutually reciprocating by way of taking a photograph of himself and Lena in lieu of the video camera he surely would've preferred. A flash, a photo, a moment, a memory.

They might not make them like they used to, but nobody makes them like Almodovar.

Who's Afraid of Veronica Lake?

2010-03-08T20:09:00.001-08:00

In the last 20 years of acting Oscar wins, perhaps none have been more savagely misunderstood than Kim Basinger's 1997 Best Supporting Actress win for LA Confidential. While Basinger's performance is not hated, per se, those who watch the movie can never seem to pinpoint why she won it, and the general consensus today is that Julianne Moore should've won for Boogie Nights. I'm not out to take down Julianne Moore (on the contrary, she is one of the greatest working actresses and one of my personal favorites, the same of which cannot be said for Basinger), but her performance is one full of numerous BIG emotional scenes--some crying scenes, many containing nudity, and one particularly memorable scene of intentional bad acting. In other words, it's certainly a movie where one can look back at any of Moore's emotional scenes and remember when the audience fell in love with her, and her character's troubles as she fights for custody of her son even while she remains a pornography actress is also one of contradictions which allow the audience to first be wary of her, then feel emotional towards her plight, something many people mistake for genuine complexity--for what other reason did Crash win Best Picture?

And then there is Basinger's interpretation of Lynn Bracken. From the first moment we see her on that fateful, character-defining Christmas Eve, she's elegantly dressed in a black cape covering her blonde waves. She's beautiful, enchanting, mysterious and she's all too aware of her effect on men, perhaps reluctantly so. When she accurately states the profession of hot-blooded police officer Bud White (Russell Crowe in a phenomenal performance of masculine prowess), he looks a bit shocked and exposed--he has a soft spot for victimized women, and he's not used to a woman who's this smart, nor this independent. When he asks, "That obvious, huh?", she tilts her head with a look of near pity, "It's practically stamped on your forehead."

We don't even know her name, yet this scene so perfectly establishes Lynn Bracken's seen-it-all before attitude, to the point where it's nearly impossible to surprise her. She knows her place as a woman, and what's more, as a prostitute, she's all too aware of her trapped place in the lonely place that is Los Angeles, and Basinger's sympathetic face is the perfect palette to paint the stoic yet hopeful plight of a woman who's seen so many men and still felt loneliness for far too long. Like Lynn, Basinger knows that she's beautiful, but she's never entirely sure if there's much importance to it.

Lynn is made to look like Veronica Lake, but Basinger's performance is, if anything, an incredible reinterpretation of Gloria Grahame, the great noir actress of the 1950s. Grahame's sexuality oozed with every line she purred (her off-screen conquests are also the stuff of Hollywood legend), yet it's her performance in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place which revealed a vulnerability under the cool-as-a-cucumber facade she only thought she could hide. In a Lonely Place is a unique film which is damn near impossible to forget once seen, and one of its many admirers is LA Confidential's director Curtis Hanson, who actually hosted a making-of documentary on the film's DVD release. In an article for the New York Times*, Hanson admitted to showing it to his cast and crew among a myriad of other 50's-set Hollywood films to demonstrate the mood he was attempting to evoke. He reportedly chose Ray's film because of the wounded masculinity he felt was perfect for Russell Crowe's conflicted bad-cop with a moral code, yet it's the central romance of Ray's film which most obviously makes its way into Hanson's incredible neo-noir (I wouldn't raise an eyebrow if told Basinger had jotted down a few notes from the film, either). Both films concern a violent yet romantic post-war man and a cool, failed actress who fall in love with each other, even though they probably shouldn't. The women of both films are alluded to having a history with men which have lead only to dead ends, and the best evidence is the pain in their eyes--Lynn and Laurel have seen men come home from war (one kind or another), battle-scared and unsure of where their loyalties really lie, and likewise neither women are sure how to allow themselves to feel loved because they don't know how to trust it anymore. In many ways, both characters are the archetypes for the silent, subtle pain of women who had no idea how to understand a new generation of masculinity, whose inability to adapt to a changing world was a defining theme of American melodramas in the 1950s.

Both films contain a scene where the not-yet lovers are able to enter the others' place of residence (which is never quite home to either character), where a exquisitely choreographed song and dance battle of the wits emerge, and before they realize it, they've already begun to fall in love.

L.A. Confidential: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9F8EFoVwg (dissembled upon request)

In a Lonely Place:

There's an incredible scene in L.A. Confidential which serves as a huge turning point in Lynn's exposure of herself, perhaps for the first time in years. It's dawn. Bud White watches from his car as she kisses her last customer, a long-time customer, goodbye. Her curls have fallen flat, her make-up is fading but Bud would still think she looked better than the real Veronica Lake. She tidies up her grand, big bed open to both her living room, and all the customers who can pay. He knocks on her door, and she opens it, having been waiting hopefully for him. She wordlessly guides him to a small room hidden from that grand but hallow boudoir. Bud and Lynn are too tired to speak, but the camera does all the talking, acting as Bud's eyes and our guide to Lynn's secrets: It's a small room with a small bed frame and embroidered pillows pointing to Bisbee, Arizona, made for a small girl with big dreams. The cacti and books on the bedside table, the floral pictures on the walls, all give the room a personality not seen for everyone. This is her real bedroom, where the real Lynn Bracken sleeps, not "some Veronica Lake look-alike who fucks for money." The look on her face reveals that she's never shown this part of the house to any man before. Bud asks, as any man this privileged would, "Why me?" Tired and vulnerable, she answers truthfully, "I don't know," then walks wordlessly to the bed, shutting away eye contact. He comes over, kisses her forehead, which she replies with her hands pulling his face closer to her own, and they make love for the first time. Neither may not know why she chooses to show this to him, but both know she wanted to, that she needed to. The same could be said about love, I suppose.

This pinnacle scene is the meatiest scene of unraveling the beautiful enigma that is Lynn Bracken, and maybe because much of the scene relies on the camera to tell her story instead of Basinger's face or dialogue, it fooled the audience into thinking Basinger didn't do much other than look beautiful on-screen. For reasons stated previously, it's not a performance to rely on histrionics or make-up jobs (Basinger never looked more beautiful on camera, and this is easily one of the most "beautiful" Oscar wins in history, a rarity when a laughable and nearly sexist emphasis is placed on taking women down a notch in the beauty department when it comes to making faces), for to do so would be a betrayal to the women of that era and the excellent film making by Curtis Hanson, not to mention Lynn Bracken.

After the violence of the film escalates in its climax, there is still Lynn Bracken, the film's sturdiest survivor. Chopping off her beautiful locks of hair as a sign of independence, she takes one last look at the corrupt, lonely world she inhabits before leaving it forever with her lover in tow. She looks self-deprecatingly at cop Ed Exley and says with a hint of irony, "Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona."

Yeah, but wouldn't it be nice to be Bud White for one day?

*New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/15/movies/a-dark-lesson-in-trust.html

10 Reasons why Buffy kicks Twilight's ass

2010-02-25T17:57:00.000-08:00

It's doubtful that I'll ever join the masses and proclaim that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the greatest show in television, but after catching up on its deeply romantic, devastatingly emotional second and third seasons on Hulu, I can easily say it was the best show about the trials of high school, and that nobody understood the (quite literal) life and death, peaks and valleys of being a teenager since Nicholas Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause back in 1955. Its use of the supernatural as a metaphor for teenage angst (a Hellmouth where evil beings cross over between Earth and Hell, is literally right over the high school) has been imitated but never matched.

One such imitator is the hugely successful Twilight, the first book of which I actually read as a sort of pop-culture research project (that, and it's only fair to actually read the book you continually criticize), and I watched the movie. There's not enough time and energy in the world to discuss how awful that first novel is and how Stephanie Meyer thought she was churning out a pro-abstinence book when she's really trying to corrupt our youth with right-wing fanatic nonsense, in a world where women don't allow themselves to have abortions even when their own life is at stake, where women become domestic goddesses to control-freak older boyfriends, and how every 15 pages Bella has to gape about how beautiful Edward Cullen is. (See? I've already started)

But I'd really rather try to steer teenage girls into the direction of a more healthy, funny, daring show which has many of the same elements of Twilight: Forbidden vampire/human romances, werewolf/human romances, teenage angst, identity and existential loneliness. For both stories, I never quite bought that the respective female protagonists were half the loners they thought they were (Bella had half the school at her feet whether she liked it or not, while Buffy had too many snappy one-liners and killer shoes to be invisible), yet only one understood the real longings of being a teenage girl, and that was Buffy.

1. Buffy is a better role model than Bella: It's not just because she literally kicks ass--it's because she actually has an activity to do, other than just staring into the eyes of her cradle-robbing vampire boyfriend. Bella, on the other hand, is either doing just that or cooking for her police officer father. She doesn't have friends who she cares at all about, she never seems to socialize other than to play lightening baseball with vegetarian vampires (I still don't understand that bit). Buffy contains a better sense of self and her journey to finding out just who she is (her transformation from the very girly girl reluctant to accept what's expected of her to the lost senior of season 3 is remarkable for those who see it), and she earns her confidence, whereas Bella's lack of self-respect is makes Edward her whole life and why her whole world falls apart when they briefly break-up (more on this at #9). And finally, Buffy loved vampire Angel dearly but she never once harped about wanting to be with him forever, and her roots in humanity, in the temporary state of all things, is her greatest strength.

2. Buffy's core sexual metaphor is more realistic than Twilight's: Twilight is pro-abstinence porn and a metaphor for chastity, which I guess is fine and is closer to my own celibate high school experience, but it feels incredibly naive and old-fashioned in the midst of the Juno phenomenon and US's most famous unwed pregnant teen, Bristol Palin. In the Buffy universe, the metaphor dares to cut deeper: After Buffy sleeps for the first time with her beloved Angel, he literally turns evil the next day. That takes courage to say, and it's a valuable cautionary lesson for teenage girls to learn, plus it's one which has more power to warn teenage girls about the possible consequences of sex.

3. Buffy was funnier: Even though some of Joss Wedon's dialogue (imagine Juno with vampires....which I just realized would probably look like Diablo Cody's sophomore slump Jennifer's Body, unseen by me) occasionally strains too hard to be cool, its dialogue is utterly unforgettable (sample: "I had no idea that children en masse could be gracious"), and it reminded us that high school may be hell, but it's no reason to forget laughter. I have a hard time remembering one single funny or interesting line in Twilight--and no, "You are my life now" isn't a candidate--for or either funny or interesting.

4. Buffy and Angel were a more interesting, stronger and compelling couple than Bella and Edward: Blame it on Joss Wedon realizing that once simmering TV couples hook up, the ratings slump--Buffy and Angel never had the chance to be really together; once they slept together, he lost his soul and became evil--when he regained his soul, Buffy had to send him to Hell for the good of mankind. When he became mortal like her, he was forced to give it up for the friggin' good of mankind (damn, I hate it when that happens--twice). In the longetivity of their relationship, there was never a dull moment or a settled emotion, and the emotional ache for each other to find a way to be together is more poignant than the sexual longing of Edward and Bella, who do little more than stare into each others' eyes and say how much they love each other; one has the feeling that Meyer was taking Cliff's Notes from the tormented passion of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but Edward and Bella make Heathcliff and Cathy look like Nick and Nora. When Buffy and Angel weren't patrolling for bad vampires, they actually dated, going to the movies, dancing, ice-skating and the likes. They even--gasp!--cracked a joke or two. It's hard to imagine that in Twilight. In fact, I think the imagination is the only place where you'll find humor.

5. Twilight doesn't care about the parents: When Bella first comes to Forks, she's leaving her mom and new step-dad and living with her estranged dad who she cannot relate to. Now, I've had more Jim Stark moments than I have fingers and toes, but I know that for the most part, average parents do try to understand their kids, and even--gasp!--love them. Stephanie Meyer believes that Bella's core isolation is her inability to bond with her father and her mother's rejecting of her to go on the road with her new husband. Director Catherine Hardwicke's phenomenal debut Thirteen didn't fall into this trap by giving Melanie Freeland her own screentime and problems to almost match her teenage daughter, but there was little for Hardwicke to do when she helmed the first Twilight movie, which is a real shame. While Buffy's mother never always understood her daughter and for the first two seasons was kept in the dark concerning her slayer duties, she was never less than a caring parent who knew Buffy's strengths and would never fail to acknowledge them. After discovering Buffy's slayer duties (the line, "Have you ever tried not being the Slayer?" is a thin veil for mothers responding teenagers coming out of the closet and revealing their true sexuality), their relationship becomes stronger, though not immediately and only after Buffy runs away from home. No episode better realized the sociological importance of parents than "Band Candy," in which the parents of Sunnydale magically behave like teenagers, and the town becomes disorderly and the (real) teenagers are, if anything, even more confused and lost than ever.

6. Angel wasn't a stalking control freak. Both Angel and Edward have stared for hours at their beloved girls sleeping, but when Angel did it, it was supposed to be creepy. And I don't remember Edward being invited to Bella's bedroom, either, which makes his pre-formal meeting endeavors even more creepier....and even though we place a value on someone "catching you when you fall," Twilight took this meaning to a very literal level, to the point where Bella was a klutz/fragile flower who could only walk on two legs of Edward was there to hold her--and he verbally stated this, more or less, on many occasions.

7. Buffy has more engaging friends. Meyer strives to make Bella seem like such an outsider (which I guess she thought was "unique") by having Bella not be able to fit in; indeed, her friends never seem at all interesting, more involved in finding a prom dress than doing math homework. It's a true stretch of the imagination why the mopey Bella would hang out with these people and vice versa, since there's never any chemistry in their scenes together, and they seem to be used only for expository reasons or half-baked comedic relief. Buffy, on the other hand, found confidantes in the nerdy Willow and Xander, who helped Buffy in both surviving demon attacks and high school. As the two characters evolved into more complex humans, our sympathy for them also exponentially grew. Even the shallow Cordelia had her moments, and she was always loyal.

8. Bella thinks she's smart...but she's just really pretentious. Okay, it's hardly a crime to read Jane Austen in your spare time. I myself had to read all of her books for an English class and I surely would've picked up one or two on my own, just as I had done with Pride and Prejudice. But it's not something I would flaunt in order to prove my intelligence, as Meyer does for her alter ego. She literally devotes two full pages (at least) concerning which Jane Austen book Bella will choose to re-read. There's also another scene where Bella tells a suitor her essay thesis on William Shakespeare is about feminism in Macbeth, to which her suitor is blank-eyed. Bella would only need to take an AP English class to find other people who could come up with a suitable observation on classic literature, instead of pretending to be the only intelligent person at her school. Buffy didn't pretend to know everything, and in fact, she was doing poorly in science and only checked out an Emily Dickenson book from the library to impress a boy. I'm not at all making an anti-feminist argument where women shouldn't be scholarly and thoughtful, but I think it's important for characters, especially those in high school, to not proclaim to have all the answers or think they're more important than anyone. There are always going to be interesting people of your own (human) age, if you just let them in.

9. Buffy actually has an identity aside from her boyfriend: And it's not just because being the Slayer is her destiny, though that imprint is something she struggled with, wanting to be a normal teenage girl. (From "Becoming, Part 2:" 'Do-do you think I chose to be like this? Do you have any idea how lonely it is, how dangerous? I would *love* to be upstairs watching TV or gossiping about boys or... God, even studying! But I have to save the world--again!') She could take care of herself, she had real desires which weren't restricted to being with Angel, and she simply had the self-knowledge which Bella continually refuses to grow, instead depending solely on being Edward's girlfriend and eventually his wife. When Edward breaks it off with Bella "for her own protection," she is an empty shell of a woman and makes no attempt at getting over him, and actually puts herself into self-destructive situations because she can "hear" him in adrenhaline-filled adventures. When Angel does nearly exactly the same thing to Buffy at the end of Season 3, she is heartbroken but come to accept his because she knows he won't be able to give her the things she knows she may want as an adult, such as marriage and children, and Angel never tries to impose these things on her as Edward does to Bella (I have yet to read any of the three other Twilight novels, but I've heard through the spiderweb that in the final novel she basically becomes a 1950s housewife/mother and refuses an abortion even when her life is at stake due to pregnancy complications).

And as a bonus, Buffy actually tries dating someone other than a vampire--her suitor is a shy, poetry-loving lad from Season 2, but she breaks it off when she realizes dating him interferes with her slaying duties and nearly gets him killed on the first date. This not only adds to her maturity and underlines the sacrifices she makes to fulfill her duties as a Slayer, but it gives her relationship with Angel more gravity given that he truly understands her secret world and what she's asked to do, and it makes his break-up with her all the more poignantly emotional--he may not be able to give her the normal things she may one day desire, but really, it would be impossible in any way for Buffy to carry a "normal life" with anyone, even a fellow human; Angel would've at least been able to give her genuine love, help and protection--the things which really matter.

10. And, finally....the vampires in Buffy don't sparkle. It's not just because it's ridiculous. With the absence of any real easy to kill vampires (I guess they're all Jewish since they find crosses ironic), it takes away any real gravity about their lack of human nature, and it makes their "lives" less fragile, thus eliminating the conflict between their superhuman strength and their vulnerabilities.

But mostly, it's just ridiculous.

Sarah Palin vs. Family Guy

2010-02-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

Dear Sarah Palin:

There's no denying, your, er, special beliefs. You think being governor of Alaska makes you "next door neighbors" to Russia and gives you automatic insight into foreign policy. You claim to read all sorts of magazines but cannot give a clear name of which ones you actually read. And now you take a relatively harmless episode of Family Guy (which, I'll admit, isn't exactly the squeaky-clean Father Knows Best for this generation) and churn it into controversy.

Ms. Palin, you will officially do anything to get attention.

In last week's episode of the satirical series, awkward teenager Chris Griffith tries to date a girl named Ellen who he has a crush on, with Down's Syndrome. When asked about what her parents do for a living, Ellen replies that her father is an accountant and her mother is the former governor of Alaska.

When I got to that joke, I chuckled at the recognition of Sarah Palin's name. It wasn't a particularly funny joke, but then again, as one person in my Creative Writing class once said, the name Sarah Palin alone is a joke in and of itself.

And now Ms. Palin, you've taken this episode and used its mentioning of you as another opportunity to look like Mother of the Year who speaks on behalf of voiceless persons with Down Syndrome. You claim this episode was like "another kick in the gut" according to your Facebook note. I have not read this note in its entirety because I am not your FB friend, nor do I have any desire to be.

This is where your reaction gets murky. Other than the vague reference to you having something in common with the character of Ellen's mother, there is no other reference in any sense to your name. Did you think the show was making fun of being the mother of a child with Down Syndrome? Because the remainder of the show was actually more tasteful than usual in its depiction of mentally challenged people, and that there wasn't anything which should merit the show's creators as "heartless jerks."

The remainder of the show has Ellen becoming rather bossy towards Chris, to which he exclaims, "Alright, I don't care, that is IT! I don't care how hot you are, I don't much like being treated this way. You know, I used to hear that people with Down Syndrome were different than the rest of us, but you're not! You're not different at all! You're just a bunch of (explicit, plural word which I can't make out because of the bleeping sound) just like everyone else!"

And, albeit the explicit word at the end, this is really the part of the episode which blasts any controversy away, because that is the point of the episode: Ellen really is no more demanding than most women (including Meg's antagonist, Connie D'Amico), and her feminine assertiveness is really her defining trait, not her affliction with Down Syndrome. She's not a victim at all. If you took out the Down Syndrome traits, you'd just be left with a very, very assertive woman. It reminds me of Timmy on South Park, how even though he's obviously mentally challenged, the fact that the main kids of the show play with him and treat him as a friend proves that the show isn't heartless, that they do not set up those with lesser abilities just so they can kick them down.

But Ms. Palin, this really isn't about you. You're not the one with Down Syndrome, and you cannot know what it is like to have it, nor will I. The actress who voiced Ellen for the episode, Andrea Fay Friedman, was born with Down Syndrome, and she in an email to the New York times she herself believed the episode the episode was funny and blasted Sarah Palin as not having a sense of humor. The real stinger, was this crackerjack line: "My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."

Sarah Palin and her son Trig on stage at the Republican National Convention.

Ms. Palin, I know that since your family seems to invite controversy no matter how gosh-darned hard you try to portray yourself as Mother of the Year (or, I suppose, now it's Grandmother of the Year), you cannot have it both ways. You cannot brush off Rush Limbaugh's comments about using the word "retarded" because he was being satirical and then attack this show for its relatively tame episode. You cannot demand that the media leave your children alone after literally toting your young son on the floor of the Republican National Convention. The messages you send to the media is about as confusing as your questions to the infamous Katie Couric interview.

But mostly, Ms. Palin, what's frustrating is that you will take any opportunity to keep yourself in the public's eye, for no real particular reason or purpose. It's as though you don't now how to go back to being the governor unknown to the greater part of the US before the Presidential election.

I'm just a humble blogger of age 20 and this is only my third post on this blog. Although some attention for my abilities as a writer would be nice, I will not go to Family Guy lengths for attention, and I actually hope you don't respond to this open letter (responding would only prove my point), because although I laugh at any latest exploit you get yourself into, I'd really rather just place you into an asterisk of American history than have you further humiliate yourself and the American government.

But, then, the great thing about freedom of speech is that you may respond.

Sincerely,
Serena Bramble

Some Sources of Interest: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26645070/

http://palingates.blogspot.com/2010/02/actress-from-family-guy-sets-record.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/21/palin-attacks-media-stay_n_159830.html

The entire episode of Family Guy: http://www.hulu.com/watch/125175/family-guy-extra-large-medium

We grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind: The best of the 2000s

2010-01-26T20:31:00.000-08:00

And so another decade has passed us. For Americans such as myself, we saw the 2000s open with a dark cloud as (at least) 4 years of a presidency was stolen from Al Gore. We witnessed in silence as our hubris fell with the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. And our thirst for Shakespearian vengeance resulted in the most unpopular war since Vietnam.

I've often been asked why I love film noir so much, and the best answer I can come up with is because it's a genre which was born out of the very real fears of World War II, and continued to spread darkness until through the Red Scare, which of itself was a very ficticious war. It's a fearless genre which exposed the innermost fear of ordinary Americans and profoundly forced us to question our choices. I truly believe that even though cineasts have a very narrow mind of what film noir is (it's impossible to define but takes only a moment to correctly identify), and that anything after the late 1950s is considered "neo-noir," or a fake imitation, but I boldly say that the 2000s brought on a new wave of film noir derived from a nation's guilt.

And yet, through all the dark shadows, the 2000s also brought us some of the most moving love stories in recent memory, the best ones concerning the anguishing power of memory in a way which hasn't been seen since the moving images of Chris Marker's La Jetee. The kind of love which is the light through the darkness, which makes you abandon all sense of logic and reason. For lack of a better word, this is the light at the end of our tunnel.

And so, without further ado, here is my list of the 10 best films of the last decade, in alphabetical order:

2046 (2004, Kar Wai Wong)

This comes with an asterisk to it: It's a truth universally acknowleged that viewers prefer the unofficial prequel In the Mood for Love over the more divisive sequel. I have had similar first viewings for both In the Mood for Love and 2046, where I admired the craftsmanship but I didn't quite know what I was being told. On second viewing of 2046 I fell in love; as of this writing I have yet to revisit In the Mood for Love.

As Michaelangelo Antonioni saw nearly 50 years ago in his masterpiece L'Eclisse, as we become a more modern world, the more we lose a sense of primal senses and intuition. Wong Kar Wai understands this fully and the intercut parallel story written by Chow of a man on a train without a sense of direction or time who falls for an android is both an incredible manifestation of how writers place their fears and desires into their work, and a poignant reminder of the bad timing of love.

Characters trying to revisit a bygone love affair is at the centerpiece of Wong Kar Wai's intoxicatingly beautiful romance, of going back to a past which exists only in their memories. The conductor of these stories is anguished playboy writer Chow Mo-Wan, carrying the wounds of his unconsummated love for his neighbor Su Li-Zhen when both were married to philandering spouses in In the Mood for Love. His pain manifests itself through brief sexual encounters with the women in his life, never able to make a connection he secretly yearns for. The women in his life include Faye Wong as a young girl who Chow loves but who aches for her Japanese lover; Maggie Cheung as a mysterious gambler who bears the same name as Chow's lost love; Carina Lau as a woman still in love with her late lover; and Zhang Ziyi as a chic call girl who is far less composed than her face would ever dare show in front of another human being. Zhang Ziyi's performance is a real treasure--better known for her martial arts films and her lackluster English language debut in Memoirs of a Geisha, Wong Kar Wai pulls out passion and sexiness and vulnerability which simply wasn't there in Rob Marshall's ill-conceived adaptation. Her performance seems to have remained a secret all this time, which begs the question: If you were to go to a mountain very far away, find a tree, uncover its hole filled with mud, would you find her lovely performance there?

The 25th Hour (2002, Spike Lee)

Love him or loathe him, we can always count on Spike Lee being America's bravest filmmaker--when studios were demanding filmmakers to edit out the memory of the World Trade Centers by using CGI, TV stations were canceling scheduled airings of programs featuring terrorist attacks and even radio stations were refusing to play John Lennon's classic "Imagine," Spike Lee pulled out all stops by opening his emotional masterpiece with the Tribute of Light memorial, in which two beams of light rose to the skies to replace the fallen towers. But this is no exercise in exploitation of a horrible event--the story of Monty Brogen's (Edward Norton in his career best performance) last day as a free man before spending 7 years behind bars for drug dealing reflects both the plight of the everyman who has to deal with a sudden tragedy and a powerful kingpin who must existentially ponder his hubristic fall from grace, and the often quoted mirror scene does a stronger reflection of the American government's (re: George W. Bush's) moral decline than any prepared speech could ever accomplish--we can blame every loved one, every ethnicity, every person in high and low places, but in the end, we are responsible for our own faults.

Sometimes shunned by film buffs as a "one for the studio" film because of the general lack of race relations and a white actor playing the protagonist, the film didn't received the love it deserved (it was released only a year after 9/11) until it appeared on a slew of "Best of the Decade" lists recently, and for good reason: Lee's parable of a post-9/11 world, which is colored in melancholy, uncertainty, suspicion, disorientation, distrust, love, hope, and, finally, redemption, is a film that needed time to allow its viewers to grow, to respond to the changing environment around it, in order to be truly appreciated. But now, we can see it for what it truly is: A brave, daring and truthful inclusion to the resume of a gifted director, and the first film to understand what it's like when a country has the rug pulled from under its bare feet.

All the Real Girls (2003, David Gordon Green)

There's been a lot of complaining by critics about the lack of great screen romances--by far the most popular of the decade, The Notebook, was laden with cliches and was based on the titular novel written by a God-loving man who recycles his own sex scenes, for crying out loud. The real key, I think, is that many of the working screenwriters are too old to have remembered the real peaks and valleys of falling in love, and have lost their daring streak to explore those possibilities, instead settling for writing the thing that'll pay the water bill. David Gordon Green was only 27 when he wrote and directed his sophomore debut on a budget of only $2.5 million (it should be noted that star Paul Schneider had a hand in writing the screenplay), and he was still young and fresh enough to have remembered how the slightest awkward phrase spoken can become poetry in the magic of first love. In the opening scene, we are thrust into the blossoming relationship (and the gloriously touching first kiss) between the small-town Valmont, Paul (Paul Schneider in a remarkable performance) and Noel (Zooey Deschanel), the sister of Paul's best friend who has just returned home from boarding school, which has preserved her innocence and virginity. Paul senses something special about this girl, and understanding that falling into bed with her immediately would only ruin their potential as a couple (as it did with every other girl in their sleepy North Carolina town), he takes small steps with Noel, and falls in love with her. However, even though she loves him as well, her newfound freedom and curiosity begins to take over and will irrevocably change their relationship and shatter both their perceptions of self forever.

All the Real Girls is my favorite love story of the decade because it completely ignores all the cliches we've become accustomed to--the hipster indie soundtrack, the cute/klutzy love interest, the wisecraking best friend, the comical family problems. None of these seem to have crossed David Gordon Green's transcendental mind, instead focusing on the sometimes lazy but always charming inhabitants of a Southern town without once condescending to the stereotypes of something like the self-serving Elizabethtown did. Patricia Clarkson is moving as Paul's mother, but it's Schneider and Deschanel who carry this film, and they deserve a lot of attention for this small gem of a film even though both have gone on to bigger projects. We only see Paul's backstory in brief flashbacks, and the emptiness in his eyes is a stark contrast to his awkward body language as Noel shakes him to his core, simply by existing. He's a man who has no idea he can experience pain until after he is hurt, and realizing too late that all the real girls of the film's title he had been with before Noel had real hearts which he broke. Deschanel matches him and even then some, and this is easily her most dense character. She's become the go-to girl for "quirky love interests" in films today (Exhibit A: The girl who takes pictures while jogging in Yes Man), and she's always seen through the love-struck eyes of the protagonist, even in the beloved 500 Days of Summer, never quite being able to tell her own story. What's so extraordinary and rare about her performance as Noel is that she's not a character who is the sum of her quirks, nor is she even the most stand-out gorgeous girl in the film, but it's her innocence which captivates both us and Paul. It's rare to think of how many screenwriters would make Noel a virgin and not have the film be about how to get the two into bed together, nor how many actresses would allow themselves to revert back to their shyness towards the world, but both are handled with hard-earned maturity and this is Deschanel's best performance of her career.

While the three main creative forces of this movie have all gone to bigger things (Deschanel is the adorned indie star, Schneider received Oscar buzz for his performance in Bright Star and has a role in the hit TV show Parks and Recreation, and Green went mainstream with the hit comedy Pineapple Express from the Judd Apatow Factory of Hits), I really think that this is the film that will be rediscovered and pointed to by cineasts as the height of their abilities, because it would be impossible to call this film anything less than real.

Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)

It's fitting to go from writing about one masterful, small, (only in terms of budget, mind you) emotional love story to another similar one, released only a year later, only this one concerns adults. It's been 9 years since the events of Before Sunrise in which the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) convinced French student Celine (Julie Delpy) to get off the train in Vienna, and they walked, talked, and fell in love. Their promise to meet up again in 6 months didn't exactly follow the script to Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember....and as much as I adore Cary Grant, thank God. What we're left with is one of the most beautiful and bittersweet tales of the awkwardness to see your ex again, still feeling the chemistry but internally disallowing yourself to pick up where you left off. Like the best screenplays and the most real situations, Jesse and Celine never explicitly profess the fact that both are still in love with each other, but it's spoken in volumes by their tongue-in-cheek jabs at each other, by their body language, by the way Celine reaches over to place her comforting hand on Jesse's shoulder but then retracts when his eyes almost catch her. The memory of their one night when the magic of true love seemed possible never left either of them--and it's the same in every language, believe me.

Anyone who is wooed by this movie will call it an instant classic, and it would evoke the feel of a classic movie even if weren't a great movie (and luckily for all, it is indeed a masterpiece). The sparse use of editing is one key ingredient to the chemistry between Hawke and Delpy; like the opening argument of Howard Hawks' comedic masterpiece His Girl Friday, the two ex-lovers are almost always seen in the same frame, captured in long takes. Rarely are they reduced to reaction shots with cuts every other line. Every line which stings with regret and pain, every joke which invites a laugh, shows an invisible umbilical cord between the two lovers as they fall back in love without ever mounting up the courage to say it. The long takes have the visual romance of a Max Ophuls film, in which the camera records the actors' faces as often as it waltzes. The Parisian setting and melancholy tone has often been compared to Casablanca. But coming out just before the rise of Facebook and a more virtual world where getting back in touch with old flames is only one awkward instant message away, Before Sunset is already a classic because it invites us back to a bygone era where coming back into a person's life really was all or nothing. Jesse and Celine will always have Paris--but for those romantics who have optimism in the film's inconclusive conclusion, we hope they have so much more.

Cache (2005, Michel Haneke)

Haneke's film may deal with the French guilt over the Algerian colonization (something which has given Haneke a negative name by detractors as exploiting bourgeois guilt), but any way you look at this (i.e. the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the American war in Iraq) it's a deeply unsettling cinematic experience which approaches Hitchcock and Bergman in its exploration of the dark side of human nature, and the evil which watches over us instead of the good. Coming from an American's perspective, the film's irony is in its view that in a world where anyone can be famous for the dumbest thing, even bad parenting (Exhibit B: The Balloon Boy), and everyone desires to "be recognized," it's the very physical act of being seen which terrifies Anne (Juliette Binoche) and Georges (Daniel Auteuil, who I remembered from Claude Sautet's excellent Un Coeur en Hiver) to their cores from their comfortable bourgeois existence. Inexplicably left surveillance tapes of their apartment on their front doorstep, Georges is forced to look deep into his past to find out who has left these tapes on his house, which may or may not be a dead end itself. In the end, however, it's not the person making the tapes who creates the tension in Anne and Georges' marriage, but it is the angry God--the real judge's eye in the surveillance tapes--which is the most unsettling thing. 30 years after its release, the paranoiac premonition of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation had finally come true.

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)

There are few directors left who can truly create their own world within the aspect ratio of a film, but Cuaron is a visionary who has accomplished this many times, from his magical interpretation of a child's imagination in times of depression in A Little Princess, his forgotten modern take on Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, his acclaimed re-invention of the Harry Potter franchise, and now his meditation on dystopia and hope in Children of Men, which in many ways is a post-apocalyptic remake of Casablanca--a former political rebel has become exhausted with the world and is politically neutral in a chaotic time of war and illegal immigrants, but the arrival of his long-lost love reinstates his raison d'etre and his hope for the future. Clive Owen even has the weary eyes and masculine attitude of Humphrey Bogart, who would sock you in an instant but only because he couldn't afford any more punches to the heart.

With all the references to our current state--globalization, illegal immigration, Abu Ghraib, war, government secrets, overall nihilism--it would be childish of Cuaron to point fingers, and instead, he gives us a message which has been lectured by Al Gore but never this eloquently: that it is the younger generation, the new generation, which will prevail and carry on. In the process, Cuaron's film unknowingly gave us a glimpse into the future of the Obama Administration...what coincidence is more serendipitous than hope being delivered by a person of color out of a world full of its own global dementors?

Far From Heaven (2002, Todd Haynes)

Somewhere along the line, Americans developed an allergy to melodrama. Was it television soap operas that did the trick? Or did we think ourselves above that artificiality? Melodramas of the 1950s by maestros such as Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray and Vincente Minnelli flourished because they were character-driven pieces in an era of colorful suburban emptiness. These cinematic operas were popular in the 50s and largely misunderstood today because they often subtly criticize the very things they appear to be celebrating, such as commercialism and a Freudian desire for power. As the maestro Sirk put it when an interviewer confronted his overuse for rear-screen projection, " 'Artificial' used to be a negative word. But every artist today must proceed with a certain artificiality."

But more than the color palette, it is the belief in the characters which has to make melodrama work, and director's frequent failure to accomplish this is what has given melodrama a bad name. Todd Haynes' sympathy for his quietly suffering suburbanites, all outsiders in their own ways, is what brings back the true spirit of Douglas Sirk (Spanish director Pedro Almodovar also deserves that honor) in his luscious and melancholy Far From Heaven. Julianne Moore proves her worth as one of the best actresses of her generation in her quietly heartbreaking performance as a "perfect" housewife living a quiet life of desperation as her marriage comes apart at the seams when her husband struggles to come to terms with his sexuality. (Haynes, a gay man himself, asks the audience what has truly changed in between the film's release date and its setting?) When her Technicolor existence suddenly emerges as a falsity and her "girlfriends" refuse to offer any real support, her only confidante is in her gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) an outsider on the basis of the color of his skin. But in a world where the unwritten rules of society govern actions and impulses of human behavior, there is no heaven for Cathy of the film's title, and her only mistake is not being a perfect wife, though let alone simply being a woman automatically makes her an outsider and a victim of society's strict expectations. Haynes' double-sided mirror of a film forces the viewer to examine their own relationship with the world they inhabit, and why we are limited from creating our own paradise inside this mindset.

The House of Mirth (2000, Terence Davies)

While many film buffs on IMDb lament about how underrated Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence is (myself included, I admit), the bigger crime is how forgotten another Edith Wharton adaptation has become, Terence Davies' take on Wharton's The House of Mirth is more simple in visual style and done on a budget about 1/3 that of Scorsese's film, but its tackling of complex issues is no less diluted--in fact, I was honestly more moved and emotionally floored by Davies' film than I was Scorsese's upon first viewing because Davies' film is less anchored in the early 1900s and more able to place itself into any time where a woman's first mistake is being born without a penis (one of these timelines could've been the 1950s, where Lily Bart and Cathy Whitacre from Far From Heaven surely would've found a confidante in each other).

Wharton's heroines often found themselves and their desires trapped by their friends, often doubling as referees to keep the status quo of their exclusive world, but where Ellen Olenska (the independent female of The Age of Innocence) and Cathy Whitacre were able to divorce their husbands and persevere (though at other people's money and at the cost of losing their respective loves Newland Archer and Raymond), Lily Bart falls the lowest because of her failed attempt at being her own woman and earning her own money. Her refusal to marry a man for security and to play dirty is what will ultimately lead to her downfall, despite the fact that she contains much more intelligence, love and integrity than her so-called friends, many of whom dabble in infidelity and sexual blackmail, among others. By the time Lily can even attempt to get her hands dirty, she has already been outcast and a forgotten woman. If this sounds like something that could've come out of an actresses' story of her time in Hollywood, it's because Terence Davies only reminds you that the film takes place in 1905 at the film's closing scene; everything before it is placed in its time setting only by the costumes, including the hats which lead Richard Roeper to denounce this as a "hat movie," masking his obvious boredom and lack of integrity. It's critics like him who caused Lily's downfall, and Davies' film to be misunderstood for the last 10 years.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)

Like all directors who spend their entire careers exploring complex themes (see Michel Haneke above), Wes Anderson has been sometimes accused as repeating himself, but his exploration of the dynamics of what makes a family has never disappointed, even when he's on auto-pilot in The Darjeeling Limited. This is the film which made me a Wes Anderson fan, and the tinges of melancholy, of a desire to revert back to the impossibility of childhood, are what inflect the dysfunctional, broken Tenenbaum family. Gene Hackman is pitch perfect as the man who wants to regain his family, though he doesn't know it immediately, and the trio of children provide a sort of holy trinity: Neurotic, widowed father and finance wizard Chas (the mind), tennis player Richie (the body) and playwright Margot (the soul). All have peaked creatively at adolescence, and as adults they attempt to find meaning in their lives and the passion they left behind. They're like variations on Charles Foster Kane as written by J.D. Salinger. In one way or another, they hate their father Royal for his emotional abandonment of them, but in trying to regain his control of his children, he also finds his ability to love. And along the journey we get crackerjack lines like, "I'm sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman."

Zodiac (2007, David Fincher)

Film students have learned from Val Lewton horror films that it's not the monster, it's only the hint of the monster, that is truly terrifying. Taking us back to a pre-technological time (you know, when if you wanted to make an impromptu phone call you had to scrounge up some quarters), the 60s as they quickly matured into the 70s is defined by California's uncaught killer and the shadow he (?) cast over a time which was only briefly truly about peace, love and understanding. In the case of the real-life Zodiac Killer, who was never caught, this real-life boogey-man brought classic horror to a very new and unpredictable dimension. And in the case of director David Fincher, it gave him a whole new maturity level to his filmmaking--this is the truly frightening movie his Seven only wishes it could've been. Cue "Hurdy Gurdy Man."

Honorable Mentions: It kills me not being able to write about Munich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Pianist, but I have to set a limit somewhere. Almost Famous is technically my favorite film of the 2000s, but I have no rebuttal against its glossy nostalgia, so it's automatically knocked down a few pegs on the "greatness" scale. I'll long remember The Incredibles, Half Nelson, The Hurt Locker, Rachel Getting Married, There Will Be Blood, The New World, Mulholland Dr., and Isabel Coixet's Elegy.

Aloha

2009-12-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

"I'd like to keep that particular piece of paper myself. I have a hunch it might turn out to be something pretty important. A document like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...and my first report card at school"--Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), Citizen Kane

While it's unlikely that this first blog will amount to anything 50 years from now when I'm 70, I like to think of this as a step forward for me as a girl who simply loves to talk about movies. You might already know me as Goodbye_Ruby_Tuesday at IMDb, but chances are if you've ever met me in person I was too awkward and shy to make conversation. I was not born to be a public speaker, and I communicate best through writing where I can edit, cut and take hours to think of a good comeback without suffering from a delayed reflex.

As you might've already guessed from the christened name of my blog, I love films and I plan to have this blog dedicated to my wondrous adventures in cinema. I won't bore you with a list of favorite films, but I love a good romance with couples who have real chemistry and have real problems that don't resemble plot devices, I love movies that are daring (I'd rather watch a failed Kubrick film than an exercise in mediocrity), I love great visuals in film since I'm also an amateur photographer, and above all I love films which believe in their characters; a director can make the most ridiculous plot twists and get away with it as long as he believes his alter egos are full and fascinating. This is why Douglas Sirk has films on the Criterion Edition and George Steven's films feel like antiques.

I could give you a long autobiography, but since I always feel like I relate more to myself through film, I'll offer the five film characters I most relate to:

Marnie Edgar, Marnie (1964, Alfred Hitchcock)

There are many Hitchcock women I relate to on some level, particularly his aloof blondes--I can possess the self-doubt of Alicia Huberman, the shy dependency of Mrs. De Winter, the need to be seen and understood like Judy Barton, and a recent May/December relationship evoked the uneven level of affection which Lisa Fremont gave to Jeff (why do men have such a hard time believing younger women can truly be content with them?). So why did I pick his most overtly troubled anti-heroine? I don't have a nutty repulsion to red ink and rain storms, and I'm certainly not a kleptomaniac. But the more I see Hitchcock's underrated masterpiece, the more I relate to Marnie, particularly her aloofness to men, which I blame as an inability to trust myself around most other people. This was so bad when I was 19 a family friend said about me (not knowing that I was eavesdropping on him), "She seems to have no interest in men." And unlike Hitchcock's other females, Marnie doesn't quite know how to relate to other people, not knowing how to reveal all her secrets to another person. She is the most unstable, lonely and unique of Hitchcockian women.

Lisa Berndle, Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophuls)

If Marnie represents me as a single woman, Lisa is me as a girl in love. Earlier this year I had a whirlwind romance with someone who was passing through the U.S. Among the many tender words said between us was that I most reminded him of Joan Fontaine, so I choose my favorite role and film of hers, in Max Ophuls' love letter to his beloved Vienna, music and romantic pain. Fontaine's Lisa, who waits eternally for a man who she doesn't deserve, isn't the sort of character many actresses would've wanted to play--she's no Hawksian Woman--but Fontaine makes Lisa's fidelity a strength, not a weakness. And in the end, it's nice to know that feminine strength is celebrated even as it becomes clear that like the backdrop of the train ride she and Stefan go on for a date (the best first date in cinema, bar none), the romance she wants to believe in is merely an illusion.

And circumstantially, this man I loved so dearly also disappeared from my life too quickly (about as quickly as he had entered it), promising that we would be together again soon, and like Lisa, I like writing long, self-confessional letters, even in this world of Facebook and emailing.

Marion, Der Himmel uber Berlin/Wings of Desire (1987 Wim Wenders)

Of all the characters in Wender's poetic film who suffer from an existential crisis, the beautiful trapeze artist Marion is the closest resembling, well, a human center--not to mention the "Earth Angel" the Penguins sang about back in 1954. A woman needing to be touched, (literally and figuratively) to be reminded of her gravity on Earth, whose desire will compel an angel to surrender eternity for her. As played with serenity by the late Solveig Dommartin (she was director Wim Wender's girlfriend at the time of filming), existential ache has never sounded more poetic. "Longing. Longing for a wave of love that would stir in me. That's what makes me clumsy. The absence of pleasure. Desire for love. Desire to love."

Robert "Bobby" Eroica Dupea, Five Easy Pieces (1970, Bob Rafelson)

The three previous characters reflected the mysterious desires of women, which is easy for me to relate to. As the confused, short-tempered and lonely drifter in Rafelson's beloved cult film, Bobby might be on the other side of the world, but he's still just as close to my heart, sort of the undeniable dark side of the moon. Quite simply, I understand Bobby's anger at being a lost traveler, out of fear that anything good will fall to pieces (an original draft of Carol Eastman's screenplay, which shapes Bobby's emotional wanderlust from the death of his beloved mother, makes his motives clearer). And it's the man's disappointment in himself to which I relate, and the fact that I seldom realize my full potential and go after what I want--and knowing what I want--that's my biggest obstacle in life right now. Luckily, at age 20 I still have a few good years ahead of me and a supportive family before I fully become the extent of Bobby's misfortunes and failures.

Consuela Castillo, Elegy (2008, Isabel Coixet)

Looking back on the women I chose (if "choose" is the right verb) for this list, it feels that most of their motives are bound by the men they love, and in turn, me being in a relationship last year, finding a stranger to trust with my body, has given me both perspective and illusion in the same spellbinding moments. Falling in love is the most beautiful and scary thing a person can ever do in life, and I have yet to see a film that personally captured my personal experience. Isabel Coixet's beautiful meditation of age and beauty comes pretty darn close, though, especially in its depiction of a May/December romance, which I myself was in, that older man are blind to the fact that they are loved for how they make women feel and not the youth or handsome features they only think they lack. I wish I could be as composed as Conseula (not to mention as exotically beautiful as actress Penelope Cruz--I'll have to settle for Veronica Lake and Liv Ullmann comparisons), and in fact there were many moments in which I found myself relating equally to the insecure older professor David Kapesh (played by Ben Kinglsley, one of his better recent performances), but her lovely, pure innocence and choosing to follow her scholarly ambitions over beauty (a key line which made me see myself in her is Kingsley's narration "She knows that she's beautiful but she isn't quite sure what to do with her beauty") makes her something of an alter ego to myself--not to mention proof that Penelope Cruz is capable of far more as an actress than casting directors and the media usually give her credit for.