No Limits to Interpretation

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Inspired by my second viewing of Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control on DVD today, here's an image I wanted to share with all of you, the significance of which I will try to explain below:

The Limits of Control, Jarmusch's latest film, is one of the most divisive not only of this year, but of the great iconoclastic director's career: Many decried it as Jarmusch's shallowest film ever, while others defended it as quite possibly his most "earnest" work. I saw it at the Angelika Film Center sometime during its theatrical run in May, and while my experience of watching this abstract, minimalist, deliberately repetitive film ranged from fascination to occasional moments of boredom, by the end my head was swimming in intellectual and visceral overload. A second viewing today only strengthened my affection for it—and the image above encapsulates why. 

For those who have not seen the film (and watch out; there may be spoilers ahead): The Limits of Control is basically one extended shaggy-dog tale about a nameless Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé) who embarks on a vague mission that involves meeting up with a slew of bohemian characters who spout off on subjects related to art and science, and exchanging matchboxes with cryptic clues on small pieces of paper (all of which he disposes of by putting them in his mouth and washing them down with espressos). That's pretty much all there is to the storyline; the story, one soon realizes, is hardly the point. This is one of those films that are almost entirely about how ideas, characters and moods are expressed through sound and image. Thus, Jarmusch lays on the druggily evocative drone of Japanese band Boris; rhymes shots and camera angles as a way to evoke the Lone Man's insistent focus on routine; and so on. To try to describe it all is to perhaps miss the point; this is a movie above all to surrender to, to experience.

This is not to say, however, that The Limits of Control is merely about pure sensation. I do think Jarmusch has an honest-to-God subject—maybe even a message—here, one that resonates with me as someone who is deeply interested in art in all its various forms: It's a film about opening oneself up to different ways of looking at the world. "Reality is arbitrary," the Lone Man utters during his meeting with his assassination target—an unnamed American played by Bill Murray—repeating a mantra uttered by one of his contacts. Jarmusch, through his exultant celebration of the sheer movie-ness of the particular alternate reality he creates in this film, suggests that one's view of the world is basically what one envisions it to be, through science, painting, film, music, etc. Unlike what the Lone Man's American target believes about himself, no one really has a monopoly on an understanding of the way the real world operates. (Anyone who thinks he does "ought to go to a cemetery," as another repeated mantra in the film goes.)

This brings me to the image above. In The Limits of Control, the Lone Man himself doesn't say a whole lot, sticking closely to his habits and routines (including a tai chi routine he's glimpsed doing in his fancy clothes), and keeping his emotions mostly in check. He operates, then, as a kind of blank slate on which his contacts can voice their various visions of art and reality—and that, I think, is what the above image expresses beautifully. After he has accomplished his mission, he returns to the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid and takes in a work of art—Antoni Tàpies's "Gran Sábana"—that is essentially a white bedsheet spread across a canvas. If, in his previous excursions to the museum, he has looked at artwork that illustrates images he encounters in real life, this time he's looking at a work that basically mirrors himself.

When it comes to approaches toward art, I'm not always so much interested in what a work of art can tell me about myself, but what it can reveal either about the artist himself or the wider world. In some ways, I feel something of a kinship with this nameless, impassive hitman. And that's why I find the above image very beautiful, and why I think The Limits of Control resonates with me as deeply as it does.

How Does It Feel?

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Just wanted to drop a quick link for you all to ponder and savor.

Matt Zoller Seitz, filmmaker, film critic, and the founder of the film blog The House Next Door—a place I've haunted every once in a while—is currently in the midst of writing up a series at Salon.com's new blog Film Salon considering the greatest film directors of this decade. His latest entry is especially scintillating, a consideration of a batch of directors he labels as "the sensualists": David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-Wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Here's how he kicks it off:

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in "Stagecoach," and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in "The Third Man." -- Walker Percy, "The Moviegoer" (1961)

The poignancy of that quote comes from the implication that the novel’s hero, Binx Bolling, is so alienated from his existence that films feel more real to him than life. But certain filmmakers -- I call them sensualists -- go Walker Percy one better. Through boldly expressive shots, cuts, sound cues and music, they suggest that we experience movies as moments because we experience life that way, too.

Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai and Hou Hsiao-hsien -- the decade’s great sensualist filmmakers -- accept this proposition as a given. Read a cable channel's one-paragraph schedule-grid summary of Mann’s "Ali," "Collateral," "Miami Vice" and "Public Enemies"; Malick’s "The New World" (all three versions, each of which is a different and equally valid film); Wong’s "In the Mood for Love," "2046," "The Hand" (a segment of the omnibus "Eros") and "My Blueberry Nights"; Lynch’s "Mulholland Dr." and "Inland Empire," or Hou’s "Three Times" and "Millennium Mambo," and you would never guess that the films’ directors had anything in common.

But they share a defining trait: a lyrical gift for showing life in the moment, for capturing experience as it happens and as we remember it.

This is an absolutely inspired linkage of brilliant filmmakers, and I feel compelled to add my own personal slant: all of these artists, in their own ways, have had a major influence in shaping the way I watch films these days. They—especially Wong (whose 2046 I would probably count as one of the great films of the decade) and Hou (whose Flight of the Red Balloon continues to be a great source of inspiration in my life)—have taught me to fully embrace, without apology, the sensual and the visceral in movies, as opposed to focusing on just its literary values (theme, story, dialogue, etc.). What words could satisfyingly describe the romantic frisson of two married people passing by each other in entrancing slow motion in In the Mood for Love; the sheer terror of an actress's distorted close-up in Inland Empire; or the transcendental spirit that infuses the whole of The New World? Embrace these ravishing moments, I say, and embrace filmmakers who dare to push the artistic envelope on such sensuality, the way these filmmakers have done. Relinquish some of that emotional control; that's what cinema, I've come to believe, is really all about, and why I continue to adore it so.

(Golden) Global Affairs

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Looking back on the first entry I wrote to kick off this tear of blogging I've done here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second in the past month, I notice that I had initially planned on posting merely once a week, as I have tried to do in the past. It's gratifying, then, to see that it's become much more than a weekly thing. I hope all of you who read this are enjoying this barrage, because for once, I'm enjoying throwing this barrage at you all.

First things first, then: I find myself with nothing to say, really, about the Golden Globe nominations announced yesterday; there aren't many noteworthy surprises among the crop that I can see. And it's futile to complain about the Hollywood Foreign Press's legion of snubs (Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker, Tilda Swinton for Julia, the provocative Romanian film Police, Adjective—the list could go on and on), because most likely they're just nominating based on existing trends anyway. So no surprise Up in the Air—which is still on my to-watch list—is getting a lot of love this year; many critics groups have already crowned it as the movie of the year; same for The Hurt Locker (though yeah, I think it's a great film as well). It's all about glamour, artificial drama and horse races, not the art of cinema; in other words, it's showbiz, not art. But I'm sure many of you already knew that. 

Once I see most or all of the nominated films/performances, perhaps I'll have more to say, mostly regarding personal preferences. Also, I don't watch a whole lot of primetime television anymore, so I definitely have next-to-nothing to say about the TV nominations (I still haven't jumped on the "Mad Men" bandwagon yet, for one thing).

In the meantime, a few words on a couple more films, one of them a Golden Globe hopeful.

Invictus (2009; Dir.: Clint Eastwood)

I'm not sure I have much to really say about this one either. Clint Eastwood's latest work is well-intentioned and has a couple of excellent lead performances from Morgan Freeman, as Nelson Mandela, and Matt Damon, as a South African rugby-team leader—but it's also just kind of boring and plodding in spots. It feels less like august contemplation from this 79-year-old American director, and more like merely a lack of urgency. Nevertheless, it doesn't screw up the inspiring true story—a South African rugby team's climb from national ill repute to World Cup contenders in 1995 during Nelson Mandela's presidency—at its heart, and it has at least one intelligent thematic curve to its otherwise predictably told story worth engaging with.

Structurally speaking, Invictus hews fastidiously to the standard underdog-sports-movie formula—no sucker-punch curves in its third act a la Million Dollar Baby—but it turns out not to be so much about whether this particular sports underdog becomes World Cup champions in 1995; if you know the history of the event the film covers, you already know that they succeed. Instead, Invictus—at least, in its more intriguing first half—directly takes on the idea of this rugby team's climb to victory as a consciously manipulative social symbol. Mandela, in his zeal to find a way to close the divide between blacks and whites in post-apartheid South Africa, latches onto the Springboks—a team that has become a denigrated symbol of South Africa's apartheid past—as a symbolic way to unite the nation and bridge that racial divide. What is admittedly refreshing about Invictus is that it doesn't merely accept Mandela's political calculation at face value; it genuinely explores the implications of this move, even questioning, at least a little bit, whether Mandela was perhaps being more politically manipulative than noble.

Once the sports-movie formula starts to really kick in during its last hour or so, Invictus becomes considerably less engaging, as the team's path to World Cup victory merely plays itself out via rather unimaginatively filmed rugby sequences (Eastwood's idea of turning up the suspense during the climactic final match is to turn a whole stretch of it into uniform slow-motion). Nevertheless, Damon's character's burgeoning political awareness, thanks to Mandela's calculation, is sometimes quite affecting; there's one rather beautiful scene in which he stands in the prison Mandela was held in for 27 years and literally imagines his turmoil. And if you consider the whole story in terms of Mandela's strategy of focusing on symbols as a source of national inspiration, then even the by-the-numbers rugby sequences take on a deeper retroactive resonance: It's not so much whether the Springboks win or not, but how their run toward the big prize unites and inspires a nation, at least for the moment—which makes the fact that they do achieve victory perhaps even more inspiring than it might have been otherwise.

Invictus may not necessarily breathe fresh air into this played-out genre, but Eastwood handles things with his usual no-nonsense simplicity—even if, in this particular case, "no-nonsense" means something occasionally didactic and dull.


Loot (2008; Dir.: Darius Marder)

Darius Marder's debut feature—which is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York—follows Lance Larson, an amateur treasure hunter looking for treasure stashed during World War II by a couple of veterans, one in Austria, the other in the Philippines. But his journeys takes him into many unexpected, psychologically fraught areas, one that ultimately becomes less about finding treasure, and more about how the two veterans themselves find ways to deal with their sometimes horrifying memories of war. Lance himself becomes rattled by the personal parallels he finds among these two vets (the vets had 19-year-old sons that were done in by drug overdoses; Lance's 19-year-old son is currently fighting his own addiction). As their journeys draw to their respective conclusions, whether or not the two vets find the closure they seek, Lance seems to have his own worldview and priorities expanded right before our very eyes. In a year in which a lot of excellent films (A Serious Man, You, the Living, Fantastic Mr. Fox—any others you readers can think of along those same lines?) have been, in some ways, about grasping and possibly understanding forces beyond ourselves, Loot is a modest, unexpectedly moving addition to such distinguished company.

Cinematic Impressions Subject To Change (With Notice)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

An Education (2009; Dir.: Lone Scherfig)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009; Dir.: Wes Anderson)

Here are two films that, for me personally, demonstrate that, yes, even (nonprofessional) film critics can evolve in their opinions of films over time. Not even we are wedded to positive or negative first impressions!

A couple of weeks removed from finally seeing the much-hyped British film An Education, I'm finding myself less enamored of it as a whole than I was immediately after the screening. For a film that focuses in large part on main character Jenny's (Carey Mulligan) desire to break out of her sheltered existence and see the wider world, An Education is mostly lacking in similar worldly wisdom, preferring to pitch most of its supporting characters as broad stereotypes and generally shoving aside real-world complexity for standard-issue coming-of-age homilies.

Still, as I watched the film, I found myself identifying so completely with Jenny's desires to expand her horizons that I can't quite bring myself to hate on this film too much, as simplistic and visually unremarkable as it is. It's not so much Carey Mulligan's charm that slays me in this regard (though, make no mistake, she's pretty much as magnetic as you've heard). No, I think it's mostly just a personal thing: As someone who still lives at home with his parents in central New Jersey, and who has always had an inferiority complex, justified or not, over all that I feel I have yet to experience in life and art, I was probably primed from the outset to see myself reflected intensely in Jenny's yearning to break free from her own sheltered home life and run off with the supposedly more experienced, "worldly" David (Peter Sarsgaard). Hell, I'd love to experience Paris in all its glory if I could do it on someone else's dime. Wouldn't you?

Which is why it's ultimately disappointing to see An Education go in the reductively moralizing direction that it does in its last 20 minutes or so, as David is revealed to be a world-class cad and Jenny finds her life in a rut as a result of his deceptions—lies, it must be said, that she probably allowed herself to believe in the glamour of it all. Earlier in the film, Jenny passionately argues against what she had come to see as a deadening focus on book-learning at her private school; this struck me as having an unmistakable ring of truth: there are just some things about life you can't learn in a classroom. Once the bottom has come out from under her life, however, the only thing Jenny has learned from all this, apparently, is the value of staying in school. All well and good, of course...but what of all that high culture and worldly awareness she's supposedly picked up, for well and ill? All for nought, it seems, in the film's mad dash toward a tidy resolution. It's as if the film ultimately slaps her—and, by extension, us in the audience—in the face for achieving a level of the sophistication she yearned for so poignantly from the beginning. I feel like the true lessons of her unfortunate story are more complicated than An Education is prepared to admit; that's why, once the resonance of its evocation of youthful awakening has worn off, the film, in the end, feels far less than the sum of its parts, the more I consider it.

The kind of worldly wisdom An Education pretends to offer is in full supply in Wes Anderson's stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation Fantastic Mr. Fox—a film that, in contrast to my experience with An Education, only gets better the more I think about it.

To preface, a confession: When it comes to the films of Wes Anderson, you can call me an agnostic. I've always recognized the heart and sincerity behind Anderson's fussily designed cinematic worlds, and I always believe I grasp what it is he's aiming to evoke or explore in a given film of his. But, with the exception of Rushmore—and with the caveat that I still have not caught up with his 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket—his films have mostly left me unmoved, with the sense that there's some kind of block preventing me from fully responding to his films the way I feel like I should. Is Anderson, with his penchant for the self-consciously whimsical and overdesigned, to blame? Not sure; I can always tell he's sincere and engaged even as he's, say, dazzling us with a Jerry Lewis-inspired cross-section of a boat in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Maybe I just keep hoping for more emotional directness in his family stories than he's willing to provide: his quirky sense of clever humor masks unspoken emotional turmoil, but the armor is very thick indeed. I see Anderson's notes, but, with isolated exceptions in all of his films, generally I have trouble hearing the music.

Now, with Fantastic Mr. Fox—his first animated feature—I feel like I've inched closer to hearing that music...and what beautiful music it is! There are still moments of his distracting ironic distance—music cues, for instance, that play as trivializing counterpoint to the emotion of a particular scene—but for once I left a film of his feeling that perhaps he does have something valuable and wise to impart to us after all. Maybe, with stop-motion animation and furry creatures to work with, Anderson has indeed finally discovered the logical toy box on which to splash his sense of visual play—a playfulness that makes Anderson one of the few filmmakers working today since Jacques Tati who demand you roam your eye all over his widescreen frames—while aiming for a grand, resonant consideration of universal childhood and adulthood in all of its joys and compromises.

Fantastic Mr. Fox clarifies at least one aspect of Wes Anderson's art that has always been a source of both fascination and frustration: While he is surely interested in real life and human beings, he has always couched his inquiries amid whimsical backdrops that beguile on the surface while daring you to discover the darker emotions underneath the look-at-me surface oddities. The Royal Tenenbaums explored upper-class family tensions in a picture-storybook setting; The Life Aquatic took stock of its titular explorer/filmmaker's life amidst a marine dream adventure world; The Darjeeling Limited used India as the setting for a brotherly reconciliation. Not all of his films necessarily take place in what one would recognize as "the real world," yet Anderson always aims to evoke hidden currents of real-world darkness among his human characters. Now, in Fantastic Mr. Fox, he even ditches human beings—and yet, even as he emphasizes these creatures' animal natures (a refreshing emphasis after the too-cutesy anthropomorphism that marred the otherwise wonderful Up), the moments of melancholy peek through even more strongly, and touchingly, than ever. What felt evasive previously simply feels true here.

The distance between a character's inner nature and the civilized front he puts up—possibly a concise description of Anderson's multifaceted vision and aesthetic, come to think of it—becomes more of an overt theme than in his previous films. Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) has turned away from a life of chicken thievery in order to settle down and raise a family, but his animal restlessness remains: he continues to cause mischief on the side. His side mischief gets his family and friends into trouble when his activities land him in dangerous hot water with three vengeful farmers. But Anderson is not interested in creating a simplistic morality play about settling down, paying more attention to your wife and child, etc.; Anderson's vision is more complex and empathetic—a bid for understanding and acceptance rather than easy moralizing.

There's plenty more to parse and savor in this film, but for now, I'll just say that the more I reflect on Fantastic Mr. Fox, the more impressed and moved I am by it. I look forward to seeing this again on a big screen; I also look forward, once again, to revisiting his previous films to determine whether I have indeed evolved in my appreciation of the ever-elusive Wes Anderson. It wouldn't be the first time I've turned around on my attitude around on a filmmaker or film I've previously been cold on, and it surely won't be the last.

Keep the Precious Cast, But Push The Rest Away

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—As most people know by now, it's that time of year: the season when Hollywood studios bring out their big prestige-pic guns for awards consideration. Over the years, I've pretty much learned to not put any traction in the increasingly irrelevant taste of the Hollywood Foreign Press, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the other awards-giving groups of its ilk; nevertheless, as much as I may cluck my tongue at these glorified popularity contests, I usually find myself getting rather caught up in movie-awards season, if only to see just how much my taste departs from the films getting all the awards hype. Here's one case, among others surely to come:

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009; Dir.: Lee Daniels)

Truth be told, I was rather dreading this movie. It was bad enough when Slumdog Millionaire won a whole slew of awards, including the big Oscar Best Picture prize, earlier this year for insensitively using the plight of the poor in India as a mere backdrop for a gaudy, clichéd, stylistically tricked-up Hollywood (or, er, Bollywood) fairy tale. Based on its trailer, Precious looked to possibly be worse: just as much of an over-the-top fantasy of poverty, but meant to be more gritty and realistic in manner. At least Slumdog was stylistically upfront about its being a fantasy, with handheld jiggling, quick edits and canted camera angles providing all sorts of distracting surface activity. Going into Precious, I was ready to be disgusted by a surfeit of sensationalism masquerading as "the way things are for these poor black folk."

Not so fast. Precious turns out to be, oh, maybe only half as offensive as its trailers make it out to be. The objectionable half mostly involves the unbelievably grotesque scenes of main character Precious's (Gabourey Sidibe) home life with her monstrously lazy and abusive mother (Mo'Nique). A montage of fatherly incest intercut with images of frying eggs...images of Precious being forced by Mom to eat cooked pig's feet...Mom throwing a TV down a bunch of stairs aiming for Precious's head, moments after she throws her baby on the floor like a plastic doll...Precious being forced to steal (I kid you not) fried chicken, and later seen walking around with her stolen bucket, wiping her greasy fingers on her pants and shirt. Believe me, there's plenty more—and all I have to say about this parade of stereotypes is, didn't Dave Chappelle lampoon this kind of stuff years ago on his late, lamented "Chappelle's Show"? (Remember Chappelle's Tiger Woods and his "Goodbye fried rice, hello fried chicken"?) And yet here we are in Precious, with director Lee Daniels apparently taking all of this with utmost seriousness of purpose (as well as with a whole bag of gratuitous stylistic visual tricks that are almost never deployed effectively in the film). Um, seriously?

Of course, Precious is also meant to be an uplifting tale of how this wronged young girl finds her way out of her hellhole of abuse and poverty. And you know what? Some of the more hopeful moments do come off fairly effectively, providing a sometimes genuinely inspiring contrast to the Jerry Springer-tinted domestic freak-show scenes. The classroom scenes in particular—in which the barely literate Precious tries to wade her way through alternative education after being thrown out of public school—are by turns funny and warmly emotional, with one particularly wrenching scene in which Precious breaks down in class and gives voice to all her insecurities in front of her teacher (Paula Patton).

If nothing else, Precious is proof positive of just how much great acting can elevate even the most ridiculous of scripts. Much has already been written about Mo'Nique's imposing performance as the shameless welfare-queen mother; I'd be more enthusiastic about her acting here if she wasn't saddled with such a risible role. Sidibe is a real find, however: she affects a kind of mumble in her vocal manner that feels almost poetic in the way it locates the wounded heart of her character. By all accounts, Sidibe herself is the polar opposite of the locked-in, barely articulate Precious; how she manages to portray such a locked-in character so empathetically is just one of those cherishable mysteries of the acting field. However she does it, she seems to have inspired the rest of the cast—yes, including Mariah Carey—to rise to her level. (I, for one, am excited at the prospect of seeing what wonders she may have inside of her in future performances.)

It's too bad their soulfulness is wasted on such an overwrought, silly, condescending movie. But hey, at least Precious isn't entirely flat-out laughable and dignity-free like last year's Frozen River.

Lookin' Sharp (I Hope)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Hope all of you enjoying the sleek (?) new look I've given to My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. If nothing else, I hope that this will indicate how serious I am this time—after a lot of broken promises over the past year—about keeping up with posting on this blog. These days, I find that my excitement about posting here is what keeps me going every day, among other things.

Oh, and no overhaul of a blog of mine would be complete without a still from Wong Kar-Wai's glorious Fallen Angels, seen above (just in case some of you didn't know where the photo in the blog's head banner came from).

Herzog, Herzog, What Have Ye Said?

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—In lieu of a review of Werner Herzog's latest film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: first, I will first direct you all to choice selections of a phone interview I did with Herzog recently regarding that film and a few other topics, posted here at my employer's Speakeasy blog. And second, I will step out of my objective-reporter hat and quickly say that yes, this creepily, subtly, fascinatingly strange little movie is very much worth seeing and puzzling over, and that I much prefer this to the more flamboyantly (and, to me, insufferably) over-the-top Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Hey, even Herzog seems to suspect that My Son, My Son is rather better than Bad Lieutenant! But don't take his, or my, word for it; it comes out for a brief run at the IFC Center this Friday.

Brought Down From Imagined Heights

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Because I have been a bit busy of late with an article I'm working on for The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog, I have not been able to blog as much about movies I've seen recently until now. But hey, that's what happens when writing about film isn't your full-time job.

Here's another one for your reading, and my writing, pleasure.

The Sun (2005; Dir.: Alexander Sokurov)

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

This is one strange movie—odd not because of its subject, but because of the defamiliarizing style Sokurov employs to explore that subject. The subject is Japanese Emperor Hirohito (played in the film by Issei Ogata) during the last days of his rule towards the end of World War II, and Sokurov seems, among other things, interested in highlighting Hirohito's isolation from the outside world of Japan that he supposedly reigns over by divine right. But the way Sokurov pulls us into Hirohito's environment through visual means is idiosyncratic, to put it mildly. He lights a lot of indoor spaces so that those spaces take on the texture of a creepy horror movie; he uses an extremely spare musical score, and at many other points simply relies on sounds of jets flying far overhead the Imperial Palace to create a feeling of desolation; and, to top it off, he films the whole thing in earthy, purposefully smudged-looking digital video, using modern means to make a historical film feel vaguely like something from the early days of 19th-century photography. Neat trick! (Not even Michael Mann was quite as ambitious or imaginative in his use of high-definition video for Public Enemies this year—four years after The Sun, mind you.)

The result of these off-center artistic choices is that The Sun ends up feeling truly out of time and place. It's a purely visceral sensation that suits Sokurov's multifaceted view of Hirohito as a sheltered ruler whose childlike affectations—most notably, his way of moving his mouth like that of a fish trying to breathe (marine life being of particular fascination to him)—may well mask an innermost desire to cast off the role that has been conferred upon him by Japanese society and tradition.

The Sun isn't so much a psychological study as it is an impressionistic portrait not just of the imperial Japanese ruler himself, but of the sizable bridge between the man as a public image and as a flesh-and-blood person. Perhaps its most telling scene, in that respect, is a relatively straightforward one of Hirohito being photographed by Americans as he stands outside the Imperial Palace, tending to his flowers. The scene—in which the photographers snicker amongst themselves, "This is the Emperor?" as Hirohito's aide tries to keep the photographers at a distance—might as well play as a precursor to the ritual of the modern-day paparazzi going after a glamorous Hollywood celebrity. This is the Emperor stripped completely of the kind of God-like mystique that even Hirohito himself sometimes seems to believe. Really, it's merely a literalization of a disconnected feeling Sokurov instills everywhere else in The Sun, both physically and psychically.

Sokurov's vision of Emperor Hirohito's mental landscape in The Sun may strike some as distant and chilly for a while, but the film eventually reveals itself to ultimately take a compassionate stance toward the man. In its closing scene, it's rather cathartic to see Hirohito, liberated from his position of power after agreeing with General Douglas MacArthur to step down, acting almost like a warmly recognizable human being again with his wife. Alas, Hirohito may be ready to move on from being a god in the eyes of men, but, as one last twist suggests, the rest of Japanese society may not be so ready for what they perceive as a majestic fall from grace, not only for him but for Japan in general (this, of course, coming as it does on the heels of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings). Maybe there is indeed a greater tragedy in this story than one man's yearning to be brought down from imagined heights.

(The Sun is now playing at Cinema Village in New York.)

Choose Your Own Interpretation?

NEW YORK—Art critic Lance Esplund, in the context of a review published by The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, drops this turn of phrase at the end of a section in which he trashes Gerhard Richter (in the context of a review of a Richter exhibition currently running at the Marian Goodman Gallery): "As far as painting goes, Mr. Richter's formless decorations leave his viewers with virtually nothing (I guess this is the point), which allows them to make of his work whatever they want it to be."

Now, I might as well admit right now that I'm not too deeply familiar with Richter's art, apart from some of his smudged, and haunting, photorealist portraits of Red Army Faction members. (I'm not deeply familiar with Esplund's criticism either, so maybe Richter is just a critical blind spot of his.) However...my first reaction to this was, "Yeah, so?" Maybe I've just become more of an "art-for-art's-sake" kind of guy over the years, but Esplund's line of reasoning suggests to me an awfully shortsighted view of what can be beautiful and challenging about art. It's automatically a negative thing for a work of art to perhaps be so elusive in its meanings that whatever one "gets" from that work is entirely determined by subjective impressions and morés? Me, I thought that was one of the great things about art: no one necessarily reacting the same way to a work, perhaps coming away from it with something different, no matter what a particular artist may or may not have had in mind while creating it (if anything). Better a work of art that inspires many different interpretations than one that spoon-feeds you its intentions, I say.

It's fine that Richter's abstract paintings leave Esplund cold; I'm sure he's not the only one. But when I read that sentence, it felt to me as if he was implying that there's something wrong with work that leaves things entirely up to the viewer as to how it ought to be perceived and interpreted. It's a line of reasoning I've heard many times before, and personally, it strikes me as almost antithetical to the potential of art.

Of course, if anyone feels I am overreacting here, by all means, feel free to let me know!

Day of Birth

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Twenty-four years ago today, I was given birth and thus introduced to this world.

Twenty-four years later—well, I could do all the usual the introspective things and reflect on how much I've learned over the years (a lot, obviously), how much I have yet to learn, what lies ahead for me and what I would like to lie ahead. But for now, I will not do that. (If I did, who knows? I may end up feeling more depressed than invigorated.) Instead, I'm going to paaaaaaartyyyyy!!! 

In that spirit, I am celebrating my 24th birthday with a two-night, two-city celebration. On the first night, tonight from 8 p.m. - 2 a.m., I plan to have some tapas, drinks and hookah at the Kairo Kafe in New Brunswick, N.J. (an area close to my home turf).

Then, on Saturday night, also from 8 p.m. - 2 a.m., I will trek to New York to hang out for more drinks (but no hookah) at Langan's, a pretty nice bar and restaurant on 47th St. between 6th and 7th Aves., very close to my office, the News Corp. building. (The snow that is forecast for Saturday will not stop me, though I hope that won't stop others from coming out.)

Consider this an open invitation to all of you fine readers of mine to come and wish me a happy birthday on either of those nights, if you can swing it. Maybe I'll meet some of you readers for the first time!

Tsai Ming-liang Plays Himself

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Hope all of you had a relaxing and stomach-filling Thanksgiving weekend! Despite the fact that I worked on Thursday (but eh, no big deal, I'm used to it by now, and at least we got fed something Thanksgiving-like in nature), my holiday weekend was quite fine. On Friday evening, I celebrated a good friend's birthday at a Japanese restaurant in midtown (the damage my dinner did my wallet, though, made my eyes pop out at the end of the evening; I definitely went overbudget, though I suppose it was worth it, in the end). And on Saturday, I saw two good-to-possibly-great films yesterday: An Education at an indie theater about half an hour away from my house, and Afterschool via IFC On Demand. I aim to say a few words about one or both of them soon enough.

For now, however, my film-review catch-up continues with a contrasting pair of films...

The Hole (1998; Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang)

After being puzzled and exhilarated by Tsai's Face six days earlier, I decided last weekend to take in another film by the fanciful Taiwanese auteur shown at the Asia Society (part of a rather incomplete retrospective programmed there): his sci-fi/musical fantasy The Hole. This wondrous film by no means dims my newfound fascination with this director.

Based on the three films of his I've seen—Face, The Hole and his 2006 Malaysia-set I Don't Want to Sleep Alone—it seems to me that Tsai is, at least in part, interested in articulating the wide-open gap between hidden and expressed desires. All three of those films have long stretches with barely any dialogue passing between characters, simply an intense sense of longing that both of them, for one reason or another, are only too careful about expressing too loudly. Tsai utilizes the kind of long-take aesthetic made popular by compatriot Hou Hsiao-hsien, which might suggest that he's aiming for Hou's brand of patient realism. But Tsai alternates stretches of slow-burning realism with surreal, fourth-wall-breaking flights of fancy, boldly pointing up the vast differences between brightly colored fantasy and glum reality, and in the process suggesting, through such juxtapositions, the depths of his characters' wants and needs.

All of this can be seen in The Hole, in which Tsai turns a sci-fi premise—a deadly plague that strikes Taipei in the last days before the year 2000—into a romantic two-character pas de deux between Tsai's usual protagonist, Hsiao-Kang (played by Tsai's usual leading man, Lee Kang-sheng) and a woman downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei). The characters never quite fully articulate their thirst to connect with each other amidst the dreary, apocalyptic madness (it never stops raining in this world); perhaps they are too fearful of getting infected by the "Taiwan fever" to risk forming a human connection. But Tsai intervenes to articulate their desires for them: every once in a while, he throws in elaborately dreamlike song-and-dance numbers, music supplied by 1950s Chinese pop hits sung by Grace Chang, all cleverly connected to a certain physical and emotional moment.    

When they do finally connect, after a moment in which they both fear they have lost the opportunity to do so forever, the sense of joy—quietly expressed by a simple image in which one almost literally lifts the other from the depths into the light—is overwhelming; only another song-and-dance number can do it justice. I hope I have come close to doing some justice to just how wonderful a film is The Hole, in which Tsai Ming-liang—as seems to be his directorial métier—is willing to follow his instincts and risk absurdity in pursuit of deep emotional truths and sublime visionary beauty.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003; Dir.: Thom Andersen)

The splendors, such as they are, of Los Angeles Plays Itself are, by their very nature, cerebral rather than visceral; nevertheless, it must be said that Thom Andersen's 169-minute video essay on the depiction of the many facets of Los Angeles throughout cinema history does offer the immediate pleasures of epic ambition, a dizzying wealth of information and film clips, and assorted moments of revelatory critical insight. Alas, my interest in this oft-celebrated, rarely screened documentary more or less ends there.

Look, it's not that I find Andersen's aims totally unworthy. Fundamentally, he's trying to dig underneath what he sees as Hollywood cinema's misrepresentations of his beloved city geographically, historically, sociologically, or otherwise—in other words, trying to find the realities behind distortions about the city that we perhaps have accepted as close to the truth because they have been seen in popular and independent American cinema for so many decades. That's certainly the kind of goal I instinctively find valuable as a wannabe film critic—and yet, even so, it's one that I ultimately find myself less than wholly sympathetic with here. I mean, we're dealing with movies here; I would like to think that most of us recognize from the outset that what we see flickering on movie screens, even after all these years, through films like Chinatown, Blade Runner, Short Cuts, and even that trashy 1986 Sylvester Stallone flick Cobra, isn't necessarily true to reality. In seeming to prize more accurate depictions of Los Angeles in films like The Exiles and Killer of Sheep (certainly great films, both) over those of more blatantly fictional constructs like the ones mentioned above, it almost seems to me like he's going rather self-defeatingly against the grain of what is possible in cinema.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'm sympathetic to Andersen's interest in exposing the many truths about Los Angeles behind the cinematic fictions, and one could insightfully apply his methods to other major cities commonly represented in film over the years (Woody Allen's upper-class fantasy conception of New York versus the real New York, for instance). I suppose I just don't get as upset about those fictions as Andersen apparently does—certainly not enough to make, or sit through, a nearly three-hour documentary essay methodically (and rather dryly) subverting them. I'm not against truth; I just take the fictions in stride more than he does.

All that said, Los Angeles Plays Itself is admittedly still worth seeing and arguing over—especially in its third section, titled "The City as Subject," in which Andersen gets makes some fascinating political points about how fictions about Los Angeles class and race relations are created, and who has the power to create them (he suggests that it's the artists with money who create these alternate cinematic representations). Whatever you may think about whether what he's ultimately doing is actually worth doing or not, the film as a whole will offer new ways of looking at individual films and of cinema in general. In that sense, it succeeds as the kind of provocative film criticism that imbues genuine life into the field. And considering the way that the film-criticism field seems to be going these days—with high-profile critics jumping into film-festival programming, for instance—I suppose I shouldn't be too picky about deeply intelligent and well-researched works like this one. Maybe one day I'll be able to fully embrace it.

(Los Angeles Plays Itself was screened on Nov. 21 at 92YTribeca; there's another screening scheduled at New York University on Dec. 2. It's not available on DVD, but it's freely available as a torrent, if you're not a stickler about such things.)

A Merci to Art—and Love

NEW YORK - Before I tackle the next film in my film-review queue, I might as well briefly take stock in what exactly I have to be thankful for this year. It's that time of year again!

Everyone surely has something to be thankful for...but sometimes, in the ceaseless rush of daily life and the stresses of everyday living, it can be difficult to realize just how much you actually have. It's sometimes especially difficult for me: I think I'm just kinda psychologically wired to blow up the things that I think are missing in my life into a massive energy-sucking black hole. It is, in short, hardly a constructive way of living—to lament endlessly on the shortcomings in one's life—and I try to fight this ingrained tendency as much as I possibly can (even if I sometimes indulge in it just to get on my mother's bad side).

Thus, Thanksgiving comes at a rather necessary time in my life this year. As much as I may complain about my not-terribly-ideal living situation (living at home, far away from my preferred New York) and my lengthy commute, among other things, all of those drawbacks mean precious little in the face of the many forms of support, intellectual, emotional or otherwise, that I receive every day from both friends—both in person and online—and yes, family. (Friends and family, I do hope you feel the same support from me, in some way or another.) I am especially thankful for the constant indulgences of my parents, who provide so much of value for me these days—not least a roof under my head and a bed to sleep in—that I'm sometimes neurotic enough to feel I don't deserve their support, as if they're just handing privilege to me without a good reason why. (Frankly, the way I act towards them, I sometimes really don't.)

But the thing I'm most ultimately thankful for? Art. Great books, films, music, paintings, and the like. The intellectual and visceral pleasures afforded by art; the conversations great art can inspire. And I'm certainly thankful to have platforms and willing ears to hear me spout off on the works of art that really turn me on. Life is such an emotional rollercoaster, especially for me, that it's a relief to find in art something I can consistently turn to for relief and possibly even enlightenment (even when it's bad art).

In that spirit, here's another instance of me spouting off on something that turned me on recently:

Frontier of Dawn (2008; Dir.: Philippe Garrel)

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

Of the widely celebrated French auteur Philippe Garrel, I am only familiar with this film and his 2005 Regular Lovers. The thing that  fascinates me most about Garrel, based on these two works, is the degree to which he manages to infuse them with a sensuous, nostalgic romanticism while maintaining a distinct distance. The characters may be romantic in their natures, but the films surrounding them aren't necessarily embodiments of said romanticism. Even romanticism, Garrel seems to suggest, has its limits in the real world.

Youthful desire versus real-world disappointment was the great theme of Regular Lovers, a three-hour drama that gradually depicted, with unusual and revelatory vividness, the burnout of the fiery idealism that spread among the students who participated in May '68 in France. Frontier of Dawn is considerably less epic in scope, but it marries a similar visual style to an equally nostalgic yet intelligent and multifaceted look at pained romantic relationships among three young lovers: not just the ways they fall in and out of love, but, most poignantly, the ways the wreckage of a romantic relationship that has run its course can still haunt us long after the fact. (Its portentous-sounding title eventually turns out to be prefectly apt, being that it hinges on a character's after-the-fact awakening of romantic consciousness.)

When it comes to evoking the mysteries of romantic love onscreen, Garrel is far more sober in nature than, say, James Gray (whose wonderful Two Lovers traversed similar emotional terrain earlier this year). We don't easily grasp the characters' motivations in their three-way dance. Why does budding photographer François (Louis Garrel, Philippe's son) seem to suddenly lose interest in celebrity-actress Carole (Laura Smet)? Why inspires Carole her heartbreaking self-destruction, even as she ends her relationship with François? What attracts both François and the relatively more stable Ève (Clémentine Poidatz) to each other? Rather than providing simple answers, Garrel allows their actions to speak for themselves; he's more interested in the outward emotional effects of these characters' actions and what those effects reveal about their individual conceptions of love, and how those conceptions are shattered by reality. It's quite possible that not even these characters know what to do with the emotions welling deep inside them. All the while, Garrel bathes his film in deep tenderness of feeling and the rich textures of William Lubtchansky's beautiful black-and-white cinematography, which gives the film a kind of subtly doomy grandeur.

The surface beguiles, and the characters' inner psychologies fascinate—but, by its third act, as Garrel dares to venture into more mystical, ghostly terrain, Frontier of Dawn gradually acquires a weightier, more tragic dimension. Finally, one of the main characters jumps out of a window and a skull appears in a mirror. However the characters approach the volatile emotions of love, Garrel sees it all as a fragile landscape—not without its considerable joys, but one that ultimately leaves scars, psychic and/or literal, in its wake. Fatalistic, sure; but, as Garrel himself suggests by the low-key manner with which he sets out his vision of amour, c'est la vie.

(Frontier of Dawn will be released on DVD on Jan. 26, 2010; I saw this during a three-day revival run at Anthology Film Archives in New York.)

On a far more optimistic note: Happy Thanksgiving!

A Sense of Perspective, Courtesy of the Coen Brothers (On This Thanksgiving Day)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - 

A Serious Man (2009; Dir.: Joel & Ethan Coen)

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

It was a minor shock to go from the gloriously skewed cinematic visions of Richard Kelly, Tsai Ming-liang and Werner Herzog (in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, which I saw at a press screening on Friday, and which I'm holding off writing about until its release at New York's IFC Center on Dec. 11) to the relatively more precise style of the Coen Brothers in their latest film, A Serious Man. But whereas The Box and Face, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, "go mad on the potentialities of movies," the Coens in A Serious Man aim for something more subtle yet equally ambitious: their latest work is no less than a consideration of the existence of God and the cosmos.

Actually, it's much more complex and intimately scaled than it sounds, but it's a reasonable starting point in approaching A Serious Man, which, in some ways, feels more like a thematic summation than either The Man Who Wasn't There or No Country for Old Men. While those films steeped moral, spiritual and philosophical inquiry in idiosyncratic genre playfulness, howevee, A Serious Man makes no such outward concessions. The Coens take an unsparing look at the travails of its Job-like protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a mild-mannered university professor who finds a whole series of unfortunate events seemingly happening to him at the same time, and who reacts to this avalanche of negativity by having a crisis of faith. Where is God in all of this? He had accepted His existence as fact up until this point, and, in his mind, had been living a good, decent life...and yet now, in a time of need, He is apparently nowhere to be found. But it's not just God that seems to have deserted him; it's a sense of purpose in his life. "I haven't done anything," Gopnik frustratedly proclaims on occasion, lamenting both the lack of fairness he feels in all that is happening to him, but also quietly bemoaning his lack of concrete accomplishments in his life (he may be up for tenure at the university, but, as he himself points out, he hasn't even published a paper yet). All he has to show for his hard work these days is a wannabe divorcée, ungrateful children and an overachieving Asian student who tries to bribe him for a better exam grade.

Gopnik, a mathematics professor, is, by nature, a rational-thinking fellow, and so he, a Jew, rations that visiting rabbis at local synagogues will help him find the answers he seeks. As it turns out, no such luck; the three rabbis he visits provide answers that fail to satisfy him. The first rabbi he visits seems to focus inordinately on the parking lot outside his window as supposedly heartening proof of God's existence; the second rabbi tells a compelling parable that merely ends up at one big question mark of a punchline; and the third rabbi won't even see him, being that he's too busy sitting around and "thinking." None of this is played for the kind of smug snark that Coen detractors consistently accuse them of; in fact, the Coens are too smartly aware of the nature of religious belief—indeed, too serious, in spite of their pitch-black comic sensibility—to lodge easy potshots at the rabbis' own ways of affirming their convictions. The lack of obvious answers, instead, deeply unsettles Gopnik—and us in the audience.

"Accept the mystery," one character says randomly in the film. The quote is a throwaway moment in context, but that, in a nutshell, articulates what A Serious Man is all about: being conscious of what we know and don't know, and understanding how people deal with things they aren't aware of. Some, like Larry Gopnik, look for answers until it nearly tears them apart; others may think about those big questions for a little while before eventually getting back to living their everyday lives. Maybe those in the latter group indeed accept that there are just something they may never know. When you think about it, that sounds very much like a universal human response to the unknown.

One thing I know for sure: the Coen Brothers, in A Serious Man, are genuinely committed to exploring the various facets of their protagonist's tortured soul in ways that are arguably more affecting than the thriller mechanics of their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. That said, both those films share a pronounced sense of daring about leaving in gaps in plot and character for all to see; this deliberate lack of closure is where No Country derived its tremendous kick. The Poland-set, Yiddish-language prologue of A Serious Man sets the stage: a husband comes home with a man his wife accuses of being a "dybbuk"; when she stabs him to prove her point, he gradually starts to bleed and staggers out of their house to an uncertain doom. We never quite know 100% if she indeed was right about him being a supernatural being; the scene simply ends with the camera observing them from outside their front door, wind and snow creating a positively ghostly, ambivalent halo. 

But its most daring gap comes at its very end...or rather, non-end. Those who found the conclusion of No Country for Old Men outrageous in its inconclusiveness will be equally frustrated by the way this film ends, or rather comes to a jarringly sudden stop. Yes, folks, the Coens have done it again...and once again, once the shock of it wore off, I could think of no other honest way conclude to a film that deals so insistently about the unanswered questions that hang over all of us. What the Coens do is literalize those unanswered questions with an impending tornado—coupled with Gopnik committing the ultimate immoral act (for him)—hanging in the balance as the film audaciously cuts to black. The end. What will happen to Gopnik and to his Midwestern community? Maybe, the Coens drive home with a vengeance, we're just not meant to know.

What I find rather profound about A Serious Man—and it is something that has run throughout the Coens' entire body of work, but which finally finds its most direct and affecting realization here—is something I think Paul Thomas Anderson tried, grandiosely, to get at with the plague-of-frogs climax in Magnolia: As much as we may magnify our own personal problems to near-apocalyptic dimensions, there are always forces greater than us that need to be wrestled with. A Serious Man may be explicitly about its inquiry into the knowledge all of us humans have and seek, but on a deeper level, it's a film about maintaining a healthy sense of perspective of one's place in the cosmos. We may feel like we're the centers of our own universes, but when it comes to the real universe...well, who are we, really? That may sound nihilistic, but I prefer to see it a statement of hard truth—and, in light of some of the mixed feelings I've had about my own place in life recently, an uplifting sentiment in its own way.

And on that note: it's Thanksgiving! If nothing else, be thankful for the momentary pleasures in life. For Gopnik, that's seeing his (high on pot, unbeknownst to him) son become a man at his bar mitzvah. For me, it's become blogging. And for those who are actually reading my recent barrage of posts, I'm thankful to you all...among many other things, of course.

(A Serious Man is currently playing in limited release nationwide.)

Madness! Madness!

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I still have a bunch of films in my personal review queue, but hopefully, with the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, I'll have time to play massive catch-up. For now...

Face (2009; Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang)
The Box (2009; Dir.: Richard Kelly)

In Psycho, Norman Bates famously said, "We all go a little mad sometimes." That certainly didn't help Bates's victims in that film, but in the cinema, creative madness can be quite the tonic. There's nothing like watching a talented filmmaker push the boundaries of the medium in order to put across a boldly original vision on the screen; even when that filmmaker doesn't entirely succeed in realizing his/her ambitions, sometimes the sheer exhilaration of his/her effort can be enough. One example of this type of shoot-the-works filmmaking is currently playing in theaters right now (though not much longer, it looks like): Richard Kelly's third feature, The Box. Another is Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's recent, Louvre-funded foray into France, Face. Both are deeply flawed and self-indulgent, but both hit on moments of jaw-dropping cinematic ecstasy that will frequently make you say to yourself, in awed admiration, "Where do these artists come up with this stuff?!!" Wherever these mad visions come from, you surely won't find 'em anywhere else.

Of course, over a week removed from the delirious high of seeing both these films, I'm now put in the (self-imposed) position of actually trying to write something substantive about them. Individual images and scenes from each float around in my head, and those memories make me smile—but when it comes to trying to form my varied impressions into a coherent take on what their respective auteurs are possibly up to, I find myself at a bit of a loss. It could be that their visions come out of something so deeply personal—from their subconscious, perhaps—that maybe they can't even explain it themselves. That's hardly a criticism, as far as I'm concerned; it's just that that elusiveness can make writing about them a bear.

This problem is very much pronounced in Face, which premiered at Cannes earlier in the year to mixed reviews, and which I saw at a free preview screening a little over a week ago at the Asia Society in New York. How to penetrate it? How to even describe it? Tsai Ming-liang's film has only the barest outlines of a plot: it has something to do with recurring Tsai character Hsiao-Kang's (Lee Kang-sheng) attempt to film a modern version of Salomé with an actor named Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud, magnificently reprising a world-weary older version of his star-making role in François Truffaut's The 400 Blows), Fanny Ardant and model Laetitia Casta as Salomé. And yet, despite what sounds like a classic film-within-a-film scenario, Tsai consistently blurs the line between the worlds inside and outside the film, never defining which is which. The idea of art-as-life becomes wildly abstracted here. French New Wave references abound: Antoine and Hsiao-Kang playfully exchange the names of famous cinema directors—it's the only language they both know, probably—as they both handle a bird Antoine calls "Titi"; Ardant and Jeanne Moreau sit around a fancy dining table as Nathalie Baye suddenly pops out from under the table looking for some jewelry; later, offscreen, we hear Moreau's famous Jules and Jim song being played on the piano, with Moreau saying something along the lines of "What have I gotten myself into?" And much of Face has a kind of art-exhibit feel, of artworks coming to life and slowly passing us by, providing an endless feast for the mind and senses. And as with most art exhibitions, Face leaves us to ponder the implications of these various moving artworks after the fact.

Tsai calls his film Face, and perhaps there's a key to this film: The film practically swims in images dealing with the human face. Laetitia Casta is seen taping up windows, as if she had gotten tired of her own reflection and decided to cover it up with black masking tape. (This is especially rich considering who she is in real life.) Antoine's first scene is a striking close-up of his face, leaning sideways to his right, with his eyes closed, as snow falls and the wind blows in his direction; much later, he's looking at his reflection and lamenting at just how much he has aged. At one point, Antoine is seen in an extended close-up with a towel covering his face; the image itself makes for an oddly affecting still life. And another close-up: that of Hsiao-Kang's grieving sister after the death of her (and his) mother, trying to suppress tears as she cleans up the mother's refrigerator. If nothing else, images like these, and many others in this vast cinematic fresco, suggest that Tsai was most interested in celebrating the ways human faces can be posed and lighted to achieve beauty in various forms and environments.

I haven't even gotten around to the out-of-nowhere Mathieu Amalric cameo, or Casta's modern-day version of Salomé's dance of the seven veils, sans music (not even Richard Strauss!), but with meat hooks and tomato sauce. And Tsai's shout-outs to his own previous work can't be of merely passing significance: the random musical numbers, his obsession with water (turned into a hilarious extended gag as a faucet in Hsiao-Kang's Taiwan apartment explodes in escalating comic mayhem), his evocation of loneliness and alienation. Face may be an attempt at a career-summarizing work, or it may just be Tsai self-indulgently basking in all of his usual thematic fascinations, in a foreign country and with the financial backing of one of the premier art museums of the world.

As you can see, I think I've spent more time describing scenes and images than coming up with a coherent interpretation of how they all fit together. Do they even fit together? More to the point: do they need to? Face is forbidding and impenetrable...but it has the heat of a visionary filmmaker throwing caution to the wind and spilling out his palpable joy in the medium onto celluloid. Perhaps the whole thing really is just Tsai indulging in his every whim. And yet, its images are so inspired and rapturous, and its seemingly bottomless mysteries so fascinating to think about, that I find it difficult to be too critical. What is the cinematic medium—heck, what is any art—worth if it constrains artists from being able to let it all hang out? All I know is, I'm very much looking forward to getting inside Tsai Ming-liang's head again. (That, of course, will depend on whether there's an independent distributor out there bold enough to give such an enigmatic film a theatrical run. What say you, Anthology Film Archives?)

In its eventual zeal to explain the mysteries it sets up, The Box proves to be much less of an enigmatic folly than Face, and thus ultimately less interesting to think and write about in the long run. Still, like Face, it is a film that is deliriously alive with bold inspiration. What starts out as an intimately-scaled morality play gradually morphs into a creepy horror film before its horrors begin to take on sci-fi, religious and philosophical flavors. As with his previous films, Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, Kelly has no less than the fate of humanity on his mind, wondering whether humanity is indeed worth saving. Such grand ambition could easily have become oppressive in the soulless Dark Knight manner, but unlike Christopher Nolan in that film, Kelly locates a warm human center in his sympathetic central couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden), thus cutting off any easy moral responses to the agonizing dilemmas they face at the beginning of the film and at the end. Meanwhile, Kelly's plot—based on Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button," which was adapted into a 1980s "Twilight Zone" episode—tosses in alien life forms, water monoliths, a 2001-style trip into the afterlife, and many more insane plot twists and visual coups. Kelly may have more chutzpah than intellect, really, but its visionary audacity is nevertheless blissful.

Besides, any film that is imaginative enough to have a car accident hinge on a hypnotized man in a Santa suit ringing a bell is all right in my book. As far as I'm concerned, such moments of what-the-hell invention constitute the height of cinema.

Behind the Scenes: The Ordinary Highlighting the Extraordinary

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I've just come off a full weekend of voracious cinephilia, in which I took in six films (all of them of the art-house variety, so no sexy vampires and werewolves for me) in the span of two days in New York. Lots of revelations to share with you all—but I find myself with a fairly healthy backlog of films I've seen in the past couple of weeks that I have yet to write about! As usual with me: so many movies, so little time.

For now, then, here are some brief thoughts on two films that are more thematically connected than you might think:

This Is It (2009; Dir.: Kenny Ortega)
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009; Dir.: Frederick Wiseman)

One focuses on the backstage rehearsals of a late pop star's never-to-be-seen-in-its-final-form stage show, while the other closely examines the entire backstage environment—the creative and business sides—of a ballet company. Two totally different worlds, yes, but the focus is essentially the same:  the sometimes arduous process of artistic creation. I usually find this kind of subject to be inherently fascinating, and these two films are no exception. Your mileage may vary.

For me, the Michael Jackson media freakshow long overtook the brilliant musical artist/showman in my mind before his recent death finally forced me to fully appreciate his considerable talent. The value, then, of Ortega's documentary tribute to Jackson is to brush off the tabloid cobwebs and train its eye almost entirely on Jackson the way he arguably ought to be remembered: as a tremendously hard-working and soulful entertainer first and foremost. In that way, I can't entirely get on board with the claims of "exploitation" that some critics have lodged against This Is It. I understand how some might see this footage as unsuitably morbid, and I suppose inherently it is. To me, though, the passion, imagination and attention to detail he exudes—his life force, in other words—even in this rehearsal footage presents its own argument. Even after all of his grotesque antics of the past two decades or so have been beaten to death by the media, here is Michael Jackson, ever the perfectionist, performing with nary a hint of world-weariness and creative burnout. His essential innocence—a quality that, even at less than 100 percent, still remains in his voice—seemingly remained intact until the end. (He even tries to pass it on to his stage collaborators, most memorably with a female guitarist trying to fill Eddie Van Halen's shoes in "Beat It.")

So yeah, I enjoyed This Is It. The performances, some of them undoubtedly rough around the edges, are generally invigorating as vocal and visual spectacles; and as a portrait of the King of Pop himself, it doesn't so much illuminate Jackson as it crystallizes some of his longstanding mysteries: how, for instance, he manages to be so close with his collaborators and yet remain so aloof and above them at the same time. For others, though, the film, with its worshipful "Chorus Line"-style interviews and lack of interest in touching on his troubled past, would most likely muster up all the cinematic weight of an extended DVD extra. Veteran documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman's La Danse would probably be more up their alley.

As usual with the ever-inquisitive Wiseman, La Danse takes a particular environment and digs deep into its nooks and crannies. His subject this time is the Paris Opera Ballet, but Wiseman's scope is far wider than Ortega's in This Is It. Dancers, choreographers, artistic directors, even down to costume designers and janitors: Wiseman observes them all in in his 158-minute film as they proceed through the processes of putting together an entire season of ballet performances. There are no mysterious and charismatic central figures here, and no direct interviews (both these non-attributes are Wiseman signatures, from his 1967 debut Titicut Follies onward); La Danse keeps a rigorous and immersive distance throughout.

What Wiseman, through his patience and curiosity, unearths is not necessarily groundbreaking. We all probably realize, in the back of our minds, that the process of artistic creation can sometimes be strenuously difficult, and the business of trying to fund a whole season of performances while maintaining a high artistic standard is about as hard. But when Wiseman presents the fruit of their labors on screen, the results—unobtrusively edited and beautifully shot records of seven lengthy dance selections, ranging from Baroque settings to spiky modern choreography—surely justify the immense dedication on all sides. And yet, in this particular cinematic context, the dance performances here feel less like creative climaxes than mere facts of life for these performers: This is what they do, and soon afterward they're back rehearsing something else. Perhaps the major achievement of La Danse is that it creates the feel of daily life being lived even as these dancers pull off wondrous artistic miracles on a regular basis. The extraordinary becomes ordinary, and yet the ordinary highlights the extraordinary.

(This Is It is still playing in theaters nationwide, while La Danse has been held over at New York's Film Forum.)

The Intellectual Versus the Visceral

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - For once, I'm actually finding myself excited by the prospect of coming home from a long day of work to try to write reviews such as the ones I've been tossing off recently. If nothing else, it makes me feel like I'm, I dunno, making some progress in my attempts to, if not conquer the world of film criticism, at least grab a piece of it.

In that spirit, onwards to...

Antichrist (2009, Dir.: Lars von Trier)

[WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

Riding into its recent theatrical release on a gust of controversy, Lars von Trier's fever dream of psychotherapy, marital distress, and primeval violence promised, simply from the press it generated at its disastrous Cannes premiere earlier in the year, to be one of those divisive, love-it-or-hate-it propositions. Leave it to me, then, to stake out the middle ground on this one.

For me, Antichrist presents an interesting case of a film that impresses almost entirely on the strength of its images, by turns hauntingly atmospheric and brute-force blunt in the way they explore von Trier's ideas about guilt, sexual power and the nature of evil. I don't really find said ideas particularly interesting. Antichrist more or less adds up to a rather muddled treatise on the nature of feminine evil, not so much universal evil; basically, it's witchcraft through the ages, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, etc. Charlotte Gainsbourg's nameless anguished matriarch, it is revealed, has become dangerously obsessed with the notion, borne out of academic research, that women have been carrying inherent evil inside them throughout history; her obsession tips over into mania in its grand Guignol final act as she, among other things, smashes her husband's testicles; jerks off her husband's dick to a bloody ejaculation; and ultimately mutilates her own clitoris, out of fear of her own woman-ness, I suppose. So basically, all women are vengeful, sex-crazed bitches at heart? Um, riiiiiight. All of this is, presented in a pseudo-Christian light, and nary a hint of humane empathy, suggesting that such behavior is merely hearkening back to primal instinct.

And yet, while others have been able to laugh off Antichrist, dismissing the whole thing as just another one of von Trier's elaborate pranks, I find myself not quite being able to join that crowd. The film, for all its incoherence, affected me, if not emotionally, then purely on a visceral level. Anthony Dod Mantle's digital-video photography successfully captures a sense of Biblical portent amidst the environment the central couple ironically call "Eden," and von Trier eventually piles on the nightmare imagery. The image of the fox eating his own innards and saying, in a deep voice, "Chaos reigns," has by now become as much an object of ridicule as it is the film's calling card, but it actually plays quite unsettlingly in context, suggesting the hell about to befall their home away from home. (Even now, I still feel a chill remembering the image.) And its final act truly is horrific, for better and/or worse; it's been a long time since I've felt the urge to cover my eyes during a film.

None of this adds up to the kind of genuinely disturbing experience that von Trier seems to be aiming for in Antichrist (whether von Trier really did make this film in the midst of a major depression, as he has publicly claimed, it isn't readily apparent in the finished work)...but nevertheless, I can't wholly dismiss it. The sheer expressive power and dreamlike flights of fancy contained here suggest an artist possessed to bare all of his obsessions on the screen, and lay it all out there, leaving the viewer to figure out what to make of it—indeed, whether to take it or leave it. In that sense, I admire Antichrist. Intellectually, I don't find I have much use for it; but if we all agree that film is primarily a visual medium, on that level it's often startlingly vivid and effective. The choice is yours. (Currently playing at the IFC Center in New York)

A Lame Shaggy Dog

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I am sitting right now in a waiting room in Saint Peter's University Hospital in New Brunswick, having just received news that a stomach operation my mother had to undergo this morning---the removal of a benign tumor---has gone "better than expected." Not only is she pretty much cured, but she'll actually be able to eat normally! That's something her doctor here had not initially expected.

Music to my ears!

My mother will have to stay in the hospital for a few more days, so I'm waiting to see her for one last time before I head back home. In the meantime, though...I might as well actually fulfill a promise on this blog for once and toss off a few words on...

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009, Dir.: Grant Heslov)

The title of this film suggests a shaggy-dog story, and that's basically what Heslov delivers, with all the requisite weight of these kinds of fantastical anecdotes, that being very-little-to-none. Heslov can't even be bothered to work up any infectious comic outrage at the general silliness, selfishness and political maneuvering on display; the best he can do is affect the same above-it-all snarky attitude Mike Nichols cruised on in Charlie Wilson's War a couple years ago.

There's nothing actively irritating about The Men Who Stare at Goats; on its own modest terms, it's sufficiently amusing. And there is admittedly something rather cathartic about its climax, in which soldiers at an Iraqi army camp are seen tripping on acid, laughing uncontrollably and freaking out all over the place. But I can't help but shake the feeling that movies like this, the Nichols film, and Steven Soderbergh's exasperating recent "comedy" The Informant! are just taking the easy way out: evincing no particular point-of-view, content instead to score smug laughs at situations that ought to make your blood boil even as it makes you laugh out loud. (See this year's superior, if slightly overpraised, U.K. import In the Loop for an example of a hilarious satire that draws blood and inspires genuine anger.)

Coming soon: Antichrist and whatever else I get around to seeing this coming weekend (I hope the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man will be one of the films I get to finally see).

Cinema, Meet Theater; Theater, Cinema

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I'm going to try to start a weekly feature on this (as ever poorly maintained) blog in which I basically just collect some thoughts on films I've seen over the course of a given week. I won't promise anything earth-shatteringly revelatory, but at least it will keep my writing muscles somewhat sharp.

So what'd I see this past weekend in the theaters (I'm sticking for now with theatrical experiences)? Let's go in order of viewing, starting with...

Bronson (2008, Dir.: Nicolas Winding Refn)

Well yes, the subject of this film is Michael Peterson, aka "Charles Bronson," a man with a reputation as Britain's most violent and notorious prisoner. But it's not really about "Charlie Bronson" in the sense you might expect from a so-called biopic. Refn isn't really interested in exploring the man behind the notoriety; this isn't really a character study. Instead, Refn focuses more on toying with the gap between Refn's self-created image and the utter emptiness at his core, an emptiness that his sheer, charismatic boldness of gesture can go only so far to camouflage. Perhaps that is the true essence of Bronson, then: It's a ceaselessly kinetic yet shallow movie, but only because, Refn and his very fine lead actor Tom Hardy suggest, the man himself was basically a shallow vessel filled only by his desire for attention at any cost. None of those gestures reveal anything about him, but maybe that's because there ultimately isn't anything to reveal. (Never does the man come off as a reflective fellow in the least.)

Telling, then, that Refn not only imbues Bronson with all sorts of theatrical gestures onscreen---dramatic classical music cues, skewed camera angles, even an animated sequence illustrating Peterson's artwork in his more recent prison years---but also incorporates a theater as an actual setting, with Peterson seen telling his story on a (figurative and surreally lighted) stage to an audience, and telling it with a wide variety of styles (he's seen with mime make-up at a few points). We're always aware of the events in the film as a sort of performance, with Peterson constantly angling for attention. And when he doesn't receive the attention he desires---especially in the scenes during his brief (and apparently apocryphal) release for "good behavior"---the scenes have the slight yet palpable feel of bad theater, noticeable mostly through the haltingly delivered dialogue.

All of this formal play could quite possibly be seen as a feature-length set-up for the film's final, gut-punch shot of our central figure. He's glimpsed, as the camera slowly zooms out, stuck in a very tight cell, nude and bloodied. And for perhaps the first time in the film, you see "Charlie Bronson" without the benefit of dramatic lighting, Peterson's voiceover narration or classical-music cues. The man you saw performing tonight stands before you as he truly is, behind the madness, writhing in some kind of pain. And the view is...well, ugly. And pathetic. And, in its own way, revelatory.

You might say that Bronson is an intriguingly empty movie. I'll leave it up to you, dear readers, to determine whether that's a good or bad thing. (Currently playing at Village East Cinema, though its run looks to be ending tomorrow.)

The Red Shoes (1948, Dir.: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

In a word: glorious. This was my first encounter with this much-celebrated British Technicolor masterwork, in a new 35mm print playing at New York's Film Forum---and boy, am I glad I decided to make my first acquaintance with this grand work of cinema on a big screen! The print is gorgeous, certainly: It's not enough to simply say the colors vividly pop, but also that the vividness allows one to appreciate just how imaginative Powell & Pressburger's deployment of such colors genuinely are regarding moods and settings scene-by-scene. (If it is possible at all for a film to feel both real and fantastic, sometimes in the same scene, Powell, Pressburger and cinematographer Jack Cardiff manage it.) Above all, though, there is the magnificent film itself: not only a wondrous, life-enhancing celebration of artistic creation, in all its joys and agonies, but also a tragedy with a heroine torn between her desire to continue her artistic pursuit and living a life outside of it. (It's a dilemma that I struggle with almost daily, though in far less melodramatic terms.) The way she ends up resolving this dilemma is both devastating and brutally poetic.

If nothing else, I just want to bask again in the film's centerpiece 17-minute ballet sequence, which pushes a ballet performance into the realm of the surreal and dreamlike in a manner that can only be described as sublime. It feels like art soaring into the heavens. You know that high you get after you think you've had a great artistic experience? You know what I'm talking about? Well, the ballet sequence in The Red Shoes comes damn close to visualizing that feeling. Awesome.

There's a couple more---The Men Who Stare at Goats and Lars von Trier's by-now notorious Antichrist---but I'm afraid, at this rather late hour, I will have to leave that for another day. Hopefully not a day too soon!

Link for the Day: An Interview With Sally Potter

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - For this post, I just wanted to invite you all to enjoy my latest contribution to The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog: an interview with director Sally Potter, whose latest film, Rage, premiered today not in theaters, but on mobile phones. (The film's minimalistic form more or less dictates the approach.)

I think that's it for now. Oh, yeah: also, Claire Denis's latest film, the generational family drama 35 Shots of Rum, gets my highest recommendation. In its warmth and poetry, it just about rivals Olivier Assayas's equally beautiful and profound Summer Hours (still my favorite film of the year to date, though both Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and maybe Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control---both film as far from the Assayas and Denis as possible---are running it very close). So there's that.

Why I Love This Business We Call Film Criticism

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A couple of days ago, someone at work sent an email to a whole bunch of people that featured a picturesque photo of a castle high up in the mountains in Burma. When I saw the photo, I immediately made a connection in mind: this looks like something out of Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus! So, to a couple of editors sitting next to me who reacted to the photo with quiet amazement, I sent a still I found on Google from Black Narcissus of the palace in the Himalayas in which the film's gradually crazed drama takes place. One of them turned around to me and started asking me a bit more about the film it came from: what it was about, whether I liked it (I most certainly do), whether that still image really was color or whether it was colorized from black-and-white, whether there were any famous names in it (I mentioned Deborah Kerr, and she immediately recognized the name).

It was immediately after this brief exchange that I realized why I'm really interested in this whole film-criticism business. Really, it's simple: I love movies. I love talking about them to people who are willing to listen (even if I'm probably better than expressing my thoughts on a film in writing than I am in person). I love sharing my enthusiasms, my likes and dislikes. I love being turned on by a really great film.

All of these things give me a great pleasure. And dammit, I want to feel and express that kind of pleasure on a daily basis, full-time, for the rest of my life. Is there anything wrong with that? At this point, I don't care if that makes me sound impossibly naïve or impractical (all adjective my mother has used to characterize my foolish pursuit of the profession---cuz most regular folk don't care about "movie critiques," says she).

That's it. No higher purpose, really. Watching, absorbing, learning and gleaning insights and revelations from films---and from art in general---makes me happy. And writing about them pleases me immensely as well. Do I really need any other reason?

Accidental Byline?

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - For the longest time, I've been intending to get published somehow in the newspaper for which I work. I've been pitching ideas, feeling a sense of triumph maybe two or three times, feeling utterly rejected many others.

But the last thing I expected was that my first-ever byline in the print version of the domestic paper would totally blindside me.

Last night, while hanging out with co-workers at a bar right across from our new office at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, I found out from someone that she saw my byline in the Money & Investing section of the Wednesday, July 8 edition of The Wall Street Journal. My eyes widened immediately; I had no idea. Naturally, I ask, "for what?"

Turns out that a routine minor story about CD yields that I plug in the numbers for every Tuesday---a little thing that usually gets no byline---got a byline this week. There was absolutely no reason for it, as far as I could see. Was it accidental? (Maybe that's just how much my superiors like me...)

In any case...it totally wasn't planned---I was recently working on another story that I was hoping would be my first in the print edtion---but hell, I'll take it!

Funny how things work out like that!

Here's the link to the story; if you hit the subscriber wall for it, just try searching, say, "kenji fujishima yield wsj" on Google.

Movies 2009: My Barebones Midyear Round-up

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - On Twitter, quite a few of the cinephiles I follow have been tweeting their mid-year roundups of the best movies they've seen thus far. Being that I'm generally a trend-follower on the microblogging site rather than a trend-starter, I've decided to follow suit...though not on Twitter. I'm using this poorly maintained blog to post my midyear cinematic reckoning.

Here are my 10 favorites so far, in rough order of preference. There were plenty more I could have chosen---in my opinion, this half-year has been fairly rich in intriguing cinematic offerings, at least depending on where you looked---but for now, this will do. (I won't annotate this; I'll leave that for my year-end wrap-up. Seems more "final" to do it then than now. But feel free to comment and engage me on my picks!)

1. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
2. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
3. Birdsong (Albert Serra)
4. 24 City (Jia Zhangke)
5. Up (Pete Docter)
6. Moon (Duncan Jones)
7. Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)
8. Two Lovers (James Gray)
9. Serbis (Brillante Mendoza)
10. Coraline (Henry Selick)

To future delights and revelations at the movies in the next six months!

What's Going On? Not Much, Really.

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - After a month of dabbling---with, I will freely admit, a certain amount of exhilaration---in the world of Twitter, I've come crawling back to this here blog because...why? I dunno. Just because.

Well, there's a reason, I guess. Much of that reason is emotional. I'm pretty much feeling stuck again in my life (I could explain why, but it would take a whole book chapter to explain, and it might probably bring undue attention from people at work anyway, so I will remain discreet publicly unless prompted privately), and right now I feel like the only thing I can fall back on to feel better about the rut I'm in is, well, writing. The one thing that I feel like I know how to do, and the one thing I would really like to do for the rest of my life, in some form or another.

So I am writing right now. Do I have anything interesting to say? Well...why not talk about Twitter?

Cards on the table, then: I like Twitter. It keeps my mind and senses alert for things that intrigue me enough to share with the rest of the world, or at least the people who follow my feed. No need to worry about forgetting that precious thought that came to your head that you liked so much; just put it down as a tweet and see who bites.

Sure, it's exhibitionism. But you know what? I guess I've come to realize that I like a certain amount of attention, at least the right kind of attention from the right people. I like knowing people actually read and care about what's going on inside my head. ("What's going on inside my head"---a Hüsker Dü lyric, by the way. I actually tweeted that early on.) I like the interaction that Twitter can afford. And sometimes I just like the challenge of boiling thoughts and ideas down to 140 characters or less.

So yes, it's totally self-centered. But I do it for me, not really for anyone else. You're all free to join into entering my scattered mind, if you wish.

So yeah...Twitter. Maybe it's a fad, as some of my more resistant friends insist that it is. Well, okay, maybe. But for now, it's a fad I'm on board with...until, I suppose, I get bored with it. We'll see.

In the meantime, no promises that this update means that I will start blogging more. I really should, though. I don't know how many people actually read this damn thing anymore, anyway...but I really should just write these kinds of longer entries more. If nothing else, it might just take my mind off some of the more depressing things that are happening---or, more precisely, not happening---in my life right now.

Tweet Tweet Tweet

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Well, I have finally capitulated to the supposed destruction of privacy in American society by creating my own Twitter feed.

I don't really have a good reason for joining the ranks of Twitterers---just curiosity, I suppose. And maybe a bit of narcissistic attention-seeking.

Mostly, though, I see this as perhaps a constructive way to keep my eyes and my mind alert to things throughout a normal day---to find something Twitter-worthy to share.

We'll see how far I go with this. Feel free to enter into my head with this Twitter thing!