Small Yet Giant Deliverances in Killer of Sheep

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Not much to report on my life, really---thesis-writing (almost to the promised land of completion!) and class assignments (a cinema studies seminar presentation coming up soon, a newsletter page to lay out) are keeping me busy. But I wanted to take the time to reprint an article of mine that was published yesterday in the Inside Beat---a review of Charles Burnett's rarely-seen 1977 indie classic Killer of Sheep, which is only now getting a proper theatrical release. I saw this film for the first time during Spring Break at a press screening, and folks: it's worth a trip to the city, not only because the film is such a beautiful achievement, but also because you're not likely to see a truer---or at least more authentic-seeming---or more poetic depiction of ghetto life in movies today. Makes me want to check out more of Burnett's work (I hear The Glass Shield is supposed to one of American cinema's more honest depictions of racism in society---but then, anything's probably more honest than Crash).

Anyway, I'm reposting the review because I was planning to get it published in today's edition of the Pulse---remember, that weekly entertainment section of the Home News Tribune for which I wrote a few articles last summer?---but apparently I was too late in letting the editor know about the article. So, to make up for my tardiness, I'm posting it here.

There's a lot more I would have liked to say about the movie had I been allowed more space---its editing of its various episodes struck me as particularly interesting in its own free-associative way---as well as going into more detail about a couple more scenes that intrigued me. But, because I'm such a busy man (something some friends of mine simply don't seem to understand!), I'll just post what was published in yesterday's Targum. Enjoy!

Unknown Gem Finally Gets Proper Recognition
by Kenji Fujishima
Published in the 3/29 issue of Inside Beat

Long available only in worn-out 16mm prints and, even then, only shown on rare occasions at film festivals and museums, Charles Burnett’s 1977 low-budget independent film Killer of Sheep — beautifully restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive — is only now, 30 years later, getting a proper theatrical release, starting a run at the IFC Center in New York and at various theaters across the country.

This is certainly a big deal, but not simply because of its rarity. It isn’t even a big deal simply because of its induction into the prestigious National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1990. No, the real big deal about Killer of Sheep is, most simply and eloquently, the film itself, which is one of the most grittily realistic yet strangely poetic looks at ordinary life in a small, predominantly African-American ghetto.

One can get a sense of that gritty realism right on the surface. From its deliberately unassuming — and, in this 35mm blow-up, noticeably grainy — black and white cinematography (Burnett shot the film himself) to its authentic location settings, and from the fairly amateurish performances of its mostly nonprofessional cast to its episodic plot — all of these elements serve to give us the feeling of real life taking place right in front of our eyes.

The real life of this film isn’t particularly glamorous, either: its main character, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), works at a slaughterhouse for a living — thus the film’s title — and goes through much of the film palpably disillusioned by the depressing reality of his lower-class existence in his Watts, Calif. community. In its interest in capturing the harsh realities of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, Killer of Sheep works in the great tradition of neorealism, the famous post-World War II artistic movement that attempted to render real life on film as authentically as possible with documentary-style techniques — handheld camerawork, outdoor location shooting, etc.

But Italian neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or Roberto Rossellini’s Open City aren’t great just because of its documentary-like realism. Like De Sica and Rossellini, Charles Burnett has both compassion and a poetic — yet fiercely unsentimental — sensibility to go along with his sharply observant sense of lived-in realism.

Thus, no one is made out to be exaggerated caricatures in Killer of Sheep — not even the two show-offy “rich” guys who are first seen stealing a television set, and then are shown asking Stan to participate in a murder for money. Even scenes like those, Burnett suggests, are an unmistakable part of life in an African-American ghetto; you do what you feel you have to do in order to get by in such dire surroundings.

And even in the midst of Stan’s sense of despair, Burnett is still able to find, and poetically convey, moments of indelible beauty and joy. Perhaps its most touching moment comes in long sequence in which Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) share a silent slow dance in their apartment to the tune of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” It’s all in one unbroken shot, and Burnett’s camera simply sits there, observing the wife’s attempt to try to reach out to her emotionally distant husband. When the song is over and the dance ends, everything seems to be back to (dreary) normal. Within Killer of Sheep, however, those small gestures — and there are many of them at unexpected, isolated moments — have the power of giant deliverances.

EDIT (March 31, 10:58 a.m.): I forgot that I actually had good-sized photos to go along with the published piece in Thursday's Targum! I'll post on here, just for fun. Thanks to Milestone Films for the picture.

Life Update No. 13: Boy, this thing is turning into a straight-up diary, isn't it?

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I think the title says it all. Sorry readers, but it looks like right now, My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second is turning---well, maybe "degenerating" is the more appropriate word---into just your usual boring diary of one-thing-after-another events. In other words, it's turning into the verbal equivalent of a typical biopic (albeit one without Oscar pretensions---'cause blogs don't win Oscars, dummy!). Booooooo!

I promise, I kept telling myself I'd update this thing sometime during my Spring Break last week. I kept saying to myself, I am going to find time to make some nice, cool, thoughtful entries to this thing, and maybe try to reclaim whatever fanbase I had before life kept throwing things in my way. Nope. Didn't happen quite as I hoped.

And it's not like I was super-busy during this break either. Going into my break, I was planning to try to get at least a good majority of my Godard-versus-Tarantino thesis done. That didn't work out quite as planned either. True, I do have a little under 13 pages at this point, which is something---but it's not really close to done, and considering how slowly I write, it probably won't be done unless I somehow find it in me to awaken that long-dormant devil-may-care side of me and just keep on writing, writing, writing 'til I have a first draft finished.

At least, though, it looks like I might actually have enough to go past the minimum 25 pages. I know, I know: quality, not quantity. But I was talking to one of the State Theatre ushers sometime last week, and when I told her about the 25-page minimum, she said, "That's not a thesis! That's, like, a paper." Perhaps she was joking (she has that lightly-joking kind of personality). She later qualified that statement with, "Well, as long as it counts as a thesis, that's all that matters."

Look, I know I probably shouldn't be complaining so much about my thesis project only because many other seniors are probably struggling with 60- or 100-page theses they have to write. Hey, it's in my nature of worry at least a little bit, even about something that maybe I shouldn't worry so much about. Is it a good thing if I still find myself doing a little bit of research, reading through books and such? Seems like I should have been done with that stuff months ago. Meh.

Whatever. Today, at least, I finished up my projected second section of the paper. Two more sections to go.

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Meanwhile, my backlog of films that I've seen but haven't written about for this blog is growing. Let's run them down, shall we?

There's Breach (*** out of ****), that based-on-real-events thriller about Robert Hanssen that isn't particularly distinguished visually, but generates a few indelible suspense moments and has a great performance by Chris Cooper as Hanssen. Cooper is so good at conveying the tortured inner soul of the character that he suggests the great movie this could have been. Instead, the film sets Hanssen up as basically a sympathetic villain for Ryan Phillippe's relatively boring young agent to catch. (But then, Phillippe's pretty boring in nearly anything I've seen him in---including Flags of Our Fathers. Maybe that's why Reese Witherspoon left him.) Writer/director Billy Ray laudably keeps Hanssen's motives vague---there are suggestions of resentment on Hanssen's part toward the relative lack of attention he received for all his years of service---but, like his previous docudrama, Shattered Glass, Breach is more honorable than memorable. (Tak Fujimoto's grayed-out cinematography is slick at first but gets monotonous after a while, although I suppose it's an appropriate choice given the relatively mundane, dull surrounding in which these events take place.)

Same for The Lives of Others (*** out of ****), the recent German Oscar-winner that tells parallel stories, both set at the same time during the existence of the oppressive Stasi in 1980s East Germany. By far the more compelling of the two is the transformation of Stasi member Gerd Wiesler from mere foot soldier with occasional bouts of conscience to full-blown human being with a full conscience. Here's another fantastic performance, from Ulrich Mühe as Wiesler; the moment where he first hears the "Sonata for a Good Man" as he's surveilling the artsy couple he's spying on is memorable for Mühe's facial expression, which literally seems to melt at hearing music of such beauty. The Lives of Others---far from being just another version of Francis Coppola's great The Conversation---is really about the possibility of creating art in the midst of a regime that represses the voice of artists, and on that level I suppose I developed a loving attachment to this movie as I watched it, partly because it confirmed my idealistic sentiments about the possibility of creating transforming art even in less-than-ideal circumstances. It's only afterwards that I realize that the movie itself is rather prosaic and safe aesthetically, although again the cinematography is impressively gray and serves its purpose. A movie about the power of edgy art that is itself an aesthetically safe, humdrum piece of work? Kind of a paradox there, I'd say. But I admit, it did move me in the end, and its lunge toward Oscar-baiting uplift at its conclusion struck me as fairly honest and genuine. It's not bad...

...but even better is David Fincher's surprisingly excellent Zodiac (***½ out of ****). A friend and I actually braved the nasty winter weather on Friday night to go see this movie, but I think it was worth the effort (although we were probably nuts to chance it in the first place). I can imagine some people finding its 160-minute length rather excessive for what is essentially an extended police procedural. But I was riveted every minute. This is an obsessive movie about obsessive characters searching for the elusive Zodiac killer---and it turns out that the most obsessive person of all is a cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, well-cast), who refuses to let the case go years after many of the other detectives and journalists had given up on it as a lost cause. So whether or not every detail is important is secondary to the fact that, for many of these characters, God really is in the details---even at the expense of personal attachments. Zodiac is a classic example of style being the movie's substance: perhaps not every single detail of the movie is important, but it's there, haunting these characters to the point of absurdity.

Of course, why are these characters so obsessed? Why does Graysmith become obsessed? Hitchcock arguably captured the mania of obsession more powerfully in Vertigo, but, while Fincher isn't known for being a psychological director (although one could certainly interpret his cult hit Fight Club as one long twisted journey into one man's frustrated mind), here he's at least trying to tone down his TV ad style here in order to focus on character and plot. To its credit, the movie has enough integrity not to beat us over the head with thuddingly obvious "explanations" for these characters' behavior. For all I know, Graysmith couldn't let this go simply because he, as puzzle-minded as he is, simply wasn't wired up to rest until this particular puzzle was solved, at least to his satisfaction. In some ways, I see Zodiac as sharing a mild thematic kinship with Michael Mann's Miami Vice: all the cops in both movies are so immersed in their jobs that their personal attachments---whether to a person or to their job---suffers. In Zodiac, some are able to walk away; some are not.

For those who don't know much about the Zodiac case, it's probably a good idea to know beforehand that technically no one has ever been caught in the case. So what Zodiac, with all its meticulousness and attention to detail, amounts to is a gigantic case of frustrated expectations---Fincher shapes his film so that you're expecting the fairly tidy resolution of, say, a typical CSI or Law and Order episode, and then...well, Graysmith might get a certain kind of closure at the end, but it's not the sense of absolute truth that one gets from the usual CSI episode, where the rightness of the solution is rarely in doubt. Then you realize, of course, that life doesn't always lead to such easy answers, and that policework can be a long, arduous process. The skillful way both of those points are made are what distinguish Zodiac from its other police-procedural peers.

And finally---Zodiac is another high-definition video movie, but, as with the case with Ed Lachman's work for Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion last year, I could hardly tell that Harris Savides' work here was high-def video, except maybe for its lack of grain. In Miami Vice and Collateral, Michael Mann made no concessions as far as trying to make his digital video images look like film---at certain points in both films, he leaves in the video grain, and both films in general have that undefinable video "look" to them. Not Zodiac. Fincher's feature apparently never saw a foot of film or videotape: the whole thing was stored onto a hard drive and, I guess, edited from there. More interesting than that, however, is why Fincher decided to shoot a movie that is set in the late '60s through early '90s in a format that is pretty much associated with the new millennium. Hmm. Well, maybe Fincher was merely interested in creating a long-running visual counterpoint: for a film that is very much about the characters' fuzziness about the truth, even the clarity of the digital images seem to taunt them.

Zodiac, thankfully, isn't merely distinguished on the basis of technology. Fight Club fanboys---and personally, I'm on the fence on that film, at least until I see it one more time---might find this a disappointment, perhaps, but for me this is---to indulge in ad-copy hyperbole a teeny bit---the first near-great film of 2007 that I've seen.

Finally, oh yeah: Fast Food Nation(**½ out of ****). Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckracking bestseller is pretty much a wash as drama---its rampant didacticism ensures that it's pretty much received as polemic first, drama way way second. (Linklater has never been much of a visual filmmaker anyway---which is probably why Waking Life, with its playful, pleasurable rotoscoping animation, is probably his best feature to date.) Still, as polemic, it explores some interesting areas outside of those disgusting meat factories, especially regarding political idealism in all different walks of life. The most cutting scene, for my money, isn't the concluding graphic footage of cow slaughter. Instead, it's the few scenes where those action-oriented high school/college kids decide to stage a symbolic protest---by letting all the cows loose---only to realize how ineffective it is, because the cows simply aren't, by nature, smart enough to leave. It looked powerful in theory, but in practice it turns out to be a disaster. It's one of the more thought-provoking depictions of political idealism gone awry I've seen recently.

Brief (Probably Not) Life Update No. 12: Learning, Partying, and Learning About Partying

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Isn't it ironic how it seems like I'm updating less this semester even though I have less credits---14---compared to last semester, when I had less free time with 17 credits on my figurative college plate? Don'tcha think?

I have a bit of free time right now by virtue of the only computer lab on College Ave. with the desktop publishing program Quark XPress being currently occupied by a class, so I figured I'd let all of you readers---whoever's left of you, anyway---in on what's been happening in my life since my last post.

Well, let's see. Last week I prepared my tail off for a midterm in my Cinema Studies seminar on Thursday, March 1. Oh, you might say, it's a film class---shouldn't that be easy for you? Ah, but complacency is a big enemy of mine: I always try to resist the urge to get too overconfident lest I come crashing down with a disheartening thud. So yeah, I spent about three days in various College Ave. computer labs---away from my Rockoff apartment, where I often have trouble getting serious work done with all the distractions (and odors---don't ask)---working up a personal study guide---8 pages long!---for the test. The test turned out to be straightforward and fairly easy, if long (it took me nearly the whole period).

This week my attention is focused on a quiz in my Desktop Publishing class that I have tomorrow---not much to worry about, really, except for the promise that the quiz is going to have a section in which I basically have to create something from scratch on Quark XPress. Uh-oh, I need to practice!

And also, good news on the senior thesis front: I actually have some solid written pages! Not much---an introduction lasting for about 3½ pages---but it's a start, and at least I'll have something to show my thesis advisor when I meet with her tomorrow. (I suspect I probably won't get much more of it done today, but we'll see.)

Looks like this upcoming spring break is going to be very nearly all thesis writing, all the time. It sucks, but it's not like my previous spring breaks have ever been breathtakingly full of lavish, sun-drenched, girls-gone-wild incident.

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Ah, but enough about school stuff. What about the fun stuff?

This past Friday night, I had one of my rare days off from doing any ushering at the State Theatre---nothing was scheduled for that night, apparently. So I decided not only to catch up on Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation at our local film festival (more on that in a subsequent entry, perhaps), but also to do something that I hadn't done in a long while---catch up with an old friend and get drunk on a lot of beer.

The old friend was my old freshman-year roommate from when I lived on Quad I over at boring old Livingston Campus. Cool guy, fun to be around, and the occasion for our meeting was a 22nd birthday bash he was throwing at his house over on Senior Street. Apparently there was a theme to this party: everyone was supposed to wear short shorts---so NBA-style shorts for guys and short shorts or miniskirts and a lot of exposed cleavage for the gals. I knew about this going on, but I had no short shorts, only some boxers---and I wasn't about to go out in 30° weather with only boxers on. No sirree, Bob! But he was cool about it---I guess he was just happy to see me.

And I guess I was really happy to be there, because it only took about one cup of beer for me to start feeling buzzed.

There's not much to say about the party itself, except that I apparently (I feel like I'm using that word a lot in this entry) loosened up so much that I left quite a big impression on not only my friend's housemates, but also on a few of the females I talked to, some of whom decided thenext day to add me as a friend on Facebook. I don't know if I'd ever get into relationships with any of them---not that I'm looking that hard for one at this point anyway---but at least I talked to them, right? As opposed to not just sitting around wishing they'd talk to me.

One of the things I often end up doing at college parties of this sort is to simply sit around like a wallflower and watch other people dance around instead of getting up and moving myself. Somehow, though---I guess it was the alcohol---I got the courage to actually get up and start shaking my ass a little bit. I think it's inhibition---even when drunk---that hampered me over the years---I've never been much of a dancer, and I always feel like I'd look stupid next to girls, many of whom always seem to know how to move a lot better than I do. But Friday night, I guess I must have said to myself, Who cares about all that? I probably looked like a total fool doing it, but hey, I was doing something to try to have fun, and everyone around me seemed to respond.

And thankfully, throughout all this, I didn't get so drunk that I either a) blanked out for a lengthy period of time, or b) threw up. (Did I ever tell you about my wine-and-cheese party experience, readers? To sum it up if I haven't: I basically drank too much wine and not enough cheese at an Inside Beat gathering and eventually found myself lying in my bed with bits of barf on my pillow, having forgotten most of what happened that night. I was told later that a friend and I went to another party and I threw up on some girl's jacket; then that friend had to basically drag me all the way back to Rockoff because no bus, seeing my immensely drunken state, would take me back. It's not so much the fact that I got sick that disappoints me; it's that I got so drunk that I barely remember what happened, because I'm pretty sure I was probably at my loosest that night.)

Supposedly I left such a favorable impression on my friend's housemates that they're already talking about inviting me back for some future house party. In fact, one of those housemates recognized me as I was walking toward the computer lab where I am now and said something to that effect. I guess I should be happy about that, right?

Don't worry, though: I'm not turning into a fratboy or anything. Girls---or, in this case, a fairly shy Asian guy with an acne problem---just wanna have fun.

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Well, that's it for this life update. I was going to talk a bit more about some of the recent new movies I've seen (including the aforementioned Fast Food Nation, which isn't much as drama, but is actually fairly interesting as agitprop), as well as briefly touch upon both the boredom that was much of Oscar 2007 as well as my recent explorations into the uniquely funky, eclectic soundworld of the Talking Heads (thank you, DC++, for allowing me to illegally download More Songs About Buildings and Food, Remain in Light, and others). But I think that'll wait for another entry---coming hopefully sometime soon. Don't go away just yet!

(Long Overdue) Brief Life Update No. 11: My Own Big Scoop/Oscar

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - The over two-week gap between this entry and my last one may be the longest gap in the history of My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. For all those faithful readers out there, I apologize for the long delay. If there are any of you out there who are actually fuming over the fact that "Kenji didn't update his friggin blog for over two weeks! He doesn't care about his readership!"---well, I guess the following will suffice as an explanation. (If it makes any of you feel any better, believe me when I say that I was genuinely intending to update this thing earlier in the week. For what that's worth.)

Over the past two weeks, I've been tied up not only with my usual classwork, but also with a rather exasperating---well, challenging, to put it more optimistically---reporting project for my Desktop Publishing class in which I basically had to try to track down as many Rutgers University alumni/journalism major grads as I could that were currently working at the Wall Street Journal, whether as reporters or editors, whether for the actual print publication or for either its online version or the Online Network, the latter of which includes such potentially useful Web sites such as CollegeJournal.com and StartupJournal.com, among a few others. I had to find them and interview them---all of them---asking them questions about how they got to where they are now, how their Rutgers education helped them, what they like about working for the Journal, etc. The story, once it's all finished and laid out and such, is going to be published in the upcoming edition of AlumKnights, the Rutgers journalism department's alumni newsletter. (We lucky Desktop Publishing students, by the way, are in charge of laying out the whole thing.)

I ended up interviewing five people from the Journal, four of them people whose names were provided for me by one of my Desktop Publishing professors (we have two for this class). The fifth one was referred to by more than one of my interview subjects, and I was thankfully able to get the fifth one---the so-called Deputy Managing Editor of the online Journal---for a relatively short phone interview; apparently he's a very busy man---so busy that he's the one that called me for the interview, not the other way around.

I would think five people would be enough for any article; most of my Desktop Publishing peers only had to interview one or two for their stories. But I spent most of this past week fairly irritated when I found out indirectly that I was supposed to try to track down all the Rutgers journalism alums at the Journal. All? Are you kidding? Most of the people to whom I complained about this agreed that this was a bit much; heck, even one of my interview subjects, when I called her to ask a few follow-up questions, said the same thing. In the end, though, I wrote up an initial draft based on my five interviews...and I think that's where I'm going to draw the line. Besides, one name who was mentioned by one of my interview subjects turned out to not even be in the paper's employee database, and another hasn't gotten back to me after about three e-mails and a message left on her work number. I guess I should try to leave another message...but really, I'm for the most part done with this thing, man.

Besides...I have a goddamn thesis I actually have to start writing! Remember, that thing comparing Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino? The thing that's due in about, oh, a little over a month???

So actually, these past two days I've been taking it easy after handing in my first draft of my Desktop Publishing story. In fact, I've been taking it so easy that I've basically been sitting around in front of my computer either playing around with Windows Movie Maker---using Mozilla's handy Video Downloader 2.0, downloading various Youtube clips, converting them to .avi files and stitching them together in true stream-of-consciousness collage style---or delving deep into the world of Youtube vlogs. (Sidenote: I should probably devote a whole future entry to discussing Youtube and, I guess, trying to elucidate its appeal, especially when it comes to vlogs. Besides, I've discovered some pretty cool, interesting vlogs on Youtube, and I'd like to share some of them with you readers sometime soon.)

Of course, shouldn't I be doing, like, homework or something? Well, I think I deserve a bit of a break...just to brace myself for another fairly tough week coming up. I have a midterm in my Cinema Studies senior seminar coming up this Thursday, and of course I'm probably going to attempt to get started on thesis stuff. (A friend of mine is also working on a thesis this year; supposedly she set herself a goal this past week to try to get 25-30 pages of it written. When I talked to her online on Monday, she said she had already gotten 10 finished. My internal reaction to hearing this was, Damn! It probably takes me more than one day to get 10 pages finished; how do I expect myself to get 30 done in a week? Well, at least 30 pages might be my whole thesis right there; that friend of mine is working on something much longer. Perhaps I could take heart in the fact that I was actually able to get my entire five-plus page draft for my Desktop Publishing story done in one day---although that's probably because I had all the notes in front me from which to refer as I wrote it.)

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In the meantime...tomorrow's Oscar night!

Actually, I'm not as excited about it as that exclamation mark may suggest; I'm fairly cynical about the Oscars, since I don't see it as much other than a self-important orgy of Hollywood self-congratulation, one that can hardly be said to be worth much as an indicator of actual quality. Maybe of "quality"---meaning what passes for "serious" prestige filmmaking in Hollywood (like this year's Best Picture frontrunner Babel---although again, I think Babel overall is preferable to last year's blunt-instrument-rather-than-movie Crash). But hey, in the right frame of mind, I suppose it can be fun as merely a pageant...and tomorrow night, I'm going to try to have some fun with it with a few good friends (one of whom takes the Oscars a bit more seriously than I do).

A few random thoughts about what multiple host Billy Crystal once sang "Oscar, Oscar":

I still believe Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima is the best film of the nominated five. It's not the most aesthetically daring of the lot, but, in its fresh and serious contemplation of issues of honor and morality in war, I think it'll end up the most lasting and memorable of the lot.

It may well be Martin Scorsese's year to finally win the Best Director Oscar he has long craved, but if he wins, to me it'll clearly be one of those make-up wins (a la Paul Newman for an earlier Scorsese picture, The Color of Money), an acknowledgment of a distinguished body of work rather than an award for his work in The Departed. It really is about time---although I wish he'd have won it for a better movie.

I'm guessing Pan's Labyrinth (** out of ****) is the favorite to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But I saw the film a couple of weekends ago and I'm not sure I get the immense positive hype for it. Yes, its fairy-tale fantasy sequences are enchanting, scary and memorable, and its ambition to try to blend childlike fantasy with brutal reality is laudable. But an "end-of-childhood [elegy]," as one critic wrote about it? Really? If anything, the movie, in all of its visually splendid triteness, is a confirmation of childlike naiveté---with clearly drawn good guys and bad guys (let's face it, there's not much nuance to speak of when it comes to the intensely fascist Capitán Vidal, who engages in ruthless murder and torture even though he perhaps realizes that his cause is nearing its end)---and an at best clumsy intermingling of fantasy and reality. The rather blank 12-year-old heroine doesn't really grow in wisdom about the real world throughout the movie, and by the end...

(spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the film)

...she's actually died and gone to some kind of heaven, confirming her belief in the weird (and admittedly wonderful) creatures she sees and interacts with. And political allegory? Where is it? Fascism was a terrible thing, no doubt, but the film's aura of political depth---accomplished simply by making the atmosphere violent and heavy, as well as by trafficking in black-and-white instead of dealing with any kind of complexity---struck me as disingenuous. In all, Pan's Labyrinth is not only purely escapist, but it's also a celebration of escapism as a way to get away from the rotten real world. (Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander might have seen things through a child's innocent eyes and imaginative mind, but at least it also seemed to recognize the emotional complexities of the adult world surrounding Alexander.) Maybe others don't mind seeing a movie like that as much as I do (or maybe I've just gotten so pretentious myself that I've lost touch with the common moviegoer or something).

It's fairly obvious that Jennifer Hudson is going to win for Dreamgirls, but aren't people going ga-ga over her powerhouse singing and forgetting that she's perhaps serviceable at best as a dramatic actress? Her best acting is in her singing---which, I suppose, is good enough for a musical, but I wonder if, down the road, she takes on a purely dramatic role and feels a lot of pressure to impress especially to justify that Oscar statuette sitting on her mantle.

And finally, one major snub: Laura Dern in Inland Empire, for basically anchoring David Lynch's richly fucked-up vision to some kind of human footing. (Did Academy voters even bother to see Lynch's movie---or, I guess more accurately, digital video? Probably not, I suspect.)

Oh, and as for the ceremony itself: I'm pretty immune to whatever charms people see in Ellen Degeneres---I've usually rolled my eyes at her comic blandness whenever I've chanced upon her daytime talk show---so I'm not expecting a whole lot of comic gold out of her tomorrow night as host, to be honest. Maybe she'll surprise me. Last year, Jon Stewart started off kinda rocky but managed to come up with a few good pieces of ribbing as the show went along.

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One more thing: to make up for not even feeling the motivation to post this on Valentine's Day, here's a video for fans of one of Jean-Luc Godard's great muses, the eternally gorgeous Anna Karina, to drool over. Does anyone have any idea how to obtain a copy of Anna, the French TV-movie from which the following clip appears?

Brief Life Update No. 10

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - It seems like this blog is becoming more of a weekly than anything else, since I seem to have time only to come up with one update a week. And this weekend I didn't see any films in a theater, so I can't even write about that!

Anyway...how's my life been going? Okay, although it looks to be getting busier this coming week, with a first quiz and, yes, another layout assignment (hopefully one which won't take forever to finish like the assignments I had in Editing & Layout last semester).

Good news on the senior thesis front: I finally put together a decent outline for the project off of which to work. Hopefully I can get started writing soon. My thesis adviser alerted me to this fascinating book by Robert Stam entitled Reflexivity in Film and Literature which is all about the ways some novels and films---Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote being examples of the former, nearly any Jean-Luc Godard film (thus my personal interest in it) or Fellini's 8 1/2 examples of the latter---flaunt their own, uh, novel- or movie-ness in trying to expose the inherent artificiality of fiction, get us to think about our reactions to them, and---in typical scholarly terms---"lay bare the device." It's been very instrumental in giving me a focus point for my thesis, which in part examines reflexivity in terms of the cinema of both Godard and Quentin Tarantino, and what each filmmaker's version of reflexivity means to both. I hope to get started actually writing the damn thing soon---kinda have to, since it's due by the end of the semester! (I don't expect mine to be too lengthy: the Livingston College Honors Program minimum is 25 pages, and that's what I've been instructed by my thesis adviser to shoot for.)

It might be hard to get started right away, considering I'm in the midst of working on a rather hefty feature story for my Desktop Publishing class. My Desktop Publishing class is in charge of putting together AlumKnights, the journalism and media studies department alumni newsletter, and I---perhaps stupidly, in hindsight---decided to tackle probably the most involved story assignment offered by the professor: I have to interview about four or five Rutgers alums who are currently working at the Wall Street Journal and put all their information together into one big story. Most other students only need to make contact with one or two people for their stories; not me. Aren't I lucky? Anyway, I think I've made decent progress so far: I was able to interview two people so far (both were very nice to me in addition to sounding fairly attractive over the phone---yes, I'm talking about females, not males), got in contact with two others (one of whom I'm not sure I'm going to interview anyway, since I'd say four people is enough for any story), and still need to track down one more. This is due in about two weeks, so I can't really afford to slack off. (Of course, this is probably going to cut down a little bit on my ability to make serious headway on my thesis in time for my next scheduled meeting with my adviser in two weeks...)

Not much else really. I'm probably going to try like heck to get stuff done early next week just so I can settle in on Valentine's Day with my great love: movies! How about a romantic Wong Kar-Wai/Hou Hsiao-hsien double bill? Chungking Express followed by Three Times? Two excellent films, both on the subject of love. Hey, I think it's worth waiting for, don't you?

In Love and War

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - This past week, NJ Transit allowed students to ride on their trains for free. They do this for one week every semester, so this wasn't some new thing (and sadly, it isn't permanent either). But this may have been the first free ride week which I took advantage of to the fullest. Last Monday I went to see Letters from Iwo Jima at AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street in New York City, and this weekend I took two more trips to NYC to see two more films: my second viewing of Hou Hsiao-hsien's beautiful Three Times (***½ out of ****) at the IFC Center, and my first viewing (finally) of Jean-Pierre Melville's highly acclaimed 1969 feature Army of Shadows (***½ out of ****), which was released for the first time in the United States last year and thus found its way into many a end-of-year Top 10 list. (Sidebar: oh yeah, wasn't I supposed to attempt one of those?) The latter played twice on Sunday at Symphony Space way the hell uptown (95th Street and Broadway).

Interesting thing about my experience with Army of Shadows: for most of the film, I found myself oddly frustrated by the thing. For some reason, I found much of it rather confusing on a plot level---I only figured out afterward when I discussed the film with someone that Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) was already a leader of the underground Resistance movement of the title when he's arrested and thrown into a prison camp at the beginning of the film. Is that a fault with Melville's storytelling, or was I just not in a particularly sharp and receptive mood on Sunday? And once again, detachment was pretty much what I felt throughout much of the movie. I guess it's intentional: these people are so dedicated to their fight that they've somehow become nearly automaton-like in the way they go about planning and executing---as if they've already been beaten down psychologically by the moral costs of being a French patriot during Vichy France in WWII. But that still meant that I barely felt I knew any of these people---if anything, it felt more like Melville deglamming the heck out of genre archetypes---the noir-ish narrator, the loyal sidekicks, the strong woman of many disguises, etc.---transplating them into this historical environment, and using a economical yet occasionally lyrical style to do the job of characterizing them. For Melville, so it seems, it's all about the looks the characters give to each other.

And then...bam! Something happens at the end of Army of Shadows---the same bam! I felt at the end of Fritz Lang's M (1930) and Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), two other films whose greatnesses only revealed themselves to me with a final sequence or image---that somehow puts a powerful spin on everything that came before. It's a gutwrenching, morally suspenseful finish that both shocks you and somehow sums up its themes and gets you to reflect deeply. I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet: suffice it to say, the characters make a tough decision, but you're startled as to how quickly and near-affectlessly most of the characters (with one exception) seem to come to that decision. Even fighting for a winning cause, Melville seems to be suggesting, has its moral and personal costs; what's so different and devastating about the ending of Army of Shadows is precisely the realization that perhaps these people have already suffered that cost even before the movie begins. Most movies that tell this kind of story might try to dramatize some kind of arc; Melville seems to be going more for a regretful, elegiac tone suggesting that humanity has already been leeched out of these people. That's challenging---and it challenged me so much that I was deep in thought for a solid hour-and-a-half after the film had ended, and as I got onto the subway and made my way onto an NJ Transit train to make my way back to (snowy) New Brunswick.

What I definitely do know now is that I need to see this again. Perhaps a second viewing would reveal to me the meaning of little throwaway moments that Melville throws into the film. In one sequence, Gerbier, who is in England, walks into some dance hall, and Melville gives us point-of-view shots of Gerbier looking at the beautiful ladies in uniforms talking to other guys. What's profound about this seemingly arbitrary sequence is how suggestive it is: juxtaposed with shots of Gerbier himself, standing alone, looking at these women with his usual stoic look, you get the sense that perhaps Gerbier sees some kind of civilization that he's no longer a part of anymore. Maybe the whole film is about the death of this particular kind of underground civilization; I mean, it's pretty obvious in hindsight that none of these characters have really been a part of regular civilization for a while now. Perhaps there are other moments in this movie that, through something as simple as a mere image, implies waves of regret; I just wasn't able to pick them all up in my first viewing. Maybe, of course, that's a measure of just how much of a masterpiece Army of Shadows is. Hey, I think I'm starting to like this film more and more as I write about it...

No such ambivalence---at least, not as much of it---with Three Times, which is almost as much a meditation---albeit on totally different subject matter---as Melville's film is, but much more formalistic in nature. I saw this a couple of months ago on DVD, so this was my second viewing---but I had to put up with a solid but un-enhanced transfer on DVD, which of course made the film seem a lot smaller than it is. So when I found out that the IFC Center in New York was bringing both this film and the (effective but slightly overrated) Death of Mr. Lazarescu to its screens for a nine-day engagement (sorry readers, it ends tomorrow), I jumped at the chance. And, as I expected, the experience was near-revelatory.

I complained about the extravagant formalism of Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower detracting from the humanity of the characters onscreen, getting the uneasy sense that it felt like Yimou was more interested in creating pretty visual effects than with using form to express feeling. (Wow, don't those assassins flying through the air look cool? Wow, doesn't the blood splashing on yellow flowers look elegant?) Now, I won't deny that some of the characters in Three Times don't feel just as remote from us as the character's in Zhang's film does---heck, Hou Hsiao-hsien dares to shoot his whole second section as a silent movie (and a claustrophobically-blocked one at that), so perhaps a certain remoteness is inherent in such a fascinating artistic choice. But the difference between Hou's emphasis on form above character and Zhang's is that Hou's visual choices seem to organically come out of the characters and their respective milieus---it isn't sumptuousness for its own sake. That second section of Three Times---set in 1911 as the Taiwanese are fighting for independence from the Japanese---emphasizes the claustrophobia of its sets and the beauty of its costumes to suggest the cramped feeling its female character, a prostitute named Ah Mei (Shu Qi) who yearns for freedom, feels on a consistent basis as she remains quietly attracted to a self-proclaimed reformer (Chang Chen) who seems more interested in focusing on political reform than he is on helping the one person who loves him. Even its silent-movie conceit seems appropriate in this regard: none of the characters in Three Times are big yakkers anyway, relying more on looks and body gestures to express their yearning or disappointment (much like Melville's band of underground Resistance fighters do, in some ways), so taking out dialogue altogether forces us to pay more attention to those small gestures: the way Ah Mei looks at Mr. Chang, for instance, or the anguished moment when she realizes that she may be trapped in her societal position forever.

For those who haven't heard much about this movie: Hou tells three different stories---the first one set in 1966 in Kaohsiung, the second in 1911, the third in 2005---using the two same lead actors (Shu Qi, Chang Chen) and exploring similar themes: love, politics, history, the possibilities and barriers to human connection. Essentially, it's an anthology movie (one that, according to critics who have more experience with Hou Hsiao-hsien than I admittedly do, uses previous films like The Puppetmaster (1993), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and Millennium Mambo (2001) as fairly obvious reference points), but it wouldn't benefit the viewer to simply see Three Times as three different films in one. What fascinated me, seeing this film a second time, were the thematic and imagistic connections among the three stories---example: when a pool-parlor girl reads a letter in 1966, it's framed the same way as when Ah Mei reads a letter from Mr. Chang in 1911; so it is with the various cell phone messages in 2005. But, of course, the differences are just as interesting to parse out as the similarities: if the 1966 story is infused with nostalgia (a nostalgia which borders on Wong Kar-Wai-ian, although Wong is much more operatic and stylized with his romantic mores), the 1911 story nearly beats you into submission with its sheer claustrophobia, and the 2005 story comes off as aimless as the gray modern society it depicts. Maybe love remains the same throughout the ages, Hou seems to imply, but the ways we do it in certain societies may be more different than we'd like to admit.

Three Times is not going to be for everyone, and I'll admit, there were moments in the second and third segments especially in which I yearned for characters to actually give voice to their obsessions much more than they actually do. And that constant pejorative "slow"? It applies here, even with three consecutive stories being told instead of one. If you check it out on DVD sometime soon, you're going to need a certain amount of patience, as well as a receptiveness to Hou's emphasis on small moments to tell big stories.

But a funny thing happened when I saw this film on DVD the first time: a few days later, I found myself actually thinking more deeply about love---how we fall in love, and whether Hou is right in suggesting that we do it in different ways, depending on different circumstances, whether political or personal. I don't know if I've experienced true love yet (ladies, I'm still unattached---wink wink), but Three Times comes close to suggesting, through its impeccably spare technique and fascinating performances, what it might feel like to be in love.

And its first segment is just so darned magnificent---an ineffable depiction of the stirrings of some kind of love, whether or not it's really true love or just one soldier's desperation to feel something romantic in a time of war---that it's gotten me thinking of the Platters' "Smoke Gets Through Your Eyes" pretty much every minute of every day these past few days. Since I'm not writing for a print publication, I think I'll indulge myself in a moment of movie ad-happy hyperbole: this may be my favorite film of last year other than Inland Empire.

Humanity vs. Inhumanity

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Oscar nominations came out earlier this week. A few surprises here and there---no nomination for Sacha Baron Cohen??? If nothing else, Borat was a brilliant performance piece---but overall this year's Oscar noms pretty much stayed on the dull, unadventurous side of the fence, especially with its Best Picture nods. I mean, you can't get much more well-meaning than this year's frontrunner Babel. I think it's undoubtedly superior to last year's pernicious multi-narrative Oscar winner Crash, but on its own terms it strikes me as a noble, occasionally moving failure at best (and so melodramatic by the end of it that all the film's credibility jumps out the window, even as your heart may bleed for its tortured characters). But, as ever with the Oscars, artistry---of which Babel undeniably has a good deal---takes a backseat to good intentions (although I must admit that I think the good intentions behind Babel---its ambition to embrace all forms of communication and miscommunication in ways both personal and political---is at least more interesting to contemplate than those of Crash).

As for the others: maybe I need to see it again (it's being re-released in theaters nationwide today), but at this point I still don't see Martin Scorsese's The Departed as much more than a once-great director pandering to those fans of his who only seem to like him for his violent machismo and his hyper style. (And I don't feel an ounce of shame seeing Jack Nicholson get snubbed: was Scorsese so intent on crowd-pleasing that he intentionally allowed Nicholson to get away with the blatant scenery-chewing he commits here?) The Queen has a fine script by Peter Morgan (miles better than the vile one he concocted with Jeremy Brock for The Last King of Scotland---more on that later) and good performances (Helen Mirren's sympathetic in the role, but I think Michael Sheen should have gotten some kind of nod as Tony Blair---the closest the film has to an audience surrogate), but it's so insistently TV-ish that I honestly don't know what it's doing in the Best Picture category. (Little Children, an equally prosaic movie, would probably have been a more interesting choice.) As for Little Miss Sunshine: in hindsight, perhaps I was a little hard on it in my initial review, not giving enough credit to the film's sharp jabs at American's success-at-all-costs mindset and perhaps fixating too much on the occasional moments of condescension (come on, that bereavement liaison was just doing her job!). Nevertheless, despite a brilliant cast, I still think the film is at best an entertaining, occasionally inspired big-screen sitcom---a movie that takes nearly every opportunity to remind you of how darn quirky! it is. (Now it seems like the people at this year's Sundance Film Festival---currently going on right now---are looking for the next Little Miss Sunshine---God help us.)

Which leaves Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima (***½ out of ****), which overall isn't as aesthetically daring as parts of Babel are (Letters doesn't have an equivalent to the Japanese nightclub scene in Iñárritu's film), but which is so warmly humanistic and compassionate toward its doomed Japanese soldiers, and takes so contemplative and even ambivalent an approach toward typical Hollywood war-movie themes and conventions, that I think it's the best of a fairly unexciting crop by a considerable margin. (In fact, so good it is that I might be inclined to consider it my favorite Eastwood film since Unforgiven.)

I got a chance to see Eastwood's film---his "Japanese" take on the battle of Iwo Jima, and a companion piece to his Flags of Our Fathers, released earlier this year---on Monday night, and for the most part I embraced it with nearly every fiber of my being. I needed this movie after sitting through the near-atrocity that was Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland (*½ out of ****).

Earlier in 2006, when United 93 came out, critics and non-critics seemed divided as to whether the film was an exploitation of a real-life tragedy or presented a legitimate way of working through our anguished memories of what happened on Sept. 11. I'm still in the middle on that issue: I recognize and half-admire its skill and director Paul Greengrass's ruthless dedication to its docudrama aesthetic, but I wonder what value a fictionalized reenactment of what happened both in the air and on the ground on that day really has for us as far as healing and catharsis goes. Still, it's a miracle of scrupulousness and taste compared to the exploitation of real-life atrocity on flagrant display in The Last King of Scotland. This movie is so seemingly inhuman that, by the end of it, I was on the verge of throwing up. Literally. It's only in hindsight that I can even begin to give it any glimmer of credit for being something other than a shamelessly manipulative Hollywood-style thriller which pretends to have some kind of political point to make.

For those who've been living under a rock, Forest Whitaker has been getting a lot of acclaim for his against-type, scary-black-man performance as the undeniably awful Idi Amin, the Ugandan despot who led a popular government coup and who eventually began to rule the nation with an iron fist, destroying any perceived enemy for any little offense, and even feeding human remains to crocodiles. But Amin isn't technically the film's main character. Nope, this is another movie in which real-life African struggle is seen through the eyes of a white lead character: in this case, a fictional medical student, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), who has come to Uganda deluding himself that he wants to help the Africans when, really, he just seems to want to bask in privilege and be a part of the Amin team, so to speak.

The Constant Gardener redux? In retrospect, The Last King of Scotland actually does something more interesting than usual with its white hero: he isn't made to be noble or insufferably do-goody. In fact, he's unabashedly selfish and naive, unwilling to see the realities right in front of his eyes before it's too late for him to get out scot-free. By the end of the film, as he's desperately trying to get out of dodge, the film has turned into an oblique parable about British imperialism in Africa (I'm paraphrasing, but at the end Amin says to Garrigan something to the effect of "you really thought you could come in here and change the world?") instead of simply a Hollywood melodrama using African suffering as a backdrop.

So why, in the end, was I so pissed off at The Last King of Scotland? I can accept the use of Garrigan, however unappealing he's made out to be (especially since McAvoy---last scene as Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe---does a pretty good job in the role); that's not the problem (although, of course, a movie that had dared to tell the story entirely through Africans' eyes might have been more challenging). The problem is the baldly manipulative Hollywood-thriller style director Kevin Macdonald employs in telling this story: emphasizing close-ups in trying to magnify Amin's bad-guy status, turning up the volume of the dreadfully bombastic score in order to create superficial "excitement," and, worst of all, using the atmosphere of violence and death surrounding Garrigan simply for what Pauline Kael, in her review of The French Connection, called "zaps." There's pretty much no psychological depth or even an attempt at understanding to be found in this film: Macdonald and screenwriters Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock seem more interested in exploiting their white-guy-in-Amin's-Uganda scenario for the maximum amount of thrills and bloody spills. Hopefully I'm not the only one to find this kind of exploitation distasteful to the utmost!

Consider this following comparison. In Hotel Rwanda a couple of years ago, director Terry George included a scene in which its main character, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle, arguably superior to Jamie Foxx's Ray Charles impersonation that year), reacted in horror at a street strewn with corpses resulting from Hutu slaughter during the 1994 ethnic cleansing in Rwanda. There's an equivalent image in The Last King of Scotland when Garrigan discovers what has happened to a poor African woman---she is glimpsed dismembered on an operating table, and Garrigan reacts in an equally horrific manner, barfing on sight. Both images of slaughter and atrocity serve similar purposes in their narratives: it signals the respective heroes' awakening resolve and sense of desperation in terrifying circumstances (although, to be fair, in Last King, that true turning-point moment probably comes much earlier). But the way both directors treat those similar moments are instructive as to why Last King is mostly disgusting trash compared to the effective, sometimes powerful (if admittedly still fairly Hollywoodized) Hotel Rwanda. In George's film, the shock of the moment comes through viscerally, and Rusesabagina is allowed to contemplate it afterward (Cheadle has a marvelous scene in which he breaks down in private as he tries to tie a tie; it's an emotionally wrenching, honest moment that still stays with me). For Macdonald, however, that dismembered body isn't so much a symbolic horror as it is an empty thriller jolt with which to shock the audience. In Hotel Rwanda, you might say "Holy shit" and then reflect on the full extent of the atrocities being committed in that country; in Last King, you might say "Oh shit" and then breathlessly try to move on to the next thriller setpiece. It's the difference between humanity and a distinctly Hollywood-based soullessness, and it's the latter that The Last King of Scotland has in abundance.

Of course, the big question for Oscar nuts: how is Forest Whitaker? Well, if anything, he's probably the one shining bright spot in this hateful brew, as he seems to valiantly try to turn Amin into something close to a flesh-and-blood human being, however reprehensible and frightening. Note that tear that you see come from his eye towards the end of the film after he's tortured Garrigan (in a repulsive manner that I will leave you to discover for yourselves, if you dare); even as that damned music tries to beat you into a Renny Harlin-like submission (it's even more inappropriately bombastic than Trevor Jones' Cliffhanger score), Whitaker seems to try for a hint of understandable regret---Garrigan was once a close friend of his, and so he's saddened that he has to torture him even as he tries to scare the crap out of him. It's that kind of sensitivity to nuance that should have been in a better, less inhuman movie than this one. (I wonder if Whitaker was horrified by the end result of shooting this film...not that he would say so in public as he does his awards-season rounds.)

After such vileness, Letters from Iwo Jima comes off as a balm that soothes the spirit even as it pokes some pretty potent holes in our views of not only war, but also our experience of war in other, older Hollywood movies. Because, if nothing else, Eastwood, in this startling late run of his, has been all about trying to elucidate the harsh realities of classical Hollywood narratives even as he remains a fairly staunch classicist himself.

The film, of course, is the second-half of his Iwo Jima diptych this past year; the first was Flags of Our Fathers, an ambitious, half-successful film which, among other things, tried to expose the anguished, guilt-ridden human beings underneath the artificial heroes they were painted as by the American war machine. In a way, you could see it as a critique of blind patriotism, or at least the forces trying to create such a feeling in support of such a morally troublesome thing as war. Letters from Iwo Jima---which deals with the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese side---explores a similar theme: these Japanese soldiers are raised by custom (the bushido code, specifically) to believe that anything is better than surrendering to the enemy, and some of the characters' attempts to try to turn their deaths into something meaningful provide some of the film's most gutwrenching moments.

I've read some criticism of the film that suggests that Eastwood's attempt at multicultural sensitivity both a) distorts the brutal, ruthless character of the Japanese during the conflict just so we can sympathize with them more, and b) humanizes the Japanese to such an extent that Eastwood and screenwriter Iris Yamashita basically turn them into versions of us. I guess I can see where such criticisms come from, and yes, there are certain moments where Eastwood indulges slightly in the kind of Hollywood-bred sentimentality that marred the extended final half-hour of Flags of Our Fathers (not to mention Million Dollar Baby). And yes, mostly what we get from this movie is its contention that, however brutal some of them may have been, they were indeed just like us Americans---and, as Eastwood dramatizes in the film, Americans weren't above committing atrocities of our own (two of the American soldiers in the film, for instance, shoot two Japanese just because they don't feel like watching over them for an entire night). But this is war, after all.

Overall, I think Eastwood is trying for something more universal in nature than its historical particulars may indicate---so to condemn the film simply because it may not be absolutely true to either history or to Japanese culture is to fall into the trap of---cliché alert!---missing the forest for the trees. Letters from Iwo Jima---and, to a lesser extent, Flags of Our Fathers---stands apart from most war movies by trying to sincerely explore some of its most pointed questions. Can one truly die an "honorable death" in war? Can death actually mean something in such a barbaric activity? And what constitutes heroism in war? In Letters, Eastwood shows characters both killing themselves before surrendering or simply trying to live. And really, isn't that the ultimate human impulse: to live? Well, perhaps not when you pledge your life to a cause---even one as gruesome as fighting a war. As much as Eastwood seems to want to believe in some the old sentimentality of older Hollywood war pictures, he simultaneously seems to realize that in war, moral relativism always wins out.

Perhaps what ultimately attracted me to Letters from Iwo Jima is the sheer sense of one director taking on large issues in such an intimate and discursive tone. It's the kind of movie that doesn't seem to be sure what it's trying to say, as if it's working out its ideas as it goes along. That, to me, is exciting. By the end, instead of feeling my preconceived notions of war confirmed, I actually felt challenged to think about issues of humanity and patriotism within the context of an activity that Eastwood seems to have concluded a priori is barbaric and inhuman. Not even Unforgiven managed to accomplish that for me.

Form and Feeling

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Sorry, faithful readers, for not updating all that much in recent days. My winter break is over now and I'm back at Rutgers for the second half of this fourth academic year, and hopefully I'll get it off to a good start. But while I could be working on that thesis outline that I promised for my advisor for next week right now, I'm taking some time out of my morning to update this blog of mine---something I've been meaning to do for a while now, especially since I've seen a handful of films over the break (yes, I persist with moviegoing even with my free Megamovies tickets temporarily revoked) that I'd like to discuss here.

I'd particularly like to discuss both Dreamgirls (** out of ****) and Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower (**½ out of ****) in the context of a discussion of spectacle. Because to me, that's what both movies essentially are: lavish spectacles.

I don't necessarily mean that as a bad thing, mind you. Spectacle has always been a part of the attraction of movies; every movie is a spectacle of some sort, really. But both of those films are spectacles of a particular variety: Dreamgirls is a musical drama that emphasizes slick surfaces and whizz-bang song and dance as much as it tries to highlight both raw emotion and a relatively truthful (at least for Broadway) look at the compromises inherent in Motown's rise in the '60s and '70s, while Curse of the Golden Flower---in keeping with Zhang's typically sumptuous aesthetic, especially in recent films like Hero and House of Flying Daggers---tries for an arty formalism as it emphasizes lush, intoxicating colors and operatic, near-Shakespearean tragic melodrama in its hard look at the implosion of a royal family during the Tang Dynasty in China during the 10th century.

Here's the question that popped up into my mind when I saw both films: at what point that does spectacle becomes simply that---spectacle---and crowd out the humanity of the stories the films tell and the characters the film depicts? In other words, at what point do films like Dreamgirls and Curse of the Golden Flower cease to involve on an intimate level and become...well, soulless pageants of sound and color? And---crucial question, I think---is that necessarily a bad thing?

I pose these questions to try to account for why I felt vaguely dissatisfied after sitting through both of these films---as if I had sat through beautiful museum exhibits without ever connecting all that much with what was happening onscreen. Actually, that's admittedly a bit of a distortion in both cases: Dreamgirls is too insistent on trying to entertain you, with its slick surfaces, its loud singing and its whizz-bang MTV-style editing, to feel much like a museum exhibit; and Zhang's film tries so hard to tell its story through its sets, its costumes and its close-ups of little bits of character business that it (thankfully) plays less like a historical pageant when you think about it afterward, and more like the kind of Shakespearean tragedy that it clearly wants to be.

It's too bad one can't really defend Dreamgirls as even an interesting formalist exercise the way one could conceivably claim for Curse of the Golden Flower, because unfortunately glitz seems to be the main order of the day in Bill Condon's film, as it is in other recent Broadway-stage-to-screen adaptations like The Phantom of the Opera, Rent and The Producers, to nearly as detrimental effect (disastrous in both Phantom and The Producers, barely bearable in Rent). Dreamgirls is slightly better than those hollow musical pageants mostly by virtue of Jennifer Hudson's impressive belting (as an actress, she seems initially awkward but improves as the movie goes on, but as a singer---as American Idol fans could probably testify---she could positive give you goosebumps, at least when she isn't making you close your ears when she's at her loudest) and Eddie Murphy's surprising depth of feeling as his character, to-be has-been R&B singer James "Thunder" Early, is on the decline commercially. Both actors occasionally come through with moments that powerfully illustrate the film's core idea---that black artists had to compromise their distinctive artistry in order to appeal to a wider (whiter?) audience, and that those who refused to do so were thrown aside---in ways that the music (perhaps mediocre on purpose?), the direction and the rest of the cast rarely do. (Perhaps it makes sense, then, that those two were honored with Golden Globes this past Monday; with such a lifeless cast, their occasionally transcendent moments were bound to stick out by default.)

Whether or not Dreamgirls accurately reflects the music and milieu of the time in American history that is its backdrop---the '60s and '70s---is something other critics have already grappled with, and is something I won't delve too deeply into here. (It becomes pretty obvious by the end of the movie---when Jamie Foxx's sell-out producer Curtis is slain by Hudson's narcissistic but still heroic Effie White and others---that we're dealing with pure, pat Hollywood fantasy anyway---good triumphing indisputably over evil---whether or not you're familiar with the period or with the history of the Supremes, whose story is often cited as the inspiration for Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger's original 1981 stage musical.) Dreamgirls isn't all that interested in history anyway, although it throws in touches (shout-outs to Vietnam and race riots, including one odd scene in which an angry Effie storms out of a recording studio and into the midst of a riot happening in the street) to give the film a false aura of historical awareness. Mostly, it's just interested in spectacle: the spectacle of impersonal slickness (Tobias A. Schliesser did the cinematography), the spectacle of a clichéd rags-to-riches story that tellingly stints on the rags part (and when the rags do come---when we see Effie trying to make it on her own after she's thrown out of the Dreamettes---Condon makes even poverty look fairly slick as well), and the spectacle of people singing loudly---as if volume meant "INTENSE FEELING" (a common trait among many American Idol-ers like Jennifer Hudson). What's ultimately missing is much evidence of soul---the kind of soul that animated even the most commercial of Motown music---in this slick commercial package, and whatever interesting insights it has to offer about the black music industry during the '60s and '70s is blunted by the film's obvious desire to impress---a sign that spectacle has at least partly overtaken the human beings supposedly populating this musical landscape.

It might be harder to assess the extent to which spectacle dwarfs humanity in Curse of the Golden Flower if you subscribe to Zhang's notion that form equals feeling. Of course, that kind of notion has always held a certain appeal for me, because I often like movies that tell its stories sparely and through visuals: shot selection, lighting, sets, costumes, even sound. Stuff, in other words, that you can't necessarily get from novels unless you imagine them for yourself. Directors like Zhang, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (you must see Three Times, especially its opening section---even if the IFC Films DVD is sadly un-enhanced for widescreen TVs) or Terrence Malick, or perhaps Stanley Kubrick in his own misanthropic way, have proved that an interest in film form can intensify our intellectual and emotional responses to a particular story being told.

So perhaps this is my way of saying that, one of these days, perhaps I'll feel compelled to take a look at Curse of the Golden Flower again and discover the ways in which the film's awe-inspiring formal beauty---its Technicolor walls, carpets and curtains; its tight-fitting costumes; etc.---complement its thematic ambition---its interest in observing how a royal family is undone by madness, stubbornness, greed, and even such supposed virtues as honor and loyalty. Maybe there are depths to the film's formalism that I'm not comprehending right now, because, as I sat through the film, I couldn't help but feel detached from the whole thing: admiring its ornately designed (overdesigned?) mise-en-scène while feeling barely a thing for any of the characters onscreen: not the slowly-going-mad Empress Phoenix (Gong Li, looking as glorious as ever), not the rigid Emperor Ping (Chow Yun-Fat, an interesting choice to play a rigidly controlling king), nor his sons. I felt the same way with House of Flying Daggers a couple of years ago, rarely feeling all that engaged in its soapy love-triangle story while admiring its beautiful look and some of its visual tropes (a tragic snowfall that ends the film, for instance, or a fight atop bamboo trees) from an emotional distance.

Maybe that detachment is meant to be point: perhaps the film's explosion of color is meant to be deliberately oppressive, to emphasize the feeling of constriction many of the characters feel. Maybe its blend of bright blood reds and eye-popping yellows are meant to serve as a visual expression of the swirling passions boiling underneath the characters' restrained surfaces. Or maybe it's all meant to simply be ironic counterpoint, much like the visual voluptuousness of Sofia Coppola's underrated Marie Antoinette was last year. Still, I was rather disturbed by the sense I got that this particular director seemed more interested in the way blood splashes on yellow flowers than in the way blood courses through a desperate woman's veins. To me, that seems...well, dehumanizing, to put it rather bluntly.

And yet, maybe such an approach is more appropriate to this particular story than in House of Flying Daggers, in which the passions of its characters wasn't matched by an equal passion for those characters on the part of the director. Perhaps, in the end, I'm suggesting that Curse of the Golden Flower is a movie that plays better after the fact than it does as you watch it. This means that the experience of watching the movie can be an off-puttingly remote and distant one for some, myself included. Of course, that doesn't mean the film is a bad one---far from it. (With such deliciously opulent set design and a few memorable action sequences, how could it be?) It may well be a formalist masterpiece of some sort, and thus perhaps it isn't really meant to be loved---just admired from afar. Like many spectacles of this sort.

Which brings me back to the questions I posed earlier about the nature of movie spectacles such as Dreamgirls and Curse of the Golden Flower. Maybe I've been raised too much on classical narrative expectations: the expectation that a movie should tell a good story and involve us in the lives of its characters. So what one could read as fatal detachment in Curse of the Golden Flower, others could read as one director's interest in using elements of film form to express feeling. (Dreamgirls is just plain careless.) This could be another case of "beauty is in the eye of the beholder": what one sees as simply visual decadence, another sees as cinema at its most visual, and thus at some kind of peak. Count me as still contemplating.

The Belated 2006 Retrospective Post

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Was 2006 overall a good year for me, or a not-so-good one?

Not so good in some ways (count on me to start with the negative!). Most of the bad stuff came thanks to my usual combination of worries about my future, my low self-esteem and occasional need to be validated (I know, not good attributes for a wannabe film critic), and my mother's incessant nagging. In the first half of 2006, I was positively in a fog: despite the fact that I had desperately switched my focus to journalism, I felt no closer to having a clearer idea about where I wanted my life to go, and even if I occasionally felt I had that clearer idea, I always found myself falling into self-doubting spells. It came to the point that not only did I feel compelled to see a psychologist during my summer break, but even earlier in the year, my mother had the oh-so-bright idea to see a local psychic and get a palm reading---mostly, I suspect, to validate her own suspicions about my mental and emotional state.

And my mother: I don't know if there is much more to say about our troubled relationship (which has thankfully gotten somewhat better, as I will explain in a bit) that I didn't already realize---and discuss in this blog---after our whole family had come home from our pleasant-then-disastrous vacation in Maine. If there has been an unpleasant peak in our relationship so far, that was definitely it---a peak in which a lot of things became clear to me about her worldview, and how that view clashed with mine.

There was one outburst after that incident---in which I admittedly overreacted to criticism she made about something I did, stormed out of the house while swearing at her (later, I found out she had misinterpreted what I said as name-calling; I didn't call her a "piece of shit," I called the whole situation a "piece of shit"), and stayed the night at Rockoff. I came back home the next day, and the day afterward she, in her own blunt way, implored me to try to accept her as she was, and deal with whatever held-in beefs I had with her in a manner more mature than the one I was exuding.

After that, for the most part, things have been pretty tranquil between us so far---so tranquil that it's almost pleasant. (I know, I'm jinxing it as I write this!) Maybe it's just because I don't tell her much anymore---although, to be honest, I never did talk to her all that much about personal stuff---or maybe it's simply because I've listened to her plea and tried to accept her faults and mentally throw away my grudges toward her. For once, though, this winter break hasn't been laden with emotional incident between us. Who knows? Maybe I partly shut her up after getting that Wall Street Journal summer internship (although, predictably and irritatingly, when I told her about it, she immediately reacted with something like, "Now, I know you really like movies, but, like I've told you many times, you have to try to write other things, not just movies").

That Wall Street Journal internship did a lot to redeem the last half of 2006, because it seems to promise at least a direction in my future. Is it a direction I necessarily want, copy editing? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure (especially because the Wall Street Journal, as prestigious as it is, initially doesn't seem to point me into the kind of direction I would desire to go, as someone who is deeply interested in writing about film)---but, if I've learned something over this past year, you won't really know until you give it a try. That sounds like a cliché, I know: but that kind of risk-taking is not something that comes easily to me, having been raised by a mother who seems to prize sureness and planning above a lot of things.

Any resolutions for 2007? Well, I guess one obvious one is to try to work my tail off at that internship, and hope that it leads to further great opportunities. If it doesn't---well, I guess I try to find my own opportunities. Above all, try to find some kind of work this year. And perhaps think about moving out of my house into the "real world" once and for all. (How else are you to escape your mother's financial choke-hold?) In many respects, 2007 is an important year in my life---I'll be graduating (if not on time, then still certainly graduating) from Rutgers this year, and I was planning to try to see what's out there in the job market first before thinking about graduate school (maybe try to pay off some of my school debts, heh). So it's rather important for me to try to get my feet grounded firmly in that "real world" via some kind of job and some kind of place to live (it'd be a dream if I could find a place to live in New York---Brooklyn, perhaps?).

On a less obviously serious note, I think I need to re-establish certain reading habits in 2007. Over the past year or two, I've been seriously slacking off in the pleasure-reading department. With all the schoolwork I've had, and with all the worrying I've done, I just haven't done nearly enough reading on my own---either film-related stuff, or just simply acquainting myself with the classics (like, say, Madame Bovary---now that I've seen the film Little Children, with its explicit references to Flaubert's novel and, specifically, its equally bored, repressed-passions bourgeois heroine). I really need to pick that habit up again! (That and reading a newspaper on a daily basis.)

And anything I need to change about my personality this year? Boy, what doesn't need improvement in my personality. Learn to make more eye contact, stand up straighter, be less easily irritable with people, be more confident arguing with people. I suspect, though, that I've been making those same personality-related resolutions since college began, and I haven't really changed all that much since then. I've always thought about changing, but never really have. Maybe I'm just comfortable with looking elsewhere when someone's talking to me or always evading arguments about, say, movies (boy, I'm just dreading the moment when I'm asked what I thought of Little Children to a friend I know who says he loved it)---although I suspect they're not necessarily good people habits to have. Maybe this year will be different. Hopefully. Let 2007 roll along.