Trying to Reconcile My Two Minds on Inception

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

[POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD]

For better and for worse, Inception (2010) is probably the film its writer and director, Christopher Nolan, has been working toward his entire career to date—a folly comparable in ambition to, say, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) or Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), among others. It's the kind of shoot-the-moon effort that demands to be marveled, if nothing else, for the fact of its mere existence...and the even more astonishing fact that such an intellectually ambitious film exists as a big-budget, heavily hyped Hollywood summer blockbuster. A cerebral, philosophical epic exploring the intersection between reality and dreams, with whole sections taking place within mental landscapes? If Nolan hadn't scored such big hits with his two Batman movies, it would be hard to imagine that any major studio would have risked granting him $200 million to pull off such a cut-from-original-cloth, difficult-to-easily-summarize endeavor. But he did, Warner Bros. granted him the large budget, and now Inception—based on a script Nolan had been working on for over a decade now—is here for all of us to watch, contemplate and passionately argue over.

I know I'm still arguing about it...with myself.

In an attempt to try to evoke my experience of watching Inception at midnight Thursday night, allow me to explore the two minds in which the film leaves me.

***

Mind No. 1

As its characters kept delivering the mumbo-jumbo Nolan had written for them, I began to realize that the detractors of Inception have missed the point in complaining about the overly explanatory nature of the dialogue. For one thing, the people that are involved in this operation of trying to plant an idea into a billionaire's brain are professionals in their respective fields—so wouldn't it make sense that their way of talking to each other would be overly technical? Especially since much of the first hour involves master idea thief Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) explaining the nature of his vocation to young mental "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page)? Complain about the supposed woodenness of the dialogue all you want...but in context, it makes perfect sense given the situations and characters.

This brings me to a larger point about this film that some of those detractors are, I think, missing: Inception is not a "dream film," not in the sense that, say, David Lynch's frequent forays into his irrational subconscious are. For about an hour, at least, Nolan's film is meant to be a rather clinical deconstruction of the genesis of ideas and dreams, not necessarily an embodiment—a laying of the groundwork for the narrative blowout that follows.

And what a blowout it is! Its final act—in which Nolan juggles five different dream planes into one exhilarating cross-cutting mélange which might have made D.W. Griffith proud—is a stunning achievement of editing and narrative construction. But even during the set-up, there are plenty of instances of mind-blowing imagery to provide plenty of eye candy. (Ever seen a town literally fold upon itself, allowing its inhabitants to leisurely walk up and down the way Donald O'Connor ran up walls in Singin' in the Rain? Or what about people floating through zero gravity while engaging in combat? You'll see that here.)

Amidst the action fireworks, Nolan is aiming for both philosophical and psychological grandeur: He's trying to explore the ways dreams plant their way into human subconscious and fester, but he also wants to explore how human psychology affects the way people dream. It's a laudable ambition, especially for a major Hollywood blockbuster—and once in a while Nolan hits upon an idea that will resonate deeply. Perhaps its most successful thread, in that regard, revolves around Cobb's trauma over his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose death haunts him to degrees that causes causes roadblocks to pop up in Ariadne's carefully imagined dream worlds. As a visualization of the way people hold onto mental scars, unable to let go of the past, it's pretty potent, and it provides at least a signifier of emotion to latch onto in an otherwise antiseptic environment.

***

Mind No. 2

I use the word "signifier" above, however, for a specific reason: That thread may signify an emotional thread, but that doesn't mean it delivers genuine emotion. I found myself unable to emotionally connect much with, really, any of the characters in this film...and I highly doubt that Nolan did, either. Because, if his previous work is any indication, human emotion simply isn't in his artistic arsenal.

With the possible exception of his Insomnia (2002) remake, Nolan's films are generally concerned less with people than with narrative gimmicks and intellectual/philosophical allegories. They aren't really about the human experience—or, at least, if they are about humanity, they go about trying to access it in ways that end up shining a light more on Nolan's cleverness and pretensions than on anything you or I would recognize in our own daily lives. Nolan may have hit upon killer gimmicks in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006)—gimmicks that could be argued to support the human stories being told in both those films—but the limitations of his techno-geek approach to cinema became painfully evident in perhaps his most financially successful effort yet, The Dark Knight (2008). An utterly soulless affair, stubbornly lacking in resonance or poetry of any kind, the film presented a relentlessly conceptual allegory about chance and free will in a world seemingly without morality—one in which all the characters, however energetically performed by its actors, were imagined as mere stick figures in a glorified thesis paper.

Inception, alas, contains more of that same soullessness, but this time blown up to elephantine proportions. The thing about the Cobb/Mal thread is that while it contains some of the film's most interesting ideas about the connections between dreams and human psychology, it also exudes barely any emotional affect. In context, the thread plays merely like a calculated attempt by a clever filmmaker to provide an emotional through-line for the film; it never actually delivers the real McCoy. Because of that, the ostensible catharsis of its supposedly operatic climax never quite hits home the way Nolan seems to want it to do. And there certainly isn't much to latch onto with the film's other characters: they are barely given personalities at all, conceived as mere mouthpieces for Nolan's reams of technological/psychological babble.

Now, I don't demand that every single movie give me a reason to "care" about the characters in them. Stanley Kubrick, for one, was never particularly interested in giving you reasons to warm to the people he depicted onscreen; he left it up to the viewer to find something in these people with which to personally identify. But Kubrick took at least a passing interest in exploring the humanity of his characters; Nolan's chilliness seems less like a directorial strategy than a mere inability to imagine human beings in the first place...and when he tries to muster up some kind of genuine feeling, the results generally feel insincere and secondhand. Nolan's attempt to explore one man's grief over a lost wife in the context of his puzzle-box narrative here looks especially thin alongside Martin Scorsese's far more powerful look at deep psychic wounds in Shutter Island (2010).

And then there's the matter of Nolan's conception of dreams, which some have faulted for being too literal-minded to approximate the way dreams actually operate. I wouldn't presume to know better than Christopher Nolan how we all dream; dreams are such a beautifully mysterious thing that psychologists are still trying to explain it, decades after Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Mystery, alas, is the one thing that is missing in Nolan's linear, prosaic, puzzle-box approach to imagining his dream worlds in Inception; there is precious little of the wonder and illumination that dreams at their most feverishly unhinged can inspire in all of us (and that you regularly see in Luis Buñuel's or David Lynch's surreal cinematic visions). Nolan is too calculated and precise an artist to inspire a milieu of mental freedom...but then, perhaps that was never his aim. Instead, he has used the premise of dream worlds to add more layers to what is, when you get right down to it, a standard (read: clichéd) heist movie. Apparently, Nolan's subconscious consists entirely of a diet of James Bond flicks, with the occasional stray high-minded reference to Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930), Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and other superior reality-versus-illusion dreamscapes.

***

Neither masterpiece nor disaster, Inception is basically a big-budget rock-'em-sock-'em action picture disguised as an intellectual exercise. I can't say that I (yet) love it the way its most ardent defenders do; the experience of watching it left me more in a state of glacial admiration than anything else. As mind-numbing and unpoetic as it is, however, I think its intellectual substance is still worth taking seriously; plus, viscerally it works like gangbusters. There has certainly been nothing like this in megaplexes so far this year, and for that alone, it deserves to be seen and respected.

The right and left sides of my brain remain unreconciled...which is quite possibly more than I can say for the right and left sides of Christopher Nolan's artistic mind, which has always been more left than right.

Anthony Mann's Physical and Psychological Landscapes

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

[SPOILER ALERT]

Winchester '73 (1950)

The Tall Target (1951)

The Naked Spur (1953)

The Far Country (1954)

The Man from Laramie (1955)

Man of the West (1958)

Anthony Mann's Westerns have all the standard genre elements—cowboys and Indians, vast expanses of American landscapes, horses, shootouts, lawmen and lawbreakers, and the like. But they also have a psychological—and, in some cases, near-Shakespearean—intensity that is unique, exhilarating and sometimes profoundly moving. Instead of being bound by genre, Mann, with his mastery of action choreography and visual style, used those elements to explore the darkness in men's souls, and the possibilities of redemption in even the most troubled of characters.

Man of the West offers a good summary of the Mann Western. In this 1958 film, an aging Gary Cooper plays Link Jones, a former outlaw who struggles to escape from his past as a criminal, only to find that past catching up with him when he finds himself in the presence of another outlaw, Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), whom he abandoned after he had grown up with him for years. It's a fairly standard plot—an outlaw called upon to do one last score—but Mann invests the film with a visceral sense of moral danger: Will Link surrender to the violent, bloodthirsty side of him that he is trying to transcend? There's an astonishing setpiece in the middle of the film in which Coaley (Jack Lord), one of Dock's henchmen, challenges Link to a fistfight that climaxes with Link humiliating Coaley—ripping off his clothes in a figurative diminishing of his manhood—in the manner in which Coaley humiliated prostitute Billie (Julie London) the night before. It's a feat of choreography, yes...but it is also deliberate in its refusal to make the violence appear superficially exciting in the least; it's severe, brutal stuff, and Mann painstakingly denies the viewer the sense of triumph one might expect in seeing Link give this vicious knave his comeuppance. This is, of course, the kind of violence that Link is trying to actively suppress.

It's interesting, and probably fitting, that it's Gary Cooper—generally a pretty recessive actor, known more for being stoic than dynamic—playing the reformed outlaw trying to go straight in Man of the West...because Cooper is, in a sense, playing a logical culmination of the even more troubled characters James Stewart played in his Western collaborations with Mann. With Stewart—in Winchester '73, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie (and also the 1952 Bend of the River, which I wasn't able to see at Film Forum's recent Anthony Mann retrospective, ending today)—you get a startling glimpse into the psychological and spiritual traumas from which Link Jones is trying to walk away.

Stewart, in general, was in a phase in his acting career where he was increasingly taking on roles that actively subverted the pre-WWII clean-cut American-boy image perhaps most exemplified in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)...and in his collaborations with Mann, you see some pretty dark notes emerging from the familiar Stewart persona. In The Naked Spur, for instance, Stewart's Howard Kemp sells himself as a sheriff looking for a wanted criminal, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan). Eventually, however, his true motives for pursuing Ben are revealed, and they are far from purely civic: He's going after Ben more for the reward money, with which he intends to buy back the land his ex-fiancée sold while he was away at war. Essentially, he's still obsessing over a past that he is desperately trying to get back.

Money is also the main concern of Jeff Webster, the antihero Stewart plays in The Far Country, set in Alaska during the Klondike gold rush. What's troubling about Webster is his rabid self-interest; he seems to not give a damn about anyone or anything unless it helps his quest for riches. Even when he finds himself amidst corruption and ineffectual law enforcement in the town of Dawson—where he intends to sell his cattle for a fortune in beef—he seems to care little for the townspeople's well being even when corrupt judge Gannon (John McIntire) rides in and usurps control over the town.

Revenge is also a major motivator in the Mann/Stewart Westerns. For all the narrative passings-of-the-torch in Winchester '73, the film eventually boils down to Lin McAdam's (Stewart) quest to avenge the death of his father at the hands of Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), who, it is revealed, is Lin's brother. And The Man from Laramie presents another stealth vengeance narrative in which Stewart's Will Lockhart seeks the man among the Waggoman ranching family responsible for selling firearms to the Apache tribe—a move that he believes resulted in the death of his brother in the line of Apache fire.

In none of these Mann/Stewart collaborations are the main characters ever presented in a flattering light; Lin McAdam and Will Lockhart may be relatively more noble than Howard Kemp or Jeff Webster, but neither Mann nor Stewart make it easy for us to warm to them as straight-up heroes. There is always something mysterious about these characters—the sense that they may well be capable of anything, even harsh violence, in their personal quests. However charming their surface manner, their depths may frighten you. 

And yet, for all the psychological warfare on display in these films, Mann always allows for a measure of redemption for his twisted heroes.

Sometimes that redemption comes simply in the form of a hero successfully achieving his goals after great struggle. After all, in Winchester '73, Lin does achieve his revenge...though only after the gun Dutch steals from Lin—the titular Winchester '73—passes through various hands and deeply affects all the lives it touches. And in The Man from Laramie, Will does discover the identity of the man who sold the weapons to the Apaches—even if, in the process of his discovery, he helps brings down an entire ranching dynasty in the process. And of course, there's that pesky bullet he takes in his right hand...

But the road to redemption can be more complicated for other Mann protagonists. The Far Country's Jeff Webster experiences a moment that cracks his self-interested facade when Gannon and his henchmen kill his friend Ben (Walter Brennan); only then does he take it upon himself to violently re-establish order in Dawson. It takes a hard-hitting personal tragedy for him to find the heroism that perhaps was always in him.

The most grueling and transcendent redemption of all, though, comes to Howard Kemp in The Naked Spur, through Lina Patch (Janet Leigh), the woman who accompanies Vandergroat after her father is killed during a robbery attempt in Abilene. Craving emotional stability from a male companion, Lina gradually becomes romantically drawn to Kemp as Vandergroat begins to more fully reveal his irrational side. But will Kemp ever be able to let go of the memory of Vandergroat's previous transgressions, even after death, to provide Lina the dependability she desires? Mann—in a conclusion that may well be the most profoundly moving passage in the Mann films I saw at Film Forum—eventually offers hope for Kemp as his thick macho armor gradually cracks in Lina's presence after Vandergroat has been killed, as you can see here:




The Mann hero, then, is neither completely villainous nor completely heroic; he may be driven by selfish and impure motives, but he has goodness within him that eventually comes out. In short, Mann's vision of humanity in these Westerns is anguished but ultimately hopeful—a hopefulness for people's capacity for change that feels completely earned in context because of how deeply he and his actors are willing to stare at the moral abysses underneath the characters' feet in the first place.

Alas, I didn't get a chance to see any of Mann's noirs, which I hear presents a bleaker picture of humanity (as noirs have a tendency to do). I did, however, see The Tall Target—a fictional retelling of one New York cop's (Dick Powell) efforts to foil a by-now-little-known plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his presidential inauguration in 1861—in which Mann resourcefully creates a down-and-dirty atmosphere that feels genuinely noirish (a refreshing tactic considering its historical basis). It's an exceptionally tight and gripping thriller—it runs a mere 78 minutes—but that is not to say that its content isn't worth considering.

The cop, named John Kennedy (yes, you read that right—though I don't think his middle name is "Fitzgerald"), is himself a bit of mystery for most of the film. At first, one assumes that his motives for pursuing his suspicions is simply professional. But then, at one point late in the film, Rachel (Ruby Dee), a slave who is onboard the train containing the assassination suspects, asks Kennedy about his interest in foiling the plot, and it is then that he recounts his experience shaking hands with Lincoln and feeling a general sense of hope.

You know what that sounds like? It sounds like the atmosphere that greeted the election of our current president, Barack Obama. Who knew that this crackerjack piece of suspense entertainment from 1951 would still be amazingly relevant today in the way that Dick Powell, in this one wondrous and chilling moment, expresses the kind of borders-defying sense of hope that was Obama's major calling card in 2008? Maybe in that sense, The Tall Target really does tie into Mann's later Westerns in its belief in the capacity for the good in people to overcome evil.

(All of these films—and plenty more by Anthony Mann—are available on DVD, though The Tall Target is available only as a DVD-R via Warner Bros.'s Archive Collection)

A Cinematic Convergence of Kids At Play

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

Innocents at play. What adult hardships?

Music You Realize You've Heard Only After You've Heard It

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Every once in a while, in my music-listening explorations, I'll come across a piece of music that I recall hearing in a film I saw somewhere but remained unknown to me until hearing it at that moment—and that recognition would trigger a feeling of exhilaration along the lines of, I didn't know that was the piece of music used in such-and-such film! Awesome!

I experienced a moment like that a week ago while listening to a 1963 recording of Robert Schumann's 1842 Piano Quintet, with pianist Rudolf Serkin playing with the Budapest Quartet. I was hearing the work for the first time...or so I thought.

The second movement of the work begins with a solemn C minor funeral march that stands in marked contrast to the whirlwind close of its first movement. But then...wait a minute...what's that I hear in the movement's ethereal second subject? Could it be? Yes, yes it is...




It's the chamber music that so delicately opens Ingmar Bergman's 1983 masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, as Bergman literally draws a curtain open into the life of the Ekdahl clan, especially through the eyes of the titular two children. For some reason, I had always believed this was simply "the music from Fanny and Alexander"...and then, upon hearing Serkin and the Budapest Quartet perform this Schumann work, bam! Shivers of recognition running up my spine.

It was a beautiful feeling—hearing music that I realized I had heard only after I had heard it.

(Oh, and even before I saw Fanny and Alexander, I heard this piece of music in the context of Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)...though the less said about its sophomoric appropriation in that film, the better.)

Of course, this wasn't the first time I had such a musical encounter.

For example, the late Richard Stone—a composer who scored many of the 1990s Warner Bros. television cartoon series I loved growing up, including Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs—would every so often use a selection of Johannes Brahms's famous heroic big tune of the finale of his First Symphony in his various cartoon scores...and I didn't realize it until I finally heard Brahms's First Symphony in high school and had my eureka moment. (Not that that was a fresh stylistic trope; Carl Stalling, who famously scored a lot of Warner Bros. cartoons in the '40s and '50s, often incorporated music by Rossini, Chopin, Rimsky-Korsakov and others into his musical accompaniments for the adventures of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest. The difference is, I was fully aware of Stalling's homages at the time.)

Jean-Luc Godard famously peppers his films with all sorts of allusions to popular and classical music. In Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), for instance, Godard randomly uses snatches of Beethoven's string quartets...but only after listening to this complete box set of Beethoven string quartets was I able to put names to the seductive musical bits on the soundtrack. (I don't think it's absolutely necessary to know that it's Beethoven you're listening to on the soundtrack; the music's intimate grandeur speaks for itself. But it enriches your experience of the film quite a bit if you are aware.)

But it's not just classical music, of course.

Before my trip to Los Angeles, I gorged on the music of The Beach Boys, having not heard their complete albums, only their hits. Turns out, though, I hadn't even heard all of their hits...or, at least, I had heard all of their hits, but in some cases I didn't realize I had heard them until this recent diet of Beach Boys listening.



So when I heard their song "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)," from the group's 1965 album The Beach Boys Today!, I immediately recognized it from Look Who's Talking (1989), not having realized that director Amy Heckerling had used more than one Beach Boys song on the soundtrack (I had already known that "I Get Around" accompanied the film's opening-credit insemination).

And the song that plays over the million reconciliations at the end of Love Actually (2003)? "God Only Knows," from Pet Sounds, of course...though I didn't realize it 'til I finally sat down and listened to the complete album recently.

It's a familiar enough experience to watch a film or TV episode and get excited when you hear a piece of music you know and possibly love being used in a fresh context. But what about the tingles of excitement you might feel when you recognize a piece of music that you then realize you had already heard before without knowing back then what it was you were listening to? To me, such moments carry a kind of excavation-like thrill—as if you've happened upon a long-lost artifact in your own mental artistic landscape.

Does this feeling sound familiar to you, dear readers? (Or does this whole blog post merely expose how catching up I need to do in my knowledge of classical and popular art—a fact that was only emphasized yesterday with the passing of cartoonist Harvey Pekar (RIP), who I know only from the excellent 2003 film American Splendor?)

You Can't Stop What's Coming...In Theaters in the Second Half of 2010

NEW YORK—A quick bit of self-promotion: Over at the film- and music-review website In Review Online, I contributed a short blurb about Jacques Rivette's Around a Small Mountain for a staff feature article previewing highly anticipated film releases in the second half of 2010. It's actually a very nice-looking feature, and it even mentions some tantalizing titles I hadn't heard about previously, new films by John Carpenter (The Ward) and Julian Schnabel (Miral) among them.

Take a look, when you can (and, of course, go see Around the Small Mountain, which I wrote about at the end of last week here. Because it's marvelous).

Short Take: Nimród Antal's Predators (2010)

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Technically, I saw four films theatrically on Friday in addition to Predators: an early Yasujiro Ozu silent film from 1935, An Inn in Tokyo, and two more Anthony Mann films, The Far Country (1954) and The Tall Target (1951). The Ozu, however, kicks off a months-long retrospective at IFC Center of which I would like try to keep track in monthly installments at this blog; and, of course, this week I'm aiming to round-up the handful of Mann films I've been able to see during my weekends at this three-week series at Film Forum, coming to an end this week.

So Predators, a reboot of the popular 1987 action/sci-fi/horror hybrid, is what remains of my weekend in the movie-theater dark...and actually, it's not bad.

For one thing, it has a promising idea underpinning the mayhem. Eight strangers are literally thrown into a jungle environment populated by two races of alien Predators, with the subtext-rich idea that these humans themselves are, in different ways, dregs of society: criminals, enforcers, gang members, combat veterans. Do they thus deserve to be hunted by these nameless aliens, or will the film assert their right to be considered human? And it has in Antal a skilled craftsman who brings a likable B-movie breeziness to the big-budget spectacle, with action scenes that are shot and edited with imagination and relatively classical precision (none of that Paul Greengrass near-incoherence here), and with actors who bring a wealth of memorable character detail to their two-dimensional roles. (Laurence Fishburne, for instance, is a scream as a lone human survivor on that island who has lived through 10 "seasons" of alien hunting.)

Alex Litvak and Michael Finch's script, alas, doesn't end up doing a whole lot with the humanistic implications of its premise, and Antal is less successful at building up genuine terror or suspense. In the end, it's just another stalk-and-slash movie. (But then, so was John McTiernan's 1987 original, to be honest, however skillfully made and spiked with machismo.) Nevertheless, it has some fresh ideas, fine acting, a few memorable setpieces—including an alien-vs.-Yakuza member swordfight that is a small masterpiece—and a final image that ends the film on an agreeably ambiguous note. Predators has its genuine cinematic pleasures; in a summer that hasn't provided a whole lot worth getting excited about in the megaplexes, especially in the action department, such pleasures are worth savoring...at least before Inception comes along. Which, actually, is just around the corner...

Jacques Rivette's Play of Life

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—I was going to post something on how the only thing Nimród Antal's new Predators (2010) has inspired in me is a strong desire to revisit John McTiernan's 1987 Predator—particularly its final showdown, which in and of itself is a small masterpiece of action filmmaking—but alas, my local library seems to have misplaced its DVD copy of the film at the moment.

I may revisit this at a later date, however...so worry not, Predator fans; the movie will still get its due here at My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second! And who knows? Maybe I'll actually get around to seeing this new version.

In the meantime...let's talk a bit about Jacques Rivette, shall we?

Around a Small Mountain (2009), Rivette's latest work, begins a week-long run at the IFC Center today; I saw it a couple weeks ago at a press screening. It is my first-ever experience with the French New Wave filmmaking legend...and this introduction proved to be a highly complimentary one.

The film is set mostly among a circus troupe, and there are two main characters: Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian outsider who becomes obsessed with the inner workings of this performing company; and Kate (Jane Birkin), who has returned to her family's traveling circus after leaving it under mysterious circumstances years ago. Much of the intrigue of Around a Small Mountain revolves around the emotional mysteries surrounding Kate and Vittorio's attempts to penetrate the wall she has built around herself.

But on the edges of this slender but charming little movie is an affectionate depiction of the lives of artists—as surely even these circus performers are, in their own ways—that subtly enlarges into a rich inquiry into the dividing lines between life and art, and furthermore between theater and cinema. Thus, on the surface of Around a Small Mountain, Rivette alternates between circus performances and backstage drama...but his conceit goes deeper than that. He may be the omniscient observer of the dramas playing out in front of his camera, but every once in a while he will break the fourth wall by putting that camera right in front of the circus performers and just letting it sit there, recording while they do their thing; it's as if they're performing just for us in the movie theater. Is this merely filmed theater, or is this just as much a cinematic moment as the more conventionally dramatic moments in the film? Rivette allows both mediums to blur, suggesting that, to him, they're possibly one and the same.

Even more than that bit of formal playfulness, though, Around a Small Mountain gradually develops into something rather inspiring: an ode to the power of art as a regenerative force. Art, it turns out, is what allows Kate to face her former traumas and at least lead the way toward some kind of catharsis—as surely art at its best can do, whether for the artist or for the spectator. And with both Vittorio and Kate, Rivette examines the power of art from both of those sides.

Around a Small Mountain may or may not itself be a great work of art...but I got immense pleasure out of its airy visual textures—courtesy of cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky, daughter of the late, great William—and its warm feel for the play of life. I look forward to diving into more of Rivette's work to see what else his distinct vision has yielded; for now, I thoroughly recommend checking this one out. It's quite wonderful.

And on that note: All of you, enjoy yourselves this weekend on this grand stage we call Life!

Happy 150th Birthday, Gustav Mahler!

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—On this day in 1860, the great Austrian composer Gustav Mahler was born.

Mahler's music holds a very special place in my heart, for reasons that are as much about nostalgia as about the extraordinarily rich, ambitious and influential music he gave the world. Throughout my high-school years, I pretty much couldn't stop listening to his symphonies, finding in these generally large-scale musical epics entire universes that spanned the entire range of human experience, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair. In short, it was music that spoke directly to my neurotic self. It still does.

For my money, the most representative of Mahler's music lies in one of his less popular symphonies: the Sixth, which I actually wrote about at length at The House Next Door here. The piece is often dubbed "Tragic," and certainly the work's despairing conclusion bears out its unofficial subtitle—but the Sixth is far more than relentless doom and gloom. It encompasses extremes of sonority and emotion, touching on sometimes straight-up bizarre notes of bitter irony and pastoral spirituality in its march to a sonic scaffold. Stylistically, too, it represents a clash between the late Romanticism of his early music and the modernist bent of much of his later work. (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and other Second Viennese School composers in the first half of the 20th century all publicly expressed admiration for the work, with Berg even going so far as to proclaim it "the only Sixth, despite [Beethoven's] Pastorale.")

If you want to experience Mahler at arguably his most unhinged, his Sixth Symphony fits the bill (though his even more forbidding Seventh runs it close). But really, all of his works are monuments of visionary imagination and passion for life in all of its splendor and gloom. They're truly something to behold and treasure—now more than ever.

For a taste, here is Leonard Bernstein—one of the most famous interpreters of Mahler's music, instrumental as he was in bringing them, especially lesser known works like the Sixth, wider exposure and popularity in the 1960s—conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the first movement of the Sixth in this filmed performance, shot by director Humphrey Burton in 1976 (and available on DVD here):





P.S. Fans of Shutter Island—of which I am one—might be interested to know, if you don't already, that the piece of music Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring is listening to upon his introduction in the story is from Mahler's Quartet for Piano and Strings in A minor—his only known chamber work, written while in his mid-teens in 1876. Oh that Martin Scorsese, always having a knack for digging up these pieces of music and using them immaculately in his films!

Time Keeps Ticking...Ticking...Ticking Away

NEW YORK—It's funny, and perhaps a little sobering, how quickly a whole year can pass you by.

One of the things my long commute to midtown Manhattan, combined with my 11:30 a.m. - 7:30 p.m. work schedule, has forced me to do is to take a local (818) NJ Transit bus from East Brunswick to nearby New Brunswick in order to catch a Northeast Corridor train from New Brunswick to get me to New York Penn Station.

This morning, after waiting for five minutes in the scorching heat and humidity, I boarded my usual 818 bus at around 8:49 a.m. and encountered a familiar face driving it: the same female bus driver that had been driving it at that particular time regularly a little over a year ago, when I started working the 11:30-7:30 shift.

Not that this was a surprise; the previous (male) bus driver had alerted me last week that she was reclaiming her old bus route. But when he mentioned it, I had only a faint memory of who this former 818 bus driver was. When I stepped onto the bus this morning and started talking to her, light bulbs of memories started flashing in my mind.

Other thoughts that flooded into my mind at that moment: Have I really been in East Brunswick this long? I'm still here even after being forced to relocate my job to New York two years ago? And finally: What the heck am I still doing here? What with all the time I spend in New York these days?

I'm not sure if I should react to these realizations with disbelief or bemusement. But it once again reminded me of how time marches on, without a care in the world. What you do with those oceans of time, of course, is entirely up to you.

Time, for one thing, certainly won't advise you on how to live your life.

A Literary Interlude, Courtesy of James Joyce

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Why yes, I am taking the plunge and trying to read James Joyce's classic 1922 novel Ulysses—and so far (I'm only about 30 pages in), I'm finding it less forbidding and impenetrable than I had expected. It certainly strikes me as relatively more accessible, to my mind, than my previous encounters with the equally experimental William Faulkner (with As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury). Even if I end up not getting half of the nuances of Joyce's language and allusions and such, nevertheless I'm actually looking forward to reading the rest of this!

Anyway, here's a particular passage from the novel that struck me, for reasons that, as you'll see below, are more deeply personal than broadly artistic:

Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery.

—Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very handy.

Answer something.

—Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.

The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well. I can break them in this instant if I will.

—Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

—Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.

—He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's mouth?

The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

—That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

—Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

—I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I paid my way.

Good man, good man.

—I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, Mrs McKernan, five weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.

—For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

—I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We are a generous people but we must also be just.

—I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

You know who Mr. Deasy, in this passage from James Joyce's classic 1922 novel Ulysses, reminds me of? My mother. Mr. Deasy's emphasis on saving money very much recalls my mother's ultra-frugal ways. Even more than that, though: the character's belief that his older age offers him the kind of experience and wisdom, money-related or not, that youngsters just don't have closely aligns with the rather condescending tone my mother takes whenever she thinks I'm about to make a "critical" mistake.

And apparently, to my mother, as I learned over the weekend, looking into moving to New York could potentially count as one of those kinds of mistakes.

(Fourth of July) Weekend Film Round-up: Fireworks—Epic and Intimate, Fiction and Nonfiction

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—For most of us in the New York/New Jersey area, this Fourth of July weekend meant trying to keep cool amidst temperatures in the mid- to upper-90s. That's one justification, at least, for my spending five or so hours on the evening of July 4 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater watching John Woo's complete and uncut Red Cliff (2008-9). The other, of course, is that this seemed like the kind of film that demanded a big-screen experience with a large crowd. Certainly my home-theater set-up wouldn't be able to quite do it justice.

I was not disappointed with the experience...far from it.

When I saw, last year, that Magnet Releasing was distributing Woo's two-part, 288-minute epic—the Hong Kong auteur's long-awaited return to his home turf after a decade in the Hollywood wilderness with only Face/Off (1997), really, to proudly show for it—here in the U.S. in a version chopped down to about half its length, I resolved never to see this bowdlerized version in theaters; why plunk down money to see Woo's vision—inspired by a selection from a 14th-century classic of Chinese literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms—mutilated in a misguided attempt at "mass appeal"?

So the screening of Woo's uncut version at Walter Reade as part of this year's New York Asian Film Festival was my first encounter with the work in any form. And, folks, it is utterly magnificent: a triumph of long-form storytelling, and the kind of sweeping popular entertainment that simply hasn't been executed on such a grand scale, and with such smashing success, in a long while.

For all its impressively mounted battle sequences, meticulous focus on war strategies and familiar Woovian poetic flourishes, what really impresses me about Red Cliff as a whole is its careful attention to character detail. Though it tells a story of war among three kingdoms in 208 A.D., this isn't an intellectual chronicle of process like, say, Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che (2008); there are flesh-and-blood characters here, inflated to mythic size but still seen clearly as individuals with personalities and burning passions. Even Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), the ruthless Prime Minister/general who persuades ineffectual Emperor Han to wage war against the Wu and Xu kingdoms, is depicted with a measure of nuance, not as a mustache-twirling one-dimensional villain. At one point in Part II, he delivers a morale-boosting speech to his decimated-by-typhoid troops with a regretful intensity that suggests deep personal wounds underlying his actions. He's a sad, lonely man, but Woo gives him his full due.

As for those battle sequences, a couple of which last nearly half an hour: They're certainly awe-inspiring in its sheer scale, but that is not to say that Red Cliff is just a mindless, war-mongering action picture. Amidst the carnage—which Woo, as expected, gives his usual balletic Peckinpah-like treatment—there are moments that suggest a moral recognition of the personal costs of war even as we are invited to exult in the violent spectacle. By the end, even as a tenuous peace has been restored in the three kingdoms, viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) remarks, "There is no victor here." Instead, there are only small personal victories—which, as usual in a John Woo film, often means the recognition of friendship and respect among men.

This great achievement in epic filmmaking certainly provided all the fireworks I needed on July 4—and I didn't have to stand in the hot outdoors to get my fix!

(Both the edited and uncut versions are available on DVD and Blu-ray.)

***

For a far less sensationalized take on warfare, there's Restrepo (2010), the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary that follows a platoon for 14 months, from May 2007 to July 2008, as its members are stationed in Korengal Valley, the most dangerous area in Afghanistan. The film's title refers to the last name of one of the members who is killed early on in the deployment; in his honor, the troop builds an outpost and names it after him. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's film is likewise infused with a similar sense of melancholy, most potently in its haunting closing stages.

Restrepo is, in many ways, an admirable film: Junger and Hetherington—the former a reporter (best known for The Perfect Storm), the latter a professional war photographer—use their embedded position in Battle Company to capture some startlingly visceral, intimate and oddly beautiful footage of daily life amidst the pressure of being constantly under fire. And the film itself has been skillfully constructed and edited (by Michael Levine) to truly immerse you in the herky-jerky rhythms of army life; when the troop is faced with gunfire, it is as sudden and shocking for us as it no doubt is for Battle Company's members.

But it's most noteworthy quality—its journalistic objectivity—turns out to be something of a limitation as well. While the filmmakers are to be commended for standing back and allowing us to draw our own conclusions about what they present to us onscreen—a refreshing approach in the age of gleefully partisan Michael Moore/Morgan Spurlock "documentaries"—that nonpartisan perspective also means that Restrepo essentially adds up to just another documentary about how war is indeed hell, and how each day is often merely a struggle to survive and stay sane. Admittedly, it's no small thing to be reminded of this universal truth, especially for those who have never been thrust into these life-or-death situations. Nevertheless, Restrepo feels more like a film that reiterates rather than illuminates. Of both this particular conflict in Afghanistan—the filmmakers, for instance, don't bother to engage with the Afghan locals living in the area where Battle Company sets up camp—and war in general, the film, to my mind, doesn't really say a whole lot that we didn't already know.

As a tribute to the fortitude of these particular men in these particular situations, Restrepo is compelling and, in the end, moving. Just don't expect any fresh revelations about life during times of war.

***

The Greek provocation Dogtooth (2009) is certainly not a documentary...but director Yorgos Lanthimos follows the lead of the great Luis Buñuel and grounds his surreal universe in something shot, by Thimios Bakatatakis, to feel almost like reality. The result of Lanthimos's eerily precise technique is that the film's surface sobriety clashes with the madness of its unnamed, unbelievably sheltered clan.

How sheltered is the family in Dogtooth? So sheltered that the children are taught that a word like "zombie" means "small yellow flower"; that they're led to believe cats are huge creatures that like to feast on children's flesh; and that the airplanes that pass by overheard are just toys to be played with. All of this, and much more, has been orchestrated by their parents (Christos Stergioglou and Michele Valley) in an apparent attempt to shield their kids from the outside world to an extravagant degree, to the point that the father becomes abusive and near-homicidal when an outside influence threatens their nutso Eden with—gasp!—videotapes.

Some have already found a satire of dysfunctional family values in this film, while others have discovered, in each unnervingly polished frame, a social critique of authoritarianism. Well, okay. For me, Dogtooth works purely and simply as a beautifully sustained piece of far-out deadpan pitch-black surreal comedy. When you think it's gone too far, it just goes further. Its delirious perversity is pretty amazing.

Celebrating the Fourth of July—1776-style!

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—As I am working both today and tomorrow—alas, the international Wall Street Journal editions don't celebrate America's independence; at least I get time-and-a-half for my holiday labors, though—I'll be celebrating Independence Day in my mind...and also tonight, with a screening of a decidedly non-American film, the complete 288-minute version of John Woo's widely celebrated Hong Kong comeback Red Cliff, unfurling at Walter Reade Theater as part of the New York Asian Film Festival. A weird way of celebrating July 4th perhaps...but it's the complete Red Cliff! Not the chopped-in-half bullshit that was released last year! On a big screen! There will be fireworks, of a cinematic sort.

But I wanted to commemorate the Fourth of July on this blog somehow. And what better way to do that than with...



..."Is Anybody There?," the stirring second-act number from the famous Broadway musical 1776, here in a clip from Peter H. Hunt's 1972 film version, with William Daniels (yes, Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World, yes I know) as the "obnoxious and disliked" John Adams. I especially like the part where he sings about how he sees "fireworks," "bells ringing out," "cannons roar[ing]," and, most importantly, "Americans—all Americans / free forevermore." (I was reminded of this number, and the problematic but enjoyable musical, last night in seeing a local production of it thanks to Middlesex County-sponsored Plays in the Park—a government-sponsored theater which, every summer, offers great opportunities to see excellent musical productions outdoors at super-cheap prices at Edison, N.J.'s Roosevelt Park.)

Happy Independence Day, America!

Football Vs. Football, or It's All About Anticipation

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—

This past Saturday, in between sleeping through Restrepo and marveling at the balletic action choreography of Eastern Condors, I met up with an old Rutgers buddy and some of his friends at a bar in the Lower East Side to watch some of the USA vs. Ghana World Cup soccer match. The USA had made it to the Round of 16 and was fighting to stay in the tournament. And for once, I actually found myself giving a damn.

I hadn't followed all the World Cup action from four years ago, and when this year's tournament began, I anticipated paying equally little attention. But don't discount the fever, however mild, one can develop when you're in a newsroom as part of your day job, as I am. (No, my friends, we do not just have FOX channels on our TVs; we're not that rigidly indoctrinated!)

The one snag about watching World Cup games—or any sports events—at my job, though, is that we can't turn on the sound; hey, editors need to be able to edit in (relative) peace! So the USA/Ghana game this past Saturday was the first time since watching 10 minutes of soccer action the first day that I watched the game with the sound on. (And yes, the sound of the crowd in the bar drowned out the sound of those ever-buzzing vuvuzelas quite nicely.) It was also probably the first time I had actually sat down to watch a sustained bout of soccer action, rather than just glancing at a TV screen every once in a while to see if someone had scored a goal.

And you know what? While watching part of the game (which USA ended up losing, alas—though I left after Landon Donovan had scored the tying goal on a penalty kick, so I left on a high note), I started to wonder: Why do Americans think this game is boring again? Because I sure don't!

(Photo credit: Vincent Yu/Associated Press)

Sure, the wait time between goals scored may be long. And in some cases, neither team may score anything for 90-some minutes. But the suspense in between it all can be electrifying—even more so than that popular American sport known (maybe a bit misleadingly) as football.

In football, timeouts come fairly often, so that two minutes of football time can technically take up five minutes or more of real time. Not the case in soccer; once the clock starts, it doesn't stop until a given half is over. That, to my mind, makes it more consistently gripping than football. Football games can have its dull stretches if the defenses on both teams are so tight that neither team scores for long periods of time; soccer games may feature opposing teams playing 90+ minutes of scoreless ball, but, because its quicksilver changes of possession, the game ends up feeling more like a seesaw constantly on the threat of tipping over until someone finally kicks a ball into a net.

And while in football, there are different ways to rack up points—touchdowns, field goals, safetys, etc.—in soccer, there's only one way (as far as I know) to score: get a ball past a goalie into a net. However a team gets close to the net, whether by team effort or via an opposition's penalty, that's the one chance a team has. Thus, you can sense the anticipation in a crowd every time a team gets close to an opposing goalie...or, at least, I felt that anticipation often in the crowd with which I watched the USA/Ghana game.

But okay, comparing soccer to football may be an apples-to-oranges thing, even if soccer is internationally known as "football." Fair enough. But when I read an editorial like this one from Richard Greener over at the Huffington Post that suggests that most Americans don't like soccer in preference of a sport such as football because it doesn't have enough action, I furrow my brow in confusion. What do you mean by "action"? Lots of scoring? Then baseball can sometimes be just as "boring" if both pitchers are having really good days and are striking out hitters left and right; hockey can be just as "dull," notwithstanding the occasional bloody dust-up; and football can have its snoozers, too, if both defenses are giving their all and the quarterback and his offensive line are getting nothing going on the ground.

Maybe it's just a matter of taste, really. As a moviegoer, I've increasingly found myself to be the type of viewer who is less interested in "action" and more interested in what goes on in between action. To borrow Alfred Hitchcock's famous "bomb theory" of suspense: Don't give me the bomb going off, give me the anticipation of one going off. In that respect, soccer, I discovered on Saturday, suits this spectator quite nicely. Yes, there is "action" in soccer, but it is all in the anticipation...and, of course, in the fancy footwork.

***

Anyway, today begins the World Cup quarterfinals. I'll be out pretty much all day in New York movie-hopping (tomorrow, a friend and I are planning on seeing a local production of the musical 1776, so I'm squeezing in all my New York movie-watching today), so I won't have an opportunity to watch any of the games. Alas, now that the two teams in which I had a rooting interest, USA and Japan, are both out...well, what nation is left to root for? Ideas, anyone?

Midyear Film Reckoning 2010, in Images

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—We've reached the halfway point of 2010, my friends. You know what that means? Time for midyear movie lists!

One day, I will finally get around to that essay explaining why this year, I've become a far more rabid repertory-cinema moviegoer, while lessening my intensity in keeping up with new releases. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is, simply put: Seeing older films in theaters, more often than not, can restore my faith in the possibilities of this great medium in ways few of the new releases are doing these days. Don't take that as a judgment call on 2010 releases, though, of which I already have much to catch up on. (Among my many, many blind spots: the 1980 and '83 installments of the Red Riding trilogy, No One Knows About Persian Cats, The Father of My Children, Winter's Bone...and, of course, Dogtooth.) Sure, not very many new releases I've seen have truly excited me (not even celebrated foreign/indie fare like Everyone Else and Exit Through the Gift Shop, to be honest)...but then, it seems to me that every year offers up a few gems amidst a load of crap, and this year doesn't seem much different.

Until this year is officially out, then, here are some of my favorite filmgoing experiences from the past six months...both new releases and repertory theatrical discoveries.

In alphabetical order:

Midyear Film Reckoning, Favorite 2010 Releases:

45365
 

Bluebeard

Chloe

Greenberg

Ghost Town

Ondine

Shutter Island

Sweetgrass 

Vincere

Midyear Film Reckoning, Favorite 2010 Repertory Theatrical Discoveries:

Bigger Than Life (1956)

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

Close-Up (1990)

The Cremaster cycle (1995-2002)

A Day in the Country (1936)

I Was Born, But... (1932)

 The Complete Metropolis (1927)

The Naked Spur (1953)

World on a Wire (1973)

Midyear Film Reckoning, Favorite 2010 DVD Discoveries:

Colossal Youth (2006)

Here's to another six months of great movies, both new and old!