SIGNING OFF FOR NOW

Just to let you all know that I won't be blogging (or emailing) so much anymore, for a while at least. The reason is, I am in process of unplugging to save what is left of my health and sanity, and this entails reducing the ways in which i am exposed to the various media of this postmodern hell society, meaning especially internet (i don't even have a TV). The fact is, I am addicted to my computer and it's time we spent less time together.

The only way for me to be healthy/happy, i believe, is to live in the moment. This has become such a cliche that we no longer have a clue what it means or how damn hard it really is. The preliminary step entails making sure I have time, endless time, on my hands, so I can start each day with no clear idea of what I will be doing or how I will fill the hours. That way, I can actualy find out what I feel like doing, instead of chasing from one pursuit to the next, one distraction to another, simply to keep myself busy enough not to have to think about how absurd and senseless life is (and how soon it will all be over).

So instead of going from one compulsive writing project to the next, I guess this means I will be spending my time walking on the heath, doing jigsaw puzzles, reading, playing guitar, a little tai chi, hanging out with any folks bold or idle enough to wander into my world, stuff like that.
In a word I am going to try hard to become a layabout good for nothing! (of the healthy variety, naturally)

i had a dream last night that the reason i had failed in my goals was because the Spirit had plans for me and was making sure I didn't become a cruel, obnoxious asshole until IT was ready to turn me into one! This is the test of power, and until i am ready for it, i better get used to (and start enjoying) being a powerfless schmuck like everybody else (barring the tyrannical assholes who run the world and rule the media!)

Nonetheless, the point of the dream was that the Spirit would use me exactly as it saw fit, and so none of the rest mattered, at the end of the day. I may as well enjoy life in the meantime.
It is impossible to enjoy life while seeking after confirmation of one's specialness.
So to hell with it. Time to accept I am a nobody like everybody else. Cybernetically speaking, this means I won't be around much for a while, making assertions of my superior intellect or stuff like that (at least till the spirit commands me to)!
I am off in search of the moment

Jake

Face in the Crowd & Splendor in the Grass: Elia Kazan's Primal Sympathy

“The performing arts, theater and film, can be as meaningful as the drama of living itself.” —Elia Kazan

I just saw two of the best movies I have seen in a while, both directed by Elia Kazan (so damn good in fact that now I have to squeeze them on my 101 Best American Movies list): Face in the Crowd & Splendor in the Grass.

Face in the Crowd was made in 1957 and stars Andy Griffith as “Lonesome” Rhodes, a country drifter with a guitar and a rowdy talent for song and sweet talk. Local radio host Patricia O’Neal discovers Rhodes in a county jail and turns him into a radio and then a TV star; with his canny knack for appealing to the common folk—possible guileless, possibly not—Rhodes becomes an enormously powerful political figure. In the words of James Wolcott, Rhodes is “a rough diamond charismatic . . . who catapults into national celebrity only to become the puppet of a populist scheme orchestrated by corporate overlords, who exploit his likeability as a lever of social control.”

Splendor in the Grass was made in 1962 and stars Natalie Wood and a very young Warren Beatty (in his first screen role) as star-crossed (and puritan-plagued) lovers in late 1920s Kansas. Despite being 50 and 45 years old, respectively, both these films seem surprisingly modern; they haven’t dated in any way that reduces the pleasure of watching them. If anything, they may even have improved with age, especially when compared to movies of the present—which may seem depressingly superficial and frivolous by comparison.

By today’s standards, Splendor is certainly melodramatic; yet for all its hysterical qualities, I think it would be far too intense for today’s audiences. And while Face is a little simplistic, its depiction of the mass media’s role in politics and in shaping the public opinion has proved amazingly prescient, if not prophetic. (Though it may at times be facile, I don’t think it’s any less searing or intelligent an indictment than, say, Michael Richie’s The Candidate or Levinson/Mamet’s Wag the Dog, and it’s a much better film.)

What’s most striking about both films is the sophistication of the writing (Face was written by Budd Schulberg, Splendor by William Inge). You don’t get scripts like this nowadays—or at least they don’t make it to the screen—mostly because this kind of literary, theatrical writing is no longer fashionable (perhaps it’s not possible, either). Nowadays, movies are either mainstream genre fare or “independent realism”—films that opt for everyday banality over engaging story (e.g., Little Miss Sunshine). Movies may have escaped the hysteria and corniness of melodrama, but in the process they have lost something valuable: the emotional intensity of good, biting social drama.

Face and Splendor are realistic films for the period; but they are not by any stretch of the imagination fly-on-the-wall, kitchen-sink dramas. They are never banal or mundane like so many “realistic” movies today. They’re more “theatrical”: the scenes are built and dramatically structured, rich with good, old-fashioned character dynamics and psychological undercurrents. Today’s movies are more kinetic, and watching this fantastic double bill, I realized how much I miss seeing the “old-style” kind of movie, films that involve you emotionally, to a degree today’s “sophisticated” (i.e., cynical) audiences would probably laugh at—because they would resent being made to feel this deeply. Yet emotional realism is what Kazan was best at, and what made him one of the great American directors (actually, he was Greek).

Both films are utterly different—one wouldn’t guess they were made by the same man—and it’s hard to say which I liked better. The first hour of Face transported me to a kind of movie heaven I haven’t experienced in ages; the second hour is less effective—and certainly less enjoyable—but even so, the film manages to hold its themes together and come through triumphantly in the end, no mean feat considering how ambitious it is. Patricia O’Neal is an amazingly beautiful actress and an unusual presence; whenever she’s on screen, it feels like we’re watching a contemporary movie. She has a remarkable ease, a naturalness, unusual even in actors today (it’s most striking when she smiles—she practically lights up the set). On the other hand, I’d never heard of Andy Griffith, and it’s easy to see why he never became a movie star. He’s inspired in the early scenes—a real tornado bumpkin—but less convincing later on, when he needs to be a darker, more complex, Machiavellian character. It’s not really his fault, however, because Schulberg and Kazan haven’t developed the character as much as they needed to either, and with or without Griffith, the film never quite delivers on its original promise. Even so, it’s an astonishingly audacious tale, as relevant today as it ever was, maybe even more so. It’s a sort of archetypal movie, like a template, a Platonic model for the tale of a nobody becoming a somebody, and in the process, being turned into (revealing his true colors as) a scumbag.

Intense as Face in the Crowd is, however, and fascinating as the characters are, in the end they are perhaps not fully convincing. Splendor in the Grass, on the other hand, even while more overtly soap operatic, rings true, and is the more successful (and emotionally wrenching) of the two films. The title is taken from a poem by Wordsworth, “Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood”:

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering

Inge, the writer, takes not just his title but his central theme from this poem. The film shows how our youthful dreams for the future must in the end submit to the limitations of reality. In other words, it’s the story of everyone’s life; but since I’ve recently gone through a particularly devastating realization of just this (as well as turning 40), the film struck me as especially poignant. The ardent, devotional love between the two main characters, Bud and Deanie (Beatty and Wood), is both convincing and touching; in movie terms, lovers like this simply have to wind up together. So when circumstances take over and they are torn apart, we trust they will eventually overcome the obstacles and be reunited. But in the end, they go their separate ways, and are left with the tender ache of melancholia for what once was and can never be. With its bittersweet ending, the movie adheres to a kind of integrity that has nothing to do with audience demands or genre conventions, and everything to do with fidelity to the story. Inge writes what he knows to be true.

Such authenticity—not only of the story but the personalities and performances—is rare in movies of any period, and Kazan has a remarkable gift for it, and for blending melodrama with authenticity. Splendor and Face are dramatic, intense, and hugely entertaining. They are never mundane, yet they capture the truth of their subjects to a remarkable degree. Although his films are stylized, Kazan seems almost obsessively dedicated to drawing the truth from his scenes. Though he doesn’t shy away from realism, he doesn’t get bogged down by it either.

People change; they grow, they move on; though at the time it seems literally unthinkable, the passions of youth, the splendor in the grass, fade and die and turn into something else. The sadness of living is inseparable from the wisdom gained by it.

Watching these films back to back reminded me how much I adore movies. It also reminded me of why. At their best, movies not only provide a respite and refuge from the harshness of our lives; they can also renew a passion that is dwindling, and help us to find strength in what remains. They awaken a primal sympathy.

Half Nelson, Old Joy, Deja Vu and the Pleasures of A Total Disregard for Substance

Half Nelson. This doesn’t qualify as an official Dogme work, but Half Nelson—written by Ana Boden and Ryan Fleck, directed by Fleck—may be the closest that mainstream US indie cinema has got to one so far, and it’s a quietly impressive, experimental work. The film has little by way of internal momentum (i.e., story), but it’s carried along by Ryan Gosling’s thoughtful and nuanced performance. As the crack-smoking inner-city teacher with (possibly) a heart of gold but a head filled with cobwebs, Gosling brings a measure of contained intensity to the film that keeps it from drifting off into non-existence. It might sound pretentious to call Half Nelson a “tone poem,” but whatever it is, it succeeds where most movies of its kind fail—fly-on-the-wall filmmaking that, while uneventful and subdued, is never dull. While managing to be intensely lifelike, it creates a lazy, trancelike hold upon us, and to be curiously involving—even suspenseful—despite the apparent lack of a narrative. Actually, there isn’t much I can say about the film—it rather defies analysis or description—except that it’s unique and at times inspired, an almost wholly successful work that would have the markings of a cult classic, if it weren’t so determinedly non-sensationalist as to seem inconsequential by today’s standards. See it for yourself. And maybe you can tell me what the deal is with the cat?

I tired to watch Color Me Kubrick—a showcase for the very talented John Malkovich, about the guy who pretended to be Stanley Kubrick for years and got away with it—but it was such a sloppy, amateurish affair that I gave up after twenty minutes.

Instead I watched Old Joy, which makes Half Nelson look like a Tony Scott film. Old Joy—beautiful title, and there is one good scene that explains it—is really an anti-movie. Not only does nothing happen, but it doesn’t even provide anything by way of character, mood, or atmosphere. It’s a big, relaxing nothing of a movie, more or less indistinguishable from a home movie about two guys who go camping for a night, visit some hot springs, and that’s it. Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy, the singer-songwriter) is watchable enough (though not especially likeable as a character), but besides that there’s nothing much in the film to hold our attention. It’s by no means as tedious as Brokeback Mountain, because at least there is the mild pleasure of seeing genuinely small-time, amateur filmmakers at work (rather than a Hollywood hotshot trying to be “independent”). Even so, the relative critical success of Old Joy is if anything even more unaccountable than that of Mountain. There are no queer cowboys here for politically correct critics to fall over themselves showing tolerance towards, and the only explanation I can offer is that praising the film is a reaction against Hollywood, a rejection of its increasingly bombastic fare. In other words, liking Old Joy, or rather, calling it a good movie—though it’s not strictly a movie at all—is a way of showing superiority and disdain for Hollywood movies. But five years from now, Kelly Reichardt (who directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with Jonathan Raymond, based on his “story”—huh?), will probably be making a Brad Pitt movie.

Déjà Vu
Speaking of Tony Scott films, this is the latest (though you may not find the accents on the title—French is way too pretentious for Scott), and his latest teaming with the ever watchable Denzel Washington. I have to confess a partiality to the films of the younger of the two Scott brothers; I especially like True Romance, but even his generic fare of the past few years has struck me as top-notch entertainment, and a lot less pretentious or pompous than some of brother Ridley’s work. If Hollywood must needs continue churning out violent plotless/overplotted action thrillers, then they should at least get Tony Scott to make them. Enemy of the People, Spy Games, and Man on Fire (not so much Domino) were state of the art action melodramas that wore their brutal emptiness on their sleeves like medals. Unlike most similar fare, they didn’t leave you feeling gypped for a movie. Scott is all style and no substance (which is why the Tarantino-scripted True Romance is his best film)—but what style! Despite the luke warm reviews, Déjà Vu is not a major disappointment. Although it starts poorly and comes unraveled in the last half hour, it upholds the Scott tradition of jagged action and sizzling high-tech realism that make his films such persuasive and intoxicating nonsense. This time he goes all the way out on a limb, into the hokey sci-fi territory of time travel, yet for most of the movie he pulls it off. Déjà Vu sacrifices realism to formula in the last section (when it sends Denzel back through time to save the girl), but until that point it makes for a pretty convincing treatment of the subject. It’s by no means a time travel classic—it lacks the surreal poetry and romance of The Terminator, and obviously it’s not a screwball gem like Back to the Future; but compared to Paycheck, for example (or to most time travel action movies), it does a stand-up job. The scriptwriters (Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio) provide no more than functional dialogue, but they lucked out with Washington and Val Kilmer to read it, on whose lips even humdrum stuff starts to sizzle. (Kilmer is a little heavy around the jowls these days, however, which is perhaps why he's been given a slightly dormant role, a far cry from how Mamet used him for Spartan.) It’s easy to see how Scott was sold on the script—it provides an impressive scenario—that of using a “worm hole” in space-time to create a window onto the past and so track the criminal in the act of the crime. This breezy little number allows for sequences (such as when Washington “chases” the bad-guy in the past while having to navigate his way through dense highway traffic in the present) that are almost perfect bits of movie business—they offer up maximum excitement with minimum consequence. They are so dazzling, in fact—Scott’s style so audacious, his disregard for substance so complete—that at times the film makes you want to laugh out loud.

The Girl with Green Eyes

I just watched this because the director, Des Davies is the friend of a friend (actress Billie Whitelaw), and he was kind enough to loan me his copy. What follows is taken form my letter to Des. (It was rather difficult to write what amounted to a critique of a work meant for the person who made it!—a first for me—not so much because I had to hold back, but because it’s tricky to find the right tone.) The film is from 1963 and stars Peter Finch, Rita Tushingham and Lynn Redgrave (Vanessa’s sister).

It’s a lovely little movie, and quite remarkable in its way. It holds up considerably better than many of the (more renowned) British films of the period—Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Charlie Bubbles, etc—some of which are considered classics. It seems a shame it is so little known today. I don’t know the source work by Edna O’Brien, but it didn’t surprise me to learn it came from a novel. I was pleasantly struck almost at once by the film’s dialogue, which seemed unusually realistic and insightful (especially for the period). Something I also found refreshing about the film was its frank presentation of the sexual relationship, the succinct way in which it depicted the mundane pitfalls of romantic love. This is one of my favorite subjects as a writer, and one that all-too rarely gets serious treatment, in movies of any period. I must confess to finding Rita Tushingham less than endearing, however, even a wee bit creepy. This may sound terribly superficial, but I kept wondering if it was intentional (on at least one occasion, you seemed to shoot her deliberately to accentuate that nose!). If it wasn’t intentional, were you aware of it? Because of it, I found I didn’t quite warm to Kate as much as I would have liked, hence was less moved by the film than I would have been, perhaps, with another actress.

What I especially liked about the film, or rather what most impressed me, was the lightness of your touch as a director, the way in which you managed to experiment with style without losing sight of content, i.e., the basic business of telling the story and presenting the characters (who really came to life in a way film characters rarely do). Your style reminded me of Godard from the same period. The film has a hard edge—one reason it has not dated—yet also a soft center, a tenderness. It strikes a very deft balance between straightforward, almost documentary realism and more playful, “cinematic” touches, for which your obvious artistry comes into play. I didn’t think there was a scene in it that rung false—although the scene with the priest didn’t have the weight it needed, and the ending was a bit abrupt.

Peter Finch is a very charismatic presence, and his character had a satisfyingly grounded, no-nonsense quality about it. It helped balance the dreamy moodiness of the girl, who sometimes came off as less “deep” than merely coy. I especially enjoyed Lynn Redgrave—what a performance! Not a false note in it.

It’s rare that a movie earns the term “slice of life” and yet doesn’t make us suffer for it—banging us over the head with excess earnestness and sincerity. The best I can say about Girl (and it’s high praise) is that it’s almost totally convincing and yet never dull—wholly unpretentious without being pedestrian. Most impressive at all, it still seems fresh and alive (though for obvious reasons it’s no longer “daring”) today, forty years later. I think what accounts for its success as a film is the apparent spontaneity with which you handle the scenes, camera, and actors. That spontaneity (or the illusion of it) acts like magical embalming fluid: just like some of those Godard flicks (which I adore), the film has aged in a very pleasing way. It doesn’t seem “old” so much as “experienced.” A film with a past?

Flags of Our Fathers, Harsh Times, Painted Veil, Science of Sleep, Notes on Scandal, Last King of Scotland

Flags of Our Fathers
Clint Eastwood's film is slight and at times uninvolving, but it has a lovely, elegiac quality, and contains some of his best work as a director. Where Eastwood's films used to be characterized by rather clunky ungainly scenes—what I would call slick amateurism (evident even in some of Mystic River)—since Million Dollar Baby he has evolved into a genuinely gifted film artist, with new levels of restraint, subtlety and artistry to draw upon. Apparently, on his way to being 80, he has come of age as a filmmaker. Flags doesn't deliver on the action sequences—it can't outdo Saving Private Ryan—but it has an abundance of genuine feeling, poignancy and pathos, that Spielberg's film lacks. Rather than an anti-war film per se, this is a meditation on war—clearly the work of a man in the twilight of life with the time (and the need) to look more closely at values (e.g., patriotism) that shouldn't be taken for granted.

Science of Sleep
A self-indulgently inspired surrealist jaunt from Michael Gondry (Eternal Sunshine), this is a film that needs to be persisted in to be enjoyed. If you get through the first half hour, you will probably be glad you stuck it out, because the film belongs to its very own species, being neither comedy nor sci-fi nor drama. It probably gets away with more "quirkiness" than it deserves, thanks to Gael Garcia Bernal in the main role, who manages to ground the self-consciously avant-garde humor and silliness in something more real. Also Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of the famous coupling of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin) as the love interest adds something unique to the mix. Like Eternal Sunshine this is a refreshingly close-to-the-bone take on romantic infatuation, and herein lies its greatest strength (the lovers never share a screen kiss). As an attempt at George Méliès/Gilliam/Burton style fantastic cinema, however, it is only partially successful. It attempts far more than it pulls off, but its awkwardness is often touching rather than simply annoying. By all means not for everyone—overall this is an experimental work disguised as a mainstream movie.

Notes on a Scandal
A rather colorless melodrama that I might have found more gripping had I not seen the trailer, which (as is the norm these days) gives away the entire story, twists and all. The only thing this film has going for it, besides the performances, is the morbid fascination of its story (school teacher has an affair with a fifteen-year-old boy and consequently falls into the clutches of a neurotic lesbian). The script by Patrick Marber (Closer) is disappointingly devoid of insight or acerbic wit, and the direction, by Richard Eyre, is at best functional, at worst dreary Channel 4 TV show standard. Judi Dench is flawless, of course, but her character is really little more than an older, lesbian retread of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction—the sexually obsessed predator role, which however realistic, always ends up seeming rather tedious and melodramatic. Cate Blanchett is lovely and ethereal and convincing throughout, but never really affecting, because her character never really comes alive for us. The same goes for the movie.

Last King of Scotland
Another overrated work that I was expecting more from, and despite Forrest Whitaker's sterling performance as Idi Amin (and a very pleasant appearance by the divine Gillian Anderson – blonde with suntan), this is a fairly routine affair. Considering the nature of the material, it's actually rather tame, with none of the searing, scathing intensity of (say) Salvador or Under Fire. The main character played by James McAvoy is unappealingly callow, and although admittedly this is right for the part, the result is that—besides Amin, who is never quite real to us—the film lacks an emotional center. It skirts around the Uganda atrocities (for the very good reason that the central character doesn't know about them until the end), and instead of going for political expose, opts for a more character and suspense driven tale. But frankly, the director Kevin MacDonald (Touching the Void) doesn't have the skill for it. He does a proficient job but no more. Besides a delightful moment in which Amin gives in to a live-saving burst of flatulence, the film has few real surprises.

The Painted Veil
The first hour of this film—based on the book by Somerset Maugham—is rather flat and lifeless, and you may wonder what could possibly happen to justify all these high-production values and prestigious players (Naomi Watts, Edward Norton—always worth watching—and Liev Schreiber). The director, John Curran, rushes through the early scenes without putting much into them, and it's obvious he is trying to get the preliminary business (the courtship, marriage, and infidelity) over with and move on to the real story. Once the disenchanted couple moves to a Cholera-inflicted area—the embittered cuckold's revenge on his bored, frustrated wife—things pick up dramatically. Ironically, the husband's hatred and anger introduces real passion to the affair, and a strange, resentful kind of love slowly develops between them—at which point the film and the performances begin to soar. By the end, something remarkable has happened. In the process of showing how these dried up, desperate characters begin to suffer and feel, how they come alive to each other and themselves, the film begins to cast a lazy, melancholic spell. By the end, we may feel our own hearts slowly breaking. A film that stays with you afterwards, with all the niggling persistence of a doomed love affair, this is a work of restrained beauty and depth.

Harsh Times
Another undiscovered gem, with a phenomenal performance by the ever-amazing Christian Bale, as Jim Davis, a US soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, returning to Los Angeles to look for work and hang out with his former buddies. The film builds slowly to its inevitable, catastrophic climax, and although some of the devices used to show Davis' increasing paranoia and psychosis are formulaic (shaky camera, yellow filters, etc), Bale's performance is subtly affecting. Bale is so real he never allows the film to descend into banality or cliché. Harsh Times is a terrific piece of dark psychodrama, with an unusual degree of authenticity to the scenes. The writer-director, David Ayers, has a solid talent for raw, believable characters and simple, no-nonsense action. He abandons himself to cliché at the end, overdoing the final shoot-out with operatic slow-motion effects when brutal realism would have sufficed (and in fact been far more effective); but for most of the film's length, he keeps us on a razor's edge—the same edge that Davis is walking. Bale's Davis is part Travis Bickle ("solider of the apocalypse"), part Richard Boyle (James Woods' character in Salvador: Davis takes time out in Mexico with the woman he wants to marry), part John Wayne and part American Psycho. He's the all-American fuck up. A far cry from Batman Begins, this is the kind of role Bale should stick to (he also exec-produced the film) if he wants to develop into what he is: one of the best actors working in movies today.

DeCaprio is Back In the Running with Blood Diamond

Blood Diamond is a terrific bit of genre entertainment from Edward Zwick, the director of Glory, The Siege, and the somewhat laughable Tom Cruise vehicle The Last Samurai. However, if you are looking for a serious treatment of controversial subject matter—illegal slave labor diamond mining in South Africa—this may not be the movie for you. Blood Diamond isn’t so much a political drama with action sequences (even if Zwick believes that’s what he’s making) as an action thriller with a convenient political backdrop to lend it some urgency and gravitas. It’s a movie, after all, and if Syriana is anything to go by—which was so utterly incomprehensible critics had no choice but to praise it—then politics and cinema simply don’t mix. Blood Diamond is considerably more poignant and moving than your average action thriller, however, and this is mostly due to Leonardo DeCaprio giving his first grown-up performance, as the embittered, hardened, and resourceful diamond smuggler Danny Archer.

In his earliest roles—the young retard in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Robert DeNiro’s battered son in This Boy’s Life, The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and the Dead, and as the young Rimbaud in Total Eclipse—DeCaprio was shaping up to be one of the most exciting actors since the young Robert DeNiro. But then something went wrong. He became a megastar with Titanic and got all buffed up for The Beach, and with his thick neck and his small round head, his Dr. Spock eyebrows and pallid skin, he began to look like he’d got stuck somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. As a result, he seemed miscast in the adult roles he was given (most of all as Howard Hughes), as if the qualities that made him such a mesmerizing actor as an adolescent made him almost uncastable as an adult. In his work for Scorsese especially (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed), he seemed to lack any substance or weight as an a actor, and he was a negligible presence. (The exception was Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, in which DeCaprio’s guilelessness and elfin features—his apparent immaturity—fitted well enough with the Walter Mitty-ish role.)

For Blood Diamond, DeCaprio assumes a thick, rather endearing South African accent and gives an impressive performance of contained intensity and depth. For the first time since those early roles, he seems to be tapping the reserves of his talent. If in his last few performances he seemed to be coasting, here he has apparently come to full attention. All of a sudden his acting is full of surprises—of small, almost throwaway touches, the kind of moments that create a fully formed, deeply affecting character. With this role, DeCaprio has rediscovered his instinct for acting—so formidable in those early roles—and with it his passion. Without him, Blood Diamond would be a so-so political thriller; with him, it’s something more poignant and memorable.

Jennifer Connelly doesn’t fare quite so well, alas, in an underwritten part as the conscience-driven journalist. In her early scenes, Connelly is poorly directed and too heavily made up (beauty like this doesn’t need make up); she appears to be overplaying to compensate for the lack of a character, and for some unfathomable reason she is practically salivating over DeCaprio. Later, she is more contained, and has some affecting moments. She does the best she can with this earnest, two-dimensional role, that of the dedicated journalist/free spirit torn between conscience and ambition.

The main role really belongs to Djimon Hounsou as the noble black man trying to find his family, and Hounsou’s Solomon is a powerful presence, the heart of the film. As an actor, he’s the ideal complementary presence for DeCaprio’s edgy, ruthless egotism, and together they make the most unlikely (and touching) of friendships. This is all familiar stuff, of course, and besides the performances and the political back story, there’s nothing really new about Blood Diamond—just another blood thriller dressed up as a tale of government corruption and personal redemption. But it’s an exemplary model—a muscular action movie with heart (if not brains) as well as brawn.

New Movie Posts: The Proposition, Bobby, The Good Shepherd, Borat, Thank You For Smoking

The Proposition is a very nicely shot, well-cast (Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, John Hurt, Danny Huston), but finally uninvolving little gothic Western written by Nick Cave. It is also yet another movie that was absurdly overpraised. Cave currently enjoys the dubious luxury of not being able to take a wrong step with critics - the surest recipe for artistic complacency and stagnation - and it's Cave's script that lets the film down. Admittedly, Cave has come up with a good, archetypal story (a criminal is sent to kill his brother in exchange for freedom), but he doesn't appear to be interested in writing real characters we can sympathize with, or even believe in. The dialogue is functional at best, at worst pretentious and heavy-handed. Cave's presence is felt throughout every scene and every line, and it feels like an intrusion. His penchant for murder, darkness, and quasi-Biblical subtexts works fine when it's the backdrop for Gothic ballads, but here it just seems indulgent, slightly sophomoric. Though it looks beautiful, The Proposition doesn't really amount to much, not least because the film - Cave's script - is so full of itself. It parades its "deeper" meanings and existential violence like some whiskey-soaked barfly trying to be deep but only succeeding in being annoying. The Proposition is somehow smug and self-enamored, and it has a kind of arrogance - it never bothers to develop its themes or characters or bring them to life. When all the blood and thunder is over, however much we may be impressed by the spectcale (critics bought Cave's malarky hook, line, and sinker), we really couldn't give a damn.

Bobby. One of the best things I have seen recently, Emilio Estevez's film came as a real surprise. It takes place on a single day leading up to Bobby Kennedy's assassination, in the hotel where it occurred. An ensemble piece with a great cast (Sharon Stone, Christian Slater, Anthony Hopkins, Demi More, Estevez, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Laurence Fishburne, and some impressive, lesser-known actors), Estevez (who also wrote the script) directs with sensitivity and assurance and a remarkable lightness of touch. Estevez's real gift is his empathy for his characters (and for the actors playing them), and it's hard to think of another recent movie so completely and effortlessly populated with living, breathing people. The film deftly aspires to Altman-style ensemble, and though it never quite rises above the level of slick and proficient filmmaking, it's an amazing achievement nonetheless. Every scene offers unexpected pleasures, and every performance seems to crackle with the joy of acting (with the possible exception of Estevez and Anthony Hopkins, neither of whom do much new here). The scenes are woven together brilliantly, into a seamless and flawlessly entertaining tapestry of human lives. The individual moments - engrossing when taken apart - build towards a devastating climax in which, against all odds, Estevez manages to make us feel the event as a bona fide tragedy. Rightly or wrongly, he creates the powerful sense of a more innocent, idealistic time in which the corruptability of leaders was not a given and optimism was not synonymous with naivete. And he gives us, free from the cynical/ironic distance of most movies today (vide The Proposition), the death of hope. (The heavy-handedness of Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" here may be the film's only real wrong step, however.) In its own far humbler (and consequently more affecting) fashion, Bobby stands as a worthy companion piece to Stone's JFK. Not a masterpiece, but an almost perfect gem, a tiny work of art that is all the more impressive for being so unassuming.

The reviews for The Good Shepherd (in the UK) were almost unanimously damning in roughly the same terms, that the main character (Matt Damon) was a lifeless cypher and the movie was long-winded, meandering, and dull. All pretty much true, but lugubrious as it is, Robert DeNiro's film is still just about worth a look, not least for its early Skull & Bones initiation scenes and some fairly convincing snapshots of the inner workings of the CIA. It's half a good movie that never quite comes together and goes on way too long. But it's no worse than a lot of other 2006 movies that got praised to the skies.

Borat was one of the biggest moneymakers of last year and I suppose the time had come for a tacky, raucous, tasteless and politically incorrect third world comedy. Borat is certainly all those things, but it's not really that funny - in fact, it's kind of annoying. Like Clerks, it's an example of raw, amateurish and basically crude filmmaking that was lucky enough to coincide with what audiences wanted, and subsequently soared to heights of success far beyond any actual merits the film possessed.

Thank You For Not Smoking
Very entertaining little social satire, carried by Aaron Eckhart in a career-topping role, with some mildly subversive insights and a good supporting cast (Maria Bello, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, Sam Eliott, that annoying kid from Birth and all those other bad movies). It skillfully walks the tightrope of its subject matter - a protagonist whose job is to put a good spin on cigarettes and who is basically a scumbag, but whose charm is irresistable - and manages to avoid most of the pitfalls of pastiche and pass for a semi-realistic character tale. Recommended.

Stop Making Sense
Stranger Than Fiction and the Question of Creative Responsibility

Stranger Than Fiction is a perfect film with one tiny flaw: it doesn’t actually make sense. But such flagrant disregard for narrative logic is inseparable from the film’s charm, and whether directly inspired by Charlie Kaufman’s cinema of self-analysis, it’s probably safe to say that the film wouldn’t exist without Kaufman’s precedent for non-linear, anti-logic meta-narratives. Stranger Than Fiction is less lacerating in its wit and less dark and scabrous in its insights than Kaufman, but considerably more affecting. It’s also closer to perfection as a post-millennial, pre-apocalypse schizophrenic romantic comedy, and confirms that the schizo comedy more or less invented by Kaufman (after some early flirtations by Woody Allen) is the natural evolution of the rom-com genre. Current times are far too precarious for a simple “boy-meets-girl” scenario to adequately distract us from our collective anxieties anymore.

Reflecting what amounts to a global identity crisis, the film is populated by semi-functional lost souls doing what they can to keep their heads above the waters of despair. An OCD IRS worker (Will Ferrell) falls in love with a tattooed Harvard drop-out and failed revolutionary, resigned to baking cookies for a better world (the ever-enrapturing Maggie Gyllenhaal); an acclaimed author and suicide manqué suffers from guilt and uncertainty over her literary gift and her wont for killing off characters (a deglamorized Emma Thompson is the tortured soul of the film); a literature professor for whom books are more real than people (another terrific turn by Dustin Hoffman, well on his way to career resurrection in offbeat supporting comedy roles). All characters in search of something if only they knew what, who have taken refuge in their routines in order to survive. Such eccentric characters are perfectly at home in what amounts to a self-reflective, self-referential, meta-comedy, in which fictional beings grasp to be real.

Stranger Than Fiction concerns a character in a novel who realizes that he is part of a fictional narrative and attempts to break out of the story (the inevitability of his own death) and meet his maker. The moment he does, he becomes a character in her life, which thereby becomes fiction—the movie we are seeing. It was impossible for me not to try and figure out if Stranger Than Fiction made sense, even while I was engaged in the blissful act of watching it. Fortunately, it was equally impossible to decide with any certainty, and in the end I realized it didn’t really matter much. Since we don’t have the opportunity to read the novel that Katherine Eiffel is writing, we can’t know how much of the protagonist’s life (i.e., the movie) is already captured by her fiction. Logically, however, the movie cannot really cohere, since Harold Crick (named after one of the inventors of DNA?), by finding out that a novel is being written about his life, would surely change the fiction’s trajectory entirely. He hears the author narrating his life, for example, but he doesn’t hear a narration about his hearing the narration, as would presumably be the case, within the (apparent) logic of the movie. Such an idea would force the story to replicate ad infinitum, spinning worlds within worlds, fictions within fictions, mirrors inside mirrors—a reflective universe in which there would be, finally, no object to be reflected.

Stranger Than Fiction shies away from the giddier and more psychedelic implications; wisely but also perhaps timidly, it does not venture where shamans and schizophrenics are compelled to tread, staying instead on the safer (and sweeter) ground of life-affirming (and death-defeating) romantic comedy. It flirts with tragedy, but never dares to consummate. It dips its toes into the dark waters of madness, but never plunges in. What makes Stranger Than Fiction different from other feel-good movies is that it actually earns our good feelings. It doesn’t sell itself short to please us. It’s eccentric and unique enough to create a sense of uncertainty as to where it’s going, and the resulting tension—the sense of the unexpected and the feeling that anything can happen—creates a fair imitation both our own lives and of Crick’s particular terror of losing control. As with Kaufman, almost every line in the film comes as a surprise; the scenes keep us guessing and the film seems fresh, uncalculated, uncontrived, effortless. The energy and lightness of Marc Forster’s direction, and the playful ingenuity of Zach Helm’s script, give the impression that the filmmakers are surprising even themselves. The film crackles with laughter and pathos, the laughs are easy and grateful, the tears sweet and unsullied by sentimentality. The beautiful irony of Stranger Than Fiction is that, by making Crick semi-fictional within his own life, he comes to seem far more real than most movie protagonists ever do. I think it's the best film of 2006.

The film is so breezily anarchic that there is even some doubt whether it will wind up as a tragedy (the IRS man might have to die for his sins). One of the touching quirks of the movie (and of Will Ferrell’s pitch-perfect performance) is that the “soulless” civil servant is the most innocent and endearing character in the film, while it is the tormented artist-writer whose soul is in jeopardy. When Eiffel discovers her character is a living, breathing person—not merely the concatenation of her genius—she is forced to face up to a new and disturbing sense of responsibility. The question arises: as a “creator,” is being true to her tale necessarily “right” for the character in it? This is not exactly a moral question; it goes deeper than mere morality, which after all entails ordinary human relations within an ordinary social context. Stranger Than Fiction raises the question of a God who lacks compassion for its creations, forced to face up to her own conscience by those same creations. Perhaps s/he even became a creator in the first place in order to learn such compassion? By her decision to abandon the necessary ruthlessness of tragedy and let Harold live, Eiffel may become a “lesser” (i.e. less-obsessed) writer, but she becomes a better person. She has learned that there is more to real fiction than taking lives, that there is a time for mercy as well as sacrifice. As any creator worth her salt knows, there is no tragedy without comedy, no laughter without tears.

Recently I have seen Children of Men, which I found to be fairly overrated. Good action sequences, admittedly, and decent enough performances, but overall this is not a particularly convincing or especially suspenseful film, and not in the least bit moving. Of course it made critics' ten best lists for 2006, along with all the other mediocre or plain lousy movies that these moron critics rate nowadays. But for a sci-fi classic, it's a poor show. Even Clive Owen and Michael Caine as a hippy can't save it from pedestrianism.

The one deserved "film of the year" contender was Pan's Labyrinth, an astonishingly well-crafted blend of adult realism and children's fantasy, beautifully shot and acted, both moving and quite disturbing, even shocking at times. After Stranger Than Fiction (more on which later) this was probably the film of the year, though I don't know who really keeps score besides morons. Certainly the best fantasy film since Mirrormask, and every bit as original.

The Prestige I was pleasantly surprised by, having read almost unanimously luke warm reviews. Admittedly it's a little slick and soulless, and not really that convincing, but it's entertaining stuff, and a partial return to form (or rather, substance) for director Chris Nolan after the disappointing Batman Begins. Of course, critics hailed that slop as a masterpiece, so Nolan won't have a clue, will he?

I also saw Nolan's first film, Following, which is unbelievably bad, tho not entirely uninteresting. Terrible acting renders an otherwise intriguing storyline ridiculous in the extreme. No indication of a major talent on the rise, so don't waste your time with this one.

The Illusionist is similar to The Prestige but much classier all round, terrific performances from Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell (whom by the way I ran into once in the west end, friendly guy) and some very nice direction by Neil Burger. This is also based on a novel and concerns a stage magician's battle with royalty. Unlike The Prestige, which never really rises above the level of a good yarn, this has some impressive visuals and a pleasingly restrained air about it, as well as a hugely entertaining (tho slightly implausible) finale.

A Scanner Darkly was a pleasant surprise; having seen the first twenty minutes last year I thought it looked fairly shoddy, but it is actually a partially successful exploration of true Dickian terrain, with some terrific little scenes between Reeves, Harrelson and Downey Jr. (as well as a pleasing return to the screen from Winona Ryder), and a few moments of genuine poignancy. Overall probably the best Dick adaptation since Blade Runner.

Hard Candy is pretty lame, nothing much of interest here, give it a miss.

Last and definitely least, I saw Little Miss Sunsine and boy, what a stinker it is. I am completely baffled and bewildered why so many people (never mind critics, we already know they are a bunch of morons) loved this shabby, sleazy little movie so much. It has absolutely nothing to recommend it except Pete Carrell and a few forced chuckles from Alan Arkin as ornery grand-dad. The whole thing is actually kind of queasy, probably the most overrated and misguided indie comedy since the truly revolting Garden State. This is the film of the year? I tell you, you people are insane!

Casino Royale: A Brief Rave

Saw the new Bond film last night, not expecting a great deal. I was pleasantly impressed. Amazed even. Easily (easily) the best Bond movie since From Russia with Love; frankly, it is the best Bond movie ever. The reason is that it is the first of the films that manages to be even faintly realistic, that is character as much as plot driven. The plot in fact is nothing special, but the handling of the scenes is refreshingly raw and gritty (not quite Bourne Identity, but close enough); for the first time ever, James Bond seems like a real personality and not just a fantasy figure, capable of suffering and other human emotions. Special praises go to Craig, who is a revelation. Eva Green doesn't do badly either: tho she weirdly fluctuates between divinely pretty and almost mannish (she looks way better without make-up), Green is extremely affecting as the first flesh and blood Bond girl. What really distinguishes this movie from other Bonds, however, is the touch of a real writer - Paul Haggis, whose hand is evident throughout the proceedings. There is actually something going on beneath the scenes now, psychological undercurrents, character dynamics, tensions; at least half the time, this is not just a good Bond movie: it's a good movie. I didn't even notice that the Bond theme wasn't being used until moments before the end when it finally appears - I had almost forgotten I was watching a Bond movie at all (yes, that's a compliment). These last few moments, after all that has gone before, made me very nearly euphoric. Never mind the fact that they celebrate Bond's acceptance of his fundamental soullessness and embracing his dubious destiny as a cold-blooded killer fantasy hero! This is cracking entertainment and final, unexpected proof that there is life in the old dodo yet.

Environmentalism is Just More Human Arrogance

What is all this stuff about saving the Earth?
have we lost our marbles?

So far as this green thinking goes, there is one basic flaw in the reasoning: all ecofriendly efforts on the part of humanity are nothing to do with the saving the planet. And thank God for that. The Earth can certainly take care of herself. It is rather that humans need to try and save themselves from the Earth's wrath before it is too late. And this is an individual thing rather than a "group action" thing. No government nor city (nor political movement) is likely to survive the earth changes that our mad activities have now made inevitable... the Earth's solution is civilization's death knell

but we are creatures of the earth (and sun) first and foremost, and so long as our allegiance is secure, we can be too

just don't get attached to your cell phone!

Babel and The Role of Movies to Provoke Change

few more notes on movies, from an email to a friend

finally saw dirty pretty things and loved it
also rules of attraction i found exhilerating, better than the book, based on what i have read so far, and avary's filmmaking chops seem to me to put tarantino's in the shade. But again the movie came and went without much support
as for babel, i did like it, quite a lot, but thought 21 grams was superior, and that babel was not nearly as powerful as it wanted and needed to be. it was harrowing, but not (for me) in the end all that moving. 21 grams on the other hand i found heartbreaking.
as for being "important" - to its credit i didn't think it attempted to hammer home any specific message and so i can't really see how (my friend) means that - important to who or what? at a pinch i can see the the writer and director are attempting some challenging things as filmmakers, but so far as....did you mean politically? i think only movies like clockwork orange or fight club (or nat born killers), ones that potentially provoke violence, can ever really impact society. calls for compassion are famously ineffective becoz in the end (tho this may be cynicism on my part) they are always really just preaching to the converted.
that said, i think babel was certainly one of the films of the year, 2006, unlike so many other stinkers that are being shortlisted.
as you may have noticed, i am getting unnecessarily exasperated with the lack of critical judgment these days!! it is not that it is almost a moral question. it actually is a moral question! the ability to tell the difference between good and bad movies seems to be disappearing in a society almost devoid of moral direction or context....
oh well

Last night I rented United 93, a film I had had no desire to see. I was swayed by the number of British publications that voted it film of the year (or at least in the running). I should have trusted my instincts. The film has absolutely nothing to recommend it. Are UK critics demented? Or is there a more complex explanation for this grotesque miscarriage of taste? The film is dull, stodgy, self-important, and devoid of any suspense or excitement. It attempts to a be a raw, gritty doucmentary renactment of "what happened," but since no one knows exactly what that is, it is just a crock. The only reason it was so well-received, I'd wager, is because the subject matter (9/11, specifically the 4th airplane that did not reach its target due to the passengers overpowering the hijackers; it came down in Pennsylvania and everyone died) is regarded with such hushed reverence that the movie enjoyed a kind of critical immunity. But what on earth is so goddamn special about 9/11 or about a bunch of passengers dying to save the whitehouse (this hardly makes them heroes in my book!)? It is just one more incident of "tragic" mass death in a world rife with such incidents.

It's ironic that after the event, Hollywood movies about terrorism were considered both bad business and bad taste; six years later, a movie about the event its regarded as the height of taste, artistry, and good commercial acumen. But it is just another movie, and in fact, a lot duller and less riveting than any number of bomb-on-airplane type movies you could name. The very thing that it is being praised for (its excruciating "realism" and muggy air of reverence) is precisely what makes it so tedious.

I think the reason people remain so in awe of 9/11 and continue to regard it as some great tragedy is that for once, a global catastrophe had repercussions on their own personal lives; it made people feel threatened and insecure. Ironically, this is the one solid justification that (objectively) one might raise in defense of the terrorists' actions: that they intended (and briefly succeeded) to wake people up and make them question the kind of society they were living in and dependent on, and question their own lives, too. But people do not appreciate being disturbed in their zombie slumber, and I think the hatred and resentment of "terrorists" has as much or more to do with this fact than with any compasison for the "innocent" victims.

None of these questions are raised by United 93, of course. The film is arrogant and complacent enough to assume that its subject matter is of such profound interest to everyone that it does not need to dress it up with any kind of dramatic artistry or character depth or much of anything at all. It is like a channel 4 documentary renactment, drawn out to an endless two hours. There is absolutley nothing controversial or daring about the film, but for some reason it was greeted as a work of art. But what I saw was a crock of shit. Further confirmation that critics are not to be trusted. Avoid this film like the plague of political correctness that it is.

Dandy in the Underworld: The Libertine

It’s extremely rare to come across a film with so sincere an artistic intent as The Libertine that isn’t also stodgy, pretentious, and self-important. Mercifully, the subject matter does not allow for a moment’s pomp or circumstance here. The film tells the tale of the resolutely dissolute nihilistic dandy, the Earl of Rochester John Wilmot, who drank and fucked with all the vigor of a one-man revolution against the hypocrisy of his society. With such a perverse protagonist as its center, the film is a tragedy that demands to be taken at least partway as comedy, and this is what the filmmakers have done with it (for the first half at least). As played by Johnny Depp (in a triumphant return to transformative brilliance), the Earl is fiercely intelligent and ferociously decadent, his decadence being both a twisted expression of and a desperate refuge from his relentless intelligence. Depp’s Earl is as bawdy and scintillating a character as we could ever hope to have as a guide through the dour and effete corridors of period melodrama (fear not, this is definitely not Merchant and Ivory terrain). In fact, he’s a blast, and from the very first moments, when he warns us we are going to be repelled by him and his story, Depp commands the screen with mesmerizing assurance. He creates a historical protagonist both eerily credible and at the same time deliriously entertaining. The same could be said of the film itself, which manages to find an almost miraculous balance between the austerity of historical melodrama and the freewheeling intensity of psychodrama. The Libertine is an imaginative portrait of the soul-searching of an artist unafraid to explore a truly fascinating subject: that of his own twisted psyche. At the same time, it is just such imaginative soul-searching—on the part of the artists who made the film—that have created a work of unusual subtlety and insight.

In the hands of Depp, playwright Stephen Jeffreys, and director Laurence Dunmore (with a little help from history), Wilmot is an almost perfect movie creation. The wayward nephew of King Charles II, Wilmot is a brilliant mind and tormented soul wrapped up in a handsome, pathologically sensuous body. He is driven by passions he cannot express to extremes few people dare to experience, extremes that will eventually bring about his death (ostensibly from small pox). It’s hard to imagine a richer, more rewarding role for an actor to play than a self-destructive genius who is also a hedonist, and Depp’s delight is evident in every scene, suffusing the film with dark, sensuous energy. Yet Wilmot is more than the sum of his parts, and Depp and the filmmakers never stoop to conquer us; they never reduce their character to manageable dimensions. Instead, they allow the Earl to remain enigmatic and obscure, both loathsome and lovable—his very own self, lost to history.

When Wilmot takes on the failing actress Elizabeth (Samantha Morton), for example, and promises to turn her into the greatest player on the London stage, we (and she) may begin to glimpse a noble soul beneath the tawdry airs and vulgar antics. Wilmot confesses to her his inability to feel passion in his own life and his need to experience it vicariously, through art and its various expressions. It is ironic, then, that his whole life—looking back upon it with the perspective of distance—should itself seem like a work of art, one in which all the human passions, the basest and most foul and the loftiest and most sublime, are enacted. These scenes between Svengali Wilmot and his winsome but ruthless apprentice are the heart of the film, and they are the toughest to pull off. Depp and Morton and the melodramatic dialogue are greatly assisted by Dunmore’s roving, hand-held camera here, and what might otherwise have been staged histrionics comes off as genuine pathos, laced with something eerie and surreal. We, like Wilmot, are unsure when his protégé is performing and when she is expressing her own true feelings. Reality and artifice, feeling and simulation, shift and blend into each other, giving the scenes a giddy, mercurial, faintly hallucinogenic quality. Yet at the same time, the unexpressed tenderness between the two, seemingly disparate characters hints at genuine tragedy: both are equally damned in their own way. In such moments, The Libertine captures the bitter elixir of impossible desire. Both the Earl and Elizabeth suffer from the same disease, and the actors convey beautifully their ache of longing, their need for acceptance on their own terms, for a moment of sweetness in the endless despair.

There are flaws, of course (John Malkovich’s false nose for one, and the Earl’s abandoning his drinking mate to die in a street brawl seems meant to be more powerful than it is); but there’s nothing to account for the reception the film received from critics, which was at best tepid and at worst scornful. While torpid, self-important drudgery like Amadeus is greeted with ecstatic reverence, The Libertine—easily one of the best historical movies ever made, and one of a handful of truly contemporary period dramas alongside Dangerous Liaisons and The Duelists—is sniffed at and dismissed as preposterous and risible nonsense. The only explanation I can think of for this travesty of judgment is that the subject matter was simply too unpalatable for most critics to come to grips with. The film’s treatment—from the superb script to the production design, the blissfully loose, almost dogme-style direction—is impeccable, and beyond reproach. Everyone involved with the movie seems to have been inspired to outdo themselves. And unlike almost any other recent film you could name, The Libertine is actually about something. It lives and breathes as a work, organic and complete, populated by a host of characters all of whom also live and breath, individual portraits within a greater composition, which is all of a piece.

I can think of no other film that comes so close to portraying, in colors both beautiful and obscene but always true, the appalling paradox of the dandy nihilist for whom pleasure is an expression of his torment. The Libertine is a superlatively performed, beautifully written, and admirably balanced portrait of a truly Luciferian character. In the Earl’s melancholic dementia, we are shown how the intellectual man, when he cannot find meaning or fulfillment in society, by virtue of his immense superiority is obliged to reject the values upon which that society is founded. The Earl willfully seeks out the inverse of these values as a means to expose the rotten hypocrisy and mediocrity of lesser minds. Yet how quickly and tragically—how inevitably—his rebellious urge turns, by slow, agonizing degrees, into the indulgence of the senses, the will for self-immolation and destruction. With his superior intellect, Wilmot is able to see through the lies of both faith and reason and is compelled to seek the only feasible reality or truth left him, that of pure animal sensation, bodily existence, and the sweet authenticity of lust. Is there anything quite so lost (so damned) as this?

In its own admirably unassuming way, the film reveals the path of the senses as the very hardest path of all to the divine. The deceptive allure of the flesh is, if anything, even more blinding and intoxicating than the heady pleasures of the intellect. Wilmot’s despairing mind drives him to an intensification of experience via sensual gratification; yet at the same time, he is seeking freedom from the intellect through lust, and the two opposing drives add up to a recipe for damnation. The road of excess is one few have the courage or strength to travel, and is as likely to lead to the gates of hell as the palace of wisdom. The Libertine is a profoundly heart-breaking yet curiously uplifting archetypal tale, one that critics (mostly male) reviled the world over, damning themselves with their prudery and squeamishness and what can only amount to a lack of courage and an incapacity to appreciate the devastating truths on display. The film they rejected offers up the quintessence of tragedy: the lofty soul dragged down to basest bodily depths through the self-loathing of the personality. As the Earl himself warns from the start, “You will not like me.” Apparently few people did, or the movie either.

Some lives—and some movies—cut a little close to the bone and reveal just how distorted and blackened the human soul can be, and must be, for its completeness to shine. By rejecting the movie, more weak-hearted, lily-livered viewers were able to reject the message also, that of the possibility of greatness and depravity co-existing, feeding off (and upon) one another in a dreadful complicity that makes moral judgments impossible. The Libertine shows in bald and brazen colors that the greater the potential for goodness is, the greater the temptation towards evil becomes. This is not a message that most decent, God-fearing critics care to contend with, evidently. Dostoyevsky once wrote that it is harder to be a great sinner than a great saint. The only real greatness—wholeness—is in having the courage to be both.

That the movie was reviled and rejected only confirms the paltry hypocrisy of the timid, soulless world it depicts, that the Earl rejects, with his own life as a sacrifice to the cause of universal revolt. Greatness will always be tested by the world, and will either be destroyed by it or brought to full fruition (for some, destruction may be the only possible fruition). The Libertine aspires after greatness. I think it achieves it; the world begged to differ. Time will tell which of us was right.

It’s difficult to express just how impressed I was by this film (especially considering how little impressed most viewers seem to have been), without getting carried away by my own enthusiasm. The Libertine is monumentally, heroically ambitious; it attempts to portray a truly unique historical figure and get at the root of his madness; at the same time, it is perfectly scaled to ordinary human emotions. The film’s ambitions never interfere with the telling of its story: they are not the ambitions of hubris, the desire to aggrandize a work beyond its station; they are from a simple desire to do full justice to the subject, a determination not to flinch from presenting it in a fully rounded light, and a need to be absolutely ruthless and honest in doing so. There is nothing superfluous in The Libertine—everything is put to good use, every line of dialogue, every shot, every set, every performance (and there are some dandies here, every one of them offers some surprises), all are woven together to form a tapestry both pleasingly simple in design and deceptively intricate in detail. It’s a work of pathos and beauty that comes not just from the hearts of those who made it but from their souls. A movie that that manages to be both heartrending and hugely entertaining at the same time, that shows the tragedy and comedy of the human condition, without shying away either from the horror or the sensuality of it, can only be considered an authentic work of art.

The Earl would be proud. His revolt was not in vain.

Inside a Moral Vaccum: Scorsese's New Clothes

I recently saw The Departed and admittedly it was a pirate copy (a perfectly good image but it jumped around a lot), so I can't be sure how much the film lost as a result; but what I saw was an incomprehensible mess and probably the sloppiest filmmaking Scorsese has ever done. Yet the critics raved; many of them even chose it as their film of the year. Are they no longer able to distinguish between intention and result, I wonder, or between the reputation of the maker and the brutal fact of the film itself? These days, even an incontestable stinker like Eyes Wide Shut gets a rapid revisionist take and becomes a "classic" in order for the critical consensus that has canonised Kubrick to remain intact. (As far as revisionist history goes, it's easier to believe the holocaust never happened than accept EWS as a great movie.)

The best way to comprehend the mathematical concept of infinity is to contemplate the stupidity of film critics. But it forces me to question whether I am in the right line of work.

There is a kind of collective dementia running our world. Of course, anyone with the most rudimentary degree of awareness has known that for a long time, and one can even get used to it and find humor in it, when an inarticulate moron like GWB becomes president of the USA. With global exploitation and political corruption reaching new lows of depravity, what is most exasperating is not that it continues to exist, but that one's fellow humans persist in pretending it doesn't, in voting, watching the news, expressing political opinions, just as if any of it had the least baring on what is really happening behind the scenes.

It's not the malevolent iniquity of the dark power elite that bugs me, but the docile acquiesence of the masses. After all, I am forced to live with the latter, at least to some extent, whereas the evil elite doen't really cross my path too often. Ditto with movies. I don't really care if once-gifted filmmakers churn out lifeless, over-stylized but basically worthless, clunky drek like The Departed; it's to be expected, after all. What I really object to is that they get praised to the skies for doing it, and often damned for their best work (Scorsese' Bringing Out the Dead, for example, easily his most impresive film in the last 25 years, and of course the critics ignored it.) How are they even to know when they have delivered the goods, if no one tells it to them straight?

People get the leaders they deserve; and if audiences get served up endless movie shite then it serves them right for taking it and having such lousy taste. What's really demoralizing is that they actually seem to enjoy it. There is a legion of tasteless and moronic film critics to misguide them.

Where oh where is dame Kael to point out the emperor's nakedness to the world and bring shame upon the emperor's head?

It's a lousy job to be a bearer of ethical/aesthetic sanity inside a moral vaccum; but someone sure has to do it

James Bond: Archaic Remnant


I am writing for a new online magazine, for any of you interested, see link below. my piece is called An Icon of Class, it's about James Bond and his influence on Hollywood
http://www.wearethemagazine.com/

I was paid a few bucks for this piece, and the editor in chief now considers me the "resident film genius," quote unquote. A position i am all-too happy to fill, needless to say, and savor the long-sought taste of recognition!

Balancing Accounts: How to Avenge Email Snubs

Here is something i sent out last week that may amuse those of you who have ever been snubbed or ignored in your efforts to communictae in this very volatile world of email.

To whom it may concern,

Please read this in its entirety if you have any interest in improving your business sense.

If you are receiving this message, here’s why: In the last 12 months or so you have, deliberately or otherwise, ignored emails sent you regarding my wares (books, scripts, articles, etc, all suffused with that unique, sadly underappreciated Horsley genius).

I am sure you have your reasons for this. Everybody always has reasons. But unless such reasons entail a debilitating sickness, an unforeseen accident, a lawsuit, abduction by aliens or something equally earth-shattering, I am not really interested. I am concerned only with the effects which your discourtesy had on me at the time. It may have been months back; perhaps you weren’t even aware of snubbing anyone at the time, much less now. But I do remember.

Writers have longer memories than elephants. Those like myself, touched or cursed by momentary genius, we are petty, obsessive, vengeful beasts. (All decent writers write at least partly for revenge.) Some day, when the success and recognition I shamelessly covet is finally mine, all your snubs will mean nothing. They are, I freely acknowledge, part of the necessary tempering of the artist, and I shall not kick against these pricks. But allow me at least to point them out.

It is in the interests of cleansing my psyche of you once and for all that I am sending this email, collectively, to let you know that, witting or otherwise, you have offended this “hot-headed fantasist” (quoting Pauline Kael, get it??)

Perhaps you think you (or your time) are too important to observe what my mother calls “good manners” and common courtesy? Perhaps you consider these ideas old-fashioned in the age of stem cells and Internet? Whatever business you are in—in most cases a publishing house or agency—I guarantee this is not so, and that your own advancement is suffering from such an attitude. Snubbing potential clients isn’t just sloppy and rude—it’s bad business.

I wanted to keep this short. Only those with sufficiently morbid curiosity (and any of you who still have consciences) will still be reading anyway. What is this maniac trying to accomplish here? I will tell you.

This email serves as a collective Curse upon all of you who had the temerity and arrogance to ignore one of the visionary talents of our age. It is a Curse in the old, Egyptian sense, not the modern, angry expletive sense (though I am tempted). Do not expect plagues of locusts or for blood to come through your bathroom faucet. Any of you who happen to lose a limb or contract brain cancer in the next few months, please don’t blame me. The curse should fit the crime, so this is a very mild curse, intended to cause just the amount of rancor, frustration, stress, righteous wrath and indignation that you have all (wittingly or not) inflicted upon my own sensitive psyche. A particularly obscene traffic jam, perhaps, an underserved parking ticket, an unaccountably rude bank teller, painful humiliation at the hands of a beautiful woman (or star client), and suchlike—expect any or all of these in the following months.

This Curse will become effective as of next Tuesday, 31^st of October, being the day of All Hallow’s Eve, also called Sam Hain, popularly know as Halloween. Any of you who feel undeserving of this cybernetic hex, contact me with humble apology and/or convincing explanation within the next seven days, you will hereby be exempted from it. The rest of you? The next time some stupid unthinking SOB snubs, disses, or ignores you FOR NO GOOD REASON, you will think of me.

That’s all. Now go about your flagging business.

Yours karmically,

The genius-whose-daddy-didn’t love him enough,

Jake Horsley

Divine Virus Productions

And the solitary response (two hours after i sent the email, a week ago, from a US publisher):

Jake,

Your email notice certainly did the trick in making me feel a “member” of the cursed.

With that said, I do apologize for not getting back to you over the last 12 months and I am truly sorry that I haven’t been able to connect with you in a way that ended up in our making a deal for one of your projects.

Please forgive me and don’t stop sending projects to me for review in the future.

Best wishes,

’Til Art is No More: Hollywood Devours Its Young


If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? An axiom that Hollywood regards with all the cynical opportunism of an unscrupulous mechanic—not only fixing things that don’t need fixing, but deftly messing them up in the process.

The 2006 remake of The Omen is the latest example of Hollywood opportunism run amok. So far as I can tell, the only reason the film was made—the only vaguely “creative” rationale behind it—was to make a big marketing strategy out of releasing it on June 6, 2006, (06/06/06, geddit?). Big, fat, hairy deal. They could have saved themselves $50 million and re-released Richard Donner’s original film, now thirty years old, with Gregory Peck (whom Liev Strieber does a peculiar, nostalgia-inducing impersonation of in the current film). Audiences would then have received a decent (if dated) bit of movie horror hokum, instead of a shallow rehash with nothing but some “cool” imagery and the stunt casting of Mia Farrow (remember Rosemary’s Baby?) to distinguish it.

The only thing that makes The Omen remake worth writing about is how it provides one more piece of irrefutable evidence as to the complete poverty of imagination or innovation in the higher echelons of Hollywood studios. Remakes have been the rage for a couple of decades now, but it’s only in the last few years that the industry began to cannibalize itself with such speed that, within another decade (Armageddon permitting), it will be remaking its hit movies fasting than it can come up with the originals. Where once there was at least the pretense of a creative justification for such remakes (i.e., old movies like The Postman Always Rings Twice, being done over to take advantage of the new permissiveness), there is now a total void of artistic rationale to cover the mercenary and soulless agenda at work.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho was perhaps the turning point. Ironically, the movie was supposedly a “labor of love” on Van Sant’s part (so he would have us believe), a grand follie that remade Hitchcock’s movie, shot for shot and word for word, as a “homage” to the master. (Can pissing on someone’s grave be considered a homage? Only in Hollywood.) The studios probably approved Van Sant’s heroically demented enterprise because it meant getting a Psycho that was in color, hence could draw in mass audiences. (Colorizing Hitchcock’s original would have caused far too much of a stink even for studio execs to want to deal with.) Van Sant’s misguided Psycho was neither a commercial nor a critical success, but even so it seems to have set a precedent for “paint by numbers” sequels (and “join-the-dots” profits?).

Nowadays, it is perfectly natural for studios to employ no-name (and usually no-talent) directors to remake “classic” horror movies that aren’t even that old and where a simple re-release would serve. As prophesized by Robert Altman’s The Player, such a procedure may represent Hollywood executive dreams come true: the means for entirely removing writers from the filmmaking process. (All emphasis here on process, none at all on filmmaking.)
Assault on Precinct 13, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, The Hills Have Eyes, When a Stranger Calls, and now The Omen and The Wicker Man, have all enjoyed the Hollywood “upgrade” in recent years, always to the detriment of the original movie (in cases such as Amityville, admittedly no great loss; the one exception to this rule is Dawn of the Dead, which almost justified itself by being a rip-roaring bit of splatter fun, just like the original.) So what’s next? A remake of Eraserhead, with Bill Murray as Henry? Or how about a new, extra special edition of Close Encounters (by James Cameron?), now that we have CGI? Hell, let’s remake E.T while we’re at it! Soon there will be no way to tell new releases from old favorites.

What I have to ask is, why not, for heaven’s sake, remake horror movies that might actually benefit from being done over? Either films whose potential wasn’t tapped the first time around or that didn’t have the technology needed to do full justice to the director’s vision? Let Cronenberg do a $50 million rehash of Videodrome, and inflict us with the postmodern paranoid epic he has always dreamed of inflicting upon us! What about all those horror movies with fantastically inspired plots that never managed to deliver on their promise? Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To, John Carpenter’s They Live, the visionary but disappointing Dark City? What about the old Nigel Neale “Quatermass” TV shows? The answer is that none of these have the instant recognizability of those ’70s horror “classics” which, once remade, pretty much sell themselves because even younger audiences have heard of (but hopefully not seen) the originals. There may be something like morbid curiosity compelling people to see these movies, out of a mixture of nostalgic affection for the originals and a desire to see how awful these new versions really are. I, too, have allowed myself to be tricked into watching these films—actually paying money to see them—despite the absolute certainty that I will repent of it afterwards. And invariably, I do.

Judging by the continuing stream of this warmed-over dreck, remakes of movies that either didn’t need remaking or never had much potential to begin with—so long as they are easily identifiable by title—more or less guarantee a profit for the studios. What could be simpler than taking a previous hit and giving it a glossy, FX-happy make-over? If they are in the mood for a good scare, people will go to see a horror movie, just like they will go to a dumb-out comedy for a laugh (let’s face it, like they will go the movies, period), no matter what it is. Remakes share their title with some movie that audiences have heard about and which they assume must be great; the mere fact it’s been remade means it’s a classic, right? They go to the movie out of some fuzzy “logic” (or rather, irrational hope) it will provide whatever special thrills made the original special. Teenage audiences (the target audience of these movies) have next to no awareness of film history and even less interest in it; they have all the memory or discernment of MTV-raised, ADD goldfish, and apparently, they like it that way. So long as they’re served the requisite gore and cheap thrills and can max out to their popcorn, who cares if they’re eating moldy old leftovers—and not last week’s but last year’s? It’s all been microwaved and MSG-ed to cover the lack of nutritional value or of anything faintly resembling flavor. Their retinas, brains and eardrums are being assaulted; and that, man, is what the movies are all about.
Ye gods. And this Hollywood agenda looks set to proceed, with all the inexorable inevitability of a fundamentalist Armageddon, verily, until Art exists no more.

The only possible way to justify an Omen remake—with its ever-more topical “Antichrist in the White House” archetypal unfolding—would be either by coming up with a whole new twist to the tale or by making the scariest goddamn movie ever. The new Omen accomplishes neither goal; most depressingly of all, it doesn’t seem to aspire to anything at all. The strongest sensation I got while watching it was an eerie, unsettling déjà vu that took me back to seeing the first film (a dozen times) as a teenager. This new version is so similar to the original, and yet so fundamentally inferior in everything but the cinematography, that it creates a kind of vacuum in the viewer—at least in those of us who have seen the original. It’s exactly the sort of vacuum you’d expect when an art form had begun to cannibalize itself. It’s happening so rapidly now that an art form is disappearing before our eyes.

If the antichrist were among us today, I wonder: would he be running a Hollywood studio?

The Inner Voice of Paul Thomas Anderson

In Dogville Vs. Hollywood I wrote a single line on Magnolia, calling it “a sprawling, only partly successful imitation of Altman, [that] suggested Anderson was a filmmaker with aspirations possibly beyond his talents.” Having seen the film for second time, seven years later, I have some serious crow to eat.

A soaring, almost wholly successful work (some scenes with Julianne Moore still strike me as overwrought and heavy-handed), Magnolia seems to me now the most heartfelt and original movie epic since, well, since forever. (I was going to say since Nashville, but the truth is, Magnolia is a considerably richer and more personal work than Altman’s.)

There’s no doubt Anderson’s ambitions as a filmmaker border on hubris; but what’s truly astonishing is that he actually has the wherewithal to see them through and do almost complete justice to them. With only his third film, Anderson made a masterpiece, a film that walks the high-wire between nigh-esoteric subtlety and melodrama bordering on soap opera, and it does so without a net. (At over three hours running time and a cost of over $40 million, anything less than a tour-de-force could have vaporized Anderson as surely as Heaven’s Gate vaporized Cimino.) Even so, Magnolia confounded many viewers (myself included obviously) with its brazen originality and disregard for movie conventions. To fully appreciate the scope, depth, and intensity of Anderson’s film, it may be necessary to meet the writer-director halfway, to allow his peculiar vision to unfold at its own tempo and in its own, unique manner. However brilliant a movie, Magnolia is not an ingratiating work; Anderson appears to deliberately confound his audience’s preconceptions about both art and entertainment, delivering a work unlike any other American movie of the last thirty years, without apology. As Anderson said to the crew on the first day of shooting, making a great movie is “nothing to be ashamed of.”

As a work of art, Magnolia is hugely entertaining, as well as being the closest American movies have come in recent years to a genuine labor of love. Against all odds, Anderson has made an intimate epic that stays true to his individual vision, a film that is both disturbingly personal and sweepingly universal in its reach. Anderson makes a proud and plaintive cry to be saved from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone; and the deeper he reaches into his own heart and soul, the more profoundly he connects with ours.

With his ability to pull off something this freakish—a movie that, by all the usual standards for judging movies, simply should not work—Paul Thomas Anderson proved himself to be a truly Promethean talent, a bona fide filmmaking genius. As Pauline Kael wrote of Coppola in his heyday (The Godfather Part Two), “that’s the inner voice of the authentic hero.”

Tarantino's Licensed Depravity

I just watched HOSTEL, which I found disgusting. I am not one to take moral stances, much less on movies. But in this case I am sorely tempted. Tarantino should have his head examined for supporting something as grotesque as this. That said, it does have some powerful imagery, once the barbarism begins (the first hour was just crap), and obviously it evoked a strong emotional response in me. But how hard is it to get an emotional response from scenes of graphic torture? (I felt the same about Tarantino’s ear-slicing scene in Dogs, which was just exploitation cinema done up in new, postmodern rags). The film was disturbing, sure, but at a visceral rather than psychological level. Footage of animal experimentation would also be disturbing. Big deal.

What I admire about movies like Blue Velvet and Casualties of War (also M), and even Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is the way they get to the psychological roots of sadism, (by) creating empathy not just for the victims (easy enough, obviously), but for the perpetrators also. Tarantino seems devoid of empathy as a filmmaker. It’s hard to imagine a greater defect (I think Kubrick suffered from it too, however, so I guess there are ways around it!). He delights in depicting scenes of pain and dismemberment with all the sadistic relish of a Goebbels.

They say a society gets the heroes it deserves. Tarantino’s success strikes me as (like everything) symptomatic of just how “depraved” (removed from basic human qualities like compassion, introspection, kindness) audiences have become, that they would take pleasure in what amount to sadistic orgies of violence with no leavening “moral” (i.e. artistic) intent behind them.

In the end, there can be no credible argument made for censorship of any kind. But if there was, Hostel would be exhibit A.