Monthly Archives: November 2010

No Country for Old Men and the Novel

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The Bliss of Book Adaptation Ignorance

I have it on good authority that Mario Puzo’s novel version of The Godfather is pretty awful and the film finds redemption in the story through cinematography and general handling. The film version of A Clockwork Orange is better than the original novel simply because it does not have the awful 2st chapter which tries to rationalize Alex’s behavior by saying it was a process of him growing up to better understand. Considering he represented an idea of evil, I don’t the identification as youthful toil only. I thought this movie could bring me to like a Coen brothers film, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be between us. The original novel wasn’t very good, but all the positives the novel had going for it is lost in this film adaptation. Then 2001: A Space Odyssey is the only time a major author adapted a film into a book. Arthur C. Clarke’s handicap of trying to interpret the film made his novel feel like a tell all of the film’s mysteries instead of an equal work of similar mystery and wonder.

There are plenty of bad novels. More films should be able to do well to adapt them, but movies generally stay inferior because they try to adapt the lengths of the novel and minuscule their own ambitions. Not enough films know how to find sleeves of a novel’s themes and see how they can make them more cinematic. Examples of  adaptation mistakes are everywhere in film history. A filmmaking duo that has been about adaptations of late have been the Coen Brothers. They won a Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men and are returning to rural dirt later this year with True Grit. The latter has the ill fortune of also having a famous film made for it, but I believe True Grit will be a good film. It isn’t because I think it will actually be bad, but due to the fact I have not read the original novel. Any feeling of an informed opinion may be an untrue presumption for the new Coens film.

As far as No Country for Old Men is concerned, I thought it would be the movie to bring me to like a Coen brothers film, but I guess it wasn’t meant to be between us. While the trailer looked good and the temperament of the film is has none of the Coen hangs up that annoy me, the film is still as unsatisfactory and hollow as any other Coen film. I felt this way by reading the novel. The original novel isn’t very good, but all the positives the novel had going for it is lost in this film adaptation. All the Coens prove is that film is an entertainment operation when faced with a challenge of a novel that has themes and objectives. Cinematic does not have to mean exciting in the shallow end and

The reason is simple. The Coen Brothers dedicate the majority of the film to making a thriller. In the novel, Tommy Lee Jones character is at the heart of the story. His commentary and experience guides everything. The mishap of misplaced money and a subsequent chase for it (while still prominent in the novel) doesn’t take on such a large percentage of the story time as it does in the film. The only times we see Tommy Lee Jones is in small spurts where his character interaction provides better anecdotes than anything else. The Coen Brothers embrace the chance to take a killing spree and make it an elaborate noir spectacle. The composition and filmmaking has thriller written all over it. It marginalizes all chances for themes and characterization.

Also, in the novel, Llewelyn Moss is much more human. He isn’t an adversary of Anton Chigurh but a dumb guy who got in the wrong situation and never knew when to stop. Like the structure of the first half of Native Son, the story is about how a terrifying event unfolds and starts to out weigh any original good intentions. Moss is at the the heart of the nervous tension. The novel highlights his fear a lot greater and focuses more on his bad mistakes. The film tries to make up for what it doesn’t acknowledge in the novel by showing his fateful mistakes later on, but his characterization is still pure grit, a kind of offset of Chigurh who can go toe to toe with him in deviousness. The final scene with Chigurh and Moss’ wife is very annoying. He says her life can be saved if her husband chose her over himself, but the question of morality doesn’t match the undertone of the characterization. It feels like a wrap up to give meaning to an out and out thriller that looks and feels like every other thriller.

As far as Tommy Lee Jones’ character is concerned, I don’t mind if he is marginalized. Like I said above, a film has to pick and choose within a novel of what it is going to highlight. However, all the film is adapting here is the skeleton of the story with nothing more. In a cynical way, maybe one should be happy that No Country for Old Men at least retains dialogue from the novel since the Coens have been laughing about earlier films of theirs being adaptations of things they never read. This film is a straight adaptation, yet it reminds me of what Sergio Leone did to Akrira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Just take the original story and make it into a stylistic exercise. Here it feels like the Coens are gutting Sam Peckinpah. He made ultra violent Westerns and rural action films. His pattern of telling his stories is by lifting personal themes of male personality to the front tier of the story so the audience is aware of the personal battles going on with a character. The Coens do more than Leone by making nods to the dramatic elements of the story. However, they don’t do enough to honor the story. The film should have been all or nothing with the novel.

Then the final 20 minutes feel like the novel. Jones’ character takes prominence and it has a tone that feels like the novel, but it isn’t satisfying. It feels tacked on like the film knows it has to make meaning out of all the ridiculousness of the rest of the story. The film could have made choices to make the film feel more realistic to life circumstances, but it just gravitated to the large number of deaths in the novel and exploited it. I’m not saying the film should have been a true dedication to the novel. Considering the novel was far from perfect, it shouldn’t have. Its just of all the things the film chose to ditch and throw away. In the novel, you feel the fear the possibility of hell reigning down on Moss’s loved ones for what he is doing. In the film, you get a nod to this at the end. The film did not need to throw away the best parts.

As a thriller, it’s well made. Parts of the film are really well done, but the film needs to be looked at for its overall qualities. It doesn’t just want to be a thriller but something more. This isn’t like Fargo where the heightened accents made a stark drama a dead pan comedy on top of the tragedy. Here there are noir odes encrusted with greater dramatic implications. The Coen Brothers film to the limits of their limited personality and infuse dated references (noir) and small quirks and details everywhere. Moss’s wife is killed at the end and you only know it because Chigurh checks his boots on the porch for blood. That was a good touch, but those touches don’t make a film. I think the Coen Brothers lost the larger scope of characterization that was needed.

Postscript. My favorite line in the film was, “You’re going to have to ride bitch” when Chigurh had to ride in between two men in the pick up truck. I liked it for no more reason except that I hadn’t heard that expression used since I was a kid. I come from a pick up truck world and it was once common.

In Search of Parker Tyler’s…

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…Critical Bearings Or: How I Found Another Way to Complain About Film Criticism

Part I

I wonder if this happens with other people, but many times when I am reminded of the institution of criticism. Leave it be a critic who is commenting on his career in its twilight or a critic trying to prescribe what methods make the most sense when one goes about adopting it as a sustainable living. See, career isn’t a necessary word since many people find ways to make their hobbies feel like a calling to help fill up the pouches in their lives. Well, when any critic gets pensive over the how the bolts of their habit are screwed on, I find ways to look back at my influences and reaffirm the notions that I, along with everyone else, repeat to themselves about why they believe what they do. We all have our beginnings, middles, and ends where the influence of other criticisms stop being transformational and instead they become mixtures of ingredients into a well boiled stew that can fluctuate a little.

Something came across my daily internet noodling recently when I saw an old how-to-guide for film criticism by Siskel and Ebert. They gerrymandered a segment of their show to accommodate a PBS video in which they give basic tips to people who aspire to get into criticism. Nothing they said really was disagreeable or torturous. My main contention with their points is that they sized up criticism to feel like a by the numbers mechanism in which someone should write prose of criticism at an easy to read length and get points which will help people decide whether they want to see a film or not. Again, I do not disagree with the segment. Lots of good commentary beyond what I allude to them saying above. However, the relayed interpretation by me is that the basis of newspaper film criticism (what Siskel and Ebert represent) is starting to take over too many avenues of critical discourse. In the age of the internet when a blog is as valuable as taking the five minutes to start it, this should not be the case.

As newspaper criticism is a model to understand further, I remember watching Ebert and Siskel back in the 1990s and Siskel making the telling comment that he thought his work as a critic was beneath art and was more like a trade than anything. For people who hold criticism to a higher standard, it is a literature, but literary abilities are found in the confines of what newspaper criticism promotes to be succinct and probing analysis. Many writers have made good use of a small format where words are in short order and the writer has to sell their judgments in line with what a buying reader will be interested to read. As every writer who works for a bureacracy goes, their success is more likely to be judged in how good of a writer they are for the format. Excellent writing that goes above pay grade is found sometimes, but as a standard rule, they are the exceptions. The model isn’t meant to house full imaginations.

In fact, what is most memorable about newspaper criticism is the final judgments. It is whether a film got 3 stars or 4 or if it made a critic’s final top ten list for the year or the critic predicted it would win an award before an award telecast. This is what carries over the most in internet criticism. Everyone is trying to run the gauntlet and prescribe what the judgmental mood will be for a film. The internet is based on communities (websites and forums) and every tribe has its populations, measured level of importance by outsiders, and norms of what constitutes a pedigree level of talent. As much as most people don’t take to the internet fall into being critics, they go to numerous sites to see what the median level of comment has to say about a film. Classically, it’s the Imdb.com rating system and lately it has been Netflix with its viewer ratings and reviews since many movies are on instant que and people are channeling the web pages like it is a TV guide and they want to watch something good for the night.

The internet should be cause for exploration and imagination in criticism. For many blogs and bloggers, it is. I don’t believe there has to be a works for all prescription, but for me personally, I like the criticism that leads to independent ideas and discussions. Instead of be subservient to what is on the screen and report back analysis, I like the criticism that will take articles of clothing from a film and find ways to extend the commentary into further discussion. The push may be to come back full circle with simple critical appraisal, but the criticism should have wings to step outside the boundaries of what a critic should comment on. I like leaving whole parts of a film outside of mention when I discuss a film. As far as I’m concerned, they are peripheral to what I am talking about and do no hold favor for mention if I am not going to fully elaborate. If this manner of approach describes anyone for me, it is the late Parker Tyler. A writer, poet, and critic between the 1930s and 70s, he held his hand in all kinds of formats from fiction to auto-biography. The main stay of his writing through all of his decades grew in his interesting approaches to criticism.

Tyler was a critic in the sense that a fusion laced Miles Davis was still a jazz musician. Davis still played trumpet like he always did, but by adopting a full fusion technique in the the 1970s, he abandoned his bee bop upbringings of relying on other jazz favored instruments for electronic influences and instruments of all musical temperatures. Davis also dropped structural restrictions and adopted fusion’s even playing field of making any kind of musical transition an equal opportunity partner. Thus, all the musicality streamlined into continuous interchanging where structure seemed beyond recognition. When Parker Tyler wrote The Hollywood Hallucination, he streamlined the mythos of the Hollywood stars into a discussion on classical mythos in Greek literature and mythology. Seeing a chance for parallel, Tyler prescribed how the atmosphere of Hollywood movie making made for a perfect recipe of illusion which hoists acts and characters into grandstand idolization which cannot be measured against any recognizable pattern of idolatry…except Greek literature and mythology and the importance their figures had for their society.

This is a fascinating idea. In academic criticism, I have seen similar types of it used. A critic will take one film and push it against a classical model that is hard to immediately recognize as being a congruent basis for comparison. Then the critic will go into breakdown and show example by example how both push favor with each other and how we can understand the fortune of a work when cast in the unexpected light of the other. There is no cordial model like this for Tyler with his examinations. He discusses and contemplates the classical realm of Hollywood movies like he in Ancient Greece and no form of separation between the two exists. Resisting presentation difference allows him to comb into small elemental niches of how both Hollywood and mythology intersect each other at intimate and textual levels. In fact, the way Tyler writes, he’s trying to give the reader an idea of how to talk about movies without having to reference their title for pages. In some of his chapters, paragraphs of elaboration will go on extensively. It will feel like he is procrastinating by going off topic, but the original topic is never returned to. It was a set up to his imaginative side road.

To show his philosophy of writing was not a case by case application for each film and more of a philosophic approach, his next book, The Magic and the Myth of the Movies, felt like a continuation of the first book. Still masked by the mystique of the movies he saw around him, he fostered his talent to simply continue his coverage of the mythic elements of filmmaking like he was a reporting covering what films should be really seen for. In the first book, some Hollywood movies were covered, and in the second, just more. Some repetition occurred and a conscious editor may have cut it out. For Tyler, it was the basis of his vision for how he saw movies. If Tyler never took a break in the 1950s to comment on art, writers, and other forms of art, he still may have continued to write about Hollywood movies with a perspective similar an artist who has found an original idea and dedicates his career to extolling its virtues in various ways. The continuation did not occur in easy ways.

When Tyler returned to writing books about film in the 1960s, new changes to the medium of the film got him to adopt new subjects and structural concentrations. He also found chance to address topics of sexuality that were always present in film but started to explode in many ways during the 1960s and 70s. These development allowed him to platform himself for some of the best social commentary one could imagine a film critic was capable of. To this day, I feel able to quote Tyler when it comes to sexual politics as much as I am willing to comment on him for aesthetics’ sake. Not only a perfect model for criticism; also a model for thought.

Living Memories

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The Reader and the History of the Holocaust

The Reader is an adaptation of a novel by the same name from 1995. It continues one of the most fascinating trends in cinema for the last 70 years: reflecting on the Holocaust. In modern times, the Holocaust is a great tragedy of historical implications on numerous fronts and our society has had the ability to record, translate, interpret and prescribe what meanings it has. As times goes on, the meaning becomes more unfolding because new implications are realized in unexpected corners. The development of countries, political organization, philosophical thought, and communal habits between people. Compare the Holocaust to other historical tragedies of generations and time periods before and today’s world does not have an extensive vision of the societal ramifications that people endured then, but the Holocaust has been given full attention by commentators and artists today.

For better Holocaust films today, the subjects tend to look at the external implications. Since filmmakers are more removed from the original documentary images of the Holocaust and enough films have covered the harsh realities of everyday strife for the Jews in the camps, filmmakers are focusing on how the Holocaust has shaped our world. In The Reader, the mileage of the Holocaust is weighed in how it effects a middle aged woman and her time as an SS guard during the war. For her, it was just a job and not an ideological position, but the duties involved (deciding who should and should not die) forces her into a corner in later years when she is brought to trial along with other guards for punishment. Everyone around the trial sees easy guilt and the trial as a long overdue penance for Germany, but for this simple woman (played by Kate Winslet), there is more to the story.

The back story begins over an affair between a youth and the said woman years prior. The audience gets his perspective so it gets his hopes and optimism over his feelings for her and since the relationship is his first, it also gets his doubts, fears, and dismay when it suddenly ends. No remorse card from Winslet. She leaves one day so he is buried in wonderment about her existence and effect over him. The youth grows a little, goes to law school, and sees her again when he visits the trial as a willing observer. He does not expect to see her, but he does. The predicament pains him since he feels compassion for her, but the commentary around him by his classmates is that he should consider her lot to be relatively evil. Since he did not know she was an SS guard, there is a new hangar to hang possible resentment on. The personal struggle grows mightily when she is accused of writing a document outlaying all the crimes and he suddenly realizes (from personal memory) she is illiterate but her shame over her personal defeat is what keeps her from contesting the accusation.

The surface conflict is how the youth avoids revealing the information he knows and allows his former flame to be imprisoned at full sentence and all he can commit himself to do to help her is sending her audio tapes while she is in prison. The tapes are things he used to read to her when they were together. She knows who her messenger is because of this, but the question is: why keeps him from opening up? Through out the film, he tells no one. There is evidence he feels spiteful over her original flee from their fling and a slight of feeling that he may be ashamed of what she stood for. Since he took the brunt of her accusations with classmates, affiliation complex says he sees himself in her position. When decades have past (and the youth is now played by Ralph Fiennes) and he finally visits her in prison right before she is due to be released, he is cold and unrepresentative of their past together. The brush off gets her to kill herself on the day of her release. When he hears the news, there is a cold silence in his face. The emotions are obviously affected. The face just cannot measure the level of despair.

The film concludes by Fiennes honoring her final requests to give her life savings to the daughter a lone survivor of a terrible incident from her past. The travel to give the money takes him to New York City where he confides for the first time in his full relationship with her. She is somewhat touched by personal touch, but she cannot accept the money for a Jewish organization. It wouldn’t be considered honorable because her money cannot rectify the sins of the past. However, she finds some touching absolution when a tin cup that holds the money reminds her of something her mother gave her as a youth. She takes that for personal keepsake, but she challenges Fiennes to do what he sees fit with the money. The task isn’t just a monetary goal, but something which will allow help him make decisions and take actions so he can come full circle with his past. The money is donated to an illiteracy foundation and Fiennes visits Winslet’s grave site with his daughter to tell her the entire story.

While combing through all of this story, I wondered if there was more context to the story than this. I have not read the original novel so I don’t know what the film is leaving out. If I follow the story, the illustration is a straight guilt profile of a man who spends his life wondering if he will find the strength to do the right thing. The structure of the story hangs on the tension that something may change within him and he will come around to accepting his feelings for her. After she is in prison, his word will not help her much, but when she starts to learn to read and write and asks him to write back, he refuses. During the trial, the tension is whether he will tell the judge what he knows and then it develops to whether he can even tell her what he feels. The depth for true ambiguity in the story lies with Fiennes character. Moments of silence and sullenness cloud his performance when the film. Still, when the film has a chance to add sub themes to run congruent with tale of a man’s missed opportunities to conquer his past, the film pays no heed.

The reason seems to be that the film back ends its story approach to get a more distinct feeling of memory. While the style structure is similar throughout, the most detailed moments are at the beginning when the film is documenting the romance between the boy and woman. Then when the film shifts to the trial, there are more specifics of moments. The third part, his later years, are a cycle through small actions and chances for Fiennes to make due on what he owes someone who has shaped his life and future. A few scenes exist to show his relationship with a daughter and a career, but they are too thin. While some may see the theoretical questions of what he feels later in his life as more important, the film wants to dissolve the question potential of that part by making the audience see the roll out of the story as tension based and for the feelings to be relayed on what the audience experienced in great detail at the beginning of the film.

Is this a cop out? Not at all. Lots of Holocaust and World War II films play on angles of disrupting the innocence of childhood memory when forced to face the grizzly nature of the Nazis and Fascism. Films by Louis Malle come to mind, but let me briefly comment on Vittorio De Sica’s late film and his play on Mussolini, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It shows an Anti-Semite angle in Italy and the disruption of an angelic home life at a wealthy person’s house when it is discovered they are Jewish as Italian soldiers are searching them  out. The film hypes the angelic angle of home life for this family while slowly easing into the tension of what would become their undoing. Since Mussolini endorsed himself over to Hitler during the war, the context is Italian. The Reader returns the story back to Germany, but it’s main hypothesis is that innocence was still finding ways to be lost in the post-war eras by people who could not feel the first hand effect of what the war did to their lives yet they could still see how it was effecting the ones they wanted to fully love.

The story seems small in the face of large stacks of work about the Holocaust in literature and world cinema, but is it still pertinent? I think so. The novel was released in 1995 and it wasn’t until the 2000′s that Mein Kampf was being published in Germany. According to people I know in Germany, for the last 20 years, World War II history is skirted in public school education. Germany does have a good Western image because they courted Nato supervision and developed into a stable democracy after World War II, but social hiccups still persisted and still exist until this day. Considering The Reader also stars Alexandria Maria Lara and Bruno Ganz of the revelatory 2004 film, Downfall, maybe the film best stands as another marker of the normalization process going on in German cinema. This film is an international production, but those are two German stars who are crossing over to do work for more German reconstruction subjects in film.

Weekly Relief – Silestone “Above Everything Else”

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The Real Future of Computer Animation

Returning to an old favorite (category wise), I am presenting this short video. It’s a commercial for Silestone, and like most commercials, it plays to an effect without adhering to an understandable selling point. In the case of this video, the effect is that it just exists. Whether the viewer can tell or not, everything in this short is the result of computer animation. Like Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney, every soluable fiber of this video is based on what can be produced on a computer screen.

The difference here? A full photographic realistic quality to the imagery. Similar to how the dinosaurs looked and felt in Jurassic Park, the computer creations are meant to blend in with our reality and share no recognizable difference to the look and movements of any other animal which can be filmed present day and shown onscreen. However, everything here is digitally birthed – from the tables, to the lights, to the fruits exploding, to the particles of liquid flowing in various directions. The first Jurassic Park made its dinosaurs feel realistic because it limited their movements and kept the number of dinosaurs to a workable number. If you look at the sequels and see the dinosaurs continue to get more animated with their actions, you get to see more of how animated they are. If anything, the first outing has the perfect mesh simplicity between real scenario and computer manifestation.

When Avatar was sold to the public, it was billed as a giant leap in digital filmmaking. James Cameron believed he could make entire worlds which would grab the viewer’s attention and get them to believe they were seeing another dimension. I’m part of the disappointed party because the visuals in the film only looked like better animated representations of what I already saw in the failed Final Fantasy film from ten years back. The look was nice, but it was familiarly plastic. What I see in this video is much more exciting. Not because of how it looks (I don’t believe in a synthesized digital reality to behold for longer than five minutes), but because it relays photographic imagery so well. If the starting point of digital filmmaking is as believable as the images in this short, then a subsequent film has unlimited powers to transforms its reality and make us not only see new things that disorient our visual perceptions, but tackle our emotions as well.

When animated films play with reality, they play with their reality. After a hundred years of doing this, the effort has worth thin on audiences. No film will surprised an aged viewer. At some point, everyone reaches their breaking point of when they feel, “I think I just saw everything.” It’s the film that encrusts a sense of boredom into what future movies they will see. As far as animation goes, the retirement party to no longer being surprised comes early. But if digital filmmaking can inherently be believed in and confused with photographic reality, films can be made that both devastate and uplift our emotional cores.

Welcoming Boardwalk Empire

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Introduction – First Season

This is a film blog, but I do not feel I am doing wrong by writing about a television series. If people know Ingmar Bergman or Krzysztof Kieślowski, they know some of their most treasured works begin as television projects and were either edited for a theatrical premiere or eventually released on DVD in their original formats. If both filmmakers had not extended television their courtesy, we would not have Fanny and Alexander, The Decalogue and Scenes from a Marriage, among others. Also, the niceness of television is that in the last 15 years, the quality of ambitious shows has skyrocketed. Good shows are not trying to do their best to emulate decent shows of decade’s past, but they are doing their work to make their structure a longer format for what could constitute a theatrical film. And since a political magazine like The New Republic has a viral update every Monday on the previous night’s episode, my stretching of the rules is a small flex. Took me 9 episodes to be convinced, but this Terrence Winters/Martin Scorsese show is fascinating storytelling.

I won’t go episode by episode analysis. In fact, I refuse. To do so is to entangle yourself in a myriad of relationship squabbles and spend more time discussing the potential what if’s of an episode instead of relay themes. As good as these episodes can be, the sheer length of seasons does force these shows to emulate some lower standards of other television writing. Too many relationships reveal themselves at a snail’s pace and keep you wanting enough so you anticipate next week’s episode like it will fully resolve every question you have, but they never do. All every new episode does is find new ways to turn the dial of your anticipation. The ever expanding curiosity is how shows draw you in in the most basic, “I want to know what happens”, way. On the other hand, themes don’t become apparent until many things in a storyline happen. Boardwalk Empire has an amazing realism filled with catching historical quirks. Some of which I wanted to write about and inspect right away, but since this is the first season, I’m being more patient than usual.

Through the first 9 episodes, parameters of power in Atlantic City is being pushed forward. Nucky Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi) is running a hotel, buying out political power, and dealing with a conflict with Arnold Rothstein. Heading power in New York City, Thompson and him got into a squabble over a bungled alcohol deal which ended in a murder of his relative. Prohibition makes alcohol smuggling a delicate business for everyone. Both want their respective islands to be the most powerful and lucrative in the area so both are fighting to expand while also trying to hedge the interests of the other. Jimmy (played by Michael Pitt) is a war veteran returning home and stuck in a low level life. Feeling he deserves more, he makes friends with a young hoodlum version of  Al Capone, bolts Atlantic City and they do their best efforts to attain power in Chicago. Jimmy returns to Atlantic City to try to rebuild a life with his young family and help Nucky Thompson in his war with Rothstein. Around these larger stories, there is the story of a widowed immigrant from Ireland, an up-and-coming Lucky Luciano, a corrupt sherriff, an aggressively religious FBI agent, and other power hungry politicians who are doing their best to be in Thompson’s vision for power.

So far, the broad story is straight corruption and power struggle. The context of every situation is enhanced by societal footnotes which add new levels to every film storyline. To paraphrase, Gene Siskel once complimented the lengthy writing of every scene in Pulp Fiction by describing how each scene would come to a natural conclusion, but dialogue and conversation carried it over for a few minutes longer. In Tarantino’s film, every scene feels like that. Boardwalk Empire isn’t able to be so structurally designed, but numerous scenes do carry over or linger a little bit longer to make its point. The subsidiary information usually falls into specific historical anecdotes. Sometimes the references are too obvious and feel like they are playing into trying to be historical. When the references are the best, the story is natural and filled with an oddness that feels too alien to be immediately recognizable as fictional. The scene the FBI agent is getting information out of a dying patient by plugging and unplugging critical wounds in his body in the middle of a public hospital, the effect is well suited and creates an unhinging environment that exemplifies the levels of his almost insane drive to find out any level of alcohol smuggling.

So far, the good measure of realism has been with the abundance of historical figures as characters. From Nucky Thompson to Al Capone and Arnold Rothstein and Lucky Luciano, you have four real people who take up an abundance of the screen time. Fictional elements rock their stories like made up relations with other characters, but the good thing is that if the fiction veers toward cliche, the cliche can only go so far. One example is when Luciano starts to become involved with Jimmy’s mother after he was looking for him for the blame in the bungled alcohol delivery to Rothstein. The fact he would be involved with her exhibited a bad potential because they could have fallen in love and when Jimmy got back from Chicago, she could have been crossed in who to side with. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Both fucking parties kept their interests to fucking and when Jimmy returned, she double crossed Luciano to let Jimmy get the advantage. As far as the main fictional characters go, none of their stories have yet become too sentimental which which the show with an unnecessary sympathetic tint so the show can relate to more people. The chord of the film has been adequately strident with history’s darker corners of characterization and early 20th century society in America.

With 3 episodes left in the season, I will probably resist my next post on this topic until season’s end. Then I can cover the bigger questions of the season’s accomplished fruitfulness (well, if there is as much as I expect), but more importantly, I hope to cover specifics in the show. Having just referenced around a total of ten characters in the story throughout the post, what I am missing is the top level approach the story has to structuring how the characters development through the episodes in the season. Since the show is a historical look at characters who influence all aspects of social life in their areas, the show has a knack for combing unexpected social branches like the women’s suffrage movement to KKK rallies. The latter may seem unique since it is the New York area the show is depicting, but an interesting storyline in the show is the oncoming rise of Warren Harding as a Presidential candidate. Nucky Thompson has little patience for other businessman’s bigotry in the show and he backs Harding, but in Presidential office, Harding is famous for being granted honorary membership to the Klan. The film is filled with these little contradictions. My hope is to try to make linkage and readable thought over the process so it can result in deconstruction.

Robert Duvall, Today

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A Passing Visit With a Legend

I think I show my age when I make comment about Robert Duvall and I have to say who he is by the performance he gave in Secondhand Lions. The hallmark type of feel good movie is a staple on network television for repeat viewing. The film is enjoyable enough to have been watched by most people at one point or another and if someone hasn’t seen it, they at least know the film. Easy translation of enjoyable movies is common. If this was 15 years ago and TBS was replaying movies the way they do, we may be talking about Robert Duvall’s lovable performance in Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. Duvall is my favorite actor and if anyone can do it, I hope they check out that little early 1990s film with Duvall as a Cuban immigrant and Sandra Bullock as an underwhelmed waitress. It’s much better than Secondhand Lions and as good as candy. However, only visible on THIS network every great while.

Of course, the problem today is Duvall is becoming known more these shallow end roles. For me, they give roundness to his career and endear you to him on other levels. Kevin Bacon is an unrecognized actor as far as large commentary goes, but his ability to fill many kind of roles is amazing. The fact he can inhabit realism with roles in JFK and The Woodsman while easily being able to slide into comedy and action roles is the ultimate compliment because it shows elasticity. Some of the more recognizable dramatic actors avoid other genres of work, but Duvall and Bacon have made many kind of roles home to their personality.

I think this is a trait within an actor which should get more compliments but Laurence Olivier said it best by saying an actor is considered the greatest because of the level of roles they take on. Film is more media conscious and perception based than any other developed art form. Unsubstantiated gravitas is in every art, but the commercial element makes it a particular animal in film. Duvall is able to take on commandeering roles which rise to levels of Shakespeare as far as deft goes, but Duvall considers himself a team player in film production work. It isn’t a late development either. Sometimes as careers rise and fall and actors become more accepting of supporting roles. Duvall has always been to coast as a player in the background. The sad thing is that his window for great roles is disappearing. An experienced Shakespeare actor like Al Pacino finally sees himself as able to take on a role as lofty as King Lear (if his planned film adaptation goes through), but when I talk to a Shakespeare professor, he believes Pacino is still too young for the role. However, Duvall, now 79, is the perfect age for King Lear. The problem is he likely won’t take on the role.

The other problem is that Lear is the oldest great Shakespeare role to do. After that, there is nothing. Of course other works and writers exist, but you start playing with a small deck of cards when you have to look at the roles and see if it aligns with the age of Shakespeare’s Lear. When Assassination Tango was released in 2002, a critic commented on whether Robert Duvall would take on a role like Lear because his talent commanded it. There was a disappointed tone of “probably not” since the feeling around Tango is that it was beneath his talent to even take time to do. Since that film, other movies like Four Christmases, We Own the Night, Lucky You, and Kicking and Screaming, have occupied Duvall’s time. None of the films featured worthy roles for Duvall. I have followed Duvall’s career from the 1970s and his current crop of character roles just doesn’t hold much interest with me.

As a character actor coming into prominence in the 1970s and 80s, he was able to maintain a diverse approach because of the acclaim of the Godfather roles and how the films gave him a chance to take on different kinds of roles. Duvall stretched out the wool of every kind of character. Along the way, naturally, certain kind of roles became more home to him than others. During the 2000′s, familiarity turned into the touchstone of his better performances. It seems like an ignorant statement to make, but Duvall’s familiarity felt the only intrinsic welcome since Duvall was doing little find roles of suitable depth. Performances in A Shot of Glory was interesting due to seeing an American actor be automatically accepted to play a Scottish character. However, His role as General Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals was his only role as high challenge. General Lee is an ancestor of Duvall’s so he saw the role as a personal challenge and an honor to his ancestry.

For Duvall, the big release this year is Get Low. I haven’t seen the film but it is getting good reviews as a quirky look at an aging elder’s request to have his funeral before his death. In the story, townspeople not only show disfavor to the idea because of its oddness, but also due to unseemly legends the character doing it has made for himself. The story looks like a “coming to terms” story for everyone involved. It’s funny because the architecture of this piece is that Duvall is honoring his retirement before it has even come to him. I hope to watch the film and feel new sensations of the ability of Duvall to seize depths of emotion he is capable of doing, but I also have to honor the notion that Paul Newman attested to when he announced his retirement from acting: it becomes hard to keep up the concentration requirements. Duvall would only be human to start feeling the same fatigue. Still, one can not help but wish he felt the burning of his age a little closer and willed the performances in the roles he was capable of doing. I also hope the blog honors the better parts of his career with more thoughtful and considerate reviews of the moments in which he was truly defining his characters .

Five Minutes of Heaven

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Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Knots of High Tension

It would be easy to say what Oliver Hirschbiegel does in Five Minutes of Heaven is layman’s work for him. After two large production movies (Downfall and The Invasion), he stops off in England to direct a small budgeted adaptation of a Guy Hibbert script. Originally comissioned by the BBC, the script was meant for television drama but the project fell through when funding came up short and the producers could not guarantee Hibbert that all of his dialogue, language, and scenario would survive final cut. Enter a major world cinema filmmaker like Hirschbiegel and the script finds a second life as a theatrical film. As far as I know, nothing about the original script is changed. The film has a lot of British hallmarks which seem like they would very hard for Hirschbiegel to add and he takes no writing credit for the film, but what he does do is remind the viewer of the essential space of tension in cinema and how it can symbolize something more for a film.

The set up of the story has morality play written all over it. In a move to make distant a crime of his past, an ex IRA terrorist-turned-spokesman decides to meet the brother of one of his victims. The meeting will be televised live to England to show a meeting of the past for future’s sake. The original crime happened when the terrorist was a youth, but it shaped the foundation of him and a brother who became sibling-less. Vacancies and frustrations build up in the psyches of both as they grew older and feel a portion of their life goes missing. Before the story relays the details, the assumption of the story by characters around the two (i.e. television people setting up the interview) is that when they meet, they will be able to hash out their past and make amends over his spilled milk. However, the perpetrator (played by Liam Neeson) knows that this man isn’t searching for solace just yet. He believes the first instinct will be to confront Neeson and something which satisfies his thirst for vengeance.

The vengeance angle is the wrench to throw off easy solutions. It is also the point in which the story cements its main interest: to relay the level of realism for the historical meeting. I call it historical because the scenario angles the story to be self reflective of the depths to which the past haunts these characters. In preparation for the interview, Neeson finds himself talking through his emotions and expectations with producers. On the other hand, the victim (played by James Nesbitt) explains his feelings by his unnerving tendencies, fringe emotions, and small abilities to remember his past. The emotional displacement between killer and victim is akin to the character portrait in the Dutch thriller, The Vanishing. That film is an exercise in emotional difference. It’s a strict realism outlook of the character tendencies of a killer and a victim (grieving boyfriend). Five Minutes of Heaven tries to add an extra layer of emotional meat by including fragmented looks into their past all the while relaying a similar realism tract to the Dutch film. Both films seem to know the objective lens in which to see this kinds of story so if you call two films a trend, it seems to be a good one.

Oliver Hirschbiegel bases his filmmaking symposium on relative closeness at all times. Generally, in films, composition is based in being able to have a variety of distances and angles in which to project the camera. Not only is the quarters for every scene quaint due to space limitations, but even when the film is out in the open, the objective is close. Keeping a stationery presence near the characters every reaction takes away from close up potentials. The film cannot say one moment is more dramatic than the other visually since early in the film, close ups are everywhere. The reason is because the film is measuring out the physical image of the characters. It wants to create a pounding sensation in their desperation, but whenever a film bases its main canvas on the actors, a general theme in the film is isolation. In this story, lots of movement surround the characters, but they feel trapped in the world of their thoughts. You can’t project isolation without falling into sizing up the realm of face at a certain nearness. Once upon a time, Louise Brooks elaborated on the universality of isolation in cinema: “The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.” While the actors are doing a lot in the film, they do want their characters to be as memorable as great statues encrusted into the emotions of a driving pain.

When the film transitions past the failed attempt at an interview and into a scenario which pits Nesbitt with opportunity to kill Neeson, there is a chance for the film to epitomize a level of anticipated tension. On some levels, by relying on the what if’s are around the corner as Neeson seeks out Nesbitt in an abandoned apartment, it does. Yet, the stroll by Neeson is so long and winded and when the audience sees Nesbitt for the first time, it’s well before Neeson does. It mutes a level of the generic tension of “what’s around the corner?” So, the languishing of pace and the open reveal of Nesbitt, what they do is transmit a level of tone before twists and turns. The latter two elements are hallmarks of plot based thrillers, but tone is king in character study pieces. If the film ended with just an interview and a non-violent conclusion, it would have saw fit to remain a simple character study, but it adds this descriptive and winding confrontation scene between Nesbitt and Neeson. It ends violently with fighting and a fall out of a second story window into the open street.

Adding the full confrontation scene is a full plot addition. Normally, it means to end the story with one dying. If blood thirst is what was most salivated for the film’s morale, Neeson would die, but when the characters fall, they fall to exhaustion and ruin. They regain consciousness at different times and go their separate ways. The film lingers with both of the characters. Meandering scenes of small moments are shown to continue on with what dominates the rest of the film. As the film is realigning itself back to the realistic story, Nesbitt calls Neeson. It isn’t to threaten more or to even accept apology. It is to just say they are done. A quick hang up results and Neeson soaks up tears over the call, but he continues on with his life. Then the film ends.

They say an essential difference between Western and Eastern religion is that in Western religion if something happens, morality will have an answer because religion doctrines forces that actions have consequences in the name of God, but in Eastern religion, the Buddha will tell a victim (like the wife of a murdered husband) to wait a few days before something is done and in the process of her waiting, she finds herself regaining a sense of life all on her own. It takes time, but the fragments of livelihood eventually do return. Our cinemas are based on actions having consequences. Plots require those specifics. The writing helps this film combats it, but Oliver Hirschbiegel reminds the viewer all you have to do is change the colors of perspective for a story to make some of the biggest differences. Style is rudimentary of genre, but in cinema, it’s also reflective of vision. Sometimes the viewer can forget that.

The Belief in Unbreakable

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How Unbreakable Penetrates the Social Conscience

Two quotes: One from Henry Adams and one from the original review of Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Stanley Kauffmann (also referencing Adams) and how they predict the modern evolution of science fiction:

“…to Adams the dynamo became the symbol of infinity… Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.” – The Education of Henry Adams

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind is not so much a film as an event in the history of faith. Seventy years ago Henry Adams saw it coming, in its quintessence, just as J.M.W. Turner’s paintings of steel furnaces 160 years ago foresaw the electronic-nuclear age. More and more, the motions of science have been utilized by fiction, more assiduously in fiction than in pure science itself, to represent a “silent and infinite force,” to fill the growing theological vacancies in the Western world. Heaven with a capital H is being replaced by heavens, and the fiction of the science field is a chief pulse in the change.”  – Stanley Kauffmann

 

Since Spielberg’s film is an overtly pious tale of man’s search for the truth of something more in the realm of alien encounters, lets consider a few developing and interesting trends in science fiction since the 1977 movie. In the same year, Star Wars was released. Excluding the obvious special effects highlight of its influence, the film created a core world which became referential for ideas of self sufficient belief. While the idea of a Star Wars religion in Australia was farcical (yet true), the nature of the film was considered hospitable for a spiritual realm and used as a basic measure of human decency and belief in the spiritual self to translate grief into self empowerment. For the religiously serious, Star Wars never amounted to a life doctrinaire filled with answers, but it did amount to an arm chair relaxation in the everyday stress of life. The idea is that when religion and life do not have the answers to erase our stresses, fiction can at least relax the everyday blights we all deal with.

In traditional American cinema, my contention is that the spiritually optimistic science fiction has evolved into what we see in the comic book films with their super heroes and other mythic creatures. Star Wars occupies one realm of story, but it’s not unbelievable to think a hero like Luke Skywalker himself could have been spawned from comic books. Like other heroes of the genre, he represents the best hope for a civilization against an impending force that seems larger than the forces of good can muster. The heart of the darkness is operated by a main villain (Darth Vader) with supplemental bad guys of lesser stature (but still imposing force) fighting their own battles for their own decrees. Every story has its own history and various battles are waged under the umbrella of a large struggle. Luke Skywalker is fighting for the sake of the world from impending control by the dark side (what Darth Vader represents) and Bruce Wayne is fighting for the heart of Gotham from going completely corrupt. A basic premise is the faith that odds can be challenged by better qualities of good.

Star Wars was a mass phenomenon onto itself, but comic book adaptations are more indicative of the basic ways we search out for values of good morals in the face of an ever elusive evil. Story wise, all the super hero stories are about auspicious beginnings of unlikely heroes and how they rise to fight for the belief in the greater good around them. People complain the story archetype is beyond soiled in Hollywood since the standard start is relatively the same, but every comic super hero fights a different niche of the collective evil. Every super hero has some variation to the basic fold of what they represent. Some stand for elements of our history and some for elements of our future and other for elements of our other worldly. Superman as Jesus Christ coming down upon Earth to save humanity is easy enough to understand, but the Fantastic Four fight for the establishment of their family unit and Spiderman fights for love along with the memory of a deceased parental figure. In the background of every power struggle story is a common denominator of our societal values.

Unbreakable is about comic books, but like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it stands apart from its genre ilk . Instead of searching for enlightenment about the importance of its genre from within the fold of its generic story process, the film is a measured dramatic break that wishes to dramatize the idea of the pristine nature people take comic books to stand for. In the film, a security guard (David) tries to make hay with his failing marriage desperate son. A true everyman, he goes about his duties in life, but feels a disconnect from those around him. When he survives a gruesome train wreck that kills everyone on board and leaves him unscathed, he is contacted by Elijah who runs an upper class comic bookstore.He believes David has super powers for surviving what should have been a fatal end. David is dismissive, but his son believes it and the two begin a relationship where the boy grows closer to his father over what might be physically momentous with him. The story is how the father-son dynamic improves over David’s move to accept his physical capabilities.

In the back-and-forth between father and son, there is Elijah. He is a firm believer in the super hero ramifications in people and what it serves for the rest of society. He tries educate David to his philosophy and when he is rejected, he still pursues David. Tries to make connections between the unexplainable ornaments in his life and the super hero potential he could possess. Every mystery has a logical answer for Elijah. And unlike David, Elijah is the physical opposite. His bones are so brittle they can break on easy contact. The uniqueness of his condition makes him believes he lives on an extreme with David, but he isn’t willing to diverge what his extreme signifies in comic book lore. The answer is a revelation for the end, but eventually, Elijah does convince him not only in the philosophical logic of how people naturally gravitate to the idea of super heroes, but how David could fit into the scheme. David starts to accept the notion when he sees his life slowly get back in order over accepting his nature. As said previously, for super heroes, the natural order of their world is salivated when they start to see who they are and use their forces for good. While David does eventually go on a small crime mission, his true battle is domestic and lies back at home.

In some respects, the director M. Night Shyamalan knows how to pitch this story perfectly. He wants the viewer to feel the personal implications of the story before they see lift off to a sequel where mass hysterics of action and adventure will be afoot. Instead of speed up the film when the excitement harbors around the corner, he keeps the tone composed and nullified to its dramatic sensibilities. Like David Mamet, the style is rigged into a strict game of focused composition and concise dialogue. None of the actors are allowed to get too expressive. The film is too concerned about tone to let it happen, but the pay off of this accord is that the audience understands the film is a full frontal change where you get all the implications in comic book movies surfaced up to a human drama. To make sure the story is not going to a certain distance before it scares itself back into action tricks, the story has to be muted. To foster the spiritual feeling every family has to want to find harmony in what looks to be a depressing situation (here is the possibility of divorce), the film has to make all the moments that are memorable to stand outside the few moments in which the story traipses onto standard comic book story.

A mark against the film is that its compact story is going to have difficulty running alongside the large ambition of Spielberg’s film. The whole film ends in a moment of awakening of serenity achieved for the characters. The ending is visual and transcendent for the characters and audience. The ending is a quiet sit together between husband and wife along with shared smiles between them. If marriages have emotional lives that swing in pendulums, the smile feels an exasperated first for that life of marriage. A demure ending also seems to entail scaled back measures of David’s history and parts of the calendar in his life which is secret moments that transfix the hero nerve in him to meet his super hero potential. We learn he sacrificed everything (including a possible football career) to save his future wife and dedicate himself to a family life. The story uplifts the sub themes in flashback scenes. While very touching, David’s background is on the back burner a little too much. The story is sequential with time line, but not in how it relays aspects of the story. You get certain pieces at certain times.

That element of trickery is a hallmark in M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking. He likes to turn curves in the story and keep the audience guessing. The big reveal at the end in Unbreakable is that Elijah was the person randomly exploding large transportation devices so he could find his natural rival in life and complete himself since his powers make him feel alone in the world. My feeling is that the film should have been forward over everything from the beginning. The revelations can feel dramatic, but the audience not knowing them is what can keep them from connecting with emotional elements in the film. Since the film is not a classical thriller, establishment of an objective human story is paramount to the audience to dig in its heart with the characters. I believe if David’s history was a forward to the film, we may better believe in his heartache to fix something that the rest of his family feels he is beyond caring to fix. The Elijah revelation is less important because even though he crowds up scenes, he is a second tier character who mainly instigates David to better come to terms with what he is missing in his life. Still, the film lacks vision to see its idea of a comic book world to the full end. A positive of Close Encounters is its vision to dedicate itself to the peak level of its genre turnarounds.

Still, what does a film like Unbreakable mean for our society? In the 14the century, natural observation still dominated science since it’s the only way humans could understand their environments. As technology developed, so too did the dismay of the believers of observation for human understanding. Illusion by illusion by ended as an accepted “fact”. However, in the 1700s and 1800s when many public figures were able to look around religion, some still saw spiritual loopholes. Thomas Jefferson believed in the mystical realm of miracles even though he was a committed Deist. Today, we still have no answers for the place of other miracles which have no easy answer. Is Elijah’s character correct for saying all these coincidences have a comic book realm to it? Not at all. Elijah’s condition has a medical name. David’s does not, but it does not mean it can’t. Yet, the fact it could still would not satisfy the believers. They will understand medicine wants to prescription everything they don’t know – even if it means being faint on details about it. The believers can still believe the lack of clarity is the recipe of a God to give us a human represent from him. Since Western religion is based on interpersonal communication between messengers of God and humans, it isn’t out of the realm of believability.

When a shrink shows a blotted picture of nonsense to a patient and asks them to interpret what they are seeing, they aren’t looking for a real interpretation. The shrink is wanting to know what would come to their brain when no rational argument can really be made to explain what they see. According to psychology, we all have basic thoughts, feelings, and concerns which fixate our brains and come to light when we are dealing with a crisis. Habitual patterns of thinking is what shrinks are looking for. In Unbreakable, patterns of human decency is what the characters are looking for. They come together over the idea of a super hero, but if we were given the same blotted picture they are given, it isn’t unlikely that we wouldn’t come to the same conclusion.

Happy Birthday, Louise Brooks

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Louise Brooks is a top tier hero for me in film so she will reappear in this blog with more commentary. Someday I will write thorough pieces that actually compliment the level of her talent. This is why I will keep the following words short and wait for another day to tackle the various benchmarks of her life and career. However, it should be noted, today is her birthday. Born November 14, 1906, in Cherryvale, Kansas; she died in 1985 at her final home Rochester New York at age 78. During the heyday of her career, he home was New York City. Again, the part of her career is a journal for commentary.

In after life, fans of her have been celebrating her birthdays as reminders to chronicle whatever way they feel about her is most relevant to them. Every person has a favorite movie, book, quote or picture of Louise Brooks (the picture above is Brooks favorite picture of herself). My favorite includes a quote that comes with a personal story Brooks and me. She included the quote in her chapter, “From Kansas to New York” (p. 6) and she was describing the differences between her mother and herself and the initial drive of personality which allowed her to take off, if you can put it that way, to a memorable career and life:

“I would watch my mother, pretty and charming, as she laughed and made people feel clever about themselves, but I could not act that way. And so I have remained, in cruel pursuit of truth and excellence, an inhumane executioner of the bogus, an abomination to all but those few who have overcome their aversion to truth in order to free whatever is good in them.”

For me, personally, I carried this quote on a scribbled piece of paper in my wallet for years. I did not associate the quote with a significant thing in my life. I did not even see it as a testament to follow. The quote just fell in line with an object level of my own personality. In the best way, while also understanding I could be the fool, the quote just stuck with what  I knew to be an intangible element of my personality.

So, happy birthday, Louise Brooks. With news that your private journals are being released and should see publication soon, I will continue a correspondence with the figments of your work and thoughts that I can still trace and see how they reflect with my life over time. We all have mirrors to certain art or artists for our lives. I am thankful I found you.