Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #19: CIGARS FOR EVERYONE!

2012-01-27T08:29:00.000-08:00

Hello again, Tree Housers.

I apologize for my delayed response; Sundance has been kicking my ass.

So how to start the last post of this thoroughly exciting annual meeting? Uh...well. Oh, okay, I got it: I don't like the idea of one-size fits all cinema. Which in a way is what Jason's second post hints at, I think: that many people will only respond to movies if they are already implicitly great.

"...the bottom line is that if we want the masses to be moved we need movies to move the masses. On the side, we can champion. We can articulate. We can encourage. But for passion for cinema to be deep and pure, it has to be inspired by what's on the screen. Period."

I know I'm quoting that line out of context but, well, it's the "period," that gets to me. I don't know who my readers are anymore than I know who "the masses" are. No clue. Who are you, gentle readers, anyway? No idea and I like it like that.

So maybe it's my bias as a member of the small group already obsessed with movies, the 1%-ers or what-have-you. But I don't think it's so simple as saying that people need to be moved by what they see. I hated Donnie Darko first time around. And then I rewatched it and I loved it. It takes rewatching, context, examination to love some films. It's not as easy as that line implies, is what I want to say, I guess. Do people even know what they want to see? Do we know this? Who are "people?" I'm so confused....

I should probably point out now that I'm not angry at Jason or anything. Jason, I'm not picking on you, okay? NOT DOING THAT, OKAY?!

In any case, I agree that people have to be moved by the movies, yes. What I don't agree with is the underlying assumption that it's just a matter of people responding to what they see, that taste is automatic. Because what the masses have access to on a regular basis is frequently not stuff I find is worthwhile. I have biases, prejudices, interests, whatever-the-fuck. But as a critic, I assume the work is to get people to see where I'm coming from, take my opinions and turn them into an articulate argument and make my case for what I think is worthwhile. It's subjective, totally and completely. Which is why I keep bringing up the fact that I'm coming at this thing from a narrow perspective. Because it's me telling you to seek out Road to Nowhere and Saya Samurai, too. But it's also my arguments that I'm hoping you'll respect and not discount simply because, "Oh, well, he likes that kind of film..." or whatever. At no point do I think, "Well, what's going to connect with everybody?" Because it's a balancing act when you decide what's worth covering: what needs to be panned, what needs to be praised, what needs to be grappled with as a messy but exciting whatsit. And that in turn is a matter of, "Well, who's going to want coverage of this anyway?"

Which just about brings me to my point (Finally, right?): I don't recommend movies in my reviews, I write about whether or not they're worth seeing. As anal as it may sound, there is a difference. A recommendation is what I make to a friend. A review is what I do when I want to lay out what works about a film and what doesn't. So when Dennis asks us to recommend a terrific movie that we think will connect with as many people as possibly, I think it needs to be said: this is not a review. To paraphrase Sheila's favorite line from This is Not a Film, if I can review a film, why recommend it?

So in the spirit of not being an asshole, here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to recommend a film and nudge you nice, sexy readers towards my review of it. Because I take great pride in writing a little about every film I see. It's a project I'm a bit behind on at the moment. But I even try to write even a line or two about movies I don't have to cover and don't have much to say about. Because it makes reviewing easier, if that makes sense.

Anywhodles, here, after all that ranting is my pick: A Dangerous Method. My thinking is that my nana is the masses. That's right, no foolin', she totally is. My nana is a smart, funny and incredibly astute movie-watcher. She knows what she likes, too, and she is squeamish when it comes to stuff that she, well, just doesn't like (seeing Rushmore with her and my late grandfather was a uniquely dispiriting experience: my sister and I loved it, and my grandparents were appalled). So she has conservative tastes but she is a good sport and likes movies of all stripes. She is my litmus test. And I think she'd dig the new David Cronenberg movie. Sounds weird, huh?

Well, that's kind of why I think it's the right pick for Dennis's challenge. A Dangerous Method is freaky, funny and uniquely off-kilter. It's also a movie that is superficially square and hence is inviting enough that my nana would be willing to give it a chance and then probably like it. A Dangerous Method is about sex and psycho-analysis, yes, but it's also a nice, respectable period drama, too. Which is what I think makes the film that much more subversive and deliriously enjoyable: Cronenberg CAN have his cake and eat it, too--he's David freaking Cronenberg. He knows how to be all things to all people. He also knows exactly how to pointedly load an image with icky and bizarre implications.

But don't just take this rambling, probably-stupid recommendation at face value, check out my review. Here's an excerpt if you're allergic to hyper-links or something:

"Because A Dangerous Method follows Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as they butt heads over their respective theories of psychoanalysis, it stands to reason that the smallest gesture in the film is full of meaning. Repeated tics, like the placement of hands on hips, or even when one character suffers a sudden, seizure-like paroxysm right after Jung discusses the symbolic death of one of his patients' fathers, are rather funny. But these actions also connote so much without really saying anything at all. Leave it to Cronenberg to make a nip slip a telling sign of the schizoid nature of Sabina Spielrein, one of Jung's most infamous patients. Cronenberg constantly uses overloaded images, including, yes, a cigar, to intrude on and indirectly raise the stakes of his film's central drama. These absurdly loaded images serve to subversively heighten the pathos inherent in Hampton's source drama."

Doesn't sound like a nana-friendly film, does it? Maybe, but I think it is. For whatever that's worth.

Bottom line for me is: I don't know what the masses want or will respond to anymore than I know what my fellow 1%ers will react to. I'd like to think it's the same stuff that I consider to be superlative and wonderful and cuckoo go nuts. But I don't know. That kind of speculation has to come with a shit ton of qualifiers, I think, because, well, I don't know you, dear reader and I'm not your best buddy. Unless I am, in which case, hey, uh, that's nice! So I have no idea but maybe you'll like A Dangerous Method.

And if you're reading this, nana, I love you and am going to find a copy of this film for you, okay?

Kissy kissy,
Simon.

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Simon Abrams is a freelance writer for Slant and many other publications who also blogs at Extended Cut: Simon Abrams's Film Journal

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #18: THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN

TREE HOUSE #17: STORIES, DREAMS, MEMORIES

TREE HOUSE #16: FAITH LOST AND FOUND

TREE HOUSE #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #18: THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN

2012-01-26T16:04:00.001-08:00

At the risk of alienating however many readers we have left, I'd like to begin this final post at the same place I left off, with the creation sequence in The Tree of Life. I know, I know: Enough with Malick, already! I understand. But, please, give me a chance, because I think this story is worth sharing, and it might be appreciated more by the film's detractors than by its orgasmic fans.

I saw The Tree of Life at the theater four times last year. Not once did I see it on a particularly big screen, and in fact the theaters got smaller each time. The last time I saw it, in its final week before it left Washington, DC, The Tree of Life had been relegated to a theater with just three rows super-close to the screen and then two rows even closer than that. I sat in the back row, and in front of me sat a group of about eight people - coworkers for the most part, it seemed, plus one or two significant others.

Because the theater was so small, and because I was now very familiar with the movie, I inevitably glanced in the group's direction to see how they were responding. Once I did, it was hard to look away. From right to left, the gang of eight ran the gamut from enthralled to befuddled to disgruntled - or so I deduced by the frequency with which they shook their heads and the amount of the movie they endured before walking out. Four of them went the distance and lingered through the credits. Two of them nearly made it to the beach sequence before bailing. And the other two left about midway through the childhood sequence, with one of them pausing on the way out to whisper to the group's ringleader: "You're a cruel, cruel man."

To borrow a phrase I read on Twitter today, it would be tempting to typecast those "premature evacuators" as intellectual lightweights who want their cinema no more adventurous than a fast-food hamburger, and maybe they were. But whatever its inspiration, their nonstop fidgeting made it clear that those who didn't "feel" The Tree of Life weren't rejecting what was happening on screen so much as they didn't think anything was "happening" at all.

As someone who is deeply moved by Malick's intimate epic, their reaction confused me. Nothing happening? Why, in the creation scene, everything is happening! And yet at the same time, I understood. Because, the truth is, that night I didn't strongly feel The Tree of Life either, not even during the creation sequence.

The problem wasn't that I'd become desensitized to the movie's awe. The problem was that the awe was actually missing. Yes, technically, this was the same movie I'd seen the three times before, but there was one big difference: the volume wasn't cranked to 11. The sound wasn't so low that the uninitiated would have noticed; Sean Penn's mumbling was hard to hear, sure, but it's that way by design. But during the creation sequence, when the spindle of light appears and "Lacrimosa" is supposed to be blaring with the kind of volume that something as enormous as the creation of the universe demands, the theater walls didn't tremble, and thus my soul didn't either.

See, there's a reason that The Tree of Life's Blu-ray edition begins with a recommendation that you "play it loud," because, sure enough, that night, with the score perfectly audible but not colossal, my favorite scene didn't feel like a religious experience at all. Instead, it played like pretty pictures set to music. A vacation slideshow. A screensaver.

In that moment, I saw the movie the way its detractors do. I was on the outside looking in. And I hated it there.

I wish I could say that's the only time I felt that way in 2011, but of course it wasn't.

Sheila has beautifully described her powerful reaction to Melancholia, but as much as I was moved by the first half of the film - including that terrific scene with the paper hot-air balloons - and Kirsten Dunst's performance overall, there are parts of Melancholia that I felt thudded like a lead balloon, either at the time or after the fact.

For example, where the movie's fans see triumph, heroism and/or redemption in the movie's conclusion, when Dunst's character builds a fortress of sticks to "protect" her nephew from the oncoming cataclysm, I see nothing more than resignation and basic human decency, which is honest, sure, but not overwhelming. Meanwhile, as the months go by, I find I'm increasingly put off by the now relatively famous scene in which Dunst's character sprawls naked in the light of the doomsday planet. It's a beautiful image, no doubt, but it doesn't make sense to me: If Melancholia (the planet) is a symbol of depression itself, then there's nothing alluring (never mind arousing) about it. And if instead the planet is the deus ex machina that Dunst's character has been longing for, a deathly means to end her depression, that doesn't work for me either, because thoughts of "the end" provide relief for the depressed, not euphoria.

And then there's War Horse, which, according to my earlier anonymity exercise, Dennis thinks would benefit if freed from Spielbergian expectations, while I think it's been given the benefit of the doubt precisely because of the legend attached. War Horse is a fine movie, don't get me wrong, and I was sporadically moved by its emotions and imagery, in particular the first shot of the saddled horse sprinting through the forest after its rider has been gunned down, and the scene in which Spielberg tactfully hides the execution of two runaway soldiers with the passing sweep of a windmill.

But even setting aside the opening act that channels The Quiet Man and the closing sequence that channels Gone With the Wind, which make for some of the sloppiest emotionality in Spielberg's career (and that's saying something), I couldn't escape the feeling that Spielberg was committing the same mistake that The Help was (somewhat fairly, somewhat unfairly) lambasted for over the summer, because even amidst tragedy War Horse wants everyone to be having a good time.

It's fair to point out that Spielberg made War Horse as a family film, and thus the horrors of World War I needed to be mostly sterilized; I get that. But think of how powerful that scene with the British and German soldiers working together to free the horse from the wire would be if Spielberg had dared to convey the warring parties as distinct tribes, rather than presenting WWI like a minor disagreement among one sprawling European family that everyone knew would blow over with time and a few shootouts.

And, yeah, Jim, what about We Need to Talk About Kevin? I can't think of a single movie from 2011 that I found so penetrating and so silly in equal measure. I had the great fortune of seeing this movie "cold" (and if you don't know a thing about We Need to Talk About Kevin, skip the rest of this paragraph), and over the first 20 minutes it provided a thrilling experience, as the elliptical storytelling and Tilda Swinton's transfixing yet enigmatic performance invite us to puzzle out this broken woman's past and present trauma. As a portrait of parental guilt, regret and ultimately unbreakable love, this movie is profound. But the other half, with the crazed problem child who seems to be maliciously fucking with his mother's sanity before he's even out of diapers? It's a joke. And whether it's an intentional joke or not - I honestly can't tell - it cheapens what might otherwise be a cutting examination of parent-child dysfunction.

There are other movies that did well on critics' year-end best lists that failed to register with me. Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives seared some powerful images into my brain, but it never touched my soul. A Dangerous Method engrossed me as I was watching it, but by the time I was home from the theater the effect had worn off, never to return, and Jane Eyre, similarly, vanished from memory like a ghost. And so on.

But this is how moviegoing works. In the big picture, on the widest of screens, it's good to be on the outside every once in a while, because it makes coming inside feel so much better, like being invited into a friend's home where a fire is burning and chocolate chip cookies are baking in the oven on a cold winter day.

Although The Tree of Life was in my crosshairs in 2010, often it's the surprises that warm us most. Warrior was a surprise for me, and in a way Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, too, because I never could have predicted how emotional I'd find it on second viewing. And so I wonder what I would have thought of, say, The Arist had I gotten to the movie before its Oscar campaign got to me. Expectations can be a bitch, you know.

I say that en route to Dennis' challenge: What movie out of the top 100 do I think deserves to be seen by a wider audience? Well, excluding documentaries, I'm going to go with a movie I name-dropped in one of my previous installments: Blackthorn, the retirement tale of Butch Cassidy. It's a feast for the eyes, includes the best chase sequence I saw all year and embraces its place in the shadow of 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid without sacrificing its own identity.

Despite its panoramic views, Blackthorn is a small picture, so whether it holds up to expectations, I don't know. But if you watch it, do me one favor, do the movie a favor and do yourself a favor: play it loud.

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. He's also a contributor to Press Play. Follow him on Twitter.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #17: STORIES, DREAMS, MEMORIES

TREE HOUSE #16: FAITH LOST AND FOUND

TREE HOUSE #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #17: STORIES, DREAMS, MEMORIES

2012-01-25T17:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Lovely Treeks,

I don't want to leave our tree house. But that is the great thing about the Internet. I can still visit you guys any time I want!

Dennis, you wrote in your beautiful latest: "This past year I discovered that I have faith, if you will, in my ability to see what’s in front of me, to put less stock in mythology and predigested interpretation, be it applied to matters of art or the spirit. And I still think there’s room for faith in the movies too. "

What a wonderful concept. It's a fun challenge, isn't it, to come to all of these movies as fresh as we can, while still, of course, filtering them through our own life experiences. That's what the movies are all about. Stories are projected up onto the giant screen. Audiences gather in the dark (or they sit in their homes watching), and while, of course, they see the story up there, they also see parts of themselves, their own stories, dreams, memories, reflections, regrets. I had what can only be described as a profound experience, watching both Melancholia and Tree of Life this year, and it is difficult to talk about because it was so profound (although you all have done wonderful jobs articulating it. Jason and Steven, your words on the creation sequence in Tree of Life gave me goosebumps!) Both films provided different types of transcendence, but all I know is, while I was watching them I was somehow catapulted out of "Self" and into another realm entirely.

I was not fully normal (well, I am never fully normal) for a couple of hours after seeing both films. After seeing Melancholia at a screening room in the middle of Times Square, I emerged into the rain, dazed and dazzled by the crowds around me. I was in a private huge space of my own, and yet felt somehow connected to the everyday throngs jostling through the streets. I didn't have an umbrella. I hunched my head down and walked to the bus, and I am lucky I didn't get run over by a cab, I was so far elsewhere in my mind. I treasure experiences like that and I was lucky, I had two of them this year in the movie theatre. Both films are also films I continue to visit in my mind. They have woven themselves into the fabric of my thinking. Out of nowhere, I will remember Kirsten Dunst running in slow-mo through the woods in her wedding dress. Or I will think of all of those flame-filled balloons being set off over the lawn, one of the most beautiful images in the film.

Out of nowhere I will remember Brad Pitt's chunky tough hands clamped down on his son's neck, and will think of my own father, how much I love him, how much I miss him. I wrote in my review of Tree of Life that those childhood sequences are filmed and edited in the way that memories actually work. It's a collage, it's sense-based (memories come to us through the five senses), and it's not linear. The same images repeat, although with different focus, different angles. I did not grow up in Texas in the 1950s, but that was irrelevant. The film gave me a vast amount of space to project my own life up there, my own memories, and there were moments when I thought watching it, "Yes. Yes. That is just what Memory is like." I can't think of another film, off the top of my head, that nails the ephemeral fleeting and yet powerful feeling of memory so accurately. It wasn't just beautiful to look at. It rocked me a bit.

When it comes to your box office challenge, Dennis, I come up a bit cold. The majority of my movie-viewing is done at home, and very few are current releases. I can barely keep up with my Dana Andrews obsession, my Joseph Cotten obsession, and now, my Elvis Presley obsession, let alone all of the movies released in any given year.

In looking back over my viewing for the year, however, I do want to recommend Cold Weather, a film that is pretty near perfect. After doing the festival circuit of 2010, it got its release here in New York in February of 2011. It is the third feature by director Aaron Katz. It tells the story of a brother and sister (Doug and Gail) in Portland. Doug had been going to get a degree in forensic science but he dropped out of college and moved home to work in an ice plant. He is a bit aimless, which may set up the expectation that this may be just another independent film featuring aimless kids talking about life and the world over endless cups of coffee. But Aaron Katz is up to something else. Doug is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. He loves the books. He gets together with an old girlfriend for coffee, and she seems ... weird. Like she might be hiding something. Soon after that, she disappears. Nobody knows what happened to her. And aimless Doug (played beautifully and simply by Cris Lankenau) suddenly finds himself in the middle of a real-life mystery. He ropes in a colleague at the ice plant, Carlos (Raúl Castillo), who is also a DJ and a Trekkie. Carlos becomes the Watson to Doug's Sherlock.

My review of this odd lovely little film describes my passion for it. Once the mystery comes into play, you think - because you have seen so many crime movies - that you know how it is going to go. There will be shootouts and tense car chases. People will hide in closets. Secrets will be revealed. None of that occurs. What a pleasure it was to watch events unfold and to have no idea what was going to happen next! Cold Weather is not an ironic wink about genre films. Aaron Katz had been working on a script about a brother and sister, because that relationship fascinated him and he felt that movies don't often portray it accurately or well. At the very same time, Katz was becoming obsessed with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, so he decided to throw that into the mix and see what would happen. Cold Weather actually is a mystery. The film has it both ways: it is a genre film, and it is a comment on the beauty of genre films. It is also a beautifully shot tender independent film, about the wary love between a young-adult brother and sister. There's a magic to Cold Weather. It's moody, somber, suddenly funny, and has a great ear for the cadences of how young people talk to each other. In the middle of a tense moment, Carlos says desperately to Doug, “Dude, you know about these kinds of things.” Doug asks, “What kinds of things?” “Mysteries, man.”

Cold Weather is one of the gems of the year.

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Sheila O'Malley is a playwright, actress and freelance writer who blogs with passion at The Sheila Variations.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #16: FAITH LOST AND FOUND

TREE HOUSE #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #16: FAITH LOST AND FOUND

2012-01-24T16:25:00.000-08:00

My Dear Treeks,

This past year was the occasion in my personal life for what some might term a “crisis of faith,” though that would hardly be my term for it. The crisis of faith came a long time ago, but this year I was able to finally put my feelings about my religious faith, or lack thereof, into some kind of working order and embrace my agnosticism. One of the key elements in helping me through my own wrestling match was the testimony (if I may appropriate that word) of Julia Sweeney on the subject of the absence of faith and her acceptance, as a fellow ex-Catholic, of atheism, in particular her wonderful CD Letting Go of God, which I encountered about four years ago. (Atheism expresses the certainty of God’s absence, whereas agnosticism rejects religious certainty and acknowledges that there is no way to know one way or the other.)

But even more important was the confluence of my desire to work through the implications of agnosticism with the release of a book which I’m sure I’ll consider important to me for the rest of my life, Vincent Bugliosi’s Divinity of Doubt. In the book, Bugliosi approaches all elements of religious faith, primarily the mythology of Christianity and the writing of the Bible, but also Judaism, Hinduism and Muslim faith—in fact, the very concept of faith itself—as well as the numerous hypocrisies and inconsistencies that arise from them, from (not surprisingly) an entirely logical point of view. (If you’re thinking that, well, logic has no place within a system of faith, Bugliosi would probably agree that faith is certainly not based on logic, but disagree with the idea that logic cannot be applied to examine fallacies based on faith.) I was even lucky enough to see Bugliosi speak on the book over the summer and talk to him briefly.

What does this have to do with the Year of Our Lord 2011 in movies? Well, it turns out there was plenty of relevancy to the subject of faith and what the late great Warren Zevon once called “the vast indifference of heaven” present in the movies I saw this year, and each encounter helped me process my own feelings and grope around with what would come to be my own understanding. I would not classify myself in any way as a clinically depressed person, though after reading and absorbing Bugliosi’s book and coming to my own conclusions about what an acceptance of God’s absence really meant, it was not a leap at all to accept the release, the freedom of obliteration that Kirsten Dunst experiences at (SPOILER ALERT) the apocalyptic conclusion of Melancholia as a kind of upbeat ending. This is, after all, the apocalypse brought down to the expressly personal—how depression becomes an interior Armageddon— not a Roland Emmerich epic where part of the “fun” is watching the digitized spectacle of hundreds of millions of people being flushed to their doom. And by the way, I’m not in any way saying that whatever one’s religious beliefs might be would necessarily have anything to do with interpreting Von Trier’s big-bang climax, or any other movie. I’m just saying that this is how the planets aligned for me.

But it might have something to do with my reaction to the other cosmic contemplation on screens this year, Terence Malick’s newly Academy-approved The Tree of Life. Malick’s perspective is one which holds not just the possibility but the likelihood that a guiding spiritual intelligence is responsible for the world as we know it (or at least as he shows it). It’s there not just in the film’s imagery but also implied in the ethereal, disconnected voices crossing all time and space and locations as they do here. It’s the film’s willingness to pluck us out of the sun-dappled comfort zone of Malick’s reverie of boyhood and back beyond the existence of the first men and women that suggested to me what might be on Malick’s mind regarding this spiritual presence, and Jim’s dino challenge led me to think that accusations of Malick being a bit too much of a flower child when it comes to nature are wrongheaded.

There's obvious validity to the point that most seem to take from the sequence-- the speculation as to a possible early instance of compassion in an earthly species. But nature here, however beautiful, is also a formidable, unruly, frightening thing, and I think if this possibility of compassion in inarticulate, non-logical, survival-oriented species like dinosaurs was the end-all, then, yes, that would strike me as a bit starry-eyed. This being Malick, however, it wouldn't be the end-all, would it? I see in the sequence all kinds of reminders, even if they don't manifest themselves fully (or at all), of the possibility of nature's rage, or at least its inhospitable quality. (It's the first thing I thought of when I saw those floating clumps of seaweed and though about what they might be hiding, followed by the lovely imagery of all those hammerhead sharks cruising through the water as seen from far below.)

The sense of wonder mixed with the sense of foreboding is there right from the start of the sequence, through the formation of the fetal creature, staring out with eyes at once more fascinating and more fearful than those of the Star Child's, right on through to the celebrated dino encounter, in which we see the creatures on the move and at rest. It's a captivating, fascinating sequence that does, as Sheila suggested, give you room to kick the tires of your various responses to the film as a whole around a bit. It also made me wish Malick had built an entire feature around this alternate, allusive kind of perspective on planetary history instead. One Scanners reader made a more overt connection of the sequence to the main characters and observed:

"I saw, in what plays out between the two dinosaurs, a reflection of young Jack's relationship with his overbearing father, so it made me consider the story of the O'Briens as being something both personal and cosmic, repeating and reflecting in life since life's beginnings."

Or maybe the dominant dino, rather than discovering a strange, unlikely impulse of compassion, just got distracted by something else to go pounce on and rip to shreds.

It's very telling (at least to me) that, as captivating as the sequence is, as soon as that searching narration comes back in and the movie's main template reasserts itself, I immediately start to lose my patience, even in viewing the sequence out-of-context as Jim provided it, and I had to believe, when I first saw it, the possibility existed that I may have just lost my taste for cosmic rumination of this sort. That asteroid (or whatever it is) hits, implying the event that will lead to the extinction of all these mysterious creatures (one that Malick wisely leaves to the realm of Fantasia) and I'm agog all over again. And then Sean Penn stumbles in and suddenly I remember the uncomfortable seats and the sticky theater floor. Is this what it was like to be cast out of the Garden of Eden?

The movies I saw that dealt more overtly with religious faith, or religious hypocrisy, were even a mixed bag. The one I was most looking forward to, Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, which depicts a woman’s journey from a blooming religious awareness through her baptism and experience in a tightly-knit (some might say oppressive) church community, and into her own crisis of faith. (The movie is divided into chapters, with title cards like “Summons,” “Renegade,” “”Consumed” and “Wilderness” leading the way.) It’s fascinating to watch Farmiga’s character submerge herself in this culture—her genuine desire for spiritual transcendence is depicted not with arched eyebrows but with the kind of respect that movies do not often afford a the depiction of religious identity. She sees a friend who speaks in tongues and cannot understand why she can’t feel the same flush of spiritual fire—to her it sounds “beautiful,” but her own attempts to “speak in the Spirit” signal her increasing desperation. Unfortunately, Farmiga signals her own intelligence too stridently when she does break away from the church and the script hits too many bullet points about male- dominated religious society a bit too squarely on the nose. Higher Ground maintains its respect for faith, but it doesn’t dig deeply enough into what it really means to lose it.

Better Higher Ground’s clumsy earnestness than Kevin Smith’s pompous blasts of righteous hot air, though. The indie director’s self-distributed Red State, a tone-deaf horror movie fashioned as a diatribe against religious fanaticism (and, as it turns out, the misguided federal aggression against it echoed in its gory Waco-esque second half), turns out to be the worst sort of preaching to the converted. Smith imagines what might happen if a group of horny high school boys are held hostage and tortured by a Christian fundamentalist sect not unlike the membership of Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church. But the spectacularly unpleasant result feels like what it must be like to get stuck between two opposing sides at a Phelps protest—it’s a harangue rather than an examination of the impulses of fanatical belief or even a good piece of pulp drama, and everybody, including the director, comes off looking bad. (Well, everybody but Michael Parks, who manages to deliver a real, fiery, magnetic performance.) Smith even directly references Phelps in the dialogue and consequently lets his real-life target off the hook—when a cop refers to the religious whackos in question, another character makes sure to distinguish between Phelps (apparently just a crackpot) and these guys, the villainous bloodthirsty Christians of the movie, who are really dangerous. (Way to avoid that lawsuit!) If you’re looking for genuine Phelps-inspired outrage, better to see Fall from Grace and deal with the real thing than sit through Kevin Smith’s ugly tirade and watch him pat himself on the back for 90 minutes.

I also found myself contemplating my own journey toward a position on faith while watching movies as disparate as Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry; Asif Kapadia’s splendid and unusual documentary Senna, about the Brazilian Formula One racer Ayrton Senna, about whom I knew nothing when I began watching the film (Thanks for the recommend, Jason!); Richard Press’s Bill Cunningham New York, the fashion photographer about whom I was also clueless; and Steven Spielberg’s magnificent War Horse.

Specifically, there is a moment in BCNY in which the filmmaker/interviewer, after having us spend about an hour in his subject’s garrulous, irascible, eccentric presence, asks him personal questions which he insists Cunningham can defer answering if he so chooses. The first, about his sexuality, is greeted by Cunningham with semi-guarded candor and humor. But the second query, about the role of religious observance in Cunningham’s life, finds Cunningham lowering his head and retreating into an uncomfortably long silence, from which he eventually emerges and offers some hesitant connections between the ritual of church and his family’s working-class background. It’s an emotionally devastating moment, coming as it does amongst all the celebration of Cunningham’s working methodology, one that speaks to conflicts well-hidden whose presence, however briefly glimpsed, offers sublime dimensions in a character portrait that accent the sensitivity of the documentary as a whole.

War Horse touched me in ways that went beyond concerns of faith, though it is certainly emblematic of a certain kind of faith, in humanity, in our connection with creatures some might see as beneath us. To reference Jason’s previous plea, if the movies must move us then for me faith that this one might do so, and profoundly, was well rewarded. The movie’s power goes beyond Spielberg’s obvious mastery of a certain kind of old-fashioned epic moviemaking, which is obviously not enough for some. (I’ve heard War Horse derided as a most lavish Disney movie ever made.) For me the experience became a reminder of the ways that a movie—any movie-- can transport us emotionally, spiritually, even when the heartstrings are not being plucked. (I’ve already overstayed my welcome in the Tree House today, so I promise I’ll have more to say in my year-end round-up about War Horse.)

Your speculation, Jason, about releasing movies anonymously really resonated with me, however, because I was thinking the same thing when I saw both War Horse and The Tree of Life. Not that both artists (and yes, product of Hollywood and unreliable as he may be, I do consider Spielberg an artist) wouldn't be instantly identifiable by what’s on screen, but I wonder how much of the distaste for Spielberg’s movie, and consequently the reverence, or at least the heightened expectations for Malick’s, would be adjusted if audiences (or perhaps more to the point, critics) didn’t know going in who the director of each film was. I believe that if all context could be removed and War Horse could be viewed outside of one’s negative or positive notions of what Spielberg brings to the table—say, if it were presented as a lost wide-screen classic from the ‘50s—some of the resistance to its confidence as a piece of filmmaking might be eroded.

Of course this is never going to happen, for reasons you’ve already articulated, Jim. There’s no way to approach a movie without at least a few preconceived expectations, especially in this day and age where publicists and the Internet all but assure what little mystery there may be about any given movie can be potentially decoded without having to see the actual thing. But I also really appreciate what you said about bias:

I'm all for 'bias' as much as I am for 'elitism'… of course, I treasure those rare opportunities to see a movie 'cold,' without knowing much of anything about it except, maybe, for a few names of those involved. Sometimes (at screenings or film festivals) I've known even less than that. But what some people call 'bias' is really better described as experience, intelligence, passion.”

I haven’t yet seen The Descendants, and from what I’ve experienced of Alexander Payne’s previous movies, as well as what I’ve seen in clips and, yes, positive and negative reactions from writers whom I trust, I suspect that the movie may not be for me. Of course I’ll still go see it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some preconceived notions as to what it might be like, and what my reaction to it might be like. However, the movie ultimately must prove itself, and I trust myself to be able to react to what I’m seeing, whether it conforms to my biased assumptions or not, to react honestly. Because really, there’s about as much objectivity at work in the art of film criticism as there is in network TV journalism. And I’m not interested in anyone who calls themselves an “objective” critic, as if one could separate one’s personal experience from how one responds to a movie and then articulates that response. The difference lies in the ability to prove the case about one’s observations, even after acknowledging that bias. This past year I discovered that I have faith, if you will, in my ability to see what’s in front of me, to put less stock in mythology and predigested interpretation, be it applied to matters of art or the spirit. And I still think there’s room for faith in the movies too.

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Dennis Cozzalio is the proprietor of the blog you are now reading as well as the gatekeeper of the Tree House. Come on in and grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #15: MALICK'S GOD, CORNISH'S MONSTERS

2012-01-24T15:20:00.000-08:00

Jeepers, Treepers,

First, to answer Jim's Tree of Life challenge: As mentioned earlier, I saw it on the big screen twice last year with Sheila and Jason, separately. Each time, the so-called Creation sequence sent me to the stratosphere. The teetering cosmic spindle that Jason describes filled me awe. The outer space effects were awesome not because they were spectacular, but because of the real mysteries they represent.

What is all that out there, beyond the sky, and in there, between cells and atoms and subatomic particles? What is the design, and who is the designer? Folks who shrugged these contemplative images off as mere up-rezzed screensavers strike me as the kind of people who don't contemplate much at all. Or prefer knottier, more philosophically convoluted or intellectually accredited contemplation. Maybe Malick wouldn't appreciate the compliment, but: this film is as plain and simple as Lutheran Sunday school.

And the dinosaurs! Just as he does with humans, Malick chose to capture these creatures at rest, dying or otherwise in between the big, dynamic gestures. The boldest move he shows us is one dino stepping on the head of an ailing one and, after a beat, retreating just when we expect it to move in for the kill. It was pretty clear to me that Malick was preaching that grace and nature have been sparring within the sentience of living beings the as long as the world can remember, that human beings are only a refinement (but far from a perfection) of this process. The Creator sketches and experiments in nature the way scientists and artists do in their labs and studios.

Malick's god is winging it, as if she were finding her way to some kind of supreme grace in the editing room. As in nature, The Tree of Life has spontaneous, convulsive moments of grace in unexpected places.

But that beach scene at the end was wack.

Speaking of awe and creatures at rest, I think Sheila's post about Cary Grant and Jafar Panahi knocked us all to the floor. There isn't much I can add to her statements there, unless y'all know the emoticon for a standing-o. I agree that the essential fight is wherever someone as noble as a humanist filmmaker can be silenced and jailed. I just happen to think that even in our much freer society there are jails and sanctions that go unnoticed most of the time because they aren't policed with arms or open threats. In this country, filmmakers (and citizens) police themselves into patterns that maintain the status quo. Whatever our ideals, we often set them aside in the interest of career
and family. That works out splendid for the (forgive me, Lord) 1%. What is our president if not an idealist who, in the interest of bipartisan cooperation and practicality, allowed 1% interests to sand his initial agenda down the near-nothing? He's a guy trying to hold onto his job, just like most of his constituents.

People trying to be free, whether in Iran or here in the States, are at the mercy of a powerful few who either misdirect their progressive instincts or outright suppress them. It's just a matter of degrees and distinct tactics. Either way, the bond that a truly free cinema could forges between peoples, beyond borders and beyond corporate lines of demarcation, is a dangerous possibility for the ruling elite, no matter which country serves as their perch or what set of directives-- whether enacted as law or carried out as corporate policy-- keeps the people in line.

That's why I can't quite see it all as just show business, Sheila. And, Jason and Simon, I can't settle for the tidy conclusion that, ultimately, show business is just a matter of giving the people what they want. Tastes are so rigidly enforced that the people generally want what NBC-Universal and Viacom want them to want.

I think the solution is to somehow make ticket prices superfluous. There must be some way for all the companies involved in the distribution and exhibition of movies to slake their greed that doesn't rely upon the box office. All they want is the money; isn't there a way to let them have it without having undue influence over the content and range of choices available to every moviegoer? Can somebody crunch the numbers on how to sustain a multiplex modeled after Family Dollar?

Sheila, I frequented the $2 theater in the 90's and remained a faithful regular as the price crept up to $3.50 and $4. It was the second-run Cineplex Odeon Worldwide Theater, and it was the dream: College kids, cops, stockbrokers, homeboys, dope fiends, office drones, Broadway dancers, cabbies, fry cooks... all of them cramming into this multiplex, slapping down pocket change to see whatever happened to be playing that day. For the price, you couldn't go wrong.

I remember seeing Peter Jackson's last great film, Heavenly Creatures, and David Lynch's Lost Highway at the Worldwide. Both were gorgeously projected, with sound that rivals anything I've experienced in the better New York City screening rooms. "Mummy! Mummy!" I remember some of the homeboys watching Heavenly Creatures calling out in fake New Zealand accents, mocking the 1950's schoolgirls addressing their mothers. But the jokes died down quickly as the story (and Jackson's operatic storytelling) cast a spell on the entire audience. Folks likely unaccustomed to sitting still for a foreign film ended up falling in love with and in awe of Heavenly Creatures. The Lost Highway screening was a riot. Packed house. Folks cursed loudly and laughed piteously throughout, but, even having paid so little at the door, not one person walked out. Everybody sat still for this experimental feature film with no great big stars in it and no clear-cut narrative line. Lynch's sensory seduction had them in a trance. Afterward in the lobby and out front, folks gathered in small groups to say, essentially (and in some cases literally), "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!" But they were grinning as they said it.

Yes, Jason, every seed like the lost Worldwide screenings eventually bears fruit somewhere in a moviegoer's imagination. The palate learns not to automatically recoil at an unfamiliar taste. Yes, it's a war of inches and all that. I am just forever searching for ways to accelerate the process.

Dennis, I believe every film from 2011 that I liked and, sight unseen, all 512 films that Simon watched (Does the boy ever sleep???) are worthy of a screen at the mainstream cinemas--even the awful ones. Let the big, bad ones remain in the mix, the way that you might photograph a slain beast alongside an object that provides a sense of scale. The great little films will cast that much brighter light in contrast to the shabby colossal films. All they need is a fair fight.

Lemme exhale some of this helium and get specific: It's absurd that
Attack the Block, the greatest sci-fi action adventure that Steven Spielberg and Ken Loach never made, grossed only $5 million worldwide. Since it cost $13 million, I suppose that makes it a huge flop. Despite all the critical praise and glowing word of mouth, 2011 was not AtB's year. I don't have any grand conspiracy theories about that one, just a deep sigh at what could have been. Director Joe Cornish grafted the disaffected teenage souls of Los Olvidados , Pixote, Sweet Sixteen and La Promesse onto a silly little crowd-pleasing monster movie. There is no good reason a film so entertaining, so prescient and attuned to its times while offering premium popcorn thrills should not gross more than Avatar, Titanic and Star Wars combined. Was its distributor, Sony Pictures/Screen Gems, too busy pushing forgettables like Green Hornet and Friends with Benefits?

Now, what moved me about Attack the Block? So many things, but nothing so much as the final image, of a 15 year old kid who was certain that he had no future or worth to anyone and thus never smiled--until now. The smile could only have been more moving if he'd turned to the camera, like Chaplin or Giulietta Masina. As it is, it's radiant enough to change the world-- if it could only get on enough screens.

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Steven Boone is a freelance writer whose work can be found at Capital New York, The Demanders (RogerEbert.com), Press Play and Hentai Lab.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #14: ACADEMY LEADERS

2012-01-24T13:31:00.000-08:00

Dearest Treeks,

One of the best ways to learn is to spend time in the company of those who know their passion, their experience, those who write with authority and intelligence and can make room for the passions and the visions of others. If there one thing I will have taken away from this week or so spent with you all, it’s the reward of being overwhelmed by the generous spirit of the writers who’ve assembled here. I feel like I’ve had a rare chance to learn so much from what everyone has brought to the Tree House this year, and I hope those who are following along feel the same. And thank you to Jim for devoting so much of his most recent post to the spirit and legacy of Bingham Ray, who was such a positive and challenging influence on the culture of the movies, both in this country and internationally.

It’s technically my last at-bat, and I’m going to do my damnedest to not let my focus fly too far out of whack. I want to talk about a couple of the many thoughts I’ve had while reading these wonderful posts and simultaneously try to address some of the moments of the year that meant the most to me, even when they might not necessarily have come from my favorite movies of the year. I fear I’m going to have to split this up into two posts in order to do so, so I beg your forgiveness and indulgence in advance.

But since the writing of this post happens to coincide with Hollywood’s second-biggest day, I suppose a diversion into the trivially important will be necessary. How about that surprise showing for Meek’s Cutoff in the Oscar nominations that were announced this morning?! Wow! 13 nominations! The pundits sure didn’t see that one coming! Actor noms for Thanapat Saisaymar and Al Dunkaccino? Who says the Oscars aren’t in touch with art and commerce?

Bizarre fantasy aside, the real nominations that were unveiled managed to raise a few eyebrows and cast the Oscar race in a slightly different light than it had been in the couple of weeks leading up to the revealing of the actual contenders. Those who had written off Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close had another thing coming to ‘em this morning, as did anyone (perhaps some of us Treeks?) who figured Terence Malick and The Tree of Life were just too left-field for the allegedly crusty-skewing Academy membership. Hugo led all comers with 11 nominations, include Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay and is the dominant force in the technical categories-- no one from its cast was honored—and The Artist collected 10, including Best Actor and Supporting Actress nods for Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo. (And yes, the dog was snubbed.) Which, if numbers are your thing, makes the final stretch all about these two love letters to the movies, and not the slugfest between The Artist and The Descendants (five nominations) that the Golden Globules seemed to forecast.

One of the biggest surprises, I suppose, is The Tree of Life, which managed three nominations, for Best Picture, Director and Emmanuel Lubezski’s cinematography. Say what you will about Malick’s movie (and we have, and we will), but one thing you certainly can’t say is that it was directed, like certain other nominated movies may have been, with both eyes on Oscar. (“Terry, you’re a shoo-in for Best Special Effects!”)

I’m guessing that of all the folks who heard their names or movies called out this morning there probably isn’t anyone happier in Hollywood today than Melissa McCarthy (and, by extension, Sheila O’Malley, but she's in Brooklyn) or, on the other end of the spectrum, as bummed as Albert Brooks, but in a funny way. ("I was ROBBED. I don't mean the Oscars. I mean literally-- someone stole my clothes and shoes.") As for Alan Rickman, well, sometimes there just ain’t no justice.

Congratulations are certainly due to J.C. Chandor, who was nominated for writing the screenplay for Margin Call, the superb, chest-tightening Wall Street disaster movie which he also directed. And speaking of screenplay nominations, Asghar Farhadi managed to score one to go along with A Separation’s Best Foreign Language Film nomination. The movie is probably presumed to be the preemptive favorite in that category, though the foreign language voting has often been volatile and unpredictable. Certainly the nominations alone are a great boost to this movie’s profile and may, as Sheila hoped in her post, increase awareness of the reality that exists for all Iranian filmmakers, not just the ones who score big at Hollywood award ceremonies.

But I’d wager the most surprised man in The Business (and certainly in his home country of Mexico) right now is Demian Bichir, who managed the relatively Herculean feat of bagging a Best Actor nomination that probably no one predicted for a performance in a movie that relatively few outside the voting community even remembered, Chris Weitz’s East L.A. nod to Bicycle Thieves entitled A Better Life. I would have bet on Jeong-hie Yun to knock Meryl Streep out of her spot before I would have ever even imagined that Bechir would be among the anointed five actors. Did Universal put a lot of money in trade paper ads for him? (I’m asking sincerely, because I’m generally unaware of the level of campaigning that goes on for any movie.) Or is it simply that the right people just happened to see this movie on DVD after it debuted digitally in October? (A Better Life was released theatrically at the end of June and grossed a paltry $1.7 million by the time it vanished from theaters, and I wasn’t even sure if it had been released on DVD yet.) Bechir’s recognition could be the Oscar industry equivalent of that one tiny spermatozoa pushing through and finding that one egg, and all the good stuff which comes as a result. One suspects that Michael Fassbender might be feeling like he was mugged though. (I wonder if he has a Twitter account.)

One of the glories of Sheila’s post is that it reminded me of what the movies can mean to real people, whether those people are sitting in the audience, directing their latest on an iPhone while under house arrest and enduring tortures we probably can’t imagine, or perhaps the ones on screen whose lives are the subject of a documentary film that seeks to remedy perceived injustices, to change those lives for the better.

Surely not even Wim Wenders’ celebrated 3D dance film Pina can withstand the momentum of Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory in the Best Documentary category, given the level of vocal support in Hollywood for the West Memphis 3 and the efforts to filmmakers Joel Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to record for posterity the event of these gruesome murders and the apparent subsequent miscarriage of justice in their aftermath, efforts which helped lead to the eventual release of the accused killers. Amy Berg’s documentary West of Memphis, shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, apparently sheds new light on the investigation into the case as well as the defense and the appeals process surrounding Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Miskelly. The Park City screening also afforded the unlikely, conciliatory appearance together at Sundance of Echols with two of the parents of his alleged victims, Pam Hobbs and Mark Byers. (An emotionally unhinged Byers emerged, in Berlinger and Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, as a circumstantial suspect in the slayings himself, though now new DNA evidence and testimony is pointing convincingly in other directions.) It is good to know that sometimes they’re not just only movies. Give credit to the Academy for recognizing that.

If The Artist reigns supreme at this year’s Academy flogging, whatever. It’s hardly the best movie of the year, but it’s a good, sincere movie. Yes, it’s overrated, but I look at that list of nominees and I find precious few titles that aren’t. I was lucky enough to see it last weekend at the Vista Theater in East Hollywood, and if you New Yorkers ever get a chance to visit Los Angeles, the Vista is a place you should visit. It sits on the exact site where the mammoth set for D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance was constructed, and it’s about a block away from the site where some of the earliest American movies were made and distributed. I’m always aware of the ghosts swirling around this ornate, lovingly-restored theater whenever I go there. But when we saw The Artist there this past Saturday night, I stood for a moment in the back of the theater and watched the audience, surrounded by all the art deco design on the walls and ceiling, staring up at the 1.33: 1 Academy ratio black and-white image, and for a moment it was easy to imagine that I had been transported back to the ‘20s, the time in which The Artist takes place, when the great movies that had been made in the very Hollywood neighborhood I was now in were still captivating audiences on their own. That was a dose of magic that went beyond the movie’s simple nostalgia and straight to the transcendent, and it happened quite separately from any kind of coronation of Oscar quality.

A question for you all: What movie from this year do you think a wider audience would enjoy if they only had the chance or made the effort to see it? My only restriction on your answer is that the movie you choose cannot come from the list of the 100 top box-office grossers of the year. Mine? The sublime outrageous Irishness of Brendan Gleeson and John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard. I would love it if this movie made some money and became a beloved touchstone, even in the sort of limited way that In Bruges, directed by McDonagh’s older brother Martin, eventually did. Oh, and more people need to experience the genuinely delightful, and genuinely creepy Troll Hunter. Trust me.

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Dennis Cozzalio is the proprietor of the blog you are now reading as well as
the gatekeeper of the Tree House. Come on in and grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #13: SPIRITS AND INFLUENCES

2012-01-23T21:25:00.001-08:00

Bingham Ray, 57, movie executive, specialty film distributor and champion of independent film, who died Monday morning while attending the Sundance Film Festival.

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Dear denizens of Dennis's arboreal dwelling:

My head is swimming after that last round. (Seriously -- try the rope swing and you can drop right into the L.A. River, not too far from the Driver's favorite picnic spot.) I'm a little dizzy, but let me see if I can organize some thoughts...

Boone: "… I'm less concerned with what individual filmmakers manage to push through the system than in what the system wants."

I feel you (as they used to say on The Wire, a great cinematic work that was nominated for only two Emmys in five seasons -- for writing -- and managed to win but a single WGA award for its fourth season). What the system wants, of course, is money. And power. And when a movie like Margaret -- not at all a "difficult" movie but a tough sell, because it doesn't have much in the way of marketing hooks -- can't get a decent theatrical release, you have to look at the marketplace.

What you see is that, with its legendarily troubled post-production history, it has probably already been written off Fox Searchlight's books. One more lawsuit remains to be settled (brought by producer Gary Gilbert against Lonergan) and, at this late date, nobody is going to want to sink any more money into it (whether that means giving it a theatrical release in most of the country or, as it turns out, even screening it for critics). Fox Searchlight has other things on its agenda now -- like trying to squeeze as much theatrical and post-theatrical revenue out of this year's crop of awards contenders: The Descendants, The Tree of Life, and Shame.

This kind of thing has always happened, and still happens all the time -- though never in quite the same way. Christopher Guest's 1987 directorial debut, The Big Picture (still the truest and funniest movie made about post-modern Hollywood I've ever seen, given my own experiences in the early 1990s) fell between the cracks of two Columbia Pictures administrations -- the one that produced it (headed by David Puttnam) and the one that was therefore not at all interested in releasing it (headed by Dawn Steele). There were even unconfirmed rumors that Steele was trying to quash the film because she thought a certain female studio executive character was based on her. (A few years ago, Guest told me that in some ways things are worse now than they were 20-something years ago: The next generation of execs are just as clueless as the previous one, but now they pretend like they "get it." See Jake Kasdan's 2006 The TV Set and Showtime's often inspired series, Episodes.) Margaret is, simply, old (expired?) product as far as the Fox Searchlight of today is concerned.

In 1984, I was a programmer for the Seattle International Film Festival. We'd seen an interesting review in Variety of a movie called Repo Man that had opened in LA, died, and disappeared. I couldn't even persuade Universal to send us a print for the festival or to screen the movie for theater owners. Washington has anti-blind-bidding laws, so we made Universal a deal: We would invite theater owners/bookers to the festival showing and that would serve as the film's exhibitor screening. It worked, and the movie became a cult hit, playing for months in Seattle at the Broadway on Capitol Hill (a theater that was gutted and is now a drug store). It was resurrected by Universal's "classics" division, made the midnight movie rounds and eventually achieved a cult reputation on cable and VHS. (This, by the way, is just one reason why Emilio Estevez will always be cooler than his little brother.)

Which leads me to one of those moments that Changed My Way of Looking at Everything. It was in the early 1990s, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The great director Krzysztof Zanussi (a friend since we had played his masterpiece A Year of the Quite Sun at the Market Theater in 1985) had become... a studio head -- of Poland's TOR Film Studio -- and was somewhat apprehensive about his new role. He didn't exactly make "commercial" movies (Quarterly Balance/A Woman's Decision, Camouflage, The Constant Factor, Contact, Imperativ, Weekend Stories) but, under the old system, he knew how to get his movies past the state censors, into international film festivals and released in much of the world. (He had the worst luck in the U.S., where his distributors had a tendency to go bankrupt.)

"I'm now a businessman!" Krzysztof announced, with an appreciation of the irony and absurdity of his new position. And then: "I don't know how my movies will survive the tyranny of the marketplace." That shook me, because I immediately realized he was right. We don't have official government censors, as in the Soviet bloc or today's Canadian provinces, but the so-called "free market" is a self-limiting, not necessarily benign, force. (Whatever the other flaws in her teenaged vision, Lisa Cohen in Margaret is absolutely right in her understanding of what censorship is, and is not.) A society based on "the marketplace" assumes that the primary goal of any given enterprise (and of human life itself) is to generate and accumulate wealth and power, and it tends to define "happiness" not only in quantifiable material terms, but that it is a state that can be achieved and maintained like a bank balance, rather than an elusive, unpredictable emotion that ebbs and flows. (Do you find that many of the most precious moments of your life -- and in movies -- are not peak experiences, but little moments of happiness or contentment that you never planned or expected to remember at the time? I do.)

Sheila: "One of the most obnoxious things that happens constantly when talking about film is that you are accused of being an 'elitist' if you like something no one has heard of. Or, worse yet, your motives are called into question. 'You only like such-and-such because EVERYONE likes it.'"

Or the flip-side of that: "You only dislike it because it's popular!" Yeah, right -- as if that's even possible most of the time. Critics on the daily or weekly beat usually see movies at pre-release screenings before anybody knows for sure whether audiences will go for them (even the focus groups and test screening campaigns are not infallible predictors). But attacking somebody's motives for "liking" or "not liking" something is ludicrous and completely without merit as a legitimate argument. (I realize I was guilty of this when I flipped around the phrase "knee-jerk careerism" to apply to A----- W----'s writing. Charges of hypocrisy don't make for legitimate rebuttals, either; an argument stands or falls on its merits, not because somebody also made a contradictory argument somewhere -- even if it's with regard to the same movie or the same filmmaker.)

Okay, so let's say somebody does praise or criticize a movie because it is or is not popular. What then? All that matters is what the critic has to say about the movie. Everything else is irrelevant and/or speculation. On the other hand, if a critic can't articulate why he/she loves or hates or is ambivalent about something, then how can his/her opinion possibly matter? It doesn't. Opinions are a dime a dozen, but they have to be tested to find out whose carries any weight.

I'm all for "elitism" in every sphere of human endeavor -- because the term usually implies that somebody is knowledgeable enough, and cares enough, to have developed a worthwhile opinion. That's not to say I'll "agree" (I try to banish the terms "agree" and "disagree" from my writing, because the terms are often so vaguely applied that they have no meaning).

For example, I usually don't fill in the "Worst Movie" slot in my critic poll ballots because, although I still see plenty of bad movies, I don't have to see anything starring, say, Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider. And for that I am grateful. But in the snarky Vulture poll for Worst Movies of 2011, I decided to explain why I would nominate We Need to Talk About Kevin for the dishonor, while it also appeared on some critics' list of the year's best. I have my reasons, which you can read by following the link. I also noticed that the only other critic to cite We Need to Euthanize Kevin was none other than A----- W---- himself, who wrote: "We Need to Talk About Kevin. Must we?" So, do I "agree" with AW? There's no way of telling. I gave my reasons. He didn't. We may hold entirely different views about the movie, even though we both, evidently, don't think very highly of it.

Which brings me back to the thought experiment Jason proposed in his first Tree House missive:

Jason: "Steven, I think you’re right that critics (and other engaged cinephiles) are as susceptible to the Hollywood hype machine as the average moviegoer. The hype factory affects not just which movies win awards but, long before that, which movies enter the discussion forum to begin with, en route to being entered into countless Netflix queues later on. And while this unfortunate reality inspires you to dream of a world without the ballyhoo and the “bargain” matinee prices that are anything but, it inspires me to think of something just as unrealistic: What would our cinematic discussions look like if movies were released anonymously?"

I'm not sure they'd look that much different, but it's hard not to notice how showbiz pundits who handicap the (mostly imagined) ups and downs, ins and outs of the Oscar "race" the same way the mainstream press does the campaign for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination wind up reinforcing a certain sameness in year-end awards contenders. (I wrote about that here, recently: "The Artist, Shame and hype-season backlash.")

And now, of course, we have blogs and Twitter creating another kind of hype -- that of critics for other critics. I saw more coverage of Uncle Boonmee, Certified Copy, Tree of Life and other critical blockbusters when they made their first festival appearances (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York) than when they were eventually released in theaters. The critics and bloggers I follow shot their wad long before members of the general public could see these films. I found myself feeling a tinge of guilt when I looked at my best-of-2011 list and found it so full of "mainstream" titles like the Cannes award-winners above. I guess there are elitists even among elitists.

And that reminds me: I'm all for "bias" as much as I am for "elitism":

Simon: "When I write, I like to think (when I do think about this stuff, that is) that I'm sharing my interests, curiosities and shortcomings as a critical viewer. ‘Critical’ does not necessarily mean ‘negative,’ though for some reason, people assume being critical means I have an axe to grind with whatever film or TV program I'm not automatically all upon to review. But the bottom line in this profession/hobby/art/whatever-the-fuck is that I'm addressing the work as I see it. Bias is irrelevant: if I respond to something in a film, that's what I'm writing about, ideally. Conveying why I responded to what I feel is important in a work of art is my goal.

Yes! Now, of course, I treasure those rare opportunities to see a movie "cold," without knowing much of anything about it except, maybe, for a few names of those involved. Sometimes (at screenings or film festivals) I've known even less than that. But what some people call "bias" is really better described as experience, intelligence, passion. I am reminded of my old friend Bingham Ray, the master specialty film distributor, who I just learned today has died of a stroke at Sundance (he was only 57). I booked our first film at Seattle's Market Theater from Bingham in 1984 (Zanussi's Contract -- for a two-week ramp-up before we opened Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense) and when we talked about movies, as we often did, it was sometimes about business, but always about the movies as movies. (After he and I both moved to LA, we would "do lunch" -- not at any chic expense-account place, but at Pink's Hot Dogs on LaBrea. I always loved him for his lack of pretense. I have spent much of today working and writing through teary eyes.)

Bingham (he and his wife Nancy named their son Nick, after the director of They Live By Night, In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar and Bigger Than Life) cared about movies as much as I do (he was greatly responsible for importing Mike Leigh, Jane Campion, Lars Von Trier and others to these shores), and he was one of the few "art house" distributors of the day who understood our philosophy at the Market Theater, which was that, as the owner/operators of a 250-seat independent cinema, our taste, judgment and commitment were our most valuable assets. We didn't want to show anything we didn't believe in, because we had to live with it, and it alone, for as long as it played. We built an audience by showing movies we liked; if we chose it, people knew it was something we wanted to share with them, and we would work our butts off getting the word out.

Many times we were pitched movies my partner Ann Browder and I didn't particularly care for, and we were told that we were foolish not to bid on something that was sure to be an art-house moneymaker. But we had our niche (roughly defined as Movies We Liked/Loved) and we figured movies we didn't could go ahead and make money for someone else, but we weren't interested. Some people thought we were silly and naive (and maybe we were), but Bingham understood and respected our position.

October Films, the company operated by Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky, made and distributed David Lynch's Lost Highway and created this ad to promote it.

Many years later, Bingham was widely quoted giving his opinion of The Blair Witch Project, which he had not chosen to pursue at Sundance. When others claimed he had been proven "wrong" after it became a monster one-off hit, he was quoted saying he didn't care how much money it made; that didn't change the fact that it was still a piece of shit. I don't care of you "agree" with him or not, I admire him for saying that. Here's something I found from another friend and colleague I first met around that time, John Pierson (from whom, when he was at Films Inc., we used to book the newly struck 35mm Looney Tunes we showed before each feature):

I think the other thing -- sort of the trademark of independent, specialized art film - was that nobody was shy about having opinions about what they liked, and what they thought was good. And in those days, anyway, you could really get behind something you believed in -- you didn't have to draw a line between, "Well, I like this, but who else would? Is there an audience for it?" It was more like, "I like it. It's good. We're gonna do something with this." And with certain people it's carried over to the current day. […]

… [When] when your roots are in the realm of personal taste, and a belief in quality, it makes a difference over time. That's not to say that people in L.A. don't have personal taste, or don't believe in quality, but I think it's more pronounced in New York. Everybody has an opinion, and stands by it. I mean, you've got Bingham Ray, a year after Blair Witch premiered at Sundance, saying, "I don't care if it grossed $100 million, it's shit." So it goes both ways -- it's not just positive, it's also stuff like, "That director's no good, that film's no good. Fuck it, I don't care if people do go to see it -- it's still crap!" You know, in L.A., if it grosses $400 million worldwide, it's not shit anymore.

Amen. Among Bingham's last bookings for the San Francisco Film Society were Margaret and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia -- two of the best and boldest films you will see this century. Most of all, though, I can hardly bear that I won't be seeing the man again. Look for his name at a key moment in Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies. Bingham's immortal in a way, but that doesn't lessen the pain of missing the guy.

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Jim Emerson is a film critic whose work can be found at MSN as well as many other outlets, in print and online. He is also the Web master for Roger Ebert.com and presides over his own filmic domain, the influential and excellent blog Scanners.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #12: THE MOVIES MUST MOVE US

2012-01-22T11:07:00.001-08:00

Treeps -

Forgive the negative connotation of the label I'm about to use, but before we go further I think we should admit one thing: as far as cinephilia is concerned, we are the 1 percent.

In saying that, I don't mean to imply that we are the haves in a world dominated by have-nots. Not at all. I mean only to point out that in the universe of movie consumers there is only a tiny fraction that approaches cinema with the same obsessiveness that we demonstrate: not just seeing movies but analyzing them, not just analyzing them but writing about them, not just writing about them but tweeting about them, not just tweeting about them but dialoging about them, not just dialoging about them but reading about them, not just reading about them but reading even more about them, and so on.

It strikes me now that the first blog I ever read - about movies or anything - was Jim's Scanners, which I discovered one day while going to Roger Ebert's site to print off a few of his recent reviews to read over lunch. From Scanners, Jim introduced me to The House Next Door, which at the time was in its infancy, founded by a professional critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, but published by an amateur enthusiast's means - a Blogger-hosted site with the most minimalist design available. It was The House Next Door that, one way or another, led to my eventual connections with Sheila, Steven and Simon, but before that it was Scanners that pointed me to the first bona fide non-professional movie blog I ever laid eyes on, this one, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule (which still has the best blog name I've ever come across, and it isn't close).

I knew then that anyone could be a blogger, but for whatever reason I wasn't immediately struck with the feeling that I needed to be one of them. I was already writing about movies, for myself and some friends, but I wouldn't create a blog for another few years. What I did do, though, from that moment on, was read movie blogs voraciously and comment at them frequently. And here's the thing: at the time I assumed every other movie enthusiast did the same.

I was wrong. However much traffic Scanners got then, however much traffic it gets now, it's less than what I would have guessed, less than what it deserves. Sadly, I'm sure the same is true of RogerEbert.com and Metacritic.com, and any other site that would serve as a gateway to endless amounts of thoughtful criticism to anyone who wanted to consume it. As Simon implied, often we 1-percenters wind up writing for each other, and even though I know from experience that there's an engaged audience beyond our 1 percent, I also know that it's only a sliver of the massive pie of available "movie fans."

I don't say this to be a downer but out of a need to report the facts as I see them, because like Steven - like all of you, I'm sure - I would love for the mass audience to be the tree house.

So how does that happen? Two ways, I think.

The first is to spread the good word, which can't mean just preaching on the corner, screaming our views over the din of everyday distractions in the hopes that someone will come along and accept our gospel without skepticism. It must also include listening, dialogue, consideration and openness. At its best, cinema is the purest all-faith church you could hope to find. We don't need to agree about what moves us; we just need to share in the glory that cinema provides. And as the 1 percenters we need to set an example for what cinephilia should be, even when we might not have the influence to singlehandedly create change, as Sheila did with her Iranian blogathon, or as Jim does when he spends multiple posts burrowing into one of his annual obsessions. In this area, thankfully, we can make a difference.

Alas, the other thing needed to bring the mass audience to the tree house is a steady diet of great cinema, and all we can do here is pray. Last week I was clicking around on YouTube and stumbled upon a Comic-Con panel from a few years back in which Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were asked by an aspiring filmmaker if it was still possible to break into the industry the way they did, essentially operating on the outside of the Hollywood system until all of a sudden they were power players within it. Tarantino thought for a moment and then provided this advice: "Make Reservoir Dogs."

"I'm not even being a smartass," QT continued. "That was a fucking kickass movie, alright. You make a goddamn kickass movie and you can take it all over the fucking planet earth. Not America. Not fucking Los Angeles. Not New York. The planet fucking earth. And everyone will know it."

It was an arrogant and self-serving answer, but it was accurate, too, and the same logic applies here, because no matter how much advocacy we provide, no matter how much passion we exude, no matter if we wear our cinephilia as boldly as Tim Tebow wears his Christianity, the bottom line is that if we want the masses to be moved we need movies to move the masses. On the side, we can champion. We can articulate. We can encourage. But for passion for cinema to be deep and pure, it has to be inspired by what's on the screen. Period.

So, at last, what moved me in 2011?

Many things. Over two viewings, I fell hard for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which certainly feels like the most flawless of 2011's great movies - smartly written, thoughtfully shot, brilliantly acted and thick with atmosphere. I also got swept up by the audaciousness of Drive, the gripping paranoia of Take Shelter, the sweetness of Beginners and the vivid exteriors of the under-the-radar Blackthorn. The best two documentaries I saw this year were Senna and Catching Hell (the latter on TV, although it had a theatrical premiere at some point). And Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 took a franchise that I never really cared for and made me care enough to watch the finale twice.

And then there was Warrior. I haven't seen Margaret (so far as I can tell, it never came to D.C.), but with due respect to the truly flawless performances in Tinker Tailor, all I can say is that if Warrior isn't your pick for the most outstanding performance by a cast it can only mean you haven't seen it, which wouldn't be much of a surprise because the mixed martial arts flick lasted in theaters just a bit longer than I'd last in the octagon against Brock Lesnar.

In recent months, Nick Nolte has earned some supporting actor buzz for his portrayal of the estranged alcoholic father of two MMA fighters, and deservedly so: I think it's the best performance he's ever given. But the other actors are just as incredible: Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as Tommy and Brendan, the brothers who share an ability to fight and not much else; Jennifer Morrison as Brendan's concerned but always caring wife; and Frank Grillo as Brendan's supportive coach.

In my review I called Warrior the Heat of fight movies, in large part because like Michael Mann's 1995 crime classic Warrior takes everything familiar about its genre and does it better, and also because it's "simultaneously mythic and realistic, stylized and uncomplicated, violent and romantic, epic and intimate." But what lingers are the performances, which in a movie not afraid to be predictable somehow manage to avoid cliche at every turn.

Of course, the movie that moved me most was Malick's The Tree of Life.

That orgasmic moment I mentioned in my first post? It happened around 3:07 pm ET on Saturday, May 28. (I told you we're the 1 percent!) I was at Manhattan's Sunshine Cinema, having made the pilgrimage from Washington, DC, for the movie's opening weekend, meeting my uncle Ric, who came from Cape Cod, and rallying at the theater with Boone (who'd managed to see The Tree of Life at a media screening with Sheila) and Odie Henderson (who was seeing it for the first time).

The cinematic moment that provided my overcome response is a few minutes into the famous (and, for some, infamous) creation sequence, which begins with Jessica Chastain's mother character whispering to God in the aftermath of her son's death, asking "Where were you?" After a short series of gaseous images, the screen goes black momentarily and then a spindle of light appears, diagonal at first and then turning perfectly vertical as "Lacrimosa" crescendos fervently in the background.

What is it, that spindle? Like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's no definitive answer, but in short I believe it to be the miracle of life, the igniter, the mover, which some would say means it's God. Whatever it is, it's the thing that comes before the Big Bang. It's the match the lights the fuse for the explosion of life.

That life includes Jim's dinosaurs, and what do I think that scene means? Well, just like I think the entire creation sequence is meant to answer the mother's question by suggesting that God, or just life itself and all its inherent creation and destruction, was everywhere all along, all the way back to the beginning of time, I think the dinosaur sequence is meant to suggest that the nature/grace dichotomy that's explored in the film can be traced back to earth's earliest creatures.

That's a little on-the-nose for me, and, as Sheila suggested, it's unconvincing besides. And like Jim, I think the final 20-or-so minutes of The Tree of Life are "an embarrassment of cliches," and each time I've seen the movie I've had to cringe my away through them.

But, oh, that moment in the creation sequence! That truly awesome moment!

That's why we go to the movies.

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. He's also a contributor to Press Play. Follow him on Twitter.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #11: REVOLUTION AND SHOW BUSINESS

2012-01-21T14:44:00.001-08:00

Hey, guys.

I love all of the tentacles of our conversation. Let me try to address some of the things that came up for me in reading all of your essays.

Steven, your comments are, as always, a necessary and healthy tonic in a sometimes cynical world. One of the most obnoxious things that happens constantly when talking about film is that you are accused of being an "elitist" if you like something no one has heard of. Or, worse yet, your motives are called into question. "You only like such-and-such because EVERYONE likes it." If you declare your love for Blue Crush (as I have, repeatedly), or G.I. Jane (as I have, repeatedly), a different group of people ceases taking you seriously. I got a dismayed note from a film critic on Facebook early on in my time on Facebook when I listed 10 movies I loved and he sounded truly sad and anxious. He had respected me, but his faith had wavered. "I had thought we were more in sync, and I don't understand this list at all, but don't worry, I still like you!"

Don't worry, dude, I'm not worried at all.

You see, I refer to the whole shebang as "show business". That's what it is to me. There has always been lowest-common-denominator stuff, there has always been highbrow stuff, but your point, Steven, about where these movies get play and in what neighborhood is very well taken.

It makes me think of an old venue in New York (and I am sure you remember it) that we all just called "The Two Dollar Theatre". It was on 50th in between 8th and 9th, if memory serves. You could see current releases, a couple months or so after they were in the "real" theatres, but all tickets were two bucks. Therefore, the place was always an absolute madhouse. I saw some great stuff there, some heavy-hitting stuff. These were not just blockbusters created for the masses. Arty films played there, seriously romantic dramas, gross-out comedies, rom-coms, even foreign films that had made a splash got at least a weekend at the Two Dollar Theatre. I'd still frequent the Two Dollar Theatre if it still existed. If you were used to the hushed silence of the audiences at the arthouses, you were in for a giant shock. The Two Dollar Theatre crowd did not treat the movies with precious kid gloves, and while yes, sometimes it was obnoxious if you wanted a little more solemnity in the atmosphere, that was also part of its awesome charm. I don't want to make a blanket statement. I, too, enjoy going to small theatres and gathering to watch a Carole Lombard festival with like-minded enthusiasts. But I wouldn't sniff at going to see Certified Copy with a packed crowd of people who were ONLY there because tickets were two bucks. That would be a very interesting experience.

In a piece I wrote about seeing The King's Speech in a crowded multiplex last year which touches on some of these issues, I said, "Being a crowd-pleaser doesn’t necessarily mean that a film plays to the lowest-common denominator. It can mean that, but it doesn’t have to. If a film works, it works, and if it works for a large number of people, so much the better. Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings in the pit as well as the aristocrats in the balconies."

And that's why I like calling it show business.

It's a pure term. It's honest about what is actually going on.

The performers who seem to "get" that on a deep level are usually the ones who survive the ruthless ups and downs of the business. Cary Grant is a prime example. He was a realistic and practical man, who made careful business decisions from the get-go, who grew up in poverty and so pinched every penny he ever earned, and was cautious about the crafting of his own persona. He didn't mess with it indiscriminately. He understood why audiences loved him, and he was careful to "be Cary Grant" because he understood the business he was in. Show business. He understood that he was "product". You'd never catch Cary Grant talking about art. But art was, indeed, what he made. When the time came for him to take risks in order to deepen his persona (and, consequently, lengthen his career as a leading man) he trusted very few. He trusted Hitchcock. He trusted Howard Hawks. And that's about it, in terms of deviating from the "Cary Grant' audiences had come to expect. This frustrated other directors into distraction. Billy Wilder was driven insane by Grant turning down all of his projects. George Cukor begged Grant to do A Star is Born. Perhaps Grant wasn't always right in his decisions, but that would only be retrospect talking. The biggest star in the world, taking no advice from anyone, and he rarely made a misstep. His legacy continues.

I often wonder who will have such a future legacy akin to Grant's among the actors working today. My guess is Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, and Leonardo Dicaprio. But time will tell.

Jim, about that dinosaur moment in Tree of Life. Your original piece was a feast of analysis, and the collation of quotes and "takes" on the moment were awesome. It's great when you go deep into a particular moment like that. The "dinosaur bit" in Tree of Life is an example of the Lost Innocence obsession that can sometimes annoy me with Malick, but it is really more of a philosophical difference than an artistic one. I just don't believe in the benignity of nature, in the way he seems to. Showing another creature mercy (or: grace) is what will elevate the human race, and (on occasion) has. It is our only hope. Malick's theory there seems to be that the capacity for mercy exists in all of life itself, even in prehistoric life which was supposed to be notoriously red in tooth and claw. Nature is benign, because God is benign: an intelligent and loving force that pushes us all forward in our evolution. To go off on a tangent for a bit, but it is related: Malick's depicted the Native Americans in New World as so saintly and blithely innocent at first that I found it hard to swallow, although it's a lovely concept. (To quote my friend Dan Callahan who had this to say on New World, "I can't believe in innocence like that. I've read too much Henry James.") So before the Europeans came, no Native Americans got into a petty fist fight? Or stole someone else's blanket? Or cheated on their wives? Were they ever malignant in their motives? Never? For real? As I say, Belief in Innocence is a philosophical stance that goes back to the days of Rousseau, and, hell, earlier. The Garden of Eden. Where does Tree of Life fit into this? The pacing of Tree of Life was so deliberate, and yet so meandering, that I actually welcomed the chance to sit in my chair and think about all of this stuff while the movie was happening. My unfolding thought process during that sequence: "Oh yeah right like that raptor wouldn't eat that other dino up, come ON, Terry, give this bullshit a REST!" And five seconds later, I'm onto Rousseau and thinking about the obsession for Lost Utopias so common to the human race, and then five seconds later I'm thinking, "Oh, look at that pretty exploding volcano." Literally. That was the thought process. Maddening, and yet unique and engaging.

Forgive my lack of segue in what follows, but it's something I really must mention.

The exploding success of not only A Separation but Certified Copy highlights one of the biggest stories of the year which is what is happening in the world of Iranian film. While it is heartening to see these fine films get the recognition they deserve, the situation is brought into stark relief by the persecution being faced by their friends and colleagues in Iran. The daily news from Iran is not only dismaying, but downright appalling: roundups and arrests of filmmakers, closing of theatres. It's war. And so even personal films that are not explicitly political, like A Separation and Certified Copy, become, in a way, political statements about freedom of expression.

I've been writing about Iranian film for years on my site, and the arrest of Jafar Panahi in 2010, with the sentence coming down a few months later, was devastating news. Panahi's films are gritty and natural street dramas (he prefers exteriors) and often deal with the position of women in Iran. The fascinating thing is that The Circle is a brutal depiction of the status of women in his country, a relentless and hopeless film, while Offside, which tells the story of 6 young women who dress up as boys in order to see a soccer game (not being allowed in the stadium as women), treated the whole situation as one big JOKE. Panahi himself said about making the film, "I mean, it just strikes me as funny. Women aren't allowed to see a soccer game. Isn't it absurd?" While Panahi has always had trouble with the authorities, it strikes me that his comedic treatment of the issue in Offside (I saw it in the theatre, and it's pretty much a non-stop romp, with a laugh on almost every line) may have stuck in the mullahs' craws the most. Being laughed at means you are insignificant, it means that people think you are silly.

Panahi's arrest came because he was suspected of making a film critical of the current regime, especially after the violently contested 2009 elections in Iran. His whole family was arrested, and a younger colleague as well. While his family was released, Panahi remains in jail.

When word of Panahi's awful sentence came down (6 years in prison, 20 year ban on film-making, interviews, and no leaving the country) I threw together an impromptu Iranian Film Blogathon on my site. Kevin Lee, the editor at Fandor at the time, asked me to write a piece on my experience with the blogathon. The majority of people were helpful in promoting or participating, and at least Tweeting messages about the blogathon. But I did get a bitchy email from a well-known critic, scoffing at my attempt. I had no illusion that what I was doing was going to help Jafar Panahi in any way. But Iranian film has always interested me (I have written more about Iranian film on my own site than any other genre) and it is important that these issues are addressed. And even more important, these films need to be seen.

Dictatorships require privacy. Tyranny requires the rest of the world to look the other way. I wanted to deny them that, if only for a week, if only in my small corner of the web.

Iranian citizens are some of the most well-wired technologically savvy people on the planet. The state-run media no longer has a monopoly on information. And so you can bet that regular Iranian film fans know exactly what is going on, and know that speeches were made about Panahi at the Berlinale and at Cannes, and these things matter. Do not let the cynics tell you different. And do not let the cynics tell you that it doesn't matter.

They are wrong.

And so the biggest miracle for me this year was seeing Panahi's This Is Not a Film (my review here, filmed on his iPhone and a borrowed camera, the edited footage of which was then smuggled into France inside a cake in order to premiere at Cannes. In the film, Panahi sits in his Tehran apartment, waiting for his sentence to come down. He hopes it won't be the worst. (Of course, it was the worst.) He decides to take this time to describe the movie he had been going to make before he got arrested. He tapes out the floor. He describes his casting choices. He shows us pictures of two of the girls he cast on his iPhone. He describes the opening shot and how the camera will move. He is in the zone of work, like any other director in the planning stages.

At one point, he gets overcome by emotion and says, "If we could tell a film ... why make a film ..."

This Is Not a Film is the most important movie of the year.

In light of Panahi's struggle and his sacrifice, not to mention his courage in making This Is Not a Film in the first place (because he will be tortured for it, and probably has been already), everything else in good old show business pales in comparison.

This is the fight. This is what matters.

If we could tell a film ... why make a film ...

His words reverberate.

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Sheila O'Malley is a playwright, actress and freelance writer who blogs with passion at The Sheila Variations.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

TREE HOUSE #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

TREE HOUSE #8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #10: MESSAGE FROM THE MANAGEMENT

2012-01-21T14:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Tree House Readers:

To say this year’s session inside the rickety construct of the SLIFR Tree House has been a success would be an early candidate for Best Understatement of 2012. The depth of emotion, intelligence and passion of the exchange so far has exceeded my wildest hopes, and the feedback I’ve been getting suggests that many of you feel the same way. I know my beloved Treeks (we all have our favorite term, it seems) would agree.

That’s why we’ve decided to extend our Tree House meeting into next week. So far everyone’s had a chance to submit one post, and we’re getting ready to finish off Round Two. But that’s just not enough— there’s just too much stuff, be it trivial, significant or, as Sheila’s upcoming post will amply prove, really significant left to discuss. So we’ve allowed ourselves three passes each, meaning that we aren’t likely to wrap this up until sometime around this coming Wednesday-- meaning that though we’ll have been at it officially for only eight days, we will have at the end compiled 20 or so posts, the perceptivity and quality of which is something we can and should all be proud.

I think this year’s Tree House has gone a long way toward proving that there is no subject too high or too low to be worth considering as we engage in the process of turning the movies upside-down and inside-out, examining how and why the art of film can touch us in so many different ways, in any given year. And I personally am very proud to be part of a group of writers who can differ and be smart and passionate without turning the Tree House into a mixed martial arts ring. Thanks to Sheila, Jason, Steven, Jim and Simon for making this year’s meeting such a worthy endeavor in every way. Onward to Act 3!

Dennis

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #9: WHERE'S MARTIN YAN WHEN YOU REALLY NEED HIM?

2012-01-20T19:15:00.001-08:00

Wow, that was way more praise than I could have hoped for regarding my scatter-brained opening salvo. Thanks, guys.

I'm pretty bad at looking at the big picture but everyone's posts have given me ample food for thought. I sympathize both with Steve's frustration and his Utopian cinematic dream, too. But after a certain point, I find my perspective is pretty limited when it comes to this kind of speculation. This is not to discount anyone's opinion, within the Tree House or without. But I usually find myself lost when it comes to speculating what magical combination of factors will first convince distributors to release and then trick audiences into watching what I recognize are some fairly obscure but very good movies, many of which I dearly love (ex: I caught the very last screening of Margaret's extremely limited original NYC run with a number of fellow critics and a smattering of regular folks, too!).

But that's why I'm glad that we have the Tree House and other similar pulpits from which intelligent zealots, ordained and unrecognized both, can testify as much as they want. Many of the professional outlets that I write for are absorbed in the useless struggle to cover everything and just produce content, which turns perfectly good pulpits into strip mall booths. Everything must be covered by everyone now but more often than not, "everything" is code for "everything but what outlets consider to be truly marginal stuff."

I spent a lot of last year cranking out content and trying to make my interests fit into various different outlets in order to both further my career and to express myself. Selling out a little bit here and a little bit there is inevitable but only if you look at it as selling out (more on this in a moment; first, some despair and pessimism).

Still: where is there a good spot to speak honestly and prominently about the limited but considerable pleasures of 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy? Blogging is a great way to share your love and ideas with like-minded individuals. But right now, I have to look at moviegoing/writing from my uniquely myopic perspective: A) The rent won't pay itself; B) I'm a professional writer and feel I deserve to be paid for my unique opinion, ideas, etc.; and C) I also want my work to be recognized and read by more than a select group of partisan friends and colleagues. So I write about movies I don't care about and, as a result, become part of the Content-Producing Mass Media Machine (patent pending).

But this year's going to be different, by golly--no, really, stop laughing. Again, I can only comfortably speak for myself. But over the course of last year, my work has reached a new level of visibility, without even my realizing it. New eyes and new voices are finding my stuff and while many don't comment on it except to say, "Hey, that film was produced in 1962, not 1974," I now know that some people DO actually read it and even enjoy it. And that's really heartening. Because, while I don't mean to disparage the impact of AMAZING bloggers like Dennis, Sheila and others, I feel I need to participate in larger media entities in order to flesh out my interests. Because it's too easy to talk about studio releases as corporate products and not recognize some genuinely exciting work happening within those systems. To build off of Sheila's piece, I found some of my favorite bits of acting from last year were in mediocre films. I think Jonah Hill is very good in Moneyball, for instance. But I thought he was also pretty good in The Sitter, a film that even apologists of David Gordon Green's current phase as a slacker comedian are reluctant to embrace.

So is a "Better Than" list necessary? I recently worked with Armond at the New York Press for 2 1/2 years. And I've never felt I needed to concern myself with his work. He did his thing and I did mine. Sometimes our respective things (minds out of the gutter, please) were the same thing, like when we both reviewed Hellboy 2 or when we saw Ken Russell's The Devils when "Russellmania!" was at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. But for the most part, I'm in my own world when I write.

When I write, I like to think (when I do think about this stuff, that is) that I'm sharing my interests, curiosities and shortcomings as a critical viewer. "Critical" does not necessarily mean "negative," though for some reason, people assume being critical means I have an axe to grind with whatever film or TV program I'm not automatically all upons to review. But the bottom line in this profession/hobby/art/whatever-the-fuck is that I'm addressing the work as I see it. Bias is irrelevant: if I respond to something in a film, that's what I'm writing about, ideally. Conveying why I responded to what I feel is important in a work of art is my goal.

So I try to juggle writing about stuff that I'm automatically interested in with writing about stuff that I'm trying to be interested in. Because ultimately, I'm trying to find things that resonate with me, regardless of where my peers/distribution confreres & foes alike/fellow members of the moviegoing public find that film-like object at.

And with that insanely reductive ideal in mind, I think it's easy to say that 2011 was a great year for films. Because there was so much to see if you were willing and able to do the work and look for stuff. Criticism is based on the assumption that we as writers are authority figures. But I'm not any more savvy than the average Joe. If Yan can cook, you can cook too, right?

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Simon Abrams is a freelance writer for Slant and many other publications who also blogs at Extended Cut: Simon Abrams's Film Journal

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See also:

TREE HOUSE 8: RARIFIED REACHES

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #8: RARIFIED REACHES

2012-01-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

Howdy, Treeps,

So many weekday distractions plague an effort like this conversation,but I'm happy that The New York Times stole my attention for a few minutes today. The paper's lead critics, Manhola Dargis and A.O. Scott, interviewed Village Voice legend J.Hoberman. They had a pleasant chat about Hoberman's history and legacyas the most influential Voice film critic since Andrew Sarris. and,earlier, Jonas Mekas. When the conversation got around to the state ofcinephilia today, they had the following exchange after Hoberman mentioned two obscure titles he championed in his final Voice review:

DARGIS I love both those movies. Yet when I write about that kindof work, I can feel as if I’m whispering into the wind, drowned out bythe whirring of the mainstream cinema hype machine, which of course iskept nicely oiled by the entertainment media. I try to resist whiningabout the good old days — though here I do need to point out that film as film is on the verge of extinction even if cinema is not — but the mainstream media pay even less mind to serious cinema than it did. It’s hard to imagine the kind of passionate debate about films like Last Year at Marienbad and even Blue Velvet going on for movies like (Once Upon A Time In) Anatolia except in the more rarefied reaches of the blogosphere, which is good (sometimes) if also an index of the marginalization of serious cinema and the discussion about it.

HOBERMAN What you call “whispering in the wind,” I’d say is speaking through a powerful megaphone. Anyway, there’s still room for novelty and potential for debate. Look at the fracas over The Tree of Life and Melancholia. It just goes to show that, although a great filmmaker like the Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was a minority taste at best among the critics of the ’80s (check out his reviews), his epigones have succeeded in creating significant cine-scandals.

SCOTT I’m glad to hear you say that. I’ve been frustrated by the emergence of a conventional wisdom — not limited to critics — according to which movies have diminished in importance and the arguments about them have diminished in intensity since whenever the good old days are supposed to have been.

As much I'm loving our confab here in the tree, I wish I could have crashed that Hoberman conversation, just to ask him, "Well, what fracas over The Tree of Life and Melancholia? What cine-scandal?" Very few people outside of cineaste circles have ever heard of Lars von Trier, and the alternate title for The Tree of Life, as far as the average American moviegoer is concerned, is That Weird, Horrible Brad Pitt Movie. For most folks, the major seismic events in the Sundance-Toronto-Cannes-Berlin-Venice galaxy are like tribal clashes on the other side of the earth. You can't detect them even if you cup one ear while pressing the other against the ground. So, how is all this great writing about film not tantamount whispering in the wind?

I have a dream. I want to go a multiplex full of people like Dennis, Sheila, Simon, Jason and Jim. I want the treehouse experience everywhere. Simon's amazing appetite for films and his staggering range--comparable to a gourmet whose palate can encompass foie gras and Snickers bars-- simply lights up the room. So does Sheila's appreciation of stellar performances (and how they can hoist a film into the stratosphere), and Jim's genius for revealing formal beauty, and Jason's and Dennis' charismatic ability to lead a wildly ranging cinema discussion gently by the hand rather than dragging it by the hair.

I want the mass audience to be the treehouse. I cannot accept the uncivil future, where those of us in "the rarefied reaches of the blogosphere" retreat to our arthouses and rooftop screenings and home Blu-ray collections, occasionally joining with the unwashed for some thoughtless (or even sometimes pretty great) tentpole flick. It's not enough.

There is so much passion for movies down in places that the smarter film bloggers wouldn't dare visit--with good reason. The ghettos can be dangerous places. But people live there, too. Film culture there thrives on Netflix, cable and bootleg DVD's, and the discussions can become as intense as the fight Hoberman recalls having with Pauline Kael over the documentary Shoah. Except that the range of movies under discussion doesn't reach even a fraction as far "up" as our treehouse talks range "down." An intrepid film blogger like Dennis can dig Brett Ratner's Tower Heist, an Eddie Murphy comedy that a great many in the lower classes are likely to have seen, and Certified Copy, a film just as accessible and relevant to their lives but from which they are discouraged from even peeking at, like Bronx teenagers shooed out of Bronxville. There are spiritual riches in all kinds of movies, but only a certain class of people gets a gander at the whole menu.

In other words, I don't care what Armond White is after. That's his business. I had no intention of making his attitude a major topic here. It's just that, in my own ignorance, I can't think of another professional critic who laments that the entire framework of our culture is built to lift certain people up while writing others off as lost causes. I know plenty of raving street corner prophets (myself, for one), who share this understanding, but few who are employed in media. So I'm not celebrating Mr. White; I'm emphasizing the importance of resistance in a culture that the ministers of powerful institutions use to make life more comfortable and comprehensible for themselves while discouraging a sense of possibility and true communication for the mass of us. In this sense, I'm less concerned with what individual filmmakers manage to push through the system than in what the system wants.

I'm glad that Margaret touched a lot of my colleagues with its observations on the messy entanglements and disconnects of city living, but marketing such a film strictly to the arthouse crowd is like holding a marriage counseling session with just one spouse.

That's it for now. Next time at bat, I promise to speak more on all your specific loves, and--hallelujah-- the movie moments I actually love from last year.=

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Steven Boone is a freelance writer whose work can be found at Capital New York, The Demanders (RogerEbert.com), Press Play and Hentai Lab.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #7: BOMBAST, BIG BUDGETS, BREAKFAST BURRITOS

2012-01-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

My Favorite Treeks:

In Burbank there’s a great spot for a breakfast burrito just down the street from where I work. It’s the glorious fulfillment of the concept of wrapping a warm tortilla around a giant mound of eggs, potatoes and (choose your breakfast meat, or not), all blanketed with melted cheese and embedded pockets— Surprise!-- of the hottest jalapeno salsa allowable to the public without signing a release. The problem is, they also ain’t a secret, and over the past 12 years that my office has been in the neighborhood, more and more people have figured out that this little shack on the corner of Victory and Verdugo is ground zero for a truly remarkable portable breakfast. On any given morning you can wait in line for as much as an hour in between placing your order and the big payoff. So yesterday I printed out Steven and Jason’s posts and brought them with me to read over while I sat and waited, and by the time I left I was less interested in eating breakfast (or doing my day’s worth of office work) than I was getting a chance to respond to those posts and everything else that has been swirling inside the Tree House this week. There’s way too much to get to in one post, that’s for sure, but I’m happy to be able to stop squirming and get my next shot.

One of the things that Simon’s post reminded me of, emphatically, is that there’s so much more to see than it’s possible to see, and that’s obviously true whatever your temperament toward the current state of film distribution, or the state of filmmaking in general, happens to be. I came away from reading his post practically dizzy from the sense of how much goes on for which I have precious few resources or opportunities to partake. It’s not uncommon to scroll down to the comments thread of a post from a critic who’s willing to share that experience, and dare to choose titles to talk about (especially in an end-of-the-year context) that people haven’t seen, only to see them having to shield themselves from accusations of being “elitist” or otherwise self-promoting in their showcasing of movies beyond the mainstream than much of the general public, or even the online community of film writers, wouldn’t be interested in seeing even if they had the chance. And that’s the thing—there is now more of a chance, thanks to Netflix streaming and other (legal) online streaming services and specialty DVDs. So when I read a post or column like the one Simon wrote, I break out my writing utensils and start taking notes, because I want to remember the names of the movies that aren’t going to get Dark Knight-sized promotional pushes and seek them out whenever I’m able.

This is what I was alluding to in my initial raising of the subject of Armond White’s “Better Than” list, though as I wrote to Jason a couple days ago I fear that more of my bemusement in calling it “one of my favorite lists” of the year overwhelmed the arching of my eyebrows and consequently conveyed less of my genuine impatience for White’s shell games than I intended. The reason I would have never thought to make the connection between Paul and Uncle Boonmee is that there is likely little, perhaps none, to be made, and as Jim pointed out, if there was you’d scarcely know it from reading White’s 15 or so words on the comparison. Even his longer reviews are shrouded in this kind of “better than” silliness, but the comparison there, as in the shorter format, is not between movies (though it is often reliably that as well) but between White and the rest of the critical community, whose own “myopic resistance” to seeing the world as he does is somehow incontrovertible evidence of their (our) corruption. I like the fact that White sometimes reminds me of things I need to pay attention to, but unfortunately reading him is an unpleasant chore. The joy of encountering Simon’s list and taking away titles for further reference is that when Simon talks about Le Quattro Volte or The Last Circus or any number of other movies you may not have seen, he’s not trying to impress you with his breadth of experience or chiding you for not taking more chances outside the envelope—he genuinely loves these movies and you get a sense, even in just a couple of sentences, as to why. Dare I say that reading Simon is “better than”…

My own list of things I have yet to see from the past year is perhaps even more daunting and potentially embarrassing than usual. Among fiction films I still haven’t caught up with are A Dangerous Method, Certified Copy, 13 Assassins, Weekend, Shame, The Skin I Live In, Take Shelter, A Separation and The Descendants, and the list of documentaries I need to absorb, is, to my mind, even more egregious: Into the Abyss, Project Nim, Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, Senna, Pina, The Black Power Mixtape 1969-1975, Page One: Inside the New York Times, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop and perhaps the ones I want to see most, Mark Landsman’s Thunder Soul, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory and Alex Gibney’s Catching Hell. Given that there’s still that much (and more, believe me) left on my plate for 2011, and that the list of my favorites among what I have seen ain’t exactly deviled ham, it’s hard for me to concur with Jim’s feeling that 2011 had fewer truly memorable, notable offerings than last year. My own top 10 list is, like Jim’s and perhaps others here, weighted toward films made outside the confines of the Hollywood star-maker machinery, but it’s still possible that on that list as many as four slots out of that arbitrary 10 could be occupied by the likes of War Horse, Contagion, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and even that corporate totem Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.

If I dig a little further down, I find titles like The Adventures of Tintin, Bridesmaids, Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, X Men: First Class and Hugo-- perhaps no one’s idea of art cinema, and maybe not movies any of us (including me) would want to necessarily promote as flawless classics. But they are, it seems to me, honorable examples of the kind of movies that, for better and/or worse, Hollywood has always done well—big, commercial, exploitable. That the system and the business model for ever-inflated budgets which in turn propagate the requirement of ever more ridiculously high box-office pole vaults in order to just break even could still result in fleeting glimpses of “product” even close to the quality of these movies signals to me that, fucked-up though things may be, all is not lost. I do think, Steven, for me, there must be a middle ground between the rejection of mainstream Hollywood and total resignation to the level of corruption and greed that exists there.

And of course I often worry that what passes for film journalism is just so much genuflection to what studios and publicists feed to the media. How many cute articles were there about Ryan Reynolds prepping for the task of embodying a beloved DC Comics legend for the movies, or Michael Fassbender’s frontal nudity quotient and parties devoted to bar-hopping through the Manhattan watering holes his character frequented in the few days before The Green Lantern and Shame (to pick two movies out of a hat) were released? Yet a week or two later, once those movies’ water-cooler cache has dried up and they turn out not to be box-office juggernauts or phenomena of the zeitgeist, it’s on to the next thing, and the movie gets tossed to the floor like one of Fassbender’s used Kleenex tissues (if you know what I mean). And that’s perfectly okay with the studios, because a movie like The Green Lantern practically evaporates on screen anyway. By Friday night’s last curtain (Curtains! Remember them?) studio honchos and box-office experts have already assigned the movie in question a pass or fail—what good does further discussion of the picture, any picture, as art or a significant artifact of culture do for them?

When folks like us actually talk about movies beyond their sell date, as if they mattered, it’s often perceived, except by those who care and know how to listen, as just more distraction, more noise. So I definitely sympathize with the despair I sensed in your comments, Steven, which I would hesitate to characterize as a harangue, even though those in charge of shepherding the relevance of this particular art form are in need of a good ass-whipping. But on the other hand I would be nothing less than hypocritical if I said that I believed we were at a cultural dead end, no matter how often I stumble, dazed, out of something like The Green Lantern or Real Steel or Fast Five and feel like just giving up. Because someone like Bennett Miller or Rupert Wyatt or Joe Johnston always manages to sneak in there and deliver something that works completely within the Hollywood model yet manages to shake things up a bit, make us sit up and believe that good, intelligent work is still possible when we stumble onto something as sharp and, yes, heartfelt as Moneyball, Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Captain America: The First Avenger. Gee, even Gore Verbinski managed to make up for those Pirates of the Caribbean movies by crafting the year’s best animated feature, Rango, with a sensibility so far left of Pixar as to be located closer to the realms of Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Casteneda and Sergio Leone.

Sheila, I’m so happy that you’re here to talk about acting. I wish I could chime in on The Descendants and/or Margaret in terms of what’s going on there in their ensembles, but I haven’t had the opportunity to see them yet. I do think that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has just about the best all-around cast of the year and the kind of acting that is utterly invigorating in its micro-efficiency. If you aren’t attuned to the kind of information skittering across the poker-faced resignation of Gary Oldman’s Smiley like tiny snaps of static electricity, that poker face itself a mask on top of a mask, or the way the other actors submit to Le Carre’s universe of deception, repression and hidden agendas in similar fashion, sparking bitter rivalry and revelations in subtle sideward glances, then the movie might seem just a confusing husk of jargon and pregnant pauses. But it’s such an evocative piece of filmmaking in large part because of how the actors embody and embolden that minimalist approach and become integrated with director Tomas Alfredson’s allusive conjuring of this tactile, lived-in, entirely non-nostalgic period piece.

As a complete aside, last week I was privy to an online conversation in which someone tried to put forth the notion that TTSS was a dud because Oldman seemed, to this person, to be dozing through the movie. My own thought—especially as one who has had attention-deficit problems in the past related to the consumption of movies based on John Le Carre books (I’m looking at you, The Little Drummer Girl) was that it obviously wasn’t Oldman who was asleep. But this person then trotted out Oldman’s personal politics as a reason for discounting the film, and it was at that point I had to tune out. As Steven probably correctly surmised, Oldman’s political views are not ones any of us here might be likely to fall in line with, and we might wish he’d keep those views to himself. But I also doubt any of us would be so inclined to suggest he hasn’t the right to hold those views or to base our response to an actor’s work on screen on whether or not he votes in lockstep with right-wing reactionaries.

While I’m on the subject of ensembles and acting, I wonder if any of you have had a chance yet to see Ralph Fiennes’ film of Coriolanus. (Watch out! Here’s my bid to being timely and topical, as the movie opens today after a limited Oscar-qualifying release in December.) It’s precisely the sort of movie with which actors love being involved for obvious reasons, the opportunity to speak those words that Shakespeare wrote (Yeah, he did, Roland Emmerich) being primary among them. But another one has to be that the movie was directed by Ralph Fiennes, a fellow actor, and as such those in the cast must have been relatively assured that Fiennes would be sensitive to their needs as performers, to be predisposed to want to focus on the elements of performance that would make them look best, be most effective on screen. However, other than adequately framing and showcasing the towering presence of Vanessa Redgrave, whose effectiveness as Coriolanus’s willful, force-of-nature-like mother couldn’t be denied by even the most egregious hack, and occasionally magnifying his own physical prowess in the lead role, it seems to me that Fiennes undercuts the power of his cast, the power of those words, by having not a clue as to what to do with the camera. Fiennes loves his actors’ faces (including his own, of course), and so he keeps that camera jammed in their mugs constantly, when he’s not staging confusing, Hurt Locker-derived battle action.

At the expense of fully shaping and fulfilling the Bosnian setting in which he modernizes Shakespeare’s plot (what little of it there actually is), Fiennes chooses to establish a pattern of relentless examination of faces and then demonstrate no inkling of how to ground those shots in the geography of the scene or, more importantly, when to back away and allow the physical action, the physical movement of those actors, to shed the limits of his directorial claustrophobia. The scene where Coriolanus shouts down the senate and denies his people the satisfaction of getting behind the policies of war he himself initiated is, of course, compelling as written, but rendered in a flurry of shaky camerawork and other ugly business, all shot too close and jittery, the handheld aesthetic of big-screen TV and faux documentary features misplaced and run amok. Coriolanus is not a Baz Luhrmann-level abomination, by any means, but it strikes me as one of the more misjudged films of Shakespeare ever made.

Finally, in further defense of crass commercialism and at the further risk of my credibility (my wife already thinks I’m nuts for it), I’ll posit as one of my favorite ensembles of the year the cast of Tower Heist, directed though it may be by that guy whose feet aren’t nearly big enough to fill up his mouth, no matter how often he insists on jamming them in there. This is big, clunky sausage-factory moviemaking that just happens to be very entertaining, and the roster of game actors, including Tea Leoni, Matthew Broderick, Michael Pena, Ben Stiller, Alan Alda, Gabourey Sidibe, Casey Affleck, Stephen Henderson, Nina Arianda and, of course, Eddie Murphy, are all given clever, amusing business and their own moments to shine, which is often more than Irwin Allen or Sir Lew Grade offered their casts of thousands. It’s all in service to a pretty disposable end, but hell, Hollywood history is littered with disposable movies (albeit ones not nearly so expensive as this one) that are treasure troves of individual moments of grace and humor. I would nominate the brief scene between Murphy and Sidibe, an innuendo-laden would-be seduction staged over the tumblers of an ostensibly uncrackable safe, as one of my favorite things about the past year in movies.

God, am I glad we’ve decided go long into next week on this year’s Tree House. There’s so much more I want to touch on-- Bill Cunningham New York; Jason’s notion of releasing movies anonymously and how it relates to War Horse (go right ahead, Jason!); how movies in 2011 approached subjects as varied as Alzheimer’s and religious faith; plus some more favorite moments. There’s just too much stuffing to put in this burrito. Time to set it aside, digest and look forward to the next meal.

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Dennis Cozzalio is the proprietor of the blog you are now reading as well as the gatekeeper of the Tree House. Come on in and grab a brew. Don’t cost nothin’.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE POST #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK

TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #6: DISCOVERY THROUGH A SECOND LOOK:

2012-01-19T20:29:00.000-08:00

Dearest Tree Housers of Life:

Great to be back with Dennis, Sheila and Jason -- and to welcome new pledges Boone and Simon. (No Animal House hazing, Dennis!) I'd forgotten how great the view is from up here. Why, you can see all the way to early 2011! Or is that Catalina?

Let me start off by saying that never before in my 40-or-so years of professional and non-professional year-end movie-list-making can I recall so little of interest from the major Hollywood studios. While several of my favorites were produced or distributed by (semi-)autonomous "dependents" (Focus Features, a division of NBC Universal; Fox Searchlight, a division of 20th Century-Fox; Sony Classics, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment), when the year was up I had only one serious studio candidate for my top films of the year, and that was the Columbia Pictures release Moneyball. (And if you've read about how that one eventually got made, it was more like an indie directed by Bennett Miller and protected from executive interference by the star/producer clout of Brad Pitt. Some of Soderbergh's planned, but studio-vetoed, improvisational freshness remains.)

Regarding Boone's and Jason's comments about A----- W----, the self-publicist whose name I long ago stopped mentioning in public because 1) getting mentioned is his only reason for writing; 2) he has nothing to say; and 3) there's no reason for anyone beyond the insignificant number of people who already know who he is to know who he is: I'll just let one item from his recent facile "better-than" list speak for itself: "Film Socialisme > The Tree of Life: Godard pinpoints outmoded media and politics, defying Terrence Malick’s arty navel-gazing. Relevance vs. Irrelevance." Think what you will about Godard's or Malick's latest, you'll get nothing of substance about them from AW. As you can see, language has no meaning here, because AW has no desire to marshall evidence, to persuade or to be understood, merely to assert the imagined supremacy of his own specious, knee-jerk careerism/contrarianism.

As Boone says, a company that peddles crap like Transformers: Dark of the Moon should indeed be considered "as unconscionable a polluter and exploiter as Walmart." And, I would add, self-proclaimed reviewers who debase critical standards and language itself the way MichaelBayJerryBruckheimer debase cinematic language are equally culpable. AW is just Ben Lyons with a contemptuous following that consists almost entirely of New York critics and bloggers who like to snicker at him and feel superior to his incessant, defensive claims of superiority over everyone else.

Oh dear. Did I just waste two paragraphs on this antiquated vaudevillian comedy act? Sorry. Moving on…

Sheila, I fell in love with all the actors in Kenneth Lonergan's long-delayed Margaret, which I was fortunate enough to see even though it never played Seattle. (UPDATE: Margaret is now scheduled to open at SIFF's Uptown Theatre January 27, 2012! #teammargaret) Surely, no movie has ever loved its actors more than Margaret (and I'm not calling you "Shirley") -- not surprising, coming from playwright (This is Our Youth) and screenwriter/director (You Can Count On Me) Lonergan. He gives them so much to play in every single scene -- the volleying for control, the efforts to be understood (or willingness to be misunderstood as a form of aggression). Hardly anybody comes out and says what they mean, and even when they try, the more specific they attempt to get, the more elusive and ambivalent their real feelings and desires become. We all know the movie was shot in 2005 (when the lead, Anna Paquin, still looked like a teenager), and got mired in post-production and contractual disputes until 2011 (they're still not resolved). But of the new theatrical releases I saw this last year, I'd put Paquin at the top for (as they say at SAG) "Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role," and Jeannie Berlin for "Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role," followed by Allison Janney and J. Smith-Cameron.

For "Outstanding Performance by a Cast," it would be a tough call indeed (a tie!) between the fiery Margaret and the cool, underplayed (but equally subtle), male-dominated cast of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I fell in love with Alfredson's movie because of the way it looks, and the precision and imagination with which it is directed and designed. What I didn't expect was how deeply the performances would move me: Gary Oldman (his finest mature work ever?), John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, David Dencik (look for him as the young cop in David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Ciarán Hinds, Kathy Burke ("My boys. My beautiful boys…"), Amanda Fairbank-Hynes…

Tinker Tailor is my choice (and many of my film-critic friends' for best English language movie of the year -- a movie that demands and rewards close study (espionage is, in essence, the study of human behavior as if under a microscope), since that's what it's about. (I like to imagine it on a double-bill with another impeccable epistemological period thriller, Zodiac.) Jason has a beautiful appreciation of it here that gets to the heart of the movie: "The complexities of the plot are reason enough to see the movie (at least) twice, but there’s also this: Among other things, Tinker Tailor is actually about the act of reexamination, the discovery of new details through a second look at the familiar." Beautifully said.

As for The Tree of Life, I'm afraid it did not stick with me. When I saw it a second time, it seemed a much less mysterious and open-ended experience. The prayerful voiceovers refer fairly directly (even literally) to what's on-screen (it's just that the first time through you don't know who's who), and the white-light-on-the-beach ending feels like an embarrassment of cliches. As a scholarly cinephiliac friend said, in horror: "It was like going to church!" And not in a liberating way, but in a punishing, stifling way. Yes, I love the Waco passages in the middle, and I'm not arguing that the movie should have been more conventional; I'm saying I think it stumbles when it is most conventional (or stale, trite) -- as in the portrayal of the dinosaurs and the adult Jack's wanderings in the wasteland, both urban and (super-)natural.

Is Tree of Life a skillfully ambiguous, create-your-own-meaning movie? Or just a mess? (I'd say it has less justification for flying apart at the end than Margaret, the last hour of which at least reflects its teenage protagonist's frenzied state of mind.) I'd love to get your responses to this particular, much-discussed moment between dinosaurs. I wrote about it here, but I'd like to know what you make of it:

Oh, and, for the record, my favorite (these are, to paraphrase Bill Haydon) emotional preferences as much as aesthetic ones) theatrical releases of 2011, because they gave me the most joy, are, in rough order of preference: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy; Asgar Farhadi's A Separation; Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff; Lars von Trier's Melancholia; Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret; Lee Chang-dong's Poetry; Lech Majewski's The Mill and the Cross; David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method...

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Jim Emerson is a film critic whose work can be found at MSN as well as many other outlets, in print and online. He is also the Web master for Roger Ebert.com and presides over his own filmic domain, the influential and excellent blog Scanners.

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TREE HOUSE POST #5: PEDIGREE "BETTER THAN" HYPE?

TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #5: PEDIGREE ‘BETTER THAN’ HYPE?

2012-01-19T09:56:00.000-08:00

Tree Peeps (Treeps?) –

Before I get around to telling you how Steven sat next to me while I had my biggest cinematic orgasm of 2011, let me begin by throwing some cold water on his typically cogent flames, lest the tree house burn down before everyone has had a turn.

Indeed, when 13 of the 17 highest grossing movies of 2011 are sequels, prequels or reboots of been-there, done-that movie franchises, and when the exceptions to the rule include The Smurfs, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, which aren’t technically part of a movie franchise (yet) but might as well be, it’s easy to feel as if Hollywood is becoming ever more soulless, ever more selfish, ever more myopic to the bottom line.

It’s easy to feel that way because I think it’s true.

But let’s go no further before correcting the record on one thing: Armond White’s “better than” list more closely resembles Hollywood in its current state than it chips away at “the whole rotten system.” With immediate full disclosure that the “better than” head-trip is the only White joint that I read this year, its mission is as transparent as ever: to promulgate the Armond White Brand.

White doesn’t attack Hollywood with his “better than” piece. How could he? His infallible hero, Steven Spielberg, was made from Hollywood’s rib and, along with George Lucas, helped create the original sin that subsequently has mass-reproduced to the point that now each spring, summer and fall (and sometimes winter) the multiplexes are stuffed with merchandise-peddling (wannabe) blockbusters. No, White’s attacks are aimed at critics in the hopes of grabbing the attention of the masses, using a shock-jock style reminiscent of early Howard Stern – he doesn’t care if you love him or hate him so long as you pay attention to him. (Which is why I haven’t paid attention, by the way, and why I’m hesitant to mention him now, but the extreme altitude of the tree house apparently has me dizzy.)

How delighted Armond must have been that The Almighty Spielberg made two movies this year, The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse, that except in fleeting moments never come close to Spielberg’s greatest works or even his very good ones, thus giving White the opportunity to be both pro-Spielberg and anti-smug-hipster simultaneously. His version of a win-win.

“Contrarian” is the label permanently attached to White, and it’s accurate, and the most infuriating thing about his enterprise is that he refuses to admit his mission statement – like big tobacco denying the addictive properties of cigarettes. “Film tastes” have nothing to do with that “better than” list. Self-idolatry is more like it, which is precisely why each entry consists of only about 25 words of explanation – because just like Hollywood, White doesn’t care how much you enjoy the show or if you learn anything so as long as you buy a ticket.

That said, Steven, I think you’re right that critics (and other engaged cinephiles) are as susceptible to the Hollywood hype machine as the average moviegoer. The hype factory affects not just which movies win awards but, long before that, which movies enter the discussion forum to begin with, en route to being entered into countless Netflix queues later on. And while this unfortunate reality inspires you to dream of a world without the ballyhoo and the “bargain” matinee prices that are anything but, it inspires me to think of something just as unrealistic:

What would our cinematic discussions look like if movies were released anonymously?

We’d still recognize Tom Cruise scaling that skyscraper in Mission Impossible and the Deathly Hallows (that was the title, right?). But if we didn’t know that Brad Bird directed MI:4 (yeah, yeah, Ghost Protocol), would I have encountered as many claims that it has the best action sequences since The Incredibles, which, surprise, Bird also directed? Likewise, would Moneyball have been approached as openly as “serious cinema,” rather than dismissed as frivolous “sports cinema,” if super-screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian weren’t attached? And would the movie geek-o-sphere (which I’m happy to call home) have gone so crazy about that opening credits sequence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is sometimes mentioned as if it’s more significant than the film that follows it, if we didn’t know it was a David Fincher product, or would that sequence have been dismissed as some overly-stylish James Bond-esque trifle?

Knowing the artist behind a film creates expectations, and, don’t get me wrong, that can be extremely valuable. The perfect example from 2011 is The Tree of Life, which famously frustrated some casual moviegoers who had their expectations set by the A-list acting talent on the marquee (Brad Pitt and Sean Penn) rather than by the name of the anonymous-as-he-can-be auteur who made it, Terrence Malick. But regardless of whether you loved The Tree of Life or hated it, or something in between, if you were familiar with Malick’s cinema, the movie couldn’t have seemed out of character, even if you didn’t quite understand why dinosaurs needed to make a cameo.

Often, though – and I suspect The Tree of Life’s critics would say it applies here, too – these kinds of expectations can be as destructive as the multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns and the celebrity-making profiles in Entertainment Weekly, because they encourage us to find relevance, depth or, to use a Tree of Life buzzword, grace, that might not be there at all – or, hell, maybe it is there, but our ingrained distrust of the artist or our hatred of the artist’s politics, peccadilloes or Polanski-level assaults convinces us to see past them.

I didn’t make an official top 10 list this year (although I did write a wide-ranging "bests" list), but if I had, I’m certain that J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 would be within arm’s length of it. It’s a “flawed” film (sorry, Mr. Ebert), but, as I wrote earlier this year, it does a super job of capturing “the mixture of ambition, naïveté, insecurity, cheer and general naked emotionality of childhood,” and I loved it for that.

Apparently forgotten by now, several months and two impressive young-newcomer performances in The Tree of Life later, is the bravely lonesome and vulnerable performance by Joel Courtney as Joe Lamb, the young protagonist. More memorable is the performance by Elle Fanning, as Alice Dainard, the mysterious (because to young boys all girls are mysterious) object of Joe’s affection, who makes jaws drop on the screen and off of it with a powerful tearful goodbye to her movie-within-a-movie husband.

But I don’t bring up Super 8 because it’s among my most cherished movies of the past year. Rather, it’s because if 2011’s movies had been released anonymously, I suspect Super 8 wouldn’t have been derided as a corrupt Spielberg ripoff, as it was by many, but instead would have been confused for the real thing. (OK, so maybe it would have needed 75 percent fewer lens flares. But you get the idea.) Because when we look at the movies themselves, removed from all the implications of expectations, it’s Super 8 that has the spirit of Spielberg, and it’s Tintin, with its never-ending parade of action sequences that seem lifted from Spielberg’s previous films and mashed-up in digitally animated, motion-captured form, that feels like an impostor, and it’s War Horse that, despite its epic scope, seems atypically small.

Point is, Hollywood isn’t the only one building myths around products that haven’t yet hit the screen. We do that on our own, which is why we’re so susceptible to the breeze from Hollywood’s hurricane.

So which movies and moments really moved me in 2011? Given that I’ve rambled so long already, I’ll have to dip into that next time. (One entry in and my tree house membership is already in jeopardy; not good.)

For now, I’ll close with this:

I don’t give a rip about the Golden Globes. (This year I watched a few minutes here and there. Most years I don’t.) And I detest the pre-show “horserace” analysis of the Academy Awards. And while I admit feeling a strange satisfaction when a performance or film I love happens to win an Oscar, I don’t lose any sleep over “snubs.” But I do watch the Academy Awards – every minute, every year – because I still subscribe to the belief, however unhip, that movies are better off with the Oscars than without them.

Yes, I recognize the ills: The subjectivity of it all. The influence of hype. The way Harvey Weinstein seems to have mastered the art of buying those golden statuettes. The way the three-movie-a-year consumer could be fooled into thinking that he/she happened to see the best movie made that year. (Way to go, James Cameron.)

But here’s the thing: For each nomination tied to a high-profile, mega-money, fast-food-friendly, box-office-busting vapid Hollywood spectacle, there’s another tied to a movie that has a 20-minute creation sequence instead of 2 hours of CGI-crafted destruction, that has opera on the soundtrack instead of a Billboard hit, that speaks in italics instead of ALL-CAPS.

Whether the average consumer seeks out these lower-profile, smaller-budget, foreign-tasting, struggling-to-break-even movies is up to them, of course. But even when the Oscars are helping Hollywood print money by confirming the greatness of the already successful, they still create the best “better than” service I know.

JB

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Jason Bellamy ruminates on cinema at The Cooler and is a regular contributor to Slant Magazine’s The House Next Door, coauthoring The Conversations series with Ed Howard. He’s also a contributor to Press Play. Follow him on Twitter.

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TREE HOUSE POST #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #4: CHURCH OF THE MULTIPLEX

2012-01-18T10:14:00.000-08:00

Like any other year, 2011 showed me some good movies, but I never feel compelled to celebrate them during awards season. In fact, I would love to terminate all awards shows tied to the gang of conglomerates we still refer to as Hollywood. They are empty pageants for salesmen, gossips and the liberal faction of the 1%. It seems crazy that glitz and glamour are the aspects of old Hollywood that endure on life support in the new century, while the stuff of value, good old-fashioned storytelling, has given way to what I call Junior Secretary Filmmaking--movies made with such chirpy efficiency and plastic personality that they should work the front desk at the Church of Scientology.

Hey there, y'all. This tree house is a perfect perch from which to lob my rocks. :-)

Dennis, I'm glad you brought up Armond White. What sets White's Better-than list aside from typical raincoat-flashing contrarianism is its disgust at the whole rotten system. It's one thing to bitch about this or that film's failures and betrayals. It's a whole 'nother bag of trouble to declare the industry at large culturally toxic. White might be all over the place in his film tastes, but he has been mighty consistent in his disdain for knee-jerk careerism.

I sense in critics in general a dependence upon and automatic deference to whomever is this year's buzz or big spender. Even in the most coolly analytical reviews I sense an undercurrent of fear of missing the boat, of losing relevance in a media climate that now moves faster than light. That's what all this constant Tweeting is about. Even snark directed at absurdly bankrupt studio product has the character of counterintuitive studio PR. To gripe that Transformers: Dark of the Moon is trash is one thing. To say that the studio which produced it is as unconscionable a polluter and exploiter as Walmart (my words, not White's) is a whole 'nother 'nother. Few who wish to earn some kind of living at film criticism are willing to go quite there.

But why? Is there really so much to lose at this point? Do we need to cooperate with the studios so readily in order to produce commentary someone other than our aunties might read?

Or is the general sentiment that these corporate entities rest so deep in the culture that we can't cut them loose without severing some vital cultural artery?

Mainstream movies rounded out their turn-for-the-worse in 2011-- bigger, louder, meaner and uglier than ever, in Digital 3-D, IMAX, Grope-o-Vision, whatever. The multiplex experience is now a nightmare of strenuous mediocrity. Responding to Hollywood's insults in kind, audience members have taken to texting and chattering openly. They simply don't give a flip, because at this point the contempt is trickle-down: The last man on the movie chain before the film meets your eyeballs, the projectionist, is now a mere file clerk, activating some time-sensitive digital copy of Jack and Jill from a windowless bunker once known as the projection booth. He is the same kid who, when filling in at the concession stand, dribbles into your popcorn when you're not looking.

Or am I the toxic one, failing to see that the movies, even the giant, metal-munching ones, can still be a force for good in the world?

From this perspective, it's hard for me to weigh in on which individual 2011 titles are memorable. I recently submitted a list to Fandor to which I neglected to add some solid honorable mentions like 13 Assassins, Fright Night, The First Grader, My Joy, Road to Nowhere, Silent Souls and, yes, Dennis, Uncle Boonmee. World cinema is evergreen, but here in the States it continues to serve a select clientele, even as blessings like Netflix and YouTube randomly broaden palates. The problem is that demographic apartheid still reigns like Ghaddaffi.

All of the films we love from last year should have been available at the multiplex, for cheap or even free. There are ways to make this happen, but the major studios and exhibitors don't care to explore such options. It's not enough that we can access virtually the whole platter as Video on Demand rentals and online streams. So long as mainstream commercial theaters remain in business, they function as quasi-public spaces, and as such have the potential to reinforce (and even awaken) the kind of humanist values that we all complain are lacking out in the street. The multiplex could be a space far more transformative than school or church-- as American movies once were. Right about now, it can't even compete with a sports bar.

In other words, The Tree of Life should have been available for free or dirt cheap at every multiplex that carried it, in a quiet corner auditorium. And, Sheila, the same goes for Juliet Binoche and her lipstick. And experimental films. And silents (real ones, not just The Artist). And little, delicate DIY films, from Maya Deren to Lena Dunham. And, Simon, Love Exposure and Film Socialisme. We are not serious about liberal, progressive values (yep, I am assuming everybody in this discussion claims liberal and progressive) if we go another year comfortable with a cinema landscape this undemocratic, stratified and mercenary.

Pass the chips.

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Steven Boone is a freelance writer whose work can be found at Capital New York, The Demanders (RogerEbert.com), Press Play and Hentai Lab.

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See also:

TREE HOUSE POST #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #3: FESTIVAL FAVORITES AND NETFLIX NUGGETS

2012-01-18T09:49:00.001-08:00

Halloa, halloa.

Firstly, allow me to say how freaking cool it is to be in such good company. Thanks for the invite, Dennis.

Next, boy, how ‘bout that 2011? Last year was for me a thoroughly exciting and exhausting year. I keep track of how many films I’ve seen in a year and last year, I saw a total of 515 or so new features. Meaning 515 films that were new to me, not 515 movies that were releases theatrically in the year. I was and am still a glutton for films and took as many opportunities as possible to gorge on tons o’ stuff that struck my fancy. Going to the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals were a real treat because I got to see movies by filmmakers I love and make great new friends.

I also worked my ass off to write as much as I could about all the films I saw. And I am constantly surprised and excited to learn that people actually read that stuff. I know that sounds like false modesty or some shit. But really, I couldn’t be more thankful.

Next: I must charge Dennis with heresy, which is sad since he’s the one that invited me into the Tree House in the first place. I mean, not liking The Tree of Life? Gosh, you’re really asking for it, pard.

Actually, I probably would have been sincerely upset about knowing that you weren’t over the moon for Malick’s latest a few months ago, Dennis. It’s a film that I think has a lot of knotty, fascinating things to say about how Malick sees God. His God is a flawed parent figure that learns from us as much as we do from him. Brad Pitt’s character also reminded me of my late grandfather (the scene at the diner where he’s flirting with the waitress reminded me of my dad’s father so much; I miss him dearly). I got a lot out of The Tree of Life and can’t think of a more vivid 2011 title.

But realistically, there are so many new (as in they were either produced or released in 2011) movies I want to share with my fellow Tree House members, so many things that I think you should see, so much cool stuff!

Too often when people make lists of the best films of the year, they ignore all the smaller parts, performances and ideas that impressed them. The empirical need to classify, however subjectively, one’s own absolute favorite films is understandable and a compulsion I totally get. But how about that one scene where the butcher in The Butcher, The Chef and The Swordsman cuts a horse in half with his cleaver? The movie’s not exactly a keeper. But I crack up just thinking about that scene.

Or how about Scabbard Samurai, a movie that hasn’t yet been released theatrically in America but was produced in 2011 and is surely one of my favorite films of the year? I mean, yes, I love Film Socialisme’s capitalist conspiracy theory hoohaa and Take Shelter’s gutting penultimate scene and wow, how about Love Exposure, folks, the best film by a filmmaker most Americans hadn’t even heard of until somebody said, “Jeepers, lookit this 4-hour tribute to Christ-like boners and finding divinity through perversion!”*

But what about all the other neat STUFF? I can’t think of another word for it other than “stuff” because there’s just so much of it and none of it fits together well. But hey, let’s throw some of it against a wall and see if any of it sticks with you as much as it has with me:

13: I adore this DTV meathead opus. It’s totally stupid but it’s so drunk on testosterone that I kind of fell in love with it. This short list of cast members should give you a hint as to why: Sam Riley, Michael Shannon, Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Ray Winstone, BEN GAZZARA, 50 Cent. I wrote about it s’more here.

Amigo: There are certain scenes and dramatic flourishes in this square drama that I fucking adore. This was the point where I realized: yup, I’m a John Sayles fan.

L’Amour Fou: The best character studies embrace and are maybe even a little bit about the limits of their knowledge, I think.

Conan the Barbarian: This movie’s the pits. But that Jason Momoa kid’s real good.

Dark Horse: Saw this one at Toronto. And all I could think while watching it (apart from gawping at Brian De Palma, who was seated riiiight across the aisle from me) was that Todd Solondz got into my head. Somehow, he got into my head. And he made a movie about what high school-aged me was most afraid of: being trapped in Long Island for the rest of my deceptively protracted adolescent life. This is a film about what an entitled fish-out-of-water teenager secretly fears he’ll become when he grows up, but only if he remains a Long Islander (Until 13, I lived in Queens, New York; then I moved a few to a house that’s literally three houses on the right of the Long Island/Queens border. And I became an angry young man…okay, angrier).

This black comedy hit so close to home that I was practically hyperventilating while watching it. I almost died twice after I recognized two childhood landmarks: 1) the office building where the lead protag’s dad works (it’s in Roslyn, near where my nana lives); and 2) the Scobee Diner from one scene (Scobee’s closed now but it used to be a staple of the community and my pre-adolescent life). I repeat: Todd Solondz got into my head. And he fucked me up.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: A very sharp remake, yessir.

Extraterrestrial: The reception at Toronto for Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s moving follow-up to Time Crimes, his slightly superior time travel thriller, was curiously non-existent. Oh, well. Extraterrestrial’s one of my favorites of this year’s festival titles, a clever science fiction film that’s more about the interpersonal drama that results from an absurd, unthinkable event than it is actually about that event. You should see this. Yes, you.

Final Destination 5: This year, I got into the habit of rewatching certain films in theaters, just to confirm my high opinion of them. This was one of them. My favorite summer movie!

Habemus Papam: I’ve yet to see a bad Nanni Moretti movie. Seriously, name one. Make my day.

The Housemaid: AND THEN SHE CATCHES FIRE. SHE ACTUALLY CATCHES ON FIRE. FWOOSH FWOOSH. 2011.html)

The Ides of March: As a director, George Clooney is what really made this political drama about the cycle of scandal and corruption that plagues American politics work for me. Somewhere along the way, he’s become a story-teller that knows exactly how to pace a scene. I hope he gets behind the camera more often.

Immortals: I like Tarsem Singh a whole bunch.

The Last Circus: A lot of the convolutions of this film’s messy and playfully grotesque allegory for post-Franco Spain went over my head. But I was still dazzled by it and wish more people had gotten a chance to see it (it’s on Netflix Instant now!). You’ll get dense political commentary and killer clowns while you puzzle over it. Of course, this is an Alex de la Iglesia picture, after all.

Let the Bullets Fly: Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting from actor-turned-director Jiang Wen’s follow-up to his jerky but momentarily amazing The Sun Also Rises. But it’s pretty freaking good….

Love Crime: Alain Corneau’s last film and a very good excuse to watch French women behave badly.

Life Without Principle: A year without a new Johnnie To movie might as well be a year without new movies.

Livid: If you’re wondering if the haunted house flick that the guys that made Inside recently unleashed at Toronto was any good: yes.

The Minister: Saw this French political drama at Cannes based on its surreal poster (a naked woman crawling into the mouth of a crocodile). But the scene advertised in that poster was totally unlike the rest of the film and, I think, could have easily been excised. Still, Dardenne brothers’ regular Olivier Gourmet starring in a Sorkin-esque movie about selling out in politics? Uh yuh, I like it.

Outside Satan: …what was that? No, really, I want answers.

Sleeping Beauty: Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s debut feature has a lot to say about the ritualized masochistic impulses surrounding sex and it says so much while talking in code…even when I felt like I got it, I knew that there was more to get. Plus, Emily Browning is great in this. I’ll never forget seeing this at Cannes with a totally befuddled audience at the end of the first full day of competition screenings.

Le Quattro Volte: Man becomes sheep. Sheep becomes tree. Tree becomes ash and air. Which then turns into a Jurassic Park reference, somehow…and whoever watches this (also on Netflix Instant!) will inherit the Earth.

Road to Nowhere: Wow.

3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy: Um. I’ll just leave this here…

The Thing: I love John Carpenter’s version, yes, it’s true. But I still think this movie is a lot better than most horror nerds thought it’d be. Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. deserves a lot of credit for making a genuinely creepy and clever homage to both The Thing and Alien.

This Must Be the Place: Paolo Sorrentino’s back! Hooray! Oh and Sean Penn’s good! Whoopee! Oh and hey, Judd Hirsch as a Nazi hunter! Huzz—what?!

True Legend: Best action movies of 2011. No joke.

A Useful Life: I can’t completely get behind the guiding sentiments behind this hour-long Uruguayan ode to film history and moviegoing/preservation. But I also can’t shake its absolute certainty that time has run out for film as a communal experience and how sad it is to now be on the cusp of being forgotten when there’s still so much to say and so much to see. It’s a very sad film but often a clever and moving one, too.

The Ward: I saw John Carpenter’s film once and really didn’t take to it. Then I watched it again so I could take notes for what I assumed would be a pan. And I rather liked (aspects of) it.

Win Win: The wrestling scenes in this film are boffo. Some of my favorite action scenes of the year.

The Woman: The brattiness of this film is kind of charming in and of itself. More Lucky McKee, please.

*That kind of sums up my taste in movies, incidentally.

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Simon Abrams is a freelance writer for Slant and many other publications who also blogs at Extended Cut: Simon Abrams's Film Journal

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See also:

TREE HOUSE POST #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

TREE HOUSE POST #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #2: AGONY, ECSTASY AND THESPIAN PRIDE

2012-01-17T22:30:00.000-08:00

Dennis - It is wonderful to be back here in the tree house with you fine people and I very much look forward to the conversation!

Your comment about the Golden Globes ("to claim disgust or irrelevance when it comes to these flashy events") made me laugh at the outset because I admit with no shame that I adore awards shows, and I love them for the reasons many others hate them. I love the speeches with the tears and the incoherence, I love the red carpet and the pretty dresses, I love the quick glimpses of camaraderie and togetherness which shows it really is a community of people no different from, oh, the small-town theatre in Waiting for Guffman, yet on a higher scale with bigger salaries. These are just creative people who are very lucky to get a chance to do what it is they love to do. On the flipside, I have a difficult time collating art into "best" or "favorite", so the investment in such-and-such a movie "winning" is irrelevant to me, and the crows of "so-and-so wuz robbed" the following day make zero sense to me. Robbed? From what? A completely subjective award? I'm with Dustin Hoffman who said in his Oscar acceptance speech that he refused to believe that he was better than Jack Lemmon, and the other nominees. People dislike earnestness in actors for some reason and snicker when actors show solidarity or honest emotion in such moments. I don't. I wish there was more of it. I love awards shows when they get messy, unpredictable, and emotional. I say bring it on. This is art, not a Power Point presentation at the Marriott.

I've seen a lot of movies this year, and most of them involve Elvis Presley, which should be a surprise to no one who reads me regularly. I covered both Tribeca and the New York Film Festival for Capital New York. I got a chance to see a lot of great things (some of which have not received distribution yet), and I can only hope that these films find an audience, like Michael Cuesta's Roadie, starring Ron Eldard in one of my favorite performances of the year, and Flowers of Evil, which made it to my Top 10 List.

Celebration is the name of the game for me, and I am very glad you framed it that way, Dennis.

My "way in" to films is usually through performance. That is no secret. You can have the most beautifully framed shot, but if the acting isn't interesting or engaging, I can barely remember the movie. To give you an example of how far I take this, I honestly felt that Rob Corddry should have been nominated for something for his performance in Hot Tub Time Machine in 2010. If I were Queen of the Universe, he would have gotten a Best Supporting nod, at least. That's some of the most alive acting I saw that year, hands down. This year, I felt the same way about the entire cast of Bridesmaids, Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy in particular. The detail of those performances, the underlying subtext of each character's through-line, the interactions, the improvisation ... all of that made Bridesmaids the feast of Acting Glory that it was. These are the movies I remember, that I will watch again and again.

Which leads me to Tree of Life, Dennis. I sympathize with your feeling that you might be "missing" something and I have often felt that myself when it comes to other movies. Tree of Life moved me on a profound level (I saw it at a screening with my co-Tree-House-pal Steven Boone coincidentally), and yet it was not at all about the acting (although Brad Pitt was wonderful and heartbreaking). I'm a big Malick fan, although I do not agree with his persistent belief in Lost Innocence, one of his pet themes. I don't believe in innocence at all, at least not in the way it is portrayed in New World, but I know that Malick believes it. His purity of belief is somehow compelling to me, even though I disagree with it, and his films give me the space to argue with them, scoff, roll my eyes, succumb, and then scoff again. I appreciate that space I am given. It seems a rare and precious thing in the movies. In my review of Tree of Life, I wrote, "Grace is a difficult concept to put into words, yet you tend to know it when you see it, or when you feel it... There is grace in the divine or religious sense, but there is also grace in the physical sense, as in the movements of ballerinas or stallions. Grace is also present in the silent feelings between people—the ties that bind us to each other, however painful or unresolved... That is one of the things I thought as I watched the violent creation of the universe, billions of years before any of us showed up. If I had to try to define it, from my own experience, I would say grace is what you find in those brief moments when a sensation flows over you that tells you, 'This. Here. Right now. Is perfect.' But that's not really a definition, is it? That's the problem with, and the beauty, of grace. Tree of Life isn't about grace so much as it is a pure representation of it." I stand by that.

In terms of favorite moments of 2011? Here is a brief list.

I love the first conversation between Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska as Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre during Jane Eyre's first night in Thornfield Hall. The scene is a masterpiece, taken nearly word for word from the book, and it crackles with intimacy and suggestion and intensity, with spaces left for long intense pauses where they size each other up. Michael Fassbender has had a big year with Shame and A Dangerous Method, but his best performance in 2011 was as Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.

I love the scene in The Descendants when Matt King (George Clooney) informs his daughter, played by Shailene Woodley, that they will have to take her mother off of life support, and she leaps into the pool, the camera catching her underwater as she swims forward, her face grimaced in a silent scream. That is my favorite shot of the year. It is what movies can do that live theatre cannot, and is a beautiful use of the medium.

There is a small quiet moment in Midnight in Paris when Marion Cotillard looks up at Owen Wilson and makes the observation, "You look so sad." Owen Wilson has always had a sadness flickering on the periphery of his goofy persona, something that is evident in most of his roles, even Starsky and Hutch. It is one of his most unique and hard-to-pin-down qualities. Midnight in Paris does not make a fetish of his sadness, but in that moment, even though the conversation was light and friendly, he did look sad. Existentially sad.

I love the look on Meryl Streep's face, as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady, as she flips through her husband's clothes in the closet. Her eyes are unfocused, almost fearful. She leans down to smell one of the coats. She is not sure where she is, or when she is, and every gesture and expression in that small silent scene suggests her disorientation.

When her stepchildren show contempt for her at the tennis club, Rose Byrne in Bridesmaids gets a brief look on her face of panicked grief overlaid with manic social jollity that is one of the best acting moments of the year.

In Asghar Farhadi's extraordinary A Separation, a man (Peyman Moadi), in the middle of a stressful life situation, gives his Alzheimer's-stricken father a bath. The old man sits passively in his wheelchair as his son sponges him down, lifting up his arms, stroking his back. The scene plays out in real time, with no closeups and no edits. The son is focused on the task at hand (as he is in every area of his life), and yet suddenly he breaks down, laying his head on his father's shoulder, weeping like a small boy.

Kirsten Dunst, who has always been an effervescent personality onscreen, was a revelation to me in Melancholia. The whole film was a revelation. (I dislike Lars von Trier's films, but was swept away by Melancholia.) In the opening wedding scene, her smile is genuine enough that a casual onlooker would be fooled, but when she thinks no one is looking, shadows flood her eyes. Her nighttime nude embrace of the approaching Melancholia planet in the sky is eloquent in terms of what depression actually feels like, and such a potent and strange image that it felt like it was burned into my cornea.

Juliette Binoche looks into the camera (or bathroom mirror) in Certified Copy, and puts on red lipstick, hoping to be attractive to the man across the table out in the restaurant. There are moments that are good, moments that are even great, but perfect moments you can count on one hand. That is a perfect moment.

Moments like that are why I go to the movies.

Sheila

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Sheila O'Malley is a playwright, actress and freelance writer who blogs with passion at The Sheila Variations.

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See also: THE SLIFR TREE HOUSE v.2011 #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

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THE SLIFR MOVIE TREE HOUSE v.2011 #1: INTRODUCTIONS AND AN OPENING SALVO

2012-01-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

Greetings, fellow Tree House climbers!

It took me a while to find the key to the padlock, but found it I have, so you may now consider the door to the 2011 SLIFR Movie Tree House officially opened. There are a couple of cosmetic changes this year that should be addressed. First of all, we have a new tree house. Last year’s was very picturesque and had about it a bit of the old Swiss Family Robinson panache-- perfectly charming—but I think you’ll agree this year’s is not only a little roomier inside but also has a bit more magic and mystique about it as well. We’ve obtained it from the set of Wes Anderson’s upcoming movie Moonrise Kingdom, and although the climb is perhaps a little more treacherous than before (shoring up some of those rickety steps was pretty scary, I can tell you) it will be worth it. I’ve put up some of my favorite one-sheets for decoration. I’ve also brought up some board games to keep us amused during the down time in between posts (a round of Ouija is guaranteed to be a lot more fun, and certainly scarier than a screener of The Devil Inside). And I think you’ll like the addition of the vintage Pepsi cooler, the installation of which afforded me the opportunity of staging my own version of Fitzcarraldo’s little riverboat conundrum.

But given the star quality of this year's Tree House membership the effort has already been well worth it. I’d like to officially offer hearty return welcomes to Jason Bellamy, Jim Emerson and Sheila O’Malley, all of whom helped me inaugurate this project last year, as well as first-time welcomes to two new members of our little group, Simon Abrams and Steven Boone. That’s a roster the proprietor of any precariously perched clubhouse would be proud to be associated with, and I am extremely happy that you’ve all offered to spend time with me here within these walls this week.

Let’s get to it, shall we? I’m still basking in the insta-tanned glow of the Golden Globes—a necessary by-product of life in Los Angeles this time of year, I’m afraid, whether one pays much attention to awards shows or not. I know the thing is, especially for those of us whose interest is keener than the average bear, whether we write about cinema, or film, or the movies, to claim disgust or irrelevance when it comes to these flashy events. But the awards themselves need not be taken seriously in order to recognize the attraction, the fun to be had from indulging in the glitz, the hypocrisy, the cringe-inducing sincerity (or lack thereof) of a show like the Golden Globes. I think where it gets kind of depressing for me is when that shroud-like feeling starts to settle in, the realization that for many people, with the coronation of a precious few titles and the establishment of Oscar front-runners (whatever that means) the richness and diversity of even a so-so movie year, much less one as good as the one we’ve just experienced, gets bottled and packaged in such a way as to becoming boring. Whatever your reaction to the individual movies, it’s unfortunate no matter how you slice it that 2011 has already become, as far as televised awards shows are concerned, the year of The Descendants, The Artist, maybe Hugo, maybe The Help, and then all those other pictures that aren’t quite up to snuff.

That’s why I consider a gathering like ours a celebration, especially if it means (and it will) talking about movies that would never make it onto the stage of the average star-studded award show, movies that we react to with personal passion, in the negative as well as the positive. The movies of 2011 will have meant something uniquely individual to each one of us, and the celebratory aspect of considering them is not derived from trying to reach a consensus on what’s best. The fun comes in examining how and why conclusions and observations about the movies of the year vary, even among those of us who might be expected to dismiss more mainstream choices in favor of an equally calcified set of approved critical favorites.

So let’s celebrate. One of my favorite things to do each year, despite all the public wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth that comes with it in some circles, is compiling my top 10 list for the year. It’s a tough process, and in most ways an absurd one, the idea of superficially ranking the meaningful and disposable movies I saw during the previous year as if they were race cars or reality show contestants. But it gives me a chance to get my mental house in order, to remember elements and moments within the movies I saw that might otherwise slip away. And on some level the organizational aspect of list-making is simply invigorating to me, a recharging of batteries that brings into clearer focus why I value the experience of having seen all the movies I did in a year, even the crappy ones. It’s a chance for me to remember and share with others movies I value that might not rank high in the general conversation.

This is why I love reading year-end critics’ lists too—to have my memory jogged, my opinions challenged, to be delighted in the curious taste and odd, sometimes inexplicable predilections of others. One of my favorite lists this year comes from everyone’s go-to curmudgeon Armond White. His annual Better Than List seems a strange concept unto itself—each movie has its conceptual partner, a movie of ostensibly similar intent or relativity, that can be used to demonstrate its superiority over the other movie. But this list almost always reminds me of something I’ve forgotten about or at least provides the amusement of seeing movies that wouldn’t seem to be in the least way connected butt up against each other in White’s morally specific universe. It would have never occurred to me, for example, to mention Paul and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives as spiritual cousins of any sort, or Jack and Jill’s “affectionate, very broad ethic satire” as a corrective to The Descendants, but White insists on the connection despite my own myopic resistance. And despite my frequently raised eyebrows, I was this year quite grateful for this pugnacious critic’s reliable lionization of Steven Spielberg in the face of the perplexingly dismissive Director’s Guild award nominations.

In some way, however, there was more than my share of sympathy in 2011 for being on the outside of critical consensus. As the lists started piling up, I found myself unable to relate to the enthusiasm and reverence that greeted Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and those old worries about whether I’d missed something obvious to everyone else reared their heads yet again. I just couldn’t drink so deeply from the impressionistic gallery of images Malick had conjured. Rather than accepting that, for Monty Python as well as for most of us, pinning down the meaning of life is a somewhat elusive endeavor, Malick bravely insists on pursuing a unique perspective on natural, prehistoric and cosmic existence, as he always does. But the difference this time is that the imagery seems untethered to anything as ordinary as dramatic empathy and involvement in the director’s quest for the Big Statement. Immediately after seeing The Tree of Life I wrote this:

“I don't know, if this movie were the only evidence, that I'd say Malick is a visually brilliant filmmaker. To me that phrase is meant to describe someone who knows how to marshal the power of images, not just as individual creations, but as pieces of a whole, or as a philosophy of design or, most important, the curiously undeniable urge to tell a story. It's when the images add up to something other than a director's microscopic, fleeting attention to the minutiae of the world around him that I start to sit up and pay attention.”

As of January 2012, it’s a chore for me to recall anything but fragments of images from The Tree of Life beyond that wonderful sequence in which the oldest boy’s growing up amongst his two younger siblings is compressed into a beautiful visual essay about the way a child might see the surrounding world. It seems to me it is with this gaze that Malick most clearly relates. Unfortunately, a child’s focus is also all over the map, and that too is a feeling I get from The Tree of Life. So am I crazy in having to admit that I have higher regard for Your Highness or Captain America: The First Avenger or Troll Hunter or Contagion than I do for The Tree of Life? You tell me.

In compiling my list for the year I also had the strange experience of having my expectations for how that list might look at the end of the year scrambled and significantly altered by three very different movie experiences, two of which I just happened to have on the same night less than two weeks ago. Typically, the sense of what might be atop the crow’s nest of my best of the year doesn’t fluctuate too much—the year I crowned Speed Racer as my movie of the year I thought long and hard before realizing no other movie hit me the way that one did and that it deserved the position. And for the entirety of this year, in fact since October of 2010, when I first saw it, Meek’s Cutoff enjoyed the status of being my preemptive choice for best movie of 2011. Then I saw Melancholia, which for me redefined the possibility of empathy in stunning cinematic language.

And then, with no expectations of being overly impressed, I saw War Horse, a genuine epic full of grandeur and, at the same time, intimate moments and overwhelming storytelling artistry, and I felt my entire list had been upended the way an infant lays waste to a castle made of wooden blocks. (There’s a moment in War Horse in which Spielberg dissolves from a swatch of stitching laid across Emily Watson’s lap to her son toiling over a rocky patch of land that is so marvelous and so—again-- empathetic that I had to fight the urge to stand up and applaud.) I was on such a high after coming home from seeing War Horse that I couldn’t sleep, so I began watching a Blu-ray of Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry and soon found myself completely absorbed in its gorgeous contemplative association of the emergence of artistic awareness with the awareness of evil and one’s own physical deterioration. The four movies couldn’t be more different—well, I suppose Meek’s Cutoff and Poetry reside in the same general arena of “slow cinema”—and yet they had all made a mess of what I had previously thought was a list that was shaping up right on schedule.

Which, really, just adds to the fun, when it’s all said and not yet done. So what are you all thinking about as we begin to try to put some perspective of our own on this past movie year? What have been some of your favorite moments? Are the genuflections they make toward movie history enough to sustain either The Artist or Hugo? (And speaking of film preservation, did any of you hear about this?) And what are the movies you want to yell and scream and evangelize about that no one else cares to? (My nominee in this category: The Guard. Isn’t Brendan Gleeson just about peerless in this movie? Yet I suspect he will go unremembered at the Oscars—I have to say I audibly gasped when the camera cut to him and I realized he was among the Golden Globe nominees for Best Actor.) The Tree House walls are not soundproof, but the neighbors are very forgiving. Let the yelling and screaming and evangelizing begin!

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THIS TUESDAY: THE SLIFR TREE HOUSE v. 2011

2012-01-15T23:54:00.000-08:00

I spent the bulk of last week talking with fellow blogger Bill Ryan about an 11-year-old movie in which we were hopefully able to regenerate some small sliver of interest. This week at SLIFR I’ve invited five of my favorite online film writers to join me for the second annual convening of the SLIFR Tree House, inside the walls of which we will commiserate, bitch, praise and chew over the entirety of the Year in Movies, Version 2011. On board for this year’s convention are Tree House veterans Sheila O’Malley, Jason Bellamy and Jim Emerson, and joining us for the fun will be two voices that may be new to the Tree House but are well known and respected everywhere else on the Web, voices belonging to Steven Boone and Simon Abrams.

All five are writers of the highest order and intelligence, as well as witty and fun people whose company, if you don’t know already, is a delight and a privilege to keep, even just in a virtual mode. (And Sheila I finally met in person this past year—she’s as purely delightful as advertised.) They are all people whose presence has been a huge influence on my development as a film blogger, either in a directly encouraging way or as examples of fine writing and inspiration at bargain Internet prices. We’ll hit on all the big topics—our favorites of the year, trends both encouraging and disturbing, awards contenders and whether or not we should care, the most compelling moments of the year, what we didn’t see (this will be a big category for me) and, of course, Clooney, Clooney, Clooney (that last one only if Simon gets his way). No subject will be too outré, too contrary, too mainstream or too trivial to toss out onto the tree house floor, and given that rather liberal lack of boundaries it should be interesting to see where this group takes the conversation.

Please consider this your personal invitation to peek inside the walls of the 2011 SLIFR Tree House and join us in the discussion. The first meeting convenes Tuesday, January 17, right here at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Shoes are not required, only a love and abiding interest in the movies. We’ll see you there.

P.S. The picture above is last year's tree house. Wait till you see this year's model. And we have a big-time filmmaker to thank for it. Stay tuned.

P.P.S. I just had to post this picture. It's not as good as the tree house I have coming on Tuesday, but the damn thing looked so much like a viewfinder on a movie camera stuck up in a bunch of skinny pines that I just couldn't resist...

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JANUARY HAMMER GLAMOUR: HAZEL COURT

2012-01-15T17:00:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite Christmas presents from this past year, given to me by my in-laws, strangely enough (though I like to think my wife had a guiding hand in the selection of the gift), is my 2012 Hammer Glamour Calendar . There were plenty of raised eyebrows around the tree when I unwrapped it, to be sure—my daughters were disgusted by all the titillating pictures inside. But gee, what was I to do? Hurl it to the floor and reject it on grounds of indecency? Why, I think not. In fact, it’s now occupying a place of honor in my office, where it has not yet been discovered by my boss, who might take my daughters’ side on the matter.

At any rate, it’s a grand tribute to some of the loveliest ladies of British horror, and I decided that, rather than just keep it to myself I’d share it with you, my faithful readers. So near the beginning of each month of 2012 I’ll post the current Hammer starlet(s) featured in the calendar along with some information about them and their careers.

Ms. January Hammer Glamour just happens to be Hazel Court. Court got her start in Birmingham, England, the place where she was born and where she eventually made an impression several years later at the local school of drama. She began work in the movies as a bit player with the J. Arthur Rank Organization (gonnnng!), and soon found herself featured in a whole passel of movies that I’ve never seen, including Devil Girl from Mars (1954), before she made an impression on the young men of my generation opposite Peter Cushing in Hammer’s first foray into the world of Mary Shelley’s monster, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). It was this high-profile role which would lead her friend Ingrid Pitt, herself a Hammer icon of the highest order, to proclaim that Court was the studio’s first star. (I would have thought that honor might have gone to Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, but Ingrid Pitt’s perspective on the issue certainly can’t be discounted.)

Though she was a staple of TV in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller and Bonanza were among her early TV credits), Court went on to solidify her status as a top-notch scream queen in a series of movies adapted from Edgar Allan Poe stories by Roger Corman. She premiered for the director as Ray Milland’s ill-fated paramour in The Premature Burial (1962) and followed up that underrated gem with The Raven (1963) and Corman’s masterpiece, The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Perhaps some of the mystery she maintains for genre fans is due to her restraint in not exploiting her status as a fearsome femme fatale any further than she did. She finished her career mainly in TV (Mission: Impossible, The Wild, Wild West, Mannix and Gidget were just a few of the shows graced by her presence), and though she became a favorite at fan conventions later in her life, she never did again make the impact she would make in those Hammer films. Her final appearance was an uncredited role in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), which likely came about because of her relationship with director Don Taylor, who made Damien: Omen II and became Court’s second husband after meeting her on the set of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1958.

Whether or not Ingrid Pitt’s assessment is true, it is certainly entirely appropriate that the year’s first Hammer Glamour star for 2012 should be Hazel Court, who at least defined the female star, to the good, for the studio for years to come.

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BARBER SHOP TALK: ZIPPING IT UP

2012-01-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

(Bill Ryan has already wrapped up his end of the discussion of The Man Who Wasn't There, so it falls to me to close up shop. You can reference the previous chapters for part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and part 5 with a click of the mouse, and with much less effort than it takes to sweep up all those clippings...)

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Bill, it has been a tremendous amount of fun trading thoughts with you this week on The Man Who Wasn’t There, even if we managed to schedule the conversation during a week in which the deadlines and demands of the outside world of work made it maybe a little more difficult to dig in than we would have liked. And those “real-life” demands are making themselves felt even on this Sunday, a designated day of rest, if I’m not mistaken, one whose status as such has never made much of an impression upon the forces that make my breadwinnin’ work available to me. (Over the past 20 years those forces haven’t been significant respecters of any free time-type hours outside the usual eight or nine demarcated in the average American workplace. But hey, at least I’m getting paid!)

So if you will indulge, and if the notion doesn’t seem particularly slovenly in the shadow of your previous, meticulously considered near 2,000-word response, I’d like to offer an answer to your final question, “How do we close this out?” with a few brief comments followed by a gallery of striking images from the movie that I found galvanizing, haunting or just plainly beautiful, accompanied by some explanation as to why.

I was really grateful for you mentioning the business of shaving. I don’t recall if I’d made a mental note of it during previous screenings, but this time the connection between Ed shaving Doris’ leg in the bathtub and later Ed’s own casual observation of the executioner shaving the patch on his calf where the electrode would be placed really impressed me. And it’s not just the shaving. We see Ed’s leg being cleaned, and that’s followed by a glance toward the bucket where, much the same way as Ed did with Doris, the executioner rinses the razor in a slosh of soapy, hairy water. You ask if I think Ed perceives Doris as being there with him. I’m not sure I made that kind of inference (and that may be due to what I bring to the table, an indicator of my own spiritual inclinations) so much as that I saw Ed reflecting, in much the same way as he subconsciously does during that remembrance of Doris rebuffing the salesman and then coming inside for a disengaged sit-down on the couch, on his relationship with her. (He does speculate that she might be where he’s going, wherever that might be, and expresses the hope that he might be able to tell her how he feels, about her, about the world, in a way he never could during their corporeal time together.)

What’s moving about this remembrance, coming in his last moments as it does, is its quality of genuine warmth. Unlike the dream of Doris returning not so much to him but to her glass of bourbon, enduring his company as a necessary evil, as an uncomfortable aspect of the comforts of home, this remembrance harkens back to the one moment of genuine intimacy the movie affords to Ed and Doris. It comes in the moments after Ed’s first meeting with Tolliver, when he’s first beginning to turn the idea around in his head about somehow getting the money to invest in Tolliver’s dry-cleaning proposal. He muses to himself about the convenient process involved (“It was clean. No water. Chemicals.”) while he soaps and shaves the leg belonging to the woman whose infidelity will eventually inspire his impulsive scheme to extract the necessary cash from her lover, Big Dave. So it’s an intimate moment, however tinged with betrayal and suppressed anger. But in Ed’s reflection upon it as he approaches the Big Sleep, the moment itself seems cleansed of resentment, suffused with regret and even apology, the prickly stubble of a bad marriage washed away by the hope of an unlikely future, or at least the desire to reconnect with what was ever good about the marriage in the first place. It’s hard to imagine trying to insist on the heartlessness of the Coens in light of this lovely strand of emotional acuity, even as they use the most unlikely of imagery in order to express it.

Someone wrote me earlier in the week, when this discussion first started and suggested that to him The Man Who Wasn’t There was, instead of a spiritual twin to A Serious Man, a black-and-white remake of Barton Fink. Though the comparison may have rewards of the sort that we’re talking about here that I just haven’t thought through, it also seems inapt in some significant ways, the primary one being that there’s a big difference between feeling the noose tighten around one’s neck over a case of writer’s block—one’s own pretense to literary and artistic value being a contributing factor to the sense of impending doom—and not having anything even resembling talent or the opportunity of expression to fall back on during the inexorable dip into the abyss. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone back to the Earle Hotel, and truthfully I haven’t felt much compulsion to do so in the years that have passed since I saw Barton Fink for the first time. It’s always seemed to me to be the Coens’ most facile movie, dismissive of the idea of literary sincerity, either from a theatrical specimen like Fink (a stand-in for Clifford Odets) or from a boozy, dissolute figure like William Faulkner, and the strangeness of the Coen touch (the peeling wallpaper, the life of the mind, et al) always struck me as being a little too in love with the influence of David Lynch, who was heavily in vogue with Twin Peaks during the movie’s production and release. In other words, the movie many might first think of as being quintessentially Coen-esque is, to me, one of their least genuine. (I think of Barton Fink as their fanboy movie.) There are many things to like, even love about it-- Tony Shalhoub’s Ben Geisler being primary among them, as you point out. (I tried finding video clips of Shalhoub’s brilliant harangues in this film, but each one came tethered to an announcement which told me that I could not view the clip in my country. I see…) But the brand of fatalism being peddled in Barton Fink has always seemed imposed rather than earned, as it does in The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Serious Man. That said, given that my attraction to their work as filmmakers is largely one in which even their worst is better than the strained efforts of their many imitators (and even many who have no interest in imitating them), I will concede that it deserves another look, one which, being 20 years removed from that Lynch-saturated cultural atmosphere, may reveal things I’d never seen before.

And to answer my own question, because whether I like it or not Barton Fink is clearly more than a pastiche, I can’t put it at the very bottom of my Coen ranking. And can’t put The Hudsucker Proxy there either—it’s a movie I like much more than I do Barton Fink, but it’s been even longer since I’ve seen it than it’s been since I’ve seen the other, so I’ll have to refrain from any real judgment on it of this sort on it. I’ll reserve the bottom spot for Blood Simple, a movie that has always seemed like not much more than a Hollywood calling card to me, clever to be sure, but also exactly the kind of Post(modern)man Always Rings Twice reference manual that The Man Who Wasn’t There fastidiously avoids becoming. Blood Simple has the earmarks of the technical brilliance to come, but it’s a precocious, immature movie and the shadow of all those film noirs runs too deep for the brothers here— it took moving into the realm of a completely different, sun-splashed world, that of Raising Arizona, for them to find their true, original voice and escape the traps of cool pastiche. Blood Simple gets my vote for my least favorite Coen Brothers movie.

Okay, last call. The Man Who Wasn’t There is such a visually rich movie, and we’ve spoken so often in this exchange of ideas about story and character that find their expression in the richness of visual imagination that the Coens and their peerless director of photography Roger Deakins bring to the movie, that I thought it would be appropriate, and fun, to end off this series with a gallery of some of those images, accompanied by a brief line or two of appreciation. A couple of these will have most certainly already shown up here or at your place, but that’s okay. Beauty shouldn’t be restricted to a single glance.

There's something incredibly warm and sympathetic about the way they light and frame Doris in this scene when Ed first comes to visit her after her arrest. The hint of a shiner on her right eye, never explained, adds to the poignancy.

I love the offhanded way Birdy and the boy regard Ed when he talks with them outside the piano recital. It's clear they are doing their best just to indulge him until he extricates himself from the scene.

Detective Burns (Jack McGee), the gumshoe Riedenschneider hires to get the deep background on Big Dave Brewster. Visually perfect.

"You know how Big Dave loved camping and the out of doors?" "Yeah."
"We went camping last summer in Eugene, Oregon. Outside Eugene..."

Everything you need to know can be found in contemplating the haircut...

Deakins employs an extraordinary long-lens tracking shot to observe Ed swimming against the tide of humanity and his own despair, already unable to remain afloat in the wake of Doris’s arrest. “When I walked home it seemed like everyone avoided looking at me, as if I’d caught some disease. This thing with Doris-- nobody wanted to talk about it. It was like I was a ghost walking down the street.”

Dark shadows...

"I killed him."

Ed's sophisticated dinner manner (what the Coens have called his talk show host pose) cannot disguise his contempt or his disinterest...

The note.

A guard peers at Ed from outside Ed's cell...

A car crash unlike any other. The sequence in which Ed, distracted by Birdy's advances, drives off the side of the road, rendered anything but routinely by the Coens' consummate command of the power and clarity of their images. I love how they use this sequence to visually tie into the UFO motif that informs the second half of the film:

Finally, another moment of curdled intimacy between Doris and Ed. Early on in the film, as they are preparing to attend the Nirdlinger Christmas party, Doris asks Ed to "zip me up," a moment of casual companionship familiar to most couples. Yet this one, with its slow track in on Doris's back, sights on the open dress, and Ed's deliberate act of compliance, has about it one part intimacy and two parts foreboding, as if Ed were zipping Doris not into a dress but into a body bag, which metaphorically, of course, he will soon do.

On that note, Bill, thanks once again for a lively and rewarding exchange. Let's consider this conversation zipped up. Next year, Roller Boogie?

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BARBER SHOP TALK: SWEEPING UP CLIPPINGS

2012-01-15T09:30:00.000-08:00

The following is Bill Ryan's wrap-up post in our brief but I think illuminating discussion of Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There. I'll have my concluding post, which will take a slightly different tack than the previous ones, up in a few hours. But until then, please enjoy Bill's insights on this fascinating movie either here or at his place. To access the previous sections of this back and forth you can either scroll down on this page or click here for part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

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Dennis, I love your comparison to Melancholia. The power of that film's ending, as you say, comes from the realization that, from Justine's point of view, her state of mind, for once in her life, might be regarded as beneficial. For her, as the Earth is about to be obliterated, there is no horror, because whatever is to come after, even if it's nothing, can't be worse than what she's feeling now. Similarly, Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There faces execution with hope, because look at what Earth has to offer. I realize I'm just parroting what you said in your last post, but what an amazing ending! I'm reminded of how Val Lewton summarized the message of The Seventh Victim: "Death is good." For some, and in a certain state of mind, maybe. Melancholia doesn't leave the viewer with any hope though, even the very grim kind that The Man Who Wasn't There does. If the endings of both films could be explained with one word each, for Melancholia it would be "Finally," and for The Man Who Wasn't There it would be "Maybe." And do you know, it wasn't until watching it again for this series that I noticed that as Ed shaved Doris's legs early in the film, so does Ed have his leg shaved in preparation for the Infinite. He even offers the slightest of ironic smiles, or glances, at the razor scraping away at his leg. Given his narration at the end, does he believe Doris is there with him? Ed seems willing to believe just about anything that will provide hope, so, you know...maybe.

For instance, he'll believe that Birdy is a great pianist. This was the section of the film that baffled me, on some level, the most, and for the longest time. Now I can no longer see where I was confused. Birdy -- who I think it's safe to say Ed is sexually attracted to, but that this is almost beside the point -- is simply Ed's last hope for life on Earth. There's an interesting parallel going on in this story with Birdy, and the one with Freddy Riedenschneider. Ed loses out in both, and I'd say that categorizing, as you do, Freddy's cynicism as sociopathological is so accurate as to perhaps be a little kind. He's not even that smart, as a matter of fact. He describes the Uncertainty Principle as the act of changing something through the act of observation, yet what he's applying this to is the revelation that Big Dave was no war hero, as he'd always claimed, but an Army clerk who sat out the war at a desk in San Diego. Big Dave, the thing being observed, was not changed by the observation. Big Dave was always that. His grasp on Heisenberg is about as firm as Larry Gopnik's is on Schrödinger ("I'm not even sure I understand the cat").

But anyway, Birdy. I think you have to understand Birdy -- not the girl, but the idea -- before you can understand Ed, or the film. Hearing Birdy -- Beethoven, really, but Ed is unable to make this distinction -- play the piano at the party at Nirdlinger's gave Ed a shot of pure beauty, and okay, Scarlett Johansson playing Birdy is part of that. The point being, for poor Ed, it was a brief moment of the kind of transcendence he spends most of the film searching for. And later, when Big Dave is gone, and Doris is gone, and everything seems to be over, that's when the emptiness really sets in, the absence. That's when Ed becomes the man who wasn't there. (When the film came out, I remember some critics claiming the title eluded to the notion that Ed was a guy who was such an empty vessel that he just got swept up in the film's action. This is clearly a stupid thing to think, and like an idiot, I used to hold that misinterpretation against the film, because if that's what the title was meant to mean, then obviously they'd screwed up.) That's when the film fades out on the narration "I'm the barber." But he seeks out Birdy, because he thinks he beauty, musically as well as physically, or what he perceives as her great talent, is all that's left. Life is monstrous, but if someone like Birdy can play music like that, maybe there's something else. Maybe the peace he felt in the church actually had a traceable source. What does he get? He's told Birdy would make an excellent typist. And also that Birdy never really cared about music anyway. If I was Ed, I might greet the electric chair with open arms myself.

Dennis, in your last post you wrote:

"Because The Man Who Wasn't There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which its rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in 'spot the references,' indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here."

I think you've pretty cleanly nailed why the Coens are so extraordinary, and how they challenge their audiences to keep up. At a glance, The Man Who Wasn't There is begging to be simply, and emptily, and tediously, taken as what you say it very clearly is not, a jumble of smart-ass cues from other films. The Coens have been accused of treating their films as this kind of playground for most of their careers, after all. But you've been right all along to point out that this film is "its own beast," just as you've been right to insist on the connection to A Serious Man. Because no, Riedenschneider's uncertainty does not apply here, because he doesn't mean a word of it. He doesn't care. Larry Gopnik's uncertainty, however, which is another thing entirely, applies throughout The Man Who Wasn't There. Larry may be much more verbal and manic and emotional (though he tries to tamp that down) than Ed, but goddamnit, after talking to you, Dennis, I'm about ready to regard these two films as twins.

So, okay, if this our last day, maybe some housekeeping? On the "liking characters" front, I mildly object to your examples, because I do like Holden Caulfield, at least by the end of that novel, and I do not like Walter Neff. Who could? The point is, that doesn't matter. This is actually a pretty big topic, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not fully prepared to get into it all right now. Suffice it to say, sympathy, and empathy, should go to those who deserve it. Ed, I think, does. Neff doesn't.

Performances! I agree with you that they are, across the board, superb. I even think Johansson is very good, and I'm on record, somewhere or another, as not thinking that she's grown into very much of an actress at all. More importantly, I think The Man Who Wasn't There may be the first time I really noticed Richard Jenkins. Not the first time I'd seen him, of course, because he's been around forever, but the first time I cared to find out his name. The way his head tilted back and his eyes closed for about a half second of sleep before his head rolled back around to Ed, and he said "Riedenschneider," is one of the finest bits of comic drunk acting I've ever seen. I've already praised Alan Fudge (who I've learned passed away last year) as Diedrickson from the ME's office, but I really do love the quiet yet subtly panicky discomfort he portrays in the few moments he has left after Ed's admission about his sex life.

For the main cast, I could go on and on. Thornton gave a brilliant performance simply by looking the way he does. He provides a clinic on minimalism throughout, which is somehow not crushed by the bigness of everyone else, from Frances McDormand's obnoxious, finally pitiable sot, to James Gandolfini's insecure bull-in-a-china-shop, to Michael Badalucco's Frank, who I think the Coens wrote with the express purpose of giving themselves a vehicle for their brand of literate, everyman speech ("What's the problem, friend? This is a business establishment, with posted hours." I like that Frank was prepared to begin an argument like that). I used to think Badalucco was one of the liabilities. I feel an intense need to be upfront about all my past foolishness.

And Shalhoub. I guess Shalhoub's Riedenschneider also provides a vehicle for the Coens' writing, but of course Riedenschneider is no everyman. Apart from everything else about the performance and the character, I was just thrilled to see Shalhoub back. He's acted in maybe a grand total of six or seven scenes for the Coen brothers, but somehow his Ben Geisler in Barton Fink established him, already, as a Coens regular, along with Turturro and Goodman and Holly Hunter and McDormand. It took, what, almost ten years for him to appear again, and it's been another ten-plus and no sign. But I love Shalhoub, and I love Shalhoub teaming up with the Coens. Why this happens so rarely is beyond me.

Finally, you ask what Coens film ranks lowest for me. Well, I'm afraid my answer is pretty boring, because it's either, depending on the day, Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers. And mind you, I still like both. I think they're funny, and there's some very fine work in each, both in the performances and cinematically (I think what Deakins does in The Ladykillers is especially undervalued). But neither film feels like them. I don't know how The Ladykillers came about, but Intolerable Cruelty was a pre-existing script they agreed to rewrite and direct, and both films feel like something they had to put themselves into. Everything else they've made, including their two novel adaptations, have been very clearly part of them already. No Country for Old Men and True Grit could almost have been predicted as Coen films, long before either was made. But Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers seemed like coasting. As a fan, I admit I was worried for a while there. The fact that they've come roaring back with four great films in a row has sort of eased my worried brow on that count, however.

Now, take those two out of the equation, and rank only the pure Coens stuff, then I guess I'd have to say The Hudsucker Proxy, a film I still like a lot. I just think sometimes their instincts for the cartoonish are off, and the movie sometimes, in the early going, feels a little shrill. Also, here and there, there's a joke that I think is beneath them (the "crane kick" stance from Norville's dream sequence, for example). But there's a lot to love. In my case, the worst Coens film is the one I merely enjoy.

And what about you? How are we to close this out, Dennis?

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BARBER SHOP TALK: A SOULFUL HAIRCUT

2012-01-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

(The following is my second post, part 4 of my discussion with Bill Ryan about Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There. You can access the previous sections by clicking on part 1, part 2 or part 3, or you can visit Bill's blog The Kind of Face You hate, where you will also find our conversation posted in its entirety.)

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Right off the top, Bill, I have to say how moved I’ve been in reading your posts on The Man Who Wasn’t There, a movie which generated little to no interest from the viewing public when it was released and holds somewhat diminished stature even within the cult of the Coens. I particularly value your adept and, yes, sympathetic way of sizing up the characters. TMWWT is certainly not an easy movie to love, like The Big Lebowski, or even to admire, like most of their others, either the “serious” ones or those that are more overtly comic. (By the way, I think you’re right to have so eloquently pointed out that this distinction between forms is a very fuzzy line of demarcation in their work. The uniquely integrated way the two sensibilities coexist is at the heart of some of the confusion about how to approach and interpret their movies, and their attitude toward their characters. But I’m getting ahead of myself…). In any case, you’re doing a bang-up job of making a great case for why a little extra effort to do so can be a rewarding endeavor.

The thing I’ve enjoyed most about our exchange so far, and specifically in reading your entries, is how you’ve deepened my own understanding and appreciation of the movie by disproving the central tenet of the Uncertainty Principle, as expressed by the sociopathically overconfident defense attorney Freddy Riedenschneider. In defending Ed, charged in the murder of the desperate but, as far as I can tell, legitimate would-be dry cleaning entrepreneur Creighton Tolliver (a man who certainly had his own vision of the future), Riedenschneider describes his client as the very essence of modern man, a schlub (just like you jurors) who’s not self-aware, calculating, intelligent enough to put all the homicidal pieces together, “too ordinary to be a criminal mastermind, an ordinary man guilty of living in a world that has no place for him.” The attorney invites the jurors (and us) to consider the emotionless husk of Ed’s outward appearance—and we’ve been privy to it for much longer and in much closer proximity than the jurors have-- and conclude that the closer we look at Ed, the less sense he makes as someone not only who could be guilty of killing but also as one who is fully engaged in the business of living.

Of course, Riedenschneider’s tactic is completely cynical and misses what we’ve come to sense about Ed, that there is something there beneath the muffled, drained expressions, visible through the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke, if we could be convinced to look closer, to actually see what’s there rather than just use the movie’s often sardonic humor as a reason to dismiss deeper inspection. Because The Man Who Wasn’t There fails if it turns out to be simply a hipster’s pose, all film noir sheen and no substance. I think the fact that, as I suggested in my last post, the movie has its own texture and rhythms apart from those of the movies in which its rooted, that it is not simply an exercise in “spot the references,” indicates that Riedenschneider’s uncertainty does not apply here.
But even more so, the way you’ve located the center of Ed’s spirituality (and that of the movie) goes a long way toward illuminating what the Coens are up to in this movie in revealing the value, despite his counsel’s claims, of a closer look at Ed.

One of the things I focused on during my most recent viewing of the movie is the way the Coens provide the outward appearance of adhering to some of the obvious tropes of film noir and use them to expose cracks in the deadpan reserve of their main character. The one I’m thinking about primarily is that omnipresent voice-over, Ed’s narration, where 90% of Billy Bob Thornton’s performance resides. This is where you get much of the essential information about the way an outwardly unaffected person like Ed Crane sees the world, interprets the actions of those around him. So you get a lot of musing about his own limitations (“I’m the barber”) and how he’s been deadened by interacting with people who strive to put up fronts that are far more transparent than they can allow themselves to imagine, like Doris and Big Dave, or even the incessant talkers, like his brother-in-law, the owner of the barber shop where he works, for whom he has little patience or interest. But the indicators of what you term Ed’s spirituality and his willingness, his need to look beyond the arid surface of his life are there early on in the narration—naturally, since what we’re hearing turns out to be the verbalized writing of a man considering his life from what is essentially the end of it. It’s not unusual for a noir narrator to be cognizant of his soul; what’s wonderful about the way the Coens have written Ed is that his occupation, the thing he does to literally occupy his time, to earn money, to distract him from his own existential worries, the thing that he outwardly seems to do almost by rote—cutting hair—turns out to be the activity that frames the way he sees the world and muses on the big questions.

At first it seems like a point of view that is forced upon him by his physical position in his job— through simple proximity and positioning, he knows the top of a man’s head. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my own cobwebbed mind I even seem to recall one of the Coens (perhaps on the DVD commentary?) saying that everything you need to know about the movie can be gleaned from looking at the many different haircuts on display. Especially to their detractors, this might sound like just so much more facetious Coen-osity, and maybe it is. (I like to think other elements in the movie are equally as expressive as the admittedly boss contours Ed shapes on some of those little punks seated at one of his stations.) But seeded in Ed’s narration is a kind of skewered philosophical musing that might sound silly or inappropriate coming from anyone else, but coming from Ed, as he scratches at his own deadened exterior from the inside, looking for some sort of illumination, it’s rather poignant. And it’s why I like your term “absurdist noir” so much. How else to characterize a hard-boiled picture where the narrator, instead of cracking wise about real estate or his own doomy temptations a la Walter Neff, muses about the implications of the scientific fact that hair continues to grow for a certain period of time even after a body has died? Of course Ed is thinking about death, whether it’s from an awareness imposed upon him before the fact (on screen) or one informed by the fact that he’s speaking from a time after which he’s experienced it firsthand. But it’s his connecting up of death, and the implications of death, with his occupation that reveals his yearning spiritual curiosity, one which, as you extrapolated so well last time, leads him to discover his own hopes for something bigger than the puny activities of a planet full of self-possessed people in the most unlikely of firmaments.

“How does the hair know when the soul is gone?” Ed asks himself, his readers, us. Again, the posing of this question, like Ed’s choice of words to describe the fact that he and his wife haven’t had sex for years, could be interpreted as sniggering on the part of the Coens, artists who are well capable of finding humor in even the blackest of death rattles, not to mention the excesses of dime-store philosophizing. But such an interpretation denies the hope with which Ed greets his own fate, during that chilling white-out when he expresses hope for a world beyond this one, where there’s opportunity and desire to explore “all the things they don’t have words for here.” It takes a bit of a leap on the audience’s part to accept the searching aspect of Ed’s personality. We’re more likely to laugh, or to look on him with a mixture of pity and sympathy, not unlike the way he regards Big Dave’s wife when she first tells him of her husband’s alleged alien abduction.

But it’s a measure of the Coens’ sympathy (yes, I do believe they are sympathetic toward Ed and his sense of spiritual suffocation) that they find a way to expand upon this fantastical element of the story in such a matter-of-fact, absurd and yet poetically fulfilling way. Not unlike the conclusion of Melancholia, in which Kirsten Dunst’s cripplingly depressed Justine finds not only release but relief, maybe even fulfillment in the apocalypse, Ed greets his fate with acceptance and with hope. It’s a fate in which he is punished, technically, for a crime he did not commit but one which he knows would not have occurred had he not set the wheels of catastrophic events in motion (in the name of love and moderated ambition, as you suggest). He considers his fate during his last moment in the spirit of discovery, as a chance to finally become something better, something which transcends the pettiness, betrayals and hampered dreams of his earthly existence.

This feeling of Ed looking beyond the haircut, beyond the temporal, whether what’s on the other side is paradise or the simple, quiet rest of obliteration, is the same thing that lifts my spirit when the planet Melancholia slams into Earth, yet shudder with horror at that tornado that provides such a ghastly end punctuation to A Serious Man. In that movie, Larry’s last-minute switching of the boy’s grades, something he’s “ettically” resisted for the entire film, suggests to me a capitulation to the indifferent, biblically-tinged evil of the way humans interact with each other that offers little of a similar kind of hope for his survival, either physical or spiritual.)

I have to start thinking about wrapping up this chapter, but before I do I just want to address that question of “liking the characters” again briefly. Do the Coens “like” their characters, or are they just perverse, cackling puppeteers? It seems fairly obvious to me that when people—critics, viewers, readers—talk of “liking” the characters they’re really talking about whether or not the writer and/or director care about them beyond their simple function in the construct of the plot. Are they just pieces in the puzzle, or does the puzzle begin to revolve around them, finding its way as a narrative because of what they do and how they feel rather than leading them through to “The End” like rats in a maze? Well, if you accept that this is the question, then I think you and I have provided plenty of evidence, derived from the film itself, not to mention other Coen brothers movies (Thank you for bringing up Burn After Reading, another of their pictures that I love almost without reservation) which supports the notion that the Coens’ ability to laugh at the situations their characters find themselves in does not necessarily preclude their sympathy or affection for their characters, or for that matter ours.

Do we “like” Holden Caulfield? Or Walter Neff? Or Ignatius Reilly? Would we want to spend time with even an ostensibly likable and sympathetic character like Roger Thornhill, the beleaguered advertising executive played by Cary Grant who gets swept North by Northwest through all manner of nonsense, none of which is of his own devising? Strictly speaking, probably not, though we certainly sympathize with him.(Cary Grant, on the other hand…). It behooves us then to remember that such “thumbs up, thumbs down”-derived assessments of the worth of character go not very far at all in illuminating what’s going on in any given film or book. And certainly the attitude of the artist toward them is not so easily summed up and deserves a little more investigation than the conventional wisdom is capable of providing.

Well, hell, I’d intended to touch on the performances a bit in this post too, which I find to be uniformly wonderful. But as one observer recently put it, I tend to be “one long-winded bastard” and have once again rambled on beyond my welcome. So I’ll touch on those superb actors a bit next time. I wish I could offer something more on your observation of real-world enterprise in TMWWT and The Hudsucker Proxy, but it’s been far too long—since its original release, I think-- since I’ve seen that movie and my memory of it is far too vague to be of any value here today. I’ll take it up as an invitation to see it again, though, as I’ve always thought that The Hudsucker Proxy is an undervalued movie in the Coen oeuvre. (It certainly proved, if nothing else, that a big budget was no distraction from their signature idiosyncrasies.) As we near the end of this project, I wonder, Bill, speaking as one Coen aficionado to another, what film of theirs might be lowest on your totem pole? Whatever your answer might be (and I suspect it’ll differ from mine) I have certainly enjoyed sussing out why, for both of us, it certainly is not The Man Who Wasn’t There.

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BARBER SHOP TALK: AN APPROPRIATE FATE?

2012-01-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

(The following is Bill Ryan's second post in our ongoing discussion of The Man Who Wasn't There. My response will follow on Friday. You can click here to access Part 1 and Part 2.)

I should perhaps have been more clear on what I took to be the source of the joke, or at least the audience’s laugh, in Ed’s scene with the medical examiner. I don’t believe that people were laughing at the situation, necessarily, or the reveal that Ed and Doris hadn’t been intimate in a long time, or that it was Big Dave’s baby. They were laughing at the choice of words, which means, to some degree anyway, they were laughing at Ed. Had he said something like “My wife and I haven’t been intimate in a long time,” I don’t know that the reaction would have been the same. This is why I think, and still feel, that the Coens were going for a laugh. But it’s strange, though, and interesting, because Alan Fudge as Diedrickson, the ME, plays the scene very straight, as a man performing a highly unpleasant act because he believes it’s the right thing to do. When he gets that answer, he gets out of that bar as quickly as he reasonably can, but the Diedrickson half of that scene is pitched at about the tone you’d expect such scene to be pitched. It’s as if Diedrickson, a normal human being, has suddenly found himself within the bizarre reality of Ed Crane, and he doesn’t like it.

That last point has a lot to do with my eventual turnaround on the film. You mention absurdity in your last post -- as well as the film’s “fun-house fatalism”, which is a pretty apt description, I’d say, and in this case may be the same thing as absurdity anyway – and that’s really the form of The Man Who Wasn’t There: it’s an absurdist noir. And Ed knows it, at least the absurdist part, as much as he or anyone else can know such I thing. He suspects, at least, that cosmic and existential absurdity has become the enveloping force in his life, and by the end he is trying, desperately and stupidly and ignorantly, not to mention uselessly, to claw out some kind of definable shape, or to maybe claw out a window to let some light in. Before I go too far with this, let me say that, while my not-quite-negative, but a least disagreeably bewildered, opinion of The Man Who Wasn’t There took a sharp turn towards the positive some time ago, I never had to explain that before, or even really think about it, until now, and my viewing of the film (my fourth or fifth overall, I’d say) the other night locked a bunch of stuff into focus. Two things, primarily, but the one salient to my current point – the other I’ll get to in a bit – is that while the film does stack tragedy upon tragedy, its structure is to stack absurdity upon absurdity.

Some of those absurdities end in death, but that’s just a part of it. I’m not sure there’s a comic moment in the film that doesn’t have some amount of near surreal lunacy to it – take Tolliver’s sudden, grunting decision to put on his wig only after he realizes Ed’s visit is of a business nature – which I suppose is not entirely uncommon to the Coen brothers, but it usually has a different purpose. Most of the Coens comedies are actually pretty sweet, or light-hearted, or just goofy, and the comic relief in their other films tends to be just that (not always, but I’d say generally that’s the case). But the comedy in The Man Who Wasn’t There is almost entirely in the service of breaking down Ed Crane. Birdy’s attempt to give Ed a friendly thank you is played for laughs (again with the absurd phrasing: “Heaven’s to Betsy, Birdy!”) but it also serves to finally, and thoroughly, crush Ed. Not that much was needed to accomplish this, but after her thank you attempt lands them both in the hospital, Ed has nothing left, not even the sliver of hope that he could repent or find redemption (through music?) that put him in the car with Birdy in the first place.

In the way it uses humor, the film is – you’re exactly right about this – joined at the hip with A Serious Man, but also Burn After Reading, and manages to be a spiritual cousin to both. It’s as if the Coens made this movie, and then decided to remake it by splitting it into those two later films. The hopeless, violent absurdity of The Man Who Wasn’t There became the film where a friendly and grinning Brad Pitt gets shot in the face, and the groping, spiritual absurdity (but, weirdly, not hopeless in either film) found its way into the movie that ends with the devastation of a looming tornado.

The spirituality of The Man Who Wasn’t There finds two expressions, one in the (absurd?) camera move that goes from a large crucifix statue in the Crane’s neighborhood church, down to a priest reading out Bingo numbers. The audience is initially led to believe the Cranes are churchgoers, but no, Doris just likes Bingo, and believes, in that wonderfully bitter line from Ed’s narration, that heaven was on Earth, and “if there’s a reward, Bingo was probably the extent of it.” Ed’s not so sure, though, and admits that, even though they’re not actually attending mass, he finds the church surroundings peaceful. But Ed’s mind is flighty and unspecific on this matter. It’s not that he thinks church, or Christianity, itself holds any answers for him. He just suspects that maybe something does, which leads to the second expression of spirituality in the film: UFOs. The comic absurdity reaches its apex with this stuff, but you’re absolutely right to say that it’s a testament to the Coens’ ability to find new ways into their characters. You also point out the national obsession for UFOs at the time the film takes place, but I’d also say that the Coens have steeped their film in pulp – that’s the source of Ed’s narration, after all, his scribbling for a true crime pulp that paid for his story from Death Row – to the point where stories from Amazing Stories sort of get mixed up in it all, too. But what I’m getting at is, the pulp expression of spirituality, or hope, or religion, or God, or whatever – for Ed, that’s UFOs. Big Dave’s widow thinks he was killed by the government (it should be noted that Katherine Borowitz plays this expression of grief-induced madness with a certain comic, twitching mania) because of what he knew about UFOs, which, while not the case, implies that Big Dave led an absurd existence himself, right up until he got it in the neck. In any case, it leads Ed to cast his eyes up to the stars and imagine something bigger that might possibly make sense of it all.

You ask at the end of your post about the idea that filmmakers must, for some reason, “like” their characters. I don’t know what it means either, and I’ve made my disdain for this notion clear in the past, but does it apply here? By which I mean, do the Coens not like Ed, or Doris, or Big Dave, for instance? To dispense with Big Dave for a moment, he’s a liar and a blowhard and he’s sleeping with Ed’s wife, so he’s not a good guy. But even he has that moment, when he confronts Ed, where he says, in effect, if you’d punched me in the nose, I would have had that coming. He also says he’s not proud of what he did, referring to his affair with Doris. His anger comes from the fact that instead of taking out some reasonable form of retribution, Ed has ruined him. Is there no room for sympathy there? More to the point, do the Coens see no room for it? Then there’s Ed, who does not, in fact, murder Big Dave – I think I’ve been careful about not using that term – but instead kills him in self defense. The worst thing he does in the film is blackmail, which Big Dave might reasonably view as way too far, an opinion the audience might share, but do you? Or do you blame Ed? Okay, yes, you blame him, because he did it, but does it make you dislike him? What do you think of Ed as a person? I think he’s obviously fairly pathetic, and would be a boring man to know, but I also believe that he doesn’t deserve his fate.

Watching the film again, the other thing that really came into focus for me is the surprising, maybe subliminal warmth. It’s a deeply sad warmth, but I was shocked at myself for not seeing how important Ed and Doris’s marriage is to the whole thing. Even though his face never betrays anything, look at what Ed is willing to sacrifice for Doris – he and Frank put up the barbershop just to pay Freddy Riedenschneider, and at one point he even admits his own guilt, to Doris and Freddy, just to set her free. He tells the truth to them both, and you see that sink into Doris’s consciousness. When he tells Freddy he knows about the affair between her and Big Dave, you see that Doris, prickly, acerbic, mean Doris, is actually feeling remorse. Maybe for the first time since the affair began, but it’s real. And that is why she kills herself. If she had any reason to believe the baby was Ed’s, I don’t think she’d have done it. But for her fractured mind, the knowledge that she was carrying the child of a man other than her husband, who was now fighting for her freedom, was too much.

Then of course there’s that little vignette, a memory Ed has while he’s unconscious in the hospital after the car accident. A macadam salesman (Christopher McDonald) tries his pitch to Ed who’s sitting on his porch, until Doris comes home and snarls at the salesman until he leaves. Then she and Ed go inside, she fixes herself another of her ever-present drinks, they sit as far apart from each other on the same couch as they can manage, Ed begins to say something, and Doris says “Don’t, it’s nothing. I’m fine.” End of memory. The Coens have said that this was meant to be a memory that was representative of the Cranes daily life together, and as such, and even without that explanation, it must be the saddest moment in the whole film. There are clues, though, that Ed loved Doris, and maybe Doris reciprocated, but even if she didn’t she appreciated him. In the bathtub, when he’s shaving her legs, she says “Love you.” Was that true? For much of the film, I’d have said no. By the end, I would say yes. Creighton Tolliver’s need for a financer might have been the catalyst for all the death that follows, but after that each character has to make their own decision, good or bad, to keep this madness rolling, and one of the decisions Ed makes that actually makes things worse, is the one to stop at nothing, at least within his very limited imagination, to free Doris. Amazingly, The Man Who Wasn’t There has a beating heart after all.

Well. I’ve gone all this way, and haven’t mentioned the title (which might be self-explanatory anyway, but we’ll get to that) or the Uncertainty Principle, as Freddy sees and applies it. I guess I’ll let you pick up those threads, if you don’t mind. But one other thing I wanted to mention yesterday, but couldn’t find room for, and probably couldn’t find an organic spot to bring it up in any of these posts. Still, it occurred to me that The Man Who Wasn’t There bears some vague similarity to another, very unlikely Coen brothers film, namely The Hudsucker Proxy. As far as the era in which each is set, they are roughly contemporaneous, but more importantly in The Hudsucker Proxy, that film’s sweet fantasia revolves around the fictional invention of a real thing – the Hula Hoop. Meanwhile, in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Creighton Tolliver is attempting to spread the word and the wealth about the newest thing: dry cleaning. And look where it gets him! I don’t really know what to do with this comparison. It may be nothing more than a passing thought…

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BARBER SHOP TALK: ED CRANE, ENTHUSIAST

2012-01-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

(Just a note to the casual reader that if you have not seen The Man Who Wasn’t There, first of all, why are you reading this? Secondly, there is likely to be little respecting of the need for spoiler alerts in the ensuing discussion between Bill and me regarding the movie, so proceed with caution if you’re a MWWT virgin and care not to have your experience despoiled. This is part 2 of our Man Who Wasn't There discussion. Part 1 was posted by Bill earlier today.)

Bill, as I was settling down to watch The Man Who Wasn’t There in preparation for the journey you and I are undertaking this week, your recounting of your experience with the audience guffawing over Ed Crane’s numb, detached expression when he says, “My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years” struck a couple of different chords for me. First, it seems to me many audience members who are going to make the trek out to a theater to see what amounts to American art-house fare from the Coen Brothers are often overly eager to share just how tight they are on what they perceive to be the filmmakers’ wavelength, so much so that no slight joke or snide aside is small enough to not warrant a hearty guffaw. And certainly given the context in which it occurs, a guffaw seems mightily inappropriate. It didn’t seem to me, in viewing the scene last night, that even the Coen brothers, masters of morbid mirth that they may be, were inviting derision here, piling upon humiliation upon numbing loss just for the fun of it. It seemed to me they were giving Billy Bob Thornton’s character some room for his existential exhaustion at this point. I didn’t feel them going for the laugh here. Ed’s phrasing, his detachment from any kind of emotional involvement at this point, is expressed with chilling empathy through the passionless disregard for euphemism with which he describes his sex life with the recently deceased (and, as it is revealed, three months pregnant) Doris, and I think the Coens respect that in this moment. The audience you saw it with, it seems to me, may have been looking for some kind of release, or an indication that the smothering sensation they may have been feeling needn’t be taken all that seriously, and that they laughed doesn’t necessarily mean that they were responding to cues that were placed there by the filmmakers. Sometimes one man’s weary verbiage is simply one man’s weary verbiage. (Maybe the resistance to this movie is rooted in its humor being much more of a intellectual construct than usual, even for the Coens? One of the funniest things in the movie is when Scarlett Johannson's Birdy, after a failed audition with a renowned piano teacher at Ed's insistence, turns to him and confesses that she has no ambition to pursue music professionally, that she hasn't the passion for it. "But you," she says to Ed's deadpan mug, "you're an enthusiast!" It's a great comic moment, and I've never laughed out loud at it.)

The other thing that I realized as I began watching the movie last night, in addition to the fact that I probably hadn’t seen it in upwards of 10 years, was the fact that I didn’t remember being aware of the audience’s reactions, positive or negative, annoying or reassuring, because I never saw the movie with an audience. My first exposure to The Man Who Wasn’t There came several months before it was released here in the U.S. when I created the closed-captioning stream for the movie’s original VHS/DVD home video release, and it has the distinction of being, alongside Intolerable Cruelty, one of only two Coen brothers features I’ve never seen projected in a theater. (I even saw The Ladykillers in 35mm.) Seeing a movie this way means a specific kind of detachment is imposed on the experience from the start, because it requires breaking down the movie into lines of dialogue and patterns of shots and shot changes before you’ve had the chance to establish any kind of familiarity with it at all. Depending on the quality of the movie you’re seeing this way, it can actually help make the experience more pleasant— after all, some (most?) movies don’t give you even this much to think about on their own. But seeing a Coen Brothers movie this way first is to put it, and yourself, at a disadvantage. When the movie was eventually released, during its brief stay in American theaters, I never got a chance to see it (and may have felt less inclined because I’d already been exposed to it). So I never had the privilege of luxuriating in Roger Deakins’ radiantly bleak chiaroscuro cinematography on the big screen, and two or three DVD screenings in the interim years have done nothing to console me in that regard.

Disregarding all that and to attempt to answer your question, what, after all these years, to make of The Man Who Wasn’t There? I’m very interested, as I know you are, in trying to figure out why the movie has held my imagination over the course of a decade, even when the movie’s almost perverse shifts in tone, its deliberate attempt to keep its viewer off-balance, in a disoriented state somewhat resembling Ed’s moral and emotional lethargy, almost seem to invite disengagement. It is telling that the Coens, after having won an Oscar for Fargo, following that film up with the often literally shaggy The Big Lebowski and then stumbling into perhaps their most unlikely box-office success, O Brother Where Art Thou, would then continue to focus on making movies whose central motivation seem to be amusing their creators rather than appeasing audience demographics.

This is important because, for the most part, the Coens aren’t interested in telling stories that are deliberately off-putting or insular— they deal for the most part in familiar Hollywood genre types, not for the purpose of deconstructing or commenting on them, as you pointed out, but because these are the movies that hook them as storytellers, and viewers, and luckily for us they just happen to come at those genres from a slightly different angle. Even their most straightforward genre exercises, like the Hammett-influenced Miller’s Crossing or last year’s True Grit, are enlivened and empowered by their sensibility while remaining true to the elements that general audiences would find most appealing about a fast-paced gangster tale or a laconic, elemental western.

But it does seem that The Man Who Wasn’t There is a special beast. I think you’re spot on to suggest that while the movie starts us off in James M. Cain territory, it deposits us somewhere nearer the bleak, scorched terrain of Jim Thompson. It is Thompson who might have, as the Coens do here, insisted that we indulge in the thorny issue of identifying with, or at least willingly spending time inside the head of this largely passive sociopath Ed Crane and, without insisting on redemption, recognizing in his behavior the way in which we might also have made similar choices. But for all the talk of The Man Who Wasn’t There being some kind of precious, insider neo-noir pastiche, how it actually plays has precious little to do with the kind of lurid sexual gamesmanship of The Postman Always Rings Twice, the raw tabloid energy of pictures like The Killing (written by Thompson) or noirs like Crime Wave or Narrow Margin, or even the queasy fatalism of something like Two Seconds or Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour. The movie’s stillness, in regarding Ed’s deadpan, perpetually smoking visage which is always taking in what’s going on-- or not going on-- around him with apparent cynical reserve (or is it just a lack of certainty?), and its unfalteringly steady procession through a grim series of events in practically a benumbed hush, seems to me distinctly European. (Roger Deakins’ inarguably gorgeous black-and-white cinematography contributes to this disassociation—there’s nothing on display here that mixes the picturesque and the perverse with the stark roughness of something like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past or Don Siegel’s The Big Steal. And the movie, despite the presence of one of Carter Burwell's loveliest scores, is haunted not by jazz but by Beethoven.)

What’s more, the movies that this one clearly has on its radar-- pictures like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Scarlett Street and Detour-- don’t feel anything like this one. The Coens would scoff at the idea, but at times The Man Who Wasn’t There, more contemplative than brash or mean, most resembles a noir Robert Bresson might have made, albeit one with scores of dry, wisecracking allusions to modern alienation and even modern aliens, of the UFO kind. This movie embraces the stately, unassumingly attractive small-town California milieu and creates in it the palpable presence of a vaguely sinister energy. It gives you time to really contemplate the intimidating depth of those dark shadows. And those shifts in tone you allude to at the end, especially the ones involving the presence of creatures from another planet who at least one character believes may have contributed in a significant way to the pileup of tragedy upon tragedy in the film’s plot, are jarring, at first. But they also indicate the Coens’ instincts for trying to find an alternate way into the heads of the characters, and alluding to a national obsession with possible life on other planets that was gaining traction during the time this movie takes place, seems a legitimate way of going about that business—even if it would have never occurred to Jim Thompson. It seems initially jokey, but ultimately it becomes, I think, more than that.

The best joke, however, the one that truly reflects the fun-house-mirror fatalism of the Coens' storytelling worldview, is that in The Man Who Wasn’t There no one is convicted or punished for anything they actually did—the driest chuckle is reserved for those who are hung out to dry for someone’s else transgression—and for those who do take their deserved lumps for lesser misbehavior, the punishment is wildly disproportionate to the crime. (As for inside references, for a movie that is ostensibly steeped in the visual iconography of film noir—it’s really more an impression of that visual iconography—there are surprisingly few obvious nods to other movies. But there's one that stuck out to me as much in 2001 as it did last night-- the brothers’ pitch-black tribute to the underwater fate of Shelley Winters in Night of the Hunter, substituting Jon Polito’s bewigged would-be dry cleaning magnate for the starlet and her long, flowing locks.)

There’s so much more to talk about regarding this movie. Thankfully we don’t have to take care of it all at once. So I’ll leave for next time my thoughts about what the title means. I’m glad you mentioned the sequence where Ed has his fatal meeting with Big Dave at Nirdlinger’s department store; I love that sequence too. It's a typically thrilling touch that Ed's own narration is interrupted by Big Dave's call, and then after Ed returns to the house to see his wife asleep as she was when he left, the narration picks up right where the interruption occurred. I also would like to delve a little deeper into this widely accepted, utterly nonsensical platitude regarding the Coens and the alleged disdain they have for their characters. Even if it were true, who was it that decreed filmmakers have to “like” (whatever that means) every character they present? Does dislike preclude artistic or narrative validity? What about Freddy Riedenschneider and the uncertainty principle? And to connect up with another bedeviled Coen protagonist, do you think there’s a link between Ed Crane and Larry Gopnik? (Ed is, after all, a very serious man.) As it turns out, there’s plenty there in The Man Who Wasn’t There, and maybe we can find words for some of the things that they didn’t have words for in Ed Crane’s ill-fated universe.

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BARBER SHOP TALK: JUST WHAT EXACTLY IS THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE?

2012-01-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

If it's Wednesday, you must be Ed Crane. Or perhaps Creighton Tolliver. Or perhaps Freddy Riedenschneider. If you're not, congratulations. You probably wouldn't want to be one of the doomed (or eternally self-absorbed) characters from Joel and Ethan Coen's 2001 marvel The Man Who Wasn't There, and for lots of reasons. Bill Ryan, head pot-stirrer at The Kind of Face You Hate, and I have decided to spend what remains of this week (and hours into the weekend if we so choose) examining some of those reasons. The Man Who Wasn't There is a mysterious movie, even among the Coen Brothers' body of mysterious work, and we thought it would be fun to revisit the movie (I hadn't seen it in 10 years) and think about why it continues to hold a spell on us, even if it's not a particular favorite of many Coen Brothers fans. I'll be back later today with my response which has been percolating in my head like a bad cup of barber shop coffee, even in my dreams, since I saw the movie again last night. It falls to Bill to kick off the discussion. Bill?

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Okay, I’m going to try to begin with a “grabber”: The Man Who Wasn’t There is the only Coen Brothers film that ever made me uncomfortable.

Wow, who could ever stop reading after that bombshell? So let me write some more things to keep that momentum going. First, I should probably note that I do love the Coens’ comedies, but my preference is for their more serious (which isn’t always synonymous with “violent”, but often is, and also, curiously, is almost never antonymous with “funny”, which is more to the point I will eventually be making) films. The Man Who Wasn’t There followed two straight comedies, two great ones, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou. Even as a fan of both of those – especially the latter, at least at the time, though now it’s probably a push – I was raring for the Coens to get back to what, given Blood Simple, you’d have to call their roots. Except of course they have two sets of roots, their second film being the entirely zany Raising Arizona, so the tonal divide has always been there, and has always been hazy, Blood Simple having a few laughs of its own.

This has also contributed to a common knock against the Coens, at least indirectly, which has to do with their alleged coldness, and, especially, the mocking and disdainful regard in which they supposedly hold their characters. As someone who has been moved by Raising Arizona, O Brother, Where Are Thou, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, even Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski, and who loves HI and Edwina and Marge and Ulysses and Tom and Leo and the Dude and Donny and Walter, and so on, I’ve always bristled, at the very least, at this ridiculous criticism, especially since, for a while, this was received wisdom for a while. “Yes, they hate their characters – we must use this as the base from which to build our opinion.” That, and the idea that, with their interest in genre films and styles from early Hollywood, the Coens were merely constructing pastiches or spoofs or icy, ironic dissections, rather than real, full-blooded movies. The answer to that came from either Joel or Ethan (whichever) around the time of The Hudsucker Proxy, when he said (paraphrase): “We think, ‘Hey we like this kind of movie, let’s make one,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s comment upon them.’”

There’s so much that goes into my initial reaction to The Man Who Wasn’t There that I don’t want to get lost in it so early, but basically, with all this in mind, going to see it in the theater in 2001, I was mighty pumped for it. It was a crime film, specifically in the noir style, even black and white, a visual approach I was very excited to see the Coens (and Roger Deakins) take, and a wonderful cast led by one of my then-and-probably-still-I-guess favorite modern actors, Billy Bob Thornton (never have the Coens cast better than they did here). As for its antecedents as a crime story, if Miller's Crossing is Dashiell Hammett, and The Big Lebowski is Raymond Chandler (in a roundabout way), then The Man Who Wasn't There was James M. Cain, with some Jim Thompson in there, too. Cain's characters tend to have a lot of misguided passion, which Thompson's characters can have, too, but the very gradual shift in morals that occurs in The Man Who Wasn't There feels more like some of Thompson's work. The setting -- the California no one else writes about, the everyday California, with small businessmen looking for some meager leg up, casual adultery, and one choice made by one man that brings down the whole world (plus, the final few minutes is straight The Postman Always Rings Twice territory). And I watched it, and I just didn’t know what to make of the damn thing. The tone of it had me all screwed up. Even early on, when James Gandolfini as Big Dave tells his story of World War II cannibalism, a grotesquely absurd tale that he uses as a punchline any time he doesn't like his wife's cooking ("What do I say when I don't like dinner?"), I wondered how seriously the Coens were taking this thing that I wanted them to take very seriously, indeed.

And later, with the UFOs, and Birdy's (Scarlett Johansson) attempt to thank Thornton's Ed Crane, which adds some let's say highly adult themes to some deliberately old-fashioned, rear-projected mayhem, plus let's not forget Jon Polito's very welcome return to the Coen fold, yet still, I thought (then), weird presence as Creighton Tolliver, the gay, innocent (in comparison to most people in the film), vain, and be-wigged dry cleaner whose search for an investor leads to the deaths of pretty much all the film's principle characters. All of this left me unsteady, in a way I wasn't used to with the Coens, who up to then seemed to be making one film after another that was pitched specifically to my sensibilities. Of course, it's hardly as if The Man Who Wasn't There feels like anything other than a Coen brothers film, and their movies always have jokes, but I felt like, for the first time, the charge that perhaps the Coens are too ironic for their own good, and less interested in making films than in mocking them, might not be too far off.

The scene that really made me squirm, when I saw it in the theater, is the bit where Diedrickson (Alan Fudge, one of an endless parade of unknown character actors in Coen brothers films who come in, nail the part, and then seemingly disappear from the film world once again), the medical examiner, comes into the barber shop where Ed works with his brother-in-law Frank (Michael Badalucco). At this point, Ed has killed Big Dave, after blackmailing him for the money needed to invest in Creighton's dry-cleaning business, using Dave's affair with Ed's wife Doris (Frances McDormand) as the leverage. However, for various circumstantial reasons, Doris has been accused of the murder, and was awaiting trial when she suddenly commits suicide. Diedrickson asks to take Ed across the street for a drink, and in a gorgeous shot of deep black wood and shadows splashed with white sunlight, he reveals to Ed, because he thinks Ed has a right to know, that Doris was pregnant at the time of her death. After a pause, Ed, staring straight ahead, says "My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years."

In the theater, this got a big laugh from the crowd I saw it with. I didn't laugh. Not because I'm so much better than those people, but because, for one thing, I didn't find even Ed's ridiculous choice of words that funny, but also because I didn't want to. There wasn't much in that situation that I could find humorous, and it bothered me that, clearly, the Coens could.

Now, I realize this all makes me sound like a stone-faced, uptight prig. Maybe I was, or am, or something. But I found the film very frustrating in a way I didn't want to admit, because, Coen brothers super-fan that I am, to not like their new film, especially for these reasons, would be like admitting defeat. And of course the new and separate danger (not really) is that by admitting this, my eventual turnaround on the film, which came much earlier than my recent viewing of it in preparation for this project, it could easily appear that I'm talking myself into liking it.

I do not believe that's the case, not least because even from the beginning there were parts of this film that I absolutely loved. There was nothing in The Man Who Wasn't There that I loved more than the sequence that has Ed putting his drunk wife to bed, while Ed's narration recounts their first date -- one which would seem to have offered little promise, but which also neatly forecast their future together -- only to be interrupted by a ringing phone, which leads to the killing of Big Dave, and Ed's return home, with clean hands, to resume his narration, the shadows of lacey curtains fluttering over his face, while Beethoven's "Piano Sonata, Opus 79" (I had to look that up) underlines all this awful grimness with counterintuitive beauty. This sequence is as good as anything the Coens have ever done, and it's the sort of thing I held onto tightly as I left the theater in 2001.

Boy, there's a lot more. The UFOs, the performances, the strange, shaggy final stretch, Freddy Riedenschneider, Ed's strange and empty pursuit for redemption, what that title's all about, not to mention, among other unmentioned things, my final turnaround. But what about you? Did this film ever make you uneasy? Does the film seem anything like the strangest of the Coens films, as I, changed opinion or not, persist in believing? Just what do you make of this?

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TALKING ABOUT THE BARBER

2012-01-09T11:11:00.000-08:00

Three summers ago (Could it possibly have been that long?) saw the release of Quentin Tarantino’s raucous, historically impudent Inglourious Basterds. To commemorate what turned out to be a true cinematic event, and to assure our place in the national water-cooler discussion that ensued, I joined forces with Bill Ryan, he of the renowned and intelligent blog The Kind of Face You Hate, and spent a week trading long e-mails on the subject of the movie and the controversy it stirred. We posted those e-mails both here and on Bill’s site-- as I recall some pretty big names got involved in the back and forth— and it was an incredible amount of fun processing the experience in this way.

Well, a few weeks ago Bill and I and lots of other folks got into a Facebook discussion about the Coen Brothers, inspired by a recent viewing of O Brother Where Art Thou, and eventually the spotlight turned to the filmmakers’ 2001 release The Man Who Wasn’t There, a movie that isn’t often brought up when one finds oneself in discussions revolving around one’s favorite Coen Brothers movie. Both Bill and I admitted that we loved the movie and found it fascinating, even after admitting that we weren’t sure we could put our fingers on exactly why. So I suggested we do another back-and-forth for our respective blogs on the topic of the movie (and, it seems inevitable, the Coen Brothers in general) to see if we could better understand our attraction to a movie that hasn’t generated anything near Lebowski-sized love. And the time for that discussion has come.

Starting Wednesday (just enough time to watch the movie again), Bill and I will trade observations about The Man Who Wasn’t There and post our exchange on both blogs. The conversation is scheduled to last Wednesday through Friday, January 11 through 13, but if the spirit moves us (and those of you who wish to chime in on the comments thread) it could go longer. (Or maybe it’ll peter out after a couple of posts if the discussion doesn’t move far beyond “Gee, this movie is great!”) However it shapes up, it should be fun to dig into one of the Coen Brothers’ least-hashed-over movies, one that certainly deserves some hashing. Remember: It all starts Wednesday, January 11, right here at SLIFR and at The Kind of Face You Hate.

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SLIFR IN 2012 (AND THE DGA AWARDS)

2012-01-09T11:02:00.001-08:00

David Fincher, just nominated for a Director's Guild of America award for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Happy 2012, everybody! Time to slough off the holiday glaze and get crackin’ on a new year here at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, one which I hope will be as full of reasons to kick off your shoes and stay a while as the past seven (seven?) years have been. I’m hoping also to be a little bit more prolific than I was in 2011, as the year past marked the lowest level of output on this blog ever. But one of the things that I’ve learned in trying to balance the requirements of real life with those of my creative project here is that quality really should trump quantity, and I’ve heard that notion confirmed to me often enough, directly and indirectly, over the past 12 months to convince me of its wisdom. Writing time is too preciously allotted these days for me to be concerned about posting simply to fill space, and those aren’t the kind of posts I suspect most people who read this blog are looking for anyway.

I’ve never claimed this site to be a source for timely reviews of the latest releases or breaking news in the world of Hollywood. You get that from time to time, but truthfully, much like it has eclipsed the immediacy of commenting on individual blog posts, Facebook has also become the go-to outlet for posting smaller items of interest that don’t require much more than a comment or two to get the discussion rolling. For catching up on more timely items, we all have our favorite sources for that—mine include film criticism written by critics like David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek, industry analyst Anne Thompson, and coverage of items big and small at sites like The Daily MUBI, INDIEWire and Movieline. I know I can’t possibly keep up with all that expertise, so instead of beating myself up for it I’m really going to try and fully embrace the time I have for writing in 2012 and make the most of it in the ways that I can. I will also hope that this dedication is reflected more in the worth of what’s written rather than how many posts I’ve racked up by this time next year.

But now that I’ve said that, news of the Director’s Guild of America nominations has flashed across my phone (courtesy of Anne Thompson!), so why not pass that info along. The list is an interesting one, as much for the exclusions as for those who got the nod (and there are a couple of surprises there too). The nominees are:

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
David Fincher, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Truthfully, I’m happiest to see the nomination for David Fincher, who probably wasn’t expected to be in the rank because his movie was reviewed slightly more tepidly that last year’s The Social Network and was also the perceived victim of slightly softer box office returns than might have been predicted. (I loved it, and I intend to write about it briefly this week, before including it on my best of the year list.) The other nominations ought not to surprise anyone who’s even halfway been paying attention. Hazanavicius is surviving the backlash on The Artist splendidly, thank you, and both his and Scorsese’s movie benefit from being valentines to the transcendent magic of cinema, in particular to the glory of the silents. Payne makes serious-minded sit-coms that a lot of people like (I have not yet seen The Descendants-- the last Payne movie I really liked was Election). And everybody seems happy that Woody Allen has finally made another good movie. (I think it’s magical too, though I think it’s flawed in ways that those familiar with Allen’s fairly dreary output of late will easily recognize.) But honestly (and here I tip my hat even more fully to my own preferences for the year), no room for Steven Spielberg and War Horse, the best movie the man has made in at least 10 years?

Sigh. So, onward to awards season, eh? Why is it that I’m already looking forward to baseball's opening day?

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MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABY!

2011-12-25T00:31:00.001-08:00

The kids are fast asleep, the stockings are hung round the chimney with glee and Santa's snacks are in position. It's time for Dad to go to bed, because the dawn arrives way too soon, and there are many things still left to do, believe it or not, before the festivities around here can get under way. But I'm gonna try to make the day less a chore this year and more about remembering the things that are important to me. Let's each of us make it a merry and peaceful Christmas day for everyone around us, give ourselves a chance to relax and reflect and rejoice in the company of friends, neighbors and loved ones, and set the concerns of the everyday aside, even for just a few hours.

And now a quickie gallery of some lovely Santa's helpers from Hollywood's past to help better decorate your day.

Carole Lombard (top right, circa 1929) and two of Santa's sauciest sirens make sure the holidays are merry and bright, and distracting and cold sweat-inducing. Then, Carole enacts a Christmas morning ritual-- the sober existential contemplation of an armload of strangely decorated boxes.

Loretta Young (also circa 1929) gives Santa's claws pause and perhaps makes Old Saint Nick wish she was the holly jolly missus... (And if that outfit isn't pre-Code, I'll roast my chestnuts.)

Barbara Stanwyck considers dropping a heavy ornament on Dennis Morgan's head, anything to stop yet another drunken rendition of "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime."

Merry Christmas, baby, and to all a good night and a great day.

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NOW PLAYING (FINALLY)! MY ADVENTURES AT THE 2011 TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL!

2011-12-22T11:39:00.001-08:00

It’s been a long time coming—since May of this year, in fact—but the extensive report on my adventures at the second annual Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, which took place in nearby Hollywood, is finally up and running. It’s called "My Favorite Film Festival of 2011: Alive and Well, in Love and War, at the TCM Classic Film Festival” and it can be found at the online culture magazine Slant, published there under the auspices of Keith Uhlich and The House Next Door, which has been a longtime force in the film blogosphere and is now the official blog of Slant magazine.

The title may be slightly deceptive, however— counting the various special programs at the New Beverly Cinema curated by special guests, the only festival I actually attended other than TCM were brief visits to the AFI Fest here in November and the Los Angeles Film Festival near the beginning of the summer. (As you may have ascertained, geography plays a huge role in my festival fun, as I am not very much part of even the intercontinental jet set.) But then again, when one has as many options in terms of the availability of classic movies on big screens as we continue to enjoy here in Los Angeles, despite the dire future projected for 35mm archival prints, it sometimes feels like every week brings with it its own festival, along with the hope that more people will avail themselves of the bounty and not take for granted its presence. (There are no guarantees, even—especially—regarding the permanence of film and the venues in which you can see it.)

So, apart from the attempt to set the piece’s content apart from matters of timeliness by billing it as an end-of-the-year report on my “favorite” film festival, it seems to me that it does work as an attempt to keep engaged the subject of seeing and appreciating classic films on the big screen, something that I think is always worth mentioning in one way or another. In that spirit I offer it to you now, with a qualification and some acknowledgments. The qualification takes the form of an apology, particularly to Keith Uhlich and Ed Gonzalez, chief editor at Slant, for my complete and utter tardiness which necessitated all the year-end positioning in the first place. As readers of SLIFR will have no doubt already observed, this past year has been the least prolific in the history of this blog (more on this in a post reserved for next week), and as with the writing here circumstances in life—the outside world, and the interior world of my creative brainscape-- made it a bit more difficult than usual to find the time, not to mention the words, to fulfill my pleasant obligation as regards reporting on the festival. I’m exceedingly glad, therefore, that I managed to wrestle it into some shape which seems to have pleased my editors, and I vow a much more prompt turnaround should they be so generous as to sponsor me again next year.

As for acknowledgments, in addition to Keith and Ed and their bright minds and friendly, encouraging demeanors, I wanted to give a shout-out to a few folks (some of which are mentioned in the piece as well) who really helped me have a joyous experience at the festival and, in the aftermath, really get it together vis-à-vis the whole writing thing. My sincere thanks to:

Ariel Schudson, student of film preservation and blogger extraordinaire at her site Sinamatic Salve-ation;

freelance writer, blogger and good pal Bob Westal;

Richard Harland Smith, fellow Horror Dad and resident genius at TCM’s Movie Morlocks;

classic film expert and all-around good guy Michael Schlesinger;

Carrie Specht, writer, director and headmaster at the Classic Film School;

Michael Torgan and Julia Marchese at the New Beverly Cinema;

and, whether or not she thinks she deserves it, Farran Smith Nehme, who I’m so happy to have gotten to know via our concurrent introduction into the blogosphere six years ago. As I said at the conclusion of the piece published at Slant, her continued influence and passion sets a shining example for all us lowly bloggers toiling in the shadow of paid professionalism; her singular wit, good humor, and genuine love and respect for the film classics of a bygone era provide me and so many others with the inspiration to truly appreciate and attempt to preserve, each in our own way, the treasures of our collective movie past.

And last but most certainly not least, thanks to my wife, Patty Yokoe Cozzalio, who put up with my absence during the days of the festival, continues to put up with even more absence during the rest of the year as I pursue the enjoyment of classic and contemporary film, and of course the time to write about it, and who lent her eagle eyes to the editing and proofing of this piece before I finally submitted it. I appreciate your effort and concern more than you’ll know, and I love you.

Now please go read the piece and even leave a comment if you care to—here or there. You might kill a tree in the process, but if you print it out you’ll have bathroom reading guaranteed to hold you over the span of several sit-downs, if you like the piece, and some extra TP if you don’t!

And if I don’t get a chance to say so between now and then, merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

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