jane dark's sugarhigh!

the golden compass

Softporn from the standpoint of steampunk.

The shift from Pullman's book to Weitz's film, in terms of its central conflict, is akin to making a movie of the French Revolution in which the crux is that Marie Antoinette is mean to kids. As much as we understand that children's books especially do put children in harm's way, as a narrative trope this has now become as powerfully counter-political as, say, the writings of Ayn Rand were in their day.

i am legend

A perplexing film, at once relentless in its linear drive and all over the place. For the first 75 minutes, it's just Will Smith's Robert Neville, the last good man, versus the denuded and albinofied zombies; it's all very kill whitey, though the film seems obdurately unaware of this blazingly obvious fact. Also never mentioned: in the background of Neville's Washington Square townhouse are masterpieces presumptively boosted from MoMA (Henri Rousseau, a couple Van Goghs, etc; he seems to favor Post-Impressionists). The film shares the trope of institutionally marked art rescued by individuals in civilization's collapse with V for Vendetta and Children of Men; do we smell an ideologeme on the rise?

These seemingly incidental elements perhaps make more sense against the film's closure, as the cure is delivered to the lone community of survivors, in a walled enclave in Vermont. For all the fortifications, inside the gates is idealized small-town America. No museums here, no furreign paintings or any other cosmopolitan corruptions. It is, let us say, contamination-free. Goodness has survived after all, and in a dizzying inversion, it's white as an unsullied snowdrift and just as rustic, coded into the town with its autumnal New England crispness, its white-painted wooden church steeple rising salvifically in the exit shot. It could be any day in the history of virtue, except it's not — as the overvoice informs us, it is September, 2012. In fact, it is September 10th as the cure is delivered, the last day of the era of contamination...

two days in paris

Guiding cliché: a version of everyone's fucked up and that's finally okay they can still successfully pair off.

Compare favorably to Waitress: also directed by female actor who appears in film, equally clichéd account of human psychology — this case just happens to be a somewhat less noxious banality.

Compare unfavorably to "One Night in Bangkok."

[ps: modernism/modernity discussion left unfinished: once art stars, displace by machines, turned to chess. Now chess stars, displaced by machines, turn to politics.]

no country for old men

A pretty good movie concerning how the world in which men change their shirts only when shot is slowly being put out of business by the suburbs.

the mist

From the moment the first tentacle comes winding out of the mist, everything's lost. The film, especially in its attempt (mildly updated from the original story) to be an allegory (albeit a confused one), makes a lot more sense if we never see the actual beasts.

Never mind the standard-issue Irresponsible Government Science Unleashes Cataclysmic Result narrative, which hasn't gained much charge since Godzilla (though still promises some interest, in its increasing incoherence). The main allegory, organized around King's passionate if undeveloped dislike for charismatic demagogues of apocalypse, concerns what horrors humans perpetrate on each other, given certain opportunities. It involves Marcia Gay Harden in a burdensome role as prophetess-harridan. Her early diagnosis of the mist — "it's death" — and her leveraging of inchoate fear toward religious violence would be far more interesting (and resonant) if that fear stayed inchoate, if there remained a rift of possibility that it was in fact nothing.

But the mist turns out to be a mere soup in which monsters bob about; obviously, in a smarter movie the medium would be the message. King's (and Darabont's) failure to grasp this, even in the midst of trying to make an oh-so-adult point about how the scary monsters are the other humans, turns out to be an exact measure of their adolescence.

southland tales

In the words of jds! correspondent Chris Nealon, "Fight Club + Buckaroo Banzai + Moby = Southland Tales ÷ Donnie Darko = 0." Though there is perhaps another equation that would involve Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Majestic...

30 days of night

Josh Hartnett revisits familiar territory in what we assumed must be the sequel to 40 Days and 40 Nights ("I am big. It's the titles that got small"). And it sort of is: our hero has to go a month with blue balls, trying not to get drained by a bunch of bloodsucking lovelies while he gets his head right.

The title also turns out to describe what should be a perfectly interesting conceit for a vampire film: in the Arctic Circle, one of the proven anti-vampire strategies is effectively off the table for a month. One could imagine an alternate approach called Land Without Garlic.

Alas, hoping for any narrative device to unfold interestingly in this film would require, as a precondition, the tiniest sliver of logical sense in the plot. No dice. Well, citizens who attend Hollywood cinema for the plot are sort of fucked anyway; it's like going to the club for the time signatures. The pleasures are elsewhere, and more social.

In this case, the main delight is Danny Huston in the Shannyn Sossamon role. Though too much of a set piece, it's entirely thrilling when he rebuts the supernatural tastes of humans with three slow words. "God?" he says in a curdling voice, pivoting his head unnaturally to take in a panorama of the desolated, frozen town, unable to wrap his serrated throat around Anglo phonemes or concepts. "No god."

At another juncture he does his hair up into a little pompadour. With blood. Seriously, let's see Shannyn Sossamon do that.

american gangster

American Gangster's soundtrack, despite a flirtation with a cred-desperate Jay-Z, is comprised of thick dollops of Seventies soul/funk album tracks real and imagined...until the final scene when Frank Lucas, having served his time, walks out into a world utterly changed. Well, utterly changed in one regard: Public Enemy has appeared on the soundtrack, specifically that song of anthemic skepticism, "Can't Truss It." It's a great song, of course, and the "idea" — the distance between Bobby Womack and Chuck D — is clear enough, and explains why Jay-Z had to be turned down: if the whole movie is hip-hop, that last rhetorical gesture can't happen.

But it's an odd gesture, finally. Lucas walks out into the New York in 1991: the world in which gangsta has just replaced PE's nation rap in a swap as total as it was sudden. Moreover, a gangsta track would have made the actual relevant point: not that times done changed, son (duh!) but that the particularities of Frank Lucas's life of crime had become universalized into a worldview, that the black superman gangster with a naturalized corporate sensibility was now the lifestyle icon par excellance.

Such a move would scarcely have been genius; it's just the minimum to have an account, and its absence utterly exemplary of the film's ceaseless failures of intelligence, its hemorrhaging of meaning. No one is asking for some kind of heavy social theory, even in a film that takes itself so seriously: it's Hollywood. But throwing up 20 seconds of Kool G Rap (if a New Yorker was needed — though a non-New Yorker would have made the universalizing point better) would scarcely have turned the film into a think piece. As it is, the movie is flatly thoughtless, unable to make even the simplest points it has in mind about the big-boxing of the urban dope trade. Perhaps it merely hopes we've all seen The Wire, Dostoyevsky to this film's Leskov.

And so, unable to think, it simply leaves the drama to the conflict between Lucas and cop Richie Roberts, with some vague suggestion that Frank in his grasp of necessity is as different from the mafia as Richie is different from crooked cops — and thus they meet as odd equals. But even this doesn't really play, given that it's staged by Denzel and Russell Crowe, a comparison able to do nothing but embarrass the latter and his comically bad Jersey accent.

michael clayton

With his blocky size, his surfeit of charisma and screen gravitas, Clooney looks like something beyond the mere human, like he has swallowed every leading man in Hollywood and perhaps had Casey Affleck for a palate cleanser. Tilda Swinton continues to look like something beyond human as well, but more in a hire-me-for-a-remake-of-The-Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth kind of way. They slug it out herein for the fate of the little people, the human beings, making this more like, say, Transformers or Rise of the Silver Surfer than most legal thrillers.

cinema quant: the update

37) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
36) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
35) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
34) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
33) Shoot'em Up (Clive Owen not in fact charismatic enough to make shit smell like roses)
32) The Nanny Diaries (Giammati plays exact same role as in Shoot'em Up, seen from other perspective)
31) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
30) No End In Sight (anti-war doc's breakout star, Seth Moulton, turns out only to want a better war)
29) Stardust (nice swordfight-played-as-videogame scene)
28) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
27) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
26) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (It's funny, see, cuz they're not gay!)
25) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
24) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
23) The Brave One (a satisfying if false portrait of a Radiohead fan)
22) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
21) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
20) Ratatouille (sugarhigh!'s mother notes this is Singin' In The Rain)
19) We Own the Night (have you noticed that all Joaquin Phoenix's characters have the same scar?)
18) Resident Evil: Extinction (the cinematic ontology of helicopters remains to be written)
17) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
16) The Kingdom ("Let us do our job....We're good at this." Yeah, in what universe? Meanwhile good parts are all Blackhawk Down)
15) Superbad (Not-so-superbadinage; this is what became of Tarantino's New American chitchat)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

elsewhere in the sugarhigh! universe

[Darkness at Noon: photo taken moments before 9/11 reading was called on account of weather; shirt made by East Bay graphics guru Jack Morgan]

A spin-off of sugarhigh! film reviews, the quarterly column "Marx & Coca-Cola" debuts at Film Quarterly (free download; click on "Content: Sample Article").

shoot'em up

Opens to the strains of Nirvana's "Breed," and closes to the Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart." One might note that this historical reversal is suggestive of the film's retrogressive tendencies; better to point out that these two songs are by far the best thing the film has going for it.

superbad

Though the immediate point of contact is earlier-summer Apatovian comedy Knocked Up, an equally apt comparison might be Grindhouse. That film too basked in a period sensibility that fell just short of being an actual period piece, the surface punctured by evidences of the contemporary that read as something between anachronisms and telltales.

The effect is less pointed in Superbad, less self-conscious, but still ubiquitous — from the post-Lovebug font of the posters to the costuming to the period-specific contrived naiveté about the sexual codes of teens, the film floats in a hazy late-Seventies/early-Eighties cloud of reference. The vast majority of the songs are from some shifting past era: the Bar-Kays, Van Halen, Sergio Mendes, Curtis Mayfield, Black Sabbath and Jean Knight, you get the idea. Music, say, from the youth of the two cops who shepherd at least one of the kids through the narrative.

The film was written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, reputedly when they were in high school themselves. The two leads, played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, may be meant to represent Goldberg and Rogen in the time of the script's writing, in the past — but their true proxies are of course the two cops, who while remaining hopelessly juvenile, now have the mysterious and comical authority to make things work out for the poor kids. They are Goldberg and Rogen in the present; one is even played by Rogen.

It's exactly this confusion which generates the period uncertainty, and the puzzlement each time the film's present comes pricking through in some slang, or a song by The Rapture or The Coup: the film simply doesn't know what time period it is depicting. This makes it oddly discomfiting, and is surely the most interesting thing about it. The only efficient way to resolve the confusion would be to understand the two cops as the leads, despite their lesser roles, and the unfolding story to be a fantasy about high school as it survives in the pot-basted recollections of the film's two side players, with contemporary kids recruited to walk through the main parts, baffled by their own clothing and ignorance.

One might note that movies are like dreams: every part in them is the makers in some facet. But this would be to fall into the trap of understanding movies as having singular makers, as being expressions of singular consciousnesses. Hollywood films are directed by money — and money, it would seem, wishes to be uncertain about what time it is, what high school is like, what kids are like. This is perhaps a predictable development: Mean Girls, after all, signaled that Hollywood had completely and flawlessly comprehended its own codes for the teen comedy, and could deploy them in perfectly serried rank — a development which inevitably presages the wistful decline of any genre. No wonder Superbad would helplessly float back toward an era of otherwise-inexplicable salience which just happens to be the cradle of the now-dying genre (emerging, arguably, between 1979's Rock'n'Roll HIgh School and 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Lodging its fantasy in the moment of birth, Superbad arrives as a marker of the genre's death. And so another form of the youth movie will have to be developed in the lab of summer releases, and it is to this task that we can expect to see, are already seeing, the Great Director turn.

stardust

It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.

Still.

One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him. Like the water-cooler boor who becomes the office analyst because he read a Jung book in college, Gaiman seems to have raised himself into the empyrean on the narrow shoulders of Joseph Campbell. Campbell is not a very persuasive starting position in the first place: a sloppy structuralism denuded of whatever force it might have had by spiritualization. Stardust, in film version at least, for all its stylized whimsies, seems like the most mechanical Campbelliana imaginable. There are no characters, only positions, in which squat a rather unfortunate set of actors. The little matrix of the hero narrative has been filled with requisitely "original" figures; it's a movie written entirely in a single page Excel spreadsheet.

To be fair, this may be true of almost every Hollywood movie: that the roles, relations and actions are fixed more remorselessly than in any Russian folktale, and that the pleasures and communications happen in the variations possible within such tight contours (one notes that this account is a mirrorworld of the caricature of Marxian description, wherein the lives of individuals unfold according to the merciless logic of dialectical history, allowed the most limited latitude of action which has an experiential relevance but no determining force on the outcome. Hollywood genre films, one might suggest, are the structure by which this non-determining and intensely limited activity is seen to be nonetheless the entirety of the film's substance, both despite and because of its irrelevance to outcomes).

What grows weary, if not downright aggravating, is when a movie (or graphic novel) wants credit simply for knowing about the structures, varying them scarcely at all — and this, we have been suggesting, is Stardust's calling card. Let's be plain: Joesph Campbell and the like are exactly incisive enough to make dumb people seem more intelligent; it's equally true that they make reasonably intelligent folk seem dumber if they take to parroting them. That Neil Gaiman appears as smarter his cohort...well, this is a verdict of considerable clarity.

This is not to say that the film is entirely without interest. There is something of interest in watching Robert DeNiro go about the grim task of obliterating his own legend, a task that dates at least to Analyze This and has, in contemporary culture, no comparison except perhaps Eddie Vedder (the strikingly unambitious boredom of the last dozen years must be on purpose, right?) By now, DeNiro is merely a poor substitute for other famous and famously stylized character actors in on their own joke (Walken, Hopper, Keitel, etc); at what point will he have effaced his own history enough to return to work?

ratatouille

Wow, Pixar really is the new Hollywood! In the sense that the films are consistently diverting and one must entirely discount the ideological payload and the last fifteen minutes in order not to experience them as exactly the shittiest thing that culture can foist on itself (in the truly insane postlude here, the figure of the intellectual — the critic — ends by confronting his true peasant origins, admitting that intellectual life is a parasitic sham except insofar as it on rare occasion valorizes natural genius sprung from the earth, and then ends by abandoning criticism for the true and authentic peasant life of a tuxedo'd finance entrepreneur).

Up until that moment, we have a different story: the swiftly-becoming-par-for-the-course Brad Bird deal about how true genius sprung from the soil can't be held down, and eventually the world's need for same will trump its need for a confabulated egalité (note to self: is film critique of French Revolution much as Incredibles was critique of cultural revolution?) Bird, perhaps after a thorough reading of Appadurai, seems to believe that the antidote to crass capitalism (the "frozen dinnering" of the deceased great chef's recipes) is, well, uncrass capitalism (see snooty entrepreneur, above).

Which is to say: it doesn't get any more incoherent than this. It's a tangled web.

And on this tangled web, which must be kept in view lest it finally entangle us all, it's a decent few minutes watching a cute animated rat hop about, and seeing how the plot mechanics will be cranked given the particularities of this input. Strictly Mickey Mouse.

sunshine

Sunspotting.

26) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
25) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
24) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
23) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
22) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
21) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
20) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
19) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
18) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
17) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
16) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
15) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the bourne ultimatum

...in which Jason Bourne, né David Webb — well-meaning, patriotic, brutally brainwashed into becoming a vacant killing machine — finds himself, late in the movie (the third in a series running since mid-2002, if dates are really needed), asking the lone sympathetic authority figure, Pamela Landy, why she's now helping him.

To which she explains that "this" (black ops, waterboarding, assassinations, etc etc) isn't what she signed off on, initially; now she wants to help him put a stop to it.

Which is to say that Matt Damon plays the American people, as imagined by, oh, The New Republic.. And Joan Allen plays Hillary Clinton as imagined by, oh, Hillary Clinton.

A curiously overrated film; it's not even the summer's most entrancing bit of propaganda, which is all we ever asked for.

25) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
24) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
23) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
22) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
21) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
20) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
19) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
18) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
17) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
16) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
15) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
14) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

ocean's 13

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.

The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.

But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.

This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.

Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.

But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.

24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

confidential to manoel de oliveira

Seriously, dude, watch your back.

hot fuzz

Saw this movie.

And now, on to an update on the rankings, with a reminder that these run from worst to best, or from least preferred to most preferred, as indicated by the numbers — so that, for example, the movie numbered "1" is the "number 1" movie on the list.

23) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
22) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
21) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
20) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
19) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
18) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
17) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

transformers

Given the clarity and accuracy of the reviews here and here, we will merely register in passing the grimmest moment in this generally grim film.

During the climactic battle (which takes place in Los Angeles, Nevada), there's a brief "shot" of the late-arriving Decepticon, Starscream (in his mechanical form as a jet) smashing into and blurring through a couple floors of an office tower. As if in a dream, we watch from a magical viewpoint, mid-air outside the office windows; they spool past like frames of film stock, detailing impossibly the interior stuff — desks, fluttering papers, bodies — being tossed asunder, before Starscream blasts out the building, leaving a defined exit wound. The sequence lasts less than two seconds, maybe less than one.

And yet it is by far the most detailed reconstruction of the iconic violence from the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, among visualizations, this is the one that has been pointedly disallowed, the image not recreated in the increasing wealth of historical recreations: we have been allowed to see the tower only from the outside, from pre-contact to the leaping bodies. To render that interior image from a perspective too close to reality would be, as we are all given to understand, somehow pornographic; one way to understand this movie is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, this gets at the moment of truth within the Transformers franchise, and the occasional brilliance of this resurrection. No other device so lovingly preserves the boy's dream that every single object in the world is weaponized: cars, planes, bodies, existing beyond the capacities of conventional armies. Car-bomb, 9/11, suicide bomber: the fantasy of weaponization is merely the reality of asymmetric warfare, and the story of how it was finally brought to the United States. The movie really should be titled Transformers, or a Brief History of 21st Century Combat. Square-jawed officer Josh Duhamel's one task in the film is to deliver the news to just-a-boy hero Shia LaBoeuf: "we're all soldiers now." This, coming only a few moments after Starscream's arrival, is surely the most dispiriting moment in peculiarly dispiriting — which is to say, peculiarly affecting — film.

harry potter and the order of the phoenix/joe strummer: the future is unwrittten

British Prep School Boys Against Evil.

Only one of these movies has Johnny Depp in it, and Depp's dead man's chest is not to be found in Potter's field. Rather, he shows up to testify on behalf of the oldest and deadest member of the Clash. The curious thing is that he was apparently interviewed on the set of one of the Pirates movies. Either that, or he dresses like that all the time: Depp gives the standard issue Strummer-is-god monologue in full Jack Sparrow regalia, down to the double-dangles of the beard, which automatically makes it the most riveting part of the film except for early Clash footage (especially the opening of Joe laying in the vocals for "White Riot") and the brief second or two of Big Audio Dynamite live.

Now that you mention it, that may be the best future for Harry. Though we hear he ends up a wise Hogwarts parent, it would be a bit better if the Pirates trilogy turned out to be the last three episodes of Harry Potter, wherein Harry, now a wizened and amoral pirate, has to decide again and again whether to be good or evil; the appearance of Keith Richards as his dad would explain almost everything.

Also noted: brief shot across the bows of postmodernity. "The Ministry has determined," says the sadistic schoolmarm Dolores Umbridge, "that a theoretical knowledge of spells should be enough to pass your exams." Quoth Harry, "what good is theory when you're actually attacked"? Etc Etc. Dolores is of course from the Ministry, and is en route to deposing good ol' Dumbledore from his post. As with The History Boys, the posing of theoretical or abstract knowledge as proper to those who have achieved and maintain political power is merely bizarre.

In Order of the Phoenix, the training montage is replaced by a teaching montage, in which Harry takes on the task of imparting pragmatic knowledge of magic to the other students. "You're a really good teacher, Harry — I've never been able to stun anything before."

For Joe Strummer, this was less of a problem.

severance

The serial obliteration of a bunch of employees for a defense firm by the ghost remainders of the Balkan troops they've armed is the obvious moralizing structure, but in fact is almost trivial. Rather, this film achieves even the barest intelligibility (even within the flexible near-magical-realism of the horror b-film) via the acceptance of one unquestioned premise: that First World anglos are unable to distinguish between a luxury hotel and a derelict state medical facility.

As long as it's in Eastern Europe.

And this is in fact somewhat interesting, highlighting exactly the peculiar place of Eastern Europe within the core/periphery order of civilization, as it exists in anglo imaginations: at once industrialized and premodern, citizens of a new European order in which state war seems unimaginable — except for the actual presence of internecine conflicts, that thus seem to belong to more distant states and centuries. The cultural anxiety is clear: geographically, it seems like the kind of place that should follow First World "rules," and thus be navigable by, well, us. And yet even in the last two decades since the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact, it isn't.

Would we know what a nice hotel looked like? And might our lack of code-comprehension, our uncertainty about the success of the project which involves remaking the world core in our image, turn out to be fatal?

waitress and knocked up

"The film also deserves credit for showing a young, unwed mother taking responsibility for her actions, rather than opting for the easy abortion route." This quotation is timeless, in its way; in this case it's three years old, from a review of Saved! that appeared in the Catholic News Service.

Saved! is perhaps the most influential comedy in American cinema...this Spring (especially if you're watching the new DVD release of Weeds Season 2, wherein Saved!'s adult romance between Mary-Louise Parker and Martin Donovan, as mom Lilian and Pastor Skip, returns in the form of mom Nancy and DEA Agent Peter). Both this season's hegemonic Hollywood comedy, and its little indie that could, revolve around the same core plot point; apparently the Non-Sequel/Franchise market is committed to the drama of the implausibly pregnant young woman facing down a complicated and morally ambiguous choice.

As you will know by now, that choice isn't whether to keep the baby. As in Saved! (and many others; this seems to convenient analogue for particular reasons), the abortion option is thought about only far enough so that it can be shown to be unthinkable even in secular terms. To this point, Waitress and Knocked Up are roughly identical films.

Of course, they go different directions: in Waitress, the protag keeps the baby but ditches both husband and lover; in Knocked Up, the woman is not really the protag and thus, by definition, keeps the baby and the father. It would be nice — or interesting — if this gave the movies meaningfully different valences, but it doesn't; they both finally read as sentimental moralizing.

However, at least a couple distinctions can be drawn, the most obvious of which is that, non-stop for the first 70 minutes and intermittently after, Knocked Up is really freakin' funny. Waitress, conversely, is only very intermittently funny (largely thanks to the diner's's Flo, Cheyl Hines, late of the Larry David Show), and goes instead for a sweetness which is now wounded, now cloying. This might be by way of noting that one is a big studio machine, one a tiny Sundancer (relatively speaking).

And this indeed the difference that counts, in every possible way. One might enjoy how Waitress, more free to defy phantasmatic heartland test audiences, allows its hero to go her own way rather than re-coupling up per Hollywood protocols. But that would way overplay the film's independence of thought: it ends with the most grating affirmation of "core values" imaginable, insisting that the mystical bond between mother and child is absolute, transcendental, beyond human will or desire or freedom. Not only is this demonstrably not true, it's every bit as theological as any ending you could imagine; it certainly doesn't curtsy any less to the grinning idiocy of Christian values than does Knocked Up or, for that matter, than does The Greatest Story Ever Told.

And that, finally, is what sucks. Proffered as an "independent" and even propositionally hip and eccentric film, it forwards the most conservative, essentializing, and traditional message conceivable. Knocked Up, we suggest, is all the good parts of Saved!: well-written, well-framed, charming, with an appealing supporting cast. Waitress is just Saved!'s "Pastor Skip," brought in to retrench the community's core values and indeed revivify them, turning backflips and speaking in excruciating hip-hop patois to better convince his Fundie flock that the moralizing message is still relevant and even cool.

Given its circumstances, this is a movie that should have been impossible to hate.

18) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
17) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
16) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
15) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
14) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
13) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
12) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
11) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
10) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
9) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
8) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
7) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
6) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
5) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

28 weeks later

So it turns out that the problem with zombie movies is symmetrical to the problem with war as such. War is so amorphously expansive and at the same time so socially powerful that it can cast its shadow on the most varied of films (and poems and plays and paintings...) so that they are each in turn seen to be "about" the war (one would need only to read the last couple years of film sections at the Gray Lady and the AltWeekly Formerly Known as the Voice to be exhausted by this fact).

Zombie movies (especially if one annexes vampire flicks) have, symmetrically, the broadest screens on which allegorical shadows might be thrown, aimlessly taking the penumbral shape of the social crisis du jour: now colonialism and now communism, now consumer culture and now AIDS. The receptivity of the zombie film may indeed explain why any notable changes in the genre (as in the recent trend of "fast zombies") is such an occasion for critical meditation, inspired perhaps by the hope that the films might take on a somewhat-greater specificity.

That's not to say that zombie films are no damn good. In fact, fast zombie films are on a roll — as enlightened viewers of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead will attest — and the sequel to the former keeps things rolling. Its achievement is for the most part that it bridges the symmetry mentioned above; indeed, the presence of occupying US soldiers, Green Zone and quarantine is plain enough that, to rely on the ever-useful wisdom of Giles the Librarian, "the subtext is rapidly becoming the text." For a brilliant minute or so, it seems that the film's formal innovation will be to use recorded headset audio from the actual Green Zone (as seen on YouTube!) as the entirety of the dialog, and improvising the zombie movie around it. That would be audacious indeed.

However, that's unfair to what makes the movie appealing, which is not merely that it's a zombie movie about Gulf War 2, or a war movie with zombies. The kicks are largely in swift brutality, again shot not just for maximum aggression but also to disguise the highly relevant information of who's been bitten and infected). We get as well some shiveringly ambiguous moments: there remains no way to know why, exactly, Robert Carlyle's wife invites him to kiss her while she lies on a gurney in the med lab's panic room. Love, revenge, pure mephistophelian calculation. But on that kiss hangs the tale.

If war — and particularly insurgency — is contagion, the opening space of contagion in this film isn't Mesopotamia but Europe. The referent in that regard is no more Iraq than the French Revolution, which threw the Continent into a panic at the threat of ideological infection. And not just the Continent; no one, perhaps, was more repulsed than Edmund Burke, crafting his withering analysis while clinging to Britannia's splendid isolation. Here of course it's England where the insurgent plague, the "Rage virus," is birthed; situation is reversed. Can it be quarantined? As ever, it's a matter of carriers: a boy, a helicopter, the same pilot from The Matrix...

16) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
15) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
14) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
13) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
12) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
11) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
10) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
9) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
8) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
7) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
6) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
5) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

paris je t'aime

...in which 18 directors set about proving it's impossible to make an interesting five to ten minute movie in Paris. The only ones who come close (Oliver Schmitz, Tom Tykwer) do so by approximating longer narratives via heavy flashbacking. Because otherwise it just can't be done.

15) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
14) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
13) Paris je t'aime (wasn't Smokin' Aces; didn't have Hayden Christenson)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

disturbia

Having very little to say about Disturbia other than "Not-That-Bad goes a long way of late," we'll borrow the formulation of our movie date, who noted that the resetting of the Real Window story to the suburbs meant, at a basic material level, that there were fewer things for Shia Le Boeuf to peer toward from his bedroom window — requiring in turn that the panoplistic scopophilia had to be satisfied by a variety of, how you say, "techno-windows": monitors hooked and not hooked to remote lenses, cameras, cellphone screens, and etc.

The distinction between a window and a monitor as regards (so to speak) looking at the world has been one very much on the mind of Hollywood (et al.) for a while; one needs only consider the founding confusion of The Matrix, and what seeing really might be. The concept of ideology figures; so does simulation, and McLuhan's light on/light through distinction. What's striking about Disturbia is the extent to which this is simply not a big deal; for the most part, in this film, all windows are windows. In that regard its logic is less that of simulation-anxiety, but of marketing convergence, in which the phone, iPod, computer monitor, television and etc all function as of-a-kind destinations for content, or for the-world-repackaged-as-content. In this movie the content is one neighbor is hot and the other one totally sucks.

14) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
13) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

fracture

You may have noticed we've been wasting away again in hiatusville; what's more, in the grand tradition of the original paper-based zine also called jane dark's sugarhigh!, we've been coopted by mainstream media. An entry from this very blog will appear, or so we're told, in the next edition of Best Music Writing; moreover, as of July we'll be starting a column over at FilmQuarterly, which will basically cover the kinds of movies we've been covering here, more or less in this style. In fact, the editor wishes for it to be like this blog, but focusing on more than one film at a time. And what will it be called? Marx and Coca-Cola, natch!

Still, we are intent on logging every new movie seen in a theater. Hence...

We can't quite be sure, not being lawyers or etc, but we're pretty sure that the legal denouement of Fracture is, uh, total nonsense? Someone out there, enlighten us: wouldn't the bullet to be removed from the wife's brain equally be found to come from the detective's gun and not Hopkins'? And once one of you legal whippets clarifies this for us, can you elucidate on the plausibility behind almost every interaction between Gosling and his new boss? We have rarely been so baffled. Maybe there are a lot of invisible jump cuts. Seriously, a little help?

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Fracture (was neither Factory Girl nor Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

grindhouse

It's not clear that Grindhouse's duo of Planet Terror and Death Proof is a better double-feature than, say, a pairing of Slither and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — each of which is a fine representative of the genres parodied herein, the zombie plague apocalypse and the psychopathic war of the sexes on a lost highway.

That's not to insult this current Rodriguez/Tarantino beast, which is largely delightful and gross and over-the-top, and has as significant flaws only a couple: at a local level, the latter feature suffers from Too Much Banter, which would be less of a problem if Tarantino's banter was as sharp as it was last millennium. But it ain't, and will never be again. At a global level, it's dull the way this package arrives essentially critic-proofed, having way overdosed on ironic self-awareness and being a bit heavily committed to making sure we know they know how any response besides Aww yeah! Fuck yeah! is likely to sound — a defensiveness which makes the whole thing feel a little waterlogged. Fine; a fair trade for all the good stuff, and the even better bad stuff. We only mean to suggest, by mentioning Slither and FPKK, that the ludicrous genre films these films celebrate, recapitulate, and spoof, are themselves a) really good too, b) equally self-aware and sometimes in funnier, cannier ways, with even more awesome exaggerations, and c) still being made.

So why does it somehow seem more pleasing to see this than the aforementioned Slither/ FPKK double-feature might be? The answer must be: Because we'll never know. That pair would be as anachronistic as the pointedly anachronistic gestures of Grindhouse, filled with Seventies flavor and Fords and filmstock and fonts, and decomposed to look that old — until some character pulls out their QWERTY smartphone, or mentions Osama bin Laden. Why not just keep us in the Seventies, in the dearly-departed era when "grindhouses" still existed in Times Square and elsewhere, still showed sleaze-gene double-features? Because for Grindhouse-the-Event to work, have to think of now too: of how, in this present moment that's finely gestured toward, the very thing we're enjoying no longer exists — is itself an anachronism. But as we suggested above, fun pieces of genre sleaze can still be had. They still exist. It's total pretense that what's being brought back is a kind of movie, rather than a kind of movie-going. The "thing we're enjoying that no longer exists" isn't movies like this; it's the form of the double-feature itself. The added value of these films is added value, a household economy of time and dollars in relation to going to the movies that has indeed passed away.

They'll make it back on DVD. Fourfold, we estimate.

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

blades of glory

...so the argument for gay marriage turns out to be that, as necessary, the pitcher and catcher (in this case quite literally) can switch places — the utilitarian claim that trumps any idealist hokum about differences in "nature" (as signified by the unnatural pair of incestuous siblings, the ambiguously named Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg).

12) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
11) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
10) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
9) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
8) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
7) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

shooter

The keywords for this film's imdb entry seem about right: Assassination / Marksman / Falsely Accused / Based On Novel / Military Veteran. Of course, they can't begin to get at the two most basic questions: when will Mark convert his supporting-cast eccentricity — and he really is the most riveting sideman in Hollywood — into lead role charisma, if ever? (Not here, though he's litely charming enough even when being "heroic").

And also, who was the production genius who failed to buy Lil Wayne's song "Shooter" for the opening credits or middle montage or closing credits, surely one of the most embarrassing gaffes/absent presences in recent cinema? (Probably Mike Flicker, though Producer Eric Howsam probably deserves some blame as well — but honestly, shouldn't Marky Mark have insisted? Shouldn't it have been in his deal? If we were doing choreographed high-drama sniper shit in a liberal revenge fantasy, and if we were former rappers who had found our true calling but were still true to the game, we would have a seventh attorney who was in charge of exactly those kinds of things.)

11) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
10) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
9) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
8) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
7) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

avenue montaigne

Since 1964, Claude Brasseur has appeared in about 100 films; he has played Mussolini, Maupassant, and an inspector (in the movie Dancing Machine). Sugarhigh! has seen exactly none of these films that passed between the slight roundelay of Avenue Montaigne and the slight serie noir crime film Band of Outsiders, 42 years earlier. In the former, he plays a one-time cabbie who has climbed to the top of society and now, near death, is selling of his world-class art collection. In the latter he plays a casual criminal who comes to a bad end. One of these might be the best movie ever made.

All movies are in the present, the always-unfolding present; seeing Brasseur enter the scene here, it is as if no time at all has passed since he departed the field outside the house of Odile's aunt. But it is stark to see a face age four decades without a sequence, or a slow dissolve; as shocking a jump-cut as anything Godard could have contrived.

10) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
9) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
8) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
7) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the host

The Host makes one wish to know much more about contemporary and recent Korean history; one has the sense the film is ludicrously, incoherently canny about its own symbolic stakes, which lurk just under the surface — like the film's monster itself — in this case underneath the surface of the conveniently superficial symbolic tradition of the Asian monster mash-up exemplified by Godzilla.

But to some extent, the urge to read the film in such a manner should be resisted. Monster movies offer this too easily and often too neatly. This film is a thicket of signs, an excess of signs; it would be an insult to its hurlyburly to make it tell some particular story, to make the repressed be SARS or avian flu, foreign military presence or toxicity, the rise of the Asian Tigers or the drama of disunification. None of these will do, though all may linger about. This sense of excess culminates in the monster's death: like Rasputin, it dies poisoned, shot, stabbed and burnt.

Moreover, the film has real force outside the realm of the symbolic, not just in its formal capacity to jolt some adrenaline out of the audience but within its story. The scene in which the bereft family members silently imagine feeding treats to Hyun-seo (whom the monster has taken) in their family foodstand/bunker, is brief, unremarked, untelegraphed, and, as the freshmen are wont to say, heart-rendering.

Moreover, the national dramas are sometimes closer to the literal than the symbolic. Much to say, surely, about Hyun-seo's dopey father, with his backstory of malnutrition and his drill to the brain; same for Park Nam-joo, the half-formed hunt-goddess with her national medal in archery. But the wittiest story belongs to the young uncle Park Nam-il, handsome in his University suit; at some point, desolate over Hyun-seo, over their own inability to help her, over his family's pressing incompetence, he breaks down into a bitter monologue about how he went to University and "sacrificed for democracy" (apparently connected facts), and now he can't even get a job.

This, pace the sense of national duty, is of course the song of many a graduate. What's ticklishly elegant about the plot is that it will turn out — again, this goes entirely unremarked, it just happens — that Nam-il's education has fore-armed him flawlessly for the film's climax: a scene that plays out after a demonstration has forth along the river, a panoramic and nervous confrontation, all placards and puppets and colored chemical clouds.

Even those with only a passing local knowledge will know a bit of South Korea's modern history of public political manifestations; the Second Republic begins in 1960 after the violent repression of a student protest sets off the April Revolution. The tradition has not abated; a dopey 1998 article in Salon renders the local color of Pusan like this:

I opened my blinds and looked down to see 100 or so helmeted police in black storm trooper outfits and plexiglass shields charging up the street through a cloud of tear gas. Directly in their path -- forming a vague skirmish line at the front gate of Pusan National University -- a mob of masked student demonstrators hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails. The spectacle looked like a Shakespeare-in-the-park production of "Star Wars".... I didn't know it at the time, but this was part of a rather normal springtime ritual in Korea. As is the case at many Korean colleges, Pusan National University students have the option of joining political demonstration groups in the same way that they can join a reading circle or a ham-radio club. Street protests -- which are always held during the mild spring months -- have become a theatrical, somewhat listless coming-of-age ritual for young students here.

The description is not so different from that scene in The Host. In the movie (and in most realities but Salon's, where the story turns out to be about the most important thing: the status of the American's job) there do seem to be some real stakes: the crowds has come to confront not the monster but the government and its helmeted cops, taken to be using the monster (and the virus it supposedly hosts) as a sort of pretext for populace management. The tradition of student street-fighting remains current; this decade has seen a ceaseless series of local revolts against Korea's participation in the WTO and similar globalizing initiatives, protests which often unite students and farmers.

This poses the problem of cultural translation in its purest form; can an American audience, almost entirely unable to imagine the basic political life of Korea (and much of the globe), encounter the force of a movie which, while not necessarily about such things, builds itself Lego-like from these matters? Perhaps not, though a healthy beginning might involve a visit to this po'faced charmer of a website, if for nothing but a refresher on what political activity looks like elsewhere.

Indeed, one of the several punchlines in The Host that surely resonates differently here involves Nam-il's crucial contribution to the slaying of the monster. For it turns out that he has learned exactly what he needed at University: how to throw a molotov cocktail. Confronted with the hybrid, appendage-strewn beast (even its form is incoherent ,and thus seemingly unassailable) that has swallowed his niece and laid waste to local life along the river, his student skills — which until this moment have consisted largely of wearing a suit and whining — suddenly blossom into heroism. The ways in which this does not recede into the symbolic, but tells a local and current story likely to be a cipher for a US audience, may perhaps be the most striking fact of the film, written in aggressively beautiful poppies of fire on the bank's paving stones.

9) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
8) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
7) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
6) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
5) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

factory girl

Giving the objectification of women an even worse name. In general this is not a warpath we cruise — if one attends to Hollywood films, one must do a little negotiating between the baby and the bathwater. The problem with this film is, in short: it lacks a baby.

Jim Lewis, for all his you-still-don't-get-Warhol keening, is quite right about the utterly invidious dynamic that the film sets up between Warhol and crypto-Dylan, larded with the hateful folkie-organicist worldview that it's hard to believe still survives: let's all go back to Eden-Woodstock, and when I say "all," I don't mean it!

At least as vexing, however, is the simple fact that the stakes of Edie's life have to be routed through two dudes; it's a pretend form of thinking special to mentally inept boys (speaking of mentally inept boys, who was the casting genius behind Hayden Christenson-as-Dylan? What absurdity must we suffer next — Ryan Phillippe as a cunning intel agent?)

But worse than all this from where we sit (for all these complaints really do regard tertiary matters) is just how tedious the movie is, and it is almost incomprehensibly tedious. Dear Hollywood: when you make movies featuring, e.g., Sienna Miller's tits, could you please include something else appealing in the 100-minute window, so that it isn't transparently obvious that everything else in the film is bare pretext? Which is to say, this isn't exactly a bad mainstream release, but among the world's worst porn films.

8) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
7) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
6) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

dreamgirls

It's been well-remarked that the songs for Dreamgirls are inaccurate pastiches of Motown that insistently sound like (and are choreographed like, and shot like) nothing so much as Broadway showtunes of no particular provenance. Somewhat less noted is that the songs are just plain bad. But even this is not the movie's Achilles heel.

To care about the story, the tragedy of the wronged, proud and ruined Effie, one must believe that she is a better singer than Deana — and in turn believe that, as performed, Jennifer Hudson is a better singer than Beyonce. This is on par with believing that Joe Cocker is a better singer than Mick Jagger. Wow, that Joe Cocker, he can really belt it out.

Which is sort of the point. Jennifer Hudson, she can really belt it out. She's a perfectly capable singer of a particular kind: a pastiche of the Aretha-style Baptist-soul shouter. As it happens, Beyonce (even as she dulls down her edge for the first half of the film) is an exceptional singer of a particular different kind. To buy the movie's entire emotional premise, one must accept that the former kind of singing (no matter how much we patter about being so over it) is more authentic than the latter, that Effie is a real chanteuse while Deana is promoted to center stage because she has more white appeal and more sexy. Triumph of appearance over essence. Debased age of the image. And on and on.

Every single thing about the movie reiterates this message, except our ears — most obviously in the song "One Night Only" where we are offered the slow soulful version by Effie, followed rapidly by the vapid disco version (because we all know that disco is vapid, right?) by Deana et al. We are supposed to ignore the extent to which the latter is much better; to hear the set of cultural presumptions, and not the songs. But that's merely the moment in which the film most overplays its cards; once you notice that Deana, — despite her inability to belt it out — is a more interesting, mobile, nuanced singer than Effie, the entire film becomes nonsensical.

It's not just that its aesthetic blindness gets contemporary music all wrong. By now we know that, even if Mick Jagger wanted to be a bluesman at 19, he found himself as a great singer when he departed that mode — after he found thirty other ways to sing songs, the least of which reveals Joe Cocker's technical chops and capacity to push a lot of air as bare schtick, giving of the narrowest and most bathos-laden emotional valence imaginable. And by now we know, one prays, that that Aretha style is but one among many; that it's no more real or authentic than the styles of Martha Reeves or Dusty Springfield or Donna Summer or Michael Jackson or Beyonce or The Brazilian Girls. That Aretha happens to be transcendently magnificent within that style is a fact about her, not about the style. Beyonce, as it happens, is the Aretha of her style. Jennifer Hudson is a better actress than singer.

Even less honorably, the movie's confusion gets Motown utterly wrong. Berry Gordy, Jr. was almost assuredly not a good guy, and the formation of Motown surely had the usual quiver of terrible motivations. Nonetheless, to paraphrase the great music critic Ludwig Wittgenstein, Commercial melodic soul seemed like a discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of singing, a new comparison: it might even be called a new sensation. The idea that Florence Ballard, no mean talent, was in Diana Ross's league as a singer of songs is comical; Ross was perhaps as compelling within the new sensations of Motown as Aretha was on good ol' Columbia. The idea that Motown sold out art for commerce, talent for gold, is truly tone-deaf; the attachment to this movie's story is an indicator of a staggeringly conservative account of art, and an index of that account's tenacious hold.

7) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
6) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

films through january

To this point in 2007, through reasons of chance or strange subjectivities, each movie sugarhigh! has seen has been worse than the last. Thus the rankings after one month, with best thing in parens:

6) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
5) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
4) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
3) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the good shepherd

As another review had it, "all cloak and no dagger." But that doesn't quite account for this film's seemingly endless plod: sometime in the third hour, one starts to feel like one is at a Rivette movie, except there's nothing particularly Rivetting about it. Several parts of the plot are just nonsense. For example, the purported goal of one elaborate Soviet operation is to compromise spymaster Matt Damon's son, so that dad can be blackmailed . Except that the compromise in question doesn't make anyone especially blakmailable, and the real threat is that the Soviets might hurt the son. This is, as it happens, a threat that could be made without any of the subtle espionage nonsense on which the film spends about an hour of our lives — an hour which is in fact a total irrelevance (except as an excuse to huck a woman out of a plane).

From a certain perspective, such indifference to plot mechanics makes sense, since this film, by way of being more-artistic-than-your-ordinary-espionage-flick, is basically all subtext. Text be damned. Indeed, the endless unfolding of subtext turns out, exactly because it dominates the whole operation rather than informing the text, to itself be a sort of waste of time. Thus the movie spends even more of our lives working through suggestive homoerotic and gender cues — men wrestling naked, repeated cross-dressing, the way Matt Damon's freaking Soviet code name is "Mother" — to little point, unless it's some banality about spy culture involving repression. Since we can't imagine the explanation's so banal, we are completely set up for, say, Damon's quiet, wincing son to be gay. Except he's not! Or there'd be no narrative excuse to huck the woman out of the plane! No, that justification would then have to come from the sub-subtext, which is that women are awful: teases, betrayers, opportunists, spies. Perhaps in that regard this film does capture the "worldview" of lame, stunted imperial apparatchiks. So it's got that going for it.

the queen

The Queen has drawn praise for three different (albeit overlapping) reasons: 1) Helen Mirren's superlative acting; 2) the film's insightful portrayal of its characters and circumstance; and 3) how extraordinarily well-made a movie it is. These purported felicities are, respectively: boringly true, piffle, and the exact opposite of the case.

1) It's well-known that Oscar-bait roles involve playing disabled or wicked ugly. The other thing that critics just love is lead characters who are fundamentally inexpressive, at which point capital-A Actors can haul out their minimalist retinal tics, lip quivers and eyebrow twitches, allowing critics to blather on about how nobody so eloquently indicates a complex inner life with nothing more than a glance, a crinkled earlobe, blah blah blah. We should never have to read that sentence again. Sure, it's a skill: a mildly technical skill that's no more challenging than being appealing or sexy, witty, smart or funny, awful or fearsome. Probably less so. But it gives critics and others a chance to display their nuanced recognition of nuance, and so these nuanced Helen Mirren perfs will be with us indefinitely. Listen, she's perfectly good at that sort of thing, and the role called for it, so: good casting, guys! As a 2006 acting "achievement," it doesn't rank with Shareeka Epps, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Maggie Cheung, Sacha Baron Cohen (in Talladega Nights), Rob Brydon, Gong Li, Steve Carell, Lucy Liu (in Lucky Number Slevin), Nick Nolte, T.I (in ATL), Leonardo Nam (Tokyo Drift), etc. Not sure it's more compelling than that guy who played the lead in Crank.

2) The monarchy hasn't really kept pace with changes in the velocity of culture and the popularization of celebrity. But actual politicians have because they traffic in that stuff. The former will be broken on the wheel of the latter, but sympathetically. Whoo.

3) The best that can be said about The Queen's cinematic construction is that it's very taut; not a move is wasted. That's what "well-made" means, most often, and it's exactly the problem; it's as if the film were trying to make the case for "the art film" being every bit as rigid and determined a genre as anything Hollywood could come up with. At least Hollywood films have the courage of their lack of conviction, and the capacity thus to be excessive, muddled, absurd. There is no moment nor gesture in The Queen that escapes its fate as crudely telegraphic (at the beginning when he's just an uncertain commoner, the quite short person playing Tony Blair wears football jerseys; you can tell when he's come into his own because he starts wearing suits!); as a mechanistic part of the parallel plot structure (which guy in the PM's camp is like which guy in the royal retinue? We'll never figure it out!); or as broadly symbolic (the noble old stag being harried in its solitude across the vast spaces of Balmoral — this noble old stag with which the Queen is obsessed — a stag eventually slain not by an aristocrat but a mere businessman hunter up from the City — the stag stands for...the Queen!)

If there is anything interesting about this movie, it's the extent to which to like it requires a commitment to nostalgic values that were always markers of privilege in the first place, though in this debased age they just resonate as "quality"...which is to say, to like this movie is already to identify with the royals (though alas, such narrowminded "standards" resonate more with prickish Prince Philip's character than poor uptight Eliz). If the deck weren't stacked enough in setting up this parallel (and, as noted, the film doesn't hesitate to make these matters blatant), we know that Diana's funeral is a truly debased event because, in the news footage edited in, we see a sprinkling not of aristocratic dignitaries but mere entertainers captured in pointed slo-mo, pointedly including Stephen Spielberg. Boo! Hiss! Now if only this movie were one seventeenth as interesting as Jaws...

flushed away

They say that Washington, D.C, is Hollywood for ugly people, but so is animation. Or it should be. Thus the employ of perfectly attractive persons — persons who trade heavily on their perfect attractiveness — as mere voices is a bit of a mystery (or at least a humiliating sidelong glance at how thoroughly we fetishize prettiness, that we'll pay for its name on a poster even if we never get to, you know, see it.)

Kate Winslet, that is to say, is — shipbound again — more convincing as an odalisque than a swashbuckling rodent. And Huge Ackman, given his talents, has no business playing a prissy cartoon rat; he misreads the lines so consistently that the movie never sets the kind of breakneck-witty tone it needs to carry us along on its sewer screwball, and as a result feels mostly static despite (or in contrast to) numerous and accelerated chase scenes.

Indeed, unlike Winslet (who's actually done just fine in a couple of different scenarios, including the deprogrammed cultist in the Campion's Holy Smoke, whose escape from a desert safe house is abetted by volumes of Dostoyevsky strapped to her bare feet), Ackman should stick to the one role he's made for: the monstrously angry manchild seething under a protective layer of sardonic flirtation, oscillating between seduction and murder. He is finally nothing more nor less than Wolverine, and he rings only small change on that performance in...

scoop

Woody Allen has made two movies (review of Match Point) in swift succession. Both are set in the posh Britain of London townhouses and country estates; both dwell, in ways both different and more egregious than his Manhattan movies, on real estate porn; both star Scarlett Johansson (who is herself swiftly turning into something akin to real estate porn).

More pointedly for the director whose work we most associate with his "personal life" (not because of his charismatic appeal, but because no one has — paradoxically — sacrificed more to be an auteur), both revolve around a low woman who threatens to bring down an ascendant British pretty boy from his aristocratic perch by exposing sexual indiscretions. In both cases he kills her. A little weird to make that movie twice in one year, hmm?

In the earlier film Johannson takes on the low woman role, a striving but ungifted American actress; in this version, though Scarlett again "plays" a base American forced to employ her non-existent acting skills (so that's weird), the low woman in question is a British prostitute we never see. Here the suave monster is played by suave monster™ Huge Ackman, more capable but somehow less persuasive for it than Scoop's appropriately overmastered Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). The repetition compulsion (the director's, not the actors' or characters') is so pungent that it's hard not to wonder what's up, and from a small distance it seems like Woody has merely remade the first film so as to write a role for himself — as a bumbling magician, no less, doing the same lame trick over and over on a rickety stage.

One wonders how many times Woody Allen can parlay such a minimal scenario into (apparently) releasable films in the short window available to him. He's always been a prince of nostalgia; here the act of nostalgia is in having to recollect (despite contemporary settings) the lost moment when the United State's unrefined, upstart vitalism was last a source of anxiety for Britain's still-regnant aristocratic class (1944? 1923? 1898?), rather than itself a vanishing fact. That lost era has replaced (the conspicuously absent) jazz as the anachronistic tell of the Konigsberg project; it must somehow count as strange that, at this moment, the director has replaced a long-standing cultural fantasy with an explicitly nationalist one.

Addendum: given Allen's stature in France, perhaps his new obsession with Britain's old panic over ceding world-hegemonic power to the US becomes a way of pandering to French audiences.

notes on the new(s)

You will note that the style of this entry is stolen from the deeply pleasing mystery-rag that is The New-York Ghost¶To include more than four poetry titles in The Grey Goose's list of the year's 100 Notable Books would fly so thoroughly in the face of their audience's reading practices as to seem polemical. And there's a logic to the fact that the youngest poet included is a spry 62; no one in that world knows what to make of contemporary poetry; choosing already-canonical figures is a to-hand solution. The dissonance, finally, comes from the distance between this latter banality and the fact that the editors must — must — be aware that, if they themselves made a list of 40 books of poems they loved and recognized as significant (limiting themselves to original collections by 20th Century American poets), which they wouldn't have any trouble doing, they would shortly discover that the vast majority of these books were written by poets in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Ginsberg was 29 when he wroteHowl; its inclusion this year is the perfect myth, in the Levi-Straussian sense of an imaginary solution to real contradictions. It at once recognizes the way that much poetry that matters to us comes as a sort of shock or breakthrough rather than a consolidation, while opening the gateways only to figures who've been culturally validated. This, not "poetry" or "taste" as such, is the real horizon of the list, the discontinuity within its apparently smooth ideological gleam.¶In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films of which Gus Van Sant's Psycho was only the best-distributed; the form finds its zenith in the loving recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark by three adolescent boys, a story the rights of which have now been acquired by Hollywood). Such films have a massive head start in finding a place in the cluttered imagespace of the average American, while being simultaneously more cost-effective to produce and market. They are pre-imagined and pre-sold. Might we think of the United States' domino-theory global hedge action to be a sort of franchise, involving little more than cosmetic changes and an updating of the plot to seem relevant to current events? Might we indeed expect to start seeing shot-by-shot recreations of wars?¶Elsewhere our friend Herr Dinglö directs us to this almost incomprehensibly satisfying passage in a recent article on Beirut: “We have no work. We have nothing else to do, so we came to overthrow the government.”¶

stranger than fiction

A more confusing fable than it first seems. In the core narrative, a guy stops going to work and his life gets a lot better in every way except he fears he will die soon. He is an IRS agent In the shell narrative a woman discovers she can no longer do her work, or at least can't do it in the way that everyone agrees makes it meaningful work. She is a novelist. Both of their realizations pivot around the "reality principle" of his imminent death.

It would seem on first pass that we have thusly a tale about the primacy of first order, or "actual" labor over second-order cultural work — an old theme, seemingly renewed here in the mildest way by the insertion of the information worker into the role that, 20 or 50 years ago, would have been a manual or industrial laborer. Even the feint wherein Dustin Hoffman — mediating between the two orders (which is, apparently, the destiny of the English Prof; holy mackerel does he have a huge office!) — ruefully proclaims the social priority of great art and seems to sentence the worker to death, only serves to underscore the apparent conclusion, in which it becomes clear that decency is on the side of the IRS agent (ironic, innit?).

The film isn't quite that simple or resolute; at a minimum, it's clear that the agent's life has become worth saving exactly because he has, confronted with his own death, become for the first time truly alive — and the necessary condition for this is not showing up for work. A life worth saving is an autonomous life; it's the autonomy from work that makes the life real enough to be a matter of import to the novelist. This import, this caring about his actual life, is what grounds the author's relevance — is what gives culture a meaningful relationship to social reality. His autonomy is the condition of possibility for culture's famed semi-autonomy.

This is why he must be an information worker, of course. He already dwells in the intermediate zone between labor and culture, between the real, exploited proletariat and the purely exploitative owners of the means of production. He is an instrument which information and capital, both in utterly abstracted form, use to get from one place to another. It's no coincidence that he works at the exact juncture of "the economy" and "the government." He is, in short, a representative of the supposed "new class" much ballyhooed in post-Marxist social thought — a class which is literally a middle class.

This existence of this new class is, one fears, a fantasy, designed to allow the imagination that the era of fundamental class conflict is somehow over (a fantasy that the movie baldly restates in the inverse: the love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is an actual laborer — a baker! how prole can you get? — who nonetheless stands in the place of non-alienated labor, because she is pursuing both her pleasure and her vocation and, get this, abandoned the emptiness of law school for said pursuit. Take that, information workers!)

Thus the movie gets to have it both ways. This new class of information workers is socially unnecessary, and — just like artists and other cultural workers, who in fact are also members of this class — could cease to work on the morrow, without toppling the system of daily life (confirming the suspicions of many of the wealthiest and poorest members of society). However, they are far from irrelevant. Exactly by being able to abandon work without disastrous effects, they demonstrate that social existence is in fact not entirely determined by work. That is, they fulfill their "new class" duties not by doing new class work (for aren't tax collection and storytelling quite old jobs, really?) but by showing, not singly but collectively, that class struggle is itself an old idea, no longer consonant with new conditions.

Both of them — him with his freshly uncovered pleasure in the texture of daily existence, her in her final choice of a single life over a great artwork — embody the virtues of universalist humanism, which is the film's completed and total proposition. From the perspective of labor and capital, this middle class doesn't exist. But from the perspective of the social imaginary, they have serious work to do: their true function is to express outward the basic antirevolutionary ideology of liberalism itself, a message that must be endlessly received by the actually existing classes so as to not recognize themselves as such.

déjà vu

The amusing and the troubling thing about Enemy of the State were the same thing: that the glossy, staggering surveillance tools of the NSA were operated not by grizzled spies or desk veterans but still-adolescent video-game weasels (an uncredited Seth Green, Jack Black, and less colorful sorts) who might otherwise have been apprentice derivatives analysts, sitting around hi-fiving and still adjusting to their haircuts as they zeroed in on the Fresh Prince.

Déjà Vu is the Scott/Bruckheimer team's return to Enemy of the State, with couple notable exceptions, most obviously that "the State" is now the good guys, and their implausibly panoptic, futuristic surveillance technology is no longer sinister-going-to-murderous but neutral-going-to-redemptive. The operators are now pleasant, concerned, diverse; a kinder, gentler technocrat. Sweet sixteen's turned 31; 1998's turned 2006. Shit happens. Things change.

But you know what they say about things changing. It's still a movie that images total power as having the totality of images at one's disposal, and moreover, in this film's turn of the ideological screw, having access to them as reality. There's a book or two about this lying around somewhere. Even if the achingly slow among us are still discovering that this is fascinatingly metacinematic (I almost suspect this reviewer's lighbulb moment of being satire about credulous film critics, but alas, he seems so excited at this new idea! Has the Voice in its parlous reformation taken to hiring Rip Van Winkles?), it's not a film about film; it's a movie that struggles, rather ineloquently but not too boringly, to figure out what might count as plot in the era of total information awareness, while pasting a candy heart on the sleeve of the PATRIOT act. At least it is in some way of its moment.

Thus the last irony, which is that Déjà Vu pretends to be ahead of its moment, presenting a surveillance environment not yet in existence. Of course, so did Enemy of the State — but did anyone really doubt that technology was already in use in some bunker, and would be publicly offered soon enough? Fiction is just the beta build of fact. And Enemy of the State was merely the first official release of Google Earth Cinema; this must somehow be good news. By our calculations, we have no more than a handful of years to wait before we can download Google Time.

casino royale

After 53 years of James Bond; after an opening sequence rehearsing how he became a double-oh and got his license to kill, which is finally the great taboo exception on which the series is based; after all the ritualistic reiteration of formulae that establish "the Bond movie" as a genre unto itself with its own structuralist consistency despite finally empty changes in actors, characters, names, settings, political situations, historical backdrops; after the relentless repetition of Bond's drive to devour both enemies and lovers who inevitably wish to devour him equally; after all this, it's hard not to wonder if the underlying desire that's sustained the interest in the franchise concerns cannibalism, you know?

babel

Because we here at sugarhigh! HQ are limited in our grasp, we didn't understand this very complicated and conceptually ambitious film. However, we did mange to glean a couple useful lessons:

• Giving Brad Pitt a smaller role doesn't make him a better actor.

• When crosscutting between a third- and first-person camera to drive home some point via cinematic form comma dude, a director may pretend that deaf people don't experience bass.

• Deaf girls, or perhaps Japanese girls, are hot.

• Air power is the key to victory, just like on the History Channel, and is always on the side of good.

• Somewhere there is a cafeteria made of awesome synth, videogames, and plasma screens, named "J-Pop"; you should totally go there, if you can.

science of sleep

This movie might be imagined as Marie Antoinette seen in a reflecting pool, with some of the appearances repeated, others inverted. If the former is an American film in Versailles, the current title is actual cinema Versaillaise (that is to say, the director was born there; finance capital comes from everywhere, an everywhere that itself emanates from the United States). But both are built on a young lovely tossed naked into the Gallic tilt-a-whirl and forced to make her and his way, respectively — and, of course, both are dreamlives. Moreover, they share the basic quality of incidentally pretending, through their Frenchness (whether it be political history or aesthetic provenance) to a kind of significance to which they are signally indifferent.

That is to say that, like Marie Antoinette, The Science of Sleep is a petulantly slight and directionless movie. Because it's Gondry rather than Coppola fille, the flimsiness is one of whimsy rather than missing affect. Gondry tropes buzz about, inevitably temporal (time travel, reality blurring, memory failure, artisanal model-making); happily, they're separated from the maleficent influence of Charlie Kaufman, the faux-indie film industry's official metanarrative boor, with whom Gondry worked on his previous feature fictions, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Human Nature. Whimsy in the service of nothing is still better than whimsy in the service of maturbatory fake-inventiveness. And so we get to wander through the whimsy, in search of contentless satisfactions: sexy Gael Garcia Bernal's facial expressions and tone of voice, the cardboard sets, Charlotte Gainsbourg's sexy-is-for-lesser-beings knit minidress, très années Pop. When she's not busy smoking, she makes felt boats and ponies.

Unlike Coppola, Gondry doesn't quite maintain the courage of his lack of convictions, and the film eventually gets a lil heavy, just as — uncoincidentallly — his visual verve wavers; we're still waiting for a film as euphorically formal as his video for Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World." Instead, we're handed an ambiguous ending. Is it a happy ending, or a final descent into delusion? Who cares. The real ambiguity is whether, lacking any idea how to get out of there, Gondry simply replicated wholesale an early Lyle Lovett song on purpose, or by magical accident, as Gael and Charlotte go out on the ocean, on their pony, which they ride on their boat.

the last king of scotland

One goes to watch the purported star do his thing, but for the most part can't see the Forest for the trees. Or not even: the view to his predictably wracked and troubling performance isn't obscured by a larger, holistic view of the Ugandan Seventies, but by, natch, someone else's story.

That social struggles ought be told as the dramas of individuals, and that this rule takes on force in direct proportion to the money involved in the telling, is not news, and would scarcely be worth mentioning except for how certainly it means to escape both mention and notice as a rule of art in the current dispensation. But we can at least take note of what is allowed and even demanded by this iron rule: the dominating form of the close-up, the apotheosizing of individual performance (which might otherwise have been left as a relic of the stage, had cinema taken up the formal possibilities available to it). So, in short, all there is to do, all there ever will be, is to enjoy individual performance and camera moves (in which we include various special effects).

But the effects of this cinematic determination are just as marked in the social activities depicted in the film. Surely it must be notable that the narration of the fall of Idi Amin (or at least the collapse of his regime's credibility) pivots, in this film, not around the political or the social but the personal. Even this is unexceptional, not worth mentioning, other than the fact that "the personal" narration of the political climaxes here — in way that would make even Faulkner blanch — in the fact of miscegenation.

This, finally, is a quite ludicrous structuration, even within the context of single-subject cinema: less a story of Africans getting fucked by the white man than yet another projection of the boundless historical power of the white dick. The best one could hope for in this movie, in other words, is to watch an actor's attempt to inhabit a consciousness unfamiliar both to him and to us, and to see what that might be like; one gets a bit of this, and its pleasure. For the most part, however, one endures not the worst but finally the most predictable substitute, a kind of "idea" that has the force of perfect idiocy.

sherrybaby

D's for never dirty,
MC for mostly Clean.

the long tail

When sugarhigh! considers the white male artists of the post-WWII era whom we find most thrilling and exemplary, three stand clear: Jean-Luc Godard, John Ashbery and Bob Dylan, artists we sometimes have great dfficulty confronting because the certainty and power of their stuff theatens a kind of despair at one's own efforts.

The casual isomorphism of this troika's aesthetic narratives in evident: despite working in media and places with distinctly different relations to pop, each has been starkly prolific (albeit with celebrated pauses in their individual output), remaking their fields in the period from 1955-65; each has responded to the inevitable fading of their mass-critical star with continued and sometimes accelerated production, clear into their current advanced ages.

Of course, the differences are just as notable (and more media-specific): the way Ashbery's critical ascendence didn't come for two decades, while Dylan and Godard took each less than a handful of years to reach the apex of their fields. Or Godard's almost invisible prolixity; in the United States, how many of the 49 titles he's directed since Letter to Jane have we had a fair chance to see, especially if we don't inhabit a town with a film festival? Or Dylan's late pause, after his serial religious conversions and Eighties dreck, to ponder over ancient ballads and return as a resecularized Tiresias, "momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgottten message in surroundings utterly alien to it"?

Alright, that was an extremity; we enjoyed it. Still, it's the kind of extremity Dylan has demanded and received in spades, these last nine years and three original albums. So the least we can do is note how the singing is a lot better on this one than the last two.

The previous pair were defined by Dylan's croak; not quite tuneless, but impelled to let us know that he was a figure beyond the mere conventions of hitting notes, or trying to hit notes. These activities were for strivers, not immortals; the very measure of hiss historical greatness became the simple fact that he could miss, avoid, ignore the niceties of notes, and still win the Voice critics' poll. It would be pleasant to suggest that this gesture was somehow a throwback to his early years, when he was often written off as a hopeless, tuneless vocalist — something we now understand to be exactly false. He was, rather, singing differently, inventing a counter-style, and "Highway 61," much less "Visions of Johanna," now sounds deeply tuneful. We do not suspect anyone will make that case about "Million Miles."

So we must be appreciative that he's dropped the And You Shall Know My Importance By My Indifference schtick, and returned to a more sanguine vocal style, riding the melodies of old Western swing forms with a pleasing laissez-faire. Alas, that's the only pleasing thing about this album which is otherwise remarkable only for its boredom-induction: what a freakin' yawn. Nothing — nothing — of Dylan's greatness remains, and why should we expect it to? Or, more pressingly, why are we so compelled to pretend that it does? This can no longer even be compared to Bob Dylan; it would be dull and slight for a Lucinda Williams albm, and she hasn't been interesting in more than a decade. It's looking up at Ryan Adams, and sugarhigh! doesn't care for Ryan Adams. There are no especially bad songs (though the inevitable way-too-long last song is a bit of a groaner) but, far more substantively, there is nothing close to a good song, even a throwaway on the order of that burlesque he tossed to Sheryl Crow before desperately repo-ing for a lesser take, lo this last millennium.

Nothing here is worthy of invective, alas. At some point, in twent of 50 years, it might be productive to explore what conjuncture of forces allowed smart, serious people to hear this as pleasing, good, even great music. This is not to suggest that valuing this album is any more or less aribtrary and subjective than enjoying Bjork or Cam'ron; it is, rather, the particularities of this case have more to say about something like cultural momentum, and historical attachments — ideas which read interestingly against the suppositional temporariness of popular culture.

the black dahlia

Cinema note: Replacement of story with plot found to be the same historical motion as replacement of motive with psychopathology.

Movie review: "Mere psychology."

crank

A queerly macho fellow, loved by the ladies and the gays, cruises around heavenlit LA, sometimes on a motorcycle, visiting absurdly luxurious locations where white powder and the hidden schemes of power flow, trying to get out of the life, puzzling through a spiritual crisis, having a little public sex — an adequate remake of Shampoo.

the protector

Tom yum goong is not the first foreign-based film to take the English title The Protector, but it is the most recent, seemingly unrelated to the Indian silent Ajit Yoddho (1934), the French thriller Le Protecteur (1974).

Most reviews of the present film mention the torch-passing joke when Tony Jaa's character, arriving at Sydney's airport, exchanges a double-take with Jackie Chan, in turn exiting the country. It's a bit of an allegory, you see, about martial arts heroes breaking into the anglophone market. What these reviews don't manage to mention is that Jackie Chan's second effort at an EngLang incursion (after box-office bomb The Big Brawl) was Wei long meng tan, or as it was called in most markets, The Protector (1985). In that film, Chan's partner is killed and there's a kidnapped girl to recover; for Jaa, two decades later, his father is killed and the kidnapees are pachyderms. Didn't Karl Marx in fact say that everything happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as elephants?

It's hard to say what this film is up to, investing so heavily in that lineage — but it's not misplaced, really. Jaa's kung fu style ("Muay Thai"), though ballyhooed per the rules of discourse as new and different, is deeply indebted to Chan's. This is not so much true in close combat (where the movie seems more interested in a parade of styles, from capoeira to "ultimate fighting") but in the movements of multiple combatants within enclosed, complex spaces. If the bravura sequence is a four-minute following shot where Jaa fights his way up the various levels of the familiar restaurant/club/thunderdome/kingpin's lair (getting noticeably exhausted and sloppy as he nears the top, which is a nice touch), the more eloquent choreography happens in some ludicrous crypto-warehouse containing, among other things, some strangely oriented chain-link fences and, oh yeah, a disemboweled bus. In these scenes, Jaa's particular kinesis, alternately highlit and obscured by the camera's deep desire to look at things from below, is plenty thrilling.

Jaa himself is peculiarly impassive — "peculiar" because it's not really the familiarly Orientalist imperturbability intent on suggesting an interiority that is at once absolute and inhuman, the subject without subjectivity. Jaa offers something like a negatve impassivity: while elaborating Chan's goofball ballet of violence, he seems intent on refusing Chan's comedic charisma. Physical comedy is Chan's gift to martial arts; Jaa returns seriousness to it , a comic seriousness of which the little elephant is the emblem. Indeed, Jaa is the little elephant; his character has, it seems, never aged beyond the opening scenes, when we see him as a child, bonding with his charges. Over the full course of the film, Jaa hasn't the slightest flirtation, nor moment of self-awareness. He is a serious boy, with all the implacable destruction that implies.

Or maybe Jaa the actor is just another Keanu, constitutionally unable to express anything at all beyond a vexed wonderment that people will still fight him, given his manifest physical superiority. Hollywood, too, suffers from that puzzlement, and is gruesomely acrobatic as a matter of course in going about its business. This just might work out.

half nelson

After Shareeka Epps finds Ryan Gosling, her high-school teacher, collapsed in the bathroom with a crack pipe, he eventually asks her to help him up, at which point the film has a choice. If it doesn't show her helping him, it abandons the moment to the purely metaphorical; if it shows the 13-year old girl reaching out and taking his hand or shoulder, it abandons itself to sentimentality. The film navigates this deftly, with a little jump-cut so that her hand is just suddenly there and then he's wincingly upright; it's a small choice but the right one, and indicative of the film's attention to its own risks. Indeed, in many ways the film is about navigating the tepid and silted waters of its own set-up, which it does with parallel care at almost every juncture. Other best thing about movie: even as it manages to get a name act to contribute a budget sondtrack, it stages Broken Social Scene as nothing but numbing sentiment for self-pitying hipsters.

accepted

Movies in many ways inherit their genres and their genremes (as we have come to call the minimal units that establish and fulfill genre expectations) from earlier forms, theater and literature most obviously. They have in turn modified old and developed new genre codes, with all the inevitability of medium specificity: the soundtrack accompaniment to episodes of horror, romance, or suspense, e.g., or the plot horizons required to manage the absurd beauty of Hollywood actors in "real" roles.

But once a genreme is in place, it can no more be abandoned than it could in the Russian folktale; to jettison such a thing would be to jettison the genre itself. And so it is occasionally amusing to watch a film wrestle with a genreme to which it is utterly indifferent, even if — perhaps especially if — this wrestling takes the form of cheerful laziness.

And so it goes in Accepted. Ostensibly the story of how the Mac guy starts an open, student-run university organized by elective affinities, literally a former insane asylum, now run by the inmates — and thus in distinction to the high-class, top-down bureaucracy up the road (is this still the Mac/PC parable? Or is it about the Sorbonne 1968? Who can tell anymore?) — the film still remains compelled to include a subnarrative about the hot girl after whom Mac guy longs, but who is of course dating blandly totalitarian PC guy. And of course, as these things go, she eventually sees that her alpha guy is actually a jerk, and that the sweet boy who used to mow her lawn is in fact a quirky charmer with a true heart blah blah blah.

What's actually charming is how this pro forma narrative is played out in a haphazardly pro forma way: no drama, no tension, not much time wasted. Presented with the choice, she makes the right one in fairly short order and that's pretty much that, excepting one later pro forma reversal which is itself reversed pro forma in about twelve seconds of screen time. Max.

The film doesn't have the desire to flout openly or mock genre conventions (itself a genre, natch); it just can't be bothered to treat them as requiring much investment at all, and dispatches them with cheerful laziness. It's just getting by, fulfilling the minimum requirements without ever pretending they have any value, not letting them interfere with the fun — doing just enough to avoid getting kicked out and sent home. In that regard, the film is a perfectly realist account of the college experience for any reasonable student, after all.

little miss sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine finally can't escape its fate as the feelgood movie of the summer. As the story of a clutch of struggling and troubled individuals coming together as a family — an elliptical circling of the wagon around the usual twin poles of the death of the elder and the defense of the kid's innocence, ending with the rebuilt nuclear family sacrificing pride for mutual dependence and dancing their defiance of the external world — it's exactly as limited as such a movie must be.

It must be said that it does as well within those horizons as it possibly could; it may be close to the best such feelgood flick. Its struggle not to subvert genre clichés (which itself is so often a yawn, anyway) but to make the most of them is pulled off sort of superbly; irascible grandpa's death, though played for pathos (again, rather effectively: "GO HUG MOM") turns out to be essential to the finale's unfolding. He's taught young Olive a dance, see, for her big finale in the Little Miss Sunshine competition — one which, though it's frequently rehearsed, we don't see until its actually performed.

The dance turns out to make a mockery of the pageant, and all children's beauty pageants. Here we must note that the film — which presents such pageants in all their vacuous horror, parading super-sexualized grade-schoolers who may or may not be in on the grotesquerie, and parents who clearly are — had the incredibly strange fortune to have its late-summer opening in parallel with the return of the national JonBenet Ramsey obsession, and the return of all her pageant images to the nation's television screens. In this movie, there's no doubt that the parents — any parents, at any pageant — did it; the only question is what "it" is.

The mockery of such pageants presents little challenge; the movie's stroke is to leave its status unknown and unknowable, exactly because grandpa's dead. Was that his plan, in teaching her the routine? Did he senilely believe it was a potential winner? Or was it simply the only "dance" he knew, as a crass, uneducated veteran? Any of these answers would be unsatisfying; the execution of all the possibilities to the exclusion of none is close on perfect.

The movie has that level of care at almost every level. One of its running sight gags is the famiily's need to push-start their VW microbus, done each time with much huffing and puffing and varying levels of exuberance; within the physical comedy, the film stages the family dynamics with choreographic ease in the order that each member hops into the accelerating vehicle. Again, it's an image with a limit, in that it must imagine familes as mechanisms, the separate parts working best when working together; the film's capacity to be eloquent despite such banal ideas is its nature and appeal.

Except for Steve Carrell, that is, who is appealing in and of himself; he's most engaging early in the film, when he's frozen and morose. In a very different way, he's as good with a squint as DeNiro. As his character's mobility and humor return over the course of the narrative, Carrell starts drawing from his general bag of comedy tricks, and the character loses some definition; one hopes he'll have the intelligence to take on a substantially serious role in the near future, just to see what he can do with it.

snakes on a plane

Snakes are born free and they are everywhere on planes.

world trade center

"You kept me alive," John McLoughlin says to his wife Donna, as he's wheeled past her at the film's conclusion; he has just spent a long day and night buried, slipping away from human thought. It might as well be "9/11" itself on the gurney, whispering to Hollywood. What was once unrepresentable has slipped, without much intermediate phase, into what must be represented every few weeks — for no reason other than to make sure we still feel the right way about the formerly historical events which have already been replaced by thoughtless shorthand. Oliver Stone's claim that the film isn't political, which received so much scoffing from "both sides of the aisle," is more or less true; the memorial (and this film is a celluloid Iwo Jima statue, nothing more, nothing less) isn't any more "political" than soundtrack music existing only to tell you exactly how to feel about a set of supposed facts, the discussion of which would somehow dishonor the very feelings you've just been instructed to have.

Meanwhile, the best talkie about 9/11 continues to be this, which proceeds from the fact of the event itself's escape into history, taking the dead with it. No one comes back. Everyone is fucked up. Those facts, unrecuperable and unresolvable, are the whirlpool on whose banks every action and gesture takes place.

An epic poem is a poem including history, sez Pound, but don't get it twisted. History and "actual events" are, at this point, mutually exclusive, and pointedly so. But this is simply another way of naming the spectacle.

de gustibus

From a letter of James Schuyler to Frank O'Hara, dated Rome, Italy, 11/7/54:

I've become a moviegoer again, if not a bug or fan; it's like being an opium addict without getting any lift. Let's see, I've seen: Witness to Murder, Mogambo, Ulisee (I saw it in Italian, so that's what I call it), de Sica's dud, Stazione Termini, On the Waterfront, From Here to...and a couple of Italian ones I won't go into. Not to put a fine point on it, I thought them all hell; though many featured nice-lookers caught looking their best.

pulse

Pity Kristen Bell: required to be a sort of Buffy-substitute on television, she now finds herself frowning Grudge-ingly through an American remake of a Japanese neo-horror, which in its haphazard way doesn't seem to be about how suthin' bad happened in some house, but about how internet access leads to anomie, alienation, and suicide, just like in Durkheim but with more ordering take-out food. It doesn't do much with this cranky-grandpa diagnosis, though apparently it has something to do with our inappropriate desire to have do with the dead, hence the whole Japanese neo-horror thing. Apparently this was more carefully integrated in the original, wherein the teens are more Scoobies, less sitting around getting picked off one-by-one by the wifi.

The shot of the flaming plane passing overhead as it crashes to earth, so "reminiscent" of the shot in the recent War of the Worlds, and so suggestive of 9/11, is actually footage spliced in from Kairo, meaning it preceded both. O grandchildren of Hiroshima. When Steve Spielberg and American lo-budge horror are jacking their image-set from the same source as al Qaeda, the terrorists have won.

step up

Step Up adopts what we've called elsewhere the "Flashdance trope" of cultural miscegenation with considerable rigor: the female high culturist has, as usual, a dead parent and a problematic audition coming up, and her personal and professional problems must be resolved via the encouter with a male practitioner of a popular/non-white form.

The persistence of this trope speaks of two particular anxieties. One, obviously, is the fear of miscegenation itself, such that instead of actually, you know, happening, it's displaced into the cultural sphere. The other concerns the anxiety about how cultural forms which originally meant to signal autonomous identity must be recuperated into the white center, to be less threatening and more marketable.

But the center cannot hold — if we've learned anything from the ascendency of hip-hop into a quasi-universal cultural form, it's that. This might be explained in a variety of overlapping ways: as an actual demographic shift; as an image of globalization's indifference to any regime beyond capitalism itself; as the exhaustion of cultural whiteness in general. As a result, the idea of "recuperation" across ethnically/racially identifiable lines has become almost meaningless; basically, everyone's black now, except for the Aryan Nation and hipsters, two sides of one coin. And the movie knows this perfectly well. The ballet dancer actually dances more like someone in Janet Jackson's corps de funk — perhaps because that's what the actress in question was doing a couple years ago. And the film's street dancer, without much hue and cry, is without much hue: he's superduper white — which means, miracle de dieu, that the high culture chick and the street culture dude can actually make it, rather than having a brief encounter in traffic.

Indeed, this film's contribution to the genre (which turns out to be, in the same stroke, its annihilation) is to deliver the unproblematic wigger hero. He's neither an object of ridicule nor a villain; he's just the movie's lead black guy, and he just happens to be white. The movie, moreover, identifies this motion toward white black kids as ongoing, onrushing: while the film's only way to have an actual, pointedly white guy is to make him British, the wigger's younger sister turns out, in an otherwise-inexplicable aside, to be even more of a street-dancing b-girl than he is. The point is explicit: we are ever more closely approaching the moment when black/hip-hop culture is entirely naturalized as culture itself.

That's not to say that all conflicts have been somehow resolved by globalization's subsumption of cultural difference into a series of specious conveniences within a finally homogenous system. Having removed both the scrim of racial/ethnic difference and its interruption of the love story's easy progress, the film (and the logic of globalization it symptomtizes) is left with unadorned class difference, which, though it is almost the only conflict in the film beyond who will get what job in the end (these may indeed be seen as single conflict negotiated across different stages), remains peculiarly non-conflictual.

This may be because the film, while shot from the camera's point of view, nonetheless assumes everything to be understood form the perspective of its fancy people. Because there's no issue of protecting cultural identity, there's no reason — right? — for the poor kids to have any resistance to becoming rich kids. The film's wager is that dramas of cultural identity, now overcome, must cede the territory to class mobility porn. Perhaps that is "the camera's point of view" in Hollywood cinema?

a scanner darkly

In the recent annals of Squigglevision, A Scanner Darkly falls between that anthology of monologues for hipsters auditioning for grad school, A Waking Life, and heroic trifle Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.

The squiggles, one assumes, are meant to indicate the unstable reality of both the addict and the subject of certain technologies the book envisions — two categories that overlap almost entirely, herein. Well, that's what paranoia does: it makes unities, and in that regard the visual strategy, which posits both a surface coherence and its falseness, seems justified.

But it's also up to something else: making an equivalent to the shaky intensity of Phil Dick's writing, which scarcely qualifies as elegant but never relents from its tremulous comedies of describing a world it's certain is a hoax. Dick's too freaked out to be boring, and the film goes for this effect. Alas, the film can't quite manage it.

The majority of Dick adaptations (Total Recall, most obviously) take the central conceit of a book or story and make merry with it, much to the annoyance of purists. And yet, watching Scanner, one understand that choice — this, a relatively faithful translation, must stew around in its inability to render Dick's textual twigginess into an equivalently charged visual field. No tragedy, certainly; the film's interesting enough, its surmise as timely as ever, its strangely-unearned elegiac finale still nonetheless redolent for a certain substantial portion of the crowd. It remains, nonetheless, a kind of half-failure of visual thinking — in classic slacker fashion, it doesn't lack the courage of its convictions but the ambition to see them past the horizon of the medium-cool idea.

the illusionist

The kind of film that gives literariness a worse name, The Illusionist was once a Steven Millhauser story. Now it's a period piece in which fin-de-siecle Vienna is inexplicably denoted by marginally teutonized British accents, the audible sign that Ed Norton, Paul Giammati and Rufus Sewell are Acting (Jessica Biel settles for Great Plains British, both more and less annoying); the Shakespearean allusions reveal the script's self-aware intelligence; and the stilted, awkward pacing of each scene indicates both seriousness and historicity. If one imagined a film that was nothing more nor less than a set of signs referring back to its own quality, it might look a lot like this one — especially if you added a closing Usual Suspects-type montage in which the detective, having been led about by the beard for two hours, suddenly twigs to the entire array of clues in a swirling montage so as to understand "the plot," ostensibly by way of standing in for the audience members who, contrarily, got all that shit an hour ago and are wondering what time it is, whether this film is a particularly cruel explanation of the idea that "you have to suffer for art," and whatever became of the Rufus Sewell of Dark City.

miami vice

One result of the series of events decades ago that freed actors from studio contracts, and the more recent shifts in the "media landscape" which have allowed stars to retain celebrity/bankability for lengthy periods without actually releasing new product, is that there is simply far less access to first-tier cinematic leads at any given moment. No recent movie has suffered more from this than Miami Vice. Michael Mann can't be said to lack for chutzpah, so one might assume that it was the financieros who refused to let him cast nobodies in the lead; at the same time, George Clooney was directing, Brad Pitt was interning with Gehry, and Tom Hanks is less an action hero than a symbologist.

And so America's best director was forced to cast Colin Farrell as Sonny. He did succeed in getting Jamie Foxx as Rico — a fairly irreproachable (if largely wasted) choice, though he would have done better, both in terms of smooth menace and cash outlay, to get Benicio Del Toro. But Colin gives the B-list a bad name. He once looked like quasi-feral rough trade, hungry, about whom you could at least imagine he might be a star some day (even if you knew it was a no-chance fantasy you were sharing with him). Since then, he looks to have sated his hunger: while maintaining his status as an agonizingly bad actor, he has also apparently eaten Philip Seymour Hoffman. And has awful hair.

Don Johnson wept.

Mann has learned a few things from HK cinema, the most persistent of which is tweaking the camera's depth of field so that the neon lights in the background shake themselves into an anxiously ambient blur. This is complemented by a strange depth effect resulting perhaps from his mission-specific hi-def cam whereby, in static shots, the background seems painted in (and rather expressionistically at that). One might say these ways of imaging are the film's star, but this would be a mistake; he also learned a thing or two about casting women (finally). Much as Spielberg's War of the Worlds was basically a Dakota Fanning film with the hapless Cruise hanging around only to make this fact evident, Mann's Miami Vice is entirely a Gong Li film, interrupted.

wassup rockers

Folks seem periodically anxious about how Larry Clark sexualizes the boy teens of Wassup Rockers — Clark himself is surely a bit anxious, if the violence with which he kills off the pedophiles within the film's frame is any indication. But such strategic disavowals seem as irrelevant as the moral tut-tutting; isn't the film's ideal audience equally the suckers who get with the movie's "message" and those who get with the deflated outrage about the film's slack excuse for visual usury?

About which: oh, yawn. If Clark's camera sexualizes his subjects, it's no more than seven out of ten cameras in Hollywood (Burbank, the valley, Studio City, New York). We — the market, that is to say, whether our response is indulgence, outrage, boredom, or some admixture — pay these people to do this very thing. Clark may be better at it in certain ways, but the idea that we're invited to consume innocent sexuality more here than in your basic Amanda Bynes vehicle is a curious one. And even if the reasonable response to that is, well that sucks too — it seems to us that a couple of hours (or decades) of making male bodies the crypto-porno objects of mersh cinema might be a swell correction. The movie even diligently draws the parallels: withhout making a big song and dance about it, the boys' episodic travails stem in every single case from the irresistable sexual appeal of their de facto leader (who is indeed their leader, the singer in the band, exactly because of his sexual magnetism), a magnetism he cyclically abuses and ignores.

It's as if the film was making a point about what variations, exactly, within the standard recipe of American feature film, motivate us to issue a little hue and cry...

marie antoinette

It's the cotton candy you bought one humid day by the canal, dissolving so swiftly it seemed to be gone before you put it in your mouth, not a taste, perhaps nothing more than a mood, to be recalled even an hour later not as an experience but as it feels to remember remembering. Insubstantial but not nothing.

Nor is it finally all that different from The Virgin Suicides, which had far less content than it was given credit for, but was a fine accompaniment to its soundtrack by Air: A French Band. It felt like something, vague and slight but something; the vagueness and slightness were its virtues, the affect it meant to convey. Both these films are successful in their mild ambitions, their whiff of burned sugar and xanax: Ambient Cinema Americain.

Still, it remains an open question why one would want to set one's little affect machine in the French court during the (narratively collapsed) years 1770-1789. The affect in question is notable, perhaps, exactly because it isn't anything as decisive as happiness; we are to understand, perhaps again, the weight of St-Just's revolutionary claim that "Happiness is a new idea in Europe" falling backward onto all the estates. But this alone wouldn't justify the simultaneous invocation/suppression of events that have as substantial a claim on world-historical drama as, say, Columbus' voyage or WWII.

Answers involving irony, or the depiction of oblivious nobility (complete with Paris Hiltonesque gestures toward pre-industrial forms of the cult of celebrity) are finally insufficient: even these raise the film to the level of critique, and it's hard to imagine anyone taking the movie thusly after actually seeing it. Thus we are tempted into psychologizing the auteur: the story of the poor little rich girl, born and then again delivered into an incomprehensibly-contoured world of privilege, glamour and public visibility which would offer her anything but real experience and the possibility of being taken seriously, proved finally irresistible to the director, and damn the context.

Surely this remains the least interesting way to decide to understand things. Perhaps, if we are to think about Sofia Coppola in such terms, we would gain more by recalling that, in the language of Antoinette and St-Just as she is spoken now, the phrase for cotton candy translates as "papa's beard." As it often seems, the gender dynamics of the French language are curious; do not the perfectly unrebarbative color, sweetness and texture of cotton candy signify the traditional opposite of the beard's masculinity?

By the same token, Marie Antoinette, a film populated almost entirely by women, makes a sort of complement to Apocalypse Now, populated only by men. Both of them, in extraordinary ways, are films of war without war. The present film might be a sort of fantasia on the most terrifying scene of Apocalypse Now, when Willard, in search of provisions and information, wanders and crawls through a detonating landscape illuminated by a firefight, fireworks, or the inferno. It's sort of beautiful. Over and over, Willard asks where the CO is, who's in charge, where can he find them? Nobody knows the answer; more awesomely, nobody cares. They just shoot their guns in some direction or another. Things explode. It comes down to this:

WILLARD
"Who's the commanding officer here ?"

SOLDIER
"Ain't you ?

Marie's Versailles, and her Petit Trianon, are not hell; they're paradisal. But paradise too is contentless; life reduced to form, to which traces of affect still cling. And this is the feeling, finally, of the movie: the feeling of contentlessness, the affect of missing affect, a very different kind of vacuum from the one directed by papa's beard — but a vacuum just the same, a vortex of candied hearts and coronations, war without war, happiness without happiness, the vague and slight paradise before the invention of life.

the devil wears prada

It's perhaps like watching Larry Bird play 2-on-2 in the driveway: it's swell to watch someone be really excellent at something, but there's scarcely any stakes or drama, and you'd rather go out for a beer. But since you can't go out for a beer as you are stuck in the theater, you watch Meryl Steep be excellent, and after awhile you start to think that it's more like watching Wayne Gretzky practice free throws: no stakes, and isn't something terribly wrong? Isn't she playing Martha Stewart, not Anna Wintour at all? How come nobody else seems to be noticing this? Meanwhile, every single significant moment in the movie is signaled by this soundtrack motif that's directly stolen from "All Kinds of Time" by Fountains of Wayne, and nobody seems to be noticing this either, and you start to wonder if the theater is filled with zombies...

pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest/the libertine

Or: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future

The drab disaster of Pirates Deuce reminds us that an ontology of the blockbuster sequel is not beyond criticism's grasp — one that would not dwell on their failings as such, but would instead compile their shared traits. Clearly the first duty of the sequel is to make the crudest possible assessment of what made the first film more pleasing than it was expected to be, and amplify that so that it loses any structural relation to other elements of the film (one thinks, naturally, of the element of "philosophy" in Matrix: Reloaded).

But perhaps more compelling as an avenue of inquiry is how it's become such a rule of genre that the sequel must put administration on display: a seemingly odd choice for a popcorn film. The requirement seems to involve the making-explicit of political structures that were only implicit in the preceding film. This may strike some readers as an abstract formation: be assured it's quite literal. The council scenes in Reloaded are a comparatively understated (if overdecorated) version of Star Wars' shift from individual dramas to the Galactic Republic between the first and second episodes. But both do the same work: in the modern cinematic epic, all plots lead to bureaucracy. If the bildungsroman integrates the individual into the social body, the sequel explains the hero's place in empire.

It's interesting that this has become understood as an inevitability, a necessary element of the form (a genreme, as any reasonable person would say). It tells us something about the world, and about what Hollywood cinema thinks its role is, both in that world (where the sequel sings back the role of the first movie in Hollywood's global order), and in teaching us how to conduct our own negotiations with reality.

But that doesn't mean it's interesting as such. In fact, if the first movie was well-executed (and it's likely to have been, by local standards, if it has generated an expensive sequel), the implied world system probably doesn't need to be explained. Thus, the introduction of the East India Trading Company as the narrative frame of Pirates Deuce, though comprising a relatively small part of the movie, is not simply heavy-handed but completely unnecessary. That whole thing about white guys in uniform with limey accents in the Carribean from the first movie, fighting it out with pirates against a background of colonialism and new world gold? Again, my good screenwriting dudes: we got it. Stand away from the Final Draft software. We don't need the Company explained to us; don't need its "ruthless pirate hunter" Lord Cutler Beckett; don't need a press packet from the studio rehearsing how "times are changing on the high seas, with businessmen and bureaucrats becoming the true pirates."

But perhaps the verb tense of "are changing" begins to clarify matters. Perhaps the sequel's shift from hero to bureaucrat, repeated summer after summer, is a way of keeping the conversion from action to administration forever in the present — given that we are always between some epic and its echo, the shift is always happening. And thus, somehow, we can pretend that it hasn't entirely and completely happened, ages ago — and moreover, the only imagination of a world before world systems that we are allowed is that of the individual hero.

—————

Watching Pirates, we were reminded that we never reviewed The Libertine, seen in New York in Spring. Like Pirates, it features a main character who has, because of some curse, something foreign where his nose ought to be. Depp's Wilmot has lost his nose to diseases venereal, and concludes the film while wearing a sort of nasal sham; Pirates' Davy Jones , morphing marine like his crew, has a nervously pullulating cephalopod where his face once was (the remarkable face of Bill Nighy, at that). The former substitution has clear enough phallic suggestion; the latter seems (as well) metonymic for the Kraken that lolls about beneath the sea surface, waiting to wreak Jones' havoc.

The ontology of the tentacle remains to be written...

waist deep

Tyrese Gibson as Taye Diggs. Meagan Good as Tyra Banks when she was people not People. The Game as Mike Tyson after a year in Gitmo. Larenz Tate as himself remembering O-Dog wistfully the way we might remember Eskimo Pies or party rapping. Yo-Yo's voice as the radio dj. Sigh.

nacho libre

For the film's climax — after Nacho has quit the orphanage to triumph or die — the orphans, led by Sister Penelope Cruz's Twin Sister, show up just before he must battle the fearsome Ramses, each wearing little versions of Nacho's luchador masca. Sister Sister does not, because she is "pretty."

Anyway, okay, we get it. I am Spartacus. O Captain my captain! I am gay. I am V. I am Nacho. We're living the microera when this scene has leapt from being a trope to a cliché, practically a genre.

Given that such collective identifications are the absolute first step of any differential politics, Hollywood's presentation of this device as a political end (always at the end of the film, natch), as a victory rather than a basic banality, wavers between the facile and the mystificatory. But it's Hollywood, Jake — one would be foolish to expect more. What aggravates is how it just doesn't make for a very good movie; it's always now a tacked-on "value," in the same way that Jack Black cavorting like a seal and parodying rock singing are familar tails arbitrarily pinned to this film's donkey.

What Spartacus understood about this device is that it renders each film that uses it as a prequel. And who the fuck would want want to see the real action of Nacho Libre: Revolucíon, wherein the collectivized orphans in their identical and anoymizing masks take it to the streets and villages of Mexico against the corporo-thugs and corrupt officials for whom Ramses explicitly stands?

Especially when that movie doesn't need to be made, as Mexico has been living it for a dozen years.

the break-up

Those who are for some reason (Satan banned in your town?) unable to attend The Omen (2006), apparently almost a shot-for-shot remake of The Omen (1976), can perhaps gain some satisfaction from seeing The Break-Up, a shot-for-shot remake of every movie ever made.

the fast and the furious: tokyo dérive

On the IDD scale (Incitement to Drive Dangerously On the Way Home), the only scale which matters in such cases and to which all other measures are impediments and cold consolations, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is around a 7: higher than Days of Thunder, which scarcely inspired one to walk back to the parking lot, but lower than Top Gun, which sent us whining through the Solano tunnel on a dangerous scooter tilted almost knee-to-asphalt — perhaps hovering around The Last American Hero, in terms of sending one careering anxiously through merge lanes onto the 80. Or perhaps we were moved by the pathos of a film that kills off its one competent actor halfway through...or amazed by the post-climactic big reveal, when the uncredited American star finally and arbitrarily makes his cameo, appearing miraculously out of the disco ball of Shibuya...the lights that speak only of the absolute emptiness of the absolute other, beaming hypnotically down on the two gaijin as they stare only at each other, cockpit to cockpit, surrounded by glittering Asian guys and gals, while the audience wonders how it could be so blindsided, how we could not have seen it coming, of course Bill Murray would show up here after lying in wait since the last shot of Lost In Translation, ready to take one last nitro-fueled shot at the emerging markets with his American muscle...

a prairie home companion

Who do you think is running Congress? Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify - that's one. And to confuse - that's the other. He does whichever is to his client's advantage. Did you ever ask a lawyer the time of day? He told you how to make a watch, didn't he? Ever ask a lawyer how to get to Mr. Jones' house in the country? You got lost, didn't you? Congress is composed of five hundred and thirty-five individuals. Two hundred and eighty-eight are lawyers. And you wonder what's wrong in Congress. No wonder we often know how to make a watch, but we don't know the time of day.

Is this really that different from Garrison Keillor's schtick?

—————

Directors change and huzzah for that — just try not to go for the okey-doke hustled out in note after note, including interviews with Altman himself, wherein he's now on accounta his octogentility making movies about death, and the passing away of some mythic form of the American way. O McCabe in the snow, O McCloud crashing toward the Astroturf™, O gun passing through the crowds of Nashville — what were those about, then?

It's the last that begs the question, not because it's canonical but because it's the same movie as A Prairie Home Companion thirtyone years earlier, cascading dialogue and provisional conversations while everyone's preparing for the next staged set piece and actors pretending to be character actors pretending to be semipro singers vamping the Americana and gosh, maybe Altman hasn't changed!

Except he has, and gulls can call it "sweetness" all they want, or maybe he drank the Kool-Aid up Wobegon way, but the change is basically in the way that, over the three decades since Nashville (and if the current historical conjuncture calls up any other year, 1975 is not a poor candidate — cue the helicopter over the Baghdad Hilton), Altman has concluded that old-timey Americana values, the loss of which are forever being bemoaned by millionaire populists and candidates, are indeed just plain good, rather than the petri dish of ideologues. So he's replaced Nashville's Hal Phillip Walker, America-for-Americans demagogue, with St. Paul's Garrison Keillor (the guy who ruined a perfectly good spanking of Bernard-Henri Lévy by pompously offering as Le Grand Conclusion that pompous little furriners oughtn't write about America if they can't set their own houses in order — our favorite form of nitwit provincialism!) in about the same spot in about the same structure: the radio voice at the center of the polyvocal web that Altman habitually throws across some particular time and place to capture what's past, and passing, and to come.

You'd think a person of Altman's cut would make this move, this substitution, to shore up our perception of Keillor as the latest in a line of such demagogues, which is what he is, retooled for NPR with a mildly different, Northern plains fundamentalism. No. The movie is still about death and Americana and mythic loss; these have ever been his subjects. What's changed is Altman's stance toward these things; piercing dubiety has melted away into its opposite, and jus' plain folks piety rules the day. In that regard, alas, Mr. Altman knows exactly what time it is.

over the hedge

Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swaIlow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen.. . leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses ; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but onIy the church to be made a sheep-house. . . .Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own.

— Thomas More

x-men: the last stand

Score one for auteur theory.

The effects of massively collaborative for-profit venture, of studio mechanics (and in this case the effects of franchise ) trump the romantic ideal of individual vision with ease; on the rock of this obvious idea, auteur theory ran aground. And yet, while the queer subtext* that Bryan Singer (it would seem) brought to the first two X-Men films isn't entirely obliterated from the Brett Ratner-directed third, its 'momentum is barely enough to generate one rote and irrelevant sub-sub-subplot (and one that's subsumed by oedipality, at that) in the latest and, one hopes, last installment.

In its stead, we get a barely subtextual fear of, and hostility to, women that should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed replacement auteur Ratner's career. One by one, the X-Women are stripped of their powers: by cure, by election, and by death. And foremost among these cases is Jean Gray, the most powerful mutant of them all, whose very superiority and, natch, her inability to handle power must translate into evil, dishonest seduction, sexual destruction, and finally her own execution at the hands of a former lover. We are sure it's pure chance that Ratner's way of imaging the evil Jean is to render Famke Janssen as at once synthetic-looking and haggard, with an awful dye job — sort of like a Beverly Hills matron in costume. Even more tellingly, when her awful power runs amok and threatens to destroy the world, dude, you can see the veins in her face! Nothing as scary as an aging babe. Er, Ex-babe.

Of course, one can't blame Ratner, or accuse him of auteurist vision, for such a concept; one merely notes how, absent Singer, the franchise regresses to the par-for-the-course-tastic. The idea of the aging babe as destroyer of worlds belongs to Hollywood itself, wherein "world" always means market share. Just as the character of the Juggernaut is an imago of the film's imagined summer competition (as has been deftly noted by our colleague), Jean Gray must stand in (barely) allegorical place for the "facts" that doom any franchise based on female characters.

* Here we use the term "subtext" with the barest pretext; perhaps there's a better term for the level of story unstated on the diegetic surface which nonetheless is fully available to and known by the audience, determins the narrative, and provides the entirety of the sense that the movie is "about" something. As Giles said as early as season two, “I believe the subtext here is rapidly becoming the text."

three times

The majority of the promo images for Hou Hsiao-Hsien's latest film are drawn from the third time, the most contemporary passage in this temporal triptych (and why not, as it's the sexiest, with suicide threats, dark clubs, text messaging, hot epileptic chicks, and the cool blue abysses of hypermodernity?)

The majority of reviews prefer the second time, the most antique among the three, shot as a silent with intertitles and set in 1911 (at the revolutionary end of the Qing dynasty, though this like most cinematic revolutions these days is discreetly left offscreen in the space of studiedly understated allusion).

It's the first time, set in 1966 as the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution was beginning on the mainland, that's the most involving (like the others, it's a narrative of heteromance deferred; unlike them, it's neither overly contrived nor overly pointed).

From the perspective of the eye, a Hou film is never dull: like Godard, he seemingly can't frame a bad shot, and even the slightest films and passages have a singular way-of-looking. He's a director of aspect, and activity can come to feel like a sort of imposition.

This becomes a problem at the level of plot. With the partial exception of the Wong Kar-Wai Lite (or Heavy, really) Millennium Mambo (which shares with the "third time" herein an impassively scolding kids-these-days overcurrent), Hou develops narrative from within ways of looking, rather than finding ways to look at the doings (contra Adorno, in Hou and elsewhere, content is sendimented form). It's the form of cinema that justifies the term world-view, a term so often reduced to indicating someone who has a theory, or even just an opinion. But if action is to arise from the viewing of a world (or a corner of the world), this mandates not only slow films, but a slow development from one to the next. While one can conjure or buy a new plot in fairly short order, it would be unjust to expect even Hou to develop self-propelling world-views, ways of looking, in rapid-fire succession.

And so fails Three Times, even though it's almost unfailingly a pleasure to look at. It has about one way of looking, which is realized on the order of events by only one of the three times; the other two are attractive, lugubrious failures.

Finally, one can't avoid wondering about the success — whether Hou's aspect here is somehow more indexed to 1966 than it is to 2005 or 1911. If, as art historians have eloquently argued, historical moments have their own ways of looking, are these ways reconstitutable? Might one conceive of a film as documentary, not of how-people-lived but of a historically-charged way of looking?

the da vinci code

There is nothing about the scene of the museum visit which is not preparation for shopping (the daily itinerary of the culture tourist, ambling from the Carrousel du Louvre to the Galeries Lafayette, assures us of this). After queueing to get in, one enters the grand gallery and surveys the goods. Perhaps you've come to see some piece in particular, perhaps you're wandering; something captures the eye. You stand before it, contemplate, discern, deliberate. Your mind, as practiced as a fingertip reading Braille, runs itself over the surface of an imagined life which could accomodate such objects. You evaluate, make a judgment. All the while, a seemingly unsatisfiable cupidity builds in you. That's the basic problem with the Louvre, the sense of loss which makes it all so poignant: you can't buy that shit.

The flagship Apple Store has opened in the center of Manhattan, at the southeast corner of Central Park. If one recalls an open plaza there, between 58th and 59th at the foot of palaces, decorated with a fountain or two, fear not. The store is literally cavernous, for it's almost entirely submerged — an irony, in that this underworld seems meant for the people who float above the surface of the globe, cosmopolites whose digital cameras store images of Shanghai, Sao Paulo and Paris. Nothing marks the plaza but for a gleaming glass portal: a cube, joisted by geometry and chrome, empty but for a hanging sculptural logo. Inside, a spiral stair winds down to the business level, around the column of an open-platform elevator.

On the day the store opened, and the next and the next, the line to get in stretched the length of the plaza and around the corner, corraled by metal crowd control barriers.

If one has not been to France, or seen The Da Vinci Code (which opened on the same day as the Apple Store and opens and closes at the Louvre), we here at jane dark's sugarhigh! have prepared these visual aids for understanding Apple's semiotic system:

Here's the geometric glass entry portal...

...with the queue along the fountain-bedecked plaza in the center of the metropolis...

...awaiting the spiral stair/platform elevator that carries clients down to the action...

...and here's the plaza at night, with glass portal illuminated...

...while here's how it looks quand il pleut.

Apple, with its doxology of aesthetics-first, MoMAlicious industrial design, is the ideal candidate for this project. That's not to say the likeness of museum and store is a new one; after all, the already-condemned underground mall in the heart of Paris pointedly named its longest promenade La Grande Galerie, after the infinite hallway in the Louvre hung with Renaissance paintings (the very run in which The Da Vinci Code begins). The Louvre itself, understanding the condition of its captive crowd, has installed its own underground mall on the path from museum hall to Metro. Consider the cheek-by-jowldom of boutiques and galleries in the 19th-cenury arcades, or the overcome descriptions of the first huge department stores, as Stendhal syndrome leapt into the agora. This correlation cannot be said to have been discovered in the first place, any more than the freezing point of water can be discovered. It can merely be named. It's the expression of a general rule of the era, a basic relation; each specific case educates us in how the rule is followed.

What we might admire about the Apple Store is not the perfection of its likeness, but how that perfection seeks to overcome similitude, to finally collapse the museum and the luxury boutique into a single episode, one which doesn't risk the client getting lost in the museum until the shops have closed, which returns the aura of the singular painting to the singularish piece of couture — an episode in which you can buy that shit, and victory is assured.

nights are warm and the days are young

Two things give us hopes for the forthcoming cinematic fete d'Antoinette. Firstly, the beloved Paper of Record has taken the lead in reading the film as, shock, a psychocryptoautobio(aquadooloop) of director Sofia Coppola. Here's Manohla Dargis:

Although early scenes of Marie Antoinette submitting to protocol — if she wants a glass of water, one servant announces her request and another fulfills it — do make her point, it soon becomes clear that the director is herself bewitched by these rituals, which she repeats again and again. The princess lived in a bubble, and it's from inside that bubble Ms. Coppola tells her story.

And then, via disingenuous averral, A. O Scott:

My earlier description of the courts of Louis XV and XVI could just as easily apply to 21st-century Hollywood, a parallel that, in "Marie Antoinette," is both transparent and subtle....It almost goes without saying that Ms. Coppola, daughter of Francis, is herself a child of Hollywood (as is Jason Schwartzman, her cousin). This is not to suggest that the film is veiled autobiography, but rather to speculate about why a movie about a long-dead historical figure should feel so personal, so genuine, so knowing.

The device of reading films as veiled auteurist memoirs is the result of a critical industry that has neither the time nor audience to favor engaging with the film in the way serious criticism might (that is, by assaying its own terms). Such an analytic can, true, offer up insights neither more nor less negligible than the movie in question, especially for the critic who understands that the box office star far more than the director has a determinate effect on a Hollywood film's final shape (there's really no way, e.g., to read Vanilla Sky as being about anything, unless it's about Tom Cruise's dotage/fading bankability).

However, for all its general inevitability, such a hurried and reductive strategy has specific histories. All too often it seems pointedly paternalistic. This isn't the first time Sofia Coppola has been subjected to such dross; witness the cheap criticisms of Lost In Translation, which brutally misrecognized the lead characters' orientalisms as the director's racism, rather than as a basic centerpiece of the film's characterizations (for a more complete account of this critical failing in the context of globalized Hollywood, you can download the essay "Another Green World"). The assumption is that the director finally has nothing to draw on but unexamined prejudices and personal life, and that these things moreover speak unconsciously through her, as she lacks the vision to modulate them. This may be true — but can one imagine the Times (or most any other site of reputedly sincere popular criticism) suggesting such a thing about Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, or Bryan Singer?

All of which is to say: if that's the sharpest analysis my colleagues at La Dame Grise can conjure, one can be confident that there's more going on. Moreover, the second reason for our hope is that, in its strategy of setting a costume drama to contemporary pop music, and even staging a courtly dance to "I Want Candy," the film sounds like nothing so much as A Knight's Tale, a genially goofy film which among its delights features Paul Bettany as naked Geoff Chaucer, and a courtly dance that starts with nothing but a rhythm, footstomps, clanking (shades of Bresson's Lancelot), a spectral melody...all swelling into a choreographed pavane to Bowie's "Golden Years" — one of the most startling, pleasing moments of film this millennium, a true conjuration.

friends with money

In which Nicole Holofcenter, the Sex & the City hack with indie cred, conspires to make a film for Jennifer Aniston about how Brad dumped her, she was sad, but she ended up with Vince Vaughan, and no, really, she's okay.

clean

Gathering up a burger with fat onion rings at a restaurant counter after getting out of the stir. Swiftly and silently running her hand along the naked body of a barely-known overdose, having not had the chance to touch her boyfriend's dead body when he OD'd earlier. These are two things Maggie Cheung does in Clean, gestures slight but not furtive; neither does the camera linger over them, nor do they intrude on the conversations happening. They are barely events, off to the side of the dialog-driven story, but each of them wrapped up in a sensuality that always concerns not what's sensually there so much as that which has been withheld until that moment. These are tiny gestures of presabsence, awfully moving. But then, we could watch Maggie Cheung knit for two hours, and sometimes this movie (made in 2004, just now released in the US) isn't much more than that. It's enough.

Equally, we could equally watch Nick Nolte stare into space for an hour. Here he conjures up a striking performance, perhaps his best, much of which is just that: staring into space and calculating, figuring things out, waiting for the recoil he uncertainly expects from Cheung after each of his polite, hopeful rhetorical brutalities. They never come.

Cheung's struggle isn't with him; it's with herself. Specifically, it's between her face and her hair. From the first scene, her black bat-coif is an ugly, stylized exaggeration that, against all odds, overdoes her famous face. The hair, in fairly simple manner, is her bad blood, her stupid rock mythology to which she clings, as if to the possibility of winning; it's her junkie self. When, later in the movie, she puts on an orange watch cap, her face changes dramatically: wide, defeated, plain. The defeat is her victory.

The absurdity by which she goes to San Francisco to get clean can't even be processed; here at HQ, that little bit of the Eighties that we can recall involved a constant stream of friends with habits leaving the Bay Area: for home, Hazelden, Hawai'i, "the land." That the sound of Mazzy Star is the sound of getting off dope is equally hard to suppose. But this is all in the last few minutes of the film, some kind of bookend to the opening number, Metric's "Dead Disco," which we are perhaps supposed to dislike (not so; a slight, perfect song). Well — narrative. Well — French person's America.

Mostly it's the faces, the physical gestures, the endless miniature image-defeats, the melancholy of the sensual, the watching.

united 93

The order in which the vics die in slasher movies (as a general rule, the women die per facts of coiffure: styled blonde, straight blonde, styled brown, with straight brown for the survivor) is formulaic, which is to say, formed: a way the film presents its madeness, no less than a sonnet's rhymes. Plot, harmony, a lead character's unifying experience, a moral...really any form of self-consistency and stability that offers a clear line from start to finish is, by its very unrelation to lived experience, a distancing effect (similar arguments resonate with plastic arts).

This is United 93's appeal. As everyone notes, the basic events, and ending, are already known and unchangeable; for most critics, this is an even though — the film is affecting despite this limit. This is an error. The film is affecting because of this limit (which is different from saying that it gets its force from the story already in place). Because the external form is fixed, the film's internal progress is freed to be relatively jumbled. The choice to have no hero or even heroes isn't simply a compulsorily ethical one regarding the need to honor all the dead and respect their familes equally; it allows for a telling that presents coherence-systems far less than most feature films. There's no rooting, no tracking a single character, not much strategically-paced revelation of events; in recompense, actions and phrases come from all directions, shaky and disorganized, far from familiarities of pacing.

It may indeed be a general rule of real-time, of which this film is a kind of terminal case: real-time without order and control always threatens panic. United 93 induces panic quite successfully, and in inverse proportion to expressions of madeness. Don DeLillo, in the most eloquently ambivalent formulation of White Noise, sez "all plots lead to death." But isn't the opposite true: isn't plot indicative of one's power to give shape to that real-time unfolding which has no shapeliness but that it ends in the tomb? Isn't plot the expression of control over death?

For all the inevitability of reviews' describing the last shots of United 93, the film — so effective up until this point — betrays itself a couple minutes before. As the passengers and hijackers equally ready themselves for the onrushing confrontation, the film opts to deploy parallel crosscuts between the two groups, the latter frantically praying to Allah, the former just as frantically to their god. It is not simply that this gesture has a didacticism unike the rest of the film, but that it's exactly what Coppola would have done. As a gesture, it's cinematic; it's shapely, made. And with that small decision, the film loses its effect, returns us to ourselves, viewers. Perhaps this is necessary, if not inevitable; though the film is after something like human immediacy within the iconic spectacle of "9/11," one does well to recall that those events were as much a part of an image-war as anything else, that their immediacy was not — could not — be conceived of as independent from the sphere of symbol management.

thousand dollar idea

Conceived of last night in bar of a hotel called Furys, with Rod Smith, Mel Nichols, Tom Orange and Rob Hardies: a companion to the series of books on pop culture and philosophy, this one concerning instead pop culture and sexuality: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sexuality, Belle de Jour and Sexuality, Brokeback Mountain and Sexuality, United 93 and Sexuality, Straw Dogs and Sexuality...

stick it

The "Flashdance trope," though one would scarcely claim it originated with that film, involves a young artist/performer (almost always with an absent parent, generally dead) who specializes in an art form marked as whiter-than-white. After failing or bailing a juried audition, the hero has a chance encounter with a dark-skinned Other who practices a newer and more populist form of the art; the hero then incorporates some elements of this vitalist street style into their own routine and, racially hybridized, dynamic and democratic, wows the judges on the second pass.

Coyote Ugly rehearses this narrative with absolute schematic certainty: "Violet Sanford" (Piper Perabo), struggling singer-songwriter, bumming out on her rooftop, hears some hip-hop from the next dirty building over...followed immediately by the lthoughtful staring/lightbulb inspiration/late-night work montage around which the film turns. All of this makes the film's jubilant ending as baffling as any cultural text on offer: when we finally hear Violet's song, it turns out to be an utterly white-identified country number, sung onscreen by Leann Rimes and written by Diane Warren. This makes sense insofar as the film is less an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's article about the New York bar Coyote Ugly than it is a Diane Warren biopic relocated to the East Coast. But it makes no sense in relation to the narrative of cultural mixing that the film so diligently sets up; the ending takes place as if that rooftop encounter, and the following montage, simply never happened. It's as if Jules, Jim and Catherine, in their final scene, drove off to In'N'Out Burger.

Stick It is more invested in the dynamic between female performer and panel of judges than either of these films, or any other film one might recall — it renders that scene not a crucial means toward the hero's future success, but an end in itself. This perhaps explains why the Flashdance trope must at once appear and be shuttled to a side narrative, and displaced from the unbearably white star (Missy Peregrym) to an already-nonwhite side player. The trope contains a central fact about this particular confrontation and its cultural payload, and so remains necessary; at the same time, the film's idea about what "success" would be is actually one stop more appealing, and so there's no room in the lead story for finally softening the judges' hearts to aesthetic miscegenation. For once, the movie has someting better to do than recapitulate the virtues of exogamy, and lands closer to "Bartleby" than "Rape of the Sabine Women."

ps: Hey Missy Peregrym — Piper Perabo called. She wants her stage-name designing algorithm back.

mission: impossible III

Cherie's "I'm Ready" — written by Kara DioGuardi, sung by Cherie, urgency courtesy of Foreigner — is as close to perfect as a pop song gets, and yes, that includes the Beatles and Nellie McKay. But the formal interest isn't its perfection. It's the possible relationship between its perfection and the singular fact of how few seconds there are in the song in which the melody isn't being sung: twelve seconds to the first verse (which turns out to be a lifetime); 0 seconds between verse and chorus; 0 seconds before chorus leads back to verse; less than two seconds between second chorus and bridge; 0 seconds between bridge and chorus, 0 seconds before the chorus repeats to outro. Once it starts, a total of two seconds that are not led by the vocal line.

Mission: Impossible III, by the same token, approaches being a perfect movie, in a way that makes perfectly cllear how much a perfect movie leaves to be desired. Someday, someone with a copy of the DVD will determine how many of this film's 126 minutes are not part of an action sequence — less than a dozen, one suspects. Perhaps an equally viable analogy is the format of a Squeeze song or Tom Waits' "Ol' 55," with a chorus so long, each part unfolding the next from what at first seems like a last gesture, that one despairs of ever arriving at its end, and gives onself over to the craven pleasures. In M:I:3, one can be certain that a long swing from one Shanghai megastructure to the next will lead into a long tumble down a canted glass face, a slide which is also a gunfight by the way, and leads directly to the grabbing of the macguffin and ensuing base-jump into a busy street, a quick game of human Frogger pursuing dropped item through traffic which inevitably shifts into the latest in car chase technologies...

Amidst all this activity, sugarhigh!'s favorite moment came when Tom Cruise descends dramatically into the Vatican's da Vinci-coded catacombs; we love it when movie stars sneak down there, and the fact that he does not run into Tom Hanks for a drawn out battle involving Israeli Army kung fu and laser cats is perhaps the least believable thing about the movie.

les amants réguliers

Philippe Garel was 20 in the May days of 1968; so too is poet François, the lead character in his '68 epic Les amants réguliers (2005). François just happens to be played by Garrel's son Louis, who a year or so before just happened to play one of the leads in wet dreamer Bernardo Bertolucci's film about the same historical occasion, The Dreamers. As if that intertext wasn't enough, somewhere in the middle of Les amants' three hours, a colloquy of stoned kid rock-throwers retreat to the crash pad of their trust-funded confrere to discuss culture. Have you seen Before the Revolution, asks one of another. No? At which point the speaker turns directly to the camera and enunciates, as if it were an elocution lesson, "Bernardo Bertolucci."

To which we can only say: take it outside, boys. Your pissing contest isn't amusing. We would love Les amants to have resurrected the Nouvelle Vague, to have restored dignity to the category "three hour French movie," or simply to have been better than the turgid anti-politics of The Dreamers. Perhaps it is better, if "better" means "less ridiculous" (though by the same token it's "worse," in the sense of "less hot"). Perhaps Garrel's idea — that the failure to disrupt regular life would come back to haunt the regular lovers a thousandfold — is at least an idea rather than a cheap insult. But the gap between what remains to be expressed, and what each film decides is expressive enough, is identical: Way Too Broad.

Michel Houellebecq's drooling, reflexive lampoonings of the soixante-huitards, aside from their Oedipal bathos, have what is either the critical acuity or sheer stupidity to rehearse the most basic distortions of the historical narrative: they present the entirety of the revolutionary desire as concerning personal liberties. In short, according to the way lots of people like to tell it, 1968 was about free love and a higher wage to spend freely on hash, not about toppling a government and revising daily life. We would hope that either Ber-nar-do Ber-to-lu-cci or Phillipe Garel could do better than that, could get at what might have been particular and resonant about that moment. Instead, the two seem simply to have flipped a coin by way of deciding which would tell their drawing-room tale of ruint romance in lurid color, which in somber b/w, as if those were the two approaches to history.

atl

So the gang got together and made a movie. It was a coming-of-age film about a foursome of African-American teens living, loving and rollerskating together down at the local rink. The ringleader would be played by a young hip-hop star, whose character would come from a broken home with a single male authority figure struggling feebly in the shadow of parental death. Said hip-hop star would be set on the course of romance with female lead who seems to float in from a diffferent world, and the narrative would build toward a climactic skate-off. Needless to say, rollerskating-jams abound on OST.

The movie was called Roll Bounce, and it was set in Seventies Chicago. And then, 200 days later later, it was called ATL, and set in Atlanta; Bow Wow had been replaced by T.I., Meagan Good by Lauren London, Chi McBride by Mykelti Williamson.

Brief verdict: ATL much better; T.I. charming; could've used more skating; what's up with mysterious Ivy League school known as "Brinton"?

Though meaning to be more charged with social substance than its predecessor, this one actually has the appeal of easy-goingness; T.I's voice and facial expressions are more like a lazy Sunday than anything Roll Bounce has on offer. O, fair realism!

lucky number slevin

[compare to poster for Slither, below]

Surely we are at least a little taken aback to learn that the parents of the wunderkind in the latest spelling bee epic are played by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Through the powerful transitive properties not simply intrinsic to but orchestrated by the film industry with its incessant circulation of the currency of stardom through a formal system of "roles," those with memories can't help but experience, in this case, the oddity of the experience that the pair, last seen with him beating the shit out of her en route to incarceration, and her rising off to heights of independent fame, have seemingly worked things out and achieved a successful, buppified parenthood, as if to say, even the most inconstant and extraordinary figures reconcile with the domestic middle way sooner or later: a tortured, metatextual restatement of what Lukacs and Moretti already knew about the modern social narrative.

It's not that one can get confused between actors and their various roles, but that the film industry actively pursues this confusion; one could theorize the chain of substitutions (and its pleasures) rather subtly, but in short, the strategy allows the marketing of the same film to one audience that actively wishes to see a film about, say, a hit man and a taxi driver in the Los Angeles night, and another (overlapping but distinct) audience that wants to go see a Tom Cruise movie, and another (ditto) that likes Jamie Foxx. Indeed, one way of describing (that is to say, valuing) film actors might be as a ratio between their presence as star and as character, in the audience's experience, as averaged across their careers. At the top of the ratio would be those who are the purest stars (Schwarzenegger, let's say); the smallest fractions would be "anonymous" character actors. It will come as no surprise that the pay scale and this ratio are isomorphic.

This whole complex lends a certain interest to figures like Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman: those who have successfully parlayed their ability to, in the clichéd language, "disappear into their roles," into a star-style career. This capacity is not profoundly mysterious; it requires, however, the parainndustrial structure of critics and awards and, as such, sheds much light on that structure.

One might write a brief monograph on the British variant of this phenomenon, wherein if one parlays well enough, one gets to become a freakin' knight of the realm or whatever. Hugh Grant, a pure star, is unlikely to make it; ditto the horrifically excellent character actor Timothy Spall. But somewhere in the moyen floats Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Dame Judi Dench, and so on — which brings us to Sir Ben Kingsley, and Lucky Number Slevin, about which we have only one thing worth saying: in how many films will Sir Ben Kingsley die with a plastic bag over his head and duct tape around his throat, and is this really something one can do over and over, or once you're a knight, can you pretty much just do whatever you want?

basic instinct 2

This is the best movie ever. My cat can read. I am the King of France.

she's the man

• Estimated year by which all of Shakespeare's 37 plays will be remade in a high school setting: 2047.

• Factor by which this process is more interesting than watching Ang Lee systematically remake genre films as middlebrow romances in which the guy can't express his love because of social conventions: 3.2

• Predicted rank that She's The Man will hold (assuming that one counts only the best version of any given adaptation): 21st.

• Current rank: 4th.

• Predictive value of hotness of actors for ranking: Near-total.

• Expected rank of Titus Andronicus remake (given that Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet doesn't count, despite expressing high-schoolness better than any other film ever, Fast Times at Ridgemont HIgh excepted): 1.

slither

After four days, we can barely recall a single detail from Slither — this, perhaps, summarizes its charms. Rarely has a movie been so indifferent to distinguishing itself, and so easy-going as a result; like discussing politics again down at the local, it's the relief of having a loaded conversation as if it didn't matter at all. This lack of self-importance is perfectly embodied by "star" Nathan Fillion, who played a similar role in Serenity; screwed by his handsomeness (he looks like a weathered Jason Bateman) into a lead role (both in the movie, and in the movie's town of Wheelsy), he graciously makes the least of it at every turn. Only occasionally does his witty recalcitrance reveal itself as an actual annoyance that he has to be the guy to take care of this shit.

Slither is a bit like Scary Movie (et al.) without the self-aware irony; it follows the program like a structuralist at a genre convention. The genre is one we have referred to elsewhere as "the narrative of ideological terror" — in which arises some non-human force whose pure drive is not absolute destruction but absolute homogenization (wherein all human bodies become mere automata, non-conscious extensions of a collective will), which is perforce resisted by the final survivor(s), possessor of "the last free consciousness, as yet untainted by ideology."

The classic form of this film is the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the incessant remaking of which faintly screams repetition compulsion: "We might say it is America’s national story, the one it remakes in times of crisis — akin to the Japanese film community’s habit of refilming the story of the forty-seven ronin cyclically, most famously in Mifune’s Chushingura (1962)."

[An an aside, we note that the narrative of ideological terror is what renders science fiction an important screen for the cultural unconscious of the United States — but shouldn't be limited either to sci-fi or America. In a chapter of the 1983 book Signs Taken for Wonders, literary historiographer Franco Moretti identifies one locus classicus of this narrative in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and in the general idea of the zombie. For the moment, we wish to note only that the film Death House (1987), also known as Zombie Death House, features a character named...Franco Moretti.]

From the position of industrial history, the only remarkable thing about Slither is that it was made by James Gunn. His previous film, the stealthily odd and thrilling remake of Dawn of the Dead, starred class act Sarah Polley (along with Ving Rhames, etc). What's more, it made meaningful money, famously besting Mel Gibson in its opening week ("Zombies Knock Off Jesus," said Variety) and ending up with a worldwide gross of above $100 million on a $28 million budget. Meaning that, with an intent more pointed than anything else about Slither, Gunn elected to move backward, away from whatever was offered him in the wake of success, to make an even more decisively pulpy film, without any box office names. Everything about Slither is largely free of the anxiety and banalization that haunt every object that wishes to succeed; the whole film is pervaded by a sense of relief, which for a horror film is curious indeed.

inside man

Spike Lee's new film goes to considerable lengths to have Jodie Foster's cosmopolite superfixer quote (pointlessly misquote, really) the titanic financier Rothschild, who said of property, "Buy when there's blood in the streets." We're supposed to blanch at this understanding of history; as advice, it focuses on the moment of choice, when one can ruthlessly climb aboard the worst forces of history or take the high road. And so is the moral dimension of Christopher Plummer's banker, a former Nazi collaborator, rendered.

Oddly, a different adage would have rendered the backstory far more illuminatingly, without offering us such an easy moral superiority: Balzac's "Behind every great fortune there's a crime." The difference is both slight and absolute, in that the former allows the imagination that there could be a billionaire banker who was right with the world; Plummer just isn't quite him. Evil, herein, is a matter off a single choice made years ago that coulda gone the other way. Had the film kept Balzac to hand, we would know that every bank holds a secret, and the snoozy peregrinations to explain why this bank would be obviated.

This is central; there's a record of Plummer's originary villainy in a safety deposit box, and on this document the plot turns. This is the film's problem. As a caper procedural with witty asides, Inside Man is at the top of the Hollywood heap, especially given the aura that the various crypto-political asides ("give me back my fucking turban") take on within the ambiguous tension of a film that is at once a) by Spike Lee, and b) studio contract work. On that level, the film's only real disappointment lies in the amount of time that the hero-criminal spends behind a mask, a choice that made a bit more sense for Hugo Weaving than for the absurdly charismatic Cllive Owen.

But in the procedural's relation between narrative and plot, the mechanics of the former are always more interesting than the "secret" of the latter, not least because the secret is always, y'know, Nazis. The motivation of audience sympathy in such films requires — no less than the domestic drama requires a child in jeopardy — that the villainous Grand Old Man have a specific and historical association with an agreed-upon absolute evil, of which there aren't all that many. Hence the predictability of the "secret," every time.

Had Balzac stood in Rothschild's place [a fine way to start any paragraph — ed.], we would be at once more fluid in our choices, and more honest. The film's failure to pick the right adage is identical to the film's failure to have an interesting plot.

This might be seen as a matter of narrative economy: the crimes crouching in bank vaults (literally, in this film) are rarely singular or easily narratable; they are crimes of duration, in which value is moved by force from some humans to others over time.

Our note is perhaps a banality: that Hollywood movies like to imagine that there are good billionaires and bad billionaires, and that the distinction is finally clear and identifiable. The appeal of this imaginary needs no detailing. What's profoundly ironic is the nature of this particular form of the fantasy, as regards Spike Lee.

The logic whereby historical evil within living memory pools around the Holocaust is exactly the justificatory logic which buttresses the state of Israel at every turn, often at the expense of other historical victims. The oddity here is not, as might first appear, simply that Spike Lee has turned his political thinking to the Holocaust, after decades of irritating Jewish audiences; the oddity is what vanishes, in this particular case, in the smoke of that choice. Lee himself has spoken against this with great vituperation, and indeed has publically posed the United States' defense of Israel against the historical treatmenty of slavery — which is to say, against the systematic, violent long-term extraction of value from black bodies to enrich white bodies. Lee (no more than Faulkner) identifies this as a founding and perpetually repressed story of America, of American wealth and power.

Spike Lee's longstanding reasoning about crimes, fortunes and power, that is to say, has been the exact opposite of the very historical imaginary that deforms and dullifies an otherwise charming and engaging Spike Lee joint; nothing, in fact, could structurally trace "what it means for Spike Lee to do studio contract work" more coherently than this incoherence.

tristram shandy (a cock and bulll story)

The easy delights of Tristram Shandy float mostly in the metacinematic, as when actor Rob Brydon, pondering his fate as a not-leading man, proposes to identify the color of his rotting British teeth "Tuscan Sunset," or the unremarked-upon casting of absurdly handsome Jeremy Northam to stand in for director Michael ("Mark") Winterbottom.

Despite the addition of a metacinematic layer (or, perhaps, given the nature of the book, one ought say supermetacinematic), the flick flits by in at what seeems like about an hour. This feels like an impossibility, though not one lingered over; what's most appealing in this version of Tristram Shandy is neither its imbrication nor slightness, but the insouciance with which it stages both — as if to be an affect guide for making unfilmable films. What next: the HBO Neuromancer? Gravity's Rainbow in the form of a trailer?

find me guilty

Here at sugarhigh!, we're told that voir dire means "to speak the truth" — it looks to one with humble French like the literal translation would be "to see to speak." That seems to give a fair narrative account of the trial fromat, from the juror's perspective: for a long time one looks, and then at the very end one is set loose to pronounce a sentence. Just like a film critic!

Twice in Find Me Guilty, mobster Jackie DiNorscio, arguing his own case before a jury, says “I’m a gagster, not a gangster.” Both times the plea is shot from the jury box. We’re the jury, of course; despite the Sidney Lumet imprimatur (where are the Dog Days of yesteryear?), the film is nothing but Vin Diesel’s case to be recognized as a comic actor, instead of the bigtime tough guy he has failed to be (a failure, we hear, forced by his testing as ugly to a big chunk of the international audience).

So, really, the patio at the Chateau Marmont is the jury box; the good citizens there sitting in judgment are the ones who must be persuaded to hire Diesel sometime down the line, to set him free from the prison of his physique and rehabilitate him as an amusing and employable guy.

v for vendetta

V for Vendetta stinks of books. Not in the sense that it’s based on an annoyingly lit’ry graphic novel from the Eighties, but in that same way that one knew syntagm-by-syntagm that The Matrix was propped up by a certain amount of critical reading, even without the Baudrillard product placement.

This is a mixed blessing, to say the least. Among purportedly pro-revolution Hollywood movies, V4V knows enough to dodge the obvious critiques: the individual hero, if he is such, diligently steps aside and lets the next generation have responsibility for changing their world, represented both by a teeming “Dude, we’re all Spartakus” collectivity and a radicalized woman-child. That seems to get it about right, and moreover the narrative doesn’t flinch from its own logic, except perhaps for the fortuitous set of eventualities whereby, the twin heads of the repressive regime having been dually dispatched, the headless government troops decline to fire on the uprising. One wishes as well that, at the climax, having persuaded her hangdog pursuer that the explosive-laden train must indeed be launched, Evey had inhabited the devil-may-care drive of anarchic destructivity enough to say “Wanna go for a ride?” rather than their both deboarding. Still, as a sort of bare-bones political text, oh, it’s fine.

That’s the problem: the film’s good enough that the ways in which it fails to be much good are particularly frustrating. These failures transpire at many levels: the confusion of preservationist values with resistance; the inability to make as good a use of the ever-lurking perversity of Natalie Portman’s murderous naif schtick as Luc Besson or Andy Samberg; the docile trot down the path from V’s mask to a lair congruent with the Phantom of the Opera’s.

But the decisive failing is in the cinematographic style; unlike The Matrix, or Bound, there’s no visual invention to speak of, no interesting shots, only a flat palette and a will to execute. Predictably well-read, the film doesn’t have a way to look. Without a substantial visual sense, there's no formal tension — no grinding of elements against each other, as one might hope from an account of conflict. This empties the narrative of drama; indeed, having successfully pre-produced its own anxiety — will the film be a political cop-out? — all it can do is palliate said anxiety at each turn. It’s like hearing somebody sing a pop song for the first time; they’re so studiously getting the notes on melody and the words enunciated on time, the performance lacks any spirit worth mentioning.

Or perhaps it’s akin to watching a particularly successful paintball player: another well-executed weekend diversion, hoping to be about life and death.

ultraviolet

For much of this film, one can't tell what kind of image one is looking at, stuck with a brain habituated to distinguishing between "live action" and animation. Here there's no distinction to be made, and the brain shivers. Milla Jovovich's face in closeup looks spectral and rendered, polygons and pancake makeup, each surface torquing onto the next with a kind of blurred elision; the buildings of the future city look about the same. From the first sequence onward, the image sometimes oscillates (and a narrow oscillation it is) between the two kinds of images, and sometimes plays out at an indecipherable limit, on the two-sided surface of extremely computer-aided graphics, a disorienting and frantically appealing blend that falls somewhere within the delta formed by Sin City, hi-end video games, and a-ha's "Take On Me" video.

It's at once hard to look at, and fantastic. And for a few minutes it seems that the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom dreamed of but couldn't quite achieve (the problem of liberalism, as ever) might finally be reallized, the Hollywood film composed of nothing but action sequences. And then, after that dream has died, there is a lengthy moment when it seems there might be only enough narrative to get you from one ass-kicking, escape, or detonation scene to the next; eventually that dream too is doused, and once again a film decides it requires enough plot that one could say it had a plot. That, we fear, isn't helping anyone.

oscar news from all over

Tonight, Ben reads at Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC.

This morning, Louis saw Sophia Loren in LAX.

At sugarhigh! world headquarters, we are studying the press release for this; we believe without hesitation that there should be a great book of poetry named The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears, but — given the blurbs from Mr. Collins, Mr. Daniels, and Mr. Suarez — we fear that this isn't it and, moreover, that it is not a sequel to this.

16 blocks

It's interesting: the particular filmic sequence in which someone, now a superhero, now a civilian, must needs make a way through the city without passing through the streets, exactly, traveling rooftop to rooftop, leaping perilously over the gaps, racing across the tarpaper and rubble, past the dovecotes and antennae. Circulation, somehow, has become a problem — perhaps because it's designed in part for surveillance and control. And so it is circulation itself that must be eluded.

There's a matching sequence, motivated by the same narrative needs for evasive action in traversing the downtown from here to there, but entirely different in affect and imagery. This is the passage from the lowest floor to lowest floor of buildings (a sequence featured more than once in 16 Blocks), requisitely smashing through walls as one goes. When such a sequence apears onscreen, it involves ground floors that seem basementlike, or basements themselves; bars figure prominently in this tradition, though not as much as grottos where some sort of restaurant prep work is being done, most frequently by Asian workers. This is in fact the classic mise-en-scene of the substructure creep: the basement of the Chinese restaurant, where non-English speaking workers scarcely look up beyond an impassive glance as the leads race through on their way to and from other lives, bloody and beweaponed.

Sure, you can just get from here to there by going basement to basement, like the winter-minded passages of the disneyland called MIT, or like John Cheever's voyager making his way home through the suburbs, swimming pool by swimming pool. But in the city, for whatever reason, immigrant labor is the necesary setting for this particular fantasy.

Often these sequences are set in the heights or depths of a particular kind of structure, stone-faced turn-of-the-century apartment buildings with a drab restaurant at ground level, the buildings that most surely and anonymously signify the massive population shift to urban areas (with attendant increase in labor density) that happened in the United States, 1880-1920. Their roofs and basements both provide for the spatialization of the urban 20th Century; they invented the third dimension for the city as surely as, per Apollinaire's poem "Guerre" (Calligrammes), World War I invented it for the globe. But if the roofs suggest flight, the basements with their sweatshop spectrality are more directly the scene of urbanization and industrialization istelf, the more material facts of western modernity.

Here one thinks of the tactic of urban combat in particularly dense blocks which involves entering one house and knocking through walls to move to the next and the next; didn't Benjamin write of this? Certainly the arcades convert this fantasy of fleeing from public space by cutting though city blocks — the hero appearing as a curiosity before the laborers — into its most profitable form, even in the late morning of modernity....

pink panther

Having promised to make a brief note about each new release we see this year, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of having to say something or other about the latest remake of The Pink Panther, starring Steve Martin, whom we once found funny.

We don't remember the earlier rounds so well, but it seems in retrospect that the possible interest of the set-up — which seems on the verge of appearing at various moments in this iteration — lies in the fact that it's Clouseau's very idiot provinciality which makes him a successful sleuth. It's not that his bumbling turns out to be a virtue, but that it's symptomatic of the general lack of intelligence and grace on the part of French civil servants, who exist within a vast cocoon of pleasure in bureaucracy [surely there's a French or German word for this? ed.]...and this is finally the virtue. This seems like the plot that's trying to creep through; Clouseau's successes periodically seem to come from his knowledge of arcane and absurd civil codes and para-facts, things only a talentless grind might know. It's not that Clouseau's innate goodness will be redeemed, but that Clouseau will redeem the concept of bureaucracy itself. In this regard the narrative-in-waiting can be regarded indeed as a French nationalist tale, the very antipode of the American nationalist police story, which revolves dependably around the idea that only a rogue cop with disregard for the regulations can save us now, because regulation is what interferes with actual genius and the solving of problems.

And yet in this edition the idea is botched at almost every turn, periodically pillorying top cop Dreyfus for his own bureaucratic ways, when it should be doing the exact opposite, and brutally misusing the Clive Owens cameo, which ought to have been an instance of how the physically-talented and charismatic Bond style of crimefighting finally fails within this national context.

Is the inability to execute the one possibly workable idea explained by the production team's non-Frenchness — or just their astounding insipidity?

Caché

Not quite sure what to make of Michael Haneke's new film, Caché, seen in a tiny theater, sharing the front row with a party of five or more French persons, who also seemed somewhat nonplussed.

Though it earns its effects, its moments of disturbance, there's also a limit to the strategy of representing national/political struggles through the structure of family relations. The allegory of the fraternal here is far more persuasive than Arnaud Desplechin's awkward Leo, Playing "In the Company of Men," but in the end displays the limits of allegory itself, which implies a decodability that the movie is then compelled to wrestle mightily against.

The film is structured around two things. The first is the word "nothing" (rien), which is repeated incessantly throughout the movie; there's scarcely any question (what's going on, what did you do today, what's wrong, what's the import of that, what caused him to feel that way, etc etc) that can't be answered with this single word. The lite reading (which shows up in several reviews) concerns the failed communication of the aging bourgeois couple, which is somehow either the cause of the final, ambiguous events, or an effect of the presence of the something that can't be said.

But that really won't do, and limns exactly one of the failings of the allegorical structure. On the one hand, domestic fissures can scarcely bee causal; we know this is a story of the return of the repressed, or the collection of unacknowledged debt, and nothing can undo the initial repression or avert its return. On the other, to spend so much attention on the family fallout of the repression is at once cliché and a lowering of the film's national/political stakes, which are not so much screened as supplanted by domestic drama, the Battle of Algiers as retold by The New Yorker's fiction editor.

Indeed, one must largely ignore the marital tension (and that's a lot of ignoring) to find the film particularly powerful, to engage its nothing. Nothing becomes a pit into which all specific meanings are sacrificed only to be reborn as an unsayable something that threatens each character with destruction (regarding this howling white space, one notes that the son Pierrot's school is College lycee Stephane Mallarmé)—a someting that might well be described as history itself (just as one might understand that history itself is making the mysterious videotapes that appear a la Lost Highway; they are shot, to adapt Prof. Louis-Georges Schwartz's formulation, from history's point of view).

Beyond the rien that is not there is the rien that is. The movie depends on the physical aging, beyond the proscenium, of the once-irresistable and irresistably French stars, Daniel Auteuil (actually born in Algiers in 1950) and Juliette Binoche, each of whom here seems thick, slack, sculpted from lardoon. This more than any narrative move or linguistic device gives force to the sense of corrupted entitlement, lost erotism, congealed history. The sense that something has gone horrribly, unsayably wrong with Frenchness itself, with France's capacity to represent itself through romantic pale beauty; and the sense that this collapse must inevitably be captured by history's camera—this tells the story far more powerfully than the banalities of domestic dynamics. The movie might finally have been more effective had it simply montaged chronological clips of the two actors from the 'Seventies through the present, inserting flash shots of bleeding and drowning Algerians during each cut.

match point (quantity v. quality)

Here at sugarhigh! we're promised to write a brief something about each new movie seen, if only so that we can recall what we saw at the end of the year. After seeing Match Point last night, we pondered in conversation with friends whether it was more or less boring than Brokeback Mountain (seen in 2005), which admittedly managed some emotional weight despite the requisite Ang Lee yawns and horrific soundtrack.

It's not so much a difference in quantity as quality. Brokeback Mountain offers its boredom as a marker of aesthetic virtue: the standardized indie [sic] mode of proffering slowness (and its invocation of mid-century European cinema) as a proof that this is art we're watching, gosh darn it. Jim Jarmusch, we're looking at you! Though Ang Lee is at least as villainous in this regard; alas, no amount of homotext can free Brokeback from the director's addiction to making vague impressions of genre films that didn't need tarting up (or down) in the first place (cf. Crouching, Hidden).

Match Point, on the other hand, would have genuinely liked to be darkly sprightly, to zip along from plot point to plot point in an accelerating descent; Woody just doesn't seem to have the chops anymore (Mr. Rhys-Meyers' acting didn't exactly help), and the boredom is incidental to a more generalized incompetence.

We have no verdict, as yet, as to which of these qualities of bordeom is preferable. It may come down to a taste for landscape porn as opposed to real estate porn, or the reverse.