The (first) end of reason

I admire the director Alejandro Amenábar for attempting something different with his film Agora. It's got all the trappings of an historical epic--a period setting, lots of extras, big-budget sets and costumes, British actors, philosophical debates, and violence. But the movie's weakest point, commercially, at least as far as American viewers, is that the balance between ideas and actions is weighted toward the "ideas" side. There are some action scenes, but none of them are exactly cry-for-freedom, Gladiator-type crowd-rousers; instead, they are all dark and tragic.

And then there are the ideas themselves. This is one of the few major motion pictures to dare to question the place of religion, any religion, and to come down on the side of rationality and reason, even as it seems to suggest that reason will usually lose out to the fundamentalist religion with the most adherents. On the surface, the movie is about Hypatia, a female teacher and scientist who lived in 4th century Alexandria, Egypt. Apparently, little is known about her, so the film fills in quite a few blanks (for example, positing that she was believer in a heliocentric view of the solar system), but the the real subject of the movie is the conflict of religions which swirled about her.

As the film beings, Roman Egypt is largely pagan, with the Christians kept down by the pagan authorities. We see Hypatia as a beloved teacher, and at least three of her male students have unrequited crushes on her. The religious battles (which Hypatia tries to stay out of) are taken to the streets, and soon the Christians get the upper hand and a large Christian mob raids the library at Alexandria, though Hypatia and her father, the curator of the library, manage to hide some of more important documents.

Fifteen years later, most of the pagans have converted to Christianity and the three men who loved Hypatia now hold important posts in either the church or the government. Now the battles brewing are between the Christians and the Jews, and sadly the rationality and questioning reasoning of Hypatia is no longer valued in the public arena (wait, this is set in the past, right?). Hypatia comes to a bad end, which is triggered when a church leader quotes from Paul about women belonging in submission to men, and that they should neither teach nor hold authority.

There is lots of dialogue and several plot strands to follow, but for the most part, they all remain clear and intriguing. The acting is fine, especially Rachel Weisz (far above) as Hypatia and Max Minghella (above) as a slave boy who takes a liking to her. The film cost $70 million and looks it--the use of CGI for backgrounds is subtle and well-done. The few times when it's not subtle, it is extremely cool: the camera swoops down from space and focuses in, Google-map style, on Alexandria. The message about religious intolerance is sadly timely still, and probably one reason why the film didn't do very well in the States (though it drew audiences in Europe); another reason is lack of big-name stars. There is also a certain lacking in character development; besides Hypatia, no one else becomes particularly interesting. But if you want a thoughtful entertainment with great production values, about a time in history which is not frequently examined in films (Hypatia's death and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria are marked by some historians as the beginning of the Dark Ages), this is right up your alley.

Alphabetical film festival: Witches and cowboys

The Alphabetical Film Festival is taking us through three shelves worth of our favorite movies on DVD, but if I had to condense my choices to one shelf, these next two films would be on that shelf.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT: I don’t need to say much about the content of this little indie film that, thanks mostly to a genius marketing campaign, became a bonafide cultural phenomenon in 1999. Three young people, out alone in the woods with video cameras researching the history of the Blair Witch, who supposedly was responsible for a series of murders many years ago, get lost and can’t find their way out the woods. Over the period of several days, they begin to think that they are being stalked by the witch or some supernatural beings, and one by one, they meet bad ends. Or so it seems--one of the film’s strengths is its use of ambiguity. We have no idea what happens to the three, except that we are told at the beginning of the film that none of them were ever seen again. This movie has almost no special effects (except for some wonderful and judicious use of sound effects), no blood or gore, no scary music, and yet it is one of the 2 or 3 scariest movies I’ve ever seen.

The old truism that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see is borne out here, Tension builds slowly over the 80 minute running time, first based on the three characters becoming frustrated over not being able to find their way back to the car, then because they aren’t getting along, and finally because weird things start happening outside their tent at night, but they can find no one in the area. We never see the witch or any other people (or creatures). We never actually see anything bad happen to any of the three: one disappears in the night and never comes back; in the hair-raising finale, one guy is standing still in the corner of a room and the woman screams and drops her camera on the floor.

In summary, it doesn’t seem so scary, but when you live through their experience with them, and put together the pieces of the Blair Witch story, it comes together to become the scariest movie since the original Halloween. When we first saw the movie, I was relatively satisfied with the ambiguous ending, but admitted to Don that I didn't quite get the last shot, of Mike standing in the corner. Don reminded me of an earlier reference to the corner of the room and I suddenly got it, and I practically screamed out loud, “Oh my God, he was in the corner!” (You’ll have to see the movie to understand.) I had nightmares for weeks. The film’s style--shaky, handheld subjective camera--has influenced many other horror films (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity). And while the grousing and cursing among the three grow a little tedious by the third or fourth viewing, the payoff of the last 15 minutes remains effective, time after time. This is the only movie I refuse to watch alone.

BLAZING SADDLES: This is the granddaddy of the nonsense comedy which makes little sense but exists to make fun of (and to make endless references to) popular culture, specifically other movie genres. The primary genre being satirized here is the western, and the film's plot can be boiled down to a traditional western story: some bad guys are trying to lay claim to a small town because they know the property will be worth something when the train comes through; the town's new sheriff, not trusted by the people, takes the lead in the fight against the villains and becomes the town's savior. But this plot is mocked and subverted at every possible turn (cliches upended, anachronisms rampant) to the point where the film collapses on itself and, at what should be the climax, the fourth wall (between the movie and the audience) is literally broken, and the characters are revealed to be actors rampaging through the Warner Bros. soundstages.

I’m sure academic analyses have been done on this film, and it does occupy an important spot in Hollywood history, paving the way for Airplane! (and many other Zucker brothers movies), Murder By Death, the movies of Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler, not to mention the rest of Mel Brooks’ ouvere. It’s also responsible for making the very act of pop culture referencing in movies universally accepted. But it’s still, over 30 years years later, also plain, wild fun. And even though the acting in comedies like these is not usually notable, here everyone is great; Madeline Kahn got a deserved Oscar nomination for doing a Marlene Dietrich riff, but Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder also manage to create characters we care about, and Harvey Korman makes a wonderfully buffoonish villain. I could spend paragraphs quoting great lines and describing great scenes (in the way of Monty Python fans), but I’ll just end my remembering the first time I saw this movie, in a theater during its initial run, when I literally fell out of my seat laughing at the campfire scene. Fart jokes are a dime a dozen now, but this was (as far as I know) the first in movie history and probably still the best.

Fear of Birds; or How Hitchcock taught me about modernism

Alphabetical Film Festival: THE BIRDS: My mom took me to see this movie when it first came out in theaters, which would mean I was 7 years old at the time--this is the same mom who took me to see Bonnie & Clyde when I was 12, God bless her. Bonnie & Clyde traumatized me (I had nightmares for weeks) but The Birds helped teach me about an important element in the arts, and in real life, too, I suppose: ambiguity. At 7, I was already a big monster movie fan and I was used to traditional closure in those movies; as bad as the monsters and mad scientists were, they always got what they deserved at the end, usually death, and the forces of good/God won out. I was also used to having everything mysterious explained by the end. Even in movies like Dracula, where the supernatural was taken for granted, there were still explanations (a bite on the neck caused vampirism) and rules (Dracula could be fought with crosses and sunshine).

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was a bit different. First of all, the horror wasn't some spooky being in a cape hiding in the shadows; it came from the skies, in broad daylight, and from something one usually associates with nature and Disney cuteness: average everyday birds. The plot: a flirty, scandal-prone ingénue (Tippi Hedren) plays romantic games with a non-game playing average Joe (Rod Taylor). While they're chasing each other around Bodega Bay, a small coast town near San Francisco, something strange starts happening: common, everyday birds begin attacking people, adults and children, and in some cases, pecking them to death. The tightly knit community of Bodega Bay blames the trouble on the scandalous interloper Hedren, though Taylor, his neurotic mother (Jessica Tandy), and his ex-girlfriend (Suzanne Pleshette) all have enough problems to keep a couple of analysts busy.

The use of special effects, indeed any photographic effects beyond placing a camera in front of actors, is not among Hitchcock's strengths; the bird attacks work OK, though a different director might have made more of an effort to make them more realistic and more graphic. And they worked well enough that I have a vivid memory of screaming like a banshee a couple of years later when a bird dive-bombed me during a picnic in a woods; I was certain that I was going to get chased and pecked like the schoolkids in the movie. But the strength of the movie is the growing atmosphere of unsettled dread, mostly because of the constant possibility of more terror from the skies, but also because most of the characters are rather unlikable people--Taylor is the most sympathetic person here, but even he has a bit of a mother problem that keeps him, in today's lingo, from reaching his full potential as a modern man (he's good looking and nicely built, but doesn't seem like good husband or father material).

But onto the ambiguity (and inevitable SPOILERS): 1) we never find out why the birds are attacking--some apocalyptic man vs. nature message is toyed with now and again, but not seriously; and 2) the film ends with no closure; a sort of truce is reached as the furious flocks of birds that had Hedren, Taylor, and his family trapped in their house suddenly stop attacking and let them take the car and leave. The last shots, of the physically and mentally traumatized family members (pictured) making their way outside to the car and driving away as hundreds of birds are still menacingly massed, are unforgettable and truly shocking, not in a BOO!!-startled way, but in a "what the hell is happening?" way.

I remember being very confused at the age of 7, and asking my mom on the way out of the theater, "What really happened? How does it really end?" as though there had to be a secret, more traditional story and ending that I missed. Poor mom couldn't explain it, and still, over 40 years later, no one has. There is a famous theory that the birds attack to make Hedren, Taylor, and Tandy become better at their most important jobs, being a family to each other, but if I accept that, I have to accept Shyamalan's dreadful Signs, in which God sends aliens to lay waste to the earth just to teach Mel Gibson to be a better father.

I prefer to think that Hitchcock was on the cutting edge of movie modernism, following European directors like Antonioni and Godard in bringing ambiguous unclosed narratives to the local movie theater (and perhaps making the world safe for Bergman's Persona and Kubrick's 2001). I remember being every confused, and a little angry, that Hitchcock didn't explain everything away and punish the forces of evil, but I wanted to see it again anyway. And of course, eventually, I learned that, more often than not, issues of good and evil and morality have more in common with The Birds than Frankenstein or Dracula (or Casablanca, for that matter).

The Alphabetical Film Festival goes to the garden

Wow, it's been over two weeks since I posted here, and even longer since I wrote about our ongoing project of watching our 3 shelves of DVD favorites in alphabetical order. In real life, we're up to the letter "F," but in blog life, I've only just started on the "B"s, so I'll try to plow through several in the next couple of weeks, not necessarily to catch up, but so I don't feel so much like a slacking slaggard.

BEING THERE: Usually, in the battle between films and literature, literature loses; very few books have been adapted to the screen without losing something major in translation (The Godfather, coming up when we get to the "F"s, is one of the few films that is considerably better than the book). This adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's novel gets around the film/novel problem by becoming a somewhat different creature from the original. As I recall (and it's been over 30 years since I read the book), the novel is very short and reads almost like a fable: a gardener named Chance, who has been isolated in the mansion and grounds of his employer since he was a child, has to leave his comfortable home when his employer dies. All he knows about the world comes from his knowledge of gardening and from watching television. Because he speaks so simply, he is taken by others to be a genius, using metaphors (drawn from gardening and TV) to spout wisdom, and winds up becoming a national figure in business and politics, never really understanding why or how powerful he has the potential to become.

The book, which is about 120 pages in its mass market paperback edition, was turned into a movie with a running time of over two hours. Aside from having a very different (and to my mind, better) ending, I can't pinpoint the differences between the two, but the movie fleshes out the characters, or at least makes them feel fuller even if we don't know that much more about them. Of course, the movie has the advantage of having Peter Sellers as Chance. Though Sellers was not always a very subtle comic actor (see any given Pink Panther movie or Murder By Death), he gives a marvelously controlled performance here, delivering his dialogue without accent or affect, looking cosmically serene without seeming stupid.

An example of his wit (and Kosinski's) is the scene in which Shirley MacLaine is trying to seduce him in a bedroom while a TV is playing in the background. He basically ignores her pawing of him, saying simply, "I like to watch," meaning he'd rather watch TV than have sex. But she interprets him as a sexual voyeur, so she proceeds to masturbate in front of him. He ignores her, but she feels liberated and thinks she owes it all to Chance's wisdom. Because he is soft-spoken and has a dignified manner, people feel compelled to interpret his simplistic utterings. When asked by the President if the economy will recover, he begins talking about the garden and its cycle of seasons; the President looks mystified briefly, but then decides that he's recommending optimism, that as nature does, so does the economy.

Sellers and the clever script, with its implicit critique of mass media (still potent today in our world of reality TV and the level playing field that allows bloggers to speak their simple little minds with no credentials) make this movie a classic. MacLaine is good, as is Melvyn Douglas, in an Oscar-winning role as a dying presidential advisor. There is one great use of a pop song, Deodato's version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" as Chance leaves his mansion and heads out into the world for the first time. There is also a very amusing string of outtakes under the end credits showing Sellers struggling with a line involving the word "asshole," and prefiguring the now-universal appearance of such clips as extras on DVDs.

Walkers on the wild side

Just finished a good book called Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed, by Dave Thompson. He covers the early years of the three musicians (late 60s-late 70s) when they worked together at various times and places and influenced an entire era of music. The well-researched book is ordered chronologically and bounces around among the three men, examining their friendships and their falling-outs, describing concerts and recording sessions in some detail, and follows to a slightly lesser degree their romances and drug adventures.

If you lived through this era and liked these musicians, you'll like this book, but I'm not sure it's the place to start for young'un newcomers to the 70's glitter rock era. To start with, Thompson doesn't stray far from these three and their immediate friends and entourages--a fair amount of space is given to the Velvet Underground (though I would have liked to hear a bit more about poor, tragic Nico, who is quoted frequently early on), Mott the Hoople, and Marc Bolan, but you'll get no larger musical context in which to situate the glitter/glam scene.

The subtitle hints at another problem with the book: the author's own prejudices creep in to the book too often for this to be considered a definitive, objective history. The word "dangerous" seems to be there for the sake of sensationalism: nowhere does he really make claims that they were dangerous to anyone except themselves and their loved ones. For better or worse, it's probably due to David Bowie that Reed and Pop got strong toeholds on the ladder to rock stardom as he produced or co-produced their biggest commercial successes (Reed's Transformer, and Pop's The Idiot and Lust for Life), but the author presents Bowie in a fairly bad light, as a fickle and inauthentic copier who never stayed interested in any one artist long enough to bring them to full fruition. He gives much more positive attention to Reed and Pop, though it sounds like just as many former friends dislike Reed as dislike Bowie. But I admit to be being titillated by all the gossipy and bitchy details of their interactions.

There's no arguing which one of the three is the biggest star: Bowie. But Pop was a major influence on the punk scene, not just his violent antics at concerts but his sparse and equally violent sound, dark lyrics, and rough-edged vocals (you can hear his influence in punk bands like Joy Division and Sex Pistols, and even in the current band Jet, whose big hit "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" sounds an awful lot like Pop's "Lust for Life"). Reed has arguably had the most marginal career of the three, remaining active but not particularly important or interesting except to fans of the New York avant-garde. Still, it's amazing how much Pop's vocals on Lust for Life sound like Lou Reed. Listen to "The Passenger" from the YouTube clip below and you'll swear you're hearing a Transformer outake (vocally if not instrumentally). Overall, a fascinating read about some fascinating musicians.

Princess of Mars; or, Love and hate and B-movies

I still love movies, but I don't love current movies. My formative moviegoing years were in the 70's--late-high school, college, and after--and I was lucky enough to enjoy mainstream Hollywood films (both Jaws and Star Wars came out while I was in college) and older movies as well, which I grew to love in large part because I was able to see them on the big screen at revival houses on and near the Ohio State campus. Foreign and underground films were also part of my movie diet.

In fact, the two-year span of 1974-75 (senior year in high school, freshman year in college) was perhaps the most important stage in the development of my moviebuffhood: Jaws turned me into a drooling fanatic--I saw it 15 times the summer it came out, all in theaters (no home video back then); That's Entertainment brought a taste of old Hollywood back to theaters; Nashville, a precursor of the later indie film boom, came out that same summer, though I didn't catch up with it until a year later at a 2nd run theater; OSU-area theaters introduced me to classics (Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Gone With the Wind, Duck Soup), foreign films (Juliet of the Spirits, Death in Venice, Swept Away), and fringe cinema (Flesh Gordon, Phantom of the Paradise, Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I saw during its initial mainstream release, before the midnight crowds turned it into a hit).

My love affair with mainstream Hollywood began going bad in the 90's; the fact that I had American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies on cable to turn to for older movies, which I began to find far more entertaining and thought-provoking than the current hits may have been a catalyst. Now I pretty much despise the state of current films. I see perhaps 7 or 8 movies during their first theatrical release; I do keep up with the others via DVD and cable, but I rarely get enthused about any of the hits. Only the B-film market seems to provide me with the charge I used to get from major studio productions.

Admittedly, B-movies are an acquired taste, and it was Turner Classic Movies' airing of the wonderful B-films of the 30s and 40s (mostly from Warner Brothers, but also RKO and Republic) that helped me appreciate them. These movies have lower budgets, cheaper production values, lesser stars, shorter running times, and weaker scripts, but when you understand that and have a few of them under your belt, you approach them on their level. You can still find good performances, artistic direction, and interesting stories--Detour (1945), one of the cheapest productions ever, is recognized today as a high-water mark for the film noir genre. Today, B-movies are mostly relegated to the home video or cable market. Some of my more enjoyable movie experiences of the past few years have been thanks to films which either never played in theaters or never got national theatrical distribution (Night Train, Kabluey, Ira & Abby).

Which brings me to Princess of Mars. This 2009 direct-to-DVD film, based on the first book in the "John Carter in Mars" series of pulp sci-fi novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was apparently made to capitalize on a big-budget live-action Pixar film due in 2012 (not to mention a somewhat dubious claim made on the cover that this story inspired James Cameron's Avatar). The plot involves a soldier, John Carter, who during a moment of crisis, is mysteriously transported to the planet Mars where, because of the gravity, he has great strength and can leap great bounds, and has adventures with green four-armed Martians and the beautiful two-armed Princess Dejah Thoris.

Let me be perfectly clear: this is not a very good movie. In this version, Carter is a soldier in Afghansistan who is left for dead and transported via flash drive to a Mars-like planet. That could be clever, but the idea isn't developed beyond what is needed to get Carter to a planet called Mars 216. The acting is terrible: the stars are former underwear model and soap opera actor Antonio Sabato Jr. (as Carter) and former porn queen Traci Lords (the princess). Both have substantial career credits, but both are just plain bad. He seems to be constantly looking for his acting coach, not finding him, and just speaking the lines as written; she tries for emotions but the Botox gets in the way--that grimace on her face in the picture above is there for almost the entire movie. Despite Lords' presence, there is no sex appeal, and the chemistry between the leads is non-existent. Matt Lasky, as the Martian Tars Tarkas with only two arms, doesn't have to struggle with a 4-arm costume, but he does have to act with a heavy rubber mask with wobbly tusks. The best acting comes from Chacko Vadaketh in the villainous role of an Afghan drug dealer who also winds up on Mars 216. And the effects are sparse; some digital work, but mostly costumes and camera filters.

However, I knew what I was getting into so I had my expectations lowered considerably. I expected bad acting and got it in spades; in fact, Sabato and Lords are MST3K bad and therefore almost enjoyable. I expected bargain basement effects and got them, and was even pleasantly surprised at the effects that worked: the Martian landscape and skies, the giant airship (seen below), and even the cheap trick that goes back to the Superman serials of the 1940s of having Sabato leap up, followed by a cut to a cheap shot of a flying man-model, followed by a shot of Sabato landing with a thud.

What I liked about it for real: no snarky ironic tone to the dialogue, no comic-book humor, a fast-moving story arc, and a lovely lack of digital sheen. Yes, CGI can create marvelous effects and looks, but when overused or poorly used, they look just as fake as the FX of old. I am still interested in seeing what the Pixar folks come up with (I'm sure the Martians will have four arms), and it will be spectacular-looking on the big screen, and with Willem Defoe, James Purefoy and Ciaran Hinds attached to the project, the acting will surely be fine. But there is something light-on-its-feet about this version that is appealing, and I will miss that up against what will undoubtedly be the the dead seriousness of the Pixar version.

1970 Redux

I lost track of Marc Cohn after his hit debut single "Walking in Memphis" which was, holy cow!, almost 20 years ago now. But he has sustained a choppy career over time and being the baby-boomer I am, I was interested in the concept of his album Listening Booth: 1970 in which he's covered several songs from that year. It's an interesting choice of material: some very big pop hits (Cat Stevens' "Wild World," Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed"), some lesser known songs (Simon & Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy in New York," Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie") and one of my favorite Motown hits of all time, Smokey Robinson's "The Tears of a Clown."

Cohn doesn't stretch much past his scruffy, modern-folky ways here, and many of the songs wind up being pleasant but uninteresting copies of the originals: "Wild World," the opener, is completely bland, perhaps because others have done more interesting versions, and Eric Clapton's "After Midnight" and CCR's "Long as I Can See the Light" are OK. The best of this batch is "Only Living Boy," which uses the same basic Paul Simon arrangement but the vocal is more laid-back than Simon's more emotional take.

Better are the songs with a bit of a spin to them. Badfinger's "No Matter What" is nicely done in a twangy country style as a duet with Aimee Mann; Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" is relaxed but seems heartfelt; the only song on here with which I am unfamiliar is the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie," on which Cohn does a nice job.

The two best songs on here are duets. He sings Bread's "Make It With You," practically the definition of mainstream easy listening music, with India.Arie in a way that makes it sound almost like an current indie song. But my favorite is his take on Smokey Robinson's classic "The Tears of a Clown." That happens to be one of my favorite all-time pop songs, a noisy, chugging, upbeat R&B tune; Cohn slows it down a bit, takes away the horn arrangement, gives the chorus a bit of a delayed spin, and sings it like Elvis Costello--with some backing vocals from jazzyish Kristina Train. Overall, this might have made a better EP with 6 or 7 songs instead of the 12 here, but it's an interesting project, and one aimed right at the hearts and wallets of us baby boomers.

Below is a clip of Cohn performing "The Letter" from Listening Booth: