It’s under this early Obama-era malaise that I watched Uli Edel’s excellent The Baader Meinhof Complex, a German nominee for a Best Foreign Picture Oscar last year. The film introduced me to a historical moment I knew nothing about, the urban guerilla warfare that erupted in Germany at the end of the ’60s and into the early and mid ’70s, instigated by a liberal group called the Red Army Faction. Elsewhere on therumpus Stephen Elliott gushed about the film and asked why films like this aren’t made in America. I suppose the short answer would be because America doesn’t produce people like the subject of this film: idealistic students willing to take up arms against institutions they believe to be fascistic.

The film follows a band of sexy anarcho-communists as they react against police violence amid protests against a visit to West Germany by the Shah of Iran, on to department store bombings, kidnappings both successful and botched, training sessions among PLO types in the Middle East, and years of insanity-inducing incarceration and court proceedings that go nowhere fast. Dipping into Wikipedia today I learned that the impetus for the rise of this millitant leftist organization was a German society still largely run by ex-Nazis. When the German baby boom generation came of age and noticed that members of the Third Reich were still largely running the show, and what’s more were sympathetic to a United States that was sprinkling napalm on Vietnam, they called bullshit on the whole enterprise. And a few of them expressed their outrage with machine guns.

The problem with machines guns is that they tend to not be too articulate. Whether by design or not, I found the RAF’s arguments difficult to suss out. A lot of it sounded like good old dorm room pontificating to me. What they actually wanted wasn’t presented all that well in the film; whether they managed to articulate themselves better in real life is a question for a historian, not an amateur film blogger.

It’s an exciting film, and it’s easy to get off on its violence, and to draw comparisons to The Battle of Algiers and Munich, et al. The RAF comes across as something of a free love cult whose members are demolitions experts, wearing cool-looking jackets (when they’re wearing anything at all) and sporting excellent eyewear. So if this film existed entirely in the realm of fantasy, if the RAF had never existed, it would belong on the same plane as Inglourious Basterds. Instead, by evoking a troubling period in which 34 actual people died, it finds itself in the company of another great recent work of German cinema, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ’s Eastern Germany spy thriller The Lives of Others.

Curiously, I watched The Baader Meinhof Complex a week or so after watching Rustin Thompson’s documentary 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle, which chronicles the five days in 1999 when a variety of environmental, labor, and human rights groups shut down the World Trade Center Conference in my hometown. I’ve avoided the feature film Battle in Seattle because I know it’ll just piss me off with overbroad characters and a general dumbing down of what happened over those five days. I was there in the thick of it, inhaled my share of tear gas, and took about three hours of video myself. I’ve been basically saving my impressions of that event for a future book, but I will say that one of the overarching themes I noticed during that week was nonviolence–and not just as a means of protest. What characterized the WTO riots to me, what made them so Seattleish was how passive aggressive they were. While the police often resorted to dickish maneuvers, threw their nightsticks and pepper spray around as they bumbled their way around downtown , they didn’t shoot anybody with live ammunition. Rubber bullets, yeah. But nobody ended up bleeding to death during the WTO riots.

The same can’t be said for Germany in the early ’70s or, for that matter, Iran in the past several months. No matter how vituperative discourse has gotten in the United States, no matter how many racist sneers talk radio shows shovel into the ears of their listeners, ours is a society in which nobody is taking literal shots at one another for political reasons. Yet, anyway. One could argue that Fort Hood is an exception, but I’d counter that such attacks are still considered, rightly or not, to be externally motivated by Islamic jihad, a force, we’ve been constantly reminded, that exists outside the United States and seeks ever more ludicrous methods of penetration, i.e. via underpants.

The questions I’m left with after watching this fine film are, where’s the line that gets crossed that leads to domestic guerilla warfare? How close are we to that line? Is the Tea Party movement capable of crossing that line? What would it take for the American equivalent of the RAF to come into being? These aren’t rhetorical questions; I really want to know, as terrifying as the answers might be.

Scarlett and I recently enjoyed Powell and Pressburger’s flat-out bizarre Technicolor ballet film Tales of Hoffman and are soon to move on to The Red Shoes. All pretense of gender neutrality has tended to go out the window when curating the films I expose my children to, and having a little girl has done wonders to underscore my identity as a straight dude. She really wants to watch singing and dancing. The films I watch with her are going to end up being discoveries for me, while the ones I share with Miles are films that helped define my boyhood. And no other film dominates that early masculine narrative as much as Star Wars.

Candy bar

Some weeks ago, I accompanied Miles and his grandfather, my father-in-law, to an event called Star Wars Live at Key Arena in Seattle. An 80-piece orchestra played passages of John Williams’s score as a big screen displayed clips from the six films. Anthony Daniels, the actor inside the C3PO suit, narrated the event, and out in the causeways vitrines displayed original movie props like blasters, light sabers, and the Chewbacca and Darth Vader costumes. The show itself was lots of fun, in a highlight reel sort of way, and there were light sabers aplenty among the fanboys. Miles left enraptured, and I knew it was only a matter of time before my wife and I put aside our wussy-ass liberal anti-guns policy and let him watch the original trilogy.

And yet, by the time he was four, osmotically, through the complex folklore of the playground, Miles had already assembled an understanding of the Star Wars universe. One afternoon, picking him up from preschool, I found him huddled with three other boys, engaged in a serious debate. As I approached, one of the boys asked, with the kind of earnestness only a four-year-old can muster, “Is Darth Vader really Luke Skywalker’s dad?”

The moment felt precious to me, and reminded me of the horrible instant I first learned the true identity of Luke’s dad. My classmate David Reed, whose parents had driven him to Seattle to see the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back, pulled the most dickish maneuver in grade school history by spilling the beans the moment he stepped into class the next day. “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s dad, everyone!” Decades later, cornered by four gentlemen wearing shirts with dinosaurs and robots on them, I reluctantly confirmed the truth about Luke’s parentage.

One of five million collectibles

(I would like to also point out that David Reed was at the center of another Star Wars-related memory, the fiasco that was my one and only slumber birthday party. The mayhem of that event resulted in each boy sleeping in a separate corner of the house. The trouble began when I was accused of drawing a dick and balls on C3PO on David’s Star Wars pee-chee. Called before a jury of my mother and David’s mom, I pleaded my innocence on aesthetic grounds, arguing that this just wasn’t the way I drew dicks and balls, that the dick and balls on David Reed’s pee-chee C3PO were the work of an inferior artist who didn’t take necessary care to realistically depict the pee hole, and who crafted the testicles as simple circles on either side of the shaft rather than being realistically confined to a scrotum. Didn’t they know I was an artist? The verdict: innocent. Later I shoved David into my closet and leaned against the door so he couldn’t get out.)

Nowadays pee-chees are the least of the licensed merchandise. Star Wars has been franchised to the hilt. Its scope encompasses not just the goopy, CGI’ed episode 1-3 prequels, but the animated series Star Wars: Clone Wars. The characters from this latter series have begun to usurp the primacy of the Luke/Han/Leia ensemble that my generation typically thinks of when thinking about Star Wars. Muscling their way into our collective consciousness of the Star Wars pantheon, with muscles rendered on computers in Marin County, are Commander Cody, Captain Rex, and Asajj Ventriss. I don’t know who the hell these people are, and I’m not in a hurry to watch computer animated versions of them.

Someone painted this picture of Star Wars characters in a band.

If that sounds curmudgeonly, I can live with that. My plan for introducing Miles to Star Wars has been a picky and rule-bound process, and I’ve spent the past couple years fretting that he’d be exposed to the hideous ’90s remastered versions at some kid’s house during a play date. When I worked at Amazon, one of the studios I worked with was 20th Century Fox, which distributes the Star Wars movies. Fox sort of begrudgingly merchandised the DVDs, as George Lucas had maneuvered such a killer deal for himself that the studio to this day barely makes any money on Star Wars releases. Among the many editions of the films they released are two-disc versions of episodes IV-VI, the second disc of which include the original versions of the films seen in theaters in the late ’70s and early ’80s. These are the correct versions, even though they scandalized anal-retentive fans, who groused on message boards that they weren’t anamorphic. Well shit, life is just not always fair.

Earlier this month, over two nights, my wife and I sat with Miles as he watched what’s now called A New Hope for the first time. I hadn’t seen it in over a decade, and watching it again with my arm around my son stoked all those old primal childhood adventure feelings. When I asked Miles what his favorite moment was, he said it was when Luke gets his father’s light saber from Obi Wan.

Watching it again was different than simply refamiliarizing myself with one of the most widely-loved works of 20th century art; I simultaneously observed previous versions of myself watching it. I layered this new viewing experience on top of the old ones, as I hope to someday add the layer of viewing of it with my grandchildren. I overhead my parents asking our neighbors if it was too scary for me. I craned to look over the seat in front of me to see R2D2 and C3PO trudging and kvetching across the desert. Walking to the car after watching The Empire Strikes Back I held my dad’s hand as he sighed, “Well, they turned Han Solo into a candy bar.” I returned to the same theater some years later as a teenager during a brief re-run of the film. I slipped a VHS tape into the VCR in Olympia, Washington. I cringed at the added-on bullshit of the remastered versions in a multiplex.

I think I like to flatter myself that, when sharing a cherished work of art with my son, I’m introducing him to something he’ll find valuable, something that will supplement his education. But after watching Star Wars with Miles it struck me that I wasn’t sharing it out of hope that he’ll develop good taste in movies. I was sharing it with him because I wanted to tell him something about his father, who was once a boy growing up on a farm, a long time ago, and not so far away.

Related posts:

1. Star Wars Retold
2. THE EYEBALL: Rashomon
3. THE EYEBALL: The Thief of Baghdad

It made perfect sense that a Beastie Boy would finance and direct a basketball documentary and release it under his own label. There’s always been a boy’s bedroom fantasy aspect to the projects the band has embarked upon, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s forays into sports stadiums and science fiction and rock and roll museums. That Yauch would get behind such a project is merely proof that the universe is operating just as it was intended to operate.

But within the past year, Oscilloscope Laboratories has steadily released a series of films that signal broader intentions. Last winter they distributed Kelly Reichardt’s low-key drama Wendy and Lucy, which I have yet to see, but it’s on my list after having enjoyed Reichardt’s deeply-felt Old Joy. Other releases include the documentaries Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie and The Garden, a film about ecological activism, as well as feature films from around the globe, including Treeless Mountain by So Yong Kim and the upcoming Kisses by Lance Daly.

A couple nights ago I watched Oscilloscope’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father directed by Kurt Kuenne. Kuenne grew up in Silicon Valley and started making films at an early age, casting his friend Andrew Bagby in many of his productions. Bagby grew up to become a doctor practicing in rural Pennsylvania. On November 5, 2001 he was discovered shot to death in a parking lot of a park. His ex-girlfriend, Dr. Shelly Turner, immediately became the prime suspect and fled to her hometown in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she subsequently announced she was pregnant with Andrew’s child.

What ensued was a breakdown of Canada’s judicial system that resulted in Turner’s release on bail and continual rescheduling of her extradition hearing. In the meantime, Andrew’s son Zachary was born. With Turner in and out of jail, Zachary’s grandparents David and Kathleen Bagby entered into a delicate childcare arrangement with the woman who’d killed their son. Watching the segments which document the Bagby’s visits and phone conversations with Turner chill the blood. Here were two grandparents desperately working within a dysfunctional system to ensure the well-being of their infant grandson, enduring swim lessons and birthday parties with the woman who’d shot their son five times.

As all this was unfolding, Kuenne set out to make a film for Zachary, to tell him about his deceased father. We meet Andrew Babgy’s friends and colleagues and a picture of a thoughtful and well-loved man emerges through wedding reception toasts and stories and snapshots. What’s equally striking are David and Kathleen, whose endurance and fortitude are what this film is ultimately about.

To say that the last half hour of Dear Zachary is a shock is an understatement. I can only put Dear Zachary in the company of Erroll Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, another feature about a gross miscarriage of justice. I have never watched a documentary film that moved me as fundamentally as this one, that knocked the wind out of me with as much force. See it. It’s devastating.

Related posts:

1. The Eyeball, a New Blog by Ryan Boudinot
2. Path Lights by Zachary Sluser
3. THE EYEBALL: The Thief of Baghdad

Saturday:
Inglourious Basterds. By now you’ve probably read lots of commentary on Tarantino’s latest. My two cents is that I could listen to those characters talk all night. It felt like a 5-hour movie in a 2 1/2 hour movie’s body and I wanted it to go on and on. A few weeks ago I happened upon a Sirius/XM radio broadcast in which Tarantino guest-deejayed. He played songs that he’d listened to while making Basterds. Here’s the complete set list.

Wu Tang Clan, “The Rulez”
KT Tunstall, “Hold On”
Bob Dylan, “Political World”
Barbra Streisand, “Stony End”
Robin McNamara, “Lay A Little Lovin’ On Me”
Sir Douglas Quintet, “Mendocino”
David Bowie, “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” – from Bowie’s Greatest Hits (not Cat People Sdtrk)
Jay Z, “S. Carter”
Roy Orbison, “There Won’t Be Many Coming Home”
Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours (Acoustic)”
Maroon 5, “Wake Up Call”
Steve Poltz, “Waterfalls”
Britney Spears, “My Prerogative”

I happened to tune in at the end of the Roy Orbison tune. I can respect people who like Roy Orbison, though to me he was always little more than an immobile wax dummy who occasionally purred. Wow, rock and roll, man. As someone who lived off the Pulp Fiction soundtrack for years, I am, like a lot of people I suppose, inclined to give Quentin Tarantino the benefit of the doubt when it comes to music. But there’s really no other way to say what I felt except that I thought his playlist sucked. That “Waterfalls” song is an acoustic cover of the TLC hit from the mid-nineties. I’m going to stop writing about this now because it’s starting to make me upset.

Sunday:

Waltz with Bashir. Animation is a great medium in which to explore the elasticity of memory. And even though both Basterds and Bashir are both about war, I think it’s fair to say that only the former one is a cartoon. Waltz with Bashir was a sobering plunge into repressed memories of war, and of the strange juxtapositions of cultures in wartime. Amid animated sequences of bombings and ambushes, the voice of John Lydon suddenly erupted on the soundtrack, singing “This Is Not a Love Song” from his PiL days.

Paprika. Another animated feature, this one from director Satoshi Kon, based on a story by–I didn’t realize this upon renting it–Yasutaka Tsutsui, whose story collection Salmonella Men on Planet Porno I picked up not long ago. While Bashir uses animation to illustrate untrustworthy memories, Paprika seeks to do the same with dreams. There’s so much crammed into the frame with this film, my favorite sequences being a procession of animals and objects marching along through various characters’ subconscious minds.

Monday:
The Holy Mountain, by Alejandro Jodorowsky. I’ve blogged about this film before, and about Jodorowsky in general. For my second viewing of this film I invited my old friend Nate over. We drank Corona and tequila and kept an armchair commentary going through the Chilean auteur’s steady unveiling of wonders. I was impressed again by how ballsy the film is. In my head I’ve been attempting to reverse engineer the directions Jodorowsky must have given his crew. Like, “I want the amputees dressed like Roman soldiers to assemble in the Jesus factory.” Or, “Let’s make sure each toad has a firecracker under it.” Or, “Let’s get some climbing gear for the prostitute and her chimpanzee.”

Tuesday: Death Proof, by Quentin Tarantino. This was the only Tarantino film I hadn’t seen. So I watched it. It was cool, whatever. Great car chase at the end, one of the best I think I’ve ever seen. The bonus features are worth checking out, particularly the featurettes on the stunts and those who performed them.

Wednesday: A Scanner Darkly. My animation streak continued with Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid drug novel. I think this movie helped me figure out what the problem is with Keanu Reeves. In any movie in which he’s required to get all fired up he ends up looking ridiculous. He is not an actor made for big, hysterical speeches. That actor would be John Malkovich. What Keanu does best is simmer and lope through a movie. I’m thinking of his great performance as Scott Fortune in My Own Private Idaho, which he’s never matched in my book.

Man on Wire: My five-day movie binge came to an end with this documentary about Phillipe Petit, that French dude who crossed the chasm between the World Trade Center towers on a tight rope. Completely riveting and unexpectedly emotional, and the perfect note with which to end five days of student fiction and movies.

John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He retired from the army in disgust during Vietnam, and his mantra during my childhood was, “No one hates war more than those who fight it.” Then one afternoon when I was a teenager, sitting on the edge of his bed, he delivered the quote above. There was nothing heroic in his opinion of war, even though he was a decorated war hero who’d single-handedly saved a ship by shoveling burning gunpowder off the deck. He considered war with sorrow, and it was this sorrow that inspired me to protest the first Gulf War specifically and helped turn me into a lefty in general.

I love war movies. Not so much for the violence (I tend to hate all other action movies) but because they’re about vast groups of people engaged in difficult undertakings. I can appreciate that scale of drama. And if it’s three plus hours long, I’m all over it. Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, even sword and sandal period epics like Kingdom of Heaven do it for me. But none comes close in beauty or complexity to Apocalypse Now.

As with Brazil, I have an ongoing relationship with Francis Ford Coppola’s achievement. The first time I came across it must have been in an edited-for-TV version, and all I remember from that viewing was the arresting sequence of Martin Sheen going batshit crazy in some hotel room. And apparently a lot of this wasn’t acting. I’ve watched it a couple times since, queuing up the Redux version when it came out in very official-sounding Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier a couple years ago. I have yet to see it on the big screen, and this is my cross to bear.

When I watched it again the other night I was struck again by the thought that came to me when I first watched The Godfather: This is what a movie made for adults looks like. Nowadays, if you want to watch shit blow up in a movie, most likely you’re watching something featuring people in masks. And most likely the explosions you’re watching were made by some guy on a computer. The hand-made quality of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, for my money, still stands heads and shoulders above such CGI fare.

It also struck me at this go-round how cautionary the film is, how seriously it considers its task. Coppola’s masterstroke was to take another era’s material, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and place it within the confines of a new global conflict, on another continent. The film proceeds as an argument against colonialism, certainly (especially with the addition of the French plantation scenes), but it struck me this time that the argument cuts deeper than that. That is, it’s not really a political film. It accesses human conditions that lie beneath the plane of politics.

We spend most of the film with Captain Willard and his crew, bringing death and American culture with them into the jungle. The fruits of this culture–surfing, Playboy Bunnies, the Rolling Stones–is carried along as if in a bag slung over the collective shoulder of the invading army. It is Kurtz’s opinion that victory is impossible for those who bear the burden of trivialities such as these, that one must shed these affectations when entering the temple of horrors. It’s only after Willard has been adequately deconstructed as a son of American culture that Kurtz allows Willard to kill him. Willard, Kurtz’s manuscript in hand, upholds his part of the bargain, promising implicitly to share Kurtz’s thesis from the abyss to the world. That the film itself is a product of America’s great image-making machinery is perhaps the ultimate irony.

I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker but I’ve heard it’s a very fine film that takes war seriously. I worry, though, that our cinematic depictions of our conflicts in Iraq will come to appear like the interchangeable backdrop of a two-person fighting game. Here the avatars face off on a Tibetan mountain top. Here they face off in a Roman square. Here they face off among some ruins in Baghdad. As long as we view the Iraq war through a political lens, we’ll be committed to propping up certain tropes, such as that American troops are gallant heroes beyond reproach. Perhaps the difference between most war movies–set during any war–and Apocalypse Now is that the latter is about war as a condition, not a specific conflict.

Apocalypse Now offers us something difficult and metaphysical, something timelessly linked to Conrad and forward-reaching into the society of the spectacle that was just getting warmed up upon the film’s release. It warns us. In the same sort of ways my grandfather warned me.

Related posts:

1. THE EYEBALL: Burn After Reading and The Iron Giant
2. THE EYEBALL: The Thief of Baghdad

If you’re brand new to Jodorowsky, I suggesting starting with The Holy Mountain. It’s such an audaciously insane film, filled with images that hit you right in the nervous system, and it’s just… Okay, just watch this trailer.

El Topo famously started the midnight movie tradition, and is known as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s favorite film. In my favorite scene–perhaps in all of cinema–a man without legs rides on the back of a man without arms. It’s full of Joel Peter Witkin moments like that, all set in an otherworldly desert landscape that looks like the boundary between earth and some mystical plane of existence. A striking, shocking, and beautiful film. Here’s a taste.

A couple weeks ago I finally watched Jodorowsky’s earlier, black and white film, Fando y Lis. Obviously working with a smaller budget than his later films, he still manages to make the most of his outdoor settings as the two title characters trek to a mythic city called Tar. The film progresses through a number of set pieces–I particularly enjoyed the jazz club taking place in what can only be described as ruins. And I came to appreciate the overdubbed dialogue as a method of amplifying the strangeness of these characters. Last night while watching William Klein’s Mr. Freedom, a film of the same vintage, I noticed it, too, had dubbed dialogue. For me, this has moved beyond a solution to a technical problem into the realm of a stylistic benefit. Here’s what I mean:

Watching these films by Alejandro Jodorowsky I have had to occasionally stop and ask myself, is that really what I think it is? And I can’t help but try to reverse engineer these stories and imagine how the director must have convinced his cast to go along with his vision. I would have loved to have been there at moment when he pulled an actor aside and said, “This morning you’re going to have tarantulas crawl all over your face.”

About a year ago I picked up The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky, a self-aggrandizing mystical memoir that at times is unintentionally funny and expands the narrative of this former mime turned avant garde director turned mystic college lecturer. The more I learn about this director the more charming he seems, the South American blood brother of David Lynch, say, or Guy Maddin’s Chilean cousin. And speaking of Lynch, Jodorowsky was once in the running to direct Dune. All that remains of this potential project are some storyboards featured in the boxed set extras, and one can only imagine what his version would have looked like. Instead, Lynch directed it, leading to a creative crisis and the subsequent triumphant vision of Blue Velvet.

Jodorowsky’s latest film–his first in 20 years–is set to come out in 2010. It’s called King Shot and stars Marilyn Manson, Asia Argento, Nick Nolte, and Udo Kier. Of course it stars Udo Kier. And Lynch is producing. It’s being described as a “metaphysical spaghetti western” and is being shot in Spain. I can’t wait.

Related posts:

1. The Eyeball #28: Movie Binge
2. THE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: #24 Nicolas Roeg’s First Five Films
3. The Holy Mountain of Contemporary Polish Posters

Woody Allen

The other night I finally slipped in a months-old Netflix copy of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the story of two American beauties abroad. Within the first twenty minutes I resisted the film, thinking I am not in the mood to watch a movie about people who don’t have to worry about paying bills. Perhaps it’s my persistent shame at being relatively untraveled, but I wasn’t all that compelled to follow the romantic intrigues of people who float through Europe on the wings of their charmed life. The characters who do have jobs in these film are shallow, khaki-wearing business schmucks, men ever cognizant of one another’s golf handicaps and bewildered by abstract art. Javier Bardem appears as a chunk of confident sexuality, an artist–of course–whose seduction of Scarlett Johansson’s and Rebecca Hall’s title characters cuts right to the subtext of romantic comedies in general. We just want the characters to get it on.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to accept escapist entertainment on its own terms, which is unusual for me. After all, recently I’ve been perfectly willing to accept the snappy breeziness of Preston Sturges.

I suppose I expect a lot from Woody Allen, while recognizing it’s his prerogative to make a light, enjoyable comedy. It was Allen’s films that suggested to me that the life of the mind might be something a kid like me could aspire to, and Allen’s bespectacled and frizzy-haired presence at the center of those early comedies was a balm to my adolescent anxieties. The post-coital chatter of those films was titilating in a way that a sex scene never could be, implying that by sheer force of wit and intelligence a physically inadequate guy could get a woman to fall in love with him. That’s heady stuff when you’re 14 years old and have never made a basket in a basketball game.

Even in the films in which Allen’s presence isn’t in front of the camera, he tends to make an appearance anyway, as with Kenneth Branagh’s channeling of Allen’s neurotic tics in 1998’s Celebrity can attest. My guess is, based on Match Point and now Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Allen just isn’t interested in directing proxies of himself right now. (I have yet to see the new film with what’s-his-name from that one show, uh, Larry David, who looks like a Woody proxy if there ever was one.) Which is wonderful and opens up a whole new period for his genius. I wonder, though, if the result of this approach is that these films feel more like a product of Allen’s head than his heart.

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1. Whatever Works, A Stardust Review
2. THE EYEBALL, The Rumpus DVD Column: Synecdoche, New York
3. The Eyeball: What I Watched this Weekend – Dracula, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Somehow, over the past ten years I’ve managed to watch Roeg’s first five films, which span that incredible cinematic decade, the 1970s. And for some reason I didn’t give much thought to who directed them, in part because each one seems like such a singular phenomenon unattached from any unifying vision of an auteur. But watching Performance last week was like placing the final piece in a puzzle. I took a step back and considered the films as five components of an arc.

Performance is about a London gangster, Chas, played by James Fox, who goes into hiding in a decrepit mansion where a pop star named Turner (Jagger) suffers through some sort of creative dead end. Turner luxuriates in a perpetual, druggy menage a trois with Pherber (Keith Richards’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton). It’s rumored that the drugs and sex in this film are not simulated, and it would actually be more shocking if it turned out that they were. The story is one of clashing cultures, of South End thugs literally falling into bed with the psychedelic youthquake. There’s violence, nudity, and Mick Jagger in a suit singing in a homoerotic precursor to the modern music video. Oh yeah, and those references to Borges. What’s not to love here?

The ways Roeg and Cammell dealt with the maleability of gender here is incredible, way ahead of its time. The only explanations I can fathom for how this movie found distribution through Warner Brothers are 1. Mick Jagger was in it, and 2. It was the year 1970. Next to El Topo, this must have seemed like a movie you could bring your grandmother to.

Roeg’s next film, Walkabout traded the debauched filth of London for the gorgeous vistas of Australia’s Outback. It, too, is a culture clash movie, though on a scale far more grand. It’s about two Australian children (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) who are stranded in the wild after their father fails to murder them then goes ahead and shoots himself in the head (Borges fails to appear this time). They soon meet an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpili) who shows them how to draw water from the sand (among other survival techniques) and leads them eventually back to civilization. It’s a sad, soulful film, and when the modernist architecture appears after your eyes have adjusted to the gnarled trees and idyllic pools of this otherworldly land, it comes as something of a shock. I came to see civilization as a blight in this movie, as something to escape from, like Mad Max in reverse.

From the Outback to Venice, then, with Roeg’s third feature, the thriller Don’t Look Now. Jonathan Lethem wrote a swell appraisal of the sex scene at its core, the one between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It’s a truly remarkable scene in a movie I found to be kind of hokey, the surprise ending in particular. Years ago, in my life as a dotcom schmuck, I interviewed Kiefer Sutherland on a red carpet and threw him the ultimate softball, asking for movie recommendations. Don’t Look Now was one of the movies of which he spoke highly. Think about that a moment. What if one of your favorite movies was one in which you watch your dad doin’ it?

So say you’re a director and you’ve been to London, Australia, and Venice. Where next? Well, space, naturally. In Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie stars in the title role, doing stuff like starting technology companies and becoming alcoholic. Perfect casting, really. I must admit I watched this film on an old Fox Lorber disc, not the newer, tricked out Criterion Collection version, which sits on my shelf as yet unopened. So it might be unfair of me to say I found this movie a somewhat interesting mess. Rip Torn is in it, and it makes me sad that I saw Torn in the soul-killing Tom Green vehicle Freddy Got Fingered, truly one of the worst movies ever made, before I saw him in this. So my viewing of him was corrupted by my bad memories of seeing him humiliated in that hideous, idiotic “comedy.” I clearly need to give The Man Who Fell to Earth another chance.

(By the way, did you catch the narrator on that trailer? Is that Bill Shatner up in that shit?)

If you’ve spent your life wishing you could catch a glimpse of Art Garfunkel’s butt crack, Roeg’s Bad Timing is the answer to your prayers. In one reality, I am a great admirer of Garfunkel. The man is so spectacularly well-read I can do nothing but genuflect before him. In the reading department, Art Garfunkel makes me feel like a total pussy. And yet in another reality, I consider the films of Nicolas Roeg and I group these names: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Art Garfunkel. It’s like that old Sesame Street song about one thing being not like the others.

Bad Timing also stars Theresa Russell in full-on vixen mode and Harvey Keitel in a lame impersonation of a cop. The story–a murder mystery set in Vienna–is sort of flimsy, but Garfunkel and his taint do an admirable enough job, and by the way did you know that when this movie was released in October of 1980, Art was reading Lester C. Thurow’s The Zero-Sum Society? I did not know that.

While Bad Timing may have fallen short in story and in the male actors’ performances, Roeg’s signature editing, marked by disorienting smash cuts, makes it worth seeking out. Considering these five films I have to admit that the part of me that creates stories for a (meager) living comes away disappointed. But my eyeballs gorge on these works of art, crammed as they are with sudden movements and windy deserts, real-looking naked bodies and shadowy staircases, all scored with unsettling noises and acid rock dirges. I’ll say it–Nicolas Roeg is one of my favorite directors. But he’s a favorite in a way no other director is a favorite. I love his films despite–and sometimes because of–their flaws.

Apologies for the piracy-o-vision, but still, damn.

I just watched the DVD of this film for which Daniel Day Lewis (I can’t bring myself to just refer to him as “Lewis”) earned a Best Actor Oscar. The disc comes with no commentary, but there’s a period documentary about the oil business in California for all you petroleum history nerds.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, watch this clip of Daniel Day Lewis in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette, his first film, in which he provides Vanilla Ice with his future look.

I watched Synecdoche in the theater on my birthday last November, catching a 10 PM showing. Stumbling into midnight after that movie was one of those rare, disorienting experiences in which the world outside the movie seems to have been subtly changed, like the time I went to Costco right after watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway and felt like I’d landed on the fucking moon. Or my first Kaufman encounter, walking into a Kenneth Cole after seeing Being John Malkovich and being physically unable to remove the grin on my face for at least half an hour.

I knew Synecdoche was the kind of movie one has a lasting relationship with. So I’m happy to say my second date with the film was better than the first. I bought the DVD, watched the film, the awkward on-stage interview with Kaufman (awkward because the interviewer asked lame questions), the interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a blogger’s roundtable discussion filmed in someone’s book-lined apartment.

One of the bloggers in the featurette–can’t remember who–made an interesting point that upon repeat viewings of this film, he/she tends to focus on one scene. For me, the scene I mulled over the most was the one in which Caden Cotard (Hoffman) and his adult daughter Olive (Robin Weigert) attempt to resolve their estrangement at her deathbed. Olive has been living in Germany, where she became famous as a 10-year-old with a full body tattoo, an attribute she later used to her advantage as an exotic dancer. She demands that they speak to each other through headset translators, with her speaking in German while Caden responds in English. She reveals that her much-older lover Maria and her mother Adele told her that Caden left her so that he could have anal sex with his lover Eric. The charge is patently ridiculous, but it’s the explanation that Olive holds on to. She demands that Caden ask for her forgiveness. Caden, at first denying the accusation, changes his mind and asks her to forgive something he never even did. Olive then refuses, and the refusal causes both of them to weep bitterly. Olive dies, and a petal of one of her tattoo roses withers and falls off her arm.

What the fuck is going on here? Consider another film in which Hoffman made an appearance, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which came out in 1999, the same year as Being John Malkovich. In Magnolia Hoffman plays a more or less well-adjusted character, a hospice nurse tasked with caring for an old man played by Jason Robards, in his final role. Tom Cruise, in his best role (which some might say isn’t saying much) plays Robard’s character’s estranged son. At the deathbed there are tears, there are recriminations, there are open wounds. We pass through that scene knowing what is being felt and how we’re supposed to feel. We’re being instructed on how to feel as we’re feeling it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, feeling much better now, thank you.

But in the Synecdoche death bed scene, our emotional frame of reference is shifting under our feet. At one moment we snicker at the accusation that Hoffman was off having anal sex with his fictitous lover Eric, at another moment we yearn that these characters will re-establish their love, but then brutally we are denied. This father and daughter are beyond reconciliation. Even though Olive wants to forgive, she doesn’t have the capacity to do so, perhaps due to the fact Caden wasn’t around to teach her how.

Is that it? Maybe? I am still confused by the scene. And I’m sure that the next time I watch it, Synecdoche will yield another puzzle.

The movie has lost money in the box office and is likely considered a failure by the people at Sony Pictures Classics whose job it is to count beans. A creative writing student of mine who is a movie producer once said that the only reason good movies get made is that there are still people in Hollywood who have both money and good taste. I can only hope that Kaufman has the backing he needs to keep giving us these generous, hard-won gifts that we’ll be watching  a hundred years from now.