The Uptown Theater, Port Townsend, WA

Port Townsend, Washington has two superb theaters, one called The Rose, the other The Uptown. By superb I mean they’re in old buildings, they don’t show commercials, the popcorn is served with more or less real butter, and the marquees bear the names of international films and Oscar-worthy mainstream pics. Last week I caught Gran Torino at The Uptown with my friends Matthew and Michael, both poets, both of whom hated the film. Michael recently blogged eloquently and with distaste about it.

I could spend a couple hours watching Clint Eastwood scowl, which he does aplenty, even delivering a line that rightfully belongs to John McCain: “Get off my lawn!” (Honestly, he really does say this.) Clint plays a widower named Walt who befriends the family of Hmong immigrants next door. Confrontations in a racially monochromatic Detroit ensue, Clint does a Dirty Harry imitation, and epithets are delivered with the post-PC air of semi-ironic bigotry. Frankly, I found no offense in the wop-gook-pollack tirades of this octogenarian lawn care enthusiast. Whatever. What did offend me was how the supporting cast of non-actors did a lot of non-acting.

"Get off my lawn!"

Bad acting tends to turn a film into a meta viewing experience. The mind wanders toward speculation about what the director was trying to achieve, what he must have thought while enduring a scene of forced pathos. With Gran Torino, Eastwood was riffing once again on his theme of how to manage man’s capacity for violence, how to mitigate it or confine it within a moral framework that limits its chaotic spread. His character Walt, who comes across like every other Eastwood character coiled into a bitter and prickly ball, is resigned to martyr himself, and Eastwood the director seems equally resigned here. Screw it, he seems to be saying, this movie doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to say that VIOLENCE IS BAD STUFF that shouldn’t happen to GOOD PEOPLE.

Gran Torino reminded me in a lot of ways to the Michael Douglas vehicle Falling Down, which was also about a surly white guy muddling through multi-cultural America. Both are films that strain to tell us that bigots are, deep down, just decent guys who want stable jobs and can be won over with a hot meal. Gran Torino is a movie made for all those Republicans trying to make sense of Obama’s America, phobic of the otherness of immigrants, willing to give those same immigrants the benefit of the doubt as long as they pay heed to good old American values like hard work and tasteful landscaping.

After the show, I popped in a DVD of bonus features included in a Sergio Leone boxed set and watched Eastwood commenting on the stylistic panache of the legendary Italian filmmaker. The interview footage was shot maybe ten years ago, and in it Eastwood comes across as happy, cheerful, at the top of his game. If Gran Torino is his last film, or is the last film in which he stars, the obit writers will cite it as his swan song, a “fitting end to a legendary career.” But to really celebrate the man with the squint, I’ll take The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly any day.

"Please God let me watch Mystic River instead!"

As if to challenge this vision of man’s solemn mastery over the ways of violence, the day after Gran Torino I watched a documentary on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Devoid of anything resembling human warmth, Kubrick’s masterpiece says something more terrifying about our compulsion to wage mayhem and even worse, to enjoy it as entertainment. Where Eastwood returns again and again to the saving grace of human decency, Kubrick asks if redemption is even possible once we’ve unleashed the monstrosities hiding in our limbic systems. One can only image how Dirty Harry would have taken to Alex and his merry band of droogs.

The Eyeball is currently teaching creative writing in a decommissioned military base on the Olympic Peninsula, which means late-night DVD watching in the officers quarters. Last night I watched The Thief of Baghdad, a 1940 film directed by a hodgepodge of Brits: Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan. From what I’ve gleaned from the booklet that came with this Criterion Collection release, it’s more of a producer’s film, created under the auspices of Alexander Korda. Fans of Technicolor and actors with wispy mustaches, you’re going to want to check this out.

Maybe it was the word “Baghdad” that got me, but I couldn’t watch this film outside the frame of all the bad shit that’s gone down in that part of the world, etc. etc. I wanted to enjoy this film more than I actually did. Watching Anglo actors play the parts of sultans and princesses amid splendidly designed sets kinda nauseated me, to tell you the truth. It wasn’t quite a musical, but there were occasional weird bursts of song. If you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m charitable toward lousy special effects, but there were scenes of a flying genie that looked like something I shot in my bedroom with a Mr. T action figure in 1983.

What would be really interesting would be to see the reverse, a Middle Eastern film from the same era about, say, the early days of America or the UK. Do such films exist? Has Bollywood ever made a biopic about Queen Elizabeth or the travels of Lewis and Clark? Or does the process of cultural reapropriation move in only one direction, with the West plundering the East? If you know of any examples of films from Asia or the Middle East that try to depict life in the West, do let me know.

I held out for just the right time to watch Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! and caved this weekend, experiencing it like I do so many movies now, on my laptop with a couple earbud headphones. Friends, this is the absolute wrong way to experience this film. It was created as a live spectacle, to be accompanied by a narrator, 11-piece orchestra, and three foley artists. I’m embarrassed to report that I missed Brand when it played in Seattle in 2006; I can only assume I was tending to a vomiting child at the time.

Get a load of the trailer:

I was pleased to see that a passing acquaintance named Annette Toutonghi appears in the cast as one of the two murderous sisters. In another life, I sat next to Annette as we answered phones for an online retailer, calmly explaining to customers that their shipments would eventually arrive. What I remember most about Annette was her remarkable voice, a sweet trill made for narrating fairy tales. Alas! Brand Upon the Brain! is an ostensibly silent film, and Maddin had no use for Annette’s pipes.

By ostensibly, I mean that there’s music, sound effects provided by the aforementioned foley artists, and narration in the form of an “explicator.” The DVD allows you to choose your own explicator, among them Isabella Rossellini, Crispin Glover, and John Ashbery. Jesus, people, what cinematic heaven is this?

Watching the making-of feature, I began to appreciate Maddin’s mastery of cinema’s vocabulary even more. The man draws from 100+ years of film history in the form and content of his films. Flashes of color in this otherwise black and white film come inspired by similar techniques in Nosferatu. The role of explicator emerged as a result of something Buñuel said about the narrated films of his childhood. Maddin shot the film with hand-held 8mm cameras, then edited it in Final Cut Pro. While editing his previous film, Cowards Bend the Knee, he became fascinated by how the software fast-forwarded and rewinded—not more or less fluidly sped-up, as with VHS, but choppily, bypassing segments, touching down occasionally on an image. With Brand, Maddin incorporated this movement in the final product. The result is something that looks like a dream.

A live perfomance of Brand Upon the Brain!

Pause to consider what Maddin has achieved here. It’s easy to think of him as a purveyor of images inspired by the films of the 1930s. But he is also resolutely a citizen of his own era, getting the most out of the more-or-less cheap and current technology his budgets dictate. In Maddin’s films we see a collision of both the extremely antiquated (art direction, score, melodramatic acting) and the tools and sensibilities of the YouTube generation. I would LOVE to see what he could do with a typical multi-million dollar small film budget.

This weekend I also re-watched one of Maddin’s earlier films, 1992′s Careful, recently re-released by Zeitgeist Video. Imagine a Leni Reifenstahl mountain movie as viewed through a Mark Rothko painting. The same sexual agony that makes Brand so compelling is here in spades, as Maddin and his screenwriting partner George Toles dish out a primordial tale of incest set in a town that embodies repression of the most extreme variety. The film so resolutely belongs in its own genre. Here’s a clip.

So on one hand, you’ve got Maddin’s methodology, his blend of old cinematic forms and new, of necessary cheapness and global distribution, of cinema as experienced through an 8mm lens and cinema as live spectacle. With these tools, Maddin has chosen to shape experiences most personal and shameful, each film getting closer to autobiographical purity while he embraces the freeing release of melodrama. It’s in these contradictions and forces that seemingly should be at odds, but which Maddin lovingly stitches together like a mad tailor, that his great art finds the screen.

Now I need to find the right time and place to experience My Winnipeg.

Rumpus blogger Rick Moody posted a comment to my recent post about Lord of the Rings asking whether the special effects of that film still held up. I got to thinking about why we accept some special effects as cool even when we can tell they’re fake while we turn up our noses at other special effects. On one end of the spectrum are the effects Wes Anderson used in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, including fakey animated shots of sea life and a cross-section of the ship The Belafonte right out of a theater production design master class. On the other end of the spectrum we have the straight-to-DVD science fiction movies of bargain bins and pretty much anything related to science fiction that BBC has ever been involved in. Dr. Who, I’m talking about you.

George Melies’s Voyage to the Moon

Why do we laugh at some special effects because they are so blatantly fraudulent, yet delight at the same level of effects when employed in a different context? Why is it that Tarantino can have a model airplane fly over a model of Tokyo and this is accepted as evidence of his mastery over the medium, while a similar model plane flying over Tokyo in a C-grade Japanese monster movie elicits snorts?

I think it boils down to three interconnected questions. One, how comfortable is the film’s creator with the fundamental falseness of the medium? Two, how much is the creator trying to “fool” the audience into thinking what they’re seeing is real? Three, how strong is the story?

The effects-driven films we tend to think of as shitty are those, I think, that either try too hard to trick us into thinking what we’re watching is real at the expense of storytelling. Filmmakers who pay inordinate attention to whether the fur on their CGI gorilla looks like “real” fur while putting this gorilla in a lame story bring attention to the falseness of the effects, and our distaste for the CGI is really a transferred distaste for the story.

Ray Harryhausen with some of his creations

We’re more forgiving of films with crappy effects that serve a well-told story. We’re willing to give the creator a little slack, particularly when it comes to older films. I recently re-watched Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts with my son and re-loved every minute of it. You can’t help but notice the seams and rivets of this 1963 film, with its stop-motion skeleton army and abundance of reaction shots. Even though the filmmaking tricks are so easy to discern, the movie holds up by virtue of the sincerity with which it was made. Harryhausen, like George Melies before him and Peter Jackson today, was working with the state-of-the-art movie magic of his day and took seriously the task of entertaining an audience.

The bathtub from The Science of Sleep

Now that we have a century’s worth of filmmaking trickery behind us, today’s auteurs, working without the budgets of the Finchers and Jacksons of the world, can embrace an equally legit cinematic orientation by flatly accepting fakeness. I’m thinking of Michel Gondry’s Science of Sleep in which crinkled cellophane plays the part of water in a bathtub. Or the antique shop decay of the Bros. Quay or my fave Guy Maddin’s super-saturated Careful, coming soon in a remastered and “repressed” (I assume in many senses of the word) version from Zeitgeist Video. I plan to devote a future post to nothing but Maddin.

So the question of whether the effects of a particular film still hold up isn’t the same question as whether those effects are comfortable in their falseness, whether the strength of the story allows us to reserve our judgment of obviously fake effects, and whether the filmmaker is trying to replace reality or create a reality of his own.

Last Friday I was laid up with some kind of nasty stomach bug that left me prone most of the day. What better time than to revisit Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring? It was literally the first thing my hand fell upon when I nauseously pawed at my DVD cabinet looking for something undemanding to watch.

Is the surge working?

It was hard not to watch LOTR again without experiencing another, political, kind of nausea, as the trilogy will always be linked in my mind to the run-up and launch of the Iraq war. I’m certain Peter Jackson set out to make a kickass, 12-hour film spectacle and couldn’t have predicted the winds that would be blowing through American culture on its release. The trilogy was released on three consecutive Decembers from 2001 to 2003. The first episode arrived in theaters a little over a month after 9/11. The second (coincidentally named The Two Towers) appeared while the drum beats of war echoed loud, shortly after Bush requested “all means that he determines to be appropriate” to launch the war. By the climax of The Return of the King, the war was in full swing.

The LOTR trilogy was a smash hit, appealing to critics and audiences across a broad demographic swath. It was easy to watch it as allegory and simply switch out the names of the good guys and bad guys to fit your political leanings. To me, the Bush administration was Sauron’s forces, but conservatives just as easily could have looked at the orc hordes as fantastical embodiments of the terrorist boogeymen Bush relentlessly invoked.
Watching The Fellowship of the Ring in the last days of the Bush administration, my body aching and head pounding, I wondered if what will date it most is the fundamental good-vs.-evil dynamic that provides the movies with their drama. Yesterday, recovered from my illness and watching the inaugural address, I gasped when President Obama addressed the Muslim world like a mature adult who appreciates the world’s ambiguities rather than casting every conflict in “with us or against” Manichean certainties. I wonder what cinematic spectacles will come to be thematically entwined in this bright new age?

I Remember

Last night I met up with some of my former Amazon colleagues, guys who, like me, served tours of duty on the DVD team, to watch Fellini’s Amarcord at Siff Cinema. The faces, rumps, busts, and girths of the cast jiggled, jumped, and danced. Fantasies and art direction cast their vaudevillian spell. The movie is all about the auteur’s nostalgia for the events of his childhood in 1930s, Fascist Italy, but I read film more as an evocation of a feeling of a place. Which is why my thoughts this morning were drawn to memories of floods, migrant workers, dusty fields, forests, gnarled apple trees, and livestock. By offering the feast of his own childhood, Fellini made me hungry to remember my own.

…more

I’m fascinated by cultural cross-pollination when it comes to art. The Beatles dug Buddy Holly, the psychedelic bands of San Francisco dug the Beatles, the Britpop bands of the nineties dug those psychedelic bands, and the Dandy Warhols watered down those Britpop bands. When it comes to movies, I don’t think there’s much more fascinating case study of cross-pollination than how Akira Kurosawa influenced westerns (particularly the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone) and they influenced him right back. Case in point, Yojimbo, starring the always magnetic Toshiro Mifune.

I feasted my eyes on this western-inspired samurai tale this weekend. One might call it an udon western. It has the trappings of the genre, including wind-swept streets, frightened villagers, and guys who walk toward each other really, really slowly. Even the music sounds like something Ennio Morricone might come up with if he had access to an orchestra of koto and shamisen players. Mifune plays Sanjuro, a samurai who stumbles into said wind-swept town to find it torn asunder by two warring factions. A moral relativist, Sanjuro takes then switches sides, playing the feud to his benefit. Here’s a trailer.

…more

Up the Riggings, You Monkeys!

For Christmas, 1972, when I was almost two months old, my parents’ friend Mr. White gave them a book called A New Pictorial History of the Talkies. My mom taught grade school with Mr. White in the Virgin Islands, and this formal manner of addressing him in the halls carried over into their social interactions as well. To this day, we address Jim White as Mr. White, as in, “Are you planning to come to Seattle this year to see The Ring, Mr. White?” and “Mr. White, could you hand me the salt please?” Aside from decades of friendship, Mr. White’s most lasting gift to me is this book, a collection of stills of movies from 1929 to 1968, from Bulldog Drummond to Funny Girl. I spent my childhood engrossed in its pages, paying particular attention to the stills of Frankenstein and Dracula, not to mention the topless shot of Hedy Lamarr in a Czech film called Extase.

Of course, when I was perusing these black and white stills in the late seventies, before VHS, I had no hope of ever seeing the movies themselves. Talkies was a repository of lost cinematic memories, of movies one might be able to catch, with luck, on late-night television. I’d stare at these images of cowboys and swashbucklers with longing, the same kind of longing I’d feel later when flipping through old newspapers in the morgue of The Skagit Argus where I worked. It’s not simply that vanished artistic expressions are poignant in themselves. It’s that the jovial, sentimental, elegant spirits these old movies conveyed make their loss so much more painful. The actors and directors who created these works were at the time concentrating on entertaining the audiences of their day, rarely–if ever–thinking beyond the next weekend’s box office numbers. But these films still have much to say to us now, here, eighty plus years later.
…more

\

Suck it.

Hey tweens who enjoy a little abstinence-only subtext thrown in with your vampire movies: go out and get a load of the non-virginal variety in Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. This was one of the Maddin movies I’ve been saving. It’s the Canadian director’s collaboration with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Which means that in addition to bared fangs there is DANCING. I have to say this wasn’t one of my favorite Maddin films. While the art direction made its nods to German Expressionism, Maddin’s presence only really became obvious in the editing–the droll title cards, a sequence of blood spreading across a map of Europe, …more

Your Weekend Popcorn Recipe

My brother-in-law Chad Johnson’s popcorn recipe is the best. I’ve enjoyed it at his and my sister-in-law’s place over the years while watching Pulp Fiction and during their rigorously opinionated James Bond sessions. I don’t know if he got the recipe from somewhere else, but in our house my son calls it “Uncle Chaddie Popcorn.”

When I met Chad years ago, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a dreadlocked George H.W. Bush under the words “The Dreaded Republican.” His popcorn is equally leftist. If you’re the kind of person who reads Naomi Klein and don’t shave your nether regions, this is the popcorn for you.

…more

Acts of Nostalgia

My old friend Nate sent me this picture yesterday, taken some 17 years ago. That’s me in the middle, playing drums, wearing a pith helmet onto which is adhered a lit candle. The guy playing bass to the left is today one of the chief economists at the Federal Reserve, formerly an advisor on global economics to Alan Greenspan. The guy singing is now a tour manager for bands like the White Stripes, MIA, and Cold War Kids.

I’ve been sort of marinating in nostalgia these past couple days, poring over this and even more incriminating photos of my college years, which got me thinking about a beguiling 2006 film called Old Joy by Kelly Reichardt. …more

Double Features

I created an account on The Auteurs a couple weeks ago. It’s an addictive site for film nerds started by a company working in close collaboration with The Criterion Collection. Right now it’s in beta. It’s a message board/blog/hulu/social networking kind of thing.

Anyway, one of the postings there recently asked users to list their ideal double features. Here are a few of the more inspired responses.
…more

I mentioned in my inaugural post that I’d recently watched The Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. The movie is about a man who struggles to support his family as a salesman of bone density scanners in San Francisco. Business is slow, and he finds himself in increasingly dire economic straits. He decides to apply for an internship at Dean Whitter in hopes of becoming a stock broker. This is a popcorn movie designed to tug my fatherly heart strings. It mostly worked.

But the film I kept thinking about while watching this Will Smith vehicle was Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. …more