Criterion Collection Releases for March 2009

The Criterion Collection has announced its new releases for March 2009. Last month, they announced the planned release of their three February titles, Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (Spine #459) and Simon of the Desert (Spine #460), and also David Lean's Hobson's Choice (Spine #461).

The four titles planned for March release:


Spine #462: The Last Metro (1980) (d. Truffaut)



Spine #463: Il Generale Della Rovere (1959) (d. Roberto Rossellini)



Spine #464: Danton (1983) (d. Andrzej Wajda)



Spine #465: Dodes'ka-den (1970) (d. Kurosawa)

New Criterion Titles Announced on 11/14/08

As Professor Farnsworth would say, "Good news, everyone!": The Criterion Collection has announced its new releases for February 2009. Last month, they announced the planned release of their three January titles, Roberto Rossellini's The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Spine #456), Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession (Spine #457), and Gregory Nava's El Norte (Spine #458).

The three titles planned for February release:


Spine #459: The Exterminating Angel (d. Luis Buñuel)



Spine #460: Simon of the Desert (d. Luis Buñuel)



Spine #461: Hobson's Choice (d. David Lean)

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (2007)

For Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant has adopted Kubrick’s approach to releasing his films with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (“full screen”). So to fully enjoy the rich photography, I’d recommend viewing it on a square monitor rather than a rectangular one.


I do not blame the viewer who would stop Paranoid Park within or around the 20 minute mark. Those first 20 minutes are exasperating. ‘What is he doing?’ you might be wondering about Van Sant (most of those who’ll seek this film out will be Van Sant fans and thus willing to humor his indulgences) as he insists on following around newcomer and acting novice Gabe Nevins (born in 1991), a kid who has the expressiveness of a blank wall.

His friends are a paltry bunch, and the bankruptcy of their character is only compounded by their insolence and discourtesy. Then it dawned on me: Alex (Nevins) is the only one who is not insolent or discourteous – he remains silent much of the time amidst the rudimentary discourse of his peers and fellow skate park delinquents.

The introduction of his girlfriend, Jennifer, is a stab to the nerves, as the girl playing her (Taylor Momsen, 15, who the DVD box informs is an actress from “Gossip Girl”) can be best summed up with one word: Ugh. Her acting was so foully amateurish I concluded that the sometimes straying good judgment of Van Sant had now wandered out of sight completely.

But, being an open-minded chap and in the habit of humoring the most discouraging artistic deviations, I stuck with it. As the film progresses, Nevins’ perpetually blank demeanor, when juxtaposed with the simultaneously jaded and callow (the most odious youths of them all) personalities and attitudes of his schoolmates and boarding buddies, becomes a small oasis of reticence. When an abiding police detective (Daniel Liu) asks to speak with all of the boys at the school about the freakish death of a night security guard down at the Portland railway, the boys exhibit the behavior manifested by a complete and utter absence of breeding. Many of these boys, including Alex, are the products of broken homes, and though it seems to be a very minor element of the story, divorce is a crucial theme of this film.

I believe Gus Van Sant and the film is fascinated by Alex for these reasons: compared to the other kids in this movie, he is a paragon of courtesy and introspection. We see his father, clearly once an unsavory individual (both arms have tattoo sleeves); now just a distracted dad, and he inquires about Alex’s life in a perfunctory manner, “You still boarding?” - Alex: “Yeah.” - “Right on.” The film is not condemning parents who divorce, just displaying from a dispassionate perspective the way that divorce is often the result of selfish adults. Divorce can sometimes lead to a vague state of anomie, producing base children and base teenagers. And why shouldn’t they be? Without a reliable positive adult influence, how are they to learn tact? So it is unusual for someone like Alex to surface, who is good and decent and courteous from instinct. He’s a good kid, and Van Sant provided me with one of the most moving and joyous scenes in recent memory: Alex’s little brother, Henry (Dillon Hines), with an uncanny lack of self-consciousness, jubilantly recounts scenes from Napoleon Dynamite in front of his big brother, who listens with tact and abidance. It is a wonderful, wonderful scene.


The film contains Van Sant’s usual brilliant Impressionist renderings of spiritually barren domestic interiors. It also continues his fascination with youth, especially youth on the margins. Anyone who tries to tell you that Van Sant has a prurient ulterior motive when choosing these stories is being obtuse, glib, and mean-spirited. These are generally the same people who, upon superficial inspection, conclude that the sexuality on display in KIDS (1995) is intended to be titillating. I once heard an unsubstantiated item of gossip that Van Sant was sleeping with Elias McConnell, the young man who plays the photographer Eli in Van Sant’s Elephant. Even if that is true, the motivation for making the film was thematic and aesthetic, as was the motivation for making My Own Private Idaho and Last Days, all of which incorporate homosexual youths into the fabric of the story.

Van Sant’s last three films, Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days are all morbid minimalist works; together they constitute Van Sant’s informal “Death Trilogy.” This collection of three, is, in my estimation, among Van Sant’s best work (along with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho), an avant-garde magnum opus that, by the rigors of its concept, sifts Van Sant’s good directorial propensities and his rotten inclinations, filtering out the crap, and leaving pure, spare lyricism. The films grew increasingly more fatalistic on the journey towards the gloomy end, showing microcosms that took order for granted, finding hidden reserves of lawlessness and despair inside ostensibly functioning systems. So it is a relief to discover that Van Sant has now provided us with a film which quietly observes hidden reserves of thoughtfulness and decency inside derelict communities ostensibly forsaken to philistines.


Grade: A-

"I'm sorry - I thought you was corn."

New Criterion Titles Announced on 10/17/08

I do this compulsively every week: scan The Criterion Collection, even though they generally only publish news of 2 or 3 new titles once a month. Last month, they announced the planned release of their two December titles, Lars Von Trier's fourth feature film Europa (Spine #454) and Samuel Fuller's White Dog (Spine #455).

The three titles planned for January release:


Spine #456: The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (d. Roberto Rossellini)



Spine #457: Magnificent Obsession (d. Douglas Sirk)



Spine #458: El Norte (d. Gregory Nava)

"Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith

The 4 Markers

First Marker: The Dawn of Man

Stage 1: Beasts. Sentient, but without the ability to deduce or reason. The first marker improves that.






Second Marker: Buried beneath the surface of the Moon near Clavius (which is an actual lunar crater)

Stage 2: Man - with the newly formed ability to deduce, grows over millions of years, steadily using their new powers of reasoning to access Space. Electronic signals are coming from the moon, despite satellite read-outs revealing only a bare lunar surface. The electronic signal is too strong and too persistent to neglect investigation. The reason the electronic signal seemed to emanate from a bare space was because the source of the signal was buried beneath the surface of the moon.


Once the astronauts get close enough to touch it, the marker emits a piercing sound. This is not an attack on the astronauts, as Heywood Floyd is very much alive when he leaves the prerecorded instructions for the Discovery mission. The high-pitched piercing sound was a communication between the second monolith and another source somewhere near the planet Jupiter. The purpose of the Discovery mission is to locate the source of the communication with the second monolith. Before the Discovery reaches its destination, there is a battle of wits and wills between Bowman and the computer mainframe, HAL 9000.


HAL with his lack of human emotions could be said to be the next level in intelligence. Artificial intelligence, devoid of pity, doubt, regret, etc. - pure, dispassionate logic. It is only natural that these two should battle to see who earns the right to enter the third stage of development.


Third Marker: in orbit around Jupiter




Stage 3: In India, the Hindu view of human development comprises four stages or Ashram: 1) Brahmacharya, 2) Grihastha, 3) Vanaprastha, and 4) Sannyasa. The third stage, Vanaprastha, is defined as “a period of secluded life in the forest with severe discipline, austerity and penance. This is a stage in preparation for the final stage of renunciation, that is, Sannyasa.”

“This stage denotes a transition phase from material to spiritual life.”

“In this phase of life, the person is in retreat from worldly life. He lives away from the city, in a jungle as a hermit...”



Fourth Marker: in the room that was prepared for Dr. Bowman by the beings that placed the Markers. You can hear these beings communicating at points during Dave's stay in the room. It sounds like ghastly chortling.


Much earlier in the film, Dr. Heywood Floyd is briefed en route to the Tycho lunar crater that the (TMA-1 ~ Tycho Magnetic Anomaly) has been caused by an artifact “that appears to have been deliberately buried.” If we assume that the second marker was placed by a higher intelligence, then we can assume the first marker was too. It seems to be a game in which the first stage of human development is set into motion and by the time the second clue is able to be accessed, then that alerts the higher intelligence that clue #3 can now be activated. Once Dave reaches the third Marker, he is sent beyond Jupiter into another plane of existence.


He is very nearly obliterated by sensory overload during this experience.


It is a wonder that he makes it through intact or still breathing.


Presumably, the fourth Marker summons and morphs Dave Bowman onto the exalted level of the Star Child: pure, self-sustaining Mind.

“I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content...I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does...You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film.”

-Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
- George Bernard Shaw


The monolith: a symmetrical nomadic apparition, at once alternatively and simultaneously sinister and awe-inspiring, a configuration whose geometric proportions have been refined to the nth degree. It is the perfect embodiment of an abstraction that Kubrick wanted to communicate about the evolution of the human mind. The roughness and crudity of the apes living in primitive disarray is thrown into such wildly contrary relief in the midst of the monolith, that it is no surprise that even the most rudimentary conception of learning plants itself in the slightly comprehending brains of the feral apes. Something about the precision and the sharp corners of the 4 right angles of the uniform black shape sets a slow-burning charge on the faculties of one of the more thoughtful creatures, and one day, while thoughtlessly milling around some old elephant bones, the ape remembers… he remembers that strange apparition he saw, and then he looks at the bones, and the powder keg explodes: Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” sounds the fundaments of triumphant epiphany. Of course Kubrick’s implicit irony is generally overlooked on first viewing because the sheer grandeur of the music and imagery is so intoxicating. The irony of course is that the celebration of discovery trumpeted by the Strauss piece belies the fact that the ape’s seminal innovation is instantaneously utilized for purposes of murder. And so the evolution of mankind begins.

The transition from the bone to the spacecraft is often noted for being the single biggest transitional leap in time in all of cinema. And of course, we don’t need any of the space in between to lose Kubrick’s point: man has discovered how to use the raw materials that have been rationed to him by existence to astonishing and frightening ends, the bone being the original utility and the spacecraft being the most advanced. But even after 2000 or so millennia, the banality of existence persists: aboard the impossibly sophisticated and advanced technical achievement millions of years in the making, Space Station 5, the massive floating steering wheel Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) docks with as a mid-point between Earth and Clavius, there are advertisements for Hilton Hotels, who presumably own the rights to the space station, and a placard for Howard Johnson’s, that chain of restaurant’s rustic name as glaringly incongruous with the aseptic cutting edge interior of the space station as a Taco Bell logo plastered inside a bio-lab. It’s deflating to see that Howard Johnson’s sign, just as it is deflating to witness Dr. Frank Poole’s (Gary Lockwood) insipid chit-chat with his parents via telecommunication while he traverses the lofty reaches of space aboard the Discovery One. Poole himself seems mildly disgusted during this sequence, and the music played over Poole’s birthday chat with his parents is sorrowful.

Keir Dullea seems at cursory inspection to be a rather bland choice for Dr. David Bowman, the other conscious astronaut aboard the Discovery (the remaining three astronauts have been placed in cryogenic sleeping chambers in order to preserve their energies at maximum level until such time as they will be needed once the ship arrives at Jupiter) but in fact Kubrick (who cast Dullea sight unseen after witnessing his performances in David and Lisa (1962) and The Thin Red Line (1964)) has optioned wisely, in that only an actor as preternaturally cool, calm, and collected as Dullea could convince us that he stands a chance against HAL. HAL is voiced by Douglas Rain, and is one of the most quietly psychotic antagonists in film history. Psychotic you say? Yes. It is one thing to go after Dave and Frank, who HAL has clandestinely witnessed conspiring to deactivate him, but to murder the three sleeping humans who have nothing to do with the conspiracy, is the work of a madman. HAL’s killing spree is not entirely successful; Dave is resourceful, and when HAL refuses him entry onto the Discovery after Dave returns from a finally futile attempt to retrieve the drifting body of the maliciously jettisoned Frank, Dave, without a helmet, hazards death by propelling himself over a brief but treacherous fissure between the berth of the Discovery’s emergency airlock and the exit of the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) pod.

Besides the grandeur and scope of Kubrick’s vision, and the intellectual ambition, the film intuits themes and observations that can be lost on those who are put off by Kubrick’s dispassionate remove from the proceedings. But the film, if viewed properly, should not leave the viewer cold, but rather should incite ecstatic absorption which only begins in the brain and then charges from there to all the senses. This is not a boring film. Many claim that it is, but it is only due to the scarcity of these viewers’ imaginations and interior resources that the film will fail to react. I postulate that human beings with rich inner lives have the richest and most rewarding experiences with art (some people feel uncomfortable around negative space, even indignant, because, naturally, they have nothing of their own to fill it with; and I don’t mean IQ). And that is what 2001: A Space Odyssey is beyond all else - beyond its technical proficiency, its philosophy, its cutting-edge special effects, its iconic status - an artistic endeavor, and if you’re the right type of person, you’ll feel the blissful chemistry of your senses and Kubrick’s intuition bubbling harmoniously.

Whenever I watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I see the monolith, I reflexively envision Kubrick, with his dark imposing countenance and towering cold intellect. When Kubrick’s films are referred to as “cold,” generally it is the cut-and-dried nature of his presentation that is being commented on. All of this meticulous aseptic precision can result in bothersome feelings that Kubrick’s magnum opus is too pat, too exacting, the perfection is hermetically sealed. To me, it’s like the film itself is the monolith, or maybe Kubrick is.


2001 materialized before particular absent-minded and coarse terrestrials in the same manner as the silent black monolith before the howling apes; at first, they were perturbed and bewildered:

“a film out of control, an infuriating combination of exactitude on small parts and incoherence on large ones.”

- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

“a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.”

- Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice, April 11, 1968

“Such movies as 'Petulia' and '2001' may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously… In some ways it’s the biggest amateur movie of them all… It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie.”

-Pauline Kael, Harper’s, February 1969

“Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”

-Rock Hudson at the Los Angeles Premiere, April 4, 1968, according to Roger Ebert


But it was not long after the initial apprehension that Kubrick’s film seized our collective consciousness and deposited us in the warm glow of intuitive clarity, leaving the detractors and the skeptics crowing like beasts outside the orb of enlightenment.

2001 is not my favorite Kubrick (that would be The Shining) but it would be inaccurate to find any of the work he granted us previous or subsequent to this film as more vital to international culture. 2001 is the centerpiece in a peerless oeuvre.


Grade: A+



+ "Deliberately Buried." The 4 Markers of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Deciphering the Monolith

Bickle’s Coda: Concerning the last 10 minutes of Taxi Driver

Is Travis dead or not? I have an answer, but I don't want to impose it on someone who prefers an alternative interpretation. But I think the image of Travis walking beneath the awning of the St. Regis hotel is rather conclusive while also being brilliantly esoteric; in other words, if you really deeply care, you will investigate the significance of this clue: I looked up St. Regis (It only took me my umpteenth instance of viewing Taxi Driver to finally do it). And guess what? (This was particularly exciting for me) - St. Regis “is best known for his convert work amongst prostitutes.” From The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association:

I suppose that in most short biographies of John Francis Regis, he is best known for his convert work amongst prostitutes. Needless to say, he was very successful. He recognized most of them were not in the business, so to speak, because they liked it, but they were poor. How I wish we had at least a half a dozen Francis Regis’ in New York. Any one day, so the figures, that I've learned go, there are ten thousand women walking the streets of New York City and many are young, no home, no money, no friends, with all the consequences that follow. He was it seems, all his life answering complaints; people criticized or complained about his work. They didn't like this and they didn't like that. He'd always have a pat answer. It was told him, ‘Look, these people you are “converting” the conversion won't last.’ His answer was, “so what, if I can keep a person from committing one sin that except for my efforts they would have committed, it's worth all my effort.”

After the bloodbath in the tenement brothel, after the bravura overhead shot looking down at the killing (fucking) room (Iris is weeping, Travis, shot multiple times, sits on the couch, the Old Man -the timekeeper- collapsed on the floor, and the john splayed out before the entrance) with the police standing in the doorway, the camera glides down the hallway, past the testimony of carnage: the plasma-misted walls, drips and drops of blood, Sport's crumpled body; and eventually exits the building where an assembly of rubberneckers are intermittently illuminated by the blue and red lights of police vehicles. Dissolve.

This is where the coda begins, and the grounds of reality become tenuous: a bulletin board is plugged with a newspaper article about the 'cabbie who saved a youth from gangsters' complete with a graph depicting the architectural layout of the tenement/abattoir; next to the article is a hand-written letter to Travis from Iris's parents; the contents of the letter are dictated blandly by the voice of a rustic older man, Iris's father, thanking Travis; Travis engages in chit-chat with Wizard, Charlie T, and Doughboy in front of the cab-stand (status quo has been restored); Travis says so long and walks to his cab, passing beneath the portentously framed St. Regis awning; he does not act too startled to find Betsy, the woman he idolized, sitting in the back seat of the cab with moony eyes full of appreciation; he acts cool; we see her only in the rearview - her head is abstracted, lit in a surreal fashion - and this is what keyed me in to the dubiousness of whether any of this was actually happening, even on the first viewing. The surreal countenance of Betsy, her belated appreciation of Travis, the fact that he asks for no payment for the taxi ride (where he's going or where he is, he won't need money), the look of relieved satisfaction on his face as he relishes Betsy's flirtations and recognition of who he really is, and the final touch, his abrupt vanishing into the night air, all convince me that the coda of Taxi Driver is a sort of netherworld of solace and peace for our friend, misunderstood for so long, his righteousness finally vindicated. Travis was too good for this world. And his martyrdom has been secured.

Thoughts on Taxi Driver (1976)

One of my very favorite pieces of literature is Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby the Scrivener: the reason it appeals to me so much is that unlike the countless other characters in the fictional universe, Bartleby is not too concerned with participating. The little we find out about his back story involves his time working at a “Dead Letter” office where he collected, and then disposed of all the sent messages, some of which we can assume were very personal and anguished, which were written for nothing and received by a void. Bartleby was spiritually broken to some extent, we gather, during his time there.

Travis Bickle does not participate but not for lack of trying. He is pathologically incapable of conducting a comfortable conversation, most especially with women who he is sexually attracted to. He is a romantic, but at every turn he sees proof that he shouldn’t be: in the New York where he lives, Scorsese evokes the palpable decay, both literal and moral, of a city feeding on itself.

Pornography is tricky business; no one wants to say that it is dirty or rotten, yet, it feels so dirty and rotten when giant ‘XXX’ signs hang in unwashed bulletin boards over crumbling buildings as horns honk and the procession of traffic cannot just be heard, but felt. Indeed, the city even invades Travis’s apartment, his home, his last opportunity to fortify himself from the litter of the streets. Scorsese very deliberately set a recording device on a windowsill to document the ambient noise of the city, and often, that ambient noise is the only soundtrack to accompany Travis when he sits alone in his apartment. Compounding the seeping sounds of the city outside is the inconspicuous bric-a-brac shelving his mealy apartment: the blue, red, and yellow circles on a package of (wonder?) bread, creased cardboard boxes of cereal: both elements self-effacingly establishing the dispiriting banality of his existence. So what’s the solution? Get a girlfriend. That’s what everyone else does. They find a relationship; nurture and be nurtured; only Travis has very fine taste, and the young woman who catches his eye is a rather elusive choice. Betsy (a very attractive young Cybill Shepherd) actually does not avert her eyes and will him away with repelled discomfort as young women of my generation would so impulsively do when confronted with a socially awkward, looks-too-hard-at-people-without-knowing-it (read: creepy) type of man.

The first time I saw Taxi Driver, I honestly could not believe that Travis was ignorant of the effect that taking Betsy to a porno theatre would have. This was not a sub-conscious desire to sabotage the date either; this is where Travis’s ignorance of tact and the proper conduct of social rituals is the most alarming of all: he genuinely does not know that most women like men to pretend that the final step of the courting ritual is not the only step they are interested in. Upon repeat viewings, you could even say Travis’s unconscious frankness is sweet in its misunderstanding, as if he was an alien from another planet that has spent a few days on earth and does not know the appropriate protocol. She has not spent enough time with him or may even be intuitive enough to understand that Travis’s taking her to the porn movie is a one in a million freak occurrence; he’s not the jackass who does it, then looks over at her lecherously, nudges her in the ribs: “How ‘bout it, babe?”

With his dream woman quickly severing any hope for a second date after the aborted first one, Travis slips further into defeated isolation. He has learned though: in a great shot, we see his futile attempts to apologize and explain to Betsy on a payphone, his head framed by the metal box, the farthest right in a line of three phones, the first one being a more rudimentary phone, the second being a little more advanced, and the payphone being the final step in the evolutionary process. From his words, we understand that she will not be persuaded, and the camera pans even farther right and looks into an abandoned hallway which ends with an exit out into traffic.

Taxi Driver will be alluring to any young man who finds himself perpetually without the relief of female companionship. Some men, like Travis, are absolute failures in this department. We cannot even be sure whether or not Travis has ever been with a woman; his past is murky, outside of the knowledge that he served in Vietnam. Men in situations like this are susceptible to self-loathing, which can soon turn into suicide, or misanthropy. We already know Travis hates the hustlers and low-life night crawlers of New York, but after his unthinkable faux pas with Betsy, and her subsequent rejection, he moves his scorn to higher levels of society as well.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a conflicted analysis of Taxi Driver, which dissects its philosophy, finding it muddled, and contradictory. While I found Rosenbaum’s review insightful and somewhat persuasive, I’m not sure if he’s intellectualizing Scorsese and Schrader’s intentions more than they themselves did. Couldn’t the film be simply a cry of hatred and anger? The scene which proves most troublesome to some viewers of Taxi Driver is a scene where Martin Scorsese himself appears in the film, one of the most disturbing and horrible characters I’ve ever witnessed on the screen. He plays an unidentified individual, though I refer to him as, “The Man in the back of the taxi.” The man turns Travis’s cab into a sickening confessional, actually informing Travis of a double murder he plans to commit, pointing to a window in a building that he has directed Travis to park near. “You see that woman in the window? Do you see the woman in the window? Yes? Yes, ‘cuz I want you to see that woman, I want you to see that woman, because that woman is my wife. You know what she’s doing up there? She’s fucking a nigger up there? A nigger. And…I’m…I’m gonna kill ‘em. I’m gonna kill ‘em with a .44 Magnum, I’m gonna kill ‘em with that gun. You ever see what a .44 Magnum could do to a woman’s face? Just blow it apart. You ever see what a .44 Magnum could do to a woman’s pussy? That, you should see.” The fact that it is the director himself playing this part makes it all the more traumatic. He is so utterly convincing (Scorsese is a great actor) and so frightening that I don’t read any irony in the part. Though I know that Scorsese is not a racist, or a misogynist, or fond of mutilation, he truly scares me, and I believe him. The grandfatherly, benevolent dignitary that we see so often now in interviews and light-hearted commercials, and even on Oprah, is accepted without thinking twice about it, but people seem to forget that that same man once played the evil-eyed, dark-bearded man in the back of Travis’s taxi (indeed, De Niro said that he modeled his appearance in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart after Scorsese; De Niro played Lucifer in the film).

I think if Raging Bull is Scorsese’s grandest achievement, then Taxi Driver is his most honest, and this is a man who has made a career out of frank brutality. Taxi Driver is a rather dangerous film in that way in that it voices all the politically incorrect, irrational, hateful, and improper thoughts and impulses that 99% of the country know to filter before expressing. With the encouragement of Schrader’s sullen, wrathful screenplay, Scorsese let his reptile brain roam free for a short time, and exorcise all the things we wish we could expel, but would rather someone else do it instead. The film is an unparalleled and volatile transgression in the world of cinema, performing the very most private purpose of all in art, which is to serve as a vessel for the artist’s suffering, hatred, despair, and all; in Travis Bickle’s story, Scorsese achieves catharsis, allowing for all us misanthropes to be relieved of our rage and disgust, if only for a time.


Grade: A+



+Bickle's Coda

Ballast (2008) trailer

I heard about this film back in May. I don't remember how exactly, but I read something that sent me to IMDb, where I read the synopsis: "A drama set in the Mississippi delta, where one man's suicide affects three people's lives." That, combined with the picture above, sent it to the top of the list of films I had to see at once.
Five months later, the trailer has been made available:

Happy Birthday Kate Winslet

I like to make lists. If you also find yourself compulsively fabricating lists of varying arbitrary things, then you will forgive me when I say that from maybe third grade on, I'd make lists of my favorite films, my favorite books, my favorite presidents. I'd make lists simply to make lists. It became an end in and of itself. One of the lists I would revise again and again over the years was my list of favorite actors (male). When I was in third grade, I loved The Fugitive (1993). My exclusive enthusiasm for The Fugitive replaced the previous champion of my enthusiasm, Indiana Jones and my #1 favorite actor, Harrison Ford, lost the title to Tommy Lee Jones. This list fluctuated every year, and Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Tommy Lee Jones, Harrison Ford, Ian McShane (because of Jesus of Nazareth), Laurence Fishburne and Ben Kingsley (because of Searching for Bobby Fischer), Samuel L. Jackson (because of Jurassic Park) would rotate around and around; Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro would be added, as would Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Gary Oldman. Sometimes when sharing this list with my parents, my mother would ask, "Do you have any favorite actresses?" And I didn't have an answer. It simply hadn't occured to me to pay attention to them. As a third, fourth, and fifth grader, my rudimentary appreciation of the dramatis personae was restricted to the men I idolized. The actresses were an afterthought, overshadowed.

I continued to make lists. Eventually I did make a list of Favorite Actresses, but it was only populated by 4 or 5 names, whereas my Favorite Actor list had 40, 50 names. Even to me this moment sounds woefully tardy in arriving, but it was not until 2006, yes 2006, that I finally witnessed a female character that could hold the same platonic fascination for me as the most riveting male cinematic characters. The character's name was, I believe, Sarah, from Todd Field's second film Little Children, and she was played by Kate Winslet, who I had seen in Titanic and a couple other things. But it was not that Kate Winslet was devoid of the same fascinating attributes that held me with this particular character in those other performances where I had watched her without sitting upright; they were there, only casting her in the very suitable role of a former academic (Sarah, we learn, had been working on a doctorate in English when she had to postpone it for wifedom and motherhood) had crystallized them: a woman of profound character, containing universes of substance, highly intelligent without being peculiar, carrying an intrinsic wholesomeness and decency even when being degraded or complicit in prurience.

These are the same qualities I see in my other favorite actresses: you see it in Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and Emily Watson. You see it in young Helen Mirren and now. You see it in Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau. Substance. Before lust, there is admiration, sympathy, identification. If the first inclination upon seeing an actress is lust, then you have not properly seen her soul, seen her as a person. She is nothing more than a base stimulus - I lust after vapid ciphers as much as the next guy, Megan Fox for example, but lust is the first and only reaction I have towards her, as she shows very little evidence of having what could be considered "a soul." Think about this: Jessica Alba, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Jessica Simpson, Jessica Biel, Olivia Wilde, Charisma Carpenter, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Malin Akerman, Elisha Cuthbert, Evangeline Lilly, Elisha Dushku, Alyssa Milano. These women, some of them even peers of Kate Winslet, are totally interchangeable: generic starlets.

So for a young actress to distinguish herself even slightly is a rather difficult task. That is another reason why all of those women previously mentioned blend together: they all seem young. Kate Winslet (who turns 33 today), like Cate Blanchett (39), has a personality that seems decades older than the youthful age where she resides. I think such individuals are referred to as "Old Souls."


The one role she is most celebrated for is one that I think is sort of unflattering to this conception I have of her: her performance as Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). She is great in it, but Clementine is a child compared to Sarah in Little Children or Ophelia in Hamlet or Maddy in Quills. Clementine is short-sighted, irrational, quick-tempered, immature, vindictive. She is also often adorable, as when she digs through her purse while slunk on a seat on the train after being exasperated by Joel's (Jim Carrey) repeating of the word "nice." I'm not saying Clementine is a bad character; quite the contrary - that's the way the character must be for the good of the film. But someone who sees her as Clementine and is not acquainted with the rest of Winslet's body of work will have no impression of the elegance and maturity so crucial to the power and gravity of her presence onscreen.

4 Luni, 3 Saptamâni si 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) (2008)

The first shot of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is a doozy: the inside of a dorm room belonging to Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), winter; the photography has an antiseptic chilliness, and later, when casting its gaze upon the pale Otilia nuzzling and deeply kissing her boyfriend, Adi, inspires repulsion at the lips and skin contact. I have seen this effect before, probably for the very first time in Larry Clark’s Kids where sex was de-eroticized and photographed to look like two husks of smeared flesh were sucking on one another – the skin contact was sickly and hungry: it was gross – and in Cristian Mungiu’s film, while not smeared, the paleness of the actors’ skin, the chilliness of the photography, drains any and all warmth from the physical intimacy. Sex is often like heroin or sleep for some, operating as a momentary escape (witness the animal hunger of Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) frenziedly pushing her naked skin upon her boyfriend’s naked skin in Mike Leigh's similarly grim social drama, Secrets & Lies (1996), another Palme d’Or winner), a warm body serving as a relief from gray, desolate surroundings. Only these bodies do not look warm, and when they touch one another, the thought of it producing more pallid, dreary souls seems devastating.


Cristian Mungiu has produced a formidable work here, though I have a rather significant reservation.

Spoilers ahead: if you’ve not seen the film, I’d recommend not continuing the review.

Employing long takes and breathing an air of grim urgency into every scene, especially when the handheld camera is tremoring slightly, subliminally, the film commands your attention; even without sound, it is evident that some harrowing, somber inevitability is underway. The kitchen-sink drabness of the proceedings and the often tremoring hand-held 35mm camerawork is reminiscent of another Romanian film, a film some have compared to “watching paint dry,” Cristi Puiu’s Moartea domnului Lazarescu or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). However, to find fault with the mundane tedium of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is to completely miss the point, which is the mundane tedium, how what should be the poignant and moving death of a lonely old man becomes a tiresome slog through red tape and the banalities of hospital bureaucracy, rendering his death a relief for the viewer rather than a tragedy. The film is brilliant, an insidious masterpiece. What that film did right and what 4 Months does wrong is Lazarescu doesn’t compromise its seemingly uneventful story. Shot to produce a slightly more rigorous tone of hyper-realism, 4 Months makes a sharp and disastrous turn into lurid melodrama.


If this had been an American film or something that hadn’t won the Palme d’Or or something that didn’t enforce such a grave tone of kitchen sink hyper-realism, then the two girls, Otilia and Gabita, prostituting themselves to the abortionist, would have been predictable. But in a prestige piece like this, such lurid melodrama breaks the atmosphere of quiet despair with a loud, obvious, even clichéd manipulation of viewers' emotions. Perhaps such things really happened, but the way it is handled here is so indelicate, so loud, it struck me as the most unexpected type of pandering.

Everything up to this point is properly prosaic: Otilia’s inability to retrieve a room in the first hotel, the quibbling of the hotel management of the second hotel who insist on exasperating red tape procedures in order to simply reserve a room, the finding of the taxi driver, reassuring the taxi driver, who, we gather from his briefcase, is the abortion proprietor, explaining the reasons why Gabita didn’t follow the arrangements they had discussed over the phone to the man, Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), Bebe’s lecturing them on why Gabita should have followed the instructions, and then lecturing them on the consequences of the procedure, and then lecturing them on the details, then making sure Gabita is telling him the truth about her circumstances, and finding she lied, asking her why, and if she still wants to continue with the procedure. He drinks some water and tells her to think it over while he steps into the bathroom. When he comes out, she says she does, and then he asks about money. They explain that the hotel room was more expensive than they thought it would be, and he lectures them some more. Otilia, getting sick of his self-righteous laying down of rules and exasperating lectures, becomes visibly perturbed, which makes him erupt in anger and threaten to leave. Gabita begs him not to. Next thing we know, he and Otilia are undressing, Gabita steps out for a cigarette, she steps back in, goes in the bathroom, which Otilia enters, nude from the waist down, and then exits, as Otilia proceeds to squat in the bathtub and scrub her genitals with a bar of soap. I’m sorry, but this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The horror of the film was being very nicely underplayed without having Otilia (and also Gabita it seems to imply) prostitute themselves to the abortionist. After seeing such devolution of the story, I would not have been surprised to see Otilia use the knife she found in Bebe’s briefcase to stab him to death.

Again, such things may have happened, but that doesn’t mean such things, when used for dramatic effect, are not clichés, even if they are rationalized as being non-literal, or a metaphor. Though the film earns back its presented tone of hyper-realism later, and the film continues to be perfectly photographed, lit, and framed, this sequence is fundamental to the film’s impact. In my opinion, the impact is severely dulled by the wrong-headedness of such a plot turn.

Nevertheless, the film is crucial viewing for anyone serious about art films, and despite my reservations, I am neither dismayed nor surprised that it won the Palme d'Or, which, unlike the Academy Awards, by and large, is a signifier of a truly quality film (if you don't believe me, check out some of the other films that won it: The Conversation, Taxi Driver, L'Albero Degli Zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), Apocalypse Now, Barton Fink, Pulp Fiction, the already mentioned Secrets & Lies, L'Enfant (The Child), all, if not masterpieces, indisputably thought-provoking and profound works of art). While not the former in my opinion, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is most definitely the latter.


Grade: A-

A Tribute to Paul Newman by David Letterman

Last night on David Letterman, there was a short but terribly moving tribute to Paul Newman showing clips of Newman's various appearances on David Letterman over the years accompanied by Rufus Wainwright's "(Cold and Broken) Hallelujah" . I tried finding a video that was limited to just the brief clip, but all I could find was the long version where Dave, with all due respect, prattles on and on with an anecdote about Paul Newman, he, and a custom-made car Newman got him as a gift. Last night, it was moderately amusing, as Dave's stammering and acerbic befuddlement usually is, but if you want to skip straight to the tribute, just drag the cursor to 7:28, and try not to get choked up.

Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

"...this country would have completely lost its collective shit..."

Apropos the last Maher-related post, here's a segment from a very recent episode (Sept. 19, 2008) of Real Time:

Happy Birthday Naomi Watts

Naomi Watts. David Lynch put her on the map, and she did not forget that fact, appearing in a 50 minute film he made, called "Rabbits." Some of this footage was later used in Inland Empire. She, along with Laura Harring, voiced one of the rabbits in this sequence (Is she the one sitting or standing?):


When she is upset or in anguish, few actresses come off as explosively wound up (Hope Davis is good at playing tightly wound women on the verge of hysteria too).

As Diane Selwyn, in Mulholland Dr., the ratty robe she wears precisely captures a tangible form of the frayed nerves of her psyche. Even more frayed are her nerves in 21 Grams, where she seems to be carrying around a ticking time bomb in her expression wherever she goes:


...her haggard features lighted so as to seem even paler than usual, damages to her soul gradually surfacing in her face. She scowls a lot, I've noticed, and when she does, you want to cross to the other side of the street to avoid it. She's a fierce actress, and serious, some might say too serious, as if she is displaying pretense to a gravity that she has not earned yet. Though I would not dismiss that objection immediately, I would tell someone dubious of Watts to watch her in several different films (which would not be a hardhsip, considering the sheer number of quality films she consistently seeks out to appear in).

Mulholland Dr. is one of my all-time favorites. I love The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a film her character is in very little. She plays the ex-wife of Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), the pitiable salesman whose deteriorating sanity and repeatedly trampled self-esteem conspire over the course of the film to produce an unhinged, cockamamie plot to fly a plane into the White House. Her character is vital in establishing the momentum of Bicke's despair, and Naomi Watts is devastating in the way she slights her ex-husband, disgusted by his whiny ineffectualism and trying, with less and less patience, to express her utter disinterest in his companionship, despite the fact that they share two children. Naomi Watts is one of those women who could crush a man with one dismissive glance, and her performance mixed with Penn's pathological neediness produces riveting and devastating moments of botched social interactions.

She has worked with three of my very favorite film directors (Lynch, Cronenberg, Haneke), and has a body of work that is unmatched in its commitment to scouting auteurs and in laboring to create substantive work. You don't see her doing Revlon commercials like Julianne Moore and Halle Berry or L'Oreal commercials like Penelope Cruz or perfume ads like Nicole Kidman. She is an artist, not a product. That puts her ahead of those four, as well as many of the rest of the actresses working in film currently.

In Anticipation of Religulous: Defending Bill Maher

Larry Charles (above, left) is someone I admired long before he directed the virtually unanimously acclaimed Borat:CLoAfMBGNoK. He was a writer on Seinfeld and directed more than 10 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It made sense that HBO veterans Sacha Baron Cohen and Charles would find themselves collaborating on a film, a film that would go on to become the most critically acclaimed American comedy of the new decade. I really liked Borat quite a bit, and when I stumbled onto this poster:


...sometime last November or thereabouts, I was a little saddened that Charles’s follow-up would be centered around the detestable Bill Maher, who I knew very little about other than the fact that he held hopelessly liberal beliefs, and wore a countenance that radiated smug.

Well, since then I’ve read about and watched a lot more of Maher. After 9/11, when every American who wasn’t crying tears of blood or flying into a fit of vengeful rage at anybody who looked even vaguely Middle-Eastern was formally declared unpatriotic or traitorous, it took massive guts, balls, backbone, whichever body part serves the idiom best, to say what Bill Maher said, on September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the attacks, on his ABC show Politically Incorrect, when speaking to guest Dinesh D’Souza:

D’Souza: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.

Maher: Not true.

D’Souza: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.

Maher: Exactly.

D’Souza: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.

Maher: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.

Warriors? Eh. Does it really take a brave warrior to overpower a female flight-attendant and then cut the unarmed woman's throat? I think D'Souza may have overstated it, but I understand what he's saying. If this highly-organized and carefully planned operation had been carried out by SEALs with less crude weaponry in a location far, far away from our country, then it would have been an act of heroic military cunning. If our country is attacked, it's terrorism. If we are the aggressors, it's counter-terrorism, understand? It's the same old ethnocentric megalomania and hypocrisy that passes as patriotism and love of country over here in the greatest country in the world (read: has the most money) and as we all learned from Mr. Show, “More Money = Better Than.”

Maher is impartial and looks at the 9/11 attacks objectively. The only ones who have any right to be upset with him and D'Souza for what they said are those who lost loved ones or their homes or were injured. In their cases, irrational bias is perfectly justified.

Maher's show was cancelled not long after this episode aired. He got a new show on HBO in 2003, Real Time with Bill Maher. Again, HBO veterans united, and now we have Religulous.

Maher is as polarizing a national figure as one will find. Jackass, or the biggest balls in the nation? He's said plenty of things that support the former and plenty of things that support the latter. The man essentially demands an opinion. Just one look at a picture of his smug face and snide expression elicits a strong reaction.


Mine used to be that he was a jackass, but now, after watching two of his HBO comedy specials and watching select episodes of Real Time and old episodes of Politically Incorrect, and seeing his unapologetic attitude of contempt for the American public, often saying things so wildly contrarian, that there must be an inkling of calculated offense in them, I’ve decided that the man has balls. Balls in the way Sacha Baron Cohen had balls, stepping into the lion’s den of hostile provincialism and slathering himself in barbecue sauce and offering baiting commentary like so much bloody pork, his whole being a walking bait just begging to brave situations of unthinkable social awkwardness, situations which had me cowering behind my fingers out of embarrassment and discomfort while Cohen boldly, self-destructively charged into the fray. I doubt Maher will come close to that, but from the trailers, it looks like he is very conscious of his director’s previous documentary/social commentary/comedy of manners/assault on propriety/stunt and must do his best to meet its challenge. If anybody’s up to the task, it’s Maher. We shall see on October 3.

Michelangelo Antonioni's L’avventura (1960)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) is one of my most favorite films, exploring the incompatibility of the primal elements of nature with human beings, specifically human beings who think they have civilized the inhospitable by maintaining a rigorously prim lifestyle of corsets, frocks, and immaculate white lace dresses. Mrs. Appleyard’s Victorian-fashioned girls’ school plants their field trip in the muggy, buzzing mosslands of Hanging Rock, certain their propriety and neck-to-ankle-length dresses will ward off the wilderness. For the school’s presumption, three of the girls vanish, to god knows where, seemingly swallowed into the earth.

Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura’s premise is identical, but serving different purposes: a group of Italian bourgeoisie out yachting find themselves drawn to a poker-faced landmass, an island, whose features are often shot to accentuate their permanence as compared to the dwarfed ephemera of the tourists. Whereas the Rock in Weir’s film evoked a more actively malevolent presence, the rocks and quarries on the anonymous island in Antonioni’s film are indifferent to the visitors, though the indifference is frighteningly implacable, and accompanied by the ever-present sound of the wind, the island begins to give the impression that it is harboring secrets. One of those secrets is the whereabouts of Anna (Lea Massari), ostensibly the lead female character in the film – she is introduced to us before anyone else (the film opens with Anna persuading her father not to worry about the yachting excursion). Anna’s boyfriend or fiancée, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and her best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitti), join her on the trip, as well as some other friends.

Anna comes from a wealthy family, is spoiled, and jaded in a petulant sort of way that renders her dissipated restlessness more unlikable than the others, who, granted, are as listless and idle as she, though without the nasty attitude. These people have nothing to do and nowhere to go: ennui hangs over them all as darkly as the uniform cloud that shudders quietly over the island as they idle on land. Anna, so bored she has begun to play irresponsible tricks on her friends and loved ones by claiming to have come within proximity of a shark, seems to be asking for it, and indeed, It answers, and she abruptly disappears, triggering the alarm of her fellow island-loiterers, who then search for her earnestly and without results. It appears her dissipation was more profound than it appeared.

Whether the disappearance is literal or not can be puzzled over for hours – the whole film presents itself in a protracted state of meditative aimlessness, saying nothing, revealing nothing, doing nothing, really, but at the same time, expressing everything.

Some audiences don’t like to fill in the blanks provided by a film, but what is art if not a communication of sensibilities? How is the art to linger in the crevices of your brain if you’ve solved it, know it top to bottom, understand it thoroughly? Film is a medium that is too often used as vulgar diversion, and not enough as a means of refinement. How is one to hear God without silence and stillness (the two things American audiences find utterly anathema when sitting down to watch a movie)?

One might say, after watching Claudia guiltily succumb to Sandro’s affections only to see him cheating on her with a prostitute late in the film, that the disappearance of Anna earlier was not literal, but symbolic of the manner in which men and women, after growing tired with their current lover, lose sight of them. I think the mystery is part of the fascination of Antonioni’s film, a haunting hypothesis that the more insolent a person is in broadcasting their dissatisfaction, how bored they are by existence, the sooner existence will let them know how bored it is of them.


Grade: A+