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.