Blue New Year

BLUE VALENTINE comes out December 31st, 2010. Spoilers below, so if you’re interested in this film (and you should be) wait till you see it before reading.

**

Despite the waterworks of tears BLUE VALENTINE is almost systematically-designed to illicit—especially with a New Years release date, preying on the bleary-eyed nostalgia and half-hopes of its audience – it is a film that concerns itself with a particularly desiccating process: the evaporation of true love, and the writhing corpse of a once-great relationship left drying in the harsh sun.

Its sad, for sure, but not because it strives to be depressing or because it heralds the dramatic failure of true, passionate love. We know from the beginning this couple is broken. The tragedy of BLUE VALENTINE is not that they are out of love now, but just how deeply they were in it. It’s a smart, if not wholly original take on the process of exploring “what went wrong” – show it all wrong, then show how very right it once was. This isn’t manipulative; this is life, a vessel of sadness, constantly being filled. So, to use a terminological approach, BLUE VALENTINE is tristful, full of sad things, without being lugubrious, excessively dismal. Its realism is one of its central pillars; perhaps THE pillar that elevates it and makes it a good film (maybe not a GREAT film, maybe an overhyped one, but a film people—people who can stomach this much reality— need to see).

A husband and wife in the throes of a divorce, and then flashbacks to see how happy they once were. If this sounds uncharacteristically simple for a feature film plot, that’s because it is, and this is one of the film’s great strengths. More than almost any film this year, BLUE VALENTINE’s success comes down to the performances of its chief players, and it’s a wildly successful turn for both cutiepie Michelle Williams and hipster-sexy Ryan Gosling, the latter channeling a chain-smoking Marlon Brando in his rough charm. Even if Gosling is a bit too attractive to buy as a bluecollar lugger-of-boxes along the waterfront, we must remember Brando was as well. He chews on his lines just enough, given them some masticated authenticity that works for him and for the movie. Williams is a bit more understated and almost defensively so; the film asks much more of her than Gosling, positioning her as both a villain and a tragic hero, and featuring her in some of the more intense, controversial scenes.

Still, for its familiar, paired-down plot there’s a very interesting thematic moment here, albeit one that’s unfortunately practically spelled out in dialogue, where the assumption that a man who doesn’t cheat on his wife and who is a good father to their child should be enough for any woman – which is a really anti-feminist, inflammatory idea. And one that I think is part of the natural emotional response to the film – he TOOK HER DAUGHTER IN! He is so SWEET WITH THE LITTLE GIRL (even though he’s constantly puffing smoke in her face). He is SO ROMANTIC! And what’s Michelle William’s response? She’s bored. She wants the jock who was an asshole to her all along. She listless and hysterical and emotionally distant. What a bitch! Doesn’t BLUE VALENTINE blame her for the couple’s irreconcilable disconnect? Isn’t she the one who has changed?

I’m not so sure, and here is where the performances, and the film, succeeds. The film ends with an ironic barrage of fireworks (so loud, so celebratory, here at the quietly bitter end) – but it ends brilliantly, because even though you know this relationship is over—really over—you don’t quite know whose fault it is. It transcends fault. And that’s even sadder. I think it's interesting that the inclination is to blame her, because her malaise feels so disproportionate to Gosling's actual crimes (what, he likes to drink? He's a bit lazy?) But who is anyone to judge how much someone should love another? How can we actually know what it feels like? We can't, and so blame isn't quite so easy to assign.

So there’s something a bit retro and definitely refreshing about this small film, as focused as a laser, but still one that will allow fun and a bit of humor to leak into even the gravest scenes. I’m no expert in the Nineties (I can’t tell you if Guns ‘N Roses or Aerosmith wrote SWEET CHILD OF MINE -- which is like, surely, some sort of litmus test), but something about the sweetness of the romance here reminds me a lot more of films like GROUNDHOGS DAY than the lovey-dovey shits that Penny Marshall pinches out into the Toilet Bowl of current cinema. Sure, the bleak, not-exactly-life-affirming ending is more of an indie film’s response to the blithely sunny nineties (post-Smith, post-Harmony Korine), but there aren’t many films like BLUE VALENTINE with big stars like Williams and Gosling in them. And I think, for all it’s hype, it’s worth making ourselves a bit sad over. Because at least that’s something. Unlike IT’S COMPLICATED, it isn’t very complicated, it’s just sort of real, and that’s kind of nice.

FACEBOOK ME

The “Facebook Movie” is, of course, not about Facebook at all. It’s the most Grecian of tragedies, with the most postmodern of codas. For insomuch that Zuckerberg is our Agamemnon, he isn’t undone by Hubris as much as belabored by Zeal. In fact, he isn’t undone at all. What’s essential to this dramatization, and what Fincher is perspicacious enough to left uneditorialized, is that Zuckerberg wins. The postscript lays it all out: Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s youngest billionaire. Maybe he lost 65 million dollars but, in the grand scheme of things (as poor, underused Rasheeda Jones points out) it’s just a “speeding ticket.”

The game has changed, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not about who comes out richer, but who finds what they are looking for in what is undoubtedly a spiritual sense. Why do you look so sad, Jesse Eisenberg, typing away like that in your hoodie as our movie comes to a close? Aren’t you rich? This is the postmodern element that makes this film so fascinating – this drive towards self-actualization, this general, unspecified malaise that Zuckerberg couldn’t get away from, no matter how many “friends” he accumulated or dollars they amounted to. Because all he really wanted, all he still wants, is dear sweet Erica from Boston University to accept his friend request. But she never, ever will.

It’s succinct, beautiful, perfectly within the film’s own vernacular: Mark “Refreshing” Facebook over and over and over until the credits sweep us away. This is Sorkin at his best. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is all about SPEED – the meteoric rise of this idea, the brutally quick way alliances are formed and broken, the actual server that allows uninterrupted browsing. The film constantly refreshes itself, moving the plot forward, updating the tally, driving us home. It moves so fast. It’s a rousing theatrical experience because it refuses to stop and reflect; we aren’t asked to side with Mark or with Eduardo or the Winklevosses or Justin freaken Timberlake. They’re all sort of assholes (or, in sweet Eduardo’s case, maybe just sort of limited).

All we’re ask to do is watch the user tally climb towards a million and gasp, occasionally, as the meaning of “friendship” is effectively hollowed from its core. Like CATFISH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK concerns itself with how the medium has changed and how this affects the messages sent. It’s when friendship becomes ‘Friendship,’ relationships are something that are denoted with a ‘Status,’ “poking” is some sort of meaningless flirtatious device (drained of sexuality, but unmistakably sexual). But the moral of both films (if there is one: CATFISH obsesses with its moral, to its detriment; THE SOCIAL NETWORK obstinately refuses to moralize, to its credit) is that these changes in language—in how words are used and what people say—actually erodes some sort of essential and human part of what it means to interact in society. “But he was your only friend!” someone (actually) audibly gasped in my rapt audience when Zuckerberg effectively fucked over Eduardo (a betrayal we all know is coming anyway). But the point is that while maybe he was he isn’t anymore—not because Mark has made more intimate connections, but rather because the meaning of friendship has changed. It is flimsier, easier to come by, able to be monetized. Being friends just doesn’t have the weight it used to. Unlike the grand mahogany of Fincher’s Harvard, with its 350 year old buildings and sturdy tradition, friendships are something built on a house of cards. This is as close to a buddy film as I’ve seen all year, and it does more to decry a genuine threat to FRIENDSHIP, in a person-to-person sense, in an intimate sense, than any film I can recall.

Coming from a role in a beautifully shot HOLY ROLLERS (shout out, Kutchins), Jesse Eisenberg is fantastic here, offering up a crucially different performance than we’ve seen from him yet. Though likely a reflection of the longer-than-usual shoot schedule that allowed for multiple takes (shout out, Zimet), not to mention Fincher’s general genius as a director of human actors, Eisenberg performance is marked by a sort of much needed nuance. He somehow plays Zuckerberg unJewish – Mark’s biggest fear is losing his sheen and having to go back to Caribbean Night at AEPi (which, we are clearly reminded, is the Jewish fraternity). In the old money stench of Harvard Square, this fear is sadly resonant. Eisenberg nails it. Justin Timberlake’s character is a bit more facilely written, but he is charming and slimy enough to pull it off. I think its fascinating that Timberlake, for all the paranoia the film assigns him, for his clear-cut delusions of grandeur, ends up BEING RIGHT. Facebook had unimaginable potential; they couldn’t even conceive just how valuable it was all going to become. His inchoate fears of persecution and invasion of privacy are the exact sentiments his actions, and the Facebook in general, are fostering in the world. A soldier of transparency who realizes he too can be seen – it’s a tragic case.

To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to a film about a Harvard geek writing computer code and making a lot of money. I even resented the idea of it a bit – the implication that BECAUSE Zuckerberg struck it so rich we should all care. But I was wrong. This movie stands up to its hype. It isn’t about money but rather the sobering fact that money is besides the point for people who are a certain way. Zuckerberg will never be happy because he’ll always feel like an outcast. Even when he isn’t an outcast at all, even when he’s president of a Fortune 500 company, even when he can buy all the Final Clubs at Harvard. For who cares if you can nail the groupies and the Victoria Secret models when all you really want is that cute girl from B.U. who wears the funny hats? The nice one. The one who clicked ignore.

A FISH TALE THAT REALLY WAS

See CATFISH. Even if it isn’t the greatest movie ever made, it’s certainly one of the greatest movie experiences I’ve had in a very long time. To discuss its plot is, in some ways, to spoil that experience. Suffice it to say that this is a documentary film following a New Yorker’s true-life interaction with an Midwestern internet penpal and her extended family. Oh yeah, and it’s one of the most neve-rackingly scary films I’ve seen in years. Light spoilers alert, so ye who tread here shall consider thineself warned.

**

The proximity to the release of Sorkin’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK feels too reflexive to be coincidence; how else to explain the weird echo these films pass between them. If Facebook allows identity—in that is encourages an online, electronic, searchable simulacra—it follows, because this is the way of things, that there can be a corruption of that process. Identity can be forged; is forged. Still, this fact, to borrow a term, this inconvenient truth, remains ego-dystonic—sociologically speaking. Even though we “know” chatrooms are populated with liars, pictures are outdated, profiles are manipulatively tailored, we continue ‘believing’ in a virtual and untestable reality, and we do so almost blithely. We know but we don’t know. The internet confuses, almost magically, the credible and the veracious.

CATFISH is smart enough to glimpse the dark side of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, or a least the dark side of humanity given the resources that Facebook and its ilk have allowed. Though I suppose it is an intrinsic quality of its documentary form, I love that the movie is such a product of its time – so late 2000s. I can’t think of another film I’ve seen recently that so elegantly presents a problematic element of popular culture and, instead of shying away from or trying to explain it, allows it to just flitter away—an extinguished fire work; an ember. CATFISH doesn't seek to provide solutions, its filmmakers too enamored with their own discovery (and selves) to really care. But the "problem" at the heart of CATFISH is indeed a problem of our society, and it’s a testament of what good documentary can do: turn us towards things we had been gazing at, unknowingly, all along.

Is it manipulative? Sure. Ethically questionable? You’d be foolish to think otherwise—consent is a fiction of the industry. But CATFISH works, either as a documentary film that feels like a narrative one, or as a narrative film in “documentary style.” Though I understand it to be a documentary, to present a “reality,” it is a great test case for how reality is constructed, an expose of the apparatus of Storytelling itself. Nev and his brother create the tale they want to tell; they feed into it. Their crimes, if crimes be committed, are too messily woven into Angela’s own. Surely they stumbled upon a truly sick woman, surely they “lucked out” in the documentary sense: setting out upon a quite different story, they possess verite footage from almost the offset of this strange internet relationship. This creates a truly satisfying narrative arch. When Nev finds the postcards he mailed months ago in an abandoned mailbox supposedly belonging to Angela’a daughter, the film has a visual drama rarely seen even in scripted work. When the monster movie these filmmakers are filming actually provides a monster (in the form of two severely retarded, uncomfortable-to-watch-on-film mentally handicapped adolescents) it’s almost “too good to be true.” But there's a lot to the edit, folks. There's a lot that is what it is because CATFISH is being made. A story is assembled, not just chanced upon.

To Good To Be True. That’s certainly an idiomatic expression CATFISH wrestles with, and in that way is a comment on filmmaking itself. Maybe not just filmmaking, maybe (and I know it sound cheesy) society in general: a society of such exposure and simultaneous loneliness that middle-aged woman pretend to be sexy young girls; that the urbane—or probably just hipster—fall for the illusion; that pierced illusion (“Pierce,” the family’s surname, a delicious rhetorical petit four; one of the film’s several) someone doesn’t destroy the story but create a story in itself. Surely CATFISH the documentary about a talented eight year old artist would never play at Sundance, would never challenge audiences with as titillating ethical and psychological dimensions as CATFISH the story of the bat-shit insane. Or a society where such a basket-case, such a obviously injured subject, will so eagerly sign a release form saying show me off. Where the whole story's all right there on digital record.

When all is said and done, if we can create a persona on Facebook aren’t we creating a ‘story’ anyway? This horror film endeavors to follow the thread of one woman’s deceit, but somehow its particular horror lies not only in the extremity of this woman’s case, but in its very proximity to our lives. It is uncanny, unheimlich, in the most classically Freudian of senses; CATFISH is scary because it’s so very Heimlich , so frighteningly close to home. Its homespun, let-me-tell-you-a-story qualities distinguish it as truly original...but also strangely familiar. It could have been made by any of my (Facebook) friends. I’ll tell you this, I can’t get it out of my mind. It got to me.

But I think I Like it.

THE SUBURBS Has Its Draws

I was predisposed not to like ARCADE FIRE’S (the have seemed to drop the definite article) latest release THE SUBURBS for two reasons: 1) As we all know, I’m a natural iconoclast; but more importantly 2) an indie rock band with such widely affluent fans calling their album THE SUBURBS is the bombastic equivalent of Baz Luhrmann releasing a movie entitled AUSTRALIA -- who the fuck do you think you are? Why are you the spokesperson to something so vast and emotionally stirring?

And the album isn’t great by any means, if greatness is measured in catchiness, energy, sales potential, number of singles, or creative experimentation. But I do think it’s a success, not only because the “music” at Best Buy sharing shelf-space with THE SUBURBS is so egregious, but simply because of the atmosphere this album manages to create. I own few albums that so effectively instills a mood and doesn’t endeavor to puncture it just to illustrate how diverse-sounding and adaptable the band can be. Arcade Fire is content with their sleepy/dreamy/wistful Indian Summer contemplating fireflies in mall parking lots; doesn’t need the anthemic “Wake Up” or the elegiac “Haiti;” doesn’t need the turbo-charge of “No Cars Go” or baroque drama of “My Body Is a Cage” – no, not here, not on this car ride. All it needs is gas, and maybe some snacks for the kids.

Here instead we get music that is literally rococo: “Rococo” and “Modern Man” and “Half Light II” are asymmetrical, detour-prone, detail-obsessed suburban koans. They never soar, but they digest easy; succinct bonbons of feeling that Arcade Fire seems uniquely adept at doling out. The exception to this is certainly “Sprawl II,” which manages to both feel more in the spirit of FUNERAL and NEON BIBLE yet also serve as a likely and fitting culmination to the (probably over-long) journey that THE SUBURBS ultimately is. It’s an instant classic, wherever or not it’s even actually very good (awkward phrases like “shopping malls rise like mountains upon mountains” makes me wonder if this is the same band that scribed songs like the lyrically-perfect and utterly-simple “In the Backseat”).

So the album ultimately is quite limited in some ways despite its own obvious (and certainly thematic) sprawl. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to dismiss, rather like the suburbs itself it remains inoffensive, familiar and anonymous at once, affordable for all it offers even if the highs aren’t quite as high as in the big city. Like the band professed in the underrated b-side “(antichrist television blues)” they may not wanna live in a building downtown, but hearing the listlessness of these sixteen tracks, I’m not sure the suburbs are doing for it for them either.

Somewhat Uninceptional

I liked INCEPTION, Christopher’s Nolan’s latest blockbuster and cinema-forum hot topic, although I liked it in a way that is very close to that ineffable distinction between what is a dream and what is a nightmare: more a matter of mood than of content. A rare 2.5 hour drama (no jokes!) through which I didn’t look at my watch once, I enjoyed the experience and scale of what was going on – especially because I saw this movie “properly” on the one ‘real’ IMAX in New York City. It felt good, it felt fun, it felt exciting. I'm just not sure why. Content-wise this film was far, far less than it could have and should have been.


I once dreamed about my grandmother playing chinese-checkers with a wet suit-clad reptile. Nolan apparently dreams about James Bond movies: mercenaries on skies, security guides with semis, tall buildings loaded with explosives. The dreamworld of INCEPTION is so heavily rooted to reality that it becomes indebted to reality in a way that isn’t entirely positive. Ultimately it’s an issue of mise-en-scène: Nolan doesn’t care about a dream’s bizarre facets, the concatenation of truths and fictions, the clang associations that populate our unconscious. In fact INCEPTION doesn’t quite deal with the unconscious at all. Rather it dives with abandon into something of a pre-conscious: the tip-of-the-tongue; the nearly-formed, just barely out-of-reach, abstruse landscape of creation.


“Dream” is the word that keeps popping up in the literally pedantic stretches of dialogue that connect moments of (truly spectacular) special FX and heart-pumping action. INCEPTION’s concept of “dream” is about the origin of ideas, a.k.a. inspiration. It’s not the “dream” of The Interpretation of Dreams: the puerile peregrination through fantasy. That’s an almost definitional difference we are dealing with. Unlike a Kaufman or Gondry or David Lynch movie, INCEPTION leaves the "personal" off the table – DiCaprio’s dream can be Ellen Page’s dream can be Benazir Bhutto’s dream can be yours or mine. It also leaves the personnel off the table -- there is nothing here in the way of a character or particularly convincing performance (baring, perhaps, the energetic Marion Cotillard). This isn't a movie about people dreaming, it's a movie about "dreams" disembodied, in a way, from humanity. INCEPTION's “Dream” is a creative breeding ground, call it limbo or what have you, right before the Realm-of-the-Idea. It isn’t a playground for our desires to run amuck, get into scuffles, act out, hide, play, create, fuck. In short, no latent content here: Nolan’s dreamscape is blithely un-Freudian, terrestrial, and literal.


And quite frankly, sort of prosaic. Nolan is too mainstream for INCEPTION to be great (but just mainstream enough to allow such a tricky movie to get greenlit .) I’m not talking ticket sales, I’m talking about personally. His sort of fascination is with reality and memory, truly epic stuff, but his sensibility is that of a clinical thinker. He’s Not Weird Enough. That’s what it boils down to. I think about a tremendous moment in ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND when Jim Carrey, running to find his rapidly-erasing lover in the streets of his memory, is startled by a sports utility vehicle that seemingly falls out of the sky. It’s a strange moment that isn’t “explained” in any traditional way – it’s just at this point in his eroding recollection the landscape is changing; cars are dropping from point A to B; fences are erected and destroyed; shit is fucked up. I love the weirdness, the violence, the disconnect. INCEPTION could never have a moment like this because the film feels such a compulsion to explain, to not be ludicrous, to not give into its watery and dreamy logic. For it wants real-world logic, even in dreams. And maybe that’s just the kind of movie Nolan wanted, which is fine. But for me, given my personal tastes, given my own relationship to dreams (both my own and the dreams of classic literature), this didn’t quite work.


But I don’t understand the complain that INCEPTION is “confusing”; I mean, quite seriously, that this film was not confusing enough by half. Confusing suggests in a sense “designed to confuse” but INCEPTION was apparently designed to make everything so perfectly plausible that it couldn’t help throwing “rules” in our faces. Sure they may be a lot of them, sure its complex, sure it’s massively over-determined, but its not confusing. I wish Nolan would let go of his boyscout fidelity to “sense,” but I’m just seeing more and more that he’s not that kind of filmmaker. Despite being the “baby” that he waited ten years to have the creative and literal capital to make, INCEPTION is a film that would have been better if it was made by somebody else. Nolan is a good action director but he has editing problems; the “multiple layers” of simultaneous events failed in a way the final scene of THE DARK KNIGHT or much of BATMAN BEGINS did. Things don’t quite mesh, which is problematic when the multiple worlds Nolan is trying to “layer” end up feeling like just one world that’s massively cluttered.


Still, if you take it on it’s own grounds; if you play by its own rules, there is a tightness and syllogism to INCEPTION that’s hard not to like. It’s easy to stitch a tightly-knit fabric when you control the loom: so can you get yourself out of any (narrative) trouble if you’re the one who writes the laws. We can appreciate the final product, but it can never be “great.” Or maybe just this one isn’t. In the end INCEPTION is something of a bassoon: an overwrought, ponderous, behemoth of an instrument, playing an elegant and elegiac song; probably not for everyone.

Getting LOST

Series spoilers below if you haven’t yet watched LOST.

***
"Not until we are lost, do we begin to understand ourselves" -- H.D. Thoreau

When I decided the actual act of blogging was less odious than the word blogging or the concept of being a—shudder—blogger, I made a pact with myself: alright, I’ll do this…but no writing about LOST. Until, I amended off-the-bat, it’s all ending.

The end of LOST is here. I’ve spent many an hour boring my girlfriend with endless musings about the direction of the show (which she didn’t then watch and does—for the sake of our relationship—now). I’ve gotten more than five friends addicted to it, consuming the DVDs happily and hungrily as I muttered ‘I told you so’ from the sidelines. In the last three years I’ve been to Hawaii, somewhat accidentally and almost always regrettably, eleven times…and found myself tied into LOST in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. It’s probably most succinctly captured in an afternoon I spent hiking a volcano alone on a day-off. I was spacing out on my hike trying to wrap my head around the mysteries of the show -- basically what has been my "default mode" intellectual masturbation for the last five years. Suddenly, out of the ether that was a jungle trail on that overcast Hawaiian Saturday, Michael Emerson (who plays ‘Ben’) comes down the mountain, just hiking for the day with his wife. I’m thinking about Ben and then suddenly he’s there: just the three of us there on the trail. I conjured him into existence. My very own LOST moment; a bit of island magic.

LOST is and always was a show about BIG IDEAS, and so it’s notoriously hard to summarize or describe to nonbelievers. Sort of like Scientology. It’s a philosophical show that owes its existence to a far-flung range of material (e.g., the video game enigma MYST, the standards-setting TWIN PEAKS, the intellectual series THE PRISONER). But unlike these sources (with the exception of season one of TP, and of course THE X FILES) it’s achieved sometime more commercial. Romance, action-adventure, even soap-opera…these genres are invoked in LOST as much as its weirder sci-fi status. So it’s a show that can be watched by a wide range of folks, be they Susie Q. Forever 21 (Cheerleader in Wantagh), Bryan James Uniqlo (Disaffected in Greenpoint), or Martin Van Heusen (Middle-aged in Middlebury). It has that elusive and financially-desirable thing: POPULAR APPEAL.

These two sides to the LOST coin (big ideas/popular appeal) has created quite a unique and heady brew. I love that LOST wants viewers to ask important questions about themselves and their lives. That being said, I also love that LOST is fun, fast, and eminently-digestible. There are sexy men and women shaking their goods, running from bad-guys, blowing shit up, banging one another, laughing, loving, surviving, falling, dying, growing, running, sweating. It’s a show of gerunds – a DOING-SHOW if you will– and moreover, a doing-show that’s meticulously thoughtful. It’s its own species in many ways.

Yet I’m going to argue that in being so uniquely crafted, LOST sacrifices a bit of its intellectual cohesiveness and creative finesse. The show wears its influences and philosophical-leanings on its sleeve – its characters are named things like Hume and Locke and Rousseau. But it never directly extrapolates on the IDEAS of these philosophers. It’s more of a postmodern philosophical pastiche, concerned with the IDEA of philosophy more than the endeavor if it. It has epistemological auspices but fails to provide the systematic rigor of analysis or deconstruction. So it’s a “smart show” for sure but, unfortunately, not one that has much to say.

Yes, LOST seems to not have much to offer. It’s a hard thing for me to sort of arrive at, and I definitely wouldn’t have imagined this in seasons one or three, but in the end I think what’s most important about LOST was the fact that it made us think it was important. It Jacobed us. And by that I mean it enticed us with an interesting, personal, eye-to-eye intellectual connection that never really materialized. AND THAT’S FINE. We weren’t actually candidates at all, and yet we couldn’t help pushing the button for six seasons straight. Listen, the secret to life is probably not going to be hidden in a show starring that douche-y guy from PARTY OF FIVE and some hot born-again Canadian non-actress. The secret to life isn’t going to be written by the people who brought us NASH BRIDGES (Lindeloff), WALKER, TEXAS RANGER (Cuse) or ALIAS (Abrams) – no matter how good those shows actually were or were not. LOST is a rube, a hell of a good one. It isn’t about the answers, it never was. It’s about the questions, how deftly the writers shifted our focus from what was important to WHAT IS IMPORTANT NOW. There is no secret answer, no meaning for the island, no perfect concept that will unlock the show. It’s as ethereal and mercurial as mystery itself; it’s own smoke-monster; formless, inchoate, lost itself.

So the very nature of the show goes against the very idea of ending it. Towards these ends, I think we were bound to be a bit let down by the final season. Closure is never an easy thing for a series, especially one of this creative caliber. But here, thematically, closure is about the hardest thing it can do. LOST is about endless cycles, passing stewardship of the island to future generations, going back in time and giving yourself the compass you went back in time to give yourself. Mobius strips of infinite nuance. I really did not love this season, and all the parts I didn’t love were parts that seemed more like lucid offerings to the answer-starved audience at home. I don’t WANT Smokey’s origins meticulously described. I don’t WANT to know the “rules.” I don’t want to know who the skeletons in the freaken caves were. Who the hell cares? LOST, being a populist show, had to kowtow a bit to its fans…and so I think it lost a little of what made it unique: deflection, slight-of-hand, withholding. It isn’t a show that gives; it’s a show that demands attention to detail, careful analysis, the frustration of feeling lost. Yes, LOST is the most perfectly titled show I’ve ever seen.

It also, in providing some undergraduate philosophy about the duality of goodness and evil, the interchangeability of such terms, the relativistic argument, created quite the pickle for its writers. We don’t know whom to route for anymore – both Jacob and the ‘Man In Black’ alternate as the “good guy” and the “bad guy.” As much as its brash iconography of white and black suggests otherwise, LOST as a philosophical text is offering that there is no true ‘good’ or ‘evil’…there is only perception. An eye opening, the overused perseverative image of the show, means just that: we SEE and we EXPERIENCE and that is how we choose sides. There are no others; we are the others; the others are the others. Its fertile philosophical ground, for sure, but it makes it hard to write compelling stories on a script-by-script basis. We need to care about characters fates (which is a bit undone by the “multiple realities” of this season) and we need to know who to route for (I certain don’t anymore, do you?) – screenwriting 101. It may be a logical place for the story to have gone, and it may be executed as well as these capable writers can muster, but in the end it’s simply not as compelling TV as previous seasons. So LOST falters on both sides of its unique duality: too populist to be truly intellectual; too intellectual to work fully as popcorn TV.

Despite this, despite Matthew Fox’s "acting", despite Nikki and Paolo, despite Eko’s untimely demise, despite Ana Lucia’s bitching, despite the bad, LOST matters. It isn’t THE SOPRANOS. It isn’t THE WIRE. But it matters. It matters because human beings spent hours of their limited time on earth watching it, sharing it, discussing it with friends and family. It matters because of what it was, rather than what it had to say. It matters because as a show it was fun, often well-written, popcorn entertainment. It matters because it made me love TV. It matters because Jacob told us so. It matters because we enjoyed getting lost so very much: we wandered back to the trail, we looked again into the jungle, we heard something rumbling out there. We ran. We pushed the button. We gave ourselves the compass we gave ourselves.

IRON SINKS

Blog entries lambasting flaccid and disappointing sequels are a dime a dozen on the internet these days, so by all means stop reading now. Your time is probably better spent trying to get the plastic off a Polly-O string cheese (that you’re not even going to eat) while watching Jeff Francoeur strike out looking AGAIN against the freaken San Francisco Giants for the love of Christ. You're killing me Francoeur! Sorry that’s just what I was doing.

Still with me? Fools. Anyway, yes, I have to say I’m disappointed by IRON MAN 2, which falls into all the trappings of what can succinctly be dubbed ‘sequel-itis’. It’s bigger…it’s grander…it’s MORE EXPLOSIVE….and all at the mere cost of everything that made the original off-beat, exhilarating, and enjoyably simple. To the IRON MAN franchise, Robert Downey Jr. is the sexy salesman whose charm is indistinguishable from the product he’s selling. If the movie biz doesn’t quite pan-out, RDJ has a viable career hocking Rube Goldburg culinary apparatuses on late-night TV. Surely he and his ilk are the reason anyone in this great country owns something as head-scratching as the As-Seen-On-TV ‘Slap Chop.’ But after a couple of years shining your shoes they can appear a little over-buffed; and thus, as with any salesman, peddling the same act after a while ends up feeling a little sad. I’m not accusing RDJ of not having any fun with the role, I’m just musing on the idea that the role is so utterly fun that he sort of neglects there’s anything else he can be doing.

Not that the failure here is RDJ, he’s the best Tony Stark this mediocre script could have conjured forward. Justin Theroux, whose on-camera work I admire so much in David Lynch films, seemed an odd duck choice to pen this sequel – but, hell, I was game. Not sure Mr. Theroux was really up for the task, it seems, regurgitating up the same-old sequel tropes we desperately do not need to see another time. This is why Mickey Rourke is unremarkable here (I still thing he’s a fantastic in THE WRESTLER and definitely capable of more than we saw in this film). Avenging his father by killing the son of his nemesis is well-trodden terrain, fine, but the Vankos men are so unilaterally villainous here that there’s not anything in the way of dramatic tension – we know who are the good guys, we know who are the bad guys, we know what the outcome's gonna be, and that’s all fine and dandy.

I guess for some that’s as much as they can ask from a quote unquote comic book movie; some people happily divide their mashed potatoes from their beef Wellington on their plate, and won’t start on one until they’ve had the last bite of the other. But I’ve always enjoyed complicating it a bit – having villains who, even if ultimately beyond salvation, at least emerge into villainy from empathetic circumstances. Ivan Vankos senior turns out to never have been the one to create the arch-reactor; it was always Tony Stark Senior (a well-cast John Slattery) -- he's as brilliant and unimpeachably sanguine as we were always led to believe.

It’s boring. Give us a struggle where Tony has to cognate the idea that his all-mighty father may have been a fraud. In other words, give us human weakness. And then, from that lowest of low points, givs us human triumph. Of course this is what IRON MAN should be about, the fragility of the human beneath the iron. The inability of man to control these outsized weapons, because man himself is beyond control. Hence the real struggle in Tony Stark’s life should be what it is in the comic series—his very-real alcoholism—and not the preposterous construct of Polonium-sickness or whatever radiation poisoning Tony was fighting for three-fourths of the film. This is another scripting problem: what’s the point of giving Tony this disease when there’s no chance in hell there isn’t going to be some eleventh-hour cure, making everything right, saving the day. Had Tony’s problem been alcoholism, the struggle is at once more human but also more thoroughly insidious: Tony is the KIND OF PERSON who can lose control. And a gun in the hands of that kind of person…

Maybe I want too much, it’s just the original film had so many individual delights that I enthusiastically pre-purchased my Saturday night tickets for IRON MAN 2. It’s not a slap in the face it’s just boring in a flashy way. And I almost prefer genuine , quiet, library-boredom over tedious explosions and high-octane ennui. Thank goodness for the smarmy performance by Sam Rockwell as Stark’s chief industrial competitor, a definite highlight for me (Gwyneth, Don Cheadle, Scarlet Johannson are all fine…there’s just not much for any of them to do but sit around and wait for the sequel).

Perhaps IRON MAN 2’s failings are best illustrated by its uninspired handling of what can be called the “secret scene.” The secret scene, as a concept, is a gift to the Fanboys: a tacit contract between filmmaker and comic book nerd that promises that, just for a moment or two, we won’t pander you with back-story because we know you know. But when the wink-wink moments are reduced to such brash iconography—the toss-away appearance of Captain America’s shield, the final glimpse of Thor’s hammer—the loving enthusiasm is a bit harder to muster. I felt like I was being advertised to; hell, I was being advertised to. Surely you don’t need to be a frequenter of "Aint It Cool News" to at least have SOME awareness Hollywood is gearing up for the next round of Marvel superheroes; hell, they’ve been beating us over the head with The Avengers movie since the first IRON MAN. Listen, I get the point here, brand marketing and the appeal of the tie-in and whatnot, but I’m just a bit sick of the artifice. It most certainly aint cool. It’s business. Give us something surprising, not just a tag to the next in a succession of Marvel Studios films. I know CAPTAIN AMERICA is coming and I know THOR is right around the corner, the question is why should I go see these films. Because, if they’re taking their cues from this movie, I very well might not.

The other film I saw this weekend was the latest torture-porn touchstone THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. For all the dramatic press and buzz among horror fans, the whole outing came off as rather a lame attempt to be shocking, but I guess that’s what you can expect when a film wears its conceit so unabashedly on its sleeve. In that way IRON MAN and THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (I’m sparing you all the details on that one by the way—google it if you really want to know) have more in common than I had expected. Both have severely limited ambitions to be nothing more than exactly what you’d expect.



And I'll leave you with that, to piece together.

SHINING ISLAND

SPOILER ALERT

If any other film director had made SHUTTER ISLAND  -- except maybe a couple, whom I will get to – I would have hated it. As is, it’s merely a joke on the audience, a Rembrandt’s version of “Dog’s Playing Poker,” masterfully-conceived crap, but crap nonetheless.

I didn’t hate this film, which has enough to admire by way of photography and directorial smirks that you wanna pull up a stool next to Scorsese and say convivially, ‘hey, look Marty, loved that shot, but the story’s a KLUNKER!’ Some particular moments stand out: the tracking shot behind the Nazi firing-squad victims is artful and dynamic – captures almost everything about INGLORIOUS BASTERDS in one snow-bright, grotesque shot. Or Michelle Williams, who is just so unbelievable beautiful it’s almost funny to think that she was “the one who looked like a manatee” on Dawson’s Creek while the world pined for Katie Holmes. But we so much younger then.

But even perfectly cooked stool is gonna taste like shit, and thus is the case with SHUTTER ISLAND – all the director’s touches in the world can’t seem to lift it above the schlocky source material. Can we blame Scorsese for this? At first I thought no, we couldn’t – maybe he wrung every single original idea out of this particular wet sponge – but the more I think about it the more I believe that, as in THE AVIATOR, our top-of-the-class director may be a bit too convinced of his own status as FILMMAKER, that the filmmaking tends to come second.

Actually, maybe not top-of-the-class, because Scorsese to me was always like the workhorse salutatorian in the high-school graduating class of important modern directors. Forever immersed and dedicated in his work, yet somehow never matching the natural brilliance, effortless arrogance, and total control of Stanley Kubrick as valedictorian. And surely SHUTTER ISLAND is as much of a love-letter to Kubrick as it is a cry of look at me, I can do that too – but, at least here, Scorsese proves he can’t. Kubrick took some of the worst source material in history (have you ever read “The Shining”? I wish I hadn’t) and made what I pretty comfortably can call my favorite movie of all time. SHUTTER, for all it’s well-lit dream sequences and tricky photography, is persistently ridiculous.



And worse—it’s boring. Look, we all knew what we were going into with this potboiler, it takes place at a G-D insane asylum after all, and we all saw the patently absurd trailer with its Trichotillomanic old crazy woman who lifts her finger to her lips for a gothic and hackneyed SHHHHH. I wasn’t expecting subtlety here. But I was expecting at least a plot twist beyond that Leo DiCaprio was crazy. NO FUCKING SHIT? I actually laughed out loud when the movie revealed this fact as if it was news to anyone. Every thing about this film not only suggests but beats you over the head with the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character (Teddy Daniels) is really the crazy one – and as far as the film’s own syllogism yes this makes sense. But without the deep characterization of the novel, and having to rely on individual visual moments to construct Leo’s character, we have here the same problem Leo had in THE BEACH – an incredibly dense character from the novel is sort of scrubbed away by the postures the filmic version has to adopt. He’s a fine actor, totally reliably good in all his films, but here the role is so dried up that he has no hope. No hope at all.

It’s a content problem, for sure. But when Kubrick had a content problem with THE SHINING he mined his own psychological reaction to the source and expounded on his emotional world visually. That’s how we got the blood-deluge elevators, or the offbeat scene with the ghost party-goer giving head to the man in the disfigured bear costume (maybe Kubrick’s most crazy and brilliant contribution in any of his films). Sure some of the dream sequences here are striking and creative (I love the snow of ash), but Scorsese doesn’t seem to have the Freudian wit and dexterousness command of manifest/latent dream content that Kubrick does. It comes off as derivative. Not just of Kubrick but of DePalma (CAPE FEAR, a much better film, is a loving DePalma homage; SHUTTER reeks of something less deferent) and of course of the man himself, Alfred Hitchcock. The final lighthouse scene, with it vertiginous spiral staircase, drives the point home. Scorsese is one the few legendary directors, and we are lucky that he is making films in our lifetime, but two vitally important lessons are to be learned here. The first lesson is one I think Kubrick, back since GANGS OF NEW YORK, is still trying to work his way around: the act of reminding us of something’s greatness does not a great thing make. Secondly, if you are paying homage to a work of art in a work of art, you best be sure your work is worthy of the reference—is indeed better than the sum of it’s parts. Otherwise we’ll just be longing for the original. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

But I’ll give Scorsese his credit, do not get me wrong. After a preposterous segment with Daniels scaling cliffs and finding hallucinations/women in nightgowns living in caves – he climbs back up to the mainland to find a uniformed man (is he a Nazi ghost; is he an institutional guard?) in a jeep, ready to bring him back to the doctors in charge. They have a very stilted, very-Kubrickian conversation, the likes of which doesn’t really appear in the rest of the film. It’s about the nature of good versus evil, the dark heart of man, all that jazz. You don’t know me, Daniels insists. I’ve known you for centuries, the officer shoots back, almost illogically. CENTURIES. Not days (which, according to the surface narrative, is the case). Not years (which, according to the “reality” revealed later in the film, is how long DiCaprio has been locked up), but centuries. This of course is almost a direct homage to the brilliant scene in THE SHINING when Jack Nicholson is talking to the ghost of the groundskeeper who supposedly went crazy and killed his wife and daughters (“no sir, YOU are the caretaker. You have ALWAYS BEEN the caretaker.”) Centuries of evil co-existing with, often overcoming, good. I really liked this, I thought ‘ol Marty was ADDING SOMETHING here and not just shooting crap in the best possible lighting. I just wish SHUTTER ISLAND had more of this, more subtext, more breathless weirdness.

So I’m glad that this is starting out as an OLD HOLLYWOOD year (I ’m yet to see Polansky’s film but I have high hopes) because 2009 was a young Hollywood year and personally filmmakers like Ivan Reitman leave a bad taste in my mouth. And SHUTTER ISLAND, far from good, isn’t the abortion that some other classic directors have swept under the plush carpets of their career: Robert Altman’s POPEYE (I know some would argue otherwise) or Spielberg’s THE LOST WORLD (yes, check your imdb’s, he did in fact direct it). If I’m going to be bored by a film, there’s a lot worse than Marty’s well-shot, well-scored offering here. Faint praise maybe, but it is what it is.

what-I say-what in Avatarnation Don't I Get?

James Cameron’s AVATAR has a few problems. The first is that it’s fucking retarded.


JUST KIDDING! I know some think I’m contrarian or negative about everything. But, alas, just because a film takes 5 years to make, just because new technology had to be invented to make it, just because it’s in 3D, and just because it cost you eighteen dollars to see it doesn’t mean it’s a great film. Have more respect for your own intellect than to cave to such flimsy syllogism, for the love of Christ.

No, AVATAR is not great. AVATAR is not particularly good. But AVATAR is okay; it isn’t the abortion that it’s garish design and are-you-kidding-me trailers seemed to suggest it would be. I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t NOT recommend it to an action movie fan, but then again I wish I had seen THE HURT LOCKER in 2D instead. Sorry, various friends who think I hate every movie and who for some reason take it personally when I do: I ain’t buying what AVATAR is selling.


Which includes both Big Macs and a new frontier for movie-dom: a three dimension one. The 3D in AVATAR is the most advanced I’ve ever seen, but then again to me it didn’t feel so far beyond what I saw in UP last year or in NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D three years ago. The problem with 3D is that it’s such a strange sensory phenomenon that it sorts of wrecks havoc on our objective sense – think of the thrill of the MAGIC EYE books when that image finally pops (“I see it!”); or think of how amazing the foreground knife-stabbing of FRIDAY the 13th Part 3-D must have seemed to its 1982 audience. It’s so utterly clever and here so cloyingly pretty that it’s as hard not to like as it is to love. I would never go as far as Ivan Reitman who bitterly declares “I hate 3D” (not merely because it’s denying what is an inevitable change for theatrical- and soon home-entertainment), but I resist the temptation to be awed by it simply because it’s so damn expensive. Then again, roused by Cameron’s use of space and clever diagonals, the 3D is mostly how I managed to stay awake during this three hour film. I’d say 3D saved AVATAR but just barely. I wonder how DVD sales will be; I can’t imagine ever seeing this film again.

Essentially it’s Pocahontas. This was Adam’s observation but the man is right, and James Cameron and umpteen thousand bloggers are saying the same (“Pocahontas in Space” or “Pocahontas with Blue People”…I’d go with “Pocahontas with Worse Music” which is saying something). The beats: a warrior infiltrates a native population, his specious attempt to “learn their ways” is really a cover for some militaristic operation to steal their valuable land. But, as these things tend to happen, he falls in love. That love redeems him, reprograms him, opens his eyes. (“I see you, Pocahontas”…”I see you, John Smith”). The agenda changes, the colonists are the villains; they are the ones who cannot See All The Colors of the Wind/Hear All the Voices of the Jungle! THEM! It’s all actually a pretty fertile and accessible framework for the story, and I don’t begrudge Cameron the cleverness to bring this classic story of colonization to the Space Age. But then I also recall that Pocahontas didn't make a very good movie – and the religious hokum seems as Disney-ified here as it did in the animated film. The environmental message may be more timely, but it also isn't very complex -- and taking almost three hours to croak out-- feels both reiterative and reductionist. Essentially, thematically, AVATAR is telling us the same thing that POCAHONTAS did; that WALL-E did; that FREE WILLY did; that HAPPY FEET did; that SOYLENT GREEN did; that AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH veraciously did: human greed blinds us towards the larger world and the connection between species as we all try to survive. Thematically, it’s dull. Which shouldn’t matter, because it’s a “popcorn movie” and just supposed to be just a lotta fun, right? Maybe that would be true if I suspected James Cameron didn’t take his own super-enlightenment so damn seriously.

I was surprised to find how essentially anti-human AVATAR manages to be, especially when TERMINATOR and TITANTIC were such thoroughly Humanist films. Maybe it’s a reflection of how long James Cameron has been in Hollywood or the growing cynicism that accompanies age: but AVATAR is not a film about mankind’s resistance in the face of disaster or tragedy, AVATAR is not about alien species learning to LIVE AND LET LIVE and appreciate difference, AVATAR is not about cooperation. In the end of AVATAR, Jake becomes Nav’i. He chooses them because them are not THEM – the colonists, the ones who can’t see. Colored with Cray-pas and posited as a Happy Ending, I think the reverberations of this ending and its real message never really play out for most of the audience who think popcorn movies should not be weighed on such mopey and over-serious theoretical grounds.

Which is probably why, while anyone with half a brain sees it and knows it’s there, the Iraq-connection (which is really what AVATAR is about) is kept pretty under the surface. It’s basically more of a tenet of the films premise than something that keeps harassing the films situational politics (although I think “we’ll fight terrorism with terrorism” is actually a line in the script). Smart of Cameron, because I wonder if the film’s Ohio audience would really be all that keen to set aside that cool, clean glass of Petroleum and reach for some frosty Pagan-Gods-in-a-glass if Cameron spelled out what “going Nav’i” really means. I don’t mean to pander, and I don’t accuse anyone of “not getting it,” but the truth is that Cameron tones down his politics and doesn’t ask us to equate the “Sky People” with Americans and the Nav’i with the Iraqi. But, like, we can if we want.

You know, it’s not a bad flick. Cameron is really brilliant as a film technician AND as a director (some of details – a soldier getting his hat blown off in the background, the whipping blades of grass when a Helicopter lands -- are awesome). He’s also a really capable and intelligent screenwriter, which is what I want to talk about here. Love it or hate it, The script of AVATAR is extremely succinct, well-wrought, internally cohesive. It makes sense as a script which may not really mean anything but it something that people in my line of employment say when a screenplay has that ineffable quality that makes it work. The characters are diverse, they arch, they change. Scenes double back on each other logically (I wondered for a second why they would waste all that screen time on Sigourney Weaver’s weird, tribal demise… then I quickly figured out it was to set up the film’s finale with Jake becoming Nav’i). Action sequences are organic to the plot, if a bit overlong. This screenplay is almost good.

But I don’t believe it quite gets there. It’s not the “stupid” lines people warned me about (“who’s bad?” -- a weird, intergalactic MJ reference) or even the fact that the space mineral is called Unobtainium that soured me. It’s more about how easily the pieces seem to fit together, how approachable Cameron makes the whole thing. From soup to nuts, AVATAR is an easy movie to sit through, to admire from afar, to enjoy. But easy doesn’t mean good. By rendering so many polygons, smoothing so many edges, making that screenplay click so completely, Cameron makes a movie that’s eminently digestible, that's easy to swallow. Fine. Good. But like so many gelatinous films before it, AVATAR reminds me that being easy to swallow often leaves something wanting for texture. And for a movie that's touted as bringing moviedom into the third dimension (and for a film with that color palate, and set on that terrain) being left wanting more texture feels like being left with blue balls.

I wish the story were a bit more complicated – not by a new and even bigger snarl-tooth beast, but by something nuanced and psychological. I would have loved to hear from (or even see) Earth, to ground us in Earth’s future reality, to hear the political discourse surrounding the Unobtainum issue. I would have loved a bit of a toned down “learning to fly” sequence, even though I guess I expected it given Cameron’s penchant for high-speed awe. I would have loved less anthropomorphic and more original habits and habitations from the Nav’i…apparently they kiss too; they live, mate, work, emote, fight, and mourn just like us. Finally, Cameron could have confronted his theoretical stance with the film, his repudiation of Jake’s humanity to be more like the Nav’i. When the evil corporal asks Jake what it feels like to betray his own species, Jake just snarls at him like the Nav’i do. It’s a succinct, even clever moment but it underscores AVATAR’s refusal to complicate its neat little plot with messy emotions, contradictions, open-ended quandaries. In short, I didn’t care about the characters, and so it didn’t work.

I wish I loved every movie I saw, I wish I could pay $18 and be assured every last dollar was worth it. But that’s not how I watch movies, and it’s not how I want to. It’s very hard to make films and nigh-impossible to make a good one, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate when a film gets it right or acknowledge when it gets it wrong. And I do like movies I see (this year, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, UP, THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, A SERIOUS MAN) all the time...and I like them that much more for being rare and special...an Unobtainium worth the many dollars I waste on lesser films. I may not be able to paint with ALL the colors of the wind, but the ones with which I do are vivid enough to be, for me, enough.