Margin Call, J.C. Chandor (2011)

Wow, this got so many raves, and it's such a dog. I use the term advisedly, to ruthlessly mock the writers of this film for trying to pass off a cancerous chocolate lab as a metaphor for the American economy.

The script is relentlessly pedantic, all the performances seem drowned in valium, the pace -- ironically, since this is supposed to be about spectacularly dramatic events -- is grindingly glacial. I apologize for the adverbs.

A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul (1979)

This is the first Naipaul novel I've read, and I found the experience quite disorienting, in ways both pleasurable and upsetting. I think my upset is what will persist, and that may be a good thing.

I'm well accustomed to literature which travels a predictable path of indignation regarding the injustice of European colonialism. I don't know that I've ever read anything, though, that so fully encompasses the complexity of the relationships between all the various players in a colonial situation. The shorthand version of colonialism -- wealthy European whites exploiting poor African blacks -- conceals a plethora of more nuanced and complicated relationships. That seems a pretty self-evident thing to say, but I don't know of another text that brings it to the fore as forcefully as this. Instead of the basic master/slave dynamic, we find here highly complex systems of classes within classes, exiles within exiles, powers within powers.

An ethnic Indian trader prospering on the east coast of Africa moves with his mixed-race slave to an interior African country which was recently decolonized by a European power and is now tipping into a civil war sponsored in part by European interests and partially by ethnic and class divisions within the aboriginal culture. Everything that's wrong with colonialism (slavery, oppression) and all of its benefits (clean water, electricity) are on display. Everything that's wrong with independence (kleptocracy, recapitulation of colonial power structures) and all of its benefits (a sense of common destiny and self-determination) are on display. Human relationships are a hall of mirrors. "Everyone is a villager," and everyone's a kind of slave. As Naipaul puts it more than once, "It wasn't that there was no wrong and no right. It was that there was no right." He has no respect for any of the systems on offer, imperial or revolutionary or anything in-between, and his analysis of how the different constituents of the river town exercise, cede, and accumulate different forms of power -- economic, political, sexual, emotional -- is nuanced, precise, and persuasive.

All this is an easy sell as far as I'm concerned. I've written myself about what seems to be the sad inevitability of revolutions turning back into empires. The discomfort enters for me, though, because it does sort of seem like Naipaul is especially contemptuous of the revolutionary part of the cycle. There are passages here which remind me of Shelby-Steele-like rhetoric, which seem to accuse the oppressed of abetting their oppression, and that kind of thinking makes this white boy fidget with discomfort. It may well be a productive upset, though, because one thing I can say for sure is that few pieties about colonialism can survive a careful reading of this book.

The Guard, John Michael McDonagh (2011)

So what's this all this, then? Sort of an Irish Hal Hartley movie, you might say. Makes not much sense as a whole, but the parts are fun: the mood is engaging, there are some craic flights of dialogue here and there, and the whole thing moves along briskly enough, so sure.

Interesting to sit down with Wendy to watch this. The first murder makes her gasp and I realize it's not even registering for me as an act of violence, since this is a comedy at heart. I wonder how many murders I've seen on the screen.

The Sea and Cake, The Moonlight Butterfly (2011)

Some people get excited when their favorite bands try new things -- they're showing their versatility! they're growing! -- but I am not one of those people. I want my favorite bands to provide a steady supply of new songs that sound exactly like, but different from, the songs I already love. These gentlemen understand that, and they have my gratitude.

The Future, Miranda July (2011)

Jesus, between this and Beginners, I'm starting to wonder whether I need to personally go out to Los Angeles and slap everybody. I adored You and Me and Everyone We Know, and I think Miranda July's a delight in every way, but here's a deadly example of how quirky can very quickly render out as tedious.

Or maybe -- here's the relentless fear -- I'm just getting too old? Have had my fill of quirky? I can in fact well imagine seeing this in 1988 alongside, say, Betty Blue, and experiencing it as soul-scouring. Was I blind then or am I deaf now?

Ach, that's all nonsense talk. If I'm old, I'm old enough to know that daddy things go in cycles, the way that Kanye West is just ampin' like Michael, and what we have here is Stranger than Paradise for the new ones same as Jarmusch put Godard in Sandusky for us. No harm, no harm! But no joy. I was glad the cat died; it was creeping me out.

Must be said: As ever with July, the details persist: I completely buy the kid digging a foxhole in the backyard, and answering, when queried about where she'll pee, "I'll do it here. Like a soldier." Also a plus is that no one is rich. And also I loved the guy who put the old blowdryer on Craigslist. Actually, I'm realizing now that I enjoyed the first 45 minutes a lot more than the second.

Young Adult, Jason Reitman (2011)

This thing makes Juno look like a Disney movie. Charlize Theron turns in an amazing performance -- really, when you think about it, a performance in many ways more demanding than the one she did for Monster -- as a terrified and terrifying former prom queen approaching adulthood on the asymptote. I'm not going to go into the plot here because if you have any sense you're going to see this yourself and if you don't then what good would it do. Diablo Cody's script is lean and sharp. She doesn't oversell or fake a single moment, and when she does write big furniture-chewing set pieces, they feel as utterly convincing and sickeningly inevitable as Aeschylus. The fact that all this takes place in a town that could pretty much pass for my hometown maybe twisted the knives even more vigorously for me, but this'll stab you no matter where you're from and/or wish you weren't.

War Horse, Steven Spielberg (2011)

There's nothing new or unusual about an artist taking a chaotic, terrifying, inexplicable historical episode and seeking to make some sense of it by overlaying it with a cathartic narrative, but whew, Spielberg takes the cake! He doesn't overlay, he positively smothers! This isn't a movie about the insane mechanized apparatus of death that was WWI using the story of a single horse as a vehicle; it's a movie about a beautiful, brilliant, heroic horse who happened to have lived through WWI. This movie's sense of history is so bizarrely out of whack, it spends literally no time on the questions of who's fighting and why; its only concern is the fate of the relationship between a farm boy and his horse.

There may be a kind of willful myopia in play here. We know Spielberg isn't ignorant of history, so if he's ignoring it, might that be a deliberate decision? Does the strangely old-fashioned lighting of the early and late bookend scenes offer a clue? I haven't seen such heroic and artificial sunsets since Gone with the Wind, I don't think. Is this, like Scorsese's Hugo, less a movie about history than a movie about movies? I'm probably fishing in a puddle.

Beginners, Mike Mills (2011)

This begins slowly, wistfully, bittersweetly, and immediately seizes my attention, but it takes less than an hour for me to start wishing that everyone involved would suddenly come down with the bubonic plague. The main characters here are, purportedly, horribly damaged and in pain. Self-hatred, self-doubt, self-denial! Plus cancer! Your natural inclination is to feel sorry for these beautiful and tragic people, but they do their very best to thwart your instincts by being the most insufferable bunch of self-involved moony whiners LA has ever seen, and that's saying something. The tone here reminds me of S. Coppola's Lost in Translation. The stylish weltschmerz. Every space -- exterior or interior -- just-so beautiful. My creeping horrified realization that no one on the screen ever has to think about money.

Comfort of Strangers, Beth Orton (2006)

First time through you could be excused for thinking this sounds like background music at Starbucks. But Orton is truly protean, and here she is hitched up with the insanely brilliant Jim O'Rourke on the boards, and every song here rewards repeated listenings; they get weirder and deeper the more you listen. What I love best is the way songs just end when they're done doing what they set out to do. That's a hard skill for a poet to learn: When to eschew finishing in favor of ending.

I've loved Orton for more than a decade. I believe that if she had decided to promote herself harder, she could have been a superstar. She didn't, and I think she's probably stayed sane and happy as a result. I hear that she's got a new one coming, at last, in 2012. I'm excited, but I haven't minded waiting.

Page One: Inside the New York Times, Andrew Rossi (2011)

No one with any interest in current events could fail to understand that information moves differently now than it did ten years ago, or ten months ago, or maybe even ten minutes ago. These changes have put obvious and well-documented pressure on "legacy media" companies like the Times. In July of 2002, NYT was trading at $50 a share; this past July it was at about $8 a share.

But you know all that. This movie goes over that territory, but where it really shines is in its depiction not of the Times as a company, but the Times as a collection of individuals. There are scenes where people gather around someone's desk and hash out what the ethical course of action is vis a vis some situation that's just arisen. People have principled disagreements, come to conclusions, act on them, and move forward. I found such moments heartening. Whatever else you want to say about the media, the Times, our desperate age, etc., you can't help but come away from this feeling like these people are truly acting in good faith and truly on a mission for good. They're probably doomed.

Win Win, Thomas McCarthy (2011)

Quirky premise and great cast laid low by a script so plodding I couldn't get through 45 minutes. Life's too short, etc.

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog (2007)

In which the NSF flies Herzog to Antarctica so that he can ask a penguin researcher, "Does a penguin ever go insane when they have simply had it with the colony?" If you love Herzog, this will tickle you pink. Dour laconic condemnations of civilization, breathless Caspar David Friedrich-esque romantic ejaculations in the face of ineffable landscapes, a fascination with damaged and fragile characters that comes across as both exploitative and sympathetic at the same time (the scene with the traumatized man who "escaped" from something he can't even talk about (East Germany?) and proudly shows Herzog the rucksack he has ready at all times, should he need to escape again, is without question my favorite moment in this film), and always, always, the magnetic attraction to oblivion. When Herzog talks about the dangers of diving under the ice, or how easy it is to get lost in a blizzard, or the way a penguin will sometimes become disoriented and start walking away from rather than toward the life-giving sea, you understand very clearly that he doesn't dread these disasters; he longs for them.

Herzog continues to make fiction films, but more and more his best attention seems to be directed toward documentaries. (Which, after all, is the more interesting movie, Grizzly Man or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?) Might it be that for a mature artist, the claptrap of artifice begins to seem an impediment rather than an aid to the realization of one's dramatic -- and even aesthetic -- goals? Discuss.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese (2011)

Since the opening ten minutes suggest that CGI is going to be the star here, far more than character or plot, I resigned myself to enjoying some eye candy and settled in with my Milk Duds. After about an hour of sepia-honeyed faux Belle Epoque visuals, though, the movie's agenda changes again. Scorsese is one clever guy. You gradually realize that this whole enterprise is basically an excuse for the maestro to champion his pet (and very worthy!) causes of film preservation and film history awareness. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this before. There are plenty of movies for kids that have broad social lessons to impart -- be nice to people different than you, consumerism is a sickness, take care of the environment, etc. -- but "ensure that cinema history is preserved"? That's some special special pleading! I'm more than sympathetic to the cause, though, so it's all good with me. C+ as a movie, but A- as a PSA.

Hanna, Joe Wright (2011)

The plot here is wholly borrowed -- three parts Bourne Identity; one part La Femme Nikita -- so we'll grade on style points alone, and we'll give a solid B+. Wright usually takes assignments my mom would call "classy," and his obvious geeky thrill in  slumming in the action genre is a little irritating. Still, he gets great performances out of his principals -- the albino sprite to the left, plus Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett -- and only at the movie's very end does he allow himself / force us to wallow in an arty and hyperextended symbolist set piece. Completely forgettable but fairly entertaining.

Inside Job, Charles Ferguson (2010)

If you read the New York Times and watch Frontline you already know most of this stuff, but this is nonetheless a sleek and efficient summary to force your libertarian uncle to watch, should you require a means of explaining to him in 108 minutes just why those damned hippies camped out on Wall Street are so irked. I particularly enjoyed Ferguson's invasion of the business schools at Harvard and Columbia, where economics professors are routinely paid huge sums to say nice things about deregulation but piously opine that they are immune to conflict of interest issues. The professors' ensuing dudgeons are pathetic to watch; incredibly, I end up feeling more sympathetic toward the tasteless Cristal-swilling johns downtown, who at least wear their avarice right on their shiny thousand-dollar sleeves.

A History of Violence, David Cronenberg (2005)

Wow, I've sat through some serious dreck from Cronenberg in the past and convinced myself it was complex, citing the A-effect, etc., but this is so stupidly wooden and vice-versa I couldn't spin it if my dissertation depended upon it. Go watch Siodmak's The Killers instead.

The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akın (2007)

Watching this, I was thinking, what was that other terrific movie I saw that dealt with the interpenetration of Turkish and German cultures, and then I remembered it was Head-On, from 2004, and then I found that Akin directed that, too! This one's a bit less visceral, but it's just as affecting and intelligent. This is a young director to watch.

It's too bad that Washington D.C. is so far away from Kabul. If the flight between them were as brief as the one between Hamburg and Istanbul, I think the world would be a different place. 

My Best Fiend: Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog (1999)

Well, you have to have a serious predisposition for these two madmen to find any pleasure in this, and if you do have the predisposition, you've probably already seen this. It's somewhat about the relationship between two quite thoroughly co-dependent collaborators, but it's also a "making-of" documentary about Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, which is a lot of fun for nuts like me.

Prince of the City, Sidney Lumet (1981)

Lumet is a hero, of course, if (at 167 minutes) a little insistent. What we have here is a set of tropes that have become extremely familiar: the bad cop decides to inform on the other bad cops, but doesn't really become good, quite. Good performances all around, but nothing extraordinary.

The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

Almost unbearably delightful. It took me four nights to watch this. More than 30 minutes at a time was too overwhelming. A deeply decadent movie. It's hard to know how to talk about it. It's a crystalline analysis of Italian fascism, but it's also such a carnival for the eye . . .

Ketchup

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

Damages, Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler & Daniel Zelman (2007-)

This is one of the most claustrophobic and nasty pieces of television I've ever seen. There's not a single likeable character, everyone is a lying and cheating power-mad narcissist out to stab everyone else in the back and then self-justify. Worst of all, no one even seems to enjoy the overripe fruits of their iniquitous labors. The show is completely humorless and profoundly amoral. Watching it makes me feel dirty and ashamed, but I'm halfway through it now.

The Killing Fields, Roland Joffé (1984)

Wrapping up "journalist as hero/antihero" week. Joffé's achievement here is easy to underestimate; there are so many ways this could have turned into a disaster, and he avoids them all. The journalist is a hero, and we get that, but he's also a dangerously narcissistic asshole, and we get that too. His colleague Dith Pran is also a complex character, both ambitious and naive, and his character here is also fully three-dimensional. On top of all that, we get here a very detailed and comprehensive history lesson without ever feeling like we're in a classroom -- also a remarkable achievement. Real questions about journalistic ethics, taken seriously, plus a lively and accurate dramatization of one of the 20th century's most despicable crimes. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours.

X Men: First Class, Matthew Vaughn (2011)

I love this stuff. Serious questions -- should we celebrate our differences, or seek to transcend them? are we controlled by history or do we control it? -- are explored seriously, plus there are awesome action sequences. Summer blockbuster perfection.

Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (2011)

Every time, I swear I'll not be swindled out of my $7.50 again, and every time, I falter and fail and curse myself. The premise is charming, the people are beautiful, the light is gorgeous, but the dialogue is so stilted it makes me cringe. It's like Allen has his hand up inside all the actors, flapping their mouths open and shut while he voices variations on the same half-dozen cliches he's been using for the past twenty years.

"Are you coming to the dinner with my parents at Le Cirque?"

"No, I really need to work on my novel."

"Why can't you be happy and enjoy yourself for once?"

Etc. It's exhausting! And the characters from literary and art history are even worse. Gertrude Stein really has nothing more interesting to say than, "I read your novel, it needs more passion?"

Thank God Allen's at least moved from London to Paris; I almost hung myself in the theater restroom after Match Point.

Adrian Brody playing Salvador Dali gets the photo because he is the only actor in this entire film who seems to be enjoying himself. Everyone else trudges through their scenes talking like they're reading off cue cards. I bet $20 that Allen was annoyed with Brody's performance for being too ad-libby. 

Salvador, Oliver Stone (1986)

What an annoying movie. I'm glad Stone wanted to draw attention to the crimes committed by the (American-enabled) Salvadoran right wing death squads, but the James Woods character is so irritating, and Stone is so concerned with his redemption or lack thereof, that the historical quickly sinks beneath the mire of the personal. A pity.

The Parallax View, Alan J. Pakula (1974)

In honor of this week's public release of the Pentagon Papers, it's heroic journalism week here. We begin with this paranoid classic. The relentlessly louche Warren Beatty is pretty improbable as a crusading journalist, but the pure weirdness of the story is ample compensation. As usual in Pakula, banal and efficient modern spaces -- parking garages, convention halls, office buildings, airports -- intensify the horror and dread. This was made at a time when Americans were just getting used to living with the idea our leaders lie to us as a matter of course, but were still capable of being scandalized. Pakula captures the zeitgeist with verve.

Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone (2008)

Hoo! I let this sit in my queue way too long. When's the last time you saw a Cosa Nostra picture that didn't feature a laundry list of cliches? Garrone, working off the best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, tells five distinct, occasionally overlapping stories of life under the Camorra, from small-time neighborhood hoods with delusions of grandeur to multi-million Euro syndicates dedicated to the expedient (and illegal) disposition of industrial waste. There's some blood, but the movie's delightfully free of the kind of swagger and celebration of violence in American mafia movies. Most of the people involved are involved because they're trapped, bored, scared, resigned, stupid, or some combination of these. Ironically, the scenes of hopelessness played out in the courtyards of the housing projects can't help but remind me of turn of the century American tenements and the organized crime that blossomed there. Old world or new world, past or future, bathtub gin or pirated DVDs, desperate people will always do desperate things.

Julia, Erick Zonca (2008)

I would wager that a lot of Europeans think this sort of thing happens in the USA all the time.

Who knows, maybe it does.

This is an update of Cassavettes' Gloria, but the madness here is less about nuance and more about flat-out intensity. Swinton goes completely Oscar-snippet batshit in almost every scene. It must have been exhausting for her; it's exhausting just to watch. Still, it's gripping, at least until the final half hour, where Zonca suddenly and inexplicably gets bogged down in what seems to be some sense of responsibility to honor the ridiculously complicated sets of double- and triple-crosses the plot has imposed upon him. Unusual for a Frenchman to fall under the misapprehension that plot matters more than character. 

Bridesmaids, Paul Feig (2011)

Well, it's more a calculation than a revolution, but it's not all bad. Women get almost all the screen time and absolutely all the jokes, and many of those jokes are genuinely funny. On the other hand, the movie does nothing to undermine, much less undo, the standard assumption of this genre, namely that the two valid paths of fulfillment open to women are cookery and marriage. The moment at the end where the cop/boyfriend takes Wiig into custody by putting her in the back seat of his patrol car pretty much sums it up: the law triumphs, and the dude drives.