Who needs James Bond anyway?

DUPLICITY. QUANTUM OF SOLACE. This is more about the former, but the latter kind of comes into play and just came out on DVD so worth advertising. The point of the title is this: Do we really need James Bond anymore when Clive Owen, once a candidate for 007 before Daniel Craig got the role, could make a career out of playing the Bond of old while the character itself is morphing into Jason Bourne without the pesky memory problems?

Let me make two things clear: first, I will not give away any spoilers related to Duplicity (trailer) and second, it was the most entertaining Hollywood production I have seen in quite a while. There have been a number of big-name movies that I've liked quite a bit, but not one that really puts together all the pieces together to be so entertaining in a way that just shows off what can be achieved with all the tools available. I'm going to risk sounding like a fan boy but the only two regrets I have about the film is the dialogue in one of the final scenes and the fact that the movie will not hold up as well to multiple viewings because I already know what will happen. Otherwise it was just a lot of fun from beginning to the end credits.

I've already alluded to Clive Owen, who really shines in this movie. He is a perfect fit and embodies the swagger, style, and wit of the character in a way that I am skeptical another person could. He is James Bond with all his debonair charisma and "swinging big dick" attitude (a line from Duplicity) unleashed in a corporate setting and with added emotion instead of the brooding anger of the most recent incarnation. He outshines Julia Roberts, which is no easy task as she was at least once known as America's sweetheart. I'm not much of a Julie Roberts fan except to say that she does quite well at creating characters that are charming and likable. Although she is not quite up to Owen's level, the real accomplishment for her here is how well she plays a cold, calculating spy that uses the Julia Roberts charm a a tool -- a fine turn for the actress and an subtle meta reference much better played than the dismal joke in Ocean's 12. Smaller movies frequently have a star who puts in a great performance but a larger movie like this brings both of these actors as well as an entire cast that all contribute -- with special recognition due to Paul Giamatti among many others.

Is great as the actors are, however, it's the overall package that really makes this movie. Tony Gilroy -- who coincidentally enough wrote for the screen the obvious influence on the new Bond -- really nailed it. It probably is the case of this being a movie that happens to be right up my alley (I admit others might not like it as well as me -- It's my kind of movie), but the way he makes the viewer reconsider earlier scenes as more is revealed and weaves together a plotline that goes back and forth in time is matched by editing nearly as suave as Clive Owen in his two-button suits. There was an article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago that is worth reading about Gilroy's filmmaking and focusing on his use of the "reveal," which he describes as anything that's a surprise. This movie is full of them and honestly keeps you interested because you just want to know what they are going to do next both in the plot and in the character development. He tells the author of that article that his first movie as a director, Michael Clayton, could have been a book but Duplicity could only be a movie and that point is where I think the movie shines. It uses all the elements of film -- acting, editing, directing, and screenwriting just to name a few -- to advance the story not just because they are elements of a movie but because they are tools. And the screenwriting! This movie was hilarious and not in a jokey kind of way, which I can appreciate at times but am even more impressed when a movie can be funny without trying so hard. It is funny in the sense of having wit and in putting characters in situations where it is inherently comedic without feeling like the actors are trying to do something just to make me laugh. On top of all of that great filmmaking, Gilroy is also able to infuse more significant issues into his film in a way that is subtle and works as a reveal both in social commentary and in playing with audience expectations (a topic we have discussed a bit here). When a movie does the anti-Crash and subtly puts out ideas for the audience to consider without even telling them the topic has been raised -- in this movie (and this gives nothing away) gender roles when the man is the emotional one and the exalted position of corporations in American are just a couple. Screenwriters and directors who use subtly are a rare breed in Hollywood and in doing so Gilroy is able to combine some of the best elements of grand studio filmmaking and personal, independent projects.

One gets the feeling that Marc Forster would like to infuse a bit more of that combination of high entertainment and serious issues in his Bond movies, but possibly because of the screenwriting of Paul Haggis, it just comes off as heavy-handed. Instead of the other issues being in the background and helping push the plot forward, in Quantum of Solace the environmental issue takes the reins too much and comes across almost as distracting as their incessant need to show off gadgetry (it's 2008 when this movie came out -- quit trying to wow us with tech that looks outdated a week after the movie came out). I am not necessarily against the new James Bond -- Daniel Craig does an admiral job in the role they have given him and Casino Royale was quite good as both a reinterpretation and as an action film in general. Both movies have pretty good action sequences but they aren't really spy thrillers and do not seem to make any attempt to relate to the current idea of international intelligence in the post-Cold War era in a way that Duplicity does, as A.O. Scott points out in his review of the film in The New York Times. If we have Jason Bourne already, what good is James Bond anymore? That might be a good question I rose but perhaps the one I should have brought up is this: Why is Clive Owen from Duplicity not the new James Bond?

The enigma of historical fiction

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER. Alright so give me a break -- I could not come up with a clever title for this posting. I would also like to say that for now, I think I will have exhausted my thoughts on historical accuracy in film, but I could not do so without turning back to this movie, which does fit quite excellently into the topic. Good choice, Owen. I also appreciated the little bit of history of the film lesson in your posting as it opens up for a lively discussion on when to take liberties with history. We seemed to fall on the same side of the argument when it came to historical accuracy, but I find this to be a slightly different case.

Your bringing up of the original title is a good point, and I find that coupled with the English title it suggests to the viewer that this is not a history lesson. Unlike most historical movies, the original title is more along the lines of a straight-up fiction-based film and the English title pretty much says that it is not a straightforward story. My preference is to generally fall in line with your conclusions about historical films adhering to actual history, but this movie challenges my opinion a bit because I join the other side here and was not troubled by the added scene of the carnival. Perhaps it is a myopic view of history that if it is not recent it does not matter as much if it is completely accurate, but I think the larger reason I find it less troublesome is because, as you said, the movie is more about ideas and an exploration of human nature than it is about the particular person. In a way Kaspar Hauser was a blank slate who was able to develop his views as a fully formed adult and so questioned humanity in general and issues like gender roles in particular from an approach that others did not. In that vein the story lends itself to treating the story as a bit a starting point for exploring ideas and not tied to his past as strongly. It's a sticky wicket, however, in allowing for changing of history because one could then argue that it is OK for Disney to have Pocahontas talking to a tree in that movie they made, which might sound benign except that I had a cousin who, although young, was certain that the actual person could speak to landscaping.

Where I think you might be on to something, however, is when you talk about not tying the story as strongly to an individual. Perhaps Werner Herzog's misstep was in including too much historical accuracy. An interpretation along the lines of This is England (which I will say, I have not seen although was intrigued enough to add it to my queue) might be a good path to take, although another example I would find promising would be something like I'm Not There, which I thought was a noble idea if not a completely successful realization of the ambition. A story like Kaspar Hauser -- especially one already labeled as an enigma -- might be the perfect story to explore as an inspiration more so than history. Another example from our history as schoolmates might be the book Einstein's Dreams from sophomore English that took the idea of Einstein developing the theory of relativity to explore ruminations about time and in doing so underscored the concept Einstein eventually formed. It's a rare story that leads to this interpretation, but I would certainly watch that type of treatment of Kaspar Hauser.

On a side note, I should say that I did not really know the story until watching this movie and after watching it when originally thinking about what I was going to say, I was listening to an episode of This American Life that turned out to have a segment by a San Francisco comedy troupe called Kaspar Hauser and it made me feel special knowing the origin of the name. Oh the coincidence.

P.S. I could not find a way to really bring this up in what I was writing as it was a bit off the subject, but there have been a number of pretty well-made movies about skinheads of late. The one you brought up sounds pretty strong and then there was the rather famous American History X and another movie I think I told you about, The Believer. Don't know if you have seen that one, but if you haven't it is worth taking a look. That was a movie that stayed with me. I think I might have to watch This is England and a thread on skinheads in film could be in our future.

Not so smart after all, are you, Mr. Know-It-All

Sorry to prove you wrong and make you look like a fool in front of our legions of readers. Now, I certainly do love Freaks and Geeks, and Undeclared too, but TV Apatow just isn't as uproariously hilarious as the best examples of film Apatow are.

Speaking of Freaks and Geeks, isn't it weird that Linda Cardellini, playing a sophomore I think, was the oldest member of the "high school" cast? She was twenty-four when it started. (James Franco was twenty-one, Jason Segel was nineteen, and Seth Rogen was still prison bait at a mere seventeen.)

And I wholeheartedly agree with your bold new vision for our blog. I look forward to applying cinematic discussion and analysis to "urban-suburban hip-hop settings."

I demand a recount

Here's what I was sure you would pick as your favorite Appatowian production:


You proved me wrong.

P.S. In the spirit of your random comment, I would like to say that I think we should have a new goal in this blog:

We need to uptick our imagine with everyone, including one-armed midgets.

Bromance Revisited

To respond to the question you posed a while ago, let me first say that this isn't an easy decision. That's not to say that every movie that's come out of the Apatow Factory has been a masterpiece, or even that all of the top-tier movies are equally good. But to choose among the best of the best—The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad—is a tough choice, like choosing which of your children you love the most. Now I know how Meryl Streep's character felt in Sophie's Choice. (No, that's not humorous hyperbole, that's literally how I feel, so you better not be laughing at my bitter emotional turmoil as you read this.)

The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Now, I don't make this decision lightly. Superbad is a close second; they took the premise of countless mediocre '80s teen comedies and turned it into a genuinely affecting story about friendship and growing up. Oh yeah, and it's funnier than all get-out. But The 40-Year-Old Virgin pulls into the lead for a few reasons, most of which you already mentioned. The humor is just off the chart; while the script supplies them with great situations (the poker game, speed dating, the ride home with Leslie Mann), the cast takes it to the next level with spot-on timing and chemistry, fantastic improv, and subtle gestures and facial expressions that are almost as funny as the dialogue. From the dramatic angle, Carell perfectly conveys all the uncertainty, self-doubt, and awkwardness that often accompany relationships or any new experience—comically amplified in his case, of course, since he's, well, a 40-year-old virgin. This goes not only for his attempts at romance, but his friendships with his co-workers as well; he has to learn how to be a guy, as well as a dater and boyfriend. As you wrote, Andy is, despite everything, someone we can relate to and cheer for.

(There's something else in The 40-Year-Old Virgin's favor, which I may or may not have told you before. One day I came home from work to find a note from my landlady, effectively giving me three weeks to leave, no reason given; on top of that, it was just a few days before Christmas. As you can imagine, that was a pretty bad day. I didn't have any booze at home because I hardly ever drink alone, and I really didn't feel like going out, so getting drunk wasn't an option for making myself feel better. So I put on my 40-Year-Old Virgin DVD and forgot my troubles for two hours. Andy and the gang have seen me through some rough times, and for that I give them credit.)

And I agree with you that the more dramatic, realistic movies like the ones I mentioned above are superior to the more cartoonish ones like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, though the latter definitely have their moments aplenty as well. (And for the record, I'd say that Walk Hard falls into a separate category, despite its cartoonishness, as a spoof; Anchorman may have made fun of TV news, and Talladega Nights NASCAR, but a true spoof mocks a genre, as Walk Hard does with musician biopics.) I thought Forgetting Sarah Marshall had a lot of great scenes and elements, but overall it didn't make nearly as much of an impression as a 40-Year-Old Virgin or a Superbad; I guess I'd describe it as less than the sum of its parts. (Though the CSI-esque TV show, featuring master thespian Billy Baldwin, was pretty hilarious.)

So anyway, was your guess right?

P.S. — I know this has nothing to do with anything, but I had to say it.

Barack Obama doesn't care about white people.

CNN: "Flood Warnings Issued; N. Dakota Braces for Record Deluge"

Joaquin Phoenix Goes Full Retard

TWO LOVERS

As long as we're talking about good movies with serious flaws, I think I'll take a minute to talk about a new release I saw a couple weeks ago, Two Lovers (trailer). It tells the story of Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), a young man with a history of mental illness who's moved back in with his parents after a suicide attempt. He soon meets two very different young women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a "good Jewish girl" whose family is going into business with his parents, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a Gentile party girl in his building with a past (and perhaps present) of drug use and a very unhealthy relationship with a married man. Leonard's relationships with each of these women deepens simultaneously, unbeknownst to either or to his parents, as the necessity for Leonard finally to chose looms larger and larger.

There's a lot to like about Two Lovers. It's beautifully shot and carefully paced. The performances are good in a straightforward way, for the most part avoiding flashy, obvious drama in favor of subtle interactions and little moments. I especially liked that, unlike oh so many formulaic romantic dramas and comedies, the movie doesn't present Michelle as the free spirit who Leonard's made for and Sandra as the ugly stepsister being forced on him by his parents. Though Sandra's definitely the safer choice, she's also a beautiful and loving person who relates to Leonard in many ways; and though he connects much more passionately with Michelle, she's a deeply scarred person who may have more potential to hurt him than to help him.

On the other hand, there were some things that definitely hampered my enjoyment of the movie, and most of them had to do with Phoenix's character, Leonard. Basically, he acts like a fourteen-year-old boy, and he talks like a retarded fourteen-year-old boy. Maybe it's just his thick, unenunciated Brooklyn accent, but none of the other characters reminded me of someone who just got Novacaine shots at the dentist. Speaking the way he did, I really had a hard time believing that his mental problems were no worse than bipolar disorder. In addition to his slurred speech, Leonard seemed like an adolescent stuck in a thirty-year-old man's body. His walk and movements look clumsy, like he just had a growth spurt and is still getting used to his body. Not only does he live with his parents, but his tiny, child-sized room includes posters on the walls and—I can't get over this—an aquarium. Maybe we're supposed to chalk this up to overprotective parents—though he's lived on his own in the past and was even engaged—or his mental and emotional problems—though the movie never really goes into this after mentioning it in passing. I think his name only reinforced all this for me; Leonard from Brooklyn may have been the one on screen, but the one I was thinking of was Lennie from Of Mice and Men. As good as much of this movie was, I just couldn't buy its basic premise—that this guy could get two beautiful women to fall in love with him over the same short period of time.

To sum up, Two Lovers is a 50% movie, not because I didn't particularly like it or dislike it, but because I both liked it and disliked it in roughly equal measure.

P.S. — "Looking forward to it" doesn't begin to describe how I feel about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. I don't mean to go overboard, having only seen that trailer and this early clip, but I have no doubt at this point that it'll be in my top 5 of 2009, if not number 1. This is a film I've seen in my dreams.

Where this wild thing will be

Directed by Spike Jonze and written by him and Dave Eggers? I'm looking forward to it this October.


UPDATE: Now with official, non-sketch trailer!

One missing piece

THE WACKNESS. Short post here because I don't have much to say about the movie (trailer) other than this: it had everything for it, except the story. I remember you had it on your honorable mention list, which is fine as I thought it was pretty good in a lot of ways and might have done the same. It had a great atmosphere, pretty snappy dialogue, and fantastic acting -- especially by Sir Ben Kingsly in a role a bit different then, oh, Gandhi. But the story was kind of lame. I found myself groaning at the thought of it turning into another coming-of-age story where the kid learns a lesson and grows up a bit and realizes the grown ups aren't as responsible as he thought. All of the elements where there except for that cliche storyline. That is, at the risk of sounding just as lame, wack.

To a deluxe apartment in the skyyyy

FUNNY GAMES

I pretty much agree with your last post, Matt, on the subject of genre. It's so fluid and hard to nail down that its usefulness is very limited. Not only are there many, many movies (and TV shows, books, songs, etc.) that contain elements "belonging" to more than one genre, but movies categorized within the same genre are often very different (I mean, the genre of "comedy" includes both Dr. Strangelove and Ace Ventura, for goodness sake). Genre isn't meaningful in itself, but only in terms of its effects on an audience through the expectations it raises.

SPOILERS!   SPOILERS!   SPOILERS!

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF AVOIDING SPOILERS, YE WHO ENTER HERE!

Ahem.

Now, there are countless examples of films that toy with those audience expectations in order to get certain reactions. For example, Psycho (trailer) starts out as a fairly standard Hitchcockian thriller about a young woman on the run after stealing from her boss; then, forty minutes or so in, she's brutally stabbed to death in the shower by—we eventually find out—a psychotic wearing his dead mother's clothes. We think we know what kind of movie we're getting, but then the rug is pulled out from under us; we don't know what genre we're in, so we don't know what to expect, heightening the suspense all the more. Another good example is No Country for Old Men (trailer), where we think we're getting a straightfoward, though very well made, good-guy-running-from-the-bad-guy movie, until toward the end when the good guy's killed by some random other guys chasing him, his wife is murdered senselessly, and the bad guy just disappears. Only then do we realize that the whole time we've been watching a completely different movie, not one about Josh Brolin on the run from Javier Bardem, but one about Tommy Lee Jones coming to terms with a changing world.

A recent film that predicates itself on toying with its audience's expectations about genre is Funny Games (trailer). An upper-middle-class family—Mom, Dad, Junior, and Fido—arrive at their shoreside vacation home and soon meet two clean-cut, impeccably polite young men who, over the course of the movie's two-hour running time—it feels much longer—taunt, beat, humiliate, and finally murder them. The film comes on the heels of the recent spate of "torture porn" movies—a genre I'm glad to say I've for the most part been able to avoid—but is a virtual shot-for-shot remake of the 1997 Austrian original, by the same screenwriter and director, Michael Haneke. Many of the marks of torture porn are present—prolonged terror and suffering, the torturers' complete control over the situation, the victims' being utterly outmatched and helpless, and rules and "games" devised by the torturers.

However, Funny Games deviates from the genre as much as it adheres to it. One of the torturers directly speaks to the audience occasionally, noting their role as co-participants in what's happening on screen; at one point he even basically says, "What's the matter? This is what you came to see, isn't it?" The two young men give different, contradictory explanations for why they're doing this, mocking the audience's expectation for a motive or "origin"; they even jump back and forth between different names. Things we naturally interpret as foreshadowing turn out to be dead ends; we see a knife left on the family's sailboat early on, but when the mother tries to use it toward the end to cut the ropes around her wrists, one of the young men sees this and throws the knife overboard. (I guess it's like Chekhov's literary maxim that if a story features a gun it must eventually be fired, except the gun misfires and that's the end of it.) The torturers' control is taken to an absurd degree when the mother manages to shoot one of them dead; the other just uses a remote control to rewind the movie a couple minutes and stop her from getting the gun. Whereas the victims in such movies are often unsympathetic in some way—for instance, the "slut" and "druggie" cannon fodder of classic slasher movies—our family is uniformly loving and relatable, which heightens the audience's feelings of revulsion at what happens to them. And instead of some kind of payoff or resolution, the plucky young son is the first to die, the father remains crippled and impotent and is never given a chance for heroism, and the mother is finally tossed off the sailboat to drown, almost as an afterthought.

Funny Games departs from the horror/suspense beats as a way of pointing out the formulas according to which these genres operate. By doing so, it emphasizes our place in all this by forcing us to engage with and question what we're seeing and our taste, under different circumstances, for similar depictions of terror and violence. Though certainly not an enjoyable film, it's a very interesting one and one that well illustrates how the subversion of genre expectations can in fact be the most effective use of them.

An excellent look at some of these issues can be found at Alternate Takes, "Some Thoughts on Safety, Danger, Dreams and Genre-worlds."

Movin' on Up

THE CLASS. MAN ON WIRE. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. A WHOLE SHIT-TON OF OTHER MOVIES AND TOPICS. There's a fascinating exchange going on in the comment threads that has turned to a direction I would like to elevate to an entire posting. It seems to have turned toward the subject of genre and I was writing a comment and deciding I had more to say and it had to do with two films on my Best of 2008 list, so why not turn their direction.

Here's the post's comments that I would like to move up:

Owen said...

And my point on that subject is that it's impossible for documentarians to do that for the same reasons that it's impossible for other filmmakers. I also think that creating a dichotomy of documentaries on the one hand and history-based fictional films on the other doesn't make much sense, since they're both making the claim, either explicitly or implicitly, that they're depicting the facts. Frankly, I don't see much difference between documentaries and fiction other than the fact that documentaries have non-actors and usually have narration. They're still trying to convey a vision or message, and will pick and choose what they show and how they show it based on that vision or message; any difference that exists is one only of degree, not of kind. That goes both for sensationalist stuff like Michael Moore's docs and for more meditative, less beat-you-over-the-head docs like Herzog's. So I really don't see why some films have this responsibility because they call themselves "documentaries," while others don't because they're "history-based fictional films," when they all face the exact same dilemmas.

Anonymous said...

I do understand your point. As one final volley i offer the following: genre selection is an important part in the filmmaking process. Choosing the lens that you want to view the material through and then executing it determines to a large extent how your film will be received. To combine the genres, which you argue is an acceptable outcome, is to say that there is not much difference between comedy and drama except that one is funny. The entire expectation changes based on the genre that you choose -- which gets back to my original point of different expectations for documentaries than for historical or biographical films...

I know you may say that dramas and comedies are too dissimilar and do not fit the point you were making concerning documentaries and historical films. I simply disagree.

Some pretty significant ideas there, but I'm going to have to come down toward the side of Owen. Sorry Anonymous (whom I think I might start thinking of as Mr. A in the style of Mr. F from AD). Might thought here actually goes a bit further than Owen in that I would say I think the idea of genre is a construct that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning intrinsically and is instead more of a construct used to classify because people like to classify things. I find myself returning to the idea of gender and discussing in a human sexuality class how the idea is really more of a social construct of what men and women are as opposed to sex which has to do with what wobbly bits one possesses. Odd analogy, I know. The idea of comedies and dramas does not disprove Owen's point but in fact emphasized it as there are two many dramatic movies that are highly comedic and two many comedies that are in reality quite dramatic. Some recent examples that blur that line are Little Miss Sunshine, American Beauty, and Lost in Translation. The last in that list was so in between that there were a number of arguments I heard over whether it was a drama or a comedy.

My larger point and the reason I chose to make this a post, is the unreliability of genre as in regards to the idea of a documentary. First of all, any film that does not capture something as it is actually happening is not truly "documenting" anything -- most documentaries are like narrative films in that they tell a story of something that happened in the way a filmmaker chooses to construct it. The process is the same for someone writing a screenplay and then directing a movie. I offer for discussion of these issues two films that Owen and I both thought were among the best films of last year and exemplify the difficulty in categorizing films. Man on Wire (trailer) contains quite a bit of dramatization to tell the story of the high-wire act and is constructed as a tightly bound narrative with very little larger importance outside the individual story it is telling. But it is undeniably a documentary and won an Oscar for it. I contrast that with The Class (trailer), a French film that does not qualify as a documentary but stars the man who wrote the autobiographical book on which the movie is based and features mostly actual students in the roles of students and was built by a lot of improvised scenes where the teacher was actually trying to teach the class and the cameras were capturing it. But this is not a documentary. My point is not to argue that these films are miscategorized but instead to point out that they exemplify how both genres influence each other and to limit either one by the how we decided to categorize them would detract from both of their effectiveness.

Where I do think genre is important is in the subject of exploiting it and I think in this realm I do kind of agree with Mr. A, but I see it slightly differently. What I think is important is the ability of the filmmaker to exploit what he or she thinks the viewer will expect from a particular genre more so than the genre itself dictating the decisions of the filmmaker. I was listening to an episode of Fresh Air this morning featuring an interview with Jonathan Demme. The Oscar-winning director has recently focused a lot of his attention on making documentaries, including Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. The movie he was discussing in the interview was mainly Rachel Getting Married (trailer) and he talked about deciding to use the style of cinematography from his documentaries when making the film and attempting to find ways to mimic the overall style by not using rehearsal, for example. The goal was to create an intimacy with the viewer by making it seem like it was documenting events that were actually unfolding by utilizing elements of documentary filmmaking. What I believe he was doing, and having seen the movie I can attest I think he succeeded, was in riffing on genre. There is an article in The New York Times Magazine today that I have not yet read but kind of scene the headline on Neo-Neo-Realism in movies and I think it also relates to the same idea that what can be important in documentaries can be just as important in narrative film and just as effective.

So my general idea is that genre is not a limiting factor that filmmakers use or should use to decide how to approach their stories. True categorization does not really exist except in the minds of viewers and some of the truly great directors and screenwriters are in tune enough with the psyche of the viewers to realize how those preconceived ideas of genre can be a tool to exploit doubt and confusion in people's minds.

P.S. I think that the post I just wrote might have just crossed the border into pretentiousness. I think I need to watch something that will allow me to talk about fart jokes next time. Except, damn it, I do have something to say about The Enigma of Kasper Hauser. OK, so fart jokes in the post after that.

Adaptation and Accuracy

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER

THIS IS ENGLAND

The issues we've discussed about historical accuracy, the filmmaker's role as adapter, and whether the combination of history and art creates propaganda remind me of two movies I saw recently. In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (trailer), Werner Herzog tells the true story of a young man who appeared in 1828 in the town square of Nuremberg, Germany, without the ability to speak and barely able to walk. After learning to speak, Kaspar related how he had lived his entire life in a small, windowless cell, tied to the floor and brought food while he slept; until he was suddenly released in 1828, he had never seen another human being or anything outside the cell, and had never heard speech. Why he was imprisoned, by whom, why he was released, and his ultimate fate remain much debated mysteries to this day.

As a film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is stunning. Kaspar is played by Bruno S., a Berlin street performer with no acting experience, who touchingly conveys Kaspar's mixed sense of fear and wonderment at the world he's never seen before. (No doubt this was partly thanks to the fact that Bruno's own early life in some respects paralleled Kaspar's, having been savagely abused by his prostitute mother at a very young age and grown up in a series of orphanages and mental institutions.) Herzog underscores the unsettling and, well, enigmatic nature of the events depicted with scenes of haunting, dreamlike imagery seemingly unrelated to the story. His eye for strange, beautiful visuals is on full display; the cinematography is characterized by stillness, natural beauty, and expert composition.

Herzog's always been interested in people outside of normal human society and experience, so it's easy to see why he wanted to tell Kaspar Hauser's story. Although in most regards the film stays close to historical events and even directly quotes Kaspar's own words several times, it is at least as much an expression of Herzog's creative desire to explore themes that interest him as it is a straightforward depiction of the actual events. A clue to his intent may be found in the film's title in German, Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, "Each for himself and God against all"; Kaspar is depicted as radically cut off from everyone around him and often feeling threatened and confused by what he sees. Having never interacted with other people or seen any of the world prior to his release from captivity, he's developed his own ways of seeing and thinking about things (a good example of that here). This clearly interests Herzog very much, as he underscores it with a wholly invented scene of Kaspar interacting with a logician. In another unhistorical scene (seen in the trailer), Kaspar is put on display in a carnival freakshow. Though these scenes add to the film as a piece of art by illustrating the themes of social and mental isolation and the socialized, even unnatural, character of normal human understanding and experience, they make the film's role as a depiction of a real man's life somewhat murky by infusing that depiction with the artistic vision and interests of a filmmaker living over a hundred years later. I don't think that detracts from the film as a piece of art (and a great one at that), but it introduces a tension based on that contradiction, one that can be alleviated but never fully resolved.

The approach to factual accuracy taken in This Is England (trailer) contrasts with that taken in Che and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Screenwriter and director Shane Meadows tells the story of Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), a twelve-year-old working-class kid in the economically struggling '80s English Midlands who recently lost his father in the Falklands War. He's befriended by a group of skinheads, but trouble arises with the appearance of Combo (Stephen Graham), representing the new nationalistic, white-supremacist element in skinhead subculture in conflict with the apolitical, racially inclusive old-school skinheads represented by Shaun's friends. The group is forced to pick sides, and Shaun falls in with Combo, who assumes the role of father figure missing in the boy's life. The film is both moving and intense, depicting the warmth of Shaun's new friendships and the anxiety, animosity, and eventual terror that Combo brings. All the performances are excellent, especially first-time actor Turgoose who perfectly conveys Shaun's adolescent uncertainty and longing beneath his tough-kid exterior. If nothing else, I learned a lot about skinheads, namely that they originally had nothing to do with racism and in fact were influenced early on by Caribbean music and culture (the Jamaican rude boys). This movie is powerful in every possible way.

What makes This Is England relevant to this topic is the fact that Meadows based it on his own childhood, with Shaun acting as his stand-in. However, he never makes the claim, even implicitly, that there is any one-to-one relation between the film and the events of his own life. In this way it avoids the dilemma in which Che and, to a lesser extent, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser find themselves. Meadows is freer than Soderbergh or Herzog to include only those elements of fact that assist the film as a piece of art, without the nagging questions of whether to compromise the art by adhering to fact or compromise fact by adhering to art. As I mentioned in the second paragraph of my previous post, perhaps changing names and events, thereby definitively divorcing art from fact, is the way to avoid these contraditions. As someone who likes history-based movies I don't really like that solution, but it may be the only one that resolves the dilemmas of historical accuracy, the propagandistic aspects of art, and artists' responsibility to things other than art itself.

Art as Propaganda, and Vice Versa (pretentious, I know)

CHE (PARTS ONE AND TWO)

So, it only took three posts for our blog to fall victim to Godwin's Law. It was inevitable (that's what makes it a law), but three posts and one day after its founding must be some kind of record. (To be honest, though, I was thinking of Godwinizing the blog even earlier; in my first post about Che, I considered comparing the film's lionized treatment of Che to a two-part film about Hitler that depicts only his WWI military service and his building the Autobahn.)

The question of whether, and if so to what extent, a filmmaker has a "responsibility" (for lack of a better word) to history when dealing with historical topics is a thorny one whose implications obviously aren't solely artistic. On the one hand, a filmmaker in the end is creating a piece of art whose merits and faults are independent of how closely it hews to history. (For example, the famous and powerful "Odessa steps" scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin has virtually no basis in fact.) On the other hand, when a filmmaker creates a film ostensibly based on history, he represents his film as a relatively accurate portrayal of that history, whether he wishes to represent it as such or not. The fact that Soderbergh and countless other filmmakers have felt the need to tell people that their history-based movies are works of fiction is evidence of this. It's only natural for the first reaction of audiences who see a film called Che with characters named Che Guevara, Fidel and Raúl Castro, etc. to be, "Oh, I guess this is pretty much what actually happened and what those people were actually like." If Soderbergh wanted to avoid this and be completely free to pursue his own artistic vision, he could easily have changed names and events and presented the film as unrelated to historical facts. Since he didn't do that, he and his film are stuck in the creatively ambiguous limbo between fiction and nonfiction, art and history.

Now, given that an artist has to make certain decisions in how to depict his subject—what to emphasize, what to downplay, what to leave out altogether—there's really no way for a film like Che not to have some propaganda aspects. Soderbergh couldn't possibly have shown every facet of Che's life and personality, so his life and personality necessarily become simplified when they become the basis for a piece of art—maybe not as simplified as a face on a T-shirt, but moving in that direction nevertheless. However, I think Soderbergh goes beyond mere artistic license or inevitable simplification, and into the direction of propaganda, in the one-sidedness of his Che. Though he said, "I'm just an artist," his artistic vision evidently didn't include an interest in showing any shades of gray in his main character. This goes so far as his decision in filming to avoid close-ups, to complement his subject's "hard-core sort of egalitarian socialist principles." This truly is reminiscent of Riefenstahl's filmmaking for the Nazis, for instance her depiction in Olympia of a field of athletes in perfect rows doing push-ups in unison, their individuality replaced with machine-like regimentation and uniformity in keeping with the Nazis' collectivist ideology. I agree that Soderbergh doesn't go nearly as far as Riefenstahl—in the opening of Triumph of the Will she referred to the Nazis' rise to power as "the start of Germany's rebirth" (about 0:01:10 in)—but his interest in using the film to paper over its subject's complexity, rather than to explore it, is disappointing and troubling.

I think these kinds of issues are fascinating and important. As you know, I'm a bit of a history nerd, so inaccuracies in the way history is depicted tend to set my teeth on edge. But I also realize that there are often compelling artistic reasons to deviate from pure fact—expressing one's creative vision, trying to convey a "deeper truth," or simple storytelling economy. How much a piece of art depicting actual events belongs to the artist, and how much it belongs to those events and should adhere to them, is often a tough call. And then there's also the distinct but related question of films adapted from a fictional book or play and how much they should adhere to their source material. I'm planning on looking at some of these issues a bit more in the near future with other films I have in mind.

And to answer your question, I think we should hold off on renaming the blog "Owen and Matt Talk Che" for now—at least until we get an advertising deal from one of those Che T-shirt outfits.

P.S. — And thanks for paying forward Soderbergh's use of "philistine"; now all I can think of is Billy Baldwin's "philistine" character in The Squid and the Whale. Come to think of it—and maybe it's just a product of talking about Arrested Development recently and watching Lost tonight—what do you think are the odds that Billy Baldwin in The Squid and the Whale ("Hey, mah brothah, who taught you these junkyard strokes?"), Buster Bluth ("Hey, brother!"), and Desmond Hume ("Aye, bruthah.") were separated at birth? Eerie, I know.

A post in which I will not use "bromance." Wait. Damn it!

I LOVE YOU, MAN. As I have not seen the movie, there's not much I have to say about it yet, which I think will make for a nice change of pace in my response here. First, I was a bit taken aback by the first line of your post. I mean, I know starting this blog is a great but I really don't want to give you the wrong impression. Well, then I realized that was the title of the movie. Anyway, for anyone else reading this blog, I can personally attest to Owen falling out of the chair during Knocked Up. I believe it was the scene regarding the pube shaving that sent my fellow movie fan to the strangely tidy floor of the Pioneer Place theater.

I tend to agree with you on the Judd Apatow stable -- for the most part. I was disappointed with Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Anchorman. Oh, and I am still working on a post to be titled Suck Hard, but it might take a while for me to draw up enough bile to put words together about that movie. I had to put that in there so as to not sound like a shill for Judd Apatow. Here's what I like about the work that he and his cohorts do: the bring the funny but they also bring the heart. I know, Lifetime moment, right? Not that I don't enjoy cruelty and sarcasm, but it is nice that in his best movies the people are there for more than just jokes and in a way it ends up being the male version of a romantic comedy. One reason those movies do so well with women is that they usually put women in a positive light and make women feel good about themselves because the protagonist usually achieves some level of happiness at the end -- and how happiness is tied to getting a man is the subject of a whole different type of blog. In Apatow movies, the main character (a guy) often works against the grain of how men are often portrayed in modern popcorn comedies, which is the Kevin James-style all guys are stupid and women just have to put up with them that has eased over from sitcoms. This is often every guy in a RomCom that is not the one the protagonist ends up with at the end. In Apatow movies the guys are flawed but likable in a way that guys can relate to and the viewer pulls for him to succeed. In the end he usually ends up achieving what guys want to get, which is the girl and not having to give up who he really is to get that girl. Plus they're damn funny.

So that's my thought on why Apatow movies work. The ones that try to be just straight comedies do not work as much for me because I think a lot of the humor comes from the characters and Ron Burgundy, for instance, was just a prop. The supporting characters were the best part of that movie. But wait -- my point I really want to make is that since I have not seen the movie, the direction I would like to steer this conversation to is this: What is the best movie/TV show to come out of the Apatow factory? I will start by making the case for The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I find the main character to be the most likeable of all the Apatow men and it is arguable Steve Carell's best performance. His Andy is someone who is not just a loser but someone that a viewer can understand and for whom one can feel a lot of affection. The supporting characters are, as usual, hilarious but also create a great atmosphere of male camaraderie -- a rare trait in any element of popular culture. They might all be fools at times, but they are the kind of fools with whom you would want to be friends. And it's damn funny.

So I'm curious to hear your response. I have my guess at what you will pick, but I don't want to sway it because that will sway you. So I'll send it as an email to myself so that I possibly send a screen capture to prove the time stamp! Ha! Hey if we do have commentators, feel free to chime in with your thoughts on the best of the Apatow brand. Oh, and nice job on the two free screenings, by the way. I'm jealous.

P.S. I was just looking at the IMDB page for the movie and realized Judd Apatow's name is not connected to the movie at all. So I guess we're saying it's just that he's like the godfather?

P.P.S. I made it a whole post without using philistine! Wait. Damn it again!

Times seen: 2; Times paid for: 0

I LOVE YOU, MAN

The free preview screening is a beautiful thing. My roommate Mike has been signing up for a lot of them recently, but since he often can't go when he gets passes, he hands them off to me. One result of this has been my seeing I Love You, Man (trailer) twice already, though it won't receive general release until Friday, and both times for free (unless you consider having to see it at some less than convenient locations an expense). As you should be able to tell from the fact that I've seen it twice, I found it an enjoyable little movie, and so spending some time talking about its strengths and weaknesses will be a welcome break from the dead-seriousness of Che.

I'm a fan of the Apatow Factory. Though not infallible, its successes (Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared on TV; The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard, etc. in theaters) far outweigh its failures (Kicking and Screaming, Drillbit Taylor). Even its products that don't quite rise to the level of comedic genius are still funny enough to be worthwhile, and almost always have enough basis in genuine human relationships, emotions, and experiences to engage, to one degree or another, the heart as well.

Though not directly a work of Apatow himself (besides maybe an executive-producer credit), I Love You, Man—written and directed by John Hamburg, who directed three episodes of Undeclared, and starring Apatow veterans Paul Rudd and Jason Segel—is instantly recognizable as Apatovian. It tells the tale of Peter (Rudd), who gets engaged but has no close male friend to act as best man at the wedding. After a few unsuccessful "man dates" to find suitable best-man material, he runs into Sydney (Segel), a relaxed, straight-talking yin to anxious, somewhat uptight Peter's yang. They hit it off, and the movie progresses through their growing friendship and some third-reel conflicts to its predictable though pleasant conclusion.

First and foremost, this movie is really funny. The script gives the cast some good material, and generally they make the most of it with spot-on delivery and chemistry. As we've seen before, Rudd and Segel work well together, in many regards reversing their roles from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where Segel played the more serious broken-hearted lead and Rudd played the so-laid-back-he's-horizontal surfing instructor. Rudd's role in I Love You, Man is particularly interesting due to the fact that, for the most part, up till now he's played cool, confident buddy-characters (Anchorman, Knocked Up, Role Models). In this one, he convincingly plays a guy who's visibly anxious and unsure of himself outside of his comfort zones; he's a nice, well meaning guy, but just a little dorky. Segel, the other half of the movie's formula, has the easier, more straightforward role but acquits himself admirably in it, nailing the comedy and convincingly portraying the ups and downs of Peter and Sydney's relationship. I didn't literally fall out of my seat laughing like I did the first time I saw Knocked Up, but nevertheless the comedy was almost always sharp as a tack.

Though a fine example of the Apatovian blend of humor and emotion, I Love You, Man has a few serious flaws. The most serious is the way it uses its supporting cast, or, rather, fails to use them. The great J.K. Simmons, playing Peter's father, had only one comic scene in the entire movie, whetting my Simmons appetite without satisfying it. Jane Curtin, as Peter's mother, was given a total of zero comic scenes or lines; how you can cast a founding cast member of SNL and essentially make her part of the background scenery is baffling. Rashida Jones, as Peter's fiancée, and Andy Sandberg, as his brother, have some humorous interactions with Rudd but for the most part are relegated to straight-man duty or just moving the plot along. Others—I'm particularly thinking of Aziz Ansari—are given only a couple lines before disappearing altogether. Of a potentially legendary supporting cast, only a few are effectively utilized. Foremost of these is Jon Favreau as the fiancée's friend's husband, who plays an angry, selfish douchebag scarily convincingly. Another is Rob Huebel as Peter's "frosty-haired chode" of a co-worker; I could watch a whole movie of that character if I didn't want to punch him in the face the whole time. And in a small but choice role there's Thomas Lennon (cast member of The State, Lt. Dangle on Reno 911!) as one of Peter's "man dates" who didn't get the memo that he was looking for a platonic relationship. A movie like this can go from good to great based on its supporting cast, so I Love You, Man really stumbles by not making the most of its stellar talent.

So, in the end, that's my assessment of I Love You, Man, good but not great. The humor works almost without a hitch (there's a running gag of Peter's awkward, nonsensical attempts at slang that gets run into the ground, but that's about it), and the highs and lows of Peter and Sydney's friendship come across with genuine feeling, but Hamberg fails to make the most of the tools at his disposal, keeping an entertaining little movie from entering the Apatow pantheon of comedy.

Owen's Best of 2006, 2007, & 2008

Just the bare lists for now (plus honorable mentions, i.e., other good movies from that year), with commentary, arguments, apologiae, etc. to follow as interest warrants.

Top 10 of 2006

1) The Fountain

2) United 93

3) Pan's Labyrinth

4) Volver

5) The Prestige

6) Half Nelson

7) Flags of Our Fathers

8) The Departed

9) Little Miss Sunshine

10) Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Honorable mentions: Beerfest, Brick, Casino Royale, Children of Men, Clerks II, Crank, Hard Candy, Harsh Times, The History Boys, An Inconvenient Truth, The Last King of Scotland, Little Children, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, A Prairie Home Companion, The Proposition, The Queen, Right at Your Door, Rocky Balboa, A Scanner Darkly, The Science of Sleep, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Thank You for Smoking, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, V for Vendetta

Top 11 of 2007*

1) No Country for Old Men

2) There Will Be Blood

3) Letters from Iwo Jima

4) The Lives of Others

5) Ratatouille

6) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

7) Superbad

8) Knocked Up

9) Into the Wild

10 Hot Fuzz

11) Zodiac

Honorable mentions: 300, Across the Universe, American Gangster, Breach, Charlie Wilson's War, The Darjeeling Limited, The Good Shepherd, Grindhouse, The Host, I Am Legend, Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, The Lookout, The Namesake, Once, Rescue Dawn, Rocket Science, Seraphim Falls, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, The Wind That Shakes the Barley

* When I originally composed my Top 10 of 2007, I excluded There Will Be Blood from consideration because it had been release in Washington in January of 2008. Upon further consideration, however, I have included it among the films of 2007; that year was cinematically the year of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, so to exclude the latter from consideration for the reason I did seems mistaken in retrospect. However, all other films released in Washington in 2008 are considered for 2008. I've added an eleventh slot so that There Will Be Blood's addition wouldn't knock Zodiac from the ranked films.

Top 11 of 2008 (through January 2009)**

1) The Fall

2) Let the Right One In

3) The Class

4) Man on Wire

5) Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father

6) The Wrestler

7) Slumdog Millionaire

8) Synecdoche, New York

9) The Dark Knight

10) Che

11) Burn after Reading

Honorable mentions: Appaloosa, The Bank Job, Changeling, Doubt, Encounters at the End of the World, The Foot Fist Way, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Frost/Nixon, Funny Games, Hamlet 2, In Bruges, Iron Man, Milk, Mongol, The Orphanage, Persepolis, Pineapple Express, Punisher: War Zone, Quantum of Solace, Rambo, Revolutionary Road, The Strangers, Snow Angels, Timecrimes, Tropic Thunder, Valkyrie, The Visitor, The Wackness, Waltz with Bashir, Wendy and Lucy

** Prior to 2008, I've always considered films only for the year when they were release where I was living at the time, but I'm strongly reconsidering that rule. On the one hand, a bright-line rule like this provides certainty as to the year for which a film should be considered. For example, The Fall was originally released in 2006 but only in Canada, so it makes no sense for me, who have never even been to Canada, to consider it for that year instead of for 2008, the year that it was release in the United States. On the other hand, this rule effectively cuts the "award season" films in two, relegating those receiving general release to one year and those receiving only limited release to the following year (that is, until either I move to New York or Los Angeles or films start getting limited release in Portland, Washington, or wherever else I might live in the future), when those films appear on the same best-films lists elsewhere and compete for the same awards. So many films worthy of consideration—The Wrestler, Che, The Class, and others—were released in Washington in January of 2009, so this list will include films from that month as well as those from 2008. Since my 2008 now has thirteen months, I've added an additional slot in the ranked films.

My Top 11

So since the "Best of 2008" list you sent me included 11 movies, I have decided I get an extra one as well. Not for any legitimate reason like yours but more because I kind of thought the last three were about even and didn't want to have to eliminate one. Oh, and I only have 2008 for now. It might take me a bit to come up with 2007 and 2006. Also there are a few of caveats I think should be stated at the outset:

• I think this was a rather weak year for movies. I've read a number of articles that alluded to the fact, but I kind of discounted that because there were a few movies I thought were quite good this year. However when I was formulating the list it seemed that although I was putting some of these on there, in a better year they would not make the cut.
  
• Yes, I picked the movie everyone liked as my top choice. Perhaps that makes me a philistine (I think it is my goal to use that word in every post, I'm just warning you -- partly because by three degrees it could make you remember what the kid would do in the library), but I have not enjoyed a movie as much since Little Miss Sunshine.
• Comedies sucked this year! I almost felt compelled to include the comedy that I chose because I had to give some recognition.
• Eight of these movies are either all in a foreign language or feature a significant amount of subtitling, even some movies from the U.S. or U.K. And one of the three movies in English is silent for nearly the entire first half (which is by far the better half).
  

And so without further ado...

1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. Man on Wire
3. The Dark Knight
4. Waltz With Bashir
5. WALL-E
6. The Class
7. Milk
8. Let the Right One In
9. The Wrestler
10. Che (Parts 1 and 2)
11. Vicky Christina Barcelona


Honorable mention:
Frozen River; Synecdoche, New York; Burn After Reading; I've Loved You So Long; Paranoid Park; Iron Man; Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father; The Fall; The Visitor; Doubt

One final note here is that I will have to admit I might have skewed my picks to create some conflict with yours as we therefore have more to debate. Aside from a few films I thought were excellent, most of them were kind of a bit more even so it was hard to pick the best.

First they came for the indies, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't indie...

I have to say, I'm a little shocked at the depth of your anti-indie hostility. I mean, I'm glad you got all that off your chest, but this blog doesn't need you polluting it with your prejudice and hate-speech. This needs to be a welcoming place, even for those of the indie persuasion.

In all seriousness (or semi-seriousness), I get where you're coming from. I remember that Portland scene, it can be demanding. It's hard for those of us of a certain age—mid-twenties—to keep up with the kids these days with their Twitters and their Jonas Brothers and their cameras in their phones. I tell ya, it all makes my head spin. But you just need to play that U2, and play it proud! I haven't heard much of their newer stuff, but The Joshua Tree is like a spiritual experience. And if you're ever in a tight spot, just casually mention that DC band I played for you New Year's Eve, U.S. Royalty, then the tables will be turned. "What, you haven't heard of U.S. Royalty? Pff, where've you been?"

And the kids in Nick and Norah are supposed to be high-schoolers? It looked ridiculous enough when I thought they were college-age; now it looks so implausible they must be breaking the laws of physics. Total alien space bats. (Or maybe our reaction just says more about the state of our own social lives in high school than it does about the movie. Sigh.)

I'll get back to talking about serious filmic analysis soon, I promise.