byronic :: mad bad and dangerous to know

Film log 2011 #59 - Meek’s Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

Excellent fare while we (impatiently) wait for Tree of Life. 

Some notes towards a review:

• Recognisable influences: Malick, Leone and Antonioni, and yet a totally original work, a true women’s Western. 
• Visually brilliant - travelling on foot across the Oregon Trail: dirt, dust, heat, sweat; the effort of movement in unwelcoming conditions; women’s clothes so inappropriate; the sound of the creaking cart wheel; the heaviness of everything; all extremely realistic.   
• The Western landscape is not romanticised, and yet there is a staggering visual poetry to this nature - but it’s more Ted Hughes than William Wordsworth, more Herzog than Eastwood. There are barely any wild animals.
• Meek’s Cutoff is one of the great wordless films: its visual language is so rich that dialogue is not necessary to involve the viewer. The characters so convincingly thirsty that every unnecessary word would chisel a precious chunk of life out of them. When they do speak, their words are tired, blunt and hard - there’s a comparison there with the language of McCarthy’s Western novels.
• Technically inventive: finally some great cross fades without a hint of sentimentality! (Such a relief from the editing in True Grit!) The aspect ratio is refreshing - haven’t seen a Western in Academy ratio in ages. The photography is so clear and the lighting so terse I could have sworn it was shot in HD (but it’s 35mm film). 
• Great use of soundtrack and extradiegetic music: sparse, discordant, and used only when necessary. Like There Will Be Blood without the testosterone.
• The encounter between the women and the Indian equates them in the eyes of the white men. The camera always shows them on the same level, and it is significant that Michelle Williams’ character is the only one who accepts his otherness and attempts to set up a communication through exchange. It is very intelligently done. I am not saying it takes a woman to come up with that, but it is not surprising that a woman gets into the arena of a male-domninated genre and does something completely new with it. With the representation of non-dominant characters (as in not male, white, straight and Christian) not even Malick gets to that level! Brilliant.

A note from Ebert: 

Although you’ll see the movie in 1:1.33, Steve Kraus of Chicago’s Lake Street Projection Room says: “It was true 1.37:1 Academy ratio. By ‘true’ I mean similar onscreen results could be had by pillar-boxing 1.33 within the conventional cropped wide-screen 1.85:1 aperture, which would make it easier for mainstream theaters to show such films correctly, but ‘Meeks’ was the real deal, in the format of films from before the wide-screen era. Correct lenses and aperture plates required to show. ” Of course Steve has the lenses and plates. If you see this movie projected in wide-screen, it is being projected incorrectly. via

Well done Renoir Cinema at the Brunswick Centre (London) for getting this right. Sometimes it is worth spending a little bit more to get into the cinema.

With a title straight from Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! wears its cinéphile heart on its sleeve. Its characters inhabit a world of indie/alt art and underground fashion movida which could have been concocted by the love-child of Fassbinder and Almodovar, shot by first-time director Zeina Durra on 16mm handheld camera – a retro nod to John Cassavates’ work. To say that this is a never-before-seen type of film is therefore not entirely accurate, but its originality and freshness in the post-9/11 panorama are undeniable.

The largely uneventful story follows conceptual artist Asya and her life in New York, as she becomes more and more paranoid about the disappearance of a childhood friend, convinced that he must have been ‘rendered’ under War on Terror legislation. All characters in the film belong to different – often mixed – ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds (French national Asya is the daughter of a Bosnian/Palestinian woman and a Jordanian/Lebanese man). But rather than making the issue of identity problematic by introducing a sense of displaced belonging, or by focussing on struggles for self-identification, Durra opts to place her characters in a post-racial, post-identity landscape. The city is multicultural to the core, and its so-called ‘native’ population non-existent or simply not relevant. Chinese restaurateurs, Thai manicurists, Russian models, Mexican historians, Argentine dancers, Italian designers and Egyptian taxi drivers largely interact without difficulties and communicate without problems.

While multilingualism is the unifying tongue of the film, Durra uses a variety of languages in interesting ways – sometimes to create unexpected bonds between characters, some other times to poke fun at them. The humour in the dialogues is occasionally sharp and clever, and most of all it is pleasantly democratic, as no one remains completely untouched by it - hipster artists as much as hispanic workers.

The added dimension of a female perspective doesn’t slide into ‘feminist-issues’ territory: it is terribly refreshing to see female characters on film whose goals in life do not depend on the conquest of a man, or are secondary to his adventures and mishaps. Both male and female characters are well-rounded, credible and interesting, and the love story depicted in the film has space to breathe and grow in a mature way totally unimaginable in contemporary American/British romantic comedies.

Where the film falters is in pace and structure, something which could easily be adjusted with a tightening re-edit. While the relative plotlessness isn’t much of an issue, at times the script is left to meander without a clear direction, and there are some loose ends in the story that feel more under-directed than deliberately left open. For instance, I would have liked to know more about Asya’s artworks: Durra opens the movie with the creation of a photographic self-portrait with cigarette, keffiyeh and AK-47, and other equally subversive, ironic works in the same series, only to then lose interest in them and their reception. Incidentally, the scene offers a great comparison with the opening sequence of Four Lions, suggesting finer and subtler ways to laugh at Islamic terrorists by laughing at Western perceptions of them.

All in all, Durra fires on many cylinders, and she shows intelligence, talent and great cinematic skill. Here’s looking forward to her next feature.

(Source: byronic)

Some thoughts on Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein.

First of all, let me say that getting up at 6.30am, queueing for over an hour for tickets, and then standing for the two-hour duration of the show (because by the time the people in front of me in the queue had got to the box office there were no seats left) was totally worth it.

Secondly, I saw the show the way I wanted to see it: with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor (they alternate roles each night). This may have been part of the problems I shall expand on below, but I’m really glad I did. I had seen BC in quite a few stage plays before, but always in slightly nerdy, intellectually sophisticated, upper-middle class parts. Not that the Creature isn’t a complex intellectual part, but I wanted to see how he grappled with a more muscular role. (He grappled incredibly well - naked; for twenty wordless minutes; see photo above.)

So all in all, I enjoyed the show. Unfortunately I didn’t love it, and I think it has quite a few issues. The main problems come under two large categories, and they are interconnected.

Problem number one: the script is rather poor. The scene division is fairly sketchy, and while the structure works well (the play starts with the Creature, not with Victor’s creation), the play drags on a bit in the middle and at the end (the middle you can get away with, the end you can’t). On a purely textual level, the script soars when the Creature declaims lines from Milton, but everybody else is speaking very plain prose so rife with commonplace and banality that subtext is effectively made plain text with every line. Focussing on the Creature is great, and it gives the story much more passion and ‘true grit’, but as a result Frankenstein is so underwritten as a character, that his role truly becomes secondary, whereas it used to be Shelley’s prime concern. For me this is a huge flaw: you lose most of the moral struggle that is necessary to properly address the philosophical issues involved - whether man can or should ‘play god’, how far can we take science, how is consciousness born, can creatures have souls? Because the Creature is given the advantage of expression over everybody else, you have no doubts that he does indeed have ‘a soul’ and chooses to operate in the way he does when faced with humankind’s rejection. 

Problem number two: casting. While I’m sure Miller must be excellent as the Creature, I didn’t like him as Victor. He played him as the mad scientist from James Whale’s film, rather than the ‘modern Prometheus’ he is intended to be. He was an action hero, possessed by a crazed desire to prove himself a god, rather than by the genius of science and the knowledge of a superior intellect. This is partly the script’s fault, and partly Miller’s own style: his voice is too hoarse, and his body too angry to be intellectually cool. (See: Boyle didn’t direct his feet!) His Frankenstein is driven by his penis, rather than his brain - not because of desire but because of testosterone: he wants to be a father of perfect creatures without having to engage in emotional and sexual contact with other human beings (he clearly despises them and their petty concerns), he wants to be the superior man-creator of a whole new humankind without debasing himself to human urges. (Interestingly, only the Creature and women are shown to have sexual and romantic desires.) This is fine, but it’s only one aspect of the character that Miller manages to convey, and I found it a little one-dimensional. (I would bet money on the fact that Cumberbatch makes something more even of this underwritten part.)

The other casting issue for me was Frankenstein père, who, turned into a father figure from Jane Austen’s rather than Mary Shelley’s world, lost all his authority and power. It’s a story of lost or negligent fathers, impotent fathers, farcical fathers - god is dead, the Father is dead, and Freud isn’t feeling that good himself. But again, this reinforces my feeling that removing basic, traditional morality from Frankenstein doesn’t make the story more modern or more interesting. Besides, the actor is clearly not playing for laughs, he’s just being laughed at. He was just the wrong casting choice (note to Danny: a large man with very thin legs never looks good in Regency breeches and stockings).

Danny Boyle’s direction was ok -  on the down side: a lot of traditionally blocked movement (mmmpf), some strange and confusing condensing of chronological settings (the Frankensteins live in the English 1810s, but the villages and cities look more like 1850s, so that Boyle can insert some subtext about technology, progress, science moving forward, etc - fine, but a bit laboured, imho); but on the up side, a smart and effective staging: some wonderful images are done with shadows and backlighting, the design is brilliant (lightbulbs! lots of them!), and the Olivier stage’s hydraulic revolving platform is used very well. But the play doesn’t end nor begin with a bang, but with the proverbial whimper - and that, my friends, is a weakness of direction.

On the whole, it felt really as though Cumberbatch was in a league of his own - and amongst actors today he probably is. He was emotionally subtle, physically powerful, outlining the growth of the Creature’s soul as well as his body with supreme finesse and control. His voice radically changes in a theatrical space, and the moment he opens his mouth to howl - whether in joy or pain - he fills the air with presence. It’s extraordinary how big and how small he can become. He is in a tragedy of its own Shakespearean grandeur, while everybody else is doing George Bernard Shaw.

Film log 2010 #90 - The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)

As far as I’m concerned, this is the film of the year. Barring any major upsets by an early release of Malick’s Tree of Life, or any surprises from Camp Aronofsky/Camp Coen, that is.

But you don’t have to take me seriously. I’m a sucker for a great script, for witty, past-paced dialogue, for a harsh critique of privileged homosocial environments, for a tragic fall totally unworthy of sympathy.

And, mostly, for Aaron Sorkin’s brain, heart, and writing muscles. He is THE KING of contemporary Hollywood screenwriters. All hail.

(Also, Justin Timberlake owns this movie with his Mephistophelian ways; if he doesn’t get at least an Oscar nomination, Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. )