Dušan Makavejev - Free Radicals

Dušan Makavejev was one of the great countercultural sui generis voices to emerge from the convulsive antiestablishment bedrock of the 1960s, w/ its various new waves and locally global movements for the emancipation of desiring-machines and their assemblages from the clutches of social-machines in the East and the West. (Social-machines as manifested by the military-industrial complex, malevolent forces of Capital and State, sociocultural estrangement, and what New Left post-Marxist critical theorist Herbert Marcuse called Technological Rationalism (the destructive drive inherent to the state apparatus of the Soviet Union just as much as those of Western Imperialism)). His films bring to mind May ’68 French student slogans such as: “take your desires for reality,” “it is forbidden to forbid,” and “under the paving stones, the beach.” While many of the radical cultural and social movements in the West maintained ideological allegiances to Stalin, Mao, Trotsky, and Marxist-Leninist discourse in general, radical artists and dissidents in the East who lived under the tyrannical sets of controls erected around European communism throughout the nations aligned beneath the aegis of the Warsaw Pact, saw the failings of Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the supposed dictatorship of the proletariat became nothing more than a base plutocracy supported by military power, a fact that became visible to the whole world in 1968 when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Czechoslovakia to put an end to the popular Spring Movement for socialism w/ a human face under Alexander Dubček. Radical writers, artists, and filmmakers (as well as politically active dissidents) throughout the Eastern Bloc had long before come to know how difficult it was to freely communicate, or especially to enact, ideas in this repressive climate. Yugoslavia’s Novi Film movement, made-up of outspokenly critical artists – besides Makavejev, the movement included Aleksandar Petrović and the seriously fucking bitter Živojin Pavlović – was one of many, many movements that skirted censorship by embossing their critiques in films that were superficially made to resemble the standard socialist-realist fare promulgated by the Serbian Communist Party’s Ideological Commission in their case. Makavejev, who started out working in the fifties after having gorged himself on disparate cinemas, high and low, at the Yugoslav Cinémathèque, quickly developed a unique style, combining bricolage, intertextuality, frank sexuality, documentary style, and sly commentary. Makavejev’s cheeky films push ideology to the foreground to lambaste and undermine it, showing how people get tangled up in it, overwhelmed by it, and ultimately trip up, all in tizzy. He mocks the image of a functioning, idyllic collectivity foisted on the masses by the existing institutions, making a mockery of popular forms and idioms, along w/ their underpinning ideological scaffolding. What his films celebrate is unbridled personal liberation of a sexual or performative nature that breaks through any constricting bonds the outside world may seek to impose upon libinal drive. The form of his films likewise takes on a freewheeling, open-ended, asymptotic wildness, turning on a dime, heading off on new lines-of-flight, employing multiple narrative forms and voices, crashing through barriers, and enacting new schema, landscaping new root-systems, wherever they may burrow. He was able to practice his termite art under the radar for well over a decade before being exiled in 1973 after the release of his greatest masterpiece, WR: Mysteries of the Organism (’71), a free-form cinematic essay celebrating Wilhelm Reich and his theories of the primordial cosmic energy he called “orgone,” which essentially amounts to the orgasmic energy that connects all things to the Universal force of Life and which pulses out of the earth, down from the heavens, and through organisms. Reich is the ultimate subject for Makavejev, whose entire body of work, leading from his early experiments in Yugoslavia, to his twin masterpieces of performative libidinal desublimation, the already Criterionized WR and Sweet Movie (’74), and culminating in a series of sneakily subversive international co-productions, has continually broken down the decrepit structures of any-given-position-whatever, to allow energy to flow and explode new possibilities out of the formulaic gridwork of narratological and ideological precedent, replacing meaning or discursive reiteration w/ sped-up ecstatic and anarchic joie de vivre, an endless making passionately active of reactive forces, fixed to blast through any institutional moorings in its path. Criterion’s bare-bones new Eclipse series box, Free Radicals, presents his first three Yugoslavian features, showcasing the early, putative emergence of Makavejev’s absolutely singular vision.

Covek nije tica / Man is Not a Bird

Man is Not a Bird (’65) opens w/ a crazed-looking oddly-coiffed mesmerist, the “youngest hypnotist in the Balkans,” delivering a soliloquy on his chosen trade, talking about “the negative aspects of love,” explaining how he has used hypnosis to free a young girl of the “delusion” that she was in love w/ a particular boy, because of some occult spell she had been put under, who it was deemed was no good for her. He talks directly to the camera, as in a documentary, riffing on the various kinds of magical thinking, old wives tales, silly superstitions, and absurd beliefs that play a major role in everyday life. “The moral,” he says, is that “magic is absolute nonsense.” How then, the ensuing film seems to ask, should we understand love? What of its magic? What of its madness? What do we do w/ desire? What follows is a fractured narrative, interrupted by various documentary asides, about two copper factory employees in the remote region of Bor. One, Jan, is relatively high up the factory ladder, an assembly expert who is in the throws of a messy affair w/ his landlord’s daughter, a tempestuous hairdresser named Rajka (the sexy and diffident and oh-so-flexible Milena Dravić). The other is Barbulović, a hulking, fiendish member of the lumpenproletariat, who loafs around, gets wasted, and fucks whomsoever he can lay his dirty hands upon (a depiction of the communist laborer that is almost ridiculously subversive in a culture used to seeing such figures hoisted up as selfless, heroic, defenders of the little people – and funny, because there is never really any reason for him to be constantly interrupting the love story that we are nominally watching). The story (or the stories-that-are-the-story), which in its way details the endless frustrations of its characters bound up as they are in demoralizing work and the vagaries of relationships that are frustrating, untenable, and impossible to cleanly extricate oneself from, is constantly being interrupted by scenes of hypnosis (the title coming from one such scene wherein a stage full of hypnotized audience members are made to flap about the stage fully believing that they are, in fact, birds), odd carnivalesque performances, digressions on Beethoven, and a mordant tour of the factory where a guide pontificates on the wonders of this worker’s paradise before a group of rapt school children while we witness Barbulović trapped in filthy, exhausting labor, an emasculated object of the collective gaze. The film depicts a taxonomy of humiliations and desperations within a set of conditions not conducive to life. Even love becomes a baleful purgatory fraught w/ dangers and conditions as poor as the barracks that house the workers. The film suggests that love and ideology are two kinds of hypnosis that can entrap entire populations of people in a mnemonic thrall from which they are unable to awaken themselves, and in which their individual strivings, desire having been hijacked by external forces, amount to little more than a mad zonked-out Serbian dude flapping his arms in an impotent, vainglorious attempt at taking flight.

Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. / Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Almost a streamlined variation on the not-a-love-story between Jan and Rajka that made up a good part of Man is Not a Bird, Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (’67) tells the temporally disjointed story of Hungarian telephone operator Izabela (Eva Ras, often naked and lazed-out in odd positions like Milena Dravić before her) and her older Serbian Muslim rat exterminator boyfriend Ahmed (the adorable and diminutive Slobodan Aligrudić, almost overwhelmed by his clothes), a story that the temporal disjointedness lets us know early on is not going to end well when one of Makavejev’s trademark documentary digressions flashforwards to the recovery of Izabela’s body accompanied by a dry dissertation by a doctor concerning the handling of the corpse. As the arc of the relationship between our two lovers goes from the heights of blissful cohabitation to bedeviled tragedy after a dalliance w/ the horny local mailman causes a guilty and sullen Izabela to collapse the love affair from within, sending mild-mannered Ahmed back to the bottle and culminating in her unfortunately unwitnessed accidental death at his blotto hands. Again, the film is routinely bisected, interrupted, and rerouted back and forth by Makavejev’s patchwork exploration of the subject from every possible angle and vantage, as a sexologist and criminologist take turns lecturing to us, elucidations on the history of phallus worship are presented along w/ erotic sketches from antiquity, fragments from Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (’31) appear on the TV, a shot of Izabel’s bare ass is graphically matched w/ a pair of eggs, then with two mounds of flower into which the egg yolks are dropped and kneaded as part of a subsequent lesson in strudel making. The film throws all of its disparate elements together in freewheeling collage, turning what is essentially a neorealist-style staged documentary into and artfully arranged hardscrabble poetic tapestry of fragments that reflexively align w/ one another, mimicking the autopsy performed by the coroner of the film as by all of its experts and talking heads who, in one way or another, for all their pompous elocution, scientific deduction, and myriad of truth-claims (like those propogated and upheld by the socialist state in its reification of the fixed tenants upon which it is all-knowingly erected), are unable to grasp the generally messy, inextricably complicated, and never semantically reducible complexities of lives as they are actually lived, carried out, and brought to thorny and difficult ends, often not morally coherent or easily assimilated by easy encapsulations as these are. Love Affair is mussed and diffuse, never equivocating one way or the other, hard to fix judgment upon, just as is life. Here we are seeing Makavajev begin to structure very directly his evolving tendency to show how ideologies, systems for endogenously producing hard-and-fast truths-in-themselves, employing bureaucracies of voices that refuse, or deploy energy to repress, the anarchic life-forces that dispel the illusion of their claims, how powers that have the tendency to narrate histories, no matter how marginalized or entrenched, in their own voice, using their own systems of signs, actively destabilizing any opportunity for critical thought, doubt, or disharmony within the apparatus of a limited and limiting expressivity, ultimately fail to uphold the frames that they impose upon the world when exposed to even the slightest countervailing exposure.

Nevinost bez zastite / Innocence Unprotected

With Innocence Unprotected, the most conceptually rich and formally busy film from his early Yugoslav period, Makavejev further encroaches upon the mashup terrain of his subsequent masterpieces of intertextual collage, WR and Sweet Movie, that directly follow it, w/ a “new production of a good old film,” as the opening title card half-truthfully informs us. The title is taken from a 1942 film of the same name as Makavejev’s, the first talkie made in Yugoslavia, though the communist powers that be tried to suppress the fact since it was made under Nazi occupation, thus making it incompatible w/ the self-mythologization of the state (this being a film whose production had to be kept secret from the Nazis for similar reasons!). The bulk of Makavejev’s film is actually given over to an arch and extremely funny repositioning of the actual 1942 film, often tinted or hand-stenciled so that Makavejev can impose his own jokester antics on the crapace of the original film itself as though he were tagging it like a Brooklyn subway car. Made by the absurd and extremely popular dangerous-to-himself-and-others muscle man, acrobat, daredevil, escape artist, and workaday locksmith Dragoljub Aleksić, the original film is a boisterously over-the-top vamp-fest featuring incomprehensibly bad acting and a shopworn plot – intercut, in a way that perhaps foresaw Makavejev, w/ documentary footage of Aleksić’s various fucked-up what-the-hell-is-he-doing? feats of highwire derring-do – about an everyman hero who saves his true love from being raped by an evil industrialist scumbag in the upstairs bedroom of the home where she is kept by a heartless old slag who has sold her out to the letch for favors already performed (or soon to be returned) in gratis. The film had one public showing during the war, but was subsequently squashed from the records, its director-star accused of collaboration and nearly sold down the river. Makavejev comes onto the scenes twenty-six years later and rounds up Aleksić and his collaborators on the classic-that-wasn’t-to-be, interviewing them, letting them do oddball shit in front of his camera, and filming nearly-septuagenarian Aleksić flexing on a rotating pedestal w/ some seriously gorgeous bitches dangling off of him. These are some self-effacingly goofy people whom age has in no way softened. Not only does Makavejev intercut the modern versions of the players in this forgotten blip on the radar of cinematographic history, he also mines moments of surprising poignancy by offsetting moments in Aleksić’s ridiculous melodrama, such as when the love interest in a moment of longing and lamentation poses crestfallen at a window to peer out on the outside world, w/ newsreel footage of the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, reminding the viewer of the real world context of the film’s impossible-seeming production and the extraordinary tragedy that befell Yugoslavia not only as one of many countries to be raped like an innocent young romantic in an upstairs loft by the Nazis, but as the only country to be bombed by both sides during the war. Suddenly the original movie’s corny plot and cardboard heroics take on a moving subtext, as a celebration of individuality and shared values in a world in which values were thrown out the window to make way for imperialistic plunder and catastrophic violence. Innocence Unprotected becomes a wild and wooly gaff w/ serious underlying resonances that milks a historical text for easy laughs only to turn the gambit around on us revealing a genuine and complicated pathos. It is both a celebration, a mockery, and a solemn and powerful reconfiguration of its own berserk and heavily mediated contents, a batshit collage that Makavejev would soon outdo once again, with WR and Sweet Movie, his two subsequent jaunts into outer-fucking-space.

World's Greatest Dad

Well known as the barking, spasmodic Tourette’s propulsion-unit of a standup comic who found himself deep-sixed in the sorry, unforgiving hinterland of popular 80s D-list comedies like the Police Academy movies and boy-meets-horse debacle Hot to Trot (’88), Bobcat Goldthwait subsequently went on to infamy as the dude who seriously fucked up Jay Leno’s set, made the appalling and awesome Shakes the Clown, and disappeared into the Los Angeles smog, presumably a little pissed off that the corner his career had started off in left him w/ precious little space to back into. Instead of showing up on Celebrity Big Brother or The Surreal Life, like many of his ilk, Goldthwait quietly reemerged in the new millennium as a director of late night comedy shows, and is now releasing his second feature film of the decade, World’s Greatest Dad, a follow up to the criminally underappreciated Stay ('06)(a.k.a. Sleeping Dogs Lie). The two films are of a piece (not just in terms of the fun they both have w/ aberrant sexual practices, either), enacting a dialectical counterpositioning of each other in terms of their divergent approaches to one particular ethical grey zone: the uses and abuses of honesty, its complicated pragmatics, and where and when it may or may not work itself out as a concept applied to practice(s). If the apparent philosophies of the two films contradict one another, this only serves to enhance the business of their ardent comedy of ethology in all its murky indeterminacy, w/ its built-in contradictory schematics and its demands for irreducible situational considerations which need to be endlessly considered, reconsidered, and finally tested, by the narrative business of the films themselves, to see where and when which ethical precepts may or may not apply. In Stay, the protagonist, Amy, is a woman asked repeatedly by her fiancé to reveal her deepest, darkest secret. That her deepest, darkest secret – which happens to be that she gave her dog head as a lark when she was eighteen – is probably something best kept secret from the party in question is proven by virtue of the woebegone revelation’s consequent seismic impact on her life as it ripples destructively out from the epicenter of this now compromised intimacy (the revelation is overheard by her creep of a brother), seriously negatively impacting all of Amy’s relationships. Amy doesn’t want to share the secret w/ her writer boyfriend, he has to keep prodding her to do so, until she does … at the exact wrong moment. Something in Amy makes her feel guilty for withholding, so she relents, but all along she knows that sharing the fact that she once sucked-off a dog – sharing it w/ her boyfriend, of all people – is in no way going to serve anybody’s greater interest. She should have stuck to her guns, and she knew it all along. Likewise, but alternatively, the sad sack protagonist of World’s Greatest Dad, high school poetry teacher and failed writer Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), foments a series of escalating lies he knows deep down he shouldn’t when his son Kyle, a pervert and asshole for whom nobody, including his father, cares much at all, dies of autoerotic asphyxiation whilst jerking off to pics of dad’s girlfriend’s crotch taken surreptitiously under the dinner table w/ his cell phone. (It should be added here that Kyle is, in a brilliant bit of casting, played by puberty-ravaged Daryl Sabara, the adorable wide-eyed moppet from the Spy Kids movies). Overwhelmed by this tragicomic accident, Lance does all he can to make the death look like a suicide, hanging his son up from the chin-up bar in the boy’s own closet, cleaning away the telltale evidence, and finally concocting a tortured and eloquent cri de coeur suicide letter. When the letter gets out, the whole school becomes moved by it, rallying around the now iconic image of the asshole son. Lance’s sort-of girlfriend, the phony and unequivocal art teacher, grows closer. His erstwhile unpopular poetry class begins to fill. Lance, who has always equated the writing success he strives for w/ women, cash, and adulation as opposed to self-realization or artistic transcendence, becomes addicted to his newfound, vicarious popularity, finally taking the bull by the horns and fabricating an entire journal to stand in as his suddenly incandescent son’s life’s work, landing him on a talk show, causing him to be pursued by the publishers who have eluded him all these years (who are even willing to publish one of his novels if they can have the journal), allowing him to meet “Kyle’s favorite,” Bruce Hornsby, and seemingly consolidating once and for all the wandering attentions of the art teacher. (Only Kyle’s one real friend, the even less popular Andrew, is suspicious, observing that the heartbreaking journal features no digressions on “vaginas, anal sex, fisting, felching, or rim jobs”). Just as the library is about to undergo a dedication to Kyle – poised like Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the only portrait we ever see of him, now as ubiquitous as that of the asthmatic Argentine doctor so often is on the clothes of the student body and the walls of the school – Lance, who out of his genuine desire to protect his son and himself, to feel loved and respected by the people in his life, has carried this lie as far as he wants to or is ethically capable of, makes an abrupt about-face and reveals all to the not-so-teeming masses, unburdening himself, at the dedication, of a life’s worth of pent-up stuff never revealed for fear of not being accepted, the disarticulated intensities of a life built on a constant attempt to be judged not wanting in the eyes of others, a life gone nowhere for fear of missteps. The film ends w/ a comically operatic enacting of this metaphorical rebirth as Lance, a one-time member of the college diving team, runs through the school, stripping down to his socks, leaping naked from the highdive into the pool. From the water he rises mirthful and ecstatic, born anew. Where in his previous film, Stay, Goldthwait outlined a particular set of circumstances in which honesty was undermined as a universalizable moral maxim, as it serves no one in the case presented by the film, and was never going to, as Amy knows deep down from the start. In World’s Greatest Dead, Lance also knows the whole time that his web of lies stems from the bad faith and concealment-of-self-for-the-benefit-of-others upon which his whole miserable life is founded and always has been. Paradoxically, he learns a lesson implicitly understood by his son Kyle while he is alive: that a man who depends upon no one else to define himself is inherently free. Indeed, Kyle is the only character in World’s Greatest Dad who isn’t playing a losing game of self-identification managed haphazardly through the relay of the self through the heavily overcoded gaze of the other. When Lance finally comes clean at the library dedication and the principal calls him an “asshole,” Lance thanks him. An asshole is what everybody always thought his son was, and to finally pull down the scrim of deceit (from which Lance comes to be constituted well before his son’s death throws the whole gambit into endgame), and to reveal that it’s okay to be seen as an asshole so long as the truth can prevail and the self be thrown into relief, Lance not only comes full circle, he is also at this very moment able to affirm his son and to embrace him, by embracing the asshole within, in a way that he was never able to do while the boy was alive. World’s Greatest Dad appears to prove the opposite theory to the one proven by Stay, but the two films taken together ultimately prove one theory: that the either/or binary apparatus is not sufficient in matters of ethology; that different conclusions can and will be arrived at by approaching ethical or moral issues from opposing points of origin; that the truth may set you free just as it may doubly imprison. The final lessons are these: that a principle doesn’t hold up until you play it out in a particular theater of operations, and that we always already knew what the right thing to do was in the first place.

Up in the Air

Is everybody high? Perhaps it’s just that the film itself works like a blithe pharmaceutical. It turns out that, despite the gushings and mushings of a great many apparently sane people prostrate before its supposed majesty, Up in the Air is a barely serviceable, shallow piece of artless shit, saved from utter abasement by two excellent actresses, one or whom is probably, to my mind, the best one working in American cinema today. George Clooney probably cannot really be faulted for playing George Clooney. He’s a fucking movie star, isn’t he? But the filmmakers do us a disservice by bringing to bear just such a movie star in a film that desperately needs, you know, a guy. Vera Farmiga is, however, and despite a series of questionable career moves of late, seemingly capable of doing no wrong. Here, she effortlessly manifests a high-test femininity that one doesn’t encounter often enough in this world (though one encounter is, oddly, often one too many for those who cannot take the heat – which is essentially most of us): pure sexual magenta, a tectonic libidinal depth charge, distributing life-destroying circulatory coolant. Hers is the kind of sexual poise and inexhaustible je ne sais quoi that fucks up lives – destabilizing the deeply entrenched philosophies that go w/ them – and fucks ‘em up right proper (!). Perhaps worse than Up in the Air itself is the realization that I will be sitting through this shitty movie again, and again, and again so that I may submit before Vera Farmiga’s deafening skull-caving goddessery. Her character, Alex, is the only digestible apple in the bunch simply because she is the only one not possessed of illusions concerning the nature of the cutthroat world she sharks about in; the kind of person we should all be grateful to get the chance to be used by; a woman who will never need anything back from us. She’s doing the best she can to ride it out in style in a shitty world full of pithy Hallmark epigraphs that barely disguise the fact that nobody here ultimately gives a shit about anybody other than themselves, least of all the filmmakers (who do the most of anyone to demonstrate caring w/ a faux earnestness as bankrupt as the commodities market). The film’s apparent trump card – non-actors tricked into the film by classified adds asking recently fired out-of-work nobodies to appear in a documentary about termination in our current economic climate (which is not what this is!) – seriously backfires on it. These quickly clipped together talking heads, directly addressing the camera, who open the film proper and appear again later for some easy blues, make obvious director Jason Reitman’s total lack of perspective. His consequent attempts to make us care about George Clooney’s sexy ennui or dizzy princess Anna Kendrick’s growing realization (admittedly well wrought) that the world can be unfair and cruel are – built to ride as these trajectories are on the spare parts of real lives really sunk – a losing battle from the word go. As freelance corporate assassins who cavort about Anywhere Red State U.S.A., traveling first class, complaining about how their lives lack real form or meaning (or occasionally basking in it, as Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is wont to do, because the film wants to be edgy), they find themselves in need of a much darker, more savage film than the one they are in, which is basically as fluffy as the clouds at 30,000 feet. Spinning their curt workaday destruction of sad, desperate lives of indentured servitude as offerings of fresh, hopeful new beginnings for the recently downsized, they demand a considerable taxation on our investment as an audience. When Bingham decides that his “travel light” philosophy of life – which he pedals, in a manner which stretches expositional credulity, as a part-time prospective Tony Robins-style inspirational speaker doing an unfunny variation on George Carlin’s “stuff” rant – is no longer doing it for him, and goes off in search of love and approval from Alex, only to discover that she is not in fact real-life-available, this is hardly sufficient comeuppance. He deserves so much worse, and a nastier, more pissed-off movie to deserve it in. I mean: the guy got to fuck Vera Farmiga! Boo hoo! Bingham’s third act restoration is such horseshit that even Clooney can’t sell it w/ that shit-eating grin and go-get-‘em mien of his. That this visually blah film, which demands of its actors that they carry the whole thing, only to make that impossible for them when considered next to the catalogue of shit-out-of-luck faces from the crowd, expects us to enjoy it as a breezy, cunning entertainment, shows some serious fucking chutzpah. A chutzpah entirely missing from the lifeless execution of this risible little treat itself, which no amount of snappy cutting or dude-packing-his-shit montages is gonna save.

Me and Orson Welles

Orson Welles seems like an odd subject for Richard Linklater, a director whose films often feel very much like celebrations of people other than himself. Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s warmly evocative period suite, adapted from highschool English teacher Robert Kaplow’s novel of the same name by Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent Palmo, possess a sly agrammatical title that sneakily tells you a great deal about what the film is actually about: the serious folly of allowing ones ego to put itself trippingly in the way of one the size of an Orson Welles’s. Such egos, at the top and bottom of the theater food chain, are not merely a byproduct of collaborative artistic endeavors, but actually a fundamental component of what makes such collective expression excel on the rare occasion that it manages to truly do so, and a fairly substantial part of what presumably drives anyone into a field where they would presume to demand the undifferentiated attention of a rapt audience. As much as we postmodern neuters may wish to dispel great man theories, it is hard not to concede that the theater has long been a place where self-stylized great men have traditionally excelled, and presumably will continue to do so for as long as such an institution exists. The film tells the story of glib seventeen-year-old (and entirely fictional) New Jersey pretty boy Richard Samuels (the almost obscenely self-possessed Disney hunk Zac Efron as walking embodiment of cocky youthful hubris), and his magical consciousness-raising / illusion-shattering momentary immersion in Welles’s 1937 Mercury Theater Italo-fascist “black shirt” adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he lands the role of Brutus’s lute-playing page, Lucius, during the last week of chaotic by-the-seat-of-the-pants rehearsals. Welles, played w/ heroic verisimilitude (particularly in the eyes and brow) by Christian McKay, is a careening, petty genius, juggling a bevy of mistresses and a pregnant wife, whose incredulous belittling of everyone w/ whom he comes into contact is matched only by his profound ability to massage effortlessly to brilliant life egos he has freshly gotten through bending to the point of tensile threshold. McKay’s Welles is a garrulous showboating fiend and cocksure, cornball charmer who has an ability to tune his fellow artisans to the precise pitch he requires of them through effortless manipulation of the sinewy strings of unpretty pride. He remains, in so doing, entirely unsullied by authenticity – something the film implicitly argues has no place in the communal realization of theatrical greatness. Artifice and calculation become twin strengths within the film (and childishness almost a sign of moral life), and can thus be read a posteriori as part of Me and Orson Welles’s own charming, infectious autocelebratory self-image w/ its heavily manufactured sound stage Depression New York front and center in its continuous demonstration of its supreme joy in being itself, manufactured as it was in Britain using a bare minimum of well exploited pseudo-exteriors. (In this way the film brings to mind Samuel Fuller’s entirely independently made 1952 Park Row, the bulk of the budget of which went toward the fabrication of the titular strip of 1880s Manhattan real-estate that Fuller understandably wanted to shoot every last fucking fabricated inch of – after all, he paid for it). Poor Richard makes the mistake of falling for the theater company’s young, shrewdly career-minded-deployer-of-pussy secretary Sonja (fussily busy-faced Claire Danes), who seduces him as a gaff and mindfucks poor full-of-himself-beyond-his-means Richard by casually demonstrating that her eye remains unapologetically on the prize. Of course, she promptly fucks Comandante Orson and has designs on none other than David O. Selznick. Young Richard, crestfallen and full of a righteous indignation (to which he has no right), misunderstanding the advise of cooze-hound Joseph Cotten (James Tupper, unsettling look-alike), overplays his hand and fights for the girl – by fighting w/ Orson. Oops. Though Welles strings our young hero expertly along in the wake of this colossal error of judgment, the great man’s ego cannot stand to be so stressed. Opening night will be Richard’s last. Welles even has Joe Cotten fire the poor fucker. The kid learns his lesson. There is a hierarchy of ego in place. By all means, throw yrs in the fight; just keep the fuckin’ thing right-sized (the size that it has earned); keep yr angling on the down low. A man like Orson Welles will never demand that you respect him as long as you can perform respect like a “God-born actor.” Where Kierkegaard saw the despair in the self of having a self, Welles knows, cherishes, and would have his minions truck in the business of carving, out of silence and gaping time, this marvelous collective emancipation: no self left at all. To remind Orson Welles that he has a self beyond imposture is to invite yr ass to be handed to you. The cold trauma of being one person, one accountable individual, scared and ultimately alone, may be a fact of life. But it ain’t the fuckin’ theater. A man like Orson Welles can spend an entire life running from the specter of himself as a self. Running in the direction of greatness and/or disaster. It’s ultimately irrelevant which.

Chi bi / Red Cliff

Full of staggering striated patterns of boats and bodies, Triumph of the Will-like phalanxes that might sometimes, from a squinty-eyed distance, look like expertly sculpted pubic hair, John Woo’s first Mandarin megapicture is more than just a work of fantastic fascistic symmetries. A lofty typological marriage of Western and Eastern epic elements, Red Cliff is easily the meat and potatoes cinematic spectacle-qua-spectacle entertainment of the year; a dialectical materialist network topology of object and human relations, rendered as quicksilver synthetic apotheosis, lurching forward w/ pinwheel precision, balancing epic macro and sensual micro, in its adaptation of 14th century Chinese urtext Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a towering novel rooted in fact, that has been transformed over time into totemic mythic abstraction, given elegant though sweaty (and red-dirt-encrusted) digital flesh by Honk Kong slow-mo gangland melodrama master turned sleek Hollywood go-to action director John Woo. Shorn of half the length of the original two-part-and-nearly-five-hour Chinese release – the biggest budget film in Chinese history, as well as surpassing Titanic as that nation’s all time highest domestic grosser – Woo’s new stridently cut version, prepared for the world beyond Asia, doesn’t seem to bowdlerize the original text so much as simply blast through it DJ style, quickening the piledriving web of intersections, scratching out new headrush breakbeats against the grain of the film’s own internal rhythms, intensifying flows instead of breaking them off. Though I cannot wait to see the full version, I have a feeling that by delving further into backstory and courtly politics the film will invariably lose some of the druggy, glandular magic of the motored-away montage on display in the two-and-a-half hour version. The story, that of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, tells of the Han Dynasty, after years of war and corruption, fallen into the hands of power-mad prime minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), who convinces the neutered Emperor to declare war on two autonomous southern principalities run by a pair of warlords – the older more wearied/experienced Liu Bei (You Yong) and the young dandy Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Though the warlords are far from being allies, they decide to team up in an attempt to fend off attack from the massive Imperial army which has stationed it troops and naval forces on the banks of the Yangtze at the base of the titular cliff. Two extremely valuable men assist the rebels: Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro), Liu Bei’s military advisor, able to predict meteorological events well in advance, thus providing the rebels repeatedly (and ultimately decisively) w/ the tactical upper hand, and Sun Quan’s viceroy Zhou Yu (superstar and Wong Kar-wai regular Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a peaceful and philosophical man of compassion and implacable focus, whose anti-war tea-artist wife is nonetheless not afraid to go behind enemy lines and play Mata Hari for the cause. The film proceeds through a series of bafflingly complex and meticulously executed battles, on land and at sea, in which natural rhythms and environmental factors merge w/ human industry and improvisatory acumen to create a profound transmutation of energies on behalf of the intelligent will of the steadfast rebels, who use fog, dust storms, the reflection of the sun, and shifts in the direction of the wind all to harness nature’s wrath on their collective behalf. Soldiers are tricked into pursuing women on horseback through a wall of luminous dust only to have their horses blinded by the sudden deployment of golden shields reflecting the sun, fog is used to trick the prime minister’s army into unleashing a torrent of arrows unto unmanned boats rigged-up to collect the arrows for rebel recycling, a change in the direction of the wind is exploited to turn the power of fire against those presumed in its possession, and the prime minister uses the corpses of those in his rank fallen by typhoid for some pretty unsportsmanlike biological warfare. Both sides pull every move out of the Sun Tzu playbook. Red Cliff combines Eisensteinean montage and the mythmaking grandiosity and rabble-rousing of a D.W. Griffith or King Vidor to deliver what is ultimately a visceral, supercharged combat experience directly to the brainstem. The CG digital paintbrush is utilized to dead-serious cartoon effect to open up magnificent plateaus and mind-melting horizons that nearly refuse to enter the eye at all. These images actually use their unreality to make them feel more real, like an overwhelming surplus of stimulus might leave one w/ a sense of scope beyond scope, like a mountain that breaks the mind w/ its size, or an event that refuses to be assimilated by the apparatus of perception. Woo’s unapologetic pop-mythological vision is nowhere near as ornate or precious as that displayed in Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers (’04) or Curse of the Golden Flower (‘06). Chi bi represents a kind of film that simply isn’t made anymore. The makers of such grand exhibitions almost never have this kind of control over the encapsulation of the infinitesimal. It is rare to see such a massive vision coalesce in the form of such an exited and exhaustive drawing inward – such a total, utter inhalation – of forces, resources, image-images, sound-images, action-images, from the smallest element up to the most awesome. It is so much of the world and of the flesh, in all of its flounce and bounce, that yr heart cannot help but beat along to its. Red Cliff is a blood machine. It pumps it w/ evenhanded control of the nerve meter. It works just so. And it’s a massive little adrenal treasure and a hell of a movie-movie fix. Goddamn, it's almost too much fun!

Capitalism: A Love Story

A Michael Moore film is a strange beast. Neither documentaries nor essay films per se, his movies are more like frustratedly impassioned multimedia letters to some proverbial editor, raked together out of bits and pieces, torrential in their intertextual incorporation and manic dispersal of various stuff, almost never waylaid by arguments of a particularly cogent vintage, scattershot in their multidirectional takeoffs and landings, and ultimately ingeniously populist in their attempt to address a particular kind of man on the street who may or may not exist in any particular time or place. People who think he makes impotent protest pics that merely preach to the converted are, however, probably selling him short. He is the only popular fixture of the American left who manages to harness the outrage and vehemence demonstrated as a matter of routine by Fox News, Moore and his ilk’s unceasingly popular bête noire, and such an argument leaves aside the huge amount of Americans who are either too young or too clueless to have concretely made their minds up about much of anything, yet who may be compelled by circumstance or word of mouth to happen upon one of his cine-screeds. It is toward these people that Moore directs his various books, television be-ins, and movies. While he is tremendously good at righteous indignation and compassion-at-gunpoint (the people whose sad stories he routinely exploits for their pathos often feel like they’ve been lined up and shoved half-willingly in front of his lens), strong when he is leading w/ his emotions and outraged sense of irony, he is not, despite his veritable army of researchers and lawyers, particularly good at drawing conclusions or following his information where it would ultimately be likely to take him. His arguments tend to be circular, blotchy, mired in emotion, and clueless to various enormities that surround and dwarf them. Capitalism: A Love Story leads off from his last couple films, limiting the baseball-capp’d fatso’s physical presence to only a few acts of decaffeinated street theater, but foregrounding the controlling agency of his voice and editorial decisions to the extent that the viewer never escapes his presence, even when the found footage is doing the legwork. Moore’s film never feels like it wants to abolish capitalism at all, which is probably smart. It sees capitalism, instead, the same way Antoine de Saint-Exupery saw war in his famous Heinrich Böll-appropriated epigraph: as a disease not unlike typhoid or malaria. It isn’t going anywhere but it needs to be treated lest it totally undermine our collective physical integrity. And let’s indeed face it: the free market isn’t going anywhere. It’s like anal sex. Once somebody stumbled upon it humanity was never going to get rid of it. So then how do we treat it? I have no idea and Michael Moore doesn’t really either. He makes it clear that bank regulation failed, that congressional oversight was undermined by the boys from Goldman Sachs running the show under the rule of Henry Paulson, who turned the Democrats in congress into the delivery boys for his fiscal bailout coup d'état. So what we need, then, is more of the same government? More of the same ineptness and corruption, then? Moore thinks democracy should trump the plutonomy (self-admitted in a leaked Citibank memo) of the top one percent – it’s still one man one vote, after all – but this is ultimately undermined by his argument that both of the major American political parties are in the pockets of the corporate demagogues. Get up off yr ass and do something, the film demands at the end. Join me in my struggle to bitch and moan, irritate security guards, and milk reaction shots. He does show some minor victories in the form of collectivized labor and moderately successful refusenik interventions in the realm of both factory shutdowns and mortgage default evictions. These are less empowering, though, then they ought to be. Collectivized labor will simply never be the dominant Western paradigm simply because it doesn’t happen democratically, it happens from the top. And the people who refuse to leave the factories that have been abandoned or the homes that have been foreclosed upon only make us feel shitty. In fact, there is so much in this movie that will make any thinking person seriously mad (from “dead peasant” insurance policies to sentence-happy judges getting kickbacks from private corrections facilities), that any fuel thrown into the fire finally begets only more of the same grievous anger. Moore pines for the halcyon days of the 1950s when unions were strong, the rich paid 90% taxes, a middle class couple only needed one of ‘em a-workin’, and the competition overseas was still recovering from being bombed into the Stone Age. If there’s one thing I know, having watched Capitalism: A Love Story, it’s that we can never go back and stop Eisenhower from picking up where the British Empire left off. This shit is in play, baby, and when it slaps you you’ll take it like Peter Lorre and you’ll like it! Alas. Amo, amas, amant all you want. I don't feel any less fucked.

Ninja Assassin

What do young people in our age want from their cinema? I should think that they want, following the strictures of contemporary cultural theory, a rage of profane or destructive excitements without any clarifying discourse, any programmatic investment, or any demands placed on them or by them other than that the odd semi-coherent orgy of vandalism be played out on the inert flesh of the world. I should think, then, that the people who made it are way more right than the critics who deplore it: the people have spoken and what they want is Ninja Assassin. And you know what? I’m perfectly OK with that. Have we not learned the lesson taught by the Marquis de Sade? That when the social contract is on its last legs all that is left to do is unmask the true, comically sick sublimated desires beneath – debauchery, perversion, crime. We are living in a culture of gore born out of the end of a dead-ended era of Empire, just as the maniacal Marquis was is his pre-revolutionary aristocratic cell, returning the social contract’s repressed self to itself in the form of its sickest, most immanent phantasies. What do the dreams of our children look like? They look like full-immersion Grand Theft Auto. And Ninja Assassin, w/ its Korean pop star practicing a Japanese martial art in an explicitly Americanized global context (Berlin and Japan are interchangeable, everybody speaks English), not only indulges our appetites, shares our dreams, and enacts an ideal psychotic fantasy, it also suggests a radical superman for tomorrow, leaping forward from the Jason Bourne franchise, and demanding that we imagine this future man as possessed of total sensorial discipline and control. A man who has not only honed the eighteen disciplines of ninjitsu, but who has fully tapped into the emergent plane of the immanent, who hears the thoughts of others, who reads the networks of causation in which he is flung like sentient dice, always ready for the playing out of the inevitable against the vectors of the given, always totally rooted in exact sense-knowledge. This man is all sense sensing itself and total fascist discipline of the flesh. Such is Ninja Assassin’s hero rebel Raizo, as he turns his harnessed powers against the symbolic father, Ozunu, the Mars-like cultivator of the forces of war, assembler and converter of orphans into incontrovertible agents of global death-reach, turns the Americoeuropean war machine against Ozunu’s micowar machine, and releases a torrent of CGI blood that looks something like an endless series of obscure glass-blowing accidents. Of course Raizo will finally defeat Ozuzu by pulling out one of those Mortal Kombat secret moves that require the dexterous pushing of a number of buttons in precise succession. Yes, the people have spoken. I await Ninja Assassin II w/ bated breath.

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

And push it does. Approximately as subtle as that dangling deformity of a subtitle, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (if that is yr real name) strains, in fact, like a pair of movers hoisting a grand piano. This shit practically herniates itself. Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones is our heroine, an obese sixteen-year-old girl in pre-Giuliani, oldschool-bleak 80s Harlem, her head shaped like the Hindenburg. What else? Um … she is the illiterate mother to a four-year-old girl w/ the Down syndrome (whom she endearingly calls “Mongo”); she is casually bearing her second child, both her kids fathered by her own father (who has been raping her since she was three); she is physically and psychologically abused by her motormouth mother w/ whom she lives in piss-lit jaundiced haze of television, hatred and pig’s feet; she has just been suspended from junior high and is about to discover that she is H.I.V. positive. That’s right motherfucker! Every couple of minutes you are going to find out that things can indeed get worse for Precious. Goddamn! No wonder she suffers from an insultingly puerile post-traumatic fantasy life full of Entertainment Tonight approved safe places which she enters and then repels from like a Negroid Rapunzel through chasms opened up like birth canals (or crucifix-shaped peepholes) in the flaking scenery whenever the going gets particularly tough. The vulgarized commercial, showbizzz latticework of the adolescent unconscious, w/ its paradisial unfurling of red carpets, the demonstration of designer gowns before the flashing cameras, and, of course, the idealized secular-religious placement of the couple – the fulfillment of the promise of total status ek-stacy in the love bond – placing her eternally internally on the arm of a handsome light-skinned blatino. At one point she even primps in the mirror, a blond, skinny white girl gazing back out. Even her fucking dreams make her pathetic. (The film itself does seem to dream similar dreams out loud: all the “together” black folk in the movie – Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, and Paula Patton – are about as white as black gets (Precious cannot even figure out what Mariah Carey’s social worker in fact is)). This is humiliation melodrama on hyperdrive and, as is generally the case in such self-defeating operations, its ultimate incredulity is to ask us as viewers to find the catharsis and uplift on the other end of this near-comic carnivalesque panoply of wear-down travails (at least its funnier than the Coen Brothers’ recent scattershot Job riff, which is to say not really very fucking funny at all, is it?). The film finally becomes most insulting to itself and us when it grants us license to use it to feel better about ourselves, kind of like we just gave a bum a twenty. The performers truly redeem themselves by putting in their all, though. You’ve never seen so many people in a movie squinting so hard to feel, and never so many inexperienced actors able to dispense that melodrama money shot: the single tear trail down the cheek. But really, when you think about how many people in America actually live lives like that of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones, how they have to slog miserably courageously through it, never getting noticed, is the feeling that this leaves you w/ a profound feeling of need to see performers redeem themselves? Fuck no, it better not be. Precious did indeed move me at times, I have to admit that. I even caught some of the uplift. The film is far from incompetently made. What can I say? I’m a sucker too. But I don’t feel good about it and I don’t commend the film for pulling off what the source material clearly made inevitable anyway. The only lasting effect that Precious really had on me that I can be happy to keep as an ongoing token of its efforts is that seeing her as a frumped-up social worker without a coterie of beauticians to attend to her, I can now say that I have fallen deeply in love w/ Mariah Carey. Like seriously deep in love. Seriously. Deep. I never thought she was all that pretty. Turns out she’s not all that pretty. She’s, like, fucking beautiful. What can I say? I always find the girls in the before-and-after shampoo adds more attractive before they have the shower, when their hair still won’t do what they want it to. So yah. I guess I grew a little.

The Road

Confession time: I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I love McCarthy, I thought the book sounded great, and it was hardily recommended by friends for whose taste in literature I harbor nothing but the highest admiration. Still, I never read the fucking thing. I guess the best argument I can make on my lazy behalf is that no other novel in recent memory better fits the category of book described in the first chapter of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as: “Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too.” That being said, I have nothing to compare John Hillcoat’s adaptation (written by nobody screenwriter John Penhall) of The Road to other than other post-apocalyptic movies, a job Hillcoat’s somber-as-fuck existential film goes a long way toward making irrelevant. It’s clearly its own thing. In some ways it succeeds and in others it does not. In the end, the only other film it leaves me wanting to compare it to is the better film that it itself could have been w/ a number of small to mid-size adjustments. Or, perhaps, to the better film that it in fact was when in first came in at some four-and-a-half hours. Or maybe even the subsequent film that it became before once again being ushered back into editing for being too bleak for test audiences. First the triumphant end of things: The Road is a masterpiece of visual design. Flawless, even. Its incorporation of every single conceivable stop along the grey scale tour, its incredible landscape compositions, and its flattened out vistas of half-eradicated space are absolutely superb. The way its ashen, hollowed-out humans are absorbed into the gutted leftover detritus of human species activity, which itself dissolves back in to a natural world that is itself dead or dying, creates a sense of profound monoform unity. Everything is reduced to the same dismal grain, the skin of the film as sickly and washed out as that of its characters. But it is precisely this reduction of the human characters in The Road to elements of its landscape that makes its repeated attempts to rise to the level of transcendent elegy nearly impossible to achieve. The tone is too post-human and maudlin for that. It is forced to lean far too heavily on the by turns elegiac and sinister – admittedly gorgeous but always excessively foregrounded – score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and an unfortunate voiceover which pretends that this film is about Viggo Mortensen’s Man when by all rights it should really be about The Boy, played w/ some serious credibility by newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee. One suspects that the voiceover and the flashbacks to pre-apocalyptic domesticity featuring lithe Charlize Theron as increasingly moribund mommy, were heavily padded-on after the film’s poor performance at test screenings. Were the Weinsteins and the folks at Dimension honestly hoping to proffer an adaptation of The Road onto the general public which people somehow wouldn’t find bleak? By using the voiceover and tying it into flashbacks that are supposed to be dreams, the film puts itself in the wrong head, and does so sloppily at that. It’s just not credible. The flashbacks work when they are at their most fragmentary: two sets of hands playing on a piano briefly breaking away for a caress, the wife before an iced-over window behind which a fire appears to be frostily burning, the synthetic appropriation of an inner thigh, the play of sun on a sundress. But when large blocks of the past play out it feels like a cheat. I mean who dreams convenient bits of backstory when they go to sleep at night? All that these flashbacks are ultimately good for, soundtracked as they are by insistent music and poetic voiceover mewlings, is 1) reminding the viewer how much better Terrence Malick is at this stuff, and 2) undermining a potentially powerful film about how a father’s love for his son becomes a distorted, prismatic splintering of itself into something morally blurry and increasingly monstrous. Taking away Mortensen’s voiceover would go a long way toward making him more frightening, the implication of his dogged way-the-fuck-beyond-the-pale love for his son more suffocating, and the final release of his son from this protracted bondage at the film’s end, on the shores of the horizonless Gulf Coast, more liberating (if not exactly hopeful). This is the story of a man who holds his son hostage, two suicide bullets left in his revolver, by using the boy as his only reason to go on, as an excuse to see all other human beings as a threat, and as a source of hope where there determinedly is none. The Man is, after all, the figure in this dyad who stands in for the civilization whose hubris got it snuffed out in the first place. It is The Boy who is slowly made aware of this, as he grudgingly comes to realize that they are not unconditionally the “good guys” after all, that “good” is in fact a dead luxury, and that there may not be any kind of evil his father would not be willing to engender in his son’s name. There is a key point somewhere in this film where The Boy becomes terrified of The Man, and it is this exact moment, difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, upon which everything rests. Anytime The Boy turns to another he is chastened by the paranoiac father. The family that takes The Boy in at the end of the film is given away by the presence of their dog as the cause of the noises which precipitated the departure of our duo, at father’s brash insistence, from the underground bunker where they had enough food and supplies to last them a very long time indeed. It is the paranoia brought about by his deformed, mutant love that gets The Man killed and effectively leaves his son to his own meager devices. In reality, though, it is not until this monstrous father is vanquished that the son can begin to live out his final days w/ any degree of efficacy whatever. That yr father – the fundamental support without whom there would be no norm, no ability to accept frustration, to obey any prohibition, without whom there is no law or moral code – is in fact a monster made such by his love for you: this is the root of a child's nightmare, where there is nothing left to protect you from the only one left to protect you. To discover – in a world of hillbilly cannibal marauders, walls of fire, and regular tree-felling earthquakes – that the one you love the most is the one you most have to fear: this is the very heart of The Road’s true horror story.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Busy, funny, and (ahem) fantastic, w/ its endlessly inventive promulgation of densely industrious sight gags and word games, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s new Roald Dahl-adapted stop-motion extravaganza, invokes many of the sorts of things you might find in a typical child’s bedroom: shoebox dioramas, model train sets (an actual one of which is on display in Mr. Fox’s son Ash’s bedroom), ant farms (the geological strata of this autumnal toy world are presented to the viewer in cross-section through which the various animals dig and burrow, constructing rhizomes), doll houses, and lots of furry stuffed creatures anthropomorphically dressed. This is a child’s-eye-view of the world, then. This will not surprise viewers of Mr. Anderson’s previous films. All of them erect heavily art-directed childlike vantages (often pejoratively mistaken for “infantile” ones) w/ all the wonder and play that the term suggests, as well as the impalpable idea of a world-sense founded in an endless questioning, prodding, discovering – the very processes by which a child comes to an understanding of what all of this stuff consists in which his questions unquestioningly believe. The world that this child’s gaze looks upon in a Wes Anderson movie, though, the world that is having sense and understanding made out of it, cut out from cardboard, is a world of adolescence in perpetual relapse (one of the many obvious and not so obvious things it has in common w/ Spike Jonze's recent Where the Wild Things Are). Inescapable, unrelenting, painful adolescence is the preservative fluid in which Anderson’s fetal creatures are ultimately suspended. This is less a flaw inherent to his films than it is a reality at the heart of which is the genuine clinical sociocultural symptomatologies his films delineate: it’s a condition, in short, w/ which contemporary society is duly afflicted. And such is the case w/ The Fantastic Mr. Fox. All the men are animals who won’t – cannot – grow up. Mr. Fox himself is a chicken thief turned newspaper columnist, an unsatisfying career change made by virtue of a promise he makes to his soon-to-be wife at the start of the film. They find themselves in quite a pickle, trapped in a cage, about to be butchered, she announcing that she is pregnant. Mr. Fox (sort of) promises that if they survive he will reign in his wild ways. Cut to twelve fox years later, Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney as only a slightly toned down variation on the go-for-broke convivial Clark Gable chutzpah he brought to O Brother, Where Art Thou?), full of resentments toward the boring, hardscrabble domestic scene in which he’s stuck, living in a hole in the ground w/ wifey and bitter, ungainly, ‘different’ son Ash. Something’s gotta give. Against the advice of his Badger lawyer (Bill Murray doing his thing), uppity Mr. Fox, in the throes of his midlife fox crisis, decides to move his family into a beech tree on a hill, in plain view of the residences of nefarious farmers Bunce, Boggis, and the unremittingly nefarious cider-drunken sharpshooter Bean (Michael Gambon, likewise – and hilariously – doing his thing), and to secretly return to his thieving ways, w/ the assistance of bashful opossum pushover, Kylie (snout poking out of bandit mask). By virtue of Mr. Fox’s inability to keep his animalness and hubris in check, he enters a war of attrition w/ his tripartite farmer adversaries, putting his family, community, and self in serious jeopardy. And getting his tail blown off for his trouble. When Mrs. Fox confronts him and asks him why he has lied to her, been so selfish, and thrown the whole animal community into a state of crisis, he responds quite simply: I’m a wild animal. Who amongst us cannot relate? I am what I am, the confluence of the various drives that make me up; I fight, I fuck, or I flee. I’m a fox goddamnit! It is precisely the adolescent who holds up his unmediated, untrammeled drives for valorization. It is the adolescent who, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, “idealizes the drives and their satisfaction.” It is the adolescent who says “I am a wild fucking animal. What did you expect?” The adult knows to keep the drives in check, to make use of an ingrained, healthy shame to prevent indulgence in shameless behavior. The adult operates without the constant need to pursue his animal appetites, damn the torpedoes. Mr. Fox’s son Ash is the other side of adolescent striving. Unable to live up to the reputation of his one time whack bat star father, who dismisses him and instead focuses his attention and praise on hotshot maternal cousin Kristofferson – athletic, wise, disciplined and effortlessly able to seduce Ash’s foxy (ahem) lab partner – Ash desperately fails to attain the realization of infinite pleasure and perfect harmony in the object relation, so he blames himself for the failure of this relation, turns against himself, and ultimately enacts an inward-directed nihilism that causes him to act out in ways that differ from his cocksure father’s acting out (he acts shameless because he is actually ashamed), but which likewise put others in jeopardy and which can only be resolved by joining his father in a selfless acting-on-behalf-of-community. In the end, Mr. Fox indeed does bring all the animals together, in celebration of their animalness, listing off each of their Latin nomenclatures, putting the animal to use on behalf of, curbing the drives for the shared purpose of a collective overcoming. Still, these American-voiced animals in their war of independence against the British farmers whose law stands in for the paternal limit, the law-of-the-father, are still made intelligible, ultimately, in terms of an Oedipal transference which once again finds them, in their collective ideality, simply pulling one over on daddy. So for all its valuable children’s movie life lessons about community, selflessness, and the celebration of difference, the cute little beasties in Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, having escaped certain death beneath the earth, but consigned to remain there all the same, under the law of the father, are unable to escape the prison of chimeras that is their adolescent ideation. For all the jubilation at hand, there is a certain sadness at work underground. These animals remain, like the human Andersoneans who precede them, as trapped as the rest of us when we find ourselves backstepping - when we refuse, or are unable, to grow up.

La nana / The Maid

To be a live-in maid / nanny to one family for over twenty years, as Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel has been in Sebastián Silva’s subtle and sneaky second film, is to work and have worked a shitty, demanding, confoundingly repetitive, and often quietly humiliating job upon which you not only come to depend for your livelihood and physical security, but for yr sense of belonging, home, personal self-value, and emotional wellbeing. It is an indentured servitude that doubly imprisons by imposing the most desperate form of psychic need upon its entrapped practitioner. La nana, an autobiographical film based on Silva’s childhood (his younger brother plays his teenage self), shot in his family’s Chilean home, dedicated to his two childhood maids, approaches this perilous lifestyle w/ a deeper, more restrained understanding than any film about the baffling socioeconomic and psychological polarities of living w/ and/or as household help than any I have ever seen, and is so unique in its doing so that it cannot help but sieve much of the business of its meaning-making from the audience expectations that it implicitly subverts. From the beginning of the film, Catalina Saavedra’s jerky, nervous, tick-laden performance and halfway malevolent forty-one-year-old-virgin gaze set us up to expect the worst; some sort of cathartic aberration; some good ol’ ultraviolent bourgeois comeuppance; a calamitous return of repressed libidinal energy in the form of a raucous reprisal. The literary and cinematic depiction of maids has often focused on repression, alienation, and dispossession leading to rebellion, abjection, madness, and murder. The master narrative for these maid tales is the case of the Papin sisters, Lea and Christine, who brutally murdered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans, France, in 1933. Jean Genet used the story as the launching-pad for his theatrical masterpiece, The Maids, first performed in 1947. It has gone on to directly influence films such as Les Abysses (’63) by Nikos Papatakis, Claude Chabrol’s 1995 masterpiece La cérémonie, Jean-Pierre Denis’ Les blessures assassins / Murderous Maids (’00), among other works of cinema, theater, literature, and reportage. (Unrelated masterpieces like Joseph Losey’s The Servant ('63), Buñuel’s Le journal d'une femme de chamber (’64), and Pasolini’s Teorema, have likewise used personal servants as standing-reserves for violent, subversive destabilization of erstwhile calm zones of domestic upper-middle-class placidity w/ their immanent and corrosive play of sublimated power relations). Saaverda’s performance and the way the filmmakers isolate and underscore her odd, increasingly pathological behavior – complete w/ migraine headaches, blackouts, attacks, and spells of glassy aphasia – present us w/ a woman quite clearly on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. While this is indeed the crux of the situation, La nana doesn’t use her as a cog in a diaphanous discursive machinery of class schism. Instead it renders her as a woman in a complex situation of servitude and neediness, who struggles to meet these unconscious needs and has to confront the fear that her piece of security, a security that has been carved out for her conditionally, can be taken away from her at any moment if she is no longer seen as of use. Any form of change is, in fact, a possible threat to this partial, compromised zone of dependence and abnegation as both-part-of-and-not-a-part-of another family w/ its own unsteady dynamics. Even the two growing teenagers – he regularly spunking up his bedsheets and pajamas and she flowering into a self-possessed, confrontational adult whose face Raquel has thusly carved spookily out of her collection of family photos – threaten her already loosening grip on a status quo that she perceives as desperately necessary to her physical and spiritual survival and to which she clings like a territorial surrogate-mother bear at war w/ chronos. Her kindly mistress proves understanding, but when her solution to the ongoing dilemma is to hire another maid to help Raquel out, the already problematic maid goes even further off the rails, desperate not to lose any ground: she makes short work of the first assistant, an innocent, guileless Peruvian name Mercedes, whom she browbeats and locks out of the house, disinfecting the entire bathroom each time the poor young thing takes a shower; a second maid, Sonia, is brought in – mean, coarse, and built like a brick shithouse – but she quits too after the two maids come to blows, Sonia also having been locked out of the house (and having consequently injured herself climbing over it); finally, after she collapses in front of her benefactors, a third auxiliary maid named Lucy enters the picture during Raquel’s consequent convalescence, and everything changes in a way that we do not see coming and which, in its heartwarming unraveling, makes of our cynical, condescending expectations an object of ridicule. Lucy is a sweet, engaging and sympathetic woman who refuses to be chastened by Raquel’s passive-aggressive hardheadedness, insisting her way through the older woman’s force field, taking being locked out of the house as an opportunity to sunbathe naked, befriending Raquel, loving her, listening to her, coaxing her. Mariana Loyola’s performance in the role of Lucy stands in stark disjunction w/ Saavedra’s – hers is reminiscent of a Chilean riff on Sally Hawkins’s infectious performance-as-workable-lifestyle-ethic turn in Happy-Go-Lucky – but even more perfectly modulated and surprising in terms of where it takes the film. Given an opportunity to be heard, a space in which compassion can open her up to a new acceptance of life on life’s terms, and a locus for transference aided by tenderness, Raquel emerges slowly and cautiously from her fog, like a wounded animal into a clearing. Lucy, who is only passing through and likes it that way, allows Raquel to giver herself away so that she may receive herself back, become alive to herself, no longer defined simply as an precarious adjunct to a family that just won’t stay still, a position she disdains and depends upon in a maddening and untenable day-to-day paradox that has up until this point been closing in on her, shutting her down. The final shot of the film is of Raquel, enacting the transference in real bodily terms, taking up the now-moved-on Lucy’s habit of jogging w/ earphones, locked into her own flesh, her own psychic and biological autonomy, smiling as she roves gingerly out into the world, content in herself of having a self. The film, then, is about how the right person entering her desperate, sad life at the exact right moment, makes it okay for Raquel to feel okay. Of course this is how this story goes. And we should be fucking ashamed of ourselves.

La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris

Watching La danse, I kept thinking of death. My death. It seemed weird. Perhaps, I thought at first, perhaps it is Wiseman. Eighty-years-young this coming January, Frederick Wiseman is simply the greatest, most important filmmaker working in the United States, and he is not long for this world. He was one of the first filmmakers to perfectly hone the observational mode of direct cinema made famous in the U.S. by the Maysles Brothers and D. A. Pennebaker, but more than anything else a form perfected in Quebec by Michel Brault. As a Canadian, I cherish the documentary tradition on which my national cinema is founded. It is the only national cinema in the world whose two greatest filmmakers, Michel Brault and Allan King, are primarily known for documentaries. Wiseman is alone in the U.S. as their equal. He has been making films that immerse the viewer in the workings of institutions without talking heads, direct address, intertitles, chronology – any cinematographic tools that would serve to foreground any functional agency of the artist’s – since making 1967’s Titicult Follies, one of the greatest and most heartbreaking documentaries ever produced. His films are exhaustive fly-on-the-wall dioramas of institutional life: mental institutions like in Titicut, high schools, police departments, welfare offices, zoos, hospitals, women’s shelters, meat packing plants, Wiseman has done them all. La danse is his second film focusing on a ballet company, after 1995s Ballet, about the American Ballet Theater, and it is as beautiful and purely cinematic a film as I have ever seen. I think that a dance company is the absolute perfect subject for Wiseman, allowing him to focus on the institution, how it runs, what kind of market forces converge upon and underpin it, as well as upon dance itself: perhaps the one artform that the cinema elevates more completely, by virtue of the proximity it can attain, than any other. Filmmakers from Powell and Pressburger to Norman McLaren to Robert Altman have done some of their best work w/ ballet as their subject. The film begins w/ quickly intercut establishing shots of Paris followed by similar shots of the world beneath the studio: corridors, pipes, tunnels, the striated networks and subterranean structures that underlay the studio. Photographer John Davey uses the square box of the old Academy ratio (1.33:1) to emphasize the hard and soft lines of these busy connective tissues, these arteries and tessellations. The art of dance is not just thrown into contrast w/ the bureaucracy and consumer capitalist machinations that it requires in order to exist at all, but the smoothed, infinitely opened out spaces where the dancing is done – both the mirror-walled rehearsal spaces that reflect infinitely redoubled illusory reflections outward, and the actual stages w/ their purplish-blue spotlights terminating at a black horizon – suggest plateaus that all this underrigging supports in the same way money, human labor, and the Lehman Brothers support it. The bodies of these incredible young people, boys and girls (like w/ most great films, I was steadfastly bisexual for the duration), are framed in such a way that we almost never see them reflected in the mirrors when they are rehearsing. They are singular and they command the attention of our entire sensory-motor apparatus. The brain and nervous system dance w/ them the same way someone richly involved in a sporting event will jerk about an enacting of the direction he wants a player to go. In a way that is somewhat similar to kung fu movies, dancers remind us of Spinoza’s supposition that we are not yet aware of what a body is capable. Dancers are masochist, practicing a kind of bondage. What they do to their bodies to transcend what is thought of as the body, its utilitarian implementation, is staggering, and to see what they do, these beautiful, tormented bodies, atop these opened-out planes, is to witness something as primordial and elemental as the flickering of a flame. Dance is a Heracletean drug. The process of hypnotizing ourselves watching these dancers is similar to the effect produced by the pulsing, silently musical, morphological handpainted films of structuralists like McLaren and Stan Brakhage w/ the added component of these sexually charged bodies, commingling bodies, bodies that will grow old and die. Dance, like everything else (only more so), is about fucking and dying. Wiseman’s film is a fetishization of death-drive opened up onto a plateau built up from a microcosmic superstructure of institutional scaffolding. Much of the dance work shown in the latter sections of the film invokes Alfred Jarry, the occult, Magick. One woman dancer smears two children w/ stage blood, slams buckets violently over their heads, then lays them at the stage. These beautiful, young bodies writhing in death-lust. There is no power anywhere like this power. And then suddenly we are watching janitors cleaning out an empty, cavernous theater, and again the specter of death and depopulation. It's ineluctable. La danse is easily the film of the year and, after Allan King’s Dying at Grace, the second best documentary I have seen this decade.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

In a story in his latest book, narrated by the Hep C virus, Will Self riffs on the “slapstick of addiction.” “Slapstick is, in essence, the ritualized worship of causation, something humans place more faith in than they do their gods,” he writes. “Anyone watching a comedian attempting to do two things at once – or even one – will be familiar with this instinctive belief.” Watching hypomanic Nicholas Cage, in the early throws of cocaine psychosis, do even one thing at once in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans proves a recipe for high highwire comedy indeed. Like Wile E. Coyote pursuing a fix bigger than God, he rushes into and out of concentric, inward-eddying happenings, vamping like Red Skelton on rotgut, hobbled like Olivier in Richard, Duke of Gloucester mode, hovering at the edge of the wolf pack to sniff out weird mushrooms, whilst employing some seriously advanced intuitive drunken monkey kung fu. Turns out he is doing two things at once, whether he is in-the-moment aware of it or not. He is an addict, bien sûr, but he never stops being the decorated hero cop. Dude gets his man, he just takes the scenic route is all, roughing up grannies if he has to. Maybe not so scenic. The post-Katrina New Orleans of Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant non-remake is somewhere between Western ghost town and movie-movie backlot. There are plenty of cars but no people, most of the action taking place in any-place-whatevers – the police stations, crime scenes, sports bars, luxury mob apartments, casinos, and rustic hideouts of any given Steven Seagal movie. Directing Nicholas Cage to (cue Bavarian accent) “let the hog loose,” Herzog gives the actor plenty of room to spree. And let the hog loose he does. All over what is essentially a hopped-up Don Siegel picture w/ those cool oldschool crane-shot urban reveals. The police procedural, like slapstick, is all about causation. One clue leads to another leads to a shakedown leads up the ladder leads to the kingpin. This is precisely what happens in Port of Call, except that Cage’s vulpine piggy is running on schizzed-out midbrain instinct, forced to improvise at the speed of sound. Out hero is not a user of intravenous drugs: he is a snorter, a smoker, a popper. It is always go-time. A race to get up on the stress hormone. The accidental inhalation of heroin requires a hard-slog over to his girlfriend’s (a prostitute who looks-like-a-starlet-because-she-is, of course) to get the alkaloid antidote lest he need, you know, sit down for a spell. Like all addicts, Lieutenant Terence McDonagh’s cure for existential loneliness is isolation. He is locked into his own mad monadology. People are projections on a screen, action movie ciphers as much for him as they are for us. They can’t touch him. The limbic compromise of his reptile brain causes him to see iguanas, like the lobsters and crabs that followed Sartre around for a couple years after he took mescaline. Alleygators get under his skin. Herzog’s one Herzogean touch in the visual field is the employment of reptile-cam – insert shots in extreme wide-angle of scaly neo-cortex topographies connected to Cage's dopey backgrounded gaze. The other thing the good Lieutenant has in common w/ all addicts in active addiction (and I should know), is the backward slapstick skip of ethics as they retreat up the beach to allow for the incoming tide of dependency. Counterintuitively, Port of Call actually suggests the efficacy of these tremendously pliable ethological gradations and degradations, first because their playing out is very funny, and second because they somehow work … for a while. The film isn’t so much a celebration of addiction, then, as a kind of marveling at it. Where Abel Ferrera’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant saw abjection and aberration put a man of faith back on his knees, Port of Call’s hero practices the wrong kind of surrender all together, but an immanent plane of causation yields to him all the same, the way Buster Keaton might accidentally fall into the exact place he needs to be. The reptile comes out on top by chance, and the hog, somehow, is vindicated. It’s luck ‘til luck runs out. And we need luck. We do. But we need a human connection, and I don't buy the variety served up here in the dénouement. You can't have it both ways.

The Messenger

It would seem natural that Israeli combat veteran Oren Moverman’s directorial debut would delve into the heavy moral morass of military life and its discontents. Already having made a name for himself in the industry adapting Denis Johnson (whose heavily visual prose in Jesus’ Son already seem blocked out and halfway art directed), and, in concert w/ director Todd Haynes, the various parallel texts mythological that cohabitate under the aegis of "Bob Dylan," Moverman appears to have a handle on the complex interplay of inner and outer worlds running alongside one another (or outer worlds on top of other outer worlds), an understanding of the dexterity required to make slippery texts, subtexts, and metatexts conceptually cohere, and an ear for oddball countercultural American vernacular not actually uncommon to foreigners perhaps because one is forced to hone ones depth perception when operating outside of ones native tongue (think Kafka). That being said, none of these apparent assets is evident from The Messenger: all that is left is talk, talk, talk. There is clearly a good film to be made on the subject of men whose job it is to notify next of kin that their loved one has died in combat, perhaps w/ the bulk of this cast, and perhaps w/ Mr. Moverman calling the shots. This is certainly not that movie. Despite the high-test quality of the two central leads (Ben Foster as wounded-in-action Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery and Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone, recovering alcoholic military lifer secretly ashamed to have never seen combat), they are consistently made to masticate heavily telegraphed dialogue that sounds an awful lot like writing. Though a wonderful actress, Samantha Morton has to deal w/ the worst of it, forced to trade in dross that would be impossible to sell even in the mouth of an actress more suited to the part of a sexually compelling working class American woman w/ a half-black kid. Samantha Morton has become more asexual as her giant forehead increasingly leads her around and her eyes look out of the screen like huge, glossy cries for help – every time I see her these days I can only think of that ethereal, wide-eyed and amniotic human battery she played in Minority Report. What ever happened to the hot-mess firecracker who first made herself known to me fucking-the-pain-away her way through Under the Skin? She is not the problem though. All of the characters say things that no one would ever say, moving episodically through sets that feel like empty casks in which no one has ever lived, emotional payoff falls out of the sky and goes kersplat, and the dead-in-its-tracks romance between achy-broken Foster and nervous android Morton is sickeningly creepy in a way Moverman is apparently unaware of, leaving one to wonder if he actually sees this stalking and cagey cornering as fucking redemptive (?). The Messenger remains refreshingly free of message in the big picture but remains chalk-full of tiny little moment-to-moment messages that are persistently spelled out and scattered condescendingly about our feet like birdseed. So far the critics have been gobbling it up. Personally, I hunger for something more substantial. I remain convinced, however, that when people start using him right Ben Foster will be one of this generation's finest actors. Maybe he needs to be playing shy-but-hyper like he did when he was a kid. Here he just barely doesn't quite totally suck. Professional pothead Woody Harrelson actually takes him to town. Goddamn!