M, 1931
Written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang
Directed by Fritz Lang
110 minutes
The very first serial killer movie. Ever. Made only a few years after the introduction of sound itself, by a master of German Expressionism. What else do you need to know?
Okay, look at that date again, then at the country of origin. Germany, 1931. A time in which the Nazi Party was only beginning its stranglehold on Germany, and the knives were drawing near for "undesirables." A film with a Jewish star (Peter Lorre) who would escape to the US soon after the film's release. A film directed by a man (Fritz Lang) of half-Jewish ancestry, who would emigrate to the US two years later, after divorcing his wife, the co-writer of this film. The woman who would then join the National Socialist Party, and would eventually go on to make propaganda films for the Nazis. If ever there was film that achieved greatness purely on the basis of the time, place, and circumstances under which it was made, it is M.
Of course, none of this is stated explicitly in the film. The word "Nazi" is never used, and the film follows a plot that has little to do with politics in the traditional sense. No, the themes of M are buried, the meaning and ideas hidden within the technical brilliance and the thrilling plot. And a central performance by Lorre that merges the best acting of the silent era with the new psychological depth enabled by sound.
As the film opens, a rash of murders has gone unsolved for eight months -- the murders (and rapes, although that is not even implied in the movie) of several young girls, snatched away from their homes and bodies mutilated. We quickly learn that Lorre is the perpetrator of the murders, but the city remains unaware, parents in a blind panic over the disappearing children. Early on, a crowd gathers around a small man whose kindness towards a small child is misinterpreted, and he is nearly murdered before he can escape. Talk of the killings spreads all around the city, and the cops seem powerless to do anything about it. In the militaristic attitude of the day, the police have incredible powers of arrest and few rules placed upon them, but seem to twiddle their fingers barking up false leads and interrogating random drunks in raids of underground bars. They are meticulous but useless.
A gang of thugs, trying to figure out how to keep the cops from hassling them any longer, decides that they have to find the murderer themselves. They recruit beggars to patrol the streets looking for the right man, and offer a reward to the person who can deliver the killer. Their dragnet works, and eventually they capture Lorre and bring him for trial under their own particular breed of justice.
Lang was one of the great directors of the silent era, and with M he embraces sound in a masterful, almost playful way. While several sequences are silent or nearly so, Lang uses sound effects to build a world outside the screen, intercutting sequences with overlapping dialogue, and in general having the same kind of fun with the new technology that Darren Aronofsky would have with low-cost computer graphics seven decades later in Requiem for a Dream. His camerawork is dazzling, in particular his expressionistic framing in static shots and a handful of virtuoso camera moves, most particularly a long tracking shot in a poorhouse that rivals anything in the Scorsese canon.
Parts of this film are dated to modern eyes. Lorre's performance is full of the kind of silent-movie mugging that hasn't been en vogue for twice my lifetime, and Lang uses sped-up motion and other silent movie tricks to add action to certain sequences. The pacing is also a bit slower than we would expect today, particularly given the overall simplicity of the plot. But these are elements that can be forgiven even if they cannot be forgotten, and M deserved a look by anyone with an interest in the history of cinema.
Rating: A-
Showing posts with label A-rated. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A-rated. Show all posts
13 March 2009
10 March 2009
Movielog, Seven Samurai
Seven Samurai, 1954
Written by Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
207 minutes
Sometimes this classic-movies-up-for-review thing just seems a little pointless. What exactly am I going to be able to say about Seven Samurai that hasn't been said better by about a thousand people in the last half-century? What insight can I offer? Oh, well, I saw it, and it's magnificent, and I soldier on regardless of my own limitations.
The plot is simplicity itself. It's 16th century Japan. A group of bandits spies a tiny village but decides not to attack until after their current crop is picked. A villager hears the plans and runs back to his home to warn his neighbors. But what can a group of starving villagers due against the bandits? Should they beg for mercy, or fight? When the question is posed to the village elder, he has an ingenious idea: hire one of the clanless samurai wandering around the cities. How can they pay him, when all they have is rice? "Find hungry samurai," responds the old man reasonably.
And so they do. I've described maybe the first five minutes of Seven Samurai, and the rest of the run time is divided up into a very logical series of events: the hiring of the titular defenders, the training of the villagers and preparations for the attack, and the final action sequence in which all that training comes to use. It's not hard to imagine a ninety minute version of this film that has a very similar plot -- Kurosawa's film is generally considered to be the progenitor of all modern action pictures, and the modern familiarity with the genre makes the particular beats and rhythms of Seven Samurai as familiar as mom and apple pie. Some old movies need a bit of translation into modern terms so that we can understand what they meant to their original audience, while this one seems familiar because of how widely and pervasively influential it was. It's a challenge to remember just how original all this was in 1954, but the movie works even if we just take it as a simple action picture.
A simple action picture, though, this is not. I mentioned that this film could be trimmed to half its length and still have virtually the same plot, but the resulting ninety-minute film would be forgettable despite the amazing performances and stellar camerawork that would still be present. Kurosawa has done far more than simply invent the action picture here; he has taken a simple plot and used it to create a masterpiece of tone and character, to examine society and the roles that individuals play in it, and to meditate on the meaning of war and violence.
At the heart of Seven Samurai is the aging samurai Shimada, played to perfection by Takashi Shimura. Shimura is an imposing physical presence, a warrior in thought and in deed, but also a man with a heart, a personable giant of a human being, equal parts wise and fierce. He can be harsh when need be but also warm and inviting -- when he smiles with his friends we find ourselves smiling along with him. Shimura's performance alone would make this a great film; his performance grounds this epic picture in the human, even the mundane, and allows us the emotional center to what is at times a heartbreaking sequence of events.
At the other end of the seven there is Kikuchiyo, played perfectly by Toshiro Mifune. Mifune and Shimura were regulars of Kurosawa's works, and had appeared together also in his Stray Dog, which I reviewed last year. Here Mifune is a young man who comes from peasant stock, but considers himself a samurai. The other samurai know better, but Mifune has courage to back up his posturing, and so ingratiates himself among them that he becomes one of their group whether they want him to or not. Mifune's character is the source of much of the comic relief of Seven Samurai, but his background also allows him to work as a bridge between the villagers and the samurai -- as the one character whose feet are planted in both worlds, he has the ability to communicate with both and to heal the divisions between them.
Which is important, for perhaps the most important theme of the film is the caste-ridden society of feudal Japan. The villagers have need of the samurai but do not trust them, and the samurai are perhaps a bit condescending to the poverty-ridden villagers. The villagers live lives of backbreaking labor and near-starvation, but give the samurai their best rice so that they can be defended from attackers. Still there is tension, as there is a general fear among the villagers that the samurai will take advantage of the women of the village, a fear that is perhaps not too far off the mark considering the deprivation that the samurai suffer through. A crucial subplot follows the love story between a young samurai in training and a peasant girl, when their love is consummated the night before the last stand of the villagers and the samurai against the bandits, the resulting eruption threatens to destroy the very social fabric that they are all trying to save.
At the end of the film, after all the dying that is going to be done has been done, one of the surviving samurai stares off into the distance at the joyous villagers harvesting their crops. This is just one more battle they, the samurai, lost -- it is the villagers that have won. World War II was less than a decade past at the time this film was made, and Kurosawa is arguing that the time for imperialist notions, the time for warriors instead of farmers, is over. Kurosawa is pointing his society towards the gentle humanism espoused by the samurai played by Shimura, toward the desire for peace and joy felt by the villagers who have survived to strive another day. Very different is the perspective on war and violence espoused by Kurosawa here and that expressed by Ford's The Searchers, which was made only two years later but here in a victoriously postwar America. There are striking parallels between these two masterpieces, but they are separated by a perspective shaped by culture and by the expectations of their audiences.
I haven't even really scratched the surface of the brilliance of Seven Samurai. How could I? It is long but never boring, old but fresh, with a simple plot but with implications that echo down the ages. This is a film that will be loved for as long as the medium exists.
Rating: A+
Written by Akira Kurosawa & Shinobu Hashimoto & Hideo Oguni
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
207 minutes
Sometimes this classic-movies-up-for-review thing just seems a little pointless. What exactly am I going to be able to say about Seven Samurai that hasn't been said better by about a thousand people in the last half-century? What insight can I offer? Oh, well, I saw it, and it's magnificent, and I soldier on regardless of my own limitations.
The plot is simplicity itself. It's 16th century Japan. A group of bandits spies a tiny village but decides not to attack until after their current crop is picked. A villager hears the plans and runs back to his home to warn his neighbors. But what can a group of starving villagers due against the bandits? Should they beg for mercy, or fight? When the question is posed to the village elder, he has an ingenious idea: hire one of the clanless samurai wandering around the cities. How can they pay him, when all they have is rice? "Find hungry samurai," responds the old man reasonably.
And so they do. I've described maybe the first five minutes of Seven Samurai, and the rest of the run time is divided up into a very logical series of events: the hiring of the titular defenders, the training of the villagers and preparations for the attack, and the final action sequence in which all that training comes to use. It's not hard to imagine a ninety minute version of this film that has a very similar plot -- Kurosawa's film is generally considered to be the progenitor of all modern action pictures, and the modern familiarity with the genre makes the particular beats and rhythms of Seven Samurai as familiar as mom and apple pie. Some old movies need a bit of translation into modern terms so that we can understand what they meant to their original audience, while this one seems familiar because of how widely and pervasively influential it was. It's a challenge to remember just how original all this was in 1954, but the movie works even if we just take it as a simple action picture.
A simple action picture, though, this is not. I mentioned that this film could be trimmed to half its length and still have virtually the same plot, but the resulting ninety-minute film would be forgettable despite the amazing performances and stellar camerawork that would still be present. Kurosawa has done far more than simply invent the action picture here; he has taken a simple plot and used it to create a masterpiece of tone and character, to examine society and the roles that individuals play in it, and to meditate on the meaning of war and violence.
At the heart of Seven Samurai is the aging samurai Shimada, played to perfection by Takashi Shimura. Shimura is an imposing physical presence, a warrior in thought and in deed, but also a man with a heart, a personable giant of a human being, equal parts wise and fierce. He can be harsh when need be but also warm and inviting -- when he smiles with his friends we find ourselves smiling along with him. Shimura's performance alone would make this a great film; his performance grounds this epic picture in the human, even the mundane, and allows us the emotional center to what is at times a heartbreaking sequence of events.
At the other end of the seven there is Kikuchiyo, played perfectly by Toshiro Mifune. Mifune and Shimura were regulars of Kurosawa's works, and had appeared together also in his Stray Dog, which I reviewed last year. Here Mifune is a young man who comes from peasant stock, but considers himself a samurai. The other samurai know better, but Mifune has courage to back up his posturing, and so ingratiates himself among them that he becomes one of their group whether they want him to or not. Mifune's character is the source of much of the comic relief of Seven Samurai, but his background also allows him to work as a bridge between the villagers and the samurai -- as the one character whose feet are planted in both worlds, he has the ability to communicate with both and to heal the divisions between them.
Which is important, for perhaps the most important theme of the film is the caste-ridden society of feudal Japan. The villagers have need of the samurai but do not trust them, and the samurai are perhaps a bit condescending to the poverty-ridden villagers. The villagers live lives of backbreaking labor and near-starvation, but give the samurai their best rice so that they can be defended from attackers. Still there is tension, as there is a general fear among the villagers that the samurai will take advantage of the women of the village, a fear that is perhaps not too far off the mark considering the deprivation that the samurai suffer through. A crucial subplot follows the love story between a young samurai in training and a peasant girl, when their love is consummated the night before the last stand of the villagers and the samurai against the bandits, the resulting eruption threatens to destroy the very social fabric that they are all trying to save.
At the end of the film, after all the dying that is going to be done has been done, one of the surviving samurai stares off into the distance at the joyous villagers harvesting their crops. This is just one more battle they, the samurai, lost -- it is the villagers that have won. World War II was less than a decade past at the time this film was made, and Kurosawa is arguing that the time for imperialist notions, the time for warriors instead of farmers, is over. Kurosawa is pointing his society towards the gentle humanism espoused by the samurai played by Shimura, toward the desire for peace and joy felt by the villagers who have survived to strive another day. Very different is the perspective on war and violence espoused by Kurosawa here and that expressed by Ford's The Searchers, which was made only two years later but here in a victoriously postwar America. There are striking parallels between these two masterpieces, but they are separated by a perspective shaped by culture and by the expectations of their audiences.
I haven't even really scratched the surface of the brilliance of Seven Samurai. How could I? It is long but never boring, old but fresh, with a simple plot but with implications that echo down the ages. This is a film that will be loved for as long as the medium exists.
Rating: A+
06 March 2009
Movielog, Watchmen
Watchmen, 2009
Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse
Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Directed by Zack Snyder
163 minutes
Soon after the teaser for this film was revealed to the world with The Dark Knight, I saw a post over at io9 clucking about the fact that Captain Metropolis was not a listed cast member on Watchmen's IMDB page -- how could this film have the heft it needed without the Crimebusters meeting called by Captain Metropolis? Well, easily, since it just gives all the necessary dialogue to Veidt and therefore doesn't have to spend ten minutes introducing a character who's really only in that one scene. The screenwriters of Watchmen deserve high praise for their work here -- they've managed to take a graphic novel that has been considered basically unfilmable for the last two decades and have found a narrative throughline in the material that allows them to keep the structure intact, even while discarding beloved but time-consuming elements of the original material. As an adaptation this film rivals The Lord of the Rings in terms of scope and difficulty, and also in terms of the overall success of the finished product. And just as with LOTR, you'll have hardcore fans of the material missing the forest for the trees and whining about random missing details when what is in front of them is a magnificent re-telling of the original tale. And I believe that like LOTR, Watchmen will be largely embraced by fans of the original work.
Holy fucking shit, what a film this is! The nitpickers and nay-sayers focus on their petty favorite details, but seem to neglect just how much of the original has been kept, more than I think any of us had a right to expect. Virtually every word of Rorschach's notebooks is here, done in creepy and psychotic voiceover. The Comedian is every bit the vile bastard he was in the book, and two key scenes, one in Vietnam and one in an old foe's crummy apartment, are every bit as moving as they could ever have been. The fire rescue? Here. The apocalyptic dreams? Right here. Dr. Manhattan's lonely sojourn on Mars? It's all here, haunting, moving, and quite simply astonishing.
And the ending? It'll probably be the most debated aspect of the movie, but it's still here in essence even if the details have changed. The details have changed because it takes precious screentime to establish the details of the original ending, screentime that is better devoted to other things. (I'm being vague here to avoid spoilers.) In some ways the movie's ending is better than the graphic novel -- it's more directly related to the themes of the story, and it doesn't require the kind of meandering that draws out the end of the graphic novel a bit more than necessary.
Yes, I loved Watchmen. Snyder and his crew found a way to film the unfilmable by focusing on the details of the investigation into the murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian. Psychopathic Hero Rorschach believes that there's a "mask-killer" on the loose, and his investigation takes him through a cross-section of this funhouse alternate history America and exposes some painful secrets along the way, and a conspiracy that affects the life of every single person on Earth. Anything that was in the graphic novel that isn't on this spine is generally not in the movie -- most particularly, the history of costumed adventurers in general is only hinted at in a short scene involving Hollis Mason at the beginning of the film, and the childhood motivations of the main cast is not shown here. Threads from the novel that involve ancillary characters also don't make it on-screen; my favorite of these involves the home life of a psychiatrist, and while I was sorry to see it go, I understand that including it would have bogged down the narrative just when it needed to pick up some steam. Do we really need ten minutes of Watchmen dealing with such a minor character? Of course not, even though it was one of my favorite portions of the novel.
The performances are good all around. Whether the decision to use mainly up-and-coming actors or otherwise unfamiliar faces came from an artistic or budgetary source is probably meaningless, for the lack of big-name stars helps the film to succeed on its own merits. It's not that Tom Cruise would have made a bad Ozymandias or that Hillary Swank wouldn't have been able to pull off Laurie, but known faces would have distracted from the overall story and kept us at a bit of a distance. Everyone brings their A game here, respecting the material first and foremost, and disappear into their roles like they were written especially for them.
Let's go in IMDB order. I'm not familiar with Malin Ackerman's other work, but her Laurie is feminine but tough in all the right ways. She has a thankless role in a lot of ways, never really getting a show-off moment the way some of the other characters do, but she is at the heart of the film, and carries off her big emotional moments with the aplomb of much more experienced actors. There's a scene ending with her in tears towards the finale of the movie, and if her performance didn't work, the movie probably would just grind to a halt, but she succeeds in portraying a woman driven almost to madness by her own past, and it's one of the most touching moments in the film. (And yes, she looks amazing in that costume.)
Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. He seemed like a bit of an odd choice for the role, and I had some doubts when watching the trailers about his voice in particular, but my fears were for naught. Manhattan is a god walking among men, immortal, able to see the future and the past, and Crudup gives this impossible character a solid grounding in humanity even while he becomes more and more distanced from ordinary human concerns. His voice is that of a college professor, the quiet physicist he once was, and even in his most powerful moments he gives off a gentleness and a decency that was perhaps missing in the comic. It's a tough line to walk, but Crudup does it masterfully, and it's a shame that this film is unlikely to get the kind of major awards buzz that would give him the recognition he deserves.
Matthew Goode is another actor with whom I'm unfamiliar, but boy is his work as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias creepy. Veidt is "the smartest man on Earth" who has built his image as a superhero into a worldwide financial empire, and Goode manages to find the right balance between Donald Trump and David Bowie that is somehow deeply affecting rather than being ridiculous. He is a cypher through most of the film, and even when all his motives are revealed at the end he maintains the right air of mystery.
Jackie Earle Haley. Holy. Fuck. He spends most of the movie under a completely face-covering mask but gives such an amazing performance with just the timbre of his voice and remarkable body language that he officially becomes an Actor to Watch in the future. Rorschach is another of those impossible roles, a fan favorite (with good reason!), and Haley captures all the right notes perfectly. He's a character who would be a psychopathic murderer except that he has turned his sociopathy towards the doers of evil in the world, and his mind has been warped by all these years in the gutter. He does the same kind of rough gravel with his voice that Bale did when playing Batman, but Haley's lack of star power allows him to disappear into the role much more than Bale ever could, and I totally bought that this character could be the terror of the underworld even when only armed with a cafeteria tray. His may be the single best performance in a film filled with great performances.
If there's a better example of amoral glee in literature than the Comedian, I'm not aware of it, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is up to the task. While Rorschach is a sociopath who enforces a strict code of right and wrong, the Comedian is just a bastard who does pretty much whatever he wants and has fun doing it. It's his death that instigates the film, and in flashbacks we see him torching fleeing Vietnamese, raping a woman, and gunning down protesters in the street. But we also get his humanity -- Morgan gives us a portrait of a man whose response to the evils of the world was to hit back just as hard and turn off his feelings, but who has not forgotten his humanity. It's a brief role but an important one, and Morgan gives a performance here that reminds me of Mickey Rourke's in Sin City, a bastard who just might want to be a gentle giant underneath.
Dan Dreiberg is probably my least favorite of the characters in the comic, but Patrick Wilson helps me see the humanity in this chubby ex-adventurer. Dreiberg is in many ways the moral center of the story, the character who has been least damaged by the world around him and who is least beset by emotional trauma, which makes him I suppose less interesting than those surrounding him. But in many ways he (like Ackerman) grounds the film, providing a human counterpoint to the Earth-shattering events surrounding him. His role in the finale is stepped up a bit from that in the novel, which helps to give an audience surrogate to this rogue's gallery of emotionally twisted people. I know Wilson best from Hard Candy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how funny he could be here; Dreiberg gets to be a bit of comic relief at certain moments in the film, and Wilson manages to find the humor in the character without ever losing the more mordant tone of the rest of the film.
I know it's fashionable to think The Dark Knight is one of the Greatest Films Ever Made, but while I liked that film a whole lot I didn't think it was quite as heady as people made it out to be. No matter what kinds of themes you find buried in Batman, TDK was ultimately about a guy who put on a funny costume to fight the Pure Evil (tm) of another guy who really just robbed banks for a living. Ledger's Joker is menacing because he is completely unhinged, an utterly vile man who wants to make the world into chaos. Watchmen is a vastly superior film because it knows that the real world rarely gives us the kinds of Evil-with-a-capital-E opponents, and that when you're playing for the grandest of stakes, sometimes all you have is moral ambiguity. The meaning of the last chapter of Watchmen has been debated for two decades and more, and the film version is sure to create a whole new generation of people arguing about it. What a magnificent experience.
Rating: A
Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse
Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Directed by Zack Snyder
163 minutes
Soon after the teaser for this film was revealed to the world with The Dark Knight, I saw a post over at io9 clucking about the fact that Captain Metropolis was not a listed cast member on Watchmen's IMDB page -- how could this film have the heft it needed without the Crimebusters meeting called by Captain Metropolis? Well, easily, since it just gives all the necessary dialogue to Veidt and therefore doesn't have to spend ten minutes introducing a character who's really only in that one scene. The screenwriters of Watchmen deserve high praise for their work here -- they've managed to take a graphic novel that has been considered basically unfilmable for the last two decades and have found a narrative throughline in the material that allows them to keep the structure intact, even while discarding beloved but time-consuming elements of the original material. As an adaptation this film rivals The Lord of the Rings in terms of scope and difficulty, and also in terms of the overall success of the finished product. And just as with LOTR, you'll have hardcore fans of the material missing the forest for the trees and whining about random missing details when what is in front of them is a magnificent re-telling of the original tale. And I believe that like LOTR, Watchmen will be largely embraced by fans of the original work.
Holy fucking shit, what a film this is! The nitpickers and nay-sayers focus on their petty favorite details, but seem to neglect just how much of the original has been kept, more than I think any of us had a right to expect. Virtually every word of Rorschach's notebooks is here, done in creepy and psychotic voiceover. The Comedian is every bit the vile bastard he was in the book, and two key scenes, one in Vietnam and one in an old foe's crummy apartment, are every bit as moving as they could ever have been. The fire rescue? Here. The apocalyptic dreams? Right here. Dr. Manhattan's lonely sojourn on Mars? It's all here, haunting, moving, and quite simply astonishing.
And the ending? It'll probably be the most debated aspect of the movie, but it's still here in essence even if the details have changed. The details have changed because it takes precious screentime to establish the details of the original ending, screentime that is better devoted to other things. (I'm being vague here to avoid spoilers.) In some ways the movie's ending is better than the graphic novel -- it's more directly related to the themes of the story, and it doesn't require the kind of meandering that draws out the end of the graphic novel a bit more than necessary.
Yes, I loved Watchmen. Snyder and his crew found a way to film the unfilmable by focusing on the details of the investigation into the murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian. Psychopathic Hero Rorschach believes that there's a "mask-killer" on the loose, and his investigation takes him through a cross-section of this funhouse alternate history America and exposes some painful secrets along the way, and a conspiracy that affects the life of every single person on Earth. Anything that was in the graphic novel that isn't on this spine is generally not in the movie -- most particularly, the history of costumed adventurers in general is only hinted at in a short scene involving Hollis Mason at the beginning of the film, and the childhood motivations of the main cast is not shown here. Threads from the novel that involve ancillary characters also don't make it on-screen; my favorite of these involves the home life of a psychiatrist, and while I was sorry to see it go, I understand that including it would have bogged down the narrative just when it needed to pick up some steam. Do we really need ten minutes of Watchmen dealing with such a minor character? Of course not, even though it was one of my favorite portions of the novel.
The performances are good all around. Whether the decision to use mainly up-and-coming actors or otherwise unfamiliar faces came from an artistic or budgetary source is probably meaningless, for the lack of big-name stars helps the film to succeed on its own merits. It's not that Tom Cruise would have made a bad Ozymandias or that Hillary Swank wouldn't have been able to pull off Laurie, but known faces would have distracted from the overall story and kept us at a bit of a distance. Everyone brings their A game here, respecting the material first and foremost, and disappear into their roles like they were written especially for them.
Let's go in IMDB order. I'm not familiar with Malin Ackerman's other work, but her Laurie is feminine but tough in all the right ways. She has a thankless role in a lot of ways, never really getting a show-off moment the way some of the other characters do, but she is at the heart of the film, and carries off her big emotional moments with the aplomb of much more experienced actors. There's a scene ending with her in tears towards the finale of the movie, and if her performance didn't work, the movie probably would just grind to a halt, but she succeeds in portraying a woman driven almost to madness by her own past, and it's one of the most touching moments in the film. (And yes, she looks amazing in that costume.)
Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. He seemed like a bit of an odd choice for the role, and I had some doubts when watching the trailers about his voice in particular, but my fears were for naught. Manhattan is a god walking among men, immortal, able to see the future and the past, and Crudup gives this impossible character a solid grounding in humanity even while he becomes more and more distanced from ordinary human concerns. His voice is that of a college professor, the quiet physicist he once was, and even in his most powerful moments he gives off a gentleness and a decency that was perhaps missing in the comic. It's a tough line to walk, but Crudup does it masterfully, and it's a shame that this film is unlikely to get the kind of major awards buzz that would give him the recognition he deserves.
Matthew Goode is another actor with whom I'm unfamiliar, but boy is his work as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias creepy. Veidt is "the smartest man on Earth" who has built his image as a superhero into a worldwide financial empire, and Goode manages to find the right balance between Donald Trump and David Bowie that is somehow deeply affecting rather than being ridiculous. He is a cypher through most of the film, and even when all his motives are revealed at the end he maintains the right air of mystery.
Jackie Earle Haley. Holy. Fuck. He spends most of the movie under a completely face-covering mask but gives such an amazing performance with just the timbre of his voice and remarkable body language that he officially becomes an Actor to Watch in the future. Rorschach is another of those impossible roles, a fan favorite (with good reason!), and Haley captures all the right notes perfectly. He's a character who would be a psychopathic murderer except that he has turned his sociopathy towards the doers of evil in the world, and his mind has been warped by all these years in the gutter. He does the same kind of rough gravel with his voice that Bale did when playing Batman, but Haley's lack of star power allows him to disappear into the role much more than Bale ever could, and I totally bought that this character could be the terror of the underworld even when only armed with a cafeteria tray. His may be the single best performance in a film filled with great performances.
If there's a better example of amoral glee in literature than the Comedian, I'm not aware of it, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan is up to the task. While Rorschach is a sociopath who enforces a strict code of right and wrong, the Comedian is just a bastard who does pretty much whatever he wants and has fun doing it. It's his death that instigates the film, and in flashbacks we see him torching fleeing Vietnamese, raping a woman, and gunning down protesters in the street. But we also get his humanity -- Morgan gives us a portrait of a man whose response to the evils of the world was to hit back just as hard and turn off his feelings, but who has not forgotten his humanity. It's a brief role but an important one, and Morgan gives a performance here that reminds me of Mickey Rourke's in Sin City, a bastard who just might want to be a gentle giant underneath.
Dan Dreiberg is probably my least favorite of the characters in the comic, but Patrick Wilson helps me see the humanity in this chubby ex-adventurer. Dreiberg is in many ways the moral center of the story, the character who has been least damaged by the world around him and who is least beset by emotional trauma, which makes him I suppose less interesting than those surrounding him. But in many ways he (like Ackerman) grounds the film, providing a human counterpoint to the Earth-shattering events surrounding him. His role in the finale is stepped up a bit from that in the novel, which helps to give an audience surrogate to this rogue's gallery of emotionally twisted people. I know Wilson best from Hard Candy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how funny he could be here; Dreiberg gets to be a bit of comic relief at certain moments in the film, and Wilson manages to find the humor in the character without ever losing the more mordant tone of the rest of the film.
I know it's fashionable to think The Dark Knight is one of the Greatest Films Ever Made, but while I liked that film a whole lot I didn't think it was quite as heady as people made it out to be. No matter what kinds of themes you find buried in Batman, TDK was ultimately about a guy who put on a funny costume to fight the Pure Evil (tm) of another guy who really just robbed banks for a living. Ledger's Joker is menacing because he is completely unhinged, an utterly vile man who wants to make the world into chaos. Watchmen is a vastly superior film because it knows that the real world rarely gives us the kinds of Evil-with-a-capital-E opponents, and that when you're playing for the grandest of stakes, sometimes all you have is moral ambiguity. The meaning of the last chapter of Watchmen has been debated for two decades and more, and the film version is sure to create a whole new generation of people arguing about it. What a magnificent experience.
Rating: A
18 February 2009
Movielog, The Searchers
The Searchers, 1956
Written by Frank S. Nugent
Based on the novel by Alan Le May
Directed by John Ford
119 minutes
The movies at their best can be a sort of time machine, giving us access to times and places that we could never visit, providing through moving image a immediacy that text and other forms of media cannot provide. That The Searchers provides this service is not in doubt -- the technical qualities of this film are above dispute, and the film is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for its portrayal of racism. But to modern audiences it has new shades of meaning, for placed in a twenty-first century context we are not quite sure if we are looking at the racism of 1868 or that of 1956.
Let's take a step back. I was born in 1980, and the western has not been a commercially viable genre in my lifetime. Oh, we get westerns here and there today, but they tend to be small pictures made by individuals as passion projects. Whereas in the time that John Ford was putting the finishing touches on this film, the western was a thriving medium for expression whose popularity had barely waned during the entirety of film history to that point, and one that had exploded over the still-new medium of television. Good westerns, bad westerns, kid's westerns, silly westerns... I suppose it's something like the proliferation of cop/mystery shows on television now, in that the basic structure of the genre is used to hang character drama, social commentary, etc cetera, by a wide variety of creative artists under a wide spectrum of skill levels.
And if the Western was the king of movie genres in the fifties, John Ford was the undisputed master of the Western. He had made dozens of them dating back into the silent era, and his collaborations with John Wayne were legendary on both a critical and a box-office level. So when The Searchers premiered, many critics overlooked its quality, understanding it merely as just another Ford/Wayne collaboration.
They were wrong, for this film is one of the finest films of its era, not least because in a sense it marks the end of its era. A decade later Sergio Leone would be making his now-classic spaghetti westerns (not the least of which is Once Upon a Time in the West), using a more modern sensibility of camerawork and performance, and a generally revisionist attitude towards the genre. In contrast, The Searchers is very much a product of its time technically, with broad performances, a mostly-static camera, cinematography that looks like a watercolor painting, and a general feel that reminds one of the proscenium. Not that any of that is necessarily bad, but the dated look and feel helps to explain why my generation is more familiar with the Eastwood westerns than with Wayne's.
I realize that I've gone several paragraphs without really talking about the plot. Wayne is Ethan Edwards, a man with a disreputable past who comes back to his brother's home in Texas after the Civil War. Three years after the Civil War, actually. What's he been doing all that time? The film doesn't give us easy answers, but we gather vaguely criminal activities in Mexico. Edwards is a racist, especially towards the Comanche Indians, and when there is an Indian raid on the family home, he swears vengeance. Two daughters of the family have been kidnapped by the Comanche, and much of the run-time of the film is devoted to Ethan and "half-breed" Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) searching for the lost women.
Early on we learn that the older daughter has been killed, and it takes the two men years to track down the younger. Years in which life goes on in the homestead, and the woman that Martin loves betroths herself to another man. If this seems out of place in my summary, it's equally out of place in the film -- the sequences back on the farm are comedic, meant to lighten the mood for the darker themes of life on the trail. Ethan's hatred of the Indians knows no bounds, as in a scene in which he kills several buffalo needlessly, just so that there would be fewer buffalo to feed the Comanche.
The Searchers does not agree with this perspective, to be sure, but it is still problematic. The Comanche chief named Scar, who leads the tribe that kidnapped the girls, is portrayed by Henry Brandon, whom I learn from Wikipedia is actually German. Most if not all of the Indians in this film are white actors wearing crazy makeup, which is why I have taken to calling them "Indians" in this review -- why soften the film's attitudes towards Native Americans by using a politically correct term that the film predates? In the cinematic world of 1956, Indians were generally unambiguous villains; our more modern sensibilities fill in some of the blanks that Ford's film leaves out, and Scar is perhaps a more sympathetic character to us than he was to audiences upon the film's release.
Or does Ford intend him to be sympathetic? This is a difficult question, for while the film provides us with a happy ending for the missing girl, we're not quite sure how she feels about the whole situation. Was she happier as one of Scar's wives than she would be living with what remains of her family? (This ambiguity was famously used by Paul Schraeder in his script for Taxi Driver, only one of many films that have been inspired by The Searchers.) Ethan believes he is doing the right thing in bringing the girl home, and in fact is portrayed as having become more tolerant than we suspected (his original intention being to kill the girl, on the logic that living like a Comanche is a fate worse than death), but pieces are missing in the psychology of these characters, pieces that would bring the themes of the film to a clearer focus.
I realize that I've gone on and on about the problems of the movie without really talking about the great qualities. It's technically superb, filled with amazing performances, and as a genre piece there are few better. It's tough for modern audiences due to the differing cinematic language of the fifties and today, but that's not something that should be held against it. Most importantly, The Searchers is never boring, and some sequences are brilliant by any standards.
This is a must-see for anyone interested in the history of film, particularly in the history of the Western. And if you're only going to see one Western from the fifties, you should probably make it The Searchers.
Rating: A
Written by Frank S. Nugent
Based on the novel by Alan Le May
Directed by John Ford
119 minutes
The movies at their best can be a sort of time machine, giving us access to times and places that we could never visit, providing through moving image a immediacy that text and other forms of media cannot provide. That The Searchers provides this service is not in doubt -- the technical qualities of this film are above dispute, and the film is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time for its portrayal of racism. But to modern audiences it has new shades of meaning, for placed in a twenty-first century context we are not quite sure if we are looking at the racism of 1868 or that of 1956.
The image that everyone who writes about The Searchers is duty-bound to include
Let's take a step back. I was born in 1980, and the western has not been a commercially viable genre in my lifetime. Oh, we get westerns here and there today, but they tend to be small pictures made by individuals as passion projects. Whereas in the time that John Ford was putting the finishing touches on this film, the western was a thriving medium for expression whose popularity had barely waned during the entirety of film history to that point, and one that had exploded over the still-new medium of television. Good westerns, bad westerns, kid's westerns, silly westerns... I suppose it's something like the proliferation of cop/mystery shows on television now, in that the basic structure of the genre is used to hang character drama, social commentary, etc cetera, by a wide variety of creative artists under a wide spectrum of skill levels.
And if the Western was the king of movie genres in the fifties, John Ford was the undisputed master of the Western. He had made dozens of them dating back into the silent era, and his collaborations with John Wayne were legendary on both a critical and a box-office level. So when The Searchers premiered, many critics overlooked its quality, understanding it merely as just another Ford/Wayne collaboration.
They were wrong, for this film is one of the finest films of its era, not least because in a sense it marks the end of its era. A decade later Sergio Leone would be making his now-classic spaghetti westerns (not the least of which is Once Upon a Time in the West), using a more modern sensibility of camerawork and performance, and a generally revisionist attitude towards the genre. In contrast, The Searchers is very much a product of its time technically, with broad performances, a mostly-static camera, cinematography that looks like a watercolor painting, and a general feel that reminds one of the proscenium. Not that any of that is necessarily bad, but the dated look and feel helps to explain why my generation is more familiar with the Eastwood westerns than with Wayne's.
I realize that I've gone several paragraphs without really talking about the plot. Wayne is Ethan Edwards, a man with a disreputable past who comes back to his brother's home in Texas after the Civil War. Three years after the Civil War, actually. What's he been doing all that time? The film doesn't give us easy answers, but we gather vaguely criminal activities in Mexico. Edwards is a racist, especially towards the Comanche Indians, and when there is an Indian raid on the family home, he swears vengeance. Two daughters of the family have been kidnapped by the Comanche, and much of the run-time of the film is devoted to Ethan and "half-breed" Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) searching for the lost women.
Early on we learn that the older daughter has been killed, and it takes the two men years to track down the younger. Years in which life goes on in the homestead, and the woman that Martin loves betroths herself to another man. If this seems out of place in my summary, it's equally out of place in the film -- the sequences back on the farm are comedic, meant to lighten the mood for the darker themes of life on the trail. Ethan's hatred of the Indians knows no bounds, as in a scene in which he kills several buffalo needlessly, just so that there would be fewer buffalo to feed the Comanche.
The Searchers does not agree with this perspective, to be sure, but it is still problematic. The Comanche chief named Scar, who leads the tribe that kidnapped the girls, is portrayed by Henry Brandon, whom I learn from Wikipedia is actually German. Most if not all of the Indians in this film are white actors wearing crazy makeup, which is why I have taken to calling them "Indians" in this review -- why soften the film's attitudes towards Native Americans by using a politically correct term that the film predates? In the cinematic world of 1956, Indians were generally unambiguous villains; our more modern sensibilities fill in some of the blanks that Ford's film leaves out, and Scar is perhaps a more sympathetic character to us than he was to audiences upon the film's release.
Or does Ford intend him to be sympathetic? This is a difficult question, for while the film provides us with a happy ending for the missing girl, we're not quite sure how she feels about the whole situation. Was she happier as one of Scar's wives than she would be living with what remains of her family? (This ambiguity was famously used by Paul Schraeder in his script for Taxi Driver, only one of many films that have been inspired by The Searchers.) Ethan believes he is doing the right thing in bringing the girl home, and in fact is portrayed as having become more tolerant than we suspected (his original intention being to kill the girl, on the logic that living like a Comanche is a fate worse than death), but pieces are missing in the psychology of these characters, pieces that would bring the themes of the film to a clearer focus.
I realize that I've gone on and on about the problems of the movie without really talking about the great qualities. It's technically superb, filled with amazing performances, and as a genre piece there are few better. It's tough for modern audiences due to the differing cinematic language of the fifties and today, but that's not something that should be held against it. Most importantly, The Searchers is never boring, and some sequences are brilliant by any standards.
This is a must-see for anyone interested in the history of film, particularly in the history of the Western. And if you're only going to see one Western from the fifties, you should probably make it The Searchers.
Rating: A
05 February 2009
Movielog, The Wrestler
The Wrestler, 2008
Written by Robert D. Siegel
Directed by Darren Aronofksky
115 minutes
Darren Aronofsky is generally recognized more for his technical brilliance and hypercompetent visuals more than for his ability to work with actors, but anyone who has seen Ellen Burstyn's performance in Requiem for a Dream should realize that Aronofsky is no stranger to the needs of actors, and is able to coax career-best performances even out of the best actors in the business today. So it's no surprise that Mickey Rourke's performance in The Wrestler is a revelation, the kind of performance that actors will be studying for decades to come, and that will restore Rourke to his rightful place among the first class of actors after a decades-long slump.
Rourke is Randy "The Ram" Robinson, who in the mid-eighties was a world-famous WWF wrestler on par with Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage. Two decades later he is still wrestling, but for tiny crowds on the slushy New Jersey circuit and making barely enough money to scrape by even in a good month. His body has been crushed and put back together so many times that we can almost hear his bones creak and his sinew snap as he moves on-screen; this is where performer and character run almost neck-and-neck, as Rourke himself shows the signs of his years of physical abuse on his physique.
Rourke is to be commended for his lack of ego in this movie. When he's not in the ring he wears thick glasses and a hearing aid; these along with long bleached hair occasionally give him the look of somebody's grandmother. He's an old broken down man barely scraping by on his wrestling income and a supplemental job working in the back of a grocery store. He lives in a crappy single-wide trailer when he has money and in the back of his rusting van when he doesn't.
It's a solitary life except for the stripper Cassidy (Marissa Tomei) whom he sees professionally and would like to see more personally. Like him she works in a profession where her appearance of physical perfection is key, and like him, she is getting to the point where maintaining that fantasy is becoming impossible. Okay, sure, she still looks like this:
...but the kids with the money to blow on a private dance with a stripper tend to work on the assumption that anyone over twenty-five is old and anyone over thirty might as well be a grandmother. Tomei looks fantastic in The Wrestler (and spends about sixty percent of her time on-screen in a state of some undress, which is always okay in my book), but for Cassidy, it won't be long before she's too over the hill to bring in the cash the way she used to.
It is a strength of The Wrestler that the film doesn't give the audience the pat solutions to Cassidy and Randy's problems. Clearly the two have chemistry together and care about each other, but is that enough? Randy has a long history of emotional abuse and broken promises (as well as substance issues), as demonstrated by his attempts at reconciliation with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). Randy approaches his daughter without even beginning to understand her, and her response is a defiant "Fuck you." It's Randy's tragedy that even after he begins to break down her barriers and to reconnect with her, his faults come back to rear their ugly head and he destroys all the good work he's done to make it up to her.
I've gone this far without even really talking about Aronofsky's work itself, and that's largely because this is a very different kind of story than Aronofksy's earlier films. Other than a few hints here and there, there's hardly anything here to make this feel like "an Aronofksy picture," partly because for the first time the director is working not from his own script but from the work of a new screenwriter named Robert D. Siegel. Gone are the visual pyrotechnics and in their place are long shots on the back of Randy's head -- we spend a fair chunk of the movie just following him around and experiencing the world as he does.
Even in the more visually dynamic moments in the ring, Aronfsky wisely takes a very restrained visual tack, allowing the images and the performances to speak for themselves. A very violent set-piece near the middle of the movie is in its own way as painful and punishing as the final twenty minutes of Requiem for a Dream, although of course it is about a very different kind of self-abuse. The violence here is much less gory than in something like Repo: The Genetic Opera but by grounding the gore in realism it becomes ten times as horrifying and a thousand times as potent. These are real people hurting themselves for entertainment, and Aronofsky's camera observes without passing judgment.
In the end, The Wrestler is a performance piece first and foremost. Without the astonishing performance by Mickey Rourke, the film would feel contrived at best and a bit cheesy at worst. Rourke's performance (not to slight Tomei, who is also very good) and Aronofsky's direction elevate the material to high drama, and make this story of a washed-out wrestler struggling to make a future for himself one of the best films of the year.
Rating: A-
Written by Robert D. Siegel
Directed by Darren Aronofksky
115 minutes
Darren Aronofsky is generally recognized more for his technical brilliance and hypercompetent visuals more than for his ability to work with actors, but anyone who has seen Ellen Burstyn's performance in Requiem for a Dream should realize that Aronofsky is no stranger to the needs of actors, and is able to coax career-best performances even out of the best actors in the business today. So it's no surprise that Mickey Rourke's performance in The Wrestler is a revelation, the kind of performance that actors will be studying for decades to come, and that will restore Rourke to his rightful place among the first class of actors after a decades-long slump.
Rourke is Randy "The Ram" Robinson, who in the mid-eighties was a world-famous WWF wrestler on par with Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage. Two decades later he is still wrestling, but for tiny crowds on the slushy New Jersey circuit and making barely enough money to scrape by even in a good month. His body has been crushed and put back together so many times that we can almost hear his bones creak and his sinew snap as he moves on-screen; this is where performer and character run almost neck-and-neck, as Rourke himself shows the signs of his years of physical abuse on his physique.
Rourke is to be commended for his lack of ego in this movie. When he's not in the ring he wears thick glasses and a hearing aid; these along with long bleached hair occasionally give him the look of somebody's grandmother. He's an old broken down man barely scraping by on his wrestling income and a supplemental job working in the back of a grocery store. He lives in a crappy single-wide trailer when he has money and in the back of his rusting van when he doesn't.
It's a solitary life except for the stripper Cassidy (Marissa Tomei) whom he sees professionally and would like to see more personally. Like him she works in a profession where her appearance of physical perfection is key, and like him, she is getting to the point where maintaining that fantasy is becoming impossible. Okay, sure, she still looks like this:
...but the kids with the money to blow on a private dance with a stripper tend to work on the assumption that anyone over twenty-five is old and anyone over thirty might as well be a grandmother. Tomei looks fantastic in The Wrestler (and spends about sixty percent of her time on-screen in a state of some undress, which is always okay in my book), but for Cassidy, it won't be long before she's too over the hill to bring in the cash the way she used to.
It is a strength of The Wrestler that the film doesn't give the audience the pat solutions to Cassidy and Randy's problems. Clearly the two have chemistry together and care about each other, but is that enough? Randy has a long history of emotional abuse and broken promises (as well as substance issues), as demonstrated by his attempts at reconciliation with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). Randy approaches his daughter without even beginning to understand her, and her response is a defiant "Fuck you." It's Randy's tragedy that even after he begins to break down her barriers and to reconnect with her, his faults come back to rear their ugly head and he destroys all the good work he's done to make it up to her.
I've gone this far without even really talking about Aronofsky's work itself, and that's largely because this is a very different kind of story than Aronofksy's earlier films. Other than a few hints here and there, there's hardly anything here to make this feel like "an Aronofksy picture," partly because for the first time the director is working not from his own script but from the work of a new screenwriter named Robert D. Siegel. Gone are the visual pyrotechnics and in their place are long shots on the back of Randy's head -- we spend a fair chunk of the movie just following him around and experiencing the world as he does.
Even in the more visually dynamic moments in the ring, Aronfsky wisely takes a very restrained visual tack, allowing the images and the performances to speak for themselves. A very violent set-piece near the middle of the movie is in its own way as painful and punishing as the final twenty minutes of Requiem for a Dream, although of course it is about a very different kind of self-abuse. The violence here is much less gory than in something like Repo: The Genetic Opera but by grounding the gore in realism it becomes ten times as horrifying and a thousand times as potent. These are real people hurting themselves for entertainment, and Aronofsky's camera observes without passing judgment.
In the end, The Wrestler is a performance piece first and foremost. Without the astonishing performance by Mickey Rourke, the film would feel contrived at best and a bit cheesy at worst. Rourke's performance (not to slight Tomei, who is also very good) and Aronofsky's direction elevate the material to high drama, and make this story of a washed-out wrestler struggling to make a future for himself one of the best films of the year.
Rating: A-
22 January 2009
Booklog, Liberation
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America, 2008
Tor Books
299 pages
What a wonder is Brian Francis Slattery. His first novel, Spaceman Blues is one of the most assured debuts I've ever read, a comic-book plot wrung through a humanistic lens and written in the kind of prose that would make Harlan Ellison and William Gibson weep. His second novel is even more astonishing -- with a half measure of Philip K. Dick another half of Kurt Vonnegut, and a full overheaping measure of none other than Thomas Pynchon on his more communicative days, Liberation is beautifully written with impeccable prose styling, contains characters that make you cringe and weep in equal measure, and is astonishing throughout its length. The fact that it doesn't wear out its welcome and reaches a conclusion in less than three hundred pages is nothing short of astonishing.
Take a gander at that title, clause by clause, in reverse:
After the Collapse of the United States of America. This is a post-apocalyptic story, to be sure, but it's not the ecological disaster of The Road or the zombie infestation of World War Z, or even the nuclear winter of too-many-to-count. Instead, Slattery's novel takes place at some unspecified time in the near future, approximately four years after an economic collapse of the United States. And when I say the United States, I mean it -- the glimpses we see of the rest of the world seem to indicate that things have basically gone on as usual, with a bit of a slowdown given that the world's largest consumer of cheap crap has gone down the tubes. Slattery is a writer on international economic issues, and his expertise gives this element of the book the intellectual heft it needs to be plausible, despite never really going into detail about the precise mechanisms of the economic collapse.
As has been noted in many other reviews of the novel, Slattery's vision of this post-collapse America is similar in many ways to nineteenth-century America. Cities maintain their own defensive networks and sovereignty, protection of individual rights tends to lie with the individual working alone with whatever means are at his or her disposal, and certain, well, institutions have made a resurgence. The destruction of the US government has created a power vacuum into which the master criminal the Aardvark has stepped -- he is called the Emperor of America and rules New York with something of an iron fist... although we later learn that perhaps being in charge isn't quite the boon you'd think.
Being the Adventures of the Slick Six. If the setting seems scarily real, the characters populating this landscape are straight out of the pulpiest of pulp fiction. The abovementioned Aardvark is the antagonist to the titular "Six," a group of master criminals who owe more to Ocean's 11 than anything in the real world. They are "the ones who pulled off impossible crimes, who stole houses from those who lived in them, drew millions upon millions out of the margins of error in the currency market, spirited jewels and paintings out of vaults and museums and into the black market, where money flew huge and invisible through the ether." First among equals in the group is Marco, a refugee from Latin America with the kind of violent past that makes those in City of God seem bucolic by comparison.
Marco is a killer among killers, death for anyone who gets in his way, and it is largely through his journey across the hulking remains of the US as he puts his team back together that we see many of the amazing sights that Slattery has planned out for us. The past bleeds into the present and the future lends its eye back to the past as Slattery tells us the story of Cyclone Cal, who builds a maniacal magical circus that destroys all it touches. The humble but proud residents who chose not to flee Los Angeles for the shores of East Asia and instead let stories of their own cannibalism spread to the few rich people who helicopter from tower to tower so as not to let anyone know how good they have it now. The endless Burning-Man like cycle of parties that is the new Las Vegas. And the drug-fueled mystical journey across the new continent engaged in by the Americoids, a group of hippies who give voice to the magical Vibe that gives knowledge and wisdom to those that deserve it... sometimes. And Marco's going to need it, because his final goal is nothing less than:
Liberation. For in this future America slavery has resurfaced, and as penance for the corpses that he has left across continents in the pre-collapse world, Marco feels driven to free the slaves. Which means rebuilding something of the old America out of the new. Which further means taking down the unbeatable Aardvark, who has a few aces up his sleeves as well.
I've done a poor job of summarizing this novel. For the most part, it's unsummarizable. As crazy as the above sounds, I've probably made Liberation seem much more conventional than it actually is. Slattery proves with this book that he isn't a one-trick pony, and indeed is shaping up to be one of the most vital new writers of the not-so-new-anymore century. Liberation, I am sure, will be a novel I will be revisiting from time to time for the rest of my life. If there is a second coming of Thomas Pynchon (who, of course, is still alive), it's going to come in the form of Brian Francis Slattery.
Rating: A
Tor Books
299 pages
What a wonder is Brian Francis Slattery. His first novel, Spaceman Blues is one of the most assured debuts I've ever read, a comic-book plot wrung through a humanistic lens and written in the kind of prose that would make Harlan Ellison and William Gibson weep. His second novel is even more astonishing -- with a half measure of Philip K. Dick another half of Kurt Vonnegut, and a full overheaping measure of none other than Thomas Pynchon on his more communicative days, Liberation is beautifully written with impeccable prose styling, contains characters that make you cringe and weep in equal measure, and is astonishing throughout its length. The fact that it doesn't wear out its welcome and reaches a conclusion in less than three hundred pages is nothing short of astonishing.
Take a gander at that title, clause by clause, in reverse:
After the Collapse of the United States of America. This is a post-apocalyptic story, to be sure, but it's not the ecological disaster of The Road or the zombie infestation of World War Z, or even the nuclear winter of too-many-to-count. Instead, Slattery's novel takes place at some unspecified time in the near future, approximately four years after an economic collapse of the United States. And when I say the United States, I mean it -- the glimpses we see of the rest of the world seem to indicate that things have basically gone on as usual, with a bit of a slowdown given that the world's largest consumer of cheap crap has gone down the tubes. Slattery is a writer on international economic issues, and his expertise gives this element of the book the intellectual heft it needs to be plausible, despite never really going into detail about the precise mechanisms of the economic collapse.
As has been noted in many other reviews of the novel, Slattery's vision of this post-collapse America is similar in many ways to nineteenth-century America. Cities maintain their own defensive networks and sovereignty, protection of individual rights tends to lie with the individual working alone with whatever means are at his or her disposal, and certain, well, institutions have made a resurgence. The destruction of the US government has created a power vacuum into which the master criminal the Aardvark has stepped -- he is called the Emperor of America and rules New York with something of an iron fist... although we later learn that perhaps being in charge isn't quite the boon you'd think.
Being the Adventures of the Slick Six. If the setting seems scarily real, the characters populating this landscape are straight out of the pulpiest of pulp fiction. The abovementioned Aardvark is the antagonist to the titular "Six," a group of master criminals who owe more to Ocean's 11 than anything in the real world. They are "the ones who pulled off impossible crimes, who stole houses from those who lived in them, drew millions upon millions out of the margins of error in the currency market, spirited jewels and paintings out of vaults and museums and into the black market, where money flew huge and invisible through the ether." First among equals in the group is Marco, a refugee from Latin America with the kind of violent past that makes those in City of God seem bucolic by comparison.
Marco is a killer among killers, death for anyone who gets in his way, and it is largely through his journey across the hulking remains of the US as he puts his team back together that we see many of the amazing sights that Slattery has planned out for us. The past bleeds into the present and the future lends its eye back to the past as Slattery tells us the story of Cyclone Cal, who builds a maniacal magical circus that destroys all it touches. The humble but proud residents who chose not to flee Los Angeles for the shores of East Asia and instead let stories of their own cannibalism spread to the few rich people who helicopter from tower to tower so as not to let anyone know how good they have it now. The endless Burning-Man like cycle of parties that is the new Las Vegas. And the drug-fueled mystical journey across the new continent engaged in by the Americoids, a group of hippies who give voice to the magical Vibe that gives knowledge and wisdom to those that deserve it... sometimes. And Marco's going to need it, because his final goal is nothing less than:
Liberation. For in this future America slavery has resurfaced, and as penance for the corpses that he has left across continents in the pre-collapse world, Marco feels driven to free the slaves. Which means rebuilding something of the old America out of the new. Which further means taking down the unbeatable Aardvark, who has a few aces up his sleeves as well.
I've done a poor job of summarizing this novel. For the most part, it's unsummarizable. As crazy as the above sounds, I've probably made Liberation seem much more conventional than it actually is. Slattery proves with this book that he isn't a one-trick pony, and indeed is shaping up to be one of the most vital new writers of the not-so-new-anymore century. Liberation, I am sure, will be a novel I will be revisiting from time to time for the rest of my life. If there is a second coming of Thomas Pynchon (who, of course, is still alive), it's going to come in the form of Brian Francis Slattery.
Rating: A
01 January 2009
Movielog, Standard Operating Procedure
Standard Operating Procedure, 2008
Directed by Errol Morris
116 minutes
A click of a shutter and maybe a flash of light, and a tiny piece of the universe is captured for a tiny fraction of a second. That's a photograph. Into that tiny little segment of recorded spacetime we the viewer project ourselves, our culture, our own biases and preconceptions. What happened before and after this moment? What was going on right outside the frame? By definition no photo can possibly tell us, which is part of the power and the limitation of photography as a medium.
The most famous photographs of the last few years were the photos of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison during the early days of the Iraq War. One's opinions of what exactly these photos depict seems to depend largely on factors that are outside the frame -- is what is happening simply a sort of "fraternity hazing?" Is it criminal activity? Crimes of war? All or none of the above? To see these photos now is to delve into a morass of political, legal, and moral gray area; these photos are now documents of recent history, and yet the photos themselves are so devoid of context that it is nearly impossible to gain any sort of factual foothold on what is depicted therein.
It is a mark of the genius of the great documentarian Errol Morris that he avoids many of the political pitfalls that arise from viewing these photos. Standard Operating Procedure is not a political film and does not take sides in the debate over these photos in general, the treatment of Iraqi detainees in general, or the Iraq War in its larger context. (That documentary would be the amazing Taxi to the Dark Side, which deals for most of its length about the details of who, exactly, is responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other prison systems used in the War on Terror.) Instead, Morris focuses almost entirely on providing the simple context for the photos -- what was happening outside of the frame? How do the persons depicted in the photos feel about them? What were they thinking, doing? What was going on outside the walls?
Along the way, Morris interviews quite a few of the individuals who participated in or witnessed the photos being taken, including Lynndie England, who claimed that what she did, she did for the love of Specialist Charles Graner. Graner was 34 at the time of the incidents and sleeping with the 20-year-old England, and is the alleged father of England's child. (Graner is currently serving sentence for his crimes and was not allowed to be interviewed by the Army.) Also interviewed is Sabrina Harman, she of the "thumbs-up" gesture, whose moving letters to her girlfriend Kelly figure prominently in the film. In these letters she discusses the abuses that she and those around her perpetrate, and seems to have an injured conscience. Another interviewee for the film, one of the investigators of the abuse, believes that her smiling face and thumbs-up gestures are real, and not faked. It is another of the strengths of Morris's film (like most of his films) that Morris never tips his hand, never tells us which interpretation of these photos that he himself supports. His dispassionate camera merely records -- the judgments are left to the viewer.
This is not the definitive film about Abu Ghraib, or even of the photos themselves. Morris does miraculous things with what he has, but the nearness of the history will doubtless prove that many events portrayed in the film will have more accurate interpretations in the future. In particular, I'd be interested in listening to Graner's interpretation of these events -- in most photos, he seems to be instigating the action. But Standard Operating Procedure is a masterpiece of tone, and in allowing us to understand the larger context of these photos, in succeeds admirably. No one with an interest in this scandal or in the nature of photography in general should miss this film for the "big picture" it helps to provide. In the end, a picture may tell a thousand words, but in most cases its the million words around that that provide the real story.
Rating: A-
Directed by Errol Morris
116 minutes
A click of a shutter and maybe a flash of light, and a tiny piece of the universe is captured for a tiny fraction of a second. That's a photograph. Into that tiny little segment of recorded spacetime we the viewer project ourselves, our culture, our own biases and preconceptions. What happened before and after this moment? What was going on right outside the frame? By definition no photo can possibly tell us, which is part of the power and the limitation of photography as a medium.
The most famous photographs of the last few years were the photos of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison during the early days of the Iraq War. One's opinions of what exactly these photos depict seems to depend largely on factors that are outside the frame -- is what is happening simply a sort of "fraternity hazing?" Is it criminal activity? Crimes of war? All or none of the above? To see these photos now is to delve into a morass of political, legal, and moral gray area; these photos are now documents of recent history, and yet the photos themselves are so devoid of context that it is nearly impossible to gain any sort of factual foothold on what is depicted therein.
It is a mark of the genius of the great documentarian Errol Morris that he avoids many of the political pitfalls that arise from viewing these photos. Standard Operating Procedure is not a political film and does not take sides in the debate over these photos in general, the treatment of Iraqi detainees in general, or the Iraq War in its larger context. (That documentary would be the amazing Taxi to the Dark Side, which deals for most of its length about the details of who, exactly, is responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other prison systems used in the War on Terror.) Instead, Morris focuses almost entirely on providing the simple context for the photos -- what was happening outside of the frame? How do the persons depicted in the photos feel about them? What were they thinking, doing? What was going on outside the walls?
Along the way, Morris interviews quite a few of the individuals who participated in or witnessed the photos being taken, including Lynndie England, who claimed that what she did, she did for the love of Specialist Charles Graner. Graner was 34 at the time of the incidents and sleeping with the 20-year-old England, and is the alleged father of England's child. (Graner is currently serving sentence for his crimes and was not allowed to be interviewed by the Army.) Also interviewed is Sabrina Harman, she of the "thumbs-up" gesture, whose moving letters to her girlfriend Kelly figure prominently in the film. In these letters she discusses the abuses that she and those around her perpetrate, and seems to have an injured conscience. Another interviewee for the film, one of the investigators of the abuse, believes that her smiling face and thumbs-up gestures are real, and not faked. It is another of the strengths of Morris's film (like most of his films) that Morris never tips his hand, never tells us which interpretation of these photos that he himself supports. His dispassionate camera merely records -- the judgments are left to the viewer.
This is not the definitive film about Abu Ghraib, or even of the photos themselves. Morris does miraculous things with what he has, but the nearness of the history will doubtless prove that many events portrayed in the film will have more accurate interpretations in the future. In particular, I'd be interested in listening to Graner's interpretation of these events -- in most photos, he seems to be instigating the action. But Standard Operating Procedure is a masterpiece of tone, and in allowing us to understand the larger context of these photos, in succeeds admirably. No one with an interest in this scandal or in the nature of photography in general should miss this film for the "big picture" it helps to provide. In the end, a picture may tell a thousand words, but in most cases its the million words around that that provide the real story.
Rating: A-
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