an open notebook

THE SKIN I LIVE IN, TOMBOY

2012-02-15T14:35:00.000-08:00

"There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is a persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied—physically, internally, in her privacy."

— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse is largely a book of literary criticism, elaborating and pinpointing how literature inscribes heterosexual intercourse as an act of male violence against women.

While watching Pedro Almodovar's newest film, The Skin I Live In, I wished dearly that she was still alive to witness it. It would have been perhaps the perfect target: rarely is the use of intercourse as punishment wielded so overtly as it is here.

It is hard to know where to begin when talking about Almodovar, who has somehow ginned up a reputation as a champion of LGBT cinema. But while doing so he has had to fend off a strong faction of antagonists who feel his subject matter and presentation betrays a serious fascination with misogyny. (For a synopsis of this so-called debate, see here).

Almodovar's gravest breach was early in his career when his film Kika contained a rape scene openly played for laughs; the director himself opined that "that sequence ended up being curiously engaging and entertaining, though still a rape." Given that Almodovar wrote and directed the film, one would be excused for being bewildered at what he could possibly mean by the use of the word 'curious.'

As the above-mentioned Popmatters article shows, Almodovar's 'curiosity' with rape certainly didn't end there and it continues to infuse a major part of his filmography.

Most recently this 'curiosity' is front and center with The Skin I Live In, the plot of which is so elaborately perverse that may reel while hearing it; here goes: a surgeon, Antonio Banderas, maintains an underground laboratory where he is holding a female captive. He has been performing some kind of operation on her and keeps her in constant isolation and surveillance. It eventually becomes known that this captive was formerly a male, in fact it is the man who raped Banderas' daughter, which eventually led to her suicide. Banderas, you see, has been plagued by his wife's death in a car accident years ago. So, what he does is kidnap this man, Vincente, his daughter's rapist, and perform a forced sex-change operation on him, followed by a full skin transplant wherein Vincente is turned into a replica of Banderas' dead wife.

Now that's a doozy!

But even this central conceit which so clearly pivots on woman-hating is accentuated by even more abuse. For example, Banderas' brother comes into the home one evening by chance and rapes Vincente (now known as Vera). After he leaves, Banderas comforts Vera and they sleep together—because nothing eases the trauma of rape like falling into bed with your kidnapper and torturer.

But, still, the least of this film's problems is the suspension of disbelief. Instead it is this: at every moment in this film, being female is scene as a source of punishment and this punishment is most centrally enforced by penetration.

After awakening from the sex-change operation, Vincente is confronted by Antonio Banderas displaying a set of increasingly wide 'dilators' which the patient will have to use on the vagina in order to prevent it from sealing. Most if not all of the sex scenes draw attention to the pain felt by penetration. It's a bit unbelievable really how every example of intercourse/penetration in the film is a source of pain or subjection of the female characters.

Dworkin would have a field day. Another of her quotes springs to mind: "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercoures per se."

Beyond how closely the film hews to Dworkin's elaboration of intercourse, the film also provides an opportunity to remind ourselves why men really shouldn't be directing rape scenes at all, or even nude scenes. Richard Brody in the New Yorker wrote very clearly that in the case of asking actors and actresses to film nude scenes "directors shouldn't ask them to do it." His reasoning is not framed as necessarily feminist, but is persuasive.

But beyond the aesthetic argument that Brody makes, there's the political one. While apologists for 'artistic license' may think anything short of a snuff film is grounds for unequivocal defense, there remains the fact that in a society where men possess privileges and power that women do not (aka, the patriarchy), these aesthetic decisions are not without political consequences. In a world where rape exists, in the immortal words of Susan Brownmiller, as 'a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,' asking an aspiring actress to be mock raped in front of a camera cannot be seriously entertained as purely an aesthetic choice.

It seems there will never be a shortage of male directors who believe that 'rape revenge' narratives qualify as feminist. It seems beyond their imagination that not having rape shown at all might be a more favorable option. Of course, the censorship police descend fast at that notion, declaring that what that means is 'limiting the dialogue' or some such nonsense. If you are confronted by any of these people, it is perhaps best to laugh them out of the room at the notion that Pedro Almodovar is a vital part of the worldwide discourse of rape and that his work on the subject is indispensable.

The icing on the cake is Almodovar's insistence that he 'toned down' the story, finding it too 'gratuitous .' Given the final product, one is reminded of Pauline Kael's riposte to Antonioni's Blow-Up. When Antonioni claimed Blow-Up was a film with 'no social or moral judgments,' Kael responded 'I'd hate to be around when he's making moral judgments.'

I'd surely hate to be around when Almodovar is being gratuitous.

In sharp contrast, Celine Sciamma's Tomboy is downright revolutionary in how nonchalantly it lays waste to the concept of gender. Focusing on 10-year old Laure, who tells a neighborhood group of kids that she is a boy named Mikael, Tomboy isn't so much an act of war against gender as a blissful ignoring of it. The film's forthright positioning of the nude female and the nude male bodies against each other as indistinguishable must count as a refreshing attempt to confound any gender conservatives in the audience.

When Mikael is outed as Laure by her own mother, the kids track her down and, to confirm the rumors, pull on her waistband and take a look. Sciamma's film wonderfully exposes the arbitrariness of this gesture. Almodovar seems to think that what's between your legs countenances your fate; Sciamma sees this for what it is: a last-ditch vestige of oppression maintained when all else fails to secure male power over women.

Tomboy was recently just edged out of my Top 10 of 2011, but deserves support: try to see it. The Skin I Live In should be avoided at all costs.

Laure/Mikael and Lisa in Tomboy.

Vera about to be raped by a man in a fucking tiger costume in The Skin I Live In. Fuck you, Almodovar.

YOUNG ADULT

2011-12-31T08:19:00.000-08:00

I have a Midwest problem. I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and many of my friends and almost all of my family still live there. After high school, almost everyone I knew went to college in-state or didn't go at all. I understand that towns like this can be a hard place to leave, for a variety of factors, and I understand that the longer you tend to stay, the less energy you have for replanting yourself.

I also sort of hate Fort Wayne, and I'm fairly certain that you could get that statement out of most of the city's residents, although the 'sort of' is what matters. You see, we all know that our city is not sophisticated or terribly culturally interesting. There are a lot of chain stores. There are not a lot of museums, and the ones there are are pretty esoteric and dull. We know you laugh at us for saying 'pop.' In other words, every negative comment you make about the lifestyle of mid-size Midwestern towns, we duly respond: we fucking know. We live here, after all.

To make my association with Jason Reitman's new film Young Adult even more acute, I happen to have left the Midwest, as soon as possible, and I'm very thankful for it. I now live in Boston, a culturally elite city if ever there was such a thing. So I know why Charlize Theron wanted to get out--as she does--and live in Minneapolis instead of Mercury (not a real place, though it looks like Fort Wayne to me). I also know why she may feel a little bit better than those she left behind, or at least those that voluntarily are choosing to raise families there; I mean, c'mon! These cities blow.

But, here's the difference between me and Jason Reitman (besides the fact that Jason Reitman inherited incredible wealth and would never in any circumstances find himself living in a mid-size Midwest city). I don't believe for a second that the people who live in Fort Wayne, Indiana are any different whatsoever from the people who live in Boston, Massachusetts. Call me fucking crazy, but there's nothing inherently within 'these people' in these 'hick towns' that keeps them there. So I'm especially irked when directors like Jason Reitman and writers like Diablo Cody seem to think that the only proper way to view Midwest residents is to look down upon them.

That's where this movie becomes more than poorly constructed and poorly directed and shows itself as dripping with contempt. Charlize Theron escaped Mercury, but she'll always be trash to this creative duo. Every possible benefit that could be had by showcasing atypical female attractiveness is deep-sixed as Theron is stigmatized by doing such horrendous things as drinking a two-liter of Diet Coke straight from the bottle, going off in the middle of the night to snag some Ben & Jerry's, and wearing bra inserts. Jesus, how shameless is this woman, you must ask yourself! Someday I will see a movie where a woman eating ice cream isn't portrayed as a significant sign of sloppiness, or at least I keep telling myself that when I'm considering offing myself.

Charlize Theron is back in Mercury to attempt to steal her ex-boyfriend, Patrick Wilson, from his new wife and their newborn baby daughter. Obviously, she is, as these characters often are, simply another variation of 'a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.' * In fact, the film is largely an attempt to see how far one woman will go in humiliating herself.

She's not alone though--no one in the film escapes unscathed. Patrick Wilson shows the film's hand when he says some stupid thing about Mercury being great because it has this tacky sports bar and how he and his dad eat lunch together at General Mills, 'sometimes pizza...sometimes sub sandwiches.' It doesn't take long after this to tell that for Reitman and Cody there isn't a single person in the Midwest who has achieved any kind of happiness that isn't predicated on a substandard IQ (Patrick Wilson), blissful naivete (Wilson's wife, Theron's mother), or the fatalism of lowered standards (Oswalt and his sister). This is where Reitman and Cody go horribly wrong--they refuse to accept or even imagine the notion that there are perfectly normal, perfectly intelligent, perfectly hip, people living in the Midwest who have found happiness.

Not so! claim the storytellers. The joke is on the saps! After all, it takes a truly miserable, pathetic human being to trick themselves into thinking their lives are truly happy when they are so clearly rotting away in Mercury. We are supposed to pity every single person in this movie on the basis that they are too stupid and oblivious to realize how unhappy they are. At the end of the day, after Theron proves herself to be, more or less, as unlikable as a movie character is generally allowed to be, a supporting character sets it all straight by saying: you're right! Take me with you! Back to the big city! You were right to come here and thoroughly fuck up everyone's lives! You are the enlightened one!

It should be mentioned, at this point, that calling the film a 'black comedy' does not suffice. Nor do any of the film's alleged instances of 'edginess' bear out. Oswalt's character is disabled, which would, we would hope, give the film some fucking transgressiveness. Not so--it turns out, as it so often does, that we are unable to think about disability in film as anything other than a story device to play both sides of the PC dollar. In other words, we have people with disabilities laughing at other people with disabilities, or making 'cripple' jokes about themselves, which gives the audience the chance to think both a.) wow, this movie sure is interesting for including these talking points, and b.) haha, see, they're okay with 'cripple' jokes! The real joke, obviously, is on every disabled actor who didn't get a part in this movie because they gave it to a famous comedian. Color me un-fucking-surprised. PS, we can blame this all on Ryan Murphy if we want.

And yes, at the end, Theron and Oswalt finally sleep together. It's this scene where Reitman and Cody are so off-base, no matter how well-intentioned. Oswalt sits there, his leg mangled and scarred, while Theron stands there with plastic bra inserts attached to her breasts. It's supposed to be a here-we-are-at-last moment of realization that our own bodies, no matter how ugly we may find them, are fully sufficient. Of course, in Reitman's hands, it's just another pity party. It's 'love conquers all' but the 'all' is all the condescending obstacles he's forced you to crawl through to get to this point. At the end, Theron goes back to Minneapolis and Oswalt probably resumes being unhappy. Hey, at least these two sad sacks got in one good fuck.

So! In other words: I'm sick of movies where the filmmakers are more concerned with showcasing what low-end brand-name products Midwestern characters keep in their homes than in those characters' actual lived emotional experiences. Young Adult has nothing but a opportunistic straddling of disability that lacks political backbone, a horrible narrative structure that allows shocking reveals to be dropped in like anvils, and more than anything else an absolute unwillingness to even try to see lower-middle-class life in a way that appreciates its economic, material, and emotional realness. No matter what other attributes you have, if you live in Mercury, Minnesota, or any other analogous city, you are, to Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, a primarily faulted person. In cutting off the emotional opportunities of these characters at the start, for no reason other than their geographical and, to some extent, their class status, this movie is fucking inhumane.

To this I respond to Jason Reitman, a wealthy hack whose entire career can be owed to his famous father, and Diablo Cody, the odds-on favorite for worst screenwriter on planet Earth, with a full 'go fuck yourselves.'

NOTE: This is primarily a rant, although I hope it is apparent that I'm engaging on the film on a critical basis as well. Just don't take this to be a completely 'evenhanded' view of the film's strengths and weaknesses. It's an aggressive attack on the heartless, bullshit assumptions that prop up the entire film's narrative. I am thinking critically about the film--but I'm also so pissed off about the film that I'll admit to not even wanting to mention the one or two things I liked in it.

* Apologies to David Brock. He, former right-wing hack, and current left-wing journalist and founder of Media Matters for America is the original author of the 'little bit nutty and little bit slutty' line that has become so notorious. It was originally a reference to Anita Hill. However, although Brock can never un-write it, I feel it somehow necessary to point out that, in my mind, he's been as good a repenter as we could ask for.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

2011-12-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

In Lynne Ramsay's first film in nine years, We Need to Talk About Kevin, 'the problem with no name' becomes named. Giving up her dream career as an 'adventurer,' Tilda Swinton becomes a mother and caretaker for her newborn son; Ramsay's conceit is to play this off not as merely an investigation of the 'feminine mystique,' but as a complete living fucking nightmare. Kevin is pure evil, up and down, his mother swears to it. And although he acts well-adjusted around everyone else, he is fully committed to psychologically terrorizing his mother. The final act of slaughter is devastating not only for its violence, but for Swinton, for its coherence.

We Need to Talk About Kevin flits about every which way and its narrative construction is what gives the film its gravitational pull. Jumping between timelines with little signposting or pattern, the film becomes an associative montage, held partially together by Swinton's panicked psyche. Scene-to-scene transitions happen through visual rhymes, giving outstanding form to the discordance of a traumatized mind. Add to this the audio cues: this film has the best sound design of the year. Small, constant sounds are honed in on; amplified. Kevin crushing cereal or breaking crayons; a neighbor bouncing a basketball or mowing his grass. Sound bridges in this case don't come across as annoying, but serve the same purpose as the visual rhyming: shifting emphasis to the flexibility of the narrative and the looseness of concentration. It lets the film embody Swinton's struggle to hear herself think, to unclutter her mind.

Ramsay's use of horror is also occasionally inspired. The struggle in a film like this is to prevent Kevin from seeming to have walked out of a B-movie and in that department the results are mixed. There's no doubt about it that this kid is a psychopath, but as psychopathy in movies goes, I found this one convincing if frustrating. But, of course, it is in the nature of psychopaths to be frustrating. Fanatically convinced that their adolescent rantings about the dehumanizing effects of television and society's infatuation with mass murder make them somehow prophets, as opposed to third-rate op-ed writers, is nothing, one feels, that a good ten years couldn't cure. What fifteen-year old hasn't mistaken their incomplexity for genius? Psychopaths, of course, don't have time to learn, as dedicated as they are to sadism and as convinced as they are of their superiority. As a depiction of how teens murder teens, the film isn't terribly convincing and is a bit too spruced up in its cleverness, but as a depiction of the dead-end psychopathic mindset, it's rightly compelling. (It should be noted that I'm drawing a fair amount of my perspective on this from Dave Cullen's admired book Columbine, which, in terms of their mentality, seems to indicate similarities between our fictional Kevin and the real-life Eric Harris).

Ramsay does score a couple of terrifying grace notes though--early on in the film we approach Celia, Swinton's daughter, from behind as she sits at a counter. When she turns around, she is wearing a massive grey eye patch. There's something shocking about this reveal, so matter of fact in its ordinariness but also in its unmistakable dread. Later, in a doctor's office, the walls are covered with images of clowns. Maybe kids are charmed by these, but again, it's hard to shake the feeling of unease. Ramsay's skill in moments like these is reminiscent of the offbeat, undermining horror of something like Twin Peaks. It's not overt, but there's no mistaking it.

Ramsay has said the film isn't an 'issue film,' and we're all the better for that, because any political significance is neutered: as mentioned, as a film about teens killing teens, this doesn't tell us very much. But as a film about a woman beset on all sides, this one goes straight to the nerves. Expect it to round out my top ten.

Racial Coding in THE MUPPETS

2011-12-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

Since I can safely assume that very few people other than myself are interested in decoding the racialism in The Muppets, I'll keep this very to the point.

As I posted before, the above is a picture of the villains in the new Muppets film.

These characters are only the most blatantly racist exponents of the racially-coded rural-urban dichotomy that props up the film's structure.

Jason Segel and Amy Adams, the whitest people alive, are from Smalltown, USA.

Smalltown is a loving embrace of quaint, fifties-style Americana. It is described as the best possible place to live.

After beginning their quest to reunite the Muppets, Segal, Adams and Walter (his puppet brother) must journey into the city of Reno. Reno is a far cry from the kitsch of Smalltown, USA, and they find Fozzie in the unenviable position of fronting a cover band called 'The Moopets,' which is composed of those pictured above. There's a pivotal scene here in terms of racial symbolism, when our heroes are outside in an alleyway talking with 'Miss Poogy,' the Miss Piggy substitute. During a conversation expressing disbelief that Fozzie could ever end up in such a terrible place, the sound of gunshots is heard. Later, Miss Poogy is seen sharpening knives, presumably for sheer pleasure or criminal intent.

Underpinning this entire drama is the juxtaposition of the clean, safe, neighborly Smalltown with the dirty, violent and hostile urban city. To say that this dichotomy has historically been predicated on the nostalgia for all-white rural homogeneity is not exactly a quantum leap. The sentimentality that surrounds fifties-style community is often expressed through a fear of the urban, which transposes quite naturally into (and is often meant as nothing but a coded expression of) a fear of non-white minorities.

Before the accusation comes that we are reading too much into this, the depiction of 'The Moopets,' and the positioning of them as greedy, violent villains says otherwise. The Moopets are entirely composed of Muppets that were darker-toned to begin with or are conspicuously darkened versions of light-toned ones. In the case of dress, clearly the Moopet versions of Fozzie, Miss Piggy and Janice are so overtly racialized as 'thugs' as to make the point clear.

Last, but certainly not least, comes the fact that these characters align themselves with Chris Cooper, the primary antagonistic in the film, who, in his one musical number, delivers a parody rap called 'Let's Talk About Me.'

In this, the racial coding finally becomes crystal clear: the villains rap, the heroes sing. But, even beyond that, we have the extra racism that is inherent in what these days passes as hip-hop parody. As something of an enthusiast for calling out every white person who thinks parody raps are funny, I am the first to assert that this is no different whatsoever. Instead, The Muppets is just another iteration of a beloved cultural trend, as seen in The Lonely Island, Taylor Swift and T-Pain's "Thug Life," endless commercials and Youtube videos, and God knows everywhere else. That trend is the absolutely giddy enthusiasm of white people to seize every opportunity to do that which they are not supposed to do: namely, rap, or, better put, act black. As I've said before, all of these jokes have the same punchline: this is not how white people are supposed to behave; and therefore, all of these jokes establish a hierarchy by telling a racial joke that cannot be told in reverse. The underlying premise is that the performers of these 'parody raps' are temporarily inhabiting these archetypes; that when the joke is done, they can leave and return to acting regularly--a privilege not afforded to the blacks they mimic.

That last point is what extends this argument even to white rappers who are attempting to be taken seriously, not ironically. As a white rapper, you are afforded the privilege, as Greg Tate sez about Eminem, to be 'not burdened with representing the 'hood and black sex to hiphop's prime real estate, the vanilla suburbs.' This is why I think people like the Emerson-canonized George Watsky are pricks; hip-hop isn't all about verbal linguistics, or, in Watsky's case, 'rapping fast.' The fact that you not only think it is, but can actually achieve some sort of fame from it, is nothing but an indication of privilege. After all, a Youtube video called 'black kid raps fast,' would never go viral. It would not be seen as exemplary, merely expected; it would not be seen as talent, merely inclination. Only when a white person excels at something that is normally associated with blackness do we care to take note, do we care to designate that skill as bonafide ability, and do we exert all necessary effort in showing not only can these white kids do it, they can do it better. What is missing from this is the baggage that white culture forces black hip-hop artists to carry: the crucible of 'authenticity' on which black artists must prove themselves but which white slam poets can simply bypass.

Paul Mooney puts it bluntly when he calls white hip-hop 'blackface without the make-up.' Harry Allen puts it even more bluntly when he sez 'from a certain angle, there’s just a shade of difference between white people rapping and white people telling nigger jokes.'

In other words, if you're white and you think rapping is funny, here's some advice: it's fucking not.

Or, is there any compelling difference between Chris Cooper's performance in the Muppets and in vogue 'ghetto parties' like this?

I contend that there is not.

Aki Kaurismaki's LE HAVRE

2011-11-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre opened last weekend here in Boston and my enthusiasm for it is in line with damn near everyone else's. However, with the company I keep it’s been seen as much less than touted—I was going to write about it anyway, but this disagreement gave me a reason to offer a more spirited defense.

Le Havre primarily involves four characters: Marcel Marx, a shoeshine; Idrissa, a Senegalese boy attempting to illegally make passage to London; Monet, an inspector charged with finding the boy; and Arletty, Marcel’s wife, whose terminal illness is unbeknownst to her husband. It falls on Marx and his neighbors to secure Idrissa a safe route home to England.

The story of Le Havre sounds like something akin to Ramin Bahrani’s work, with its multicultural, working-class motifs; and, indeed, given to Bahrani it could easily and properly be turned into a devastating portrayal of the injustices visited upon France’s immigrant community. But instead, Kaurismaki, to his credit, supplants kitchen sink realism with warmness and levity—a decision completely appropriate to his characters and their hospitality, but too often unseen as filmmakers choose instead to fetishize despair and the so-called poetry of decay.

Kaurismaki’s humanism expresses itself in opposition to kneejerk neorealist impulses in its carefully manipulated color schemes and its insertions of farcical humor, but perhaps most of all in its insistence on allowing its characters to achieve their fullest dignity—the fatalism of the ghetto be damned.

My friends who disagree with me over the film decry the whimsical interludes as ‘nonsense,’ and surely the humor is quite dryly absurd; at one point, Marcel gains entry to a refugee detention center by claiming to be of the inhabitant’s albino brother. Personally, I found all this charming; but there must be something going on here besides me being a sap and my enemies being heartless. So what is it?

Importantly, we must not confuse Kaurismaki’s efforts with someone like Robert Benigni’s—this isn’t the full stop abandonment of social realism nor a disgraced effort to convert lived misery into ironic laughs. Kaurismaki’s film is not ignorant of the hardships and indignities that meet the lower class, quite the contrary; there are moments of revealed mourning and the tone is not of overcoming but of making peace with. Jean-Pierre Darroussin’s Inspector Monet (in my favorite performance of the year) moves and speaks with the subtle efficiencies of aged professionals, everything having been done before, all duties seemingly circular; Chang, Marcel’s frequent professional companion, lets it be known one night that he has lived his entire life in France under an assumed alias so as not to be deported, and he seems aware of but unbothered by what this admission implies; Arletty scolds Marcel for bringing her expensive flowers at the hospital.

There are other examples, but the point should be made: Kaurismaki’s film is ‘feel-good,’ but by no means is he stating that lower-class life in France is a whole lot of fun if only you look hard enough. His generosity to his story is not sentimental or opportunistic; instead, it seems lived through, hard-won. In Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, after everything that could go wrong does go wrong, it ends with the protagonist smiling at a group of pigeons; it’s this kind of allowably ironic, pitiable happiness that Kaurismaki finds so appallingly reductive. Le Havre ends with everything that could go right going right, including Arletty’s miraculous recovery; and the last shot is the couple looking at a blooming cherry tree, as if to signify a happily-ever-after. Of course, this isn’t true; J. Hoberman calls the film ‘utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.’ He’s right—but I find the end of Le Havre much less trite than that of something like Chop Shop. In the latter, the understanding of the ephemerality of these moments of happiness yields to a kind of knowingness that puts the audience in a position of power over the character, a dramatic irony where the viewer is more savvy of the character’s misery than they are; in Kaurismaki’s film, this power does not exist and both the director and his characters partake in this understanding; it yields not to a vain knowingness but a shared reflection.

I don’t find this to be pandering to cliche, nor do I find it the most congratulatory type of wish-fulfillment; I find it heartfelt in the truest sense. The final shot of the blooming cherry tree recalls, whether intentionally or not, A.E. Houseman’s 'Loveliest of Trees,' and the poem and the film share a similar involvement with the somewhat dutiful, but nonetheless gratifying pleasures to be had in a long life.

Unlike many other directors whose work revolves around the working-class, Kaurismaki is not interested in extracting particularities; nor is he overtly interested in reinforcing the myth of a kindler, more noble lower-class; in place of these he proposes a more radical proposition—that no matter how fractured we are as a group (be it as an immigrant community or as members of a class), our common experiences cement us together. Le Havre is not about placing faith in the kindness of strangers—it’s about giving us the belief that the people on whose kindnesses we depend may not, in fact, be strangers after all.

—

Watch the trailer here.

NOTE: I don’t hate Ramin Bahrani or anything; he’s only used by name as an example. Broadly speaking, the opposite of a film like Le Havre is ‘poverty porn,’ best seen in films like Slumdog Millionaire—which speaks only to the obliviousness of its creators—or Precious, which is pure condescension through and through. Bahrani remains one of the most established, credible purveyors of ‘poverty porn;’ his films are much better than most, but could be argued to exist on an identical continuum. For this, see Richard Brody's reply to A.O. Scott regarding ‘neo-neo-realism.’ I’m particularly fond of his phrase regarding how these films ‘cut off a wide range of aesthetic possibilities and experiences on ostensible grounds of virtue.’ This is what Le Havre does best: widens the range of aesthetic possibilities.

FEMME FATALE

2011-11-04T00:03:00.000-07:00

“Formalism and an absence of humanism don’t necessarily entail a lack of artistic seriousness. Indeed, looking for symmetry and coherence in a universe that seems to consist only of chaotic fragments from other movies—a very contemporary and very real dilemma—might constitute a genuine quest for transcendence.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Femme Fatale

—

Approaching this film as a thriller would be a classic mistake (I should know, I made it). It opens with a heist-gone-wrong and a girl-on-the-run set-up, but only occasionally do these devices constitute what could be called a storyline. Well, maybe a story, but certainly not a ‘line’—it takes longer than usual to pick up the film’s gambit, but the only thing linear about Femme Fatale is De Palma’s visual rhythms, which, as always, unfold with awesome aplomb. After enough reveals, De Palma’s chess moves seem arbitrary; after a few more, you realize he’s not interested in the suspension of disbelief, but in the indulgence of it. With De Palma as conductor, Femme Fatale coalesces into a master filmmaker’s hallucinatory daydream—why care about the thrills of luck when there are the perplexities of fate? De Palma’s belief in cause and effect goes beyond a technician’s fetish for genre mechanics and into a deeper causality that asserts itself in the interstices of our personal mysteries. In the absence of what could be called a younger De Palma’s diagrammatic realism, Femme Fatale’s passion makes great art, which, as Godard said, like fire, is born from what it burns.

THE GUARD (brief comments on race)

2011-08-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Guard is the debut film directed by John Michael McDonagh (brother to Martin) and I had the severe misfortune of seeing it last weekend. It is thoroughly unpleasant: his dialogue is all weak jabs so obviously striving for the muscle of his older brother's, the plot is a shambles, the photography is repellent, etc. But, one line stood out to me: when Brendan Gleeson learns Don Cheadle has a passion for skiing, he responds: "I thought black people couldn't ski? Or is that swim?"

The line got laughs from my theater, but it stood out for me not just for its crudeness, but because I had recently come across this piece over at the indispensable Sociological Images: "Tragedy at Red River: Race, Privilege, and Learning to Swim" by Lisa Wade.

In it she briefly mentions how there is marked disparity between blacks and whites when it comes to the ability to swim, but how this difference can be seen as the historical result of racial barriers to entry: notably, many black adults can't swim because they were rarely allowed access to swimming pools and therefore do not teach their children; or, the act of learning to swim as a class privilege that doesn't enter as often into black life.

The Guard then is notable for one reason only: in one line, it perfectly shows how cultural oppression becomes a one-liner.

CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE and TERRI (On men who don't grow up and women who have to)

2011-08-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

The dominant archetype of modern romantic comedies is the ‘man-child.’ It is often remarked that films today treat the audience as children (studios fire back: our audience is children), but it is not quite so often pointed out that films today treat their characters as children as well. We expect this from Sandler and Ferrell, but recently the symptoms have spread. Terri and Crazy, Stupid, Love are two new films each with indie cred (Crazy, Stupid, Love because its director team, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, last made I Love You, Phillip Morris and have penned scripts for the likes of Terry Zwigoff and Richard Linklater—even if most filmgoers don’t know it) that star two of the most distinguished performers who have been forcibly typecast as man-children as of late: John C. Reilly and Steve Carrell. As is generally the case in such fare, both are affable dunces living mediocre middle-class lives who muck up their marriages through a hi-larious display of well-meant obliviousness that at times seems almost autistic and a presumed sexual incompetency. As Steve Carrell repeats to himself, ‘I’m a cuckold,’ and there remains in these characters a boyish fear of, not just impotence, but sex itself.

In both these films, the man-children are placed in the awkward position of having to administer advice to actual children—advice which, it is abundantly clear, hasn’t worked so well for them. Reilly is a vice-principal of a high school and he conducts weekly one-on-one sessions with Jacob Wysocki’s Terri, a habitually tardy teenager single-handedly caring for his uncle, who has Alzheimer’s, who on top of that is relentlessly mocked for being obese and wearing pajamas to school. Carrell is tasked with giving advice to his son in regards to both of their failed love lives, which in his case has led to a separation and presumed divorce from Julianne Moore. The takeaway in such films is usually the same: a neat little reversal wherein the adults are the ones who really need the advice and they inevitably learn more from the kids than the kids do from them. Through the unjaded, naive romanticism of his son does Carrell learn how to love and from the depth of Terri’s authenticity does Reilly discern the real lesson of acceptance and friendship.

There’s a problem in these set-ups, however, and it goes to the heart of the man-child trope. The problem is that there are no real problems. None of these adults ever make any mention or show any sign that they are facing any recognizable problems that actual adults face in material reality as we know it. With only man-children, and no adults, there are no adult problems: there is no mention of divorce proceedings, lawyers, sex, taxes, mortgages, etc. There is no indication of how these adults deal with the material problems that constitute the reality of middle-class America. It is an evasion that allows films to no longer tackle the material and political forces that shape and define our lives. In other words, none of these films actually appears to have any interest in real fucking life. The man-child genre divests from the unspectacular but essential conflicts that exist for actual human beings in favor of an individualism that focuses on so-called ‘conflicts of the heart.’ The reason children can give such great advice in these films is because the adults don’t appear to have any additional duties: they are in precisely the same situation as the children. What this all comes down to, of course, is a refusal to deal with problems that actually exist: such as class, which Crazy, Stupid, Love and Terri are all about without being about it at all. There’s no mention of how these families exist economically: how does Terri support his uncle? How do health insurance and welfare figure into Terri’s life? Does Steve Carrell’s life really not change a bit even when he starts buying thousands of dollars of clothes and alcohol? What the fuck does Ryan Gosling do? None of these questions are answered, because these questions do not even exist. This isn’t just a matter of ‘that’s not what this film is about, geez, go watch a political documentary or something!’ it’s a matter of whether or not films are willing to be anything other than escapism, by which I mean anything other than inherently reactionary.

Terri is the better film. As romances, we should remember Billy Wilder’s rule that the story is about ‘what keeps them apart.’ In Terri, the answer is pretty clear, at least for Terri: he’s not suitably attractive or sociable to interest the girl he likes. In Crazy, Stupid, Love, there’s never really an explanation over why Steve Carrell and Julianne Moore don’t even attempt to reconcile; in keeping with the film’s evasion of the real life of actual couples, there’s no therapy, discussion of problems, lawyers, etc. In fact, for most of the movie Steve Carrell and Julianne Moore don’t seem to be a couple at all; they do, of course, constantly talk about their first date over mint chocolate chip ice cream. Which, again, proves the film’s inability to speak of love and relationships in anything other than symbolically adolescent terms.

Both films have subplots however that are of more interest than the main storyline, and both involve, for once, actual problems that human beings face. The storylines of Olivia Crocicchia in Terri and Analeigh Tipton in Crazy, Stupid, Love speak to the immense pressures on young women. Olivia Crocicchia plays a high-school student who is coerced by a boy into letting him finger her in class. The class notices, spreads the word, and she is ritually subjected to public humiliation. Analeigh Tipton babysits Steve Carrell’s daughter and develops a crush on Carrell. In an attempt to court him, she takes nude photographs of herself to give to him. The photos are discovered before she can deliver them by her mother, who shows them to her father, much to the shame and embarrassment of Tipton. It is Crocicchia’s wounded fatalism and Tipton’s sincere confusion at the unforgiving codes of femininity that give each film its moments of clarity. Both are victim to a social order (aka patriarchy) that demands women ‘put out’ to gain male acceptance and then, after they do so, turns its back and ruthlessly shames them.
The resolution of this dilemma in Crazy, Stupid, Love is less satisfying than the one in Terri, but that’s to be expected. In Crazy, Stupid, Love after all, sex is all that counts. There isn’t a single problem that can’t be solved by a good fuck. Even when the movie starts critiquing this premise, it falls back in line and lets each male fuck his way to the girl of his dreams. Objective complete. At the end of the film, Tipton gives the photos instead to Carrell’s son, who the entire time has been crushing on her to no avail. He’s a sweet kid, sort of, and the pictures are supposed to be a consolation prize for never standing a chance in hell. Of course, the real person who never stands a chance is Tipton herself: in Crazy, Stupid, Love it would be out of the question for Tipton to realize how absurd and degrading it is to find yourself taking nude photos to get men to notice you and then burn the photos in a fire in an act of profound self-respect. Nope, in this film, the rules are set, as Ryan Gosling sez: “The battle of the sexes is over. We won. We won as soon as women started pole dancing for exercise.” That’s the best line in the movie because it’s all at once an unblinking display of male privilege and the lament of many a radical second-waver. In the end, though, the guy who said that gets the girl, no questions asked, and Analeigh Tipton isn’t allowed to not be a sex object, so the best she can do is objectify herself for the right guy. The right guy, incidentally, in finally receiving better masturbation material (he was previously using a boring, old clothed picture of her) validates his mantra of ‘never giving up,’ which, throughout the film, is rarely different from ‘unrelenting force.’ His strategy, stated earlier in the film, is to ‘keep sending her text messages even though they make her uncomfortable.’ If these strategies seem domineering and misogynistic, just remember they produce results: I mean, c’mon, what are these girls going to do, be lonely? Analeigh Tipton gives a great performance—doomed to be chipper because she hasn’t quite figured out the true nastiness of everything yet. Analeigh is the center of Crazy, Stupid, Love because for her, and no one else it seems, is life actually fucking hard.

Terri takes a darker path—unlike Tipton, Crocicchia has realized how fucking hard it is and she creates a haunting but delicate self-destructiveness. In one of the final scenes of Terri—which is one of the best scenes of this year and belongs in a better film—she, Terri and their friend Chad (another ‘antisocial’ teen) get drunk and take pills while hanging out in a shed. What follows is an unveiling of deep self-loathing and unharnessed sexual curiosity. It’s a stunning scene—you could call it the kinkiest sex scene of the year, but this is so much more than that; it has nothing to do with that trumped-up ‘avant-garde’ movement of fetishizing geeks. This is dialing in on the sexual power source of ‘kink’ without any of its attendant lifestyle bullshit; this is the moment where the sexual boundary is actually pushed, without any ceremony or narcissism. This scene is stunningly good, and Crocicchia plays it with a true melancholic femininity; one born of suffering, not pretense; she’s not a wannabe masochist, this is just where she ended up when she got lost wandering too far down the road.
Tipton and Crocicchia deserve award nods for cuing in to the emotional distress of trying to negotiate and cope with a forced surrender without getting scarred too badly, all while being surrounded by grown men acting like children.

ADDENDUM : This mutual thread, the expectation of women to act fuckable and then subsequent contempt, is also the lifeblood of Horrible Bosses, so obscene a film that it almost goes without saying that it’s the worst thing I’ve seen this year.

This Side of Paradise: Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris'

2011-06-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

"Why would I read a biography of Rodin?"
- Owen Wilson (Gil) in Midnight in Paris

"For principal roles, I don't know the black experience well enough to really write about it with any authenticity. In fact, most of my characters are so limited locally. They're mostly New Yorkers, kind of upper-class, educated, neurotic. It's almost the only thing that I ever write about, because it's the only thing I know. I just don't know enough about these other experiences."
- Woody Allen in response to a question about his lack of black characters, from 'Woody Allen on Woody Allen'

In Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson strikes back at Michael Sheen's pretension by labeling him a 'pseudo-intellectual.' The charge is truthful to an extent: Sheen's mannerisms are hilariously pompous, and he makes elementary mistakes in his topics of lecture. Despite this, the charge holds no water, as least insofar as it comes from Woody Allen, who spends the rest of the film trafficking in a similar brand of dishonesty: arranging the high-culture wars around seemingly arbitrary lines, or, perhaps more likely, establishing a character's intellectual value by how closely they hew to the values and lifestyle of Mr. Allen himself. Allen brazenly plants flags and declares charlatans like Sheen his enemy, but how much of an antagonist is he really to Allen's style of intellectualism? A great many of Allen's critiques are undermined by his own overt but unexamined preferences. How many Allen wannabees threw out their biographies of Rodin as soon as Owen Wilson (the Allen stand-in) expressed incredulity that he would ever read such a thing, and did they replace them with Luis Bunuel box sets? In Allen's world, you can almost quantify your suitability for the world of intellectualism by counting the number of references you pick up on, and the type of references unsurprisingly skew a certain way: well-established, white, Western (mostly American) artists/writers. I can't imagine another film so contradictory in its vehement denouncement of upper-class American life while simultaneously establishing its credibility through an endless checklist of bourgeois name-dropping. This isn't new territory for Allen, but rarely has one of his all-white, gentrified, mainly styleless films ever claimed so ludicrous an ability to rail against the cultural bourgeoisie, when it is so clearly a part of it (take a look at the audience the next time you're in the theater: this is not a film for the everyman).

Jonathan Rosenbaum makes a salient point about Woody Allen's double standard when it comes to dumb rich Americans and glamorized rich American 'artists' when he states:
"While the spending habits of Gil’s fiancée’s snooty, intolerant, and philistine parents are made to seem deeply offensive and anti-democratic, the spending habits of Fitzgerald & Company, as they dart off in their taxis to various parties and bistrots, are made to seem wholly egalitarian and reasonable, even enlightened. And what’s most egalitarian of all, it seems, is that everybody’s middle-class, to a demonstrable fault."

I'd take the point further: Allen's hypocrisy doesn't simply end at his apparent love-hate relationship with extravagant wealth, but continues in his enthusiastic embrace of anyone marked by the bourgeoisie as an acceptable 'artist,' with no further questions asked. It is this high-brow double-standard that allows Allen to furiously criticize the American right-wing, represented by Owen Wilson's prospective in-laws, and in particular the Tea Party movement as 'crypto-fascist.' Gone, however, are any indications that Gertrude Stein, who Allen fawns over was actually, and noncryptically, fascist.

Furthermore, Allen's interest in Paris seems rather directly proportional to how Americanized it is at any given time; it's for this reason I assume that Owen Wilson speaks no French. He's less interested in Paris as a nation than as an exotic destination in which to cultivate his male American genius. The 'maleness' of Midnight in Paris is essential to understanding it as well; all romantic female characters in Allen's film fit neatly into two slots: nag and muse. They are either single-handedly responsible, as intrusive and aggravating females, for disrupting the clearly-inevitable path to greatness of their prospective lovers (in the case of Gil and Fitzgerald) or something of a pretty naif who will swoon over Gil the second he opens his mouth for no discernible reason other than to grant him inspiration and guide him angelically down the aforementioned path to clearly-inevitable greatness. It is this macho-artist fantasy that allows Rachel McAdams (as Gil's fiancee) to be so blatantly insensitive and virulent that Wilson has no serious obligations to her, even though he presumably proposed to her, and lessens his adultery to a problem less moral than logistical and temporal while conceiving of hers as indicative of betrayal, failure in character, and, implicitly, the superiority of male reasoning (since her ruse is immediately detected by super-male Ernest Hemingway, while she's too myopic and unintelligent to figure out what he's doing).

It is this unexamined privilege and prejudice that Woody Allen clings to as if a lifeboat, forever ingratiating himself into the bourgeoisie despite occasional cheap shots toward his fanbase. It is this clear preference for the cultural values of upper-class white American men that makes his position as the arbiter of good taste patently ridiculous. Woody Allen is funny (and so is Midnight in Paris at times), but he's also, it must be said, his own worst enemy: a pseudo-intellectual.

Toy Story 3

2010-07-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

"Oh, I love 3D, are you kidding?"
- John Lasseter, director of Toy Story and Toy Story 2

"The Top Critics tab is my new friend."
- Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, on Twitter.

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It's easy to dislike Toy Story 3, but hard to admit it.

There's something distressing about the swell of non-criticism surrounding Pixar's latest; something that calls into question the very health of the mainstream film press. The film enjoys nearly unanimous praise; by any measure, Toy Story 3 is a resounding success. And yet, its supporters still cling to fierce but wildly unnecessary protectionism. What has lead to the current climate—where even a single negative review causes such scathing and personal reprimands? Armond White was the first to go on record as giving the unequivocal "thumbs down" to Toy Story 3, and almost instantaneously his review was deemed unworthy. Why?

Yes, Armond White is notoriously "contrarian" as they say. He exists in what might be called the "sphere of deviance," although arguably for good reason. His criticism is often overwrought; his conclusions and reasoning often baffling (in the case of his Toy Story 3 review, there are unforgivable errors in his so-called plot synopsis). But the kneejerk reaction to anything that bears his byline dismisses some of his legitimate (and not unique) arguments unfairly.

Something that I've latched on to occasionally is the critical relationship between Armond White and Richard Brody, film editor at The New Yorker. Brody has also been accused of flagrant taste, and, in fact, champions many of the same films that White gets a bad rep praising.

On the other hand, I usually wince when reading White and feel enlightened reading Brody, and their respective reputations seem to indicate an appreciation of style, wit and reason—not taste. Brody is hardly less harsh in his review of Toy Story 3, but lacks calling the films viewers "suckers," even if he can sometimes patronize by describing himself as "inoculated" against mere simple pleasures.

The reaction to Brody's pieces is nearly non-existent, likely because Brody engages in some very thoughtful arguments that can't be dismissed by Roger Ebert crying "troll."

The reaction to White's piece is a disaster. At least two of the arguments he makes have been made in the past, cogently and persuasively, by Jonathan Rosenbaum. White claims Toy Story 3 "celebrates consumerism," while Rosenbaum admitted fifteen years ago that even the first Toy Story could be seen as a "toy catalog." Pixar's own actions suggest that both critics aren't wrong. Likewise, the angry hit jobs that came out after White's review try to discredit him by noting his praise of Joe Dante's Small Soldiers. Anyone serious about film should know that Small Soldiers is hardly a trashy movie; Rosenbaum's review raising it over Saving Private Ryan is a must-read.

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So what is wrong with Toy Story 3? Armond White, for all his clamoring, at least narrows it down to "formulaic," which is essentially correct. Richard Brody speaks to as much when he nails Pixar's routine to a T: "a kind of perfection, but a sickening, deadening perfection that fears imperfection as the balloon fears being pricked."

When watching Toy Story 3, I was astonished and confused by the dramatic choices its creators chose to make. Toy Story succeeded on its dialogue and the forced relationship between its two main characters—Woody and Buzz. In Toy Story 3, the two hardly converse; Buzz is sidelined, either in his original "Space Ranger" mode or in "Spanish mode." The former is a neat but ineffective trick; the latter is a dead carcass of a joke.

Woody himself hardly speaks—then again, they erased his romantic interest as well, with no explanation (not daring; just foolish)—and when he does, it's one-note: "We're Andy's toys! We have to get out of here! (I'm waiting for the screenplay to confirm that this is, more or less, all he says 75% of the time)" It would take a long brainstorming session to come up with a single memorable line in Toy Story 3 of the same caliber as the ones from Toy Story, including the one Lee Unkrich used to diss his enemies on Twitter.

Unkrich's own self-promoting and utterly obnoxious Twitter offers more credence to the idea of the latest Pixar team rewriting its own history and casting themselves off as a ragtag team of geniuses gifting the world with the best-reviewed films of all time.

Watching Toy Story again, one remembers how much of an asset Joss Whedon was—the creator of beloved shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Angel. You can recognize his trademark wit in several lines in the first few minutes, whether it's Woody thanking everyone for making "Plastic Corrosion Awareness Night" a success or Rex telling Buzz, "And I'm from Mattel. Well, I'm not actually from Mattel; I'm actually from a smaller company that was purchased in a leveraged buy-out."

There's definitely nothing this snappy on tap in Toy Story 3, but when looking at the record of current Pixar directors and animators, one finds them suspiciously unwilling to credit Whedon with nearly anything. Whedon credits himself with crafting the "voice and sensibility" of the characters; David A. Price, who wrote a book on the history of Pixar, calls Whedon "under-recognized" and claims that the film "really started to come together" when he took his turn at it; reviews of Toy Story: The Art and Making of the Animated Film, which appeared shortly after the release of Toy Story and quickly disappeared also claim Whedon appears mostly responsible for the film's "banter-laden wit."

And yet, I can't find John Lasseter mentioning Whedon on the record anywhere; allegedly, his name is dropped on the DVD Commentary track once despite spending four months on the film and receiving top billing as a screenwriter. Pete Docter, when interviewed, even claimed: "In the case of Joss Whedon, he came on and the story was already pretty solid."

I love Docter's films, but really, relying on any independent source, that comment makes absolutely no sense.

Why is Pixar so hesitant to credit anyone other than its long-term insiders? And why is it so openly hostile to anything that contradicts its status as the best studio ever?

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But back to Toy Story 3, I find the whole film a foregone conclusion and an exercise in wasted opportunity. Instead of challenging expectations, as Pixar has done during its best moments, the film puts its guard up and tries to please everyone.

The film opens with a promising premise: the toys, after Andy leaves for college, will be whisked away and forced to live alone in the attic with other cast-off playthings. The idea seems almost perfect; in a series of films where the toys are obvious stand-ins for humans, who do the best they can to seek companionship and guidance in a world often dictated by forces greater than themselves, where else could it end but in quiet isolation, eking out the end amongst themselves? Too depressing, perhaps, but the ideas are ripe for plucking—transplant the toys from Sunnyside into Bonnie's room and voila! First-generation toys exiled to the attic find themselves replaced and shunned by the spoiled, bourgeois second-generation having tea parties in the downstairs; a revision of Toy Story on a class scale.

Instead, the film is, all-in-all, a hundred-minute chase scene. Mimicking other mediocre-at-best films such as Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape, Toy Story 3 fails to live up to the heart of the first two installments. It doesn't earn the tears it tries to induce. It sells nostalgia to twenty-somethings who can afford the inflated ticket price. I found it utterly dim and unimaginative and find the lavish praise surrounding it suspicious and blinding.

Toy Story 3 is a 13-dollar pat on the back.

UPDATE (7/3):

I think I could have mentioned a few more things in regards to Pixar's efforts to merchandise their films. Certainly, Toy Story 3 contains more toy properties than Toy Story, which mostly populated the second half of its film with virtually unsellable "mutant toys." I really can't see something that ambitious happening in any of their upcoming films, two of which are more sequels, Cars 2 and Monsters Inc. 2.
Also, here's a quote by Andy Mooney at the above-referenced Disney Consumer Products (DCP) conference held at Walt Disney world that seems to indicate merchandising has some real effect on what films Pixar makes:
"DCP will however benefit significantly as The Walt Disney Company develops sustainable content in the form of theatrical or direct-to-video sequels as well as television shows behind proven properties, particularly Toy Story, as our franchise development efforts in support of Toy Story were essentially put on hold during the Pixar negotiations."