Avatar

What do we talk about when we talk about Avatar (Cameron, 2009)? Do we retell the tale of Pocahontas with the names changed? Do we rehash Dances with Wolves or other stories of liberal guilt? Are we only salivating at the promise of having our eyeballs fucked by glorious 3D?

I cannot say for sure.

But here are three things I can say for sure:

1. Sigourney Weaver is genuinely upsetting as a freakishly large blue alien in a cut-off Standford shirt; this is just one nifty/horrible thing no one tells you about before you go see Avatar. Oh, you’ll have a great time exploring Pandora, otherwise known as the world of Lisa Frank given hundreds of millions of dollars worth of life, but no one tells you that when the film is over you’ll try and fail to erase the image of Weaver’s smiling blue catface from behind your eyelids.
2. Because much of the budget was allocated towards, I would assume, realizing the world of Lisa Frank through cutting edge technology, there wasn’t much cash left over for the hiring of actors. Presumably James Cameron wanted to hire Jeremy Piven to play the head of the evil mining corporation in his banal exercise on the military-industrial complex. Alas, he could only afford Giovanni Ribisi. But because Cameron is such a virtuoso, he somehow convinced Ribisi to impersonate Piven. So for everyone that has ever dreamed of seeing Ari Gold chew into the rich ugliness of capitalism using Ribisi’s body as his avatar, there is finally a film for you.
3. Avatar has nothing to do with environmentalism.

And here lies the most interesting aspect of an otherwise forgettable film. For all the posturing Avatar seems to be doing about Gaia and nature, the film is really just a technophilic embrace of USB ports and social networking sites dressed up as trees, winged beasts, and incredibly silly looking tribal dances.

Of USB ports and ponytails:

All the blue catfaces on Pandora have long black ponytails terminating in fine cream colored tendrils that can be plugged into other living things on their homeworld. For instance, say you want to ride a horse – just saddle up and pop your ponytail into its ponytail and – voila – you ride that horse. The same goes for dragon-type creatures of assorted sizes and color schemes.

This Cronenberg-esque blurring of flesh and machine is reinforced during a curious conversation between our hero, Jake Sully, and the requisite love interest, Neytiri, on the night of their first sexual romp among the glowing leaves and seedpods of Pandora. Before they squirm through the ponytail on ponytail (and only possibly genital on genital) action, Neytiri, a blue catface princess, tells our hero about the wealth of information accessible by plugging your hair into the Tree of Voices. Plugged in, you can access the knowledge of blue catface people past, all the memories and experiences of the race available merely by logging in with your hair. So let’s try something. Let’s pretend for a second that the Tree of Voices is instead called the Internet. Then, when we arrive at the scene where all the blue catfaces plug into each other and sway in an effort to heal a dying Sigourney Weaver, we the audience can see that we are really watching messages of sympathy posted on Facebook walls everywhere. We are prompted to think of myspace pages for dead people where friends continue to post. I came to Avatar expecting to see some trite discussion of mother nature, but instead all I got was an Internet fanboy circlejerk of the most epic proportions. See Avatar and celebrate the richness of an existence lived through World of Warcraft, a social life carved in Facebook, the cornucopia of knowledge TMZ provides for us. All presented in 3D and IMAX, of course.

RS

Trailer Analysis – First Edition

A Prophet (Audiard, 2009)

Watch!

The new film from Jacques Audiard, a fantastic filmmaker responsible for the criminally overlooked The Beat That My Heart Skipped, won the Grand Prix at Cannes last May, and based on this trailer, I’m anxiously anticipating its release. As a trailer, it won’t be winning any awards – little flourishes like emblazoning he knew nothing in large, roaring script across the images ensure that – but even those missteps cannot detract from the power of certain moments like the brief shot of one character casually putting out a blue flame burning along the shoulder seam of his black t-shirt. Only a second or two long, the image is beautiful and strange, and stays with the viewer after the memories of the irritating quotes flashed from reviewers fade away.

In short: not a devastatingly good trailer, but Audiard is an accomplished filmmaker, and the snippets of scenes unfolded here are enough to warrant attention.

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Police, Adjective (Porumboiu, 2009)

Watch!

“Are you drunk?” one character asks the protagonist in the last moment of the trailer for the well-reviewed Police, Adjective, one of the films that competed in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. “Even if I were sober,” he says, pausing before sipping his beer once more, “I’d still be clueless.” It’s a nice bit of dialogue in a trailer full of promising scenes. This trailer, more traditional in form than I like but strong nevertheless, is composed of excerpts of dialogue that, rather than fleshing out the plot, give the viewer a feel for the mood. “Kafkaesque,” one critic proclaims – I’m not ready to go ahead and okay that yet but there’s certainly an intelligent, satirical attitude being cultivated. No saying whether I’ll get a chance at seeing this in a theater though, which is a shame.

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Nine (Marshall, 2009)

Watch.

I think in future editions of my take on current trailers, I’m going to focus exclusively on good things. But the trailer for Nine raises my ire to such a degree that I cannot let it exist without saying something. For those that don’t know, Nine is the film adaptation of the musical Nine, which was an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 8½, one of my absolute favorite things. Thankfully, nothing is mentioned in the trailer to connect this abomination to Fellini’s masterpiece. Fellini goes unmentioned, as does 8½. This, I think, is the only good done by the trailer. Everything else consists of spitting on Fellini’s grave.

Here’s the first bit of dialogue heard in the trailer:

Kate Hudson playing a character named “Stephanie”: Hi Guido Contini! I’ve seen all your movies.

Daniel Day-Lewis playing a character named “Guido Contini”: (quizzical, sunglasses-obscured look)

KH/”Stephanie”: They have such style.

DDL/”Guido Contini”: Style.

KH/”Stephanie”: I think it’s the Italian in you!

If I were to imagine, painfully, what it would be like for a person with a mental handicap to distill 8 ½ into one bit of terrible dialogue, the final product might be what you just read.

I’ll imagine some more: the screenwriters of Nine and Rob Marshall are sitting in a conference room after having had an intern paraphrase the plot of 8½ for them. They mull over what they’ve heard.

Rob Marshall: So this Fellini guy, he made a movie and it’s about art and life and that kind of thing. But listen: I’m thinking we just make a movie about an Italian guy who makes really sexy movies and then we’re going to cast a bunch of sexy actresses and then – get this – we’re going to cast Fergie and then in place of ideas, what we’re gonna have is a bunch of sleek surfaces and strippers. And I guess there’ll have to be singing, the director singing about how hard it is to make a movie when all you want to do is bone and then some of the actresses singing his name a lot of times and, of course, a song that in three, maybe four, minutes summarizes what it is to be Italian. So yeah, do you think you guys can write that?

Screenwriters: We actually just wrote that while you were talking to us!

Rob Marshall: Great!

Screenwriters: Yes!

Then some high-fives exchanged and some coke is done and then a movie gets made. Then I watch the trailer for said movie and cry real tears.

The trailer concludes with this gem of a phrase: “THIS HOLIDAY SEASON BE ITALIAN.” There are words to address this sort of thing but really I’d rather just hit the Nine trailer in the face until it is dead.

And that’s all for today!

RS

Top 20 Films of the Decade

With the simple qualification that cinema be art, I drafted this list. Two of the choices gave me pause due to their very recent releases, but I feel strongly enough about both to include them here. Admittedly, I have seen each only once, but I continue to feel the impact of these films even now, and am compelled to regard that as proof of their quality.

Because I know of nothing harder than writing about what one loves, I’ve elected, for now, to make no statements about any of the films.

20. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Audiard, 2005)

19. Dogville (von Trier, 2003)

18. Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)

17. I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007)

16. Hunger (McQueen, 2008)

15. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Tarantino, 2004)

14. The Squid and the Whale (Baumbach, 2005)

13. A Serious Man (Coens, 2009)

12. Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009)

11. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Mungiu, 2007)

10. Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004)

9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik, 2007)

8. Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006)

7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Schnabel, 2007)

6. Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2002)

5. No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007)

4. Talk to Her (Almodóvar, 2002)

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)

2. There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)

1. In the Mood for Love (Wong, 2000)

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By no means is this list final. Truthfully, I feel content only with my top four – from there on I am racked by doubt. And then there are the large number of films released this decade that I have yet to see, many of which could be strong contenders for a place on this list. In other words, check back for revisions. If anyone has a recommendation, or any thoughts on the current list, please share.

RS

The Film Is the Film: Godard’s Une femme est une femme (1961)

Continuing my journey through the life and works of Jean-Luc Godard, I recently watched A Woman Is a Woman for the umpteenth time. While Contempt is his best film, A Woman Is a Woman is my favorite, the one I most frequently return to.  I think it is one of his best looking films, thanks to both Anna Karina and DP Raoul Coutard. It is also one of his most clever.

On the surface, A Woman Is a Woman seems like a mere confection. With its highly artificial tri-color palette (red, white and blue) and gauzy look, it is easy to mistake it for a light picture, early-period Godard, before he gets really cantankerous. Yes, the film has a cuteness about it (I have a friend who hated it, who told me that he wanted “to drown it in a bathtub”), but I think to only remark on the sweet playfulness is to totally neglect the implications of the formal cues Godard gives the spectator.

The main source of formal experimentation in the film comes from its sound. From what I’ve read in Richard Brody’s book, this was a source of great commotion for audience members when the film opened. Many thought something must’ve been wrong in the projection booth for the sound to behave the way it does. Listen: what they heard was Godard pulling back the curtain on non-diegetic sound. The beautiful noises we hear from traditional soundtracks, the swelling of strings that alert us to heightened emotion, say two characters kissing – Godard exposes it all as cinematic convention. He makes us hear a soundtrack as unnatural. The score, written by Michel Legrand, roars to life, only to cut out moments later, seemingly with a will of its own. This is played for laughs, but, as I will discuss, the implications make them more than just creative gags.

Take note during a crucial turning point in the film: right before things between Émile (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Angéla get real ugly, a slow left to right pan begins, as text crawls across the screen. It is a moment of slowness that feels different compared to the breathless (haha) pacing of the film’s first thirty minutes. And the viewer has the peculiar sense that the film slows here because the screenplay demands it. During a typical Hollywood picture, we’re lulled into believing that what we see happens because of the diegetic logic of the film. Sure, we understand that all of this was mapped out beforehand, but in the darkness of the theater we are taught to forget that. Not so in A Woman Is a Woman. Godard’s is a film turned inside out so that the audience may admire each stitch, every seam. But it has none of the stuffiness one may expect from such a postmodern exercise. It’s too pretty for that.

A Woman Is a Woman deals in artifice and performance. It destroys the demarcation between diegetic and non-diegetic. There is no “world of the film” within A Woman Is a Woman. There is only the film. And this is what the viewer must understand. It is all a construction, and because of this, the film invites the spectator to see its subject matter as construction; relationships between men and women, gender itself. Think about Karina’s very artificial appearance, or the way Belmondo’s character wants to get home to watch himself in Á bout de souffle – what of this is not a complete construction? Perhaps Godard didn’t realize it, but I think A Woman Is a Woman prefigures the breakthroughs in identity politics that emerged during the 90s.

The phrase a woman is a woman is a tautology. It says nothing. The film calls attention to this with its showy self-consciousness. We are asked to spend just 84 minutes with a delightful cast and a series of gorgeous shots. And we do this, willingly. The film is a film, and why would we expect it to be anything else? But for Godard, a film was reality. And thus we have the far-reaching implications of the film’s acknowledgment of construction and convention. Of course, sitting atop all of this is the specter of Godard’s very real marriage to and very real problems with Anna Karina during the making of the film. So is this a comedy or a tragedy, a question posed a number of times in the film. It depends on how closely you attend to its candy-colored images and rebellious soundtrack. For the record, I’d say it’s both.

or

An aside:

I realize that this review feels closer to academic film criticism than, say, a Roger Ebert review. There is a bifurcation between film reviews and film criticism, and I’m not here to say whether this is correct and good, or really to make any judgment about it. I only want to stress that while A Woman Is a Woman is a highly intelligent piece of art that comments on film and gender (things that maybe don’t sound like the average person’s definition of entertainment) it is also great fun.

RS

(Further Reading: J. Hoberman‘s brief essay on A Woman Is a Woman that is included along with Criterion’s release of the film. I’m indebted to Mr. Hoberman’s astute observations.)

Le mépris (Godard, 1963)

Revisited Contempt last night. Some thoughts:

The highly stylized, meticulously posed shots of Brigitte Bardot’s naked body serve as visual metaphors for the spectator’s experience during Contempt; it is a film with a cold, terrible loveliness. Despite Bardot’s attractiveness, Godard’s camera renders her as lifeless as a statue during the producer-ordained t&a scenes. To borrow a moment from Barton Fink, watching Contempt is like waking next to a beautiful and dead woman. You touch the skin only to find that all heat has left the flesh. The coldness lingers against the spectator long after the film has ended, a feeling lasting much longer than if the film had delivered to the viewer what producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine sought: centerfold shots of Bardot in typical sex kitten fashion.

Although Bardot’s body, and the struggle for control over it, is central to any discussion of the film, Contempt is, above all, Godard’s treatise on cinema; it is, perhaps, his most perfect film. The casting is sublime, as are the breathtaking long takes and tracking shots. Enough cannot be said about the long takes. The film’s center, the disintegration of Paul and Camille’s relationship, is the best example of this. The audacity of its length, combined with the scene’s mise-en-scene, sound and editing, make for a masterclass in form=content. It really isn’t fair to other films; it sets the standards for quality too high. I’m off to stare at a blank wall to detox. Maybe then I’ll be able to watch something else without disappointment.

An aside:

I’m currently reading Richard Brody’s exhaustive study of Godard, Everything Is Cinema, and in the early chapters Brody posits again and again that highly-influential film critic André Bazin and Godard disagreed fundamentally about cinematic form (Bazin was near-fetishistic when it came to long takes and deep focus while Godard favored a more intense editing style). Contempt, then, serves as an interesting counterpoint to Brody’s thesis; it is hard to imagine a film Bazin would find more pleasing. Had he been alive to see Contempt, one can only imagine his ecstatic response to the magnificent 30-min apartment sequence that is the film’s heart, what with its fluid long takes and marvelous use of the entire frame.

RS

Spark

“At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.” – Jean-Luc Godard

I saw A Serious Man today. Impeccable. I would like to review it, but I’m not sure I can. Perhaps in time.

RS