Notes from Cineplex 6/23-7/17: No One is Innocent

What a long span of dates in the title! Has it really been that long? I wish I could remember everything that happened during that time, but my mind fogs. I woke up yesterday amidst sweaty sheets, shaking in horror. The smell was horrid. A whole week had disappeared in my mind. I'm afraid I might not have spent the whole time in bed. I found a balled up piece of paper in my pants. It was a form from a local penal facility, confirming that I had been segregated from the other prisoners for "inappropriate touching." So was I the toucher or the touched? Probably it's best not to think about it. I was able to go to the bathroom with no signs of blood, so I guess it doesn't matter. I do vaguely remember going to movies during this time. I suppose I should get to that before I make anyone else sick...

BRÜNO: This is the last one I remember seeing. It might have been yesterday. It made me a bit uncomfortable, given some experiences I may or may not have had recently, but, being a sophisticated Bay Area type, I tried to get over it. The idea behind the movie, apparently, was to drop an outrageously gay man into the midst of a bunch of uptight straight types, and watch them freak out. Some of the stunts seemed genuine, some less so. Highlights included an interview with Paula Abdul in which she sat on human furniture ( and seemed at home doing it ), a focus group reviewing a feaux TV pilot starring a talking penis, and an interview with a minister who, with the help of Jesus, cures homosexuality. During the interview, the eponymous character told the man of God that he was letting his "blow job lips" go to waste. I laughed, I cringed. I felt a lot of empathy during the "cringe" moments for star Sacha Baron Cohen. I know his character is a put-on, but the reality that seeps through is of a person willing to go to any degree of humiliation in order to a) get a laugh and b) expose the hypocrisy of those around him. This a somewhat contradictory task, as he tries to get empathy while fucking with people at the same time. I've tried this myself in my life, with varying degrees of success. I think it's a noble project. And I'm sure someone must have planted that note in my pants, trying to fuck with me in the same way. That's what I'm going to keep telling myself, anyway.

THE SONG OF THE SPARROWS: This was a parable from Iran, about a man from a village who took a job in the city, only to see his macho world unravel. He freaked out a bit, then gained some kind of understanding, I guess. The moments of profundity failed to reach the mark as much as they did in some of director Jafar Panahi's earlier work ( particularly CHILDREN OF HEAVEN ) but there was a lot of humor in it and the film's look was compelling. There were lots of red skies and dust, and in some scenes I could almost feel the particulate matter swirling around me. A positive note having to do with the movie's country of origin: the digital intermediate plague that infects most American prints was nowhere in evidence. The movie's protagonist had a job herding Ostriches, and there were lots of closeups of the beasts, and scenes with the birds stampeding. When I lived in Louisiana, I used to walk around the campus of LSU alone, looking at animals that were caged at various points. Amongst these were Ostriches. They are really ugly, I used to think, and probably are profoundly stupid, if indeed intelligence is partially datermined by brain weight to body weight ratio, as an old biology teacher once told me. I had scary thoughts, looking at the beast. Later, when I heard the Werner Herzog jungle speech in BURDEN OF DREAMS, I thought I had come home. The Ostriches in Song of the Sparrows were not as foreboding, but that's when memory kicked in. This happens all the time to me in movies.

MOON: Another thing that happens to me a lot in movies is that I have conversations in my head with the directors or stars of the movie I'm watching, usually to say, "Good job!" in some form or another. If I don't like the movie, I don't have these fake conversations, as I wouldn't like purveyors of crap to be living in my head anyway. Of course none of these people are really in my head. I just end up talking to myself. As I think about reaching out, I fall deeper inwards. A lot of movies take this kind of thing as their subject, and Moon is one of them. The actor in the movie, Sam Rockwell, literally talks to himself in the movie. His character works alone on a future mining base on the moon, and one day he finds a clone of himself, only without the foreknowledge of his cloning. Problems ensue. Mr. Rockwell is an actor I've had many head conversations with in movies ( especially CHOKE and CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND ), so the more of him in a movie, the better. There's not much else to distract from him, one exception being a robot with Kevin Spacey's voice ( the deadpan delivery made me remember how good Spacey was reading limes by David Mamet ). Questions concerning the robot's intentions highlighted the way in which the movie has it's own internal conversation going on with another movie featuring loneliness, questionable computers and space, 2001 ( that's right, the movie that was set EIGHT YEARS AGO! Aargh! ). I'm not sure it added much to my own internal 2001 conversation, but it's not one I'm averse to revisiting, or listening in on, or whatever it was that happened. The movie looked OK as far as I could tell, which regretably wasn't much because I saw it in a theater that was having 'scope focus issues. It happens. The thing moved along at a fairly stately pace thanks to the efforts of director Duncan Jones, aka David Bowie's kid. Not bad at all for the first time out. Maybe I'll talk with him later.

WHATEVER WORKS: I found out that Woody Allen wrote this in 1977, which made total sense to me because it's actually funny. Larry David spews forth Allen's misanthropist humor without mimicking Allen, which drives down the annoyance potential considerably. Maybe it's because he's not a "real" actor ( the pros who appear in Allen movies invariably end up imitating Woody, which drives me batshit. Worst example: Kenneth Branagh in CELEBRITY. Even Rebecca Hall did it in VICKI CHRISTINA BARCELONA! ). Evan Rachel, on the other hand, is annoyingly mannered, but in her own sexy little way so I'll live with it ( is Evan old enough now for me to say that about her in print? ). The movie is mostly just a backdrop for the funny lines, with familiar situations and a trite ending, but the lines are funny, so I'm happy with it.

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN: God help me, but I think I've "fallen (ugh)" for Michael Bay. His visual style is busy, with big sinewy shapes, often twisting in a frenzy, and bleeding color. This style used to designate the lower classes, but in this and other Bay movies Middle America seems to have gotten the vibe. This style gives everything a sort of horrifyingly baroque quality, like Fox News as Grand Guignol. This is the style applied to a movie about giant robots based on toys ( toys in "real life," that is ) who try to kill us all by blowing up the sun. I used to fantasize about this while staring up at the sun while swimming as a kid, looking up through watery eyelashes ( "I've heard it takes 8 minutes for light to reach us from the sun-so would it really take that long for us to know if it blows up?" ). Primordial fears in a crazy Bay hall of mirrors. I'm down. At the 100 minute mark, I thought to myself, "I'm glad this movie is an hour longer." My ass started to drag a bit at the 130 minute mark, but still. Later in the week, I watched the equally long Bay movie BAD BOYS II on the dreaded medium...and loved it. God help me...

PUBLIC ENEMIES: "Okay," respondeth the Lord, "here's a new Michael Mann movie." I've praised Mr. Mann's movies before here for being "elemental." By that I mean that the characters in Mann's movies are always in a hard struggle against the environments they live in, environments that mirror the inner drives/psychology of the characters and are expressed in ways that remind me of earth, air, and water. The sruggle comes from Mann's character's intense, intimate relationship to their environments, relations whose intensity is so great that it strains the limits of the the world. Since escape is impossible, the only answer is complete immersion. In ALI and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, hard characters struggle with the earth. There are lots of warm greens and reds, and the 'scope frame is filled with earth and trees, with hardly any sky. HEAT and MIAMI VICE feature creatures from the deep, trying to swim against the current. The sky is in nearly every shot, with the color red disappearing in favor of white and blue-grey. In Public Enemies, the air meets the earth in the windswept fields of the Midwest USA, and the characters in this environment are trying either to blow with the wind or contain it. The sky is a nearly constant, overpowering presence, and the colors of the earth seem pale, as if stripped bare by the winds of everything but a kind of edginess that reflects the memory of color ( this might have something to do with the medium the movie was shot in-see below ). The price for dreaming is steep for the denizens of this world. What I think these characters are dreaming of is something like a free thought or feeling, something not determined by the environment, or the thing which ultimately defines their existence. It's a kind of denial, or an impossible dream. A kind of romance. One of the ways this is expressed in the cinematography is in the preponderance of shots featuring an extreme closeup in half the frame with a deep focus shot on the other--things are either too close or too far, and relations between things are strained. These people are hard like their world, and when they try to dream and shake free it hits back all the harder. In close-up Johnny Depp's Dillinger hides behind a tree for cover, as a G-Man approaches in the background from a distance. Dillinger's head is huge in close-up, the back of the tree so close I could almost feel it myself, while the tiny G-Man struggles small in the darkness and distance. Suddenly, a deafening sonic vibration hits, as a bullet from the G-Man's gun sends tree bark flying; the dream of distance hits back at the earthy dreamer. Public Enemies has nearly 21/2 hours of small moments like these. I've seen this movie 3 times, and am looking forward to screening number 4. ( I'd like to acknowledge here directors Max Nosseck and John Milius, who both did excellent earlier versions of the Dillinger story, one from the 40's and one from the 70's. Both movies feature great performances from the leads-Lawrence Tierney, Warren Oates-but neither movie is near Public Enemies artistically. )

TETRO: Some of my FOFF brethren might sneer at the above parenthetical, as Public Enemies was shot on the hated medium. I would respond by saying yes, film is better, but great visual artists like Mann and Soderbergh-throw Lynch also into the mix-often are able to bring out interesting properties of whatever they're using. I'm not so sure Francis Coppola, given the evidence of the also video-shot Tetro, falls into that category. The movie looked great, don't get me wrong, but I'm still not sure that it had to be that way. While I felt the video edginess added to the texture of Soderbergh's GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE and Mann's Enemies, I kept thinking that the pretty images in Tetro would've been even prettier in celluloid, especially with all the inky high contrast black and white ( in video, it's a head "inky" and not a gooey, icky, sensual "inky" that comes from film ). Regardless, I liked Tetro because of the intimacy of the environment and the characters. These are the qualities, I think, that elevate THE GODFATHER. The movie is set in a sleepy town in Argentina, amongst a group of tortured artist types. Vincent Gallo, as one of the tortured, yells a lot. I ate it up. ( "I don't have to SHIFT my cars! I'm used to LUXURY CARS! They shift themselves!!! CADILLAC-ever heard'a that!" Sorry, I had a BUFFALO '66 flashback there.. ) This is the kind of small, personal movie that I wish Coppola's fellow 70's auteur alum Martin Scorsese would make. He says he can't do it now. I wonder...

Quick hitters: AWAY WE GO started out looking like a grainy, cheaply shot indie movie. At several points, however, I sat up and said ( to myself ) , "Wow! What a shot!" This stands in conterast to the overdetermined production design of director Sam Mendes's earlier films. I've liked these, but the approach of Away still felt a bit like a cleansing summer breeze. The leads were appealing, and many of the vignettes were very funny, especially the one involving Maggie Gyllenhaal and baby strollers. So why the "bitter beer face" when I left the theater? Because the comedy fell flat in a scene near the end of the movie ( it involved a stripper's pole and a conversation about miscarriage ), and the last 15 minutes got sappy in a way that valorized the heterosexual nuclear family nesting instinct. Yawn...Director Harold Ramis ( GROUNDHOG DAY ) has proven to be a one-hit wonder. His YEAR ONE joins a list of bland-as-a-ricecake recent comedies he's made, including the snooze-inducing ANALYZE THIS and THAT. The best jokes were in the trailer, and even that wasn't very funny. Year is the first Judd Apatow production, I believe, not to get the "R" rating, and this feels like a soulless merchandizing gimmick ( "let's get adolescents into the tent!" ) masquerading as a movie. Next to this, Mel Brooks' HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART ONE looks like an artistic triumph...SURVEILLANCE, by David Lynch's daughter Kelly, offers all the flatness and washed out color palette joys that the digital intermediate has brought to the world of cinema ( or, in my friend Carl's words, "it looked like ass." ). However, it had some great scenes of motor cop menace, all the characters are completely amoral, and there's a show-stopping performance by Bill Pullman, of all people. No INLAND EMPIRE, but no waste of time either...Just a note of appreciation here for the return of reperatory programming at the Castro Theater. My screening this week of THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, during their 1939 retrospective, was a revalation. Hope to get there for the great Errol Flynn next week...As for new stuff, I may see nothing this week. I'm starting to feel sick again and I crave my stinky sheets. I have little interest, despite the brilliant third feature by Alfonso Caurón, in the HARRY POTTER franchise. I'd rather sleep or come up with some kind of story to explain that disturbing note I found. I'm sure now it was a frame...