Moot Point

What up internet? This week I have been grading quizzes and watching melodramas. The latter kind of made up for the former. I still have to go back and change some numbers, and then make an excel thing of all the grades. I will do it in the morning, because grading students depresses me. Most of them did pretty well though. That’s encouraging.

1. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956): I could watch this movie once every week, but I haven’t seen it since the inception of my weekly movies posts. It is the ultimate in Sirkian melodramatic excess; it is totally the movie people are talking about when they call him this brilliant ironist. It’s got all these overdetermined phallic symbols (oil derricks! comparative gun sizes! giant liquor bottles! models of oil derricks!) and sexual disorders and alcoholism and so forth. Highly recommended. The above is a clip in which a girl’s sluttery literally kills her father, as he is unable to cross the symbolic public-private divide that is the giant staircase.
2. Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954): So Rock Hudson is an irresponsible millionaire who gets into an accident that indirectly causes the death of Jane Wyman’s husband, who is a doctor and also apparently a total saint. Then he also indirectly causes Jane Wyman to get into a car accident and go blind. Oh, and he falls in love with her. And becomes a doctor to try to save her. From blindness. The best parts:

• how mean all the “good” people (including Agnes Moorehead!) are to him when the bad stuff he caused was completely circumstantial, totally unintentional and arguably not really his fault
• the “mentor” character who teaches Rock Hudson how to be good directly compares the dead doctor to Jesus
• he gets Jane Wyman to fall in love with him by basically turning into her dead husband
• when he scrubs in before the surgery that might allow Jane Wyman to see, he is inexplicably shirtless

It’s good times, but really pales in comparison with All That Heaven Allows, which reteams Sirk, Hudson, and Wyman, and is also about a character who re-evaluates her life after they fall in love. 3. Chinese Roulette (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976): Heh. Fassbinder is awesome, and I liked the setup (with this “sophisticated” couple catching each other with their lovers and then trying to be all “civilized” about it, and their weird crutch-wearing bad seed of a daughter, who I felt really bad for — she set it up so they’d catch each other, and her parents are totally mad at her for making them face up to their illusions, not at each other). The climax involves a game called “Chinese roulette,” which is like a really bitchy version of 20 questions, because the answer is a person in the room, and the questions are things like “How should this person die?” and “What would this person have been in the Third Reich?” It’s great case of a conversation being about one thing but obviously actually being about another, to the point that it’s completely absurd that they’re talking about the first thing at all. There did seem to be a lot of people purposefully crossing the set to other people, which I got, but still couldnt shake the feeling that it was the kind of “ART MOVIE” thing that the Kids in the Hall or someone would parody. 4. Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007): The first thing I will say about this movie is that one scene really shocked me, in the “surprised and disturbed” sense. I think that’s a good thing — movies don’t very often surprise me anymore, especially in terms of sex and violence. (They constantly delight me, though.) So it’s Shanghai in the early 1940s. Tony Leung is a collaborator working with the Japanese to quash dissent. Tang Wei is a young girl (Wong) who works for the resistance; her job is to become involved with him. The movie tells the story entirely from Wong’s perspective, and it’s pretty exceptional. None of the resistance dudes seem to have any concept of what they’ve asked her to do, and it’s not like she’s doing it because she really seems that politically committed. So why? I think the secret of the movie is that this girl needs fiction to feel anything. The first time we see her cry is when she is performing in a play. She escapes to the movies (to what I thought was an anachronistic Casablanca but was actually Intermezzo) when she needs somewhere to cry. And her relationship with Tony Leung…it doesn’t seem pleasant, but it is really intense. It’s 100% gorgeous, also: lust and caution are Ang Lee’s specialties. (How many Ang Lee movies could really just be called Lust, Caution? I can think of at least three.) I am still kind of thinking this movie over, but it was great, even if it did give me weird sex dreams. (It is also possible I would have had the weird sex dreams anyway.)

David Thompson decides that Wes Anderson didn’t live up to his potential. I feel like he totally missed postmodernism.

That was all the more apparent when Anderson released a 12-minute short, Hotel Chevalier, with Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman in a French hotel doing very real, blunt and sensual things (Portman was naked a lot of the time). This glimpse ran up half a million hits on iTunes, even as the big film (without it) staggered at “select” art house theatres. And who could miss the gulf between the inanity of the big film and the emotional force of the short? For that matter, who could fail to miss that Portman was the first wholesome compelling female in Anderson’s work?

It’s really telling that his explanation of the film’s “raw” “blunt” power is that it features a naked starlet. As we all know, the sexual objectification of women = edgy.

Another take:

Critics have been creaming themselves over this 12 minute distilled essence of Anderson, but I think it’s just an excuse to show Portman’s scrawny posterior. She disrobes completely, while her lover Jason Schwartzman remains clad in his three-piece suit.

Sigh.

So this week on The Bionic Woman, which I’m still watching kind of in spite myself (Katee Sackhoff wasn’t even on this week), Bionic Woman went undercover…at university! This means the whole episode was basically shot at UBC.

They even have a scene on the patio of the grad pub. Though they make it into a fake coffee shop. But I’ve totally sat at the table that Michelle Ryan, the guest star, and Isaiah Washington were. I’m pretty sure it’s the spot where a bird shat on my head. Clearly, he was just waiting for Isaiah.

Anyway, it’s pretty fascinating to watch people do kind of flatly acted¹ espionage in places where I go all the time. The big final fight (at the “Farmer’s Market” for those of you who watched, so I’m guessing no one) was right outside the auditorium where we have screenings.

It was pretty exciting for me.

¹ Though I like Michelle Ryan a lot better with her real accent; why couldn’t they have just made the character British?

Now that I have begun my new “get up in the morning and spend several hours working in the office school provides me” initiative, I will hopefully be able to catch up on all my movie watching.

1. Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932): This was convenient after watching the amazing Black Caesar. There are lots of plot parallels. This is one of those movies where you can really see the internal industry censorship (and actually the external government censorship — movies weren’t considered protected speech until the 1950s) working! And it is awesome for that reason. If the word “overdetermined” didn’t exist, someone would have to make it up for this movie. I love when moralizing characters from the community actually point at me. Also, how there is lots of moralizing about gun control, but none about the more obvious gangster-prevention step of repealing Prohibition.
2. Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2001): This is really…interesting. It is about a Jewish strongman who works with a Nazi clairvoyant in the early 1930s. It’s super-fascinating in the way it stages a lot of Weimar-era stuff: I kept thinking about Kracauer and “The Mass Ornament” and all that stuff.
3. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006): This definitely benefited from a second viewing. The first time I saw it, I as expecting a different movie, and I definitely watched from a “perverse” point of view: I found the Stasi perative protagonist really creepy and I kept rooting for him to get caught, even though that meant I was rooting for the State, not for the loveable playwright with the awakening political consciousness. That was not really the point of the movie, which is about how people survive in a totalitarian state and about the transformative power of art, but it doesn’t let artists off the hook in terms of political engagement. It is really kind of nice. I think we were supposed to take the creepiness as part of the condition of living in a surveillance society. Apparently it’s a pretty unrealistic movie, in terms of what it was actually like in the GDR, but that’s never really bothered me before, and if anything makes the whole thing more interesting. It’s like filmically trying to recuperate the lingering lack of trust and whatnot that characterized East German life. Or something. As an intriguing “otherwise unrelated German films have something in common besides a complex relationship to the past” note, both this and Invincible feature a character playing a piece of music on the piano as a pivotal, emotional moment.
4. Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977): While I totally get why people like this movie, I fail to understand why it has this privileged position of sacredness for so many people. It’s really not a very good movie in many, many respects. It’s slow to start, the acting is horrible, the pace is kind of plodding. I was really looking forward to watching it again (even the crappy updated version that school had on DVD¹) but man, it was really boring right until the last half hour, when there is a big fight with airplanes. I know that Star Wars is a classic of cult/fandom-friendly films because of the time it takes to build its story world (a perspective I owe mostly to Henry Jenkins), and further that a lot of the pleasure of Star Wars comes from nostalgia, but honestly? All I see is some slow storytelling, some exceptionalism, and an embarrassingly obvious psychoanalytic reading of Luke’s ability to get his “missile” in the “hole” in the Death Star’s defenses. Sorry, nerdy dudes my age. I like lots of things that are culty or campy or bad but that are enjoyable anyway, but Star Wars just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
5. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945): I know that she was supposed to be unlikeable to the point of ridiculousness, but my favourite character in this was Vera, the shrill woman who Al — who “accidentally” killed a dude and stole all his money — picks up and totally controls him by threatening to sell him out to the police. And is dying of consumption maybe. She is awesomely feisty, if the scratchmarks she left on the dead dude (who implies that he tried to rape her) are any indication. That’s what we in the biz call “reading against the grain.” I am feeling contrarian this week.

In other news, there were a couple of excerpts of Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste posted online. I have never bought a 33 1/3 book because I am not that kind of hipster-aspirational pretentious (I am other kinds, don’t get me wrong), but this one seems really interesting. In that it’s a piece, not about the album itself, but about confronting critical issues of “taste,” which I think is super-interesting.

¹ While I’m on it: who cares if Han or Greedo shoots first? I realize that it is supposed to reveal something about his character, and the revision represents Lucas sanitizing their childhood memories, but watching it now, it is two seconds in a two-hour movie. A two-hour movie for kids. Who cares? That’s right, I said it.

Not so much viewing this week. You get an extra-long post to make up, apparently. Computer is broken (using Alex’s).

1. Black Caesar (Larry Cohen, 1973): I liked this even more than I thought I would. Maybe it’s because I’m so unfamiliar with the whole blaxploitation cycle, but I had no idea how traditional a gangster movie this was. It’s much closer to a 1930s gangster movie than even to The Godfather or something: it’s got the shame of poverty, the rise to the top, the decadence, and the inevitable fall. Of course, it plays differently when inflected with 1970s civil rights politics: the hero’s ambition and unwillingness to take no for an answer reads differently (especially when he buys his lawyer’s entire apartment because his mom was his maid), not to mention his childhood best friend’s rage at the idea of owning people. Also, the ending — which involves blackface and violence and the American flag — is pretty incredible. The gangster movie always lionizes naked ambition and capitalistic acquisition, but this movie is more clear than many about showing the dark side of it, the way power corrupts, than your Edward G. Robinson movies. You know, because they could show the raping and the abusing and so forth.The corruptive influence of power obviously meant something really different to a black audience (and different still to a sympathetic white audience) than it did when gangster movies first showed up in the 1930s.
2. The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007): Oh, Wes Anderson. I liked this movie, I did; the acting was good, the art direction was typically gorgeous, there is a quiet deadpan comedy about it, and it was clearly making fun of the whole “Westerners go to India to find spiritual enlightenment” trope by showing the brothers to be as shallow as they are. My favourite little moment of self-awareness was how Jason Schwarzman kept turning on his iPod to appropriate music — it’s kind of a mea culpa on Anderson’s part for the on-the-nose soundtrack choices he’s known for — but of course the movie still does it. In the prequel short, Hotel Chevalier, which you’ll have to find a flash upload of if you live in Canada because for some reason it’s not available at the Canadian iTunes store, Natalie Portman’s character even comments on it. This kind of internal contradiction brings me to my ambivalence about Wes Anderson’s movies (besides Rushmore, which I think was a nearly perfect movie). I am now going to quote Amanda from Pandagon’s spoilery review, because she pinpointed the issue I have with Anderson’s stuff:

He has a firm intellectual understanding of the problems of wealth and privilege, but he can’t set aside an emotional infatuation with the idea that the wealthy are more interesting and important than you or me, even as the plot turns and character touches scream that he’s attempting to say otherwise.

I think that just about says it all. The Suitcases of Obvious Symbolism are “by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton” and I bet cash money that you will be able to buy them like you could the Life Aquatic sneakers; that is ultimately the Wes Anderson Problem. The story’s all about how stuff (money, materialism, self-centredness) works against us, but ultimately the movie still wants us to love the stuff. The bags. The perfume bottle. The Hotel Chevalier bathrobe. Owen Wilson’s crazy $3,000 loafers with the suns and moons on them. I don’t think it’s necessarily a negative, which seems to be Amanda’s judgement. If a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from the privileges of wealth and whiteness doesn’t make Wes Anderson a director for our time, than what could?

Oh, and I signed up for NaBloPoMo again. It’s where you post on your blog, every day, for the month of November. Like NaNoWriMo, but easier. I was kind of starting to burn out toward the end last year, but this year I have a strategy.

This article was linked on one of the feminist blogs, that was objecting to the totally illogical deployment of feminism as a scapegoat and a crack about how “unromantic” condoms are. Those are both pretty lame things, but not as lame as the actual premise of the article:

But new life has recently come from surprising sources: Superbad and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, two movies that, while middling in themselves, should be seen as following and expanding upon an innovative precedent first set by Wedding Crashers, that of the man-crush romantic comedy. Although it seems to have gone unnoticed, the secret to Wedding Crashers success was that it was a romantic comedy in which the two buddies are the real couple.

My problem is not so much the premise that a lot of movies purport to be about one thing but are actually about how two dudes love each other, in a totally manly way, but rather that this guy acts like that is a new precedent in any way at all. I would suggest that Justin Shubow maybe should have done some research. He may have come across the word “homosocial.” Also, buddy cop movies, which actually follow the tropes of romantic comedies, but replace sex with foiling some villains. Also, the Westerns and action films of Howard Hawks with special emphasis on Rio Bravo. Also, Beau Travail. Also, Lord of the Rings. Also, Western culture.

Also, his diagnosis of a manliness shortage caused by feminism? Maybe not totally wrong. Well, mostly wrong, but my pet theory (which I probably stole from someone, but who knows) about why you get things like Scrubs and Superbad, which push homosocial love (once called “romantic friendship”) to such an uncomfortable degree (and that this is funny) is because of the increased visibility of actual homosexual relationships. The queer subtext of stuff like Montgomery Clift and some guy comparing gun sizes in Red River — or a tender moment between Frodo and Sam — is pretty unavoidable now. . Intense same-sex relationships are regarded with suspicion (think of Jason Lewis’s creepy jealousy of Ben Affleck’s new girlfriend in Chasing Amy). So, making it funny and embracing the uncomfortable is one way of dealing with it dramatically.

Where was I? Oh yeah, belated weekly movies.

1. Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938): I can admit that this is a seriously flawed movie, but I love Katharine Hepburn so much in it: she is so unrepentantly selfish in this movie. “You’ve torn your coat.” Classic.
2. Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2004): When I first saw this, I actually thought it was the weaker of the two, I think because the last chapter is so much less kill-y than the end of Volume 1. But upon reflection and a repeat viewing, I think it might be equally as awesome. The whole ending sequence with Beatrix and Bill is basically amazing. Uma Thurman and David Carradine act the shit out of that thing.
3. Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998): This has held up really well. I’d actually forgotten how much I remembered from this — all the stuff with Vincent Cassel cross-dressing, the whole” I will have one mistress here… and no master” speech, how cold she is to Joseph Fiennes by letting him live because he made her that much stronger, the last scene where she virgins up. Also, who knew Daniel Craig and Emily Mortimer were both in this? It’s pretty fantastic, and the production design is appropriately epic. I can’t wait for the sequel, Elizabeth is going to kick some Spanish armada ass.

Okay, so maybe this isn’t that interesting if you don’t do film theory, but I just realized Scientology is basically like a glorious combination of fascinating symptomatic anxieties about technology tied in a nice little package.

The story of Xenu is covered in OT III, part of Scientology’s secret “Advanced Technology” doctrines taught only to advanced members. It is described in more detail in the accompanying confidential “Assists” lecture of 3 October 1968 and is dramatized in Revolt in the Stars (an unpublished screenplay written by L Ron Hubbard during the late 1970s).

The fact that a core text in the religion is easily adaptable to the genre conventions of science fiction film is your first problem. Also, it might indicate that maybe it’s not so much revelation as, you know, the influence of science fiction? And, uh, Cold War anxiety? Continue Reading »