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.