Showing posts with label controversy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label controversy. Show all posts
07 July 2022
Podcastery, y'all: Screen Drafts - John Waters.
22 October 2009
At the movies: A Serious Man.
Professor Larry Gropnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, in one of the year’s finest performances) is a man in a state of crisis. His wife wants a divorce so she can marry another, he’s on a collision course with his University’s tenure committee, his savant brother Arthur (Richard Kind) has taken up what seems like a permanent residence on the family couch, the next door neighbors are encroaching on his property, his stoner son seems dangerously unready for his bar mitzvah, and the Columbia record club won’t stop calling.
Larry Gropnik is a man put upon, and answers are unforthcoming from both human and divine. Perhaps taking advantage of the new freedoms might help?
Joel and Ethan Coen have spent enough time making enough quality pictures that their names alone bring a certain degree of interest. Though A Serious Man is considered a smaller scale film than last year’s Burn After Reading or their Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, it is an achievement on par with their finest work, and the best film they’ve made since The Man Who Wasn’t There.
With critical response sharply divided between those who feel the film traffics in Jewish caricature and those who find its theologically provocative perspective revelatory, it is a film that demands to be seen and experienced on whichever theological level the viewer finds themselves comfortable with. Equally versed in theoretical physics and the mechanics of spiritual divorce, A Serious Man dazzles on so many levels that easy superlatives just don’t come.
Nothing about this film or the universe it which it unfolds is easy or simple, and its many dualities make for a cinematic and spiritual experience like nothing else at the movies this year. Strangely, A Serious Man is much bleaker than No Country for Old Men, but as funny as The Big Lebowski, and those comparisons serve the film well. The voice of the heavens belongs to Grace Slick, and there are mysteries we all must accept, both in this life and the life to come. One of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.
05 March 2009
At the movies: Watchmen. (warning: elliptical spoilers)
QUIS CUSTODIET CUSTODIES
I approached this film with utter dread. I’d enjoyed director Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, but found his follow-up 300 as painful and expressive as a kidney stone, both ponderously ornate and incredibly stupid. So I’m being up front in the interest of journalistic objectivity when I say that I was terrified of how bad this movie might turn out. It turns out, though, that the surprise is on me, and Snyder’s film of the immortal Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel is actually kind of good. It doesn’t succeed on all fronts, and there are a few instances that clang rather than mesh, but on the whole, I’m actually impressed.
It covered all the necessary story points, it moved along breathlessly (its hundred and sixty-odd minutes pretty much flew by), and as far as presenting big budget weirdness up for the masses, it’s as subversive a mainstream film as Oliver Stone’s unfairly-maligned Alexander.
Once again, Moore has had his name kept away from the filmed version of one of his works, which in a way reasserts his authorship praeteritively. These are his characters, and yet they are not. Not completely. But Watchmen, the film, does preserve the dominant tenet of its graphic origins, using a Greco-Roman approach to divinities as its model, rather than the Marvel/DC saints. Rather than emblematic of ideals that humans should aspire to, Moore's heroes are just as flawed and screwed up (alcoholics, sociopaths, exhibitionists, and racists) as humanity is.
Unfolding in an alternate earth, circa 1985, history has played out rather differently than we know it to have done: a 1959 accident resulted in the creation of a superhuman being, codenamed Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose near-limitless power changes outcomes and shifts global arrangements around completely. Manhattan’s cosmic power resulted in the immediate end of the Vietnam War, which led to the abolishing of term limits, which brings the film’s world into the beginning of Richard M. Nixon’s fifth term.
Two different groups of costumed adventurers, The Minutemen (circa 1940) and the Watchmen (circa 1970) provide us with the majority of our characters. Messed-up human beings with messed-up lives, these ‘masks’ were diversions for the public, locked away after the late-70s passage of the Keene act, which outlawed costumed adventurers and crimefighters. But now, someone, it seems, is killing off ‘masks,’ and the remaining survivors have to get to the bottom of a mystery that could shred the very fabric of space and time. This is the engine that gets the film going, as we follow the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, of The Bad News Bears and Little Children) as he starts laying out the pieces of the puzzle.
The original work is one of the most seminal graphic novels ever created (though I would put the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz masterpiece Elektra: Assassin on a similar pedestal), and what makes it onscreen is an inordinate deal of what makes the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen so enduring and special: this is as morally complex a film as von Trier’s Dogville or Tolkin’s The Rapture, and anyone expecting a wham-bam superhero adventure is in for a rude and blue-phallused awakening.
Speaking of that blue phallus, let's talk for a moment about Doctor Manhattan. As far as this film is concerned, Doctor Manhattan is God. And God, busting forth with the power cosmic and the ability to create and annihilate with but a thought, is disinterested with humanity. And it's only by appropriating the ideology of good ol' American Puritanism that humanity can get its act together, which is provocative on several levels. Because it isn't the fire and brimstone dogma so many millions get drilled into their heads, but rather the illusion of that dogma that provides the fulcrum on which society, at least in this film, pivots.
And that leads to an interesting conundrum about the film: there are no regular folks. We get glimpses of the occasional regular folk (including the denizens of the newsstand), and whole craploads of them die in horrible ways, but there's no real human perspective on display here, so that's a mark against this particular adaptation. It's not an insurmountable problem, though.
Flawed as they may be, the Silk Spectre II/Nite Owl II sex scenes, bookending their rescue of what seems like an entire refugee community, get into the psychosis of the need to be a superhero in a more perceptive manner than The Dark Knight. That’s the film that will hang over everyone’s analyses of Watchmen, and it’s an unfair comparison, because The Dark Knight had Heath Ledger’s powder-keg of a Joker, and in Watchmen, the villain is human nature. The Percy Bysshe Shelley quote that adorns a statue during a climactic confrontation is a fitting one, both for our species’ tendencies toward egomania and for the way in which we hope to make a difference- to have it all matter, somehow.
So I have to say, I miss the squid, and Malin Akerman wasn’t really up for what her role called for (though the catty tone many advance reviews have taken with her performance is off-base and unfair). The whole instance of how The Comedian uncovered what he uncovered isn’t really explained at all, nor does it even really matter in the long run, which is also a problem. Jackie Earle Haley is good enough in this that it doesn’t even bother me that they’re considering him for the new Freddy Krueger. Patrick Wilson gets to play a secretly sexy nerd, and Billy Crudup has this amazing zen approach to the proceedings that for some reason make me think back to that immortal line in Almost Famous/Untitled where he proclaims “I am a golden god!” Change that adjective to cerulean, and you’ve got something.
This movie could have been a disaster of epic proportions. Instead, it’s a thematically complex pleasant surprise, and I find myself giving this take on Watchmen the highest compliment I could: it’s good enough that I forgive Zack Snyder for 300.
I approached this film with utter dread. I’d enjoyed director Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, but found his follow-up 300 as painful and expressive as a kidney stone, both ponderously ornate and incredibly stupid. So I’m being up front in the interest of journalistic objectivity when I say that I was terrified of how bad this movie might turn out. It turns out, though, that the surprise is on me, and Snyder’s film of the immortal Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel is actually kind of good. It doesn’t succeed on all fronts, and there are a few instances that clang rather than mesh, but on the whole, I’m actually impressed.
It covered all the necessary story points, it moved along breathlessly (its hundred and sixty-odd minutes pretty much flew by), and as far as presenting big budget weirdness up for the masses, it’s as subversive a mainstream film as Oliver Stone’s unfairly-maligned Alexander.
Once again, Moore has had his name kept away from the filmed version of one of his works, which in a way reasserts his authorship praeteritively. These are his characters, and yet they are not. Not completely. But Watchmen, the film, does preserve the dominant tenet of its graphic origins, using a Greco-Roman approach to divinities as its model, rather than the Marvel/DC saints. Rather than emblematic of ideals that humans should aspire to, Moore's heroes are just as flawed and screwed up (alcoholics, sociopaths, exhibitionists, and racists) as humanity is.
Unfolding in an alternate earth, circa 1985, history has played out rather differently than we know it to have done: a 1959 accident resulted in the creation of a superhuman being, codenamed Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose near-limitless power changes outcomes and shifts global arrangements around completely. Manhattan’s cosmic power resulted in the immediate end of the Vietnam War, which led to the abolishing of term limits, which brings the film’s world into the beginning of Richard M. Nixon’s fifth term.
Two different groups of costumed adventurers, The Minutemen (circa 1940) and the Watchmen (circa 1970) provide us with the majority of our characters. Messed-up human beings with messed-up lives, these ‘masks’ were diversions for the public, locked away after the late-70s passage of the Keene act, which outlawed costumed adventurers and crimefighters. But now, someone, it seems, is killing off ‘masks,’ and the remaining survivors have to get to the bottom of a mystery that could shred the very fabric of space and time. This is the engine that gets the film going, as we follow the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, of The Bad News Bears and Little Children) as he starts laying out the pieces of the puzzle.
The original work is one of the most seminal graphic novels ever created (though I would put the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz masterpiece Elektra: Assassin on a similar pedestal), and what makes it onscreen is an inordinate deal of what makes the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen so enduring and special: this is as morally complex a film as von Trier’s Dogville or Tolkin’s The Rapture, and anyone expecting a wham-bam superhero adventure is in for a rude and blue-phallused awakening.
Speaking of that blue phallus, let's talk for a moment about Doctor Manhattan. As far as this film is concerned, Doctor Manhattan is God. And God, busting forth with the power cosmic and the ability to create and annihilate with but a thought, is disinterested with humanity. And it's only by appropriating the ideology of good ol' American Puritanism that humanity can get its act together, which is provocative on several levels. Because it isn't the fire and brimstone dogma so many millions get drilled into their heads, but rather the illusion of that dogma that provides the fulcrum on which society, at least in this film, pivots.
And that leads to an interesting conundrum about the film: there are no regular folks. We get glimpses of the occasional regular folk (including the denizens of the newsstand), and whole craploads of them die in horrible ways, but there's no real human perspective on display here, so that's a mark against this particular adaptation. It's not an insurmountable problem, though.
Flawed as they may be, the Silk Spectre II/Nite Owl II sex scenes, bookending their rescue of what seems like an entire refugee community, get into the psychosis of the need to be a superhero in a more perceptive manner than The Dark Knight. That’s the film that will hang over everyone’s analyses of Watchmen, and it’s an unfair comparison, because The Dark Knight had Heath Ledger’s powder-keg of a Joker, and in Watchmen, the villain is human nature. The Percy Bysshe Shelley quote that adorns a statue during a climactic confrontation is a fitting one, both for our species’ tendencies toward egomania and for the way in which we hope to make a difference- to have it all matter, somehow.
So I have to say, I miss the squid, and Malin Akerman wasn’t really up for what her role called for (though the catty tone many advance reviews have taken with her performance is off-base and unfair). The whole instance of how The Comedian uncovered what he uncovered isn’t really explained at all, nor does it even really matter in the long run, which is also a problem. Jackie Earle Haley is good enough in this that it doesn’t even bother me that they’re considering him for the new Freddy Krueger. Patrick Wilson gets to play a secretly sexy nerd, and Billy Crudup has this amazing zen approach to the proceedings that for some reason make me think back to that immortal line in Almost Famous/Untitled where he proclaims “I am a golden god!” Change that adjective to cerulean, and you’ve got something.
This movie could have been a disaster of epic proportions. Instead, it’s a thematically complex pleasant surprise, and I find myself giving this take on Watchmen the highest compliment I could: it’s good enough that I forgive Zack Snyder for 300.
17 September 2008
"A real blast."
I love a good bit of controversy, and I love a controversial film even more. So it brings me a great deal of joy to give y'all an advance warning of a pretty staggering film that is coming your way that will fuck some people up. The film is an animated Israeli documentary called Waltz with Bashir, and it details a man's efforts to reconnect with other members of his army division during Israel's Lebanon War in the early 80s, specifically in relation to two massacres that occurred in two refugee camps during that time.
The film is remarkable, using the smae sort of psychogenic fugue-narrative that David Lynch worked so well in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but applying it to real-life trauma and shock. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, but you could almost call it a head-on collision between A Scanner Darkly and Redacted, except much much better than the latter and on par with the former.
So there are a couple of reasons why people are going to lose their shit about this film- one is that it deals with the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but what's going to cause the big freak-outs left and right is that the massacring in those refugee camps was done by Christians. Since contemporary evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has taken to walking a hard pro-Israel line (basically in order to force the hand of the divine, which is stupid, ignorant, and blasphemous all at the same time and perfectly illustrative of what's achingly wrong with the current theological mindset of U.S. Christianity), I don't imagine that they're going to take too well to this, and I can't wait.
So when Pat Robertson and Rexella van Impe or whoever is trying to exploit faith for power starts decrying this film in the near future, you can remember you got your heads up from me.
Today I saw:
I DON'T FEEL LIKE DANCING (d. Joachim DOLLHOPF and Evi GOLDBRUNNER) ***
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (d. Ari FOLMAN) *** 1/2
Yesterday I saw:
C.R.A.Z.Y. (d. Jean-Marc VALLEE) ***
SHROOMS (d. Paddy BREADNACH) * 1/2
The film is remarkable, using the smae sort of psychogenic fugue-narrative that David Lynch worked so well in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, but applying it to real-life trauma and shock. It's like nothing I've ever seen before, but you could almost call it a head-on collision between A Scanner Darkly and Redacted, except much much better than the latter and on par with the former.
So there are a couple of reasons why people are going to lose their shit about this film- one is that it deals with the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but what's going to cause the big freak-outs left and right is that the massacring in those refugee camps was done by Christians. Since contemporary evangelical Christianity in the U.S. has taken to walking a hard pro-Israel line (basically in order to force the hand of the divine, which is stupid, ignorant, and blasphemous all at the same time and perfectly illustrative of what's achingly wrong with the current theological mindset of U.S. Christianity), I don't imagine that they're going to take too well to this, and I can't wait.
So when Pat Robertson and Rexella van Impe or whoever is trying to exploit faith for power starts decrying this film in the near future, you can remember you got your heads up from me.
Today I saw:
I DON'T FEEL LIKE DANCING (d. Joachim DOLLHOPF and Evi GOLDBRUNNER) ***
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (d. Ari FOLMAN) *** 1/2
Yesterday I saw:
C.R.A.Z.Y. (d. Jean-Marc VALLEE) ***
SHROOMS (d. Paddy BREADNACH) * 1/2
12 September 2008
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