45 result(s) tagged “Ways of Watching”

I start an essay for most every movie I see. Whether I actually finish the essay — or even make any headway on a thesis — is another matter entirely.

Today I’ll be the old man who runs out of candy at Halloween and starts handing out worthless crap that’s lying around the house. July was tiring, and the first weekend of August was exhausting, and in the absence of having something real to give you, you get this.

I’ll spare you the beginnings of an essay on George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, because the two paragraphs I wrote bear a striking resemblance to something written more than four years earlier, but everything else is fair game. Coherence, cogency, and complete sentences are neither promised nor implied.

Why bother?

For one thing, my Google Docs and hard drive are clogged with these fragments, and by publishing them I am freeing myself, turning my demons into angels.

Second, I think it’s really funny to see exactly how far I didn’t get in writing about Eastern Promises and Stranger Than Fiction, even though I have notes (with the former) and some recorded ramblings (with the latter) that would serve as ample raw material.

Third, maybe somebody wants an intimate look at my writing process. Not likely, but ... .

Fourth, maybe there’s an idea or reading that might interest somebody. The Memento piece is actually fairly substantial, although it’s missing context and connective tissue.

My first thought after watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men — amid groans from others in the theater — was that I understood why some people hate it.

This was prompted by something I’d read earlier that day, an item from Roger Ebert’s Movie Answer Man column:

“I went to see No Country for Old Men with a group of my friends. I was absolutely fascinated and riveted by the film and think it is the best film I have seen thus far this year. My very good friend, who also happens to be a very smart guy, thought the film was terrible. I was shocked. Should I debate the merits of the film with him? Is it even worth debating such a wonderful film when the person you are debating with has no appreciation for it, and does it pose a risk to the friendship?

It’s a fair and fascinating question, but Ebert’s reply was unfortunately glib:

“As Louis Armstrong instructs us, ‘There are some folks that, if they don’t know, you can’t tell ’em.’”

I might accept that dismissive response if he were talking about Transformers or some tony, repressed period romance; we all have things that we just don’t like, no matter how well they’re done.

But No Country for Old Men subverts audience expectations at just about every turn, and despite its considerable pleasures and a straightforward chase-the-drug-money plot, it’s a willfully difficult film. In that context, why wouldn’t you want to argue about it? It’s the rare movie that’s open enough to foster malleable opinion; thoughtful people who dislike it initially can be won over if spurred to look at it differently.

(A warning for sensitive folk: This essay discusses and uses screen captures from a short film in which a man conquers mammoth bare breasts and inserts his entire naked body into a woman’s vagina. [And, magically, the number of Culture Snob readers grows exponentially.])

An object within an object of the same type — the novel within a novel, the film within a film — is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work.

But if the object is nearly whole — that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content — looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.

Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes.

Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.

Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.

The prospect of Haneke’s English-language remake — due in theaters in late winter and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth — is worrisome. (George Sluizer’s American botch of his own The Vanishing comes to mind.) But it’s also necessary; as unpleasant as it is, Funny Games deserves to be seen more widely because it forces introspection. I doubt you can watch it without seriously considering why you watch movies of this sort, and how you react to them.

And it’s more timely now than it was upon its initial release a decade ago.

For me, the film is most striking in the scene in which Anna (Susanne Lothar) is forced by white-clad, white-gloved psychopathic visitors Peter and Paul to remove her clothes, while her helpless husband (The Lives of Others’ Ulrich Mühe) casts his eyes down and her young son sits on a couch with a bag over his head.

I’ve been curious about the hand shots for years, but even after collecting these screen captures I don’t have a firm grasp on their meaning. So I’m throwing them out there and welcoming comments, hypotheses, and arguments.

The discomfiting effect is related to the uncanny valley, which suggests that people are repulsed by things (robots, computer animation) that too closely approximate reality.

“Repulsed” is the key word. These little children might scare you, but your reaction as a viewer isn’t based on fear for the safety of the movie’s characters. (These little buggers are nasty, but they’re also pretty ridiculous as assassins.) Rather, these near-children make you queasy, disgusted.

You’ve been horrified.

They have no special powers. They have minimal identity or personality. Up until 2002, when 28 Days Later and (I’m told) Resident Evil made them fleet of foot, they lumbered around. In most conceptions, they merely hunger for human flesh.

A single zombie is an easy target. A single shot to the brain kills it — permanently, for good this time — in George A. Romero’s world.

It is only their easy, efficient reproduction that gives them any power — the exponential way that four become eight become 16 become 32 become 64 etc. if each only munches on or infects one other person.

With its dismal first-weekend performance at the box office, Captivity offers an opportunity to bemoan (or cheer) the diminished commercial prospects for that genre we’re no longer allowed to call “torture porn.”

At The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl recently argued (in the context of Hostel: Part II) that labeling something “torture porn”

“is a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work. It’s critical name-calling.”

There are some interesting arguments here, but I reject the assertion that “torture porn” isn’t an appropriate and meaningful tag for the genre. And I don’t think the phrase is a dismissive put-down.

In the opening of 28 Weeks Later, Don (Robert Carlyle) faces a dilemma: He can leave his wife to die and run like hell on the off chance that he might outrun the “infected,” or he can stay with her and face a gruesome end.

He runs like hell, and looks back to see his wife attacked.

This is the movie writ small, laying the groundwork for more impossible choices.

Have you calmed down yet?

Are you over the orgasmic delight you felt at the way David Chase defied all predictions about the end of his beloved series, The Sopranos? Have you recovered from your rage about ambiguity, a lack of closure, and Journey?

Good.

Now let’s clear a few things up. Tony Soprano did not die. That last scene was not at all a cinematic expression of Tony’s anxiety, and therefore David Chase did jab his middle fingers into your eyes. Yet there was nothing wrong with the way it ended, even if it was manipulative.

In this “Five Minutes” audio commentary, Culture Snob will explain all that and more, without abruptly cutting to silence mid-sentence.

Despite (and because of) its pedigree, Natural Born Killers is undoubtedly trashy, reveling in the killing spree of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) and joyfully joining in the public and media fascination with mass murderers. And it’s an invigorating, brilliantly assembled movie celebrating the way that cinema can make the ugliest human behavior thrilling.

The reasons for recording (with Bride of Culture Snob) this commentary track to The Prestige are many and simple:

• Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan didn’t include one on the first DVD release — at least not that I’ve found.
• In my essay, I faulted the movie’s ending, but I now accept it as suitable and even necessary.
• There remains great confusion and debate about what actually happens in the movie, even though the script and presentation seem to me models of clarity and foreshadowing.
• Bride of Culture Snob and I continue to argue about the conclusion, and whether it fits or panders to an audience’s anticipated inability to follow the story.
• While it received generally favorable notices, The Prestige seemed to be dismissed as a mere entertainment, and I think critics and audiences failed to recognize the movie’s depth, density, and elegance.

We address all these areas in the commentary track, come to some resolution about the ending, and explore my theory that viewers tend to understand one of the movie’s “tricks” while watching the first time but get fooled by the other.

Brevity is the soul of wit, that motherfucker Shakespeare once wrote, and even though he’s wrong, I’ll keep this short.

RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson has created the Contrarianism Blog-a-thon. (He chooses to capitalize the last “T” for some reason; I shall not.)

Emerson’s get-together is fun enough, but it doesn’t provide much practical guidance. Being contrary these days is hard work. In this Web-democratized age when every possible opinion already has its champion, how the hell can one be a contrarian? On the other hand, how can one not be a contrarian? After all, whatever you think, you’re fighting against all those who have a different perspective.

I will enlighten you on how to be a conventional contrarian.

Marnie is narratively and technically artless — literal and obvious and shrill and nearly naked in its themes and concerns, a story clumsily built around Freudian repression. Its psychology is facile; its score is overbearingly dramatic; and director Alfred Hitchcock seems hostile toward even the most basic realism with his rear-projection drives and the mechanical horseback riding of the fevered climax. The technique of Marnie is downright standoffish, easily read as laziness or incompetence.

Yet Marnie is not the travesty many people think.

In Inside Man, director Spike Lee and screenwriter Russell Gerwitz announce early that nothing too traumatic will befall any of the characters, and then they keep that promise; they implicitly give the audience permission to enjoy the film. Especially considering the potential for violence in the premise, this is an exceedingly gentle movie — and I mean that as a compliment.

The supsension of disbelief, to borrow a hackneyed maxim, is a privilege, not a right; you need to earn it.

And last year’s holiday hit The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe doesn’t.

The true subject of Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is that fact that most people don’t find Albert Brooks funny.

That sounds sour, and it sells the movie short, but it’s fundamentally true. While The Aristocrats endlessly repeated a single dirty joke to expose the gears and springs of comedy, Brooks uses a single comedian — himself — to explore the often fragile bond between a performer and the audience. The issue: Why do some people laugh at a joke that leaves other people cold? Disguised as a narrative fiction, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is an essay on the nature of humor.

Plus: V for Vendetta.

The Netflix Rolling Roadshow is doubtlessly a brilliant piece of marketing, but the core concept celebrates the sense of place that movies can conjure or capture.

The DVD-rental company is sponsoring free screenings of famous movies at the places that inspired them or the sites where they were filmed. Hence, Escape from Alcatraz on Alcatraz, The Shining at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, and Jaws on Martha’s Vineyard.

But none of this summer’s selections can match the inspiration behind the showing of Field of Dreams this past Friday at Left and Center Field of Dreams.

We rarely take a Faulkner sentence and examine it in isolation. We generally don’t inspect a song’s introduction, or chorus, or bridge, without even dealing with the context of the whole. We don’t study the corner of a painting, pretending that there’s nothing beyond it.

Maybe we should.

Matt Zoller Seitz beat me to the punch in citing what appears to be a trend in online movie writing:

“[I]n recent years — particularly in the last six months, for some reason — there’s been an exponential growth in Internet-based writing that dares to talk about what movies are actually made of: shots and cuts.”