anonymous: pretty lies

Who could have expected such good, old-fashioned film-making from infamous schlock-meister Roland Emmerich? What a marvellous story, and so marvellously well told! No distracting camera movement, no moment of fat left to over-lengthen any scene. Olde London-town looks wonderful, true to life, dirty and lovely, and the details! like the theatre, and the way the groundlings take active part, pitching in to fight the French at Agincourt when so inspired, it's all wonderfully exciting. Historically, of course, the story is total rubbish; to paraphrase Himself, the story maintains so politic a state of rubbish that its lies will not allow any hint of truth to intermingle with them. But that's true enough to Shakespearean tradition, too, as the real Richard III would tell you if he could dust himself off and speak his piece.

And, ye gods, the actors those cold islands produce. What a lioness is Vanessa Redgrave as she ages! Last year she also gave us a dazzlingly original Volumnia in Ralph Fiennes' stripped-down and energetic Coriolanus, creating a woman who so longs to be a soldier that her salute near the end is nearly heartbreaking. Her calm, kind instruction to Virgilia in the arts of raising and loving soldier sons and husbands, so wonderfully matter-of-fact, is unlike any I've seen, with no trace of disdain for the weaker girl, a performance of completely assured genius. Here, as the aging Elizabeth, she paints a complex but believable portrait, managing to weave together the contradictory bits that writer John Orloff gives her. The way it's written, a lesser actress (that is, almost any actress) would have emerged with two dimensions, giving maybe a single glimpse of a third, but Redgrave is astonishingly good as the theatre-enthralled, flesh-loving, increasingly age-confused monarch who keeps a loose grip on her kingdom by bowing to her counsellors, those chilly, ambitious Cecils.

If for no other reason, it's worth watching just to spend two hours in those lost streets and taverns and theatres, which feel tangible, sweat-smelling and mud-filled under Emmerich's magic paintbrush. He's wasted an extraordinary amount of time, ours and his own, in previous films destroying our world in vivid detail. Now that he knows the joy of creating lost worlds in equally acute detail, perhaps he will become the master of re-vivifying lost times, even if he does spend his time telling silly lies whilst inhabiting them.

*************

POSTSCRIPT:

As to the issue of who wrote Shakespeare's plays: just today I see that veteran actor Janet Suzman gives a good, solid poke in the eye to all the posh-boy Oxfordians in her new book. Those Oxfordians (that is, those who believe, as this film posits, that no low-born commoner like Shakespeare could have risen to such genius, and that therefore Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, must have written his plays instead), generally rest their argument on three major points: what they call Shakespeare's lack of education, the fact that Oxford is on record as having travelled, particularly to Italy, a country which Shakespeare loves to bring to life, and the eerie lack of books in Shakespeare's will when he died.

Suzman wrestles down the first two points (Shakespeare's education was, in fact, equivalent to that received in a modern university, and, as to Italy, there's a little thing called imagination, fed by maps and reading), leaving the question of the books. How could the greatest writing genius of all time die without leaving a library? To which I reply, he left no trace a library in his will, which is a very different matter.

Look at this: what kind of library would a man like Shakespeare have had? A vastly illegal one, for a start. It would have been filled with heretical tracts (hermetical works, books by Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, etc), not to mention Catholic works, works on occultism, alchemy, and probably no small amount of pornography, any piece of which could throw half a neighborhood into the Tower. Either the man passed it quietly on to a worthy successor before he died, or else his good, probably non-reading wife Anne burned them in a panic before they could be uncovered.

the skin i live in: permanent damage

Here’s my history with Almodovar: twenty odd years past, I went to an art-house in Portland to see Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and hated it so much I’ve resisted seeing any of his films since, in spite of some frothy encomia from critics. I have been leaning reluctantly towards giving him a second chance since Flower of My Secret, and decided at last to take the plunge with The Skin I Live In.

What did I hate about Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down? I was much closer to my college years then, and therefore more sensitive about sexist propaganda, having so recently had my feminist consciousness raised. The film as I remember it was a wacky romantic comedy about blossoming love between a kidnapper and his victim. I assume (as opposed to remember) that Almodovar was exploring inter-gender issues of dominance and power, but it seemed like a load of chauvinist crap. Granted, at the time I had precious little earned wisdom about inter-gender issues of dominance and power, and so smug self-righteousness was easy to summon.

Now: what is The Skin I Live In about? Inter-gender issues of dominance and power between a kidnapper and his victim! I am not kidding. Here’s my question for you: have ALL his intervening films been about this same thing, or did I just pick my moment with crazy prescient irony?

All that said, TSILI is an extraordinary film. It’s as if he decided to remake Eyes Without a Face and then took it way off on his own crazy Almodovar trip. Think Eyes Without a Face, only way, way more twisted. Nobody gets chewed on by dogs, but things that do happen make a dog-chewing seem like the happier alternative.

In fact, I didn’t realize how truly disturbing it was until I woke up this morning with my mind haunted by it. Because Almodovar has such a beautiful, unpretentious visual style, you don’t realize how rough the story really is at first. He’s like Polanski: a master story-teller, all his techniques just so. His pacing is fantastic. He carries you along seamlessly, without a bump, without a hassle, and your aesthetic sense is pleased by the scenery, and Antonio Banderas is so good, and the story is so strange and compelling, and then you wake up in the morning and go ye gods! my psyche is bent! Can I fix it, or is this permanent?

(BIG, BIG SPOILER ALERT: And as far as the feminist issue goes, all the men in this particular cinematic world are basically dicks, and the women deal with that depressing factor by dying. There is one single woman in this movie who successfully fights instead of throwing in the towel, and she turns out to be a man. I’m totally serious.)

bobby deerfield: the disappointment continues

I romanticize '70s movies; I know that. There's good reason for it. I'm convinced that film was undergoing a beautiful renaissance when I was a kid, and I was lucky to be learning how to watch movies at that time. One remembers the classics; one forgets about movies like this.

First point of order: you don’t get to be a Formula One champion without being a little bit obsessed with cars and driving. You don’t even get into the top twenty without that factor at play. Never having met the man, I will pretty much guarantee that Sebastian Vettel has never gone a week in his adult life without driving, tinkering with his car, or going crazy not being able to drive. Certainly he’s never, no matter how much in love he is with whomever, gone a day without thinking about driving. It’s not just racing: Nadal plays tennis in his head when he’s not on the court; Jack White channels constant music, even when he’s not touching a guitar. Since he was old enough to walk, I’d put money on it that Lionel Messi has never gone a day without touching a soccer ball, romantically blissed out or no.

Then there’s Bobby Deerfield, the eponym for this film. This guy is the racing champion of the world, and he doesn’t really seem to be that into racing, at least after the first half-hour of the film (which is, not coincidentally, the best part). How absurd is that? His big issue, according to the crazy woman with whom he falls inexplicably in love, is that he is too cautious in life. Too CAUTIOUS? A Formula One driver? Yes, sometimes a Felipe Masa might lose some edge after getting clonked on the head by a flying spring and bashing into the tyre-wall, but would you call the man cautious? He still gets into a Ferrari several times a year and dodges other crazy-assed adrenaline-freaks at speeds of several hundreds of miles per hour.

I know what you’re thinking: she means cautious about relationships. But he’s not. Quite the opposite: she’s the one who keeps running away. This movie has no internal cohesion.

On the other hand, this is Pacino before he expired: Pacino back when he was young and not only cared deeply about acting well but did it, with grace and a certain constancy, with quiet, introspective displays, before acting for him became synonymous with Being Loud. This was Pacino sandwiched between Dog Day Afternoon and And Justice For All, and so he was still a pleasure to watch whilst just teetering on the brink of his expiration date as one of the greats.

On the other hand, the scene where he does the Mae West impersonation is every bit as excruciating as it sounds, and this is Pacino stuck in a badly-scripted, stupid story. It purports to be about a Formula One champion who spins into an pit of existential angst when his team-mate is killed on a stretch of track which should not have been dangerous. Instead, it’s really about the crazy, dying German woman (badly played by Marthe Keller) with whom he supposedly falls in love (although there is no spark of onscreen chemistry between them) and her annoying, insulting manner towards him. She constantly accuses him of cowardice, calling herself brave for climbing into the basket of a hot-air balloon and simultaneously calling his racing “boring”.

I don’t for a second believe there’s an outstanding athlete in the world who will put up with the company of a person who so denigrates his passion, much less one who will give up, without a word or a trace of regret, his career to schlep around being in love with her while she’s dying. This movie is closer to Love Story than to Grand Prix, only it’s the BAD version of Love Story. Wrap your mind around THAT.

hopes dashed, and vast disappointments suffered

*SPOILER ALERT*

Deep Blue Sea: (2011. Dir: Terence Davies) I love Rachel Weisz. I love Tom Hiddleston, and I love Simon Russell Beale. Also I have an ancient and abiding fondness for that old English parlour-room theatre. So why was this movie such a slow trudge for me? The trouble can be laid at the doorstep of the two Terences, I suspect: director Terence Davies and original playwright Terence Rattigan.
The thing that Davies has always done extraordinarily well is to create an atmosphere of stunning beauty, with astonishingly convincing period details. Rattigan was a madly popular playwright in the first half of the twentieth century who fell out of favour alongside the rest of the Old Guard during the hip and with-it sixties.

Davies gets the details right again, or convinces us he does, which amounts to the same thing, but the story itself is moribund and lethargic, starting in the middle of a coma-like depression and never rising up from it. First of all, he’s coloured the whole thing in burnished golds, which looks museum-y and awful, and he’s put poor Rachel Weisz in soft-focus through nigh-on the entire thing, which tells me that either he doesn’t recognize her considerable beauty, which is just insane, or else it’s a clumsy comment on the character (she’s FALLEN out of FOCUS, baby). Whatever: it’s distracting and distancing, and, trust me, we don’t need further distance from these characters.

One of my favorite films of all time is Mamet’s version of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, but what Mamet got right, Davies got all wrong. First off, this script has been much rattled around: it is not a direct descendant of the original play, which one might think would make it better, more cinematic, but this one is still a miss, still a deadly bore. On top of that, he allows it to zombie along at a comatose depressive’s pace, which is bold, but doesn’t work. If the dialogue were more interesting, alright, but these folks have very little of any interest to say to one another. The finale is a foregone conclusion from the get-go; it’s all one very long and not very interesting coda.

You know how in some lesser Tennessee Williams plays (OK, even some of the greater ones, from a particular vantage point), a female character only makes sense if you re-cast her in your mind as a man in drag? I’m thinking of Eccentricities of a Nightingale in particular, but you could even argue about the Ava Gardner/Bette Davis role in Night of the Iguana. I’m getting a similar sense with this. There’s something about this terrible, fatally doomed love affair which makes no sense as filmed. She tries to off herself because he forgets her birthday. Well, alright, I guess I’ll buy that, but I won’t pay much. She keeps saying that he doesn’t love her, and yet we see him romancing her in ways which are obviously more than merely sexual, with tenderness and attention, certainly pointing to a man in love. Then she says he doesn’t love her “in the same way” that she loves him. Well, alright, but the way it’s filmed, it looks like some pretty nice love to me, and I’m losing some patience with this girl.

There is a suggestion that one of their issues is his lack of culture: the same sort of thing you find in a Tennessee Williams play. She is a classy gal slumming with some rough trade. But Hiddleston, for all his talent, is so very sharply-cheekboned, so veddy veddy upper-class, that it’s impossible to buy that one, not for any amount.

When at last they part, it’s so flatly written (“The old blue serge.” “Your shoes need a clean.” “I’ll miss you.” “Be safe.” “Be good.”) that even the myriad skills of Hiddleston and Weisz fail with some bedragglement.

The rare moments it snaps into top gear are when these two are fighting, or in those few moments when Simon Russell Beale is trying hard to reach out to his estranged wife. Again, he’s hampered by a soggy script, but he gives a good hard try.
Davies, as always, gives us interesting framing and a convincing portrait of post-WWII depressing London, but it’s not enough, not by half. It starts nowhere, goes nowhere, and the characters never rise into life.

*BIG SPOILER ALERT. But you know you’ve already seen it.*

The Dark Knight Rises: (2012. dir: Christopher Nolan) Wow. Did I watch the same movie everyone else did? Is there one good version they send out to most of the country, then a lame edition they send to the ass-end of Oregon? Because that's the one I had to sit through.

The best thing I can say about it is that it had some great, great moments. When Scarecrow is acting Fouquier-Tinville in the marvellously surreal kangaroo court ("Death or exile?"). When Bane is confronted by the squirrelly little rich weasel Daggett and he sets the back of one enormous hand on Daggett’s shoulder and asks in that weirdly avuncular voice, “Do you feel like you’re in charge?” When the President makes a speech that Gotham will not be abandoned, and when asked what that means, Commissioner Gordon says, “It means we’re on our own.” When Catwoman vanishes silently and Batman says, “So that’s what that feels like.”

I am also assured that if you watch the whole trilogy together, the tight-weave of interlacing themes and storylines is extremely pleasing. I believe you, but I’m not going to test it.

All that allowed, the story is full of absurd plot-turns that make no sense, defying not only laws of physics but of common sense. The great thing I remember about the Dark Knight graphic novels was that Bruce Wayne was a bitter man dealing with his mortality. Nolan makes a nod to this (the doctor’s visit in the beginning when he’s told he has no cartilage at all in his knees, which alone should leave him a near-complete cripple, immediately after which he dives out a window and rappels like an Olympian down the side of the building), but then with every life-threatening wound (a broken back? Are you kidding me? And then he, what, walks barefoot across the desert all the way to Gotham? Without money, or food or shoe-leather? And gets there in time to save the world? Get out of town, Nolan. And at the end: he just had a brutal fight with Bane, got gut-stabbed by a true professional, and yet he can jettison from the Bat miles over the ocean and, what, swim to safety wearing his bat armor? GET out of TOWN, Nolan!) it’s like they’ve forgotten that he hasn’t got real superpowers, that he’s a superhero solely by virtue of will power and rich-boy toys. Supernatural healing powers are not supposed to be part of the Batman package.

If you ever saw Mel Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ, you know that at some point (the point, I think, is different for every spectator but comes for everyone sometime) during the protracted, yea, interminable suffering of Jesus at the hands of the Romans, you’re empathizing, you’re empathizing, and then at some point you just kind of shut off, just go, “OK, no human could possibly withstand this much. Therefore you are not human. Therefore this whole thing is a kind of charade. You’re kind of cheating us into empathizing with you, Mr. Superhuman Christ Guy.” And there’s a certain disappointment in that. When the First Council of Nicea declared that Christ was Made of the Same Substance as God, and therefore birthless, deathless and eternal, it robbed the passion of a certain power, ie: that of a genuinely human suffering, which by definition a god can never truly know.

I reached that point somewhere in TDKR. Someplace, relatively early on, I think, it became apparent to me that if Bruce Wayne was really suffering this, and if Bruce Wayne was really just a very powerful but mortally human man, he would be dead or incapacitated. I found the recovery in the hole (despite Tom Conti, whom I was very glad to see again after all these many years) to be an absurd waste of time and energy. Plus, anyone who’s ever seen a Star Wars movie would be able to tell you that doing it without the rope was the big secret. And you still don’t buy it, do you? Because why should you? It has nothing to do with this particular physical reality. This whole movie doesn’t. In the unfairly maligned John Carter, we the audience are introduced to the alternate laws of physics on a different planet (ie: on Mars, gravity has a very different grasp). In Nolan’s Gotham, we are being told it’s an adjunct to our own world, and yet impossible things happen twice a minute.

And that’s not even addressing the politics, which I originally took to be egregiously plutocratic. (We poor folk can’t make good decisions ourselves; we need rich men like Bruce Wayne and scofflaw policemen like Commissioner Gordon making our decisions for us. Otherwise we’ll place ourselves in the hands of evil Occupy Wall Street types like Bane, arm ourselves and start killing the good, downtrodden authority figures.) Later I decided the politics is meant to be a shambles, another evidence of darkness in a very dark world. Nolan’s Gotham incorporates a populace, both rich and poor, that is greedy, potentially violent, kind of horrible. Which is fine, except that it leads to my biggest disappointment.

My biggest disappointment in the whole disheartening morass is the cheat at the end. The whole thing, -- the whole trilogy, -- is building up to Bruce giving everything, sacrificing his life for the good of Gotham, for our good, despite our unworthiness. (And, yes, it is a Christ thing, thanks for asking.) I cried at his funeral, OK? When the Dickens was being read. And then we find out he slipped the noose and is living the high life in Italy with Catwoman? Cheater! It’s like in the Last Temptation of Christ, when Christ forgoes his destiny to live a long and pleasant life.

When all's said and done, you want to go to Florence just long enough to ask Wayne, “Why did I give you so much of my time, if you’re just going to choose the normal-guy life? And can I have it back, please?”

*SPOILER ALERT*

Red Desert: (1964. dir: Michelangelo Antonioni) This is the kind of movie we’ve been arguing about at work lately, since the new top ten directors’ and critics’ lists have come out. (How important is innovation when ranking a film –- read: Citizen Kane -- once those innovations have been subsumed into the common cinematic language?) Red Desert won the Golden Lion at Venice the year I was born, and you can see why: it must have felt intensely modern at the time, wonderfully inventive. But is that enough to make it a great film across the long haul? It’s a movie shaped from unique and exciting camera-work, with wonderful use of color, and even that can’t make up for the boredom of being annoyed by a crazy woman for two-plus hours. She’s the kind of crazy woman who exists only in movies directed by men, the kind who looks like Monica Vitti, writhes sensuously when in real life she would be freezing rigid and stone-like (some directors get that right. See the Skin I Live In, or Puzzle of a Downfall Child), the kind who plays crazy by indulging in random twitches and vacant stares, but without convincing that there’s anything behind that stare except, “Man, I wish he’d call cut.” Richard Harris in his prime is wasted in his Observer role, and obviously uncomfortable acting in Italian. Like many Antonioni films, it ends where it starts, and her great realization (spoiler alert here! get ready) is that the secret to living is to accept what happens to you as Your Life.