A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

Embarrassingly, this is my first Cronenberg film. Also somewhat embarrassingly, I'm still unsure of my initial reaction to it -- as I was watching it, I think I was dismissing a lot of it as trite, rolling my eyes at some of the '80s-movies bullying of Viggo Morensen's son, for example. I mean, the kid catches a fly ball in gym class and it sets off the class douchebag? Isn't he supposed to hit on his girlfriend or something?

But what I think I missed is that Cronenberg was using these cliches and exaggerating them in some cases in order to explore his and his audience's reactions to violence. Another example of this is the town of Millbrook, Indiana, in which Mortensen's family lives. Here's Cronenberg on the setting in a Village Voice interview:

It's perversely idealized. It's almost Twilight Zone-y. There's an appeal to that longing for an imaginary past -- a yearning for an innocence that was never so pure anyway. It's meant to be recognizably real, but it has to play as mythological as well. That's part of the balancing act.

That self-consciousness helps when we see other events play out that we've seen before, like Mortensen saving the day when two killers invade his diner. He guns them down, and we do feel a visceral thrill that justice has been served. But we also get a brief look at the half-blown-off face of one of the baddies. We don't feel sorry for him, but we are repulsed by the sight of what violence does to the human body. And the incident starts the unraveling of the nice Midwestern persona of Mortensen's character, as people from his past start to show up and call into question who he really is. The "perversely idealized" town, I think, is supposed to put the audience on guard that this isn't reality, it's more of a metaphor than anything -- as a poster on criterionforum.org put it, it's Mortensen's "misguided ideal" that his body won't let him achieve because it's so natural committing violence.

On the other hand, the same poster, who admits he loves the film, says "the inherent problem of the film is that it chooses to undermine the conventional revenge flick by emulating it to excess." That excess is what I saw the first time around more than the undermining, but in reading and writing about the film, I'm starting to understand the subversion much better.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

I have no idea what I can say about this movie that hasn't been said somewhere, even though it's only been out three weeks. For posterity, though, here are a few of the many things I liked:

1) I'm no judge of acting, but I was on edge whenever Heath Ledger's Joker was onscreen.

2) The opening heist scene was both tense and a perfect intro to the Joker's methods and morality.

3) The shot of the Joker hanging his head out the window of (I forget) either a cop car or the semi-truck. Some people have suggested the movie should've ended there, and I can see their point.

And a few of the things I didn't:

1) Two-Face's transformation felt rushed, and added another prong to the story that I didn't think needed to be there -- save him for the third film.

2) I had no idea what the hell was going on in the waterfront scene before Batman's final showdown with the Joker.

3) Some of the obvious tie-ins to today's political situation took me out of the movie. For example, Batman's wiretapping policy -- when Morgan Freeman says, "This is wrong," I almost groaned. Now of course, spying on an entire city during a normal day is wrong, but this is the ticking time-bomb scenario that never actually happens in real life but happens all the time in the movies. All Batman wants to use this for is to find the location of the Joker, who he knows is going to kill a lot of people that day. The whole situation is an obvious Patriot Act reference, but if we're really supposed to contemplate the ethics of our real world government, we can't really do it in such a fantastic scenario (one that pro-domestic spying and pro-torture folks will invariably bring up to try to justify these kinds of tactics). Freeman's line comes off as a half-hearted sop to the left so the movie can at least give the appearance of exploring both sides of the issue when really, there's only path for Batman to take to save Gotham. The executive producer of 24, a registered Democrat, said something interesting about that show's tendency to justify torture: "The politics of the show are narrative politics." Batman was just following narrative politics.

That gripe aside, I liked a lot of the other inquisitions into whether Batman's presence and actions helped or hurt Gotham -- it's suggested that Batman helped inspire villains like the Joker ("You complete me"). In that respect, it's like several other Nolan films since Memento. As an auteurist whore, I'm happy to find thematic connections between his "artier" films like Memento and The Prestige and blockbusters like the Batman franchise. He seems to be interested in issues like the psychic toll of fighting injustice, the thin line between justice and revenge, guilt, the power of memory, etc. 

Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)

This is the fourth Mann/John Alton combo movie I've seen (after T-Men, Raw Deal, and Border Incident), and I'm now pretty sure they could make me want to watch a movie of Keanu Reeves reading the phone book. The visuals in all their collaborations are absolutely stunning. Even the still at the left looks pretty good, and that's taken from a shitty transfer, apparently the only one any the DVD's of this film have been made from. This is quintessential noir cinematography. Yes, this is noir, even if it does take place in 1794 France.

How nasty and twisted is this movie? At the end of the film, when the villain is pleading his case in front of a mob, his former right-hand man turns to the man standing next to him and says, "Shut his face." So the guy SHOOTS HIM IN THE FACE! This is, of course, right before he gets beheaded at the guillotine. This is hard-core for 1949. 
 

Bullfighter and the Lady (Budd Boetticher, 1951)

I'm feeling lazy and I have other films to catch up writing about, so here's what I wrote over at criterionforum.org:

I thought it was beautifully photographed, with an interesting mix of stylized low-key compositions (strange to see in a Boetticher film, since all the Ranown Westerns are in color) and documentary-style footage of bullfighting (though there is some stylization there, too, particularly in the lyrical slow-motion sequence at the end). I also thought Boetticher handled the relationship between the famous torero and his wife, as well as the bullfighting training scenes, with aplomb. As far as the main story arc goes, I was intrigued early on with the idea of the fair-haired American nonchalantly asking the greatest torero in Mexico to teach him the ropes basically so he can impress a broad. I kept waiting for Robert Stack's character to get his comeuppance for not understanding that his attitude and behavior, while rewarded in America, are not as well-received in Mexico (ala John Grady Cole in the novels All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain). But he kept getting better than he deserved, even after he inadvertently caused the death of his mentor. I didn't think he deserved the redemption he achieved, but the movie thought he did.

There's some great stuff on Boetticher's career over at Senses of Cinema, too.

Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975)

It's been awhile since I've seen one of these good ol'-fashioned '70s paranoid thrillers. I watched Coppola's The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men a long time ago. Coincidentally, and I'm sure someone has written about this somewhere, at the end of Condor I saw a perfect segue into All the President's Men, which came out a year later.

The most obvious similarity is Robert Redford playing the crusading hero fighting against corruption that goes up to unfathomable heights in the federal government. Another one comes in the coda to Condor, when Redford says he's told the whole sordid story to the New York Times. Here's where it gets interesting. At first, you feel that Redford has scored a victory, using the press to expose governmental corruption the same way he would as a reporter in All the President's Men. But then the CIA higher-up, played by Cliff Robertson, asks him, "Do you think they'll print it?" implying that the CIA has the power to squash the story. Redford reasserts that they will, but the film ends with a freeze-frame on Redford's expression definitely betraying some doubt that justice will be done. As it turns out, Pollack wanted that ambiguity, talking about the ending in this 1976 interview. Of course, in All the President's Men, the idea of the press going up against a crooked, monolithic institution was explored further, with the press coming out on top (that being said, knowing that this was real lent the film a certain sadness that so much of our government could be so corrupt).

Elsewhere in the interview, Pollack (as everyone has assumed anyway) said the Watergate scandal was a prominent subtext of Condor:

Here I tried to deal, as much as I could, with trust and suspicion, paranoia, which I think is happening in this country, when every institution I grew up believing was sacrosanct is now beginning to crumble. It’s destroying, in a very serious way, a certain kind of trust that is essential to have in a working society.

These days, that would count as an optimistic outlook on our country's leadership. Which is why so many films have come out in the last few years that have addressed issues like the war in Iraq, torture, etc. This article from The Atlantic analyzes the resurgence of this '70s-esque phenomenon. The most interesting part of the story for me was the end, in which author Ross Douthat contrasts the attitude of the country during the wars that shaped their respective eras in order to explain (and I'm simplifying a bit here) why there haven't been any real good movies about the Iraq War.

That is, in the end, the key distinction. The Vietnam War was a bipartisan fiasco that took place amid profound social disarray, and everyone was understood to be complicit—Democrats as well as Republicans, ordinary citizens as well as politicians, the soldiers on the ground as well as the Best and the Brightest shipping them overseas. The conflict in Iraq is occurring during a time of relative domestic peace, and as a result the pessimism it’s produced, though real enough, hasn’t shaken our civilizational confidence in nearly the same way.

The difference is readily apparent in our politics. The Vietnam era had riots and rallies, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army, because the rot seemed to go so deep that only desperate measures were worth contemplating. The resistance movements of this era, by contrast, spend most of their time raising money for Democratic candidates, because it seems to many people that winning a few elections could make the nightmare go away. And what’s true for MoveOn.org is true for the entertainment industry. The popular culture of the 1970s reflected the widespread sense that only a revolution could set things right. But nobody’s going to write a 21st-century version of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), a book about the revolutionary spirit and countercultural excesses of ’70s Hollywood stars; this generation of stars is too busy fund-raising for Hillary and Obama.
All of this suggests that the ’70s revival, though pervasive at the moment, may not have that much staying power. 

The original decade of nightmares didn’t end when the Vietnam War did; it persisted through Ford and Carter, oil shocks and stagflation, and the Iran hostage crisis. The new ’70s may go out with George W. Bush.

All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

I had no idea Marilyn Monroe was in this movie.

I had heard all about Bette Davis' performance, and once I saw George Sanders, who I remembered as being excellent as a total ass in Rebecca, I knew I was in for some delightful bitchiness from him. But when Monroe appeared as Sanders' date at the party Davis was hosting, I almost had to run to the computer to check if it was really her. She was playing a similar role here as in her first movie, The Asphalt Jungle, earlier that year -- appear in a few scenes subject to the whims of a man older and more powerful than her, breathy and befuddled, and that was it.



To be fair, though, she wasn't completely the object of derision here, even if she was "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art." She got off a few good lines, one about theatrical producers looking like "unhappy rabbits" and one about the guy who usually abuses her, Addison DeWitt (played by Sanders): Eve Harrington says she's scared to talk to DeWitt because she's afraid she'd bore him. "Don't worry," Monroe says cheerfully, "You won't even get a chance to talk."

Of course, Davis is the showstopper here, and I don't really need or want to write about one of the most written-about roles in movie history. I'll just say that I enjoyed Mankiewicz's dialogue coming out of her mouth and Sanders' mouth (hey, and Monroe's, too, I guess) much more than from any of the other characters. Fortunately, they both talk a lot.

Besides those characters' dialogue, the thing I liked best about the film was that it never showed either Margo or Eve, one a consistently huge star and the other a rising star, actually acting. It's almost as if whether they were actually that good or not on stage was beside the point -- the whole point of the film is that Margo begets Eve, who at the end begets Phoebe, and on and on. Each might have special talents on stage, but they all have (or had, in Margo's case) the same ruthless and selfish ambition. The implications of the last shot of the film are pretty obvious -- the multitude of reflections of Phoebes in the mirror show how all these actresses are essentially alike, and that the cycle will continue ad infinitum. The film isn't about acting, it's about actors.

I can't believe it took me flipping through the channels to get my mind off the baby's closet I'd just marred with my ham-handed handyman skills in order to see this movie for the first time. To (very loosely) paraphrase Margo Channing, there are several holes in the closet where a shelf should be.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

One of the many huge blind spots in my film viewing (along with musicals, horror, and gay-panic comedies) is silent films -- off-hand, I think I've only seen Birth of a Nation, Metropolis, and The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's pretty terrible for someone who's a film teacher. Now, after seeing Wall-E, I'm even more eager to finally see more silent films, especially those of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, since Pixar people supposedly watched a lot of those while making this movie.

I absolutely loved the first half-hour of the movie, which was pretty much dialogue-free as Wall-E traversed a post-apocalyptic landscape, engaging in the Sisyphean task of compacting garbage for a race of people who no longer lived there. Re-reading that sentence and reminding yourself that Pixar made this movie, you can understand why this could only go on for so long. It's not that Pixar shies away from more adult-oriented thematic material, but this was abstracted to the point of avant-garde, considering the mainstream appeal of Pixar. I thought Kenneth Turan put it pretty well in his review when he said "the company has an uncanny gift for pushing things further without pushing too far."

Turan, like most other critics, goes on to say that the second half of the film is more predictable and formulaic but, also like pretty much every critic, gives it a pass. I'm tempted to agree. I did think the film got a little preachy once the humans entered the film and the chase scenes didn't do much for me, but I realize that pretty much every Pixar film (or any mainstream Hollywood film, really) is going to have stuff like that to draw in the kiddies. It's not that I wanted a completely unhappy ending (I wanted Wall-E and Eve to end up together -- I'm not made of stone), but I didn't think the film needed that happy ending AND the rest of humanity finding redemption. Like my lovely wife said, "I could've done without the humans altogether." Then again, that might make this more like The Road, which might not go over as well with the under-8 set. 

One last reaction from my lovely wife, who's eight months pregnant (did I mention she's lovely?): she just asked me why none of the other Wall-E robots were still running. I pointed out that she had no problem believing that a robot had the full range of human emotions. "That's not that unbelievable to me," she said. "I anthropomorphize everything." That's true. She currently sleeps with five pillows to help support her, um, well, everything. Anyway, she named the one she drapes her arm across "Clooney." 

The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937)

Most people know The Awful Truth as the screwball comedy that helped make Cary Grant a star. To my lovely wife, it's the movie with a scene where a cute dog hides its eyes to play hide-and-seek. Of course, my wife, owner of two good eyes, is also a fan of Cary Grant. But it was Mr. Smith (Asta from the Thin Man movies -- so huge he has his own fan site) who won the lady's heart. 

Now, she happens to be working on a book that's a romantic comedy that also includes a dog playing a prominent role, so I thought she might have some pithy comments or cogent analysis after we finished watching the movie tonight -- we had to break it up into two nights, since being eight months pregnant is apparently "tiring" or something like that. Instead, this is what she gave me: "I liked Mr. Smith." A combination of pregnancy brain and inveterate love of dogs produced a kindergarten thesis from my English major wife. Oh well -- classic Hollywood screwballs are one of the few genres we'll willingly sit in the same room for, which explains why there will probably be a blog post in the near future on Mamma Mia!

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

While everyone seems to acknowledge the impact of Easy Rider, it doesn't seem like many people actually think it's a great movie. It helped make Jack Nicholson a star, it helped create the New Hollyood movement, but beyond that, I guess it's more likely to be buried in a time capsule to represent the '60s, much like Wall Street for the '80s or Reality Bites for the '90s. I think Roger Ebert nailed it pretty well in his Great Movies essay on it, acknowledging its lasting power, but having some fun at the expense of some of the more dated and obvious scenes:

One of their bikes needs work, and they borrow tools at a ranch, leading to a labored visual juxtaposition of wheel-changing and horse-shoeing. Then they have dinner with the weathered rancher and his Mexican-American brood, and Fonda delivers the first of many quasi-profound lines he will dole out during the movie: "It's not every man who can live off the land, you know. You can be proud." (The rancher, who might understandably have replied, "Who the hell asked you?" nods gratefully.)

So much of the movie defies the usual narrative conventions of Hollywood, it was a shame to see the hippies v. rednecks plot play such a huge role -- the southerners in this movie make Larry the Cable Guy look Socratic. Of course, that conflict was necessary to bring about the tragic end of Captain America and Billy, and I think their seeming martyrdom is what turns a lot of people off about the film, especially to those who are tired of hearing about the wonderful idealism of the '60s. Ebert cites Pauline Kael's review of the film in which she says

the movie's sentimental paranoia obviously rang true to a large, young audience's vision. In the late '60s, it was cool to feel that you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless.

But you also have to take into account Fonda's cryptic line, "We blew it" the night before they're killed. Apparently, Hopper has said that line referred to Captain America's feelings about their ill-gotten money, obtained through a cocaine deal at the beginning of the film. That, I think, at least makes the heroes culpable (and at least one of them is aware that they are culpable), and as Ebert pointed out in his original review in 1969, these supposedly anti-establishment heroes actually sold out by trying to get rich quick and base a lifestyle around money, even if they don't look the type. Taking that into account, the movie reads less like a tragic love letter to the '60s counterculture than a well-deserved nail in the coffin for it (the bad acid trip in the cemetery also supports that reading, I think).

One last observation: I liked Nicholson in the movie for the most part, except for his Very Important Speech about why "normal" people feel threatened by Captain America and Billy (again: another reason why you can understand people thinking the movie is too sympathetic to the hippies). Also, I didn't find his ramblings about aliens while stoned very funny, either. Maybe it's because I liked this version so much better, almost 25 years later: