Wild

It has been my practice since the start of this millennium to see a movie on either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. At the top of my current must-see list was Foxcatcher, but when i noticed that there was a morning showing of Wild that would end around the time the first showing of Foxcatcher began, i decided to be especially good to myself and see both, since i am woefully behind in my moviegoing this season. I hadn't read Cheryl Strayed's memoir, on which the film is based, and honestly knew very little about the story, besides the fact that it was about a woman who goes on an epic walk-about. Somewhere in the back of my mind, i feared that it was one of those self-indulgent stories about a woman who has the money and leisure time to go off on a spiritual quest to solve problems that seem far less pressing than my own. Nevertheless, i knew that Wild had gotten good reviews and was being nominated for several awards, so i thought it would be a good lead-in to the main feature. As things turned out, i was so moved by Wild that i had to postpone Foxcatcher until another day so that i could savor the mood a little longer. 

There are movies that are fun to write about, whether it is because of their aesthetics, their history, the compelling performances, or just because they tell a good story. Then there are movies that I find it very difficult to write about because i connect with them on such a personal level that i can't even say if they are "good" by objective standards or not. I'm pretty certain that Wild is a "good" movie, but i'm even more certain that it was the best movie i could have chosen to see today. It touched me in a way that few movies have, perhaps in part because when i was young and -- like the protagonist -- dealing with grief in some very un-therapeutic ways, i too dreamed of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, of losing myself  in the beauty of the natural world and challenging myself in its unforgiving terrain. But i never did. 

There is, of course, a long tradition of losing oneself in the wilds, whether it be Dante's midlife crisis, Thoreau's rather tame wilderness of Walden Pond, or even Christopher McCandless's ill-fated trek to Alaska. But it is, as the old Joe Jackson song says, different for girls. There are a whole additional array of terrors in the form of men who may or may not be predators, which any woman who has been out there on her own is bound to have encountered at least once. And the film does a good job of capturing that substratum of anxiety that requires a woman who undertakes a solitary quest like this one to have an additional layer of courage, beyond what is needed to face the physical challenges of the environment and the psychological challenges of having all that time alone with her own thoughts, memories, and regrets. 

Above all else, this movie felt honest to me: honest in the weariness, determination, and occasional terror of Reese Witherspoon's performance; honest in the graceful and ephemeral presence of Laura Dern as the mother whose death she still mourns; and honest in the bruises, the pain, and the triumph of a life-restoring journey. 

Life Itself

Roger Ebert is one of those rare public figures that i wish i'd had a chance to meet. Whenever i would read one of his reviews i would feel almost as though i did know him, as though we'd just watched the movie together and were discussing it over a cup of coffee afterward. That's the kind of writer he was: personal, clear, entertaining, insightful.

There was so much about him that i admired: not just his wonderful reviews, but also his absolute and democratic love of movies, his openness about his alcoholism, his refusal to accept defeat when confronted with a level of illness that would send most of us into utter despair. And yet, i was a bit hesitant about seeing Steve James's documentary Life Itself. I was a little afraid that it would be a simple praise-piece. How could it be otherwise? After all, Roger had died just over a year ago after a very public struggle with an especially virulent form of cancer; and, although it is a cliche to describe someone's struggle with cancer as "brave," Roger Ebert had been brave, incomparably brave in confronting his illness, and in remaining in the public eye after surgery had drastically changed his appearance. And he'd been both brilliant in his embrace of new technologies that gave him a way of continuing to share his thoughts on the movies and generous in providing a forum for young critics to reach a wider audience and continue the work he had begun.

Of course, i should have known that Steve James would not direct a puff-piece, that like his classic, Hoop Dreams (1994), this would be a complex picture of a man who could be an avuncular movie reviewer or a competitive pain in the ass. Life Itself is a loving look into the life of this man whom, on one level, we all knew so well. Perhaps because i am no longer young myself, i was especially moved by the way in which the film makes us reflect on what it means to reach the end of a life well-lived. And by "well-lived" i do not mean perfect, for Roger Ebert was anything but. He was, as we all are, a work in progress--but oh what he managed to accomplish in the course of that life! 

The camera is unflinching in capturing some of the details of Ebert's final months, and it is unflinching in large part because that seems to be what Roger wanted. We watch uncomfortably as he receives nourishment through a tube in his throat: it is excruciating to watch, because it was clearly excruciating for him to endure. But endure he did, for as long as he could. And he let the camera catch his pain, because that too is part of life. And he kept working. That is perhaps what amazes me most: he never stopped. When his distinctive midwestern voice was stilled, he found new ways to continue sharing his thoughts on the movies with his audience. Even his signature "thumbs-up" gesture took on new and more poignant significance as it became a more general way for him to communicate and a symbol of his enduring optimism. 

Ebert's life wasn't just reviewing movies, and the film does a fine job of capturing the complexities of his relationships with other people, from his often contentious professional partnership with the late Gene Siskel to the friendship he shared with directors like Werner Herzog and  Rahmin Bahrani. But most touching are the scenes between Ebert and his wife Chaz and the glimpses they offer of a life filled with love, mutual understanding, and a sense of two people who both knew and appreciated how lucky they were to have found each other and shared their lives. 

When the end credits of Life Itself began to roll, i found myself unable to leave the theater because i couldn't stop the tears from rolling down my face. They weren't sad tears, despite the pain and debilitating surgeries that Roger Ebert endured and the emotional pain that was so clearly written on Chaz's face as her beloved husband struggled through his final illness. They were instead tears of appreciation for this reminder of -- as the title says -- life itself, in all its beauty and pain, its struggles and accomplishments. 

Vampires of Detroit

Up until this afternoon, if you had asked me to name my favorite cinematic vampires, i would have probably rattled off a list: Nosferatu (both Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski), the classic Bela Lugosi, the oddly coiffed Gary Oldman. But at the top of that list would have been the poignant castrato child-vampire who befriends a pale and lonely little boy in that moody Swedish masterpiece,  Let the Right One In (2008). Today, after seeing Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, that list has to be redrawn. This is the vampire world i'd bare my neck to be a part of -- a world in which even the blood, sipped from delicate aperitif glasses, looks delicious. Imagine what it would be like to have such an existence, to survive long enough to learn dozens of languages, read thousands of books, master an orchestra's worth of musical instruments, and converse with a centuries-old Christopher Marlowe (still holding a grudge against Shakespeare though he's outlived him by 400 years); how it would feel to walk the sinuous, shadowy streets of Tangiers or the ominous wasteland of post-industrial, post-prosperity Detroit, at midnight without fear. 

Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston)

Manic Pixie Dream Vampire Ava (Mia Wasikowska)

Only Lovers Left Alive does not depend on an intricate plot or an orgy of blood-sucking; in fact, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), the one exuberantly insatiable vampire in the film, is presented as a comic figure, a "vampire brat" as my companion and i dubbed her. Instead, the movie focuses on relationships and reflections on the state of the world as viewed through the eyes of those who have had a very long time to observe it. Central to the film is the relationship between the lovers of the title, Eve (Tilda Swinton), who somehow manages to simultaneously convey both serenity and ecstasy, and Adam (Tom Hiddleston), a melancholy musician/inventor depressed to the point of suicide at the mess the living ("zombies," as he refers to them) have made of the Earth. They live on opposite sides of the world: she in a sumptuous nest of tapestries and books in Tangiers and he, surrounded by rare musical instruments in what would seem to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but is in fact Detroit. Yet they are joined at the soul and deeply in love. When he needs her, she flies to his side (on the red-eye, for obvious reasons). Eve and Adam complement each other both in appearance and philosophy. Both are pale, elegant figures in their century-old dressing gowns and dark glasses, but where the dark-haired and black-clad Adam seems almost paralyzed by despair in his tinkerer's Paradise (i.e. junk heap) of a house, Eve spins in dervishly delight, her wild mane of blonde hair swirling about her. Through the window of Eve's Tangiers home she looks out on a small plaza crisscrossed by people and activity throughout the night. Adam is cocooned, cringing in horror when the doorbell rings, looking out on the street through a makeshift security camera set-up at the unwanted groups of teen admirers of his music who have somehow discovered where he lives. His walls are covered with old cardboard egg-crates for sound insulation, further cushioning him from the world outside. 

I wish that i knew Jim Jarmusch, that i could call him on the phone right now to tell him how much i loved this smart, funny, erotic, and thought-provoking movie. And then i'd ask him how he discovered that Detroit was not only an exquisite counterpoint to Tangiers, but also the ideal setting for the melancholy Adam to make his home. It is in many ways the perfect illustration of the themes of mortality, immortality, and ecological suicide that the film explores. When Eve arrives in Detroit, Adam takes her on a tour of the city in all its crumbling splendor (with one happy side-trip to the house where Jack White grew up); the most striking location on this tour is the Michigan Theatre building, one of those grand movie palaces of the 1920s, now used as a parking garage -- a beautiful ruin of cathedral-like dimensions, reduced to sheltering the product that was once the pride of Detroit, the cars that, for a while at least, made this city rich.  And while i had him on the phone, i would tell him how much Only Lovers reminded me of a very different movie, the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugarman, with which it shares many similarities in its Detroit settings -- from the lonely deteriorating house on an eerily empty street that the musician calls home, to the abandoned factories and seedy bars of this once-great city. Most of all, like Only Lovers Left Alive, Searching for Sugarman has at its heart the story of a musician's musician, a man who through his art has survived the rumors of his death. So call me, Jim Jarmusch, let's talk about it.

Watch the trailer for Only Lovers Left Alive here.

Celine and Jesse Redux

The first thought that occurred to me after seeing Before Midnight (2013) was what a luxury it is that a film like this even exists: a luxury for director Richard Linklater, born of his ability to work with dedicated actors and on a low-enough budget to make the kind of movies that can take the time to explore -- really explore -- the complexities of human relationships; a luxury for two fine and serious actors to develop their characters over the course of their relationship; and a luxury for the viewer to walk the streets of Vienna, Paris, and the Peloponnese beside them, to watch Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) change and mature along the bumpy road of their distinctly non-Hollywood romance. 

Before Sunrise

Celine and Jesse's story begins in Before Sunrise (1995), when they meet on a train traveling west from Budapest. They are both young, beautiful, and bright. They strike up a conversation that is intense in the way that everything in life is (or at least should be) intense when one is twenty-two and taking on the big and small questions of life, love, and the world in general. Reluctant to say goodbye when the train arrives in Vienna, Jesse spontaneously asks Celine to get off the train with him, and with equal spontaneity, she does. The two wander through that lovely city all night, drinking coffee, debating, and becoming intimate. When morning arrives and Celine must catch her train to Paris, there is a moment in the station that hangs suspended in time as we and they wonder if this is it -- one beautiful moment to remember for a lifetime -- or if these two young lovers will ever meet again. They don't exchange phone numbers, but they hurriedly make the decision to meet again in the same spot in six months. We are left to wonder if they ever do, until that question is finally answered nine years later in Before Sunset (2004). 

Before Sunset

The second film is set in Paris, where Jesse has come to Shakespeare and Co. to give a reading of his successful novel, based on his night with Celine. She is in the audience. Although Jesse has only a few hours until he has to catch a flight to New York, the two slip away for a stroll through the winding streets of Paris. We learn that Jesse had returned to Vienna for the proposed rendezvous, but that Celine had been unable to get there. Life goes on, finding them now both in their early thirties, she with a career in humanitarian work, he a successful author with a wife and son. But that one perfect night and a long series of "what-ifs" still connect them to each other, though they have not exchanged a word in nine long years. 

It is that "what-if" that makes these first two films so true and so satisfying for this viewer (and i'm sure for many others as well). Who hasn't had some brief, beautiful encounter and wondered what would have happened if...? It might not have been set in anywhere nearly as romantic as Vienna, or with someone as attractive as Julie Delpy or Ethan Hawke. But there are those moments when you are so young, and so completely open, that you feel like you could share every drop of your being with someone you didn't even know a few hours earlier. You might be in your eighties, looking back at the end of a long, eventful, and satisfying life, and still remember that moment, that person, that feeling, that loss. Richard Linklater was inspired by just such an encounter with a young woman named Amy Lehrhaupt, with whom he spent a night wandering the streets of Philadelphia in 1989. Sadly -- and unbeknownst to Linklater, who had lost contact with her -- Lehrhaupt died in a motorcycle accident shortly before filming began on Before Sunrise. Before Midnight is dedicated to her.

Although it answers the big question left hanging at the end of the first film, Before Sunset is not the typically happy and tidy ending to this story. Jesse and Celine are both older and a little more bruised by life; they are beginning to grow into the personalities that were still taking shape in the first film. Yet the feelings they shared in Vienna are still there, and although the consequences of their decision are far more complex than they would have been nine years earlier, they embrace this second chance. Celine caught her train at the end of the first film, but this time Jesse never makes it to the airport for his flight back to New York.

Before Midnight

The ending of Before Sunset is a satisfying one for any romantic. We brush aside the big questions of the family that Jesse leaves behind in New York and the more complicated issue of what it means to be involved in a romance that has been -- for lack of a better word -- romanticized, both privately within the imaginations of the two lovers and publicly in a best-selling novel. But when, after another nine-year interval, we catch up with Celine and Jesse again, this time on a vacation in Greece, they are coping with the consequences of that decision: he with guilt over his son, who lives in Chicago with Jesse's embittered ex-wife; she with frustration over how much of her own life has been put on hold for Jesse's benefit and with her own ambivalence in her role as mother to the couple's twin daughters. They are no longer bursting with youth, independence, and possibilities; they are a middle-aged couple dealing with the problems and irritations that come with a shared life. Before Midnight is both heartbreaking and heartwarming as it explores the repercussions of the choices we make in life. 

For any viewer who has followed this series from the beginning, there is a comfort and familiarity in seeing Delpy and Hawke grow and change over the course of nearly twenty years. How fortunate or prescient of Linklater to choose these two actors for his leads. Not only do they seem to share the director's dedication to this project, but they are both actors with that most rare of qualities: the willingness to age gracefully in front of the camera. Of course, it helps that Delpy is French and therefore presumably immune to Hollywood's compulsion to turn ever actress over thirty-five into some strange waxworks version of her younger self; but when she is on the screen, she is there as a beautiful woman of forty, believable as a character who has shared a life with someone, who has children, has a career, and has to wrestle with the dissatisfactions and self-questioning that come at that stage in life. In short, she and Hawke both feel palpably real in these roles, and have grown more so with each performance.  Celine and Jesse are not always easy to love, but then, who is? And no matter how self-absorbed he might be or how prickly she sometimes is, this is how real people are outside the world of fairy tale endings, and it is impossible not to care about them and hope to run into them another nine years down the road.

Breaking My Vow of Silence

It's been a rough six months, dear reader, in which i've battled with what i can only describe as a combination of resurgent writer's block and a case of cinephobia, an almost total inability to partake of the thing that most sustains me. Literally months went by without a single trip to the movie theater, an unheard of thing for yours truly. Even in my scruffy youth, i could and would always scrounge up the price of a movie ticket, even if it meant subsisting on a diet of Philly soft pretzels and brown rice. But not lately. Among the few movies that i've gone to see since the start of the fall were Killer Joe, a wonderfully demented little piece of perversity that actually made me start to like Matthew McConaughey again, and Christian Petzold's Barbara, a quietly powerful film that explores the oppressive atmosphere of life in the former East Germany. 

Watch the trailer for Barbara here.

Things are, however, finally looking up: I've been to three of this season's big titles in the past three days and have another week of free time to catch up on a few more. On Sunday, i went to see Les Misérables; yesterday, Life of Pi, and today, Lincoln. Since there are already plenty of well-written, thoughtful reviews of all three films, i won't go into any great detail about them individually. But each film invites a different kind of watching, and that's something that i take great pleasure in. Les Miz is so familiar--is there anyone who hasn't seen at least one stage production of it?--we know all the music and struggle not to burst into song along with the characters at every turn. Hell, some of us have even read the book! But there's a good reason why it is so familiar, why we go back to read/see it again and again: it is one of the world's great stories of suffering humanity, of nobility, and of the possibility of redemption. It is cathartic. It makes us feel better about the human race. Still, such familiarity can be a terrible obstacle for a film, but in this case i found the whole thing very affecting, very moving. I left the theater humming those familiar songs and thinking that maybe this time i should try to tackle the novel in French. I probably won't, but it's nice to feel that inspired.

               

                                              

I was originally pretty skeptical about Life of Pi. I'd read and enjoyed the novel, but hadn't thought of it as especially cinematic; and --gasp!-- it was in 3D. Oh me of little faith! Has Ang Lee ever let me down? Of course he hasn't! I found the film mesmerizing, beautiful, hypnotic, and very hard to put into words. I'm usually turned off by films that seem too effects-driven, but this film used special effects, 3D, and CGI to the most exquisite advantage. I felt like i could have stayed on that lifeboat with Pi and Richard Parker and sailed around the world for years.

I went to see Lincoln primarily for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, and that was as brilliant as i hoped it would be. But the pleasures of the film went beyond that. Tony Kushner's screenplay is a delight, rich in that kind of zingy nineteenth-century political rhetoric that makes you realize how very dull and plodding most of our politicians are today. The film focuses so specifically on the political maneuvering to abolish slavery through the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution that it might easily have become bogged down with the simplistic sanctification of a great moment in history.  Instead it is alive with strategizing, scoundrels, and large moral questions. It is always a good thing when a historical film leaves you wanting to know more, and in the case of Lincoln, i was especially intrigued by the character of Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and want to read more about him. One criticism that i feel that i need to make (and i think that many others have expressed a similar opinion) is that the movie goes on for about ten minutes too long. There is the perfect emotional conclusion as we watch Abraham Lincoln leaving the White House on his way to the theater, his back slowly receding until he is no longer there, at which point the audience let out a collective sigh. But then the movie goes on, as though Spielberg doesn't trust his audience to have sufficient grasp of history to know what happens next. And so it continues unnecessarily, showing poor wee Tad in hysterical tears at the news that his father has been shot, showing poor Abe curled up dead in his bed, etc., etc. It's a dull and emotionally deflating ending to an otherwise powerful film.

One final -- perhaps frivolous -- note: Among these three films, i got to see many, many of my favorite actors in supporting roles. Helena Bonham Carter was her usual deliciously frowsy presence as Mme. Thénardier, providing the perfect touch of comic relief in Les Miz. The marvelous Irrfan Khan was a great addition as the adult Pi in Life of Pi (if you haven't seen it yet, check out his performance as Sunil in the third season of In Treatment). And Lincoln? It's almost as though the casting director had called me on the phone to ask me what actors i really wanted to see: there's David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, James Spader, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Gloria Reuben, to name a few. 

It's been a few good days of moviegoing. It's nice to be back.

Sizzling in the Southern Sun: Cool Hand Luke Revisited

I don't know if this happens to all film lovers or if it's just a sign of some character flaw in myself, but of late my passion for the movies has waned a bit. I suspect/hope that it is just part of a more general need to step back and chill at the end of a long academic year and that my mojo will return soon enough. I simply haven't felt much like watching (or writing about) movies. I've been catching up on some favorite TV shows, watching entire seasons of Treme, Mad Men, and Foyle's War, but not many movies. In preparation for writing about Goodbye Solo, i did watch Taste of Cherry (1997) and Umberto D (1952): two great movies, though admittedly, watching them was like tossing ice cubes on the already sputtering fires of my joie de vivre. I also finally watched Red Desert (1964), which arrived from Netflix in April and sat on top of the DVD player until early June (not a very economical use of a Netflix subscription, to be sure). I admired it greatly in that way that we recognize and admire great works of art in a museum, where there are guards and alarm systems to ensure that we stand at a safe distance: no running your fingers along the textured surface of a painting, no standing a half-inch away to inhale its scent, no holding your tongue to it to taste the paint. I confess that at least in part what was ailing me was the need for something a little more visceral. 


And this past Wednesday night i found it. We've gotten so accustomed to having movies available to us all the time and in such a dizzying array of formats, that it's sometimes hard to remember the sheer visual impact of seeing a movie like Cool Hand Luke (1967) in all its technicolor splendor on the big screen. But last night i had the opportunity to revisit that pleasure -- and got a nice reminder of the kind of films that started my love affair with the movies in the first place. I sometimes get so caught up in art house and indy films that i forget what a great and beautiful machine Hollywood in its heyday could be. If i were going to get all film scholarly on you, i could talk all about the homoerotics and Jesus-metaphors in Cool Hand Luke, but i'm not going to. I'm going to talk about heat. Everything in this movie is hot, with the obvious exception of the title character with his unflappable sense of cool and his iceberg blue eyes. Those eyes and that sudden flash of a smile are the cool center around which the rest of the film seems to swelter. Paul Newman, well, Paul Newman was hot long before Paris Hilton turned the word into a meaningless cliche. Paul Newman was a beautiful man, and this movie never for a moment lets us forget that. 

Cool Hand Luke is one of the most embodied movies ever to come out of Hollywood, filled with bare-chested men sweating in the southern sun, lusting after a rustic Lolita in an unforgettable car-washing porn parody, even offering a few glimpses of exposed male posteriors that remind us what a watershed year 1967 was in its gleeful smashing of the rules of the Production Code. But male tushies and naughty girls washing dirty cars were not the only ways in which Cool Hand Luke broke the rules of classic Hollywood filmmaking. The heat in the film is not solely or even primarily due to the presence of all those sex-starved, sweaty men. The real Prometheus here, stealing fire from the gods and putting it on the movie screen, is Conrad Hall, cinematographer extraordinaire. Connie Hall was a visionary who used the "mistake" of letting the sunlight flare the camera lens to great effect, making the men on the chain gang seem ready to burst into flames like hapless ants being incinerated on a sunny sidewalk by some juvenile sociopath with a magnifying glass. In the decades since the release of Cool Hand Luke, we've become so accustomed to the use of lens flares as part of a film's visual rhetoric that it's hard to remember that this technique was once such a startling way of shooting a scene. But even today, our jaded 21st century sensibilities are no match for the scorching heat of Connie Hall's camerawork. 

Postscript: The documentary Visions of Light (1992), an invaluable source of information about the  cinematographer's art, contains this interview with Conrad Hall in which he discusses his iconoclastic approach to his craft. The first minute shows a few clips from Cool Hand Luke that demonstrate the powerful impact of the use of lens flares in the film. 

Happy Birthday, Tattered Film Palace!

I started this blog one year ago today as a way of combatting an extended case of writer's block by writing about one of the things i love most in this life. Have i succeeded? Who knows? The writer's block has subsided though not disappeared, as the sporadic appearance of new posts and my often lengthy silences will attest. 


The writing has been fun, and has not occurred entirely in a vacuum: the stats confirm that i have at least a few readers (as well as a few hits from spam and phishing expeditions). The biggest surprise has been seeing which posts are the most popular. Thanks to the amazing and very kind Monte Hellman, who liked what i had to say about his film Road to Nowhere and posted a link to my blog on his Facebook page, that post got a lot of traffic. Getting a shout-out from one of America's most iconic directors was the high point of my blogging year.


Surprisingly though, that wasn't the most popular post. That honor goes to my entry on Black Narcissus. Who would have thought that an old classic like that one, released sixty-five years ago, would still grab so much attention? Judging by how many of the hits on that entry come from spots all over the globe, i like to flatter myself that my critique of white actresses in brown face has been the source of at least some of the interest. Unfortunately, i suspect that the post has also left at least some readers disappointed; those would be the people who were directed to my site through Google searches of terms like "nubile Indian girls" and "erotic nuns." Seriously. 


The one aspect of this experience that has been a little frustrating is the lack of feedback from my readers. I'm really curious about who is visiting this blog and whether anyone has actually watched a movie as a result of reading it. I haven't decided whether or not to continue writing it, or if i do, whether to change the direction in some way ... maybe plot summaries in rhyming couplets or haikus about cinematography. At any rate, thank you for reading my blog, i hope you've enjoyed it.