Editing DIY

Dear dears: I'm editing my short movie myself. At the beginning I was totally panicked because me and technology are in shaky terms, like two clumsy dance partners who keep stepping in each other's toes. But after three days pushing cursors and cutting footage, I am loving it, even though I get into major problems that then I don't really know how to extricate myself from. Yesterday a wonderful solution was found for my floundering. Set the program at 99 undo commands. It's the only way.
Editing is fun. It is also somehow beautiful. It is playful and exciting, requires mechanical skill but also much more than that. The intangibles of knowing when to start and end a scene; what makes something funnier or more dramatic; what makes the story move at a good clip. You can change the tone and meaning of a scene just by cutting off some frames. You can make an actor's reaction more powerful by choosing just to show the meat of it. I know this may be obvious, but it is a wonderful discovery to do it yourself with your own little fingerinos.

Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn is the first foray into Hollywood of the great German director Werner Herzog, yet it still manages to be a Werner Herzog film. That is, a lyrical foray into extremity and madness. It tells the story of Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who escaped a Laotian prison camp and survived in the jungle before being rescued by the US Army. Herzog had already made a documentary about him called Little Dieter Needs to Fly, which according to many sources is even better than this movie. I have not seen it, but I have seen Rescue Dawn and I strongly recommend it.
There is a wonderful profile of Herzog and the making of this film in this recent article in the New Yorker. Basically, the story of "Rescue Dawn: The Movie" is the story of the struggle between the desires of an artist filmmaker and those of the moneymen. Because this is the formidably crazy Werner Herzog, it turns out that the artist won the battle with enormous wile, stubborness and chutzpah (read the article, it is a hoot). Rescue Dawn is not an action movie, it is not a war movie. It is a movie about man in extremis, which is one of Herzog's favorite themes. What distinguishes this film from any other Rambo-like jungle adventure (which is probably what the producers were hoping for) is precisely the sensibility of the director. Nothing feels staged. Actually, that is not true. The first minutes of the film, which happen in a US Navy carrier, safely indoors, feel clunky and mechanical. The dialogue sounds stiff, the lighting looks cheap, one braces for the worst. But once Dengler's plane crashes in the jungle, Herzog feels right at home. He is in his element. The thicker the foliage, the more forbidding the jungle landscape; the more glorious, fluid, powerful and lyrical the images.
There is enormous emotional power in this film and it comes not only from Herzog's subtle, un-Hollywood conception of the hero, but also mainly from Christian Bale's towering performance. For Dieter Dengler is not your typical gung-ho, cocky American hero. He is some sort of eccentric, German-born kid who is good humored and good natured and has, besides a luminous smile and a winning, cocky charm, endless reserves of inventiveness and willpower. He is not a machine. I have never seen a hero like this in a Hollywood movie. About Dengler, Herzog has said: “All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.” And this is exactly what Bale conveys with incredible force and total abandon. It is a fresh and original performance that never falls back on clichés. I fear that its magnificence may be attributed to or confused with the fact that he lost 55 pounds for this film. But it is his characterization and the authenticity of feeling that merit him the awards. If he is not nominated for an Oscar, it will be a travesty.
In the middle of the jungle, and under apparently quite insane production circumstances, Herzog somehow elicits fantastic performances of the entire cast. Steve Zahn is excellent as Dengler's friend and fellow escapee. It's the first time I see him in a non-goofy role and he is tender and haunting to the core. Jeremy Davies, (in my book, the male version of Jennifer Jason Leigh, and this is never a good thing) turns out his usual unhinged, mannered shtick as a crazed prisoner. He wins the weight contest by a mile, looking worse than an Auschwitz survivor, but somehow, even though he's good, he is shticky. It's not about that.
The movie is slightly bizarre for American standards. The rhythm is off, there are no predictable turning points and formulas, and only a few torture thrills, but the story is gripping and it has deep expanses of pure feeling. The cinematography, by Herzog's longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who must be a professional masochist, is stunning, with gorgeous, floating camera swoops and fantastic handheld shots that never distract. Some scenes in the prison camp seem right out of Goya's war paintings. Herzog shoots the amazing Thai jungle locations as landscapes of the mind. He also puts the actors through a grinder. They eat worms and snakes and pull leeches off their bare skins.
There is by now a famous scene between Zahn and Bale where the prisoners fantasize the contents of their fridges at home. It reminded me of Chaplin's food hallucinations in The Gold Rush, very funny and moving at the same time. There is true tenderness between the two escapees. In the end it is clear that the film is much more about the edge of madness, good and bad, about human folly, and like all survival stories, about existence, than it is about a hero's exploits.
I will not spoil anything for you if I tell you there is a happy ending after the rescue that seems pegged on to humor somebody in a focus group. Thanks to the utter integrity of Bale's acting and to Herzog's discreet subversiveness, the scene works at a different level. It is worth the price of admission just to watch the reaction in Dengler's face as he is given a hero's return. The overwhelming confusion, the pain, the joy, the dizziness is all there; for a moment he seems like he is looking for himself. Then as he salutes, composing himself, his eyes fill up with tears and he strains to contain his emotion. Not one to fall for easy patriotic and religious bromides, all he says is he wants a steak. And when he is asked to explain how he survived, he replies simply, like a Buddhist sage: You empty what is full and you fill what is empty.
And this is why I love Werner Herzog.

There Is A Rough Cut!

You must have thought I had forgotten all about the little short I shot. Pas du tout, as we say in French.
I just went to Paris for a month and left it in the hands of an editor, who worked on it while I was away.
As you can imagine, the suspense was killing me, but I finally saw the first rough cut yesterday. It still needs a lot of work, and it is extremely rough and it has lots of problems, but I think it works. It is a very strange feeling to see the bits and pieces one shot in the course of three days, strung together into a story. Some stuff that I thought wasn't going to work, amazingly does. Other parts are going to need major tinkering, but with some sleight of hand we may make it work. It's the first time I feel something distantly related to exhilaration.

Required Viewing: No End In Sight

We're back to reality, with a major itch for the movies. First thing out of the bat is let's get totally outraged, homicidal and depressed. No, it's not the Transformers we chose for this task (though we know they'd have done the trick). It's a documentary called No End In Sight, written and directed by Charles Ferguson, now showing at Film Forum. This film should be shown on TV every night. I already told my senator Hillary Clinton to watch it. Every Congressman should.
It is a lucid recap of the absolute disaster of the Iraq War that continues raging four years after our unspeakably moronic fratboy of a President declared that the mission was accomplished.
Remember that scene in Clockwork Orange where to deprogram Malcolm McDowell they make him watch hours and hours of horrible scenes of violence to the accompaniment of Beethoven's 9th Symphony? Well, this is what should happen to Bushie, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie and Condi with this film. None of them would deign be interviewed for the film, but to start with their collective punishment, they should be made to watch this film till the end of eternity. They should watch it in the company, not of Beethoven's music, but of the soldiers and the families of the soldiers who didn't come back or who were maimed and injured because their Humvees were not armored, for instance. A bridge falls in Minnesota and yes it is a terrible tragedy. But I don't hear anyone raising the same kind of outrage for the destruction we've unleashed in the Middle East, and by corollary here at home. We have created millions of savage enemies, who will gloat at the spilling of American blood, if they don't actually take it upon themselves to orchestrate it personally. We have ravaged and destroyed an entire country. To be able to say that Iraq was better off with Saddam, who was as evil as they come, is proof of the debacle we have provoked for no good reason. Words like arrogance, debacle, quagmire, cynicism, corruption, incompetence, disaster, IMPUNITY, don't begin to encompass the enormity of the damage. And yet, those responsible are still in office, our congress is not forceful enough in its condemnation or its actions, and life goes on.
This film will make you physically ill. It will make you gasp in disbelief. And it's not saying anything we don't know already and that hasn't been documented in countless books and journalistic articles. It just makes sense of it. With the benefit of hindsight, it clearly spells out the list of disastrous decisions and lack of preparedness that resulted in the murderous chaos we see today. It starts badly and just keeps piling on the mistakes, the cynicism, the ignorance and the arrogance until you want to cry uncle. It is devastating. What is tragic is that there were scores of intelligent, capable people in the military, and other government agencies who worked and planned and researched and thought, to the best of their ability, a plan to make this folly happen in a less destructive way. They spoke out their concerns. Nobody listened to them.
You see in this film the two fascinating polarities of the American enterprising spirit: the thorough, conscientious people who solve problems with great heart, ingenuity and alacrity, and the spineless, lazy vermin who are just out to profit: ignorant, cynical macho bullies who cannot face or accept criticism, deeply corrupt power freaks on a bender. To this last group belongs the entire Bush administration. To the first group belong heroic individuals in the Army and other organizations. These people have a conscience and a core of human decency. They break your heart in the film. Their righteous indignation is quiet and contained, and they even feel guilty that they didn't do enough. They feel personally responsible. They can face the camera unwaveringly. The fury is contained in their eyes. You know they are telling the truth because their gaze does not shift nor their voice wavers. Why don't we have people like that in office?

I will quote from a fascinating book called Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, by Irving L. Janis of Yale University. It is chilling in its accuracy to describe how decisions go wrong in groups. He cites as case studies The Bay of Pigs, The Korean War, Pearl Harbor and Vietnam. The book was written in 1982. (Thanks to brainy Bea for the reference):

In a concurrence-seeking group, there is relatively little healthy skepticism of the glib ideological formulas on which rational policy makers... generally rely... One of the symptoms of groupthink is the members' persistence in conveying to each other the cliché and oversimplified images of political enemies embodied in long-standing stereotypes. Overoptimistic expectations about the power of their side and the weakness of the opponents probably enable members of a group to enjoy a sense of low vulnerability to the effects of any decision that entails risky action against an enemy. In order to maintain this complacent outlook, each member must think that everyone else in the group agrees that the risks can be safely ignored.

...The most prominent symptoms were excessive risk-taking based on a shared illusion of invulnerability, stereotypes of the enemy, collective reliance on ideological rationalizations that supported the belligerent escalation to which the group became committed, and mindguarding to exclude the dissident views of experts who questioned the group's unwarranted assumptions.

In the first paragraph he is talking about Bay of Pigs; in the second about the Korean War.

Dropping Like Flies

Isn't it weird that Antonioni and Bergman died one after the other? It's like when Shakespeare and Cervantes died the same day (of the same year!) I hope all our geniuses don't start dying en masse all of a sudden. 'Cause we are not replacing the caliber of these people with new ones, that much is clear.
Of Antonioni I can't say much because I have seen exactly 2 movies: La Notte, which I loved, and The Passenger, which I hated. I have homework to do on him.