mother!

Or, Department of Heavy-Handed Mixed Metaphors.
Watching this trainwreck of a movie, I could not help but think of Rosemary's Baby, from which it borrows many ideas, liberally and clumsily. Here too we have an egotistical creative husband (Javier Bardem, trying his heroic best not to be as absurd as his character). He's married to a blonde sweetheart of a woman, Jennifer Lawrence, in one of the most egregious feats of miscasting mankind has ever known.
As John Cassavetes before him (physically, Bardem and Lawrence are Cassavetes and Mia Farrow on steroids), Bardem is completely self-involved and oblivious to his wife's emotional needs. She is building their nest, a hexagonal house in the middle of a field. There is no driveway.
Nosy people appear, in the welcome shape of Ed Harris, and the spectacularly brittle Michelle Pfeiffer, just like Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer before them. All kinds of strange shenanigans start taking place. Here too a fear/desire of pregnancy emerges, as well as the notion, which in Roman Polanski's gifted hands is a masterpiece of dark humor and dread, that hell is other people.
Unfortunately, all resemblance to Polanski's movie stops there, because to say that writer-director Darren Aronofsky is heavy-handed is understating the issue. Apparently, he has never met a metaphor he didn't like, so the salad of symbolism dooms the movie to camp: the house as a living organism, the sacrifice of the homemaker, fear of pregnancy, male impotence, the destructiveness of ego and celebrity, Cain and Abel, you name it. You confirm you were in trouble when the characters are listed in the end credits as "Mother", "Him", "Man" and "Woman". This movie deserves the Mystery Science 3000 treatment.
Everything is shot by Matthew Libatique to resemble a dreamlike state, and I'd be fine with this if, as in any truly creepy psychological horror film, such as Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant, and Repulsion, or Jack Clayton's The Innocents, the disquiet came from our not knowing whether the horror is all in the character's mind. But Aronofsky stacks the deck early on and dispenses with ambiguity. One look at Ed Harris and one knows nothing good can come from him, whereas the Castevet neighbors in Rosemary's Baby really make you wonder whether they mean well or they are direct emissaries of Satan. All the fun and the fear lie in not knowing for sure.
Aronofsky wants to tell an allegory, but it seems to me that, at least in film, allegory is most effective when it is rooted in reality. That's when it messes most with our heads. I'm thinking of allegorical movies that work not only because they are set in reality, but also because they stick to one theme. Movies like Lars Von Trier's Breaking The Waves (love is sacrifice), Dogtooth (tyranny), by Yorgos Lanthimos, and The Teacher (abuse of power and corruption), by Jan Hrebejk. They are all set in very concrete places, from an oil rig in the North Sea to a modern house in Greece, to a school in communist Czechoslovakia. These movies use realistic detail to bring the psychological aspect into stark relief.  By happening in a real context they signal to the audience that this could happen to us.
In contrast, in mother! (or Von Trier's labored allegories like Dogville and Antichrist) in which everything is dreamlike, it reads as artificial. There is no tension between the outside reality and the reality of the mind. We can't really connect to characters that are symbols. It's just a freak show.
During the first third and best part of the movie, Aronofsky manages a mounting feeling of powerlessness and absurdity as strangers take over Mother's house with the acquiescence of her husband, who loves to be fawned upon. The movie comes alive when Ed Harris and especially Michelle Pfeiffer show up (she's the best thing in the movie, and the only person with a sense of humor). But even their story spins out of control as it becomes clear that they represent the aged marriage, with kids, bitterness and some homicidal silliness about an inheritance.
The problem with heavy-handed symbolism is that the writer thinks the audience is going to feel smart by making the connections but, 1. they are labored, obvious and vulgar, 2. not one iota of believable feeling or attraction transpires between the characters. None of them are real people, except for Michelle Pfeiffer, who should be given an Oscar purely on account of how she delivers the line "have a baby".
I once was almost driven to a nervous breakdown by one such guest who invaded my home and rendered it inhabitable by the sheer force of her malignant personality. I remember opening the fridge and not recognizing anything in there - instead of a warm and generous presence, the food inside seemed a reproach. To this day I cannot describe how this person managed to propel me to the edge of a meltdown, but the feeling is of an alternate reality from which you are shut out, even on your own turf. This is a wonderful feeling to depict in a movie, and Aronofsky sustains it for about half an hour. Unfortunately, he decides to relinquish all self-control, and the movie spirals into cheesy absurdity.
Now, what can be more irrelevant, unbelievable and absurd in a movie than a poet? Why, a poet that has crippling writer's block (pathetic echoes of The Shining) and attempts to scribble pearls of wisdom in what looks like parchment paper. At the height of ridiculousness, he gets a flash of inspiration and clamors for a pen (while naked)! He apparently drives people to a frenzy with his words, which I assume to be a cross between Paulo Coelho and a Hallmark card, but which we are left to imagine since Aronofsky pulls the laziest trick in the book, which is that he knows full well that no one could write anything that could unleash such orgiastic chaos, so we'll never know if he's better than Shakespeare or is writing Jonathan Livingston Seagull II. We are left to trust that Bardem is a poet who changes people's lives because he pontificates new age mumbo jumbo at them.
I could believe the frenzy he provokes had he been a rock star, a musician, an actor, a sports hero, a Kardashian, or some Silicon Valley ghoul. But a poet? Give me a break! This is the kind of putrid stereotype about writers that makes people fear and distrust writing and writers. In fact, this is the kind of movie that makes people fear and distrust art.
Bardem's poet offended me almost as much as the casting of the usually wondrous Jennifer Lawrence as his cipher of a wife. Lawrence is an actress of spunk and gumption, so it is impossible for her to be without a spark, hard as Aronofsky tries. The movie consists mostly of her in close-up, and she's good and honest enough an actress to withstand the scrutiny, but Aronofsky gives her nothing to do but be afraid, cry, recede and ask stupid questions. No one is less interesting than a martyr.
One keeps praying that she will find the balls to confront her husband and all the unwanted guests, and that Lawrence will finally unleash her witty, fresh audacity, but her character represents the other tired trope of male fantasy: the understanding muse, the woman who blends into the walls so that the male genius might thrive. She is the homemaker, the female womb. She doesn't have a job: she lives for him, to save him, to inspire him and to cook and clean and decorate. For a role like this, you do not get Jennifer Lawrence. Also, fuck this movie.
More offensive than the outrageous grand Guignol that follows, which sadly includes a baby, is the fact that after two hours of following her point of view, her abandonment, her disorientation, her feelings of being nothing, it turns out that everything is about HIM. Had this been orchestrated with some irony, it could have been a devastating satire on male self-importance. But I'm afraid that Aronofsky is dead serious.

Queen Of Earth

Elizabeth Moss is the only reason to see this derivative, dysfunctional movie by Alex Ross Perry. Queen of Earth is a witless imitation (the precious may prefer to call it "homage") of Bergman's Persona, but don't be fooled by the name-dropping. You wish.
Moss and the mystifyingly employed Katherine Waterston play Catherine and Virginia, two close friends who spend lots of time together although they hate each other, for reasons no one cares to explain.
Virginia's parents have a nice home somewhere in the woods in upstate New York where Virginia invites Catherine (Moss) to recover from her divorce and her father's death. There she has an epic nervous breakdown, being rather impossible and refusing to bathe and leave her room.
Virginia, who is unimpressed with the dissolution of Catherine's self, makes her a salad which ends up festering on her friend's bedstand for days, like the rotting rabbit in Polanski's Repulsion (the mother of female mental breakdown movies, and a much better use of your time).
If you are going to trot out references to the superior works of your cinematic heroes, you might as well give them a valiant twist. A wilted salad is a sad replacement for a decomposing rabbit, and two surly actresses do not Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson make. It's like watching someone imitate Woody Allen imitating Bergman, except Allen's mimetism is much more proficient.
Moss, however, gives it her all. She is scarily transparent, fearless and excellent. Except for one truly creepy moment, when we fear the chaos that Catherine's unhinged state of mind might unleash, the movie is both drab and pretentious. A retelling of Persona which includes a cipher of an ex-husband and a nasty metrosexual neighbor who has the hots for Virginia and hates Catherine turns into a faux-profound thing about Catherine being a failed artist and living in the shadow of her father's success. This feels as tired as it sounds.
At times, the two women remind one vaguely of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, without the fabulous diva hysteria.
Perry plays around with the timeframe of the story, going back and forth for no reason that I could discern other than a wish to impress. Everything is arty with a capital A, but beats me if this film is meant to be a psychological thriller or a drama, or a parody so dark, you can't find the laughs.
Queen of Earth is like a first-year film student's wet dream. It's only exciting to the film student in question. Ross Perry did much better with his far sharper Listen Up, Philip.

It Follows

It doesn't really. A collection of scattered, potentially interesting ideas fizzle out in this silly horror movie. The premise is that something scary is unleashed against you when you have sex. In real life this may range from HPV to gonorrhea to herpes to AIDS, all way scarier than the people (zombies? undead? It's not clear) who appear to be following the poor horny fools who shag. Imagine if you took these sexually invoked zombies to instill sexual panic in the general population. A disaster movie about abstinence! That would be interesting. But It Follows sticks to a bunch of inarticulate, generic young adults and wastes every opportunity that its own premise promises.
I was wondering if the easy way out from this horror would be to simply use a condom, but the movie never addresses the possibility, as it doesn't really care about the rules it sets up and then changes at will. Character and motivation are never established, so we don't understand why the heroine of the movie makes crazy choices, for instance, as when in the throes of sheer terror she decides to run to a park alone at night and sit on a swing. Unless there are good reasons for the bewildering choices characters make in horror movies, the audience is distracted by the whys. As in, why are you so stupid?
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell toys with the disturbing notion that this post-sexual haunting may be a cruel prank, a sort of urban legend that drives people crazy, since no one else can see the followers. What if it is all in their heads, a sort of suggested hysteria? That's the movie I would have loved to see. Psychological terror is always far scarier and suggestive than the supernatural. The director flashes this idea at the audience but soon abandons it, as he does every potentially interesting story turn. He skims over the juiciest parts of his own premise.
It Follows has all the elements of a classic horror movie (and too many of its well-worn tropes) yet Mitchell doesn't have the attention span and the focus to carry them out. For instance, he establishes that the girl has two creepy teenage neighbors who like to spy on her. But he underestimates their potential to confuse and soon forgets them. The movie is full of such arbitrary and absurd nonsequiturs.
Still, it is fun to find yourself scanning the frame for these shapeshifters, who sometimes look like normal people, sometimes are naked, sometimes look like ghouls. It would be nice to know who they are: the bereft after sex? The people who don't have any? It's a mystery.
It is fun to not know who is real and who isn't, and Mitchell handles this particularly well in one scene. But then random stuff starts happening and one loses faith in a movie that does not follow its own rules. There is one effectively staged, truly scary moment, achieved with nothing but the smart use of a tall guy and excellent timing.  The rest is a lot of aimless padding and lazy writing.
The overwrought, manipulative music score doesn't help. There are a couple of well-staged moments (ripoffs of Polanski and David Fincher) within disorganized sequences, but the movie makes no sense. The ending is a total dud. I didn't follow it.

A Master Builder

This new collaboration between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory (My Dinner With Andre) is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's classic play. In the absence of Louis Malle, who directed their wonderful Uncle Vanya in 42nd Street,  Jonathan Demme is at the helm. If you are expecting the same lovely modern rendering of a classic play on screen, you may be disappointed.
For starters, Jonathan Demme is not Louis Malle. He is nowhere near Malle's elegant finesse and his subtle direction of actors. Demme holds the camera close to the actors' faces, which makes for more intimacy, but also, on occasion, a need for dramamine. The actors alternate between naturalistic acting (Shawn did the adaptation), and exaggerated displays of theatricality. The only one who breaks your heart is the great Julie Hagerty as Aline Solness, the Master Builder's wife. As for the young woman who comes back into Halvard Solness' life to exact revenge, Lisa Joyce is so over the top that she elicits titters. She has some good moments, and it is a very hard role, but playing a woman unhinged by childhood abuse, she is 19th century hysterical in a story set today. Solness wears a track suit. Things don't quite jell. Demme can't find a unifying style in the actors, nor much emotional coherence.
Wallace Shawn, as compelling an actor as he is, is grossly miscast in the role of Halvard Solness, an authoritarian, ruthless architect. Shawn was a wonderful and credible Uncle Vanya, but he is not the right type for the role of a man, larger than life, who is, among other things, catnip to women.
Solness needs to be a rock star.
The movie starts promisingly. There is something interesting about monstrous egotism in a small package. Yet one pictures a man who is feared and revered and who is devastatingly attractive to those around him, despite being, or precisely because he is, a massive creep. Frank Langella comes to mind. Two young women drool all over Solness. In this version, this is not believable.
Why this play now? It's about a man who cannot abide competition, a man who has calculated and built his success on the suffering backs of the people around him. He will take down anything and anyone that gets in the way of his rise. He has no scruples. This topic should last an eternity, and Ibsen was much ahead of his day in his acute perception of the all-encompassing domination of men over women. The play is written as a series of powerful revelations that shed light on how spectacularly rotten Solness has been all his life. All his prestige is founded on the basest behavior. Sort of like anyone in power ever.
When well done, adaptations of plays on film get past the staginess and straight into the emotional power of character. Malle did that brilliantly with his Uncle Vanya, which started as a rehearsal with the actors, who then took off and became the characters. Roman Polanski did wonders with Carnage and Venus In Fur, but he is a master filmmaker, as well as an accomplished stage director.
But Demme's and Gregory's muddled approach is not inspired as a filmed play, nor a compelling film. And at over 120 very talky minutes, it's hard to sit through.

Venus in Fur

Roman Polanski brings David Ives' hit play to the screen. The movie stars Polanski's doppelganger Mathieu Amalric, as Thomas, a playwright who is auditioning actresses, and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner, as Vanda, a ditzy actress who walks in from the rain and then turns out to be a human bag of tricks, and then some.
The playwright and the actress weave in and out of the text of the play they are working with, something called Venus in Fur, which is an adaptation of a novel by Sacher-Masoch, the guy who lent his last name to masochism. So we are watching a movie, adapted from a play that has a play in it that is adapted from a novel.
Visually, Polanski helps the Chinese boxes conceit by making it clear we are entering a symbolic theater. The opening scene is a lovely tracking shot in a stormy night in a Parisian boulevard that suddenly veers into a little theater, where several doors open (like in the opening credits of Get Smart) until we reach Thomas, who is on the phone berating all the idiot actresses he has auditioned so far. In comes this Vanda, acting like a ditz, but somehow convincing him to let her read. She is vulgar and seemingly out of her depth, and completely wrong for the role of a repressed 19th century woman, but when she reads the lines, she transforms into the character, who also happens to be named Vanda.
Emmanuelle Seigner is a formidable beauty, but she is not the actress that the role requires. She is entertaining, but lacks nuance. And it pains me to say this, but this is an instance where the role is better suited to a younger woman. Perhaps a better actress (say a Juliette Binoche) would better convey that mercurial quality of Vanda's that seems forced in Seigner.
Amalric, however, is a great actor, and he is fantastic as this man who thinks he calls the shots and whom this mysterious woman eventually unravels.
When I saw the very entertaining play on Broadway, I did not quite understand what the point was. The woman who starts as a ditz ends up being far smarter, and she needs to deploy all her female arsenal of tricks to get where she wants to, from coyness, playing stupid, being ravishingly beautiful, turning out to be extremely smart, etc, but to what end? To effect some sort of gender revenge on the hapless guy? Is that it? Polanski helps clarify the metaphor by going symbolic full force, something that he can do with cinematic tools. The same could have happened onstage, change the lighting, make her final assault a coup de theatre, but it didn't and it was confusing. Here it is clearer, although I'm not sure, if I understand this play correctly, that women want to emasculate men, even if they have good reason sometimes.
This is a small movie with two actors on a stage, but thanks to Polanski's command of his craft, it does not feel like filmed theater. It feels like a movie and it makes the Broadway staging seem poor and pedestrian in comparison. It is gorgeously framed and cut, it flows beautifully.  When the actors mime pretending to use props, Polanski adds the sound effects of a spoon tinkling against an invisible cup or the swoosh of a whip, and it works like magic. This gives an added layer to the play within the play, to the idea that theater is both magical and it is a game. Polanski really knows what to do with the language and the tools of cinema. This is why I love him.
Too bad that the bombastic score by Alexandre Desplat, a mix of carnival and Greek music, unbalances the subtlety of Polanski's visual approach. The end also builds into the almost grotesque. Of course, these choices are all Polanski's. His biggest choice is to have decided to make this particular story of gender war into a film. It is not a coincidence that Thomas has a last name that rhymes with Polanski, that Amalric looks like him and that Vanda is played by his actual wife. Polanski has always had a macabre sense of humor and, given his notorious past, I'm still trying to figure out what he is trying to say with this one. In a scene where Vanda protests that the play is abusive towards women, Thomas is outraged, finally claiming that not everything is abuse and that things are complicated. Indeed.

NYFF 2012: The Ones That Got Away

Yesterday was my last day at the 50th New York Film Festival and I was invigorated and not at all tired after 22 movies, perhaps because I saw mostly extraordinary films.
But, as is to be expected, there were some clunkers, all of which my instincts had correctly warned me against. There were no truly offensive movies, but the three French movies I saw (not counting Amour) were very disappointing.
Camille Rewinds by Noemie Lvovsky is a French remake of Peggy Sue Got Married that does not improve on the original. It is rambling and not very disciplined, although it has some funny moments.
About my violent impatience with You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, the latest outing by Alain Resnais, you can read here. It was the worst movie I saw in the festival.
Also disappointing was Olivier Assayas' Something In The Air, an autobiographical account of his radical high school days. Assayas is an energetic, exciting filmmaker, as he amply demonstrated with Carlos, but here he chooses to use sulking non-actors for the main roles and all the energy he puts into the staging, his untalented cast saps from the film, making it extremely tedious. They look the part of French students in the seventies but they are morose, and unintelligible young people without personalities. It's hard to care for their conundrums. Assayas has a great sense of atmosphere and has much to criticize of idiotic student politics, drug use and bad French taste in pop music. As in Carlos, a vastly superior film, he continues coldly skewering dogmatic ideologues with his refreshing lack of patience for antiquated leftist clichés. I'm glad I stayed until the end because the best scene in the film comes late in the movie and involves the shoot of a movie starring Nazis, a prehistoric bimbo and a dinosaur. But it takes Assayas way too long to get to the point; namely, that art and creativity and even working on the cheesiest film on Earth are a better, more genuine calling than being an aimless young French bourgeois toying with ideas of revolution.
Sally Potter, whose films I have never liked, did not disappoint with Ginger and Rosa, which is pretty bad. The only reason I bought tickets was the cast, which promised the great Timothy Spall, Annette Bening, and Oliver Platt, only to waste them in puny roles. The main roles are mostly miscast, with a truly awful Christina Hendricks playing Ginger's mom, Alessandro Nivola, misdirected, playing her dad and a good, lovely Elle Fanning playing Ginger. Why Potter couldn't find actual British actors to play these roles is beyond me, but you could feel the strain in the actors grappling with the accents (with Fanning faring best of all). The movie is an obvious and labored melodrama with artistic pretentions, whose beautiful cinematography reminds one of expensive TV commercials. Potter lets her actors flounder, can't direct her way out of a paper bag, can't stage a scene for the life of her, her scenes are mostly vignettes that end nowhere, and her thesis about a British teenager coming of age in the sixties while obsessed with nuclear annihilation is obvious and strained. The festival's organizers don't do Potter any favors by including such a mediocre, bumbling film amongst such quality company. There were first films by directors from Mexico, China and Israel that showed much more discipline and rigor than this half-baked exercise in melodrama. Ginger and Rosa is like a Mexican soap with fake British accents. Dreadful.
The Dead Man and Being Happy, an Argentinian film by Spanish filmmaker Javier Rebollo, is an interesting concept marred by way too much cleverness. It's a road movie starring an old hit man and a younger woman, who drive around Argentina as he waits to die from three inoperable tumors. There is fun observation of some of Argentina's most endearing quirks, like sheltering Nazis and being always on the verge of development or disaster, usually both at once, but it's all marred by a really annoying, mostly unfunny and unnecessary voiceover narration that aims for drollness but is redundant and pretentious. Still, there is something oddly appealing about the adventure, even if it is contrived. I guess it's the travelogue aspect of it. Nothing that Lucrecia Martel hasn't done a million times better.
Here are our favorite NYFF films top down:

Extraordinary
Amour Michael Haneke
Caesar Must Die!  Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
Like Someone in Love Abbas Kiarostami
Beyond The Hills Christian Mungiu
The Gatekeepers Dror Moreh

Excellent
Barbara Christian Petzold
Tabu Miguel Gomez
Fill The Void Rama Burshtein

Very Good
Frances Ha  Noah Baumbach
Our Children Joachim Lafosse
No Pablo Larrain

Good
Final Cut Gyorgy Palfi
Here and There Antonio Méndez Esparza
Memories, Look at Me Song Fang
Bwakaw Jun Robles Lana

Disappointing
Something in The Air Olivier Assayas
Camille Rewinds Noemi Lvovsky

Annoying, but Interesting
The Dead Man and Being Happy Javier Rebollo
Room 237 Rodney Ascher
Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out, Marina Zenovich

Dreadful
Ginger and Rosa Sally Potter
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet  Alain Resnais

Stay tuned for more reviews of the Festival coming soon.

The 50 Greatest Films of All Time

Sight and Sound Magazine just released its list of 50 greatest films of all time. The big surprise is that Hitchcock's Vertigo dethroned Citizen Kane for the first time in 50 years. Now, is Vertigo the greatest film of all time? It is a great film, but the greatest of all time? Will it be able to last 50 years on top like Kane did? That is the problem with best film lists. They are by definition myopic.
Every time someone asks me to name my favorite film of all time, or even my 10 best, I groan. I find it impossible to say. I can tell you 25, 50, but to narrow it down to less than 25 is a futile exercise.
The Sight and Sound list is a venerable canon, a solid, sensible list. It's a great primer on the history of cinema. It includes films that changed other films forever. I'm thrilled it puts Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in 6th place. I'm relieved it does not include Star Wars. It does not overtly celebrate greatly influential movies, for better or for worse, like Spielberg's Jaws, nor does it celebrate insufferable pains in the ass like R.W. Fassbinder. It is an august list. It includes most of the usual suspects (Dreyer, Godard, Tarkovksy, Ozu, Kurosawa). A great many movies in the list hail from the distant past. We need that much hindsight to select great films, that we can't think of anything newer than David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Wong War Kai's In The Mood For Love, which are more than 10 years old.
But then half the fun of these canonic lists is you get to quibble with them.  This one includes a few essential comedies, Keaton, Chaplin, Wilder, Singing in The Rain, but in general it skews towards the solemn. It includes some stuff that I find unbearably pretentious, even if it might be essential viewing. I loathe mid and late Godard, and so while I agree with the inclusion of Breathless, and have no choice but grump at the inclusion of Contempt, I can't abide Pierrot Le Fou, which is like watching a French brat throw a tantrum for two interminable hours. I sat through eight hours of Bela Tarr's long, mesmerizing and sometimes soporific Satantango. It is a great work of art, but is it one of the 50 best films of all time? If sheer arty length is a criterion, then I think The Clock by Christian Marclay should be a worthy contender, even if he did not shoot one foot of film himself. Do we really need three Tarkovsky movies in the mix? (Not in my book. I find him very tough going). Why not three Billy Wilder's? Or Chaplin? Polanski's Knife in The Water? Why not The Shining? Fargo? Dog Day Afternoon? Still, if you want to explore the essentials of world cinema, this list is a great place to start arguing.

The Clock

Now showing as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, this impressive art installation is well worth braving the endless lines to get in. (It's free). I breezed in last Saturday at 8:30 am but when I came back at 11 pm, I had to wait almost 2 hours to get in. And I intend to go back this week. It's addictive.
Artist Christian Marclay has created a unique timepiece. It's a real-time clock made of movie clips that have to do with time. If you walk in at 8 am, it is 8 am in the clips. A minute later, it is 8:01. It's a movie that lasts 24 hours. What is astonishing is that Marclay found clips that feature either clocks, watches or characters mentioning the time of almost every minute in the day. That's a lot of clips. The Clock is not just a collection of random clips but a flawlessly edited movie that is absolutely spellbinding in many levels.
First level, if you are a movie junkie, you are in heaven, as you recognize faces, favorite stars, scenes from films, even clips from movies you haven't seen, or wonder about actors whose faces elude you, try to place a movie name to a scene. Even if you don't know a movie star from Adam, you will still be hypnotized by Marclay's canny creation of sequences. He plays around with editing, intercutting scenes from different films to underscore the amazing trickery of the film cut. A character opens a door, he cuts to a different character entering a different room. A character from ancient history asks for the time; cut to the close up of a digital wristwatch. He makes us realize how used we are to this language of cuts that compress time and storytelling. Cinema as shorthand for time.
The sound editing is magnificent. Sound and music foreshadow scenes or leave the trail of a scene behind. For instance, a clip of the final scene of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, shows Antoine Doinel greeting the sea for the first time, but the clip is shown with the music from Jane Campion's The Piano, and then, in a lovely lyrical echo, it cuts to little Anna Paquin doing cartwheels on the beach.
Yet luckily for us, Marclay is not a movie buff. He is not making value judgements on the films he loves, or bragging about his film knowledge. He picks from good movies and bad, but he has a great eye and great timing and rhythm, and picks visually arresting scenes. The clips flow seamlessly, and work exactly like the narrative in a movie, creating emotional landscapes, humor and suspense, a compressed history of human beings in one day. You will find yourself deciding that you are leaving, say at 11, only to find yourself staying to see what is going to happen minutes later. It's about the human need to know what happens next.
There are sequences about death, sex, eating, working, playing, dreaming. So many people fumble in bed trying to turn off the alarm clock, so many people are always jumping out of bed, late for something important they are about to miss. You can clearly grasp the difference between the stillness of bonafide movie stars and actors of a lesser caliber. The Clock makes you conscious, if you are of this persuasion, of every single aspect of the artifice of film: light and shadows (particularly in black and white), the symmetry of the human face, framing, camera movement. You see the artistry of great masters like Polanski in a morning scene where Mia Farrow, in Rosemary's Baby, wakes up to reveal horrible scratches on her back; a marvel of elegance, irony, horror and revelation, in contrast to shoddy pans and careless camera work by lesser craftspeople.
The Clock can be deliciously overwhelming, almost disorientating, for movie obsessives.
On another level, The Clock is a visceral, subconscious experience. After I saw it, I had fabulous dreams about making movies with a cast of thousands. At some point you kind of forget about the movies and you focus on the actions, on the almost hypnotic, mantric quality of the footage with its spirals and repetitions and its relentless flow. You are transported by the sudden realization that you are extremely conscious of the time (you don't need to look at your watch, the movie tells you exactly what time it is), how long has it been since you've been transfixed by the illusion of time in the movies, in which one minute can be an eternity or it can go in a blink. You become extremely aware of time flowing or seeming to stop. Sometimes it is amazing that not even a minute has elapsed, and it seems to be 9 am forever, while sometimes you are caught in the reverie of this flowing continuum, and you realize you've been sitting there for three hours.
It is also a bizarre window into the human experience. A massive, delicious, extended dream sequence enacted by people who look much better than us, because they are the stuff of our deepest dreams.

Oscars: The Good News And The Bad News

Good news is, The Tree of Life made it to the Best Picture, and so did Terrence Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Also The Artist, which is the best movie this year except for A Separation. I'm rooting for it.
The Descendants is a perfectly decent movie, but for some reason I liked it much more as I watched it than afterwards. Afterwards, it became a little meh. The Artist should win this year, but it's a toss up because these people vote with their ass most of the time. They are entirely capable of giving it to The Help.
Bad news is that a movie that most critics hated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, inexplicably made the list. There is nothing more unpalatable to me that having Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks in the same movie. I can watch them both separately no problem, but together it's overkill. Bridesmaids is the much better choice. The Help utterly sucks. But the Academy members are a bunch of sentimental old farts who want the movie business to be bathed in corn and good intentions. Midnight in Paris is the best stuff Woody Allen has done in years, but I don't think it merits a best movie nomination.  Hugo is simply not good enough to be in this list, despite its good intentions.

Good news is, A Separation, from Iran, the year's best movie, also got an original screenplay nod. This is the movie that absolutely needs to win Best Foreign Film. And if it wins original screenplay too, for which it got a surprising and well deserved nomination, all the better. I'm very happy the academy did not nominate The Skin I Live In from Almodóvar (he's his own country now), because it sucks. 
Bad news is that Footnote, an annoying, overproduced Israeli movie, made the nominations too. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia should be here. Alas, he is now persona non grata. Miss Bala from Mexico stood a chance. But this category never really represents the best of foreign cinema, except in the case of A Separation, which is truly a spectacular film.

Good news is Demián Bichir made to the best actor noms (token Hispanic, maybe?). I have not seen the movie but I hear he is great. He's always been a good actor. Terrible, unbelievable bad news is that Michael Fassbender, who gave the performance of the year in Shame, was not nominated. Somebody read these people the riot act. I would substitute him for Gary Oldman, who barely appears in his own film (sorry, Cathy!). I think this one is between Dujardin and Clooney. And if so, let it be Dujardin.

Good News is that Kenneth Branagh got his nod for playing Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. Good for Nick Nolte and Jonah Hill. Bad, incomprehensible news is that Viggo Mortensen did not get a nod for his believable, awesome Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. Or Kevin Spacey in Margin Call. This category was rich with fine performances this year, and yet the Academy votes are most predictable. Where is Eddie Redmayne for My Week With Marilyn, Corey Stoller for his Hemingway in Midnight in Paris? Albert Brooks for Drive? Or Robert Forster for The Descendants? Boring.

Good news is they are all good. Good for Rooney Mara, good for Glenn Close, Aunt Meryl, etc. Bad news is that Elizabeth Olsen from Martha Marcy May Marlene should have been nominated, and Carey Mulligan as well for her work on Shame.  Also, terrible, terrible slight not to nominate the outstanding Kristin Wiig of Bridesmaids. She deserves to be here. This one is between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis.

Good news is Melissa McCarthy is in for Bridesmaids, and the rest of the category is solid. Bad news is Vanessa Redgrave, who gives the supporting performance of the year in Coriolanus, is not here (unless she counts for next year). Sissy Spacek was dead on perfect on The Help. Where is she? I'm not hazarding a bet, but Octavia Spencer is a possibility.

Good news is this is a good and worthy group. As far as I'm concerned, the two worthiest contenders are Hazanavicius and Malick, and if either one wins, I'll be ecstatic, edging towards Hazanavicius. Bad news is I'm down on Woody Allen, whose movie is very uneven. Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation should be here as well.

Good news is go, Emmanuel Lubezki, as far as I'm concerned, absolute front runner for his astounding work in The Tree of Life. Bad news is Manuel Alberto Claro who did the cinematography for Melancholia should be here. I also loved the work of Sean Bobbitt in Shame.

Adapted screenplay I have no good news to report. I have only seen The Descendants and TTSS, and that screenplay seemed to me to be quite problematic. I'm hoping Coriolanus qualifies for next year, because it is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Why is Jane Eyre not here? That was a solid adaptation. Carnage the film was so much better than Carnage the play. But Polanski is poison.
On Original Screenplay there is plenty of good news: YAY! Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig! Bridesmaids got a very well deserved nod, and so, surprisingly for a foreign film, did A Separation. The Artist is brilliant. Bad news is I think Margin Call is a terrible screenplay and Midnight in Paris could be better. Sean Durkin's script for Martha Marcy May Marlene was better than either one of them.

The good news is there are only 2 nominated songs! I will be happy when there are zero. Of course rooting for Brett McKenzie and his lovely Muppet song, because the bad news is the Rio one sucks.  As for the score, the good news is The Artist should win because it is the score of a movie without words and it is incredibly well done. The bad news is that I hated Alberto Iglesias' score for TTSS. Wrong choice of composer, the music sounded exactly like his last three Almodóvar movies. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross should be here for their effective work for David Fincher.
Let the griping about the Oscars begin!

Best And Worst Movies of 2011

(And everything in between). All and all, this was a pretty great year for movies. Some critics justly included gems like Aurora, Poetry, and Tuesday After Christmas in their lists. You can find these movies in my list of 2010, because I saw them at the NYFF. This list is subject to change, as I'm still to see some movies.
But if I absolutely must furnish a:

10 Best List

A Separation
The Artist
Melancholia
Bridesmaids
The Trip
The Tree Of Life
Shame
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Into The Abyss
Corpo Celeste

Great

Coriolanus
Carnage
Cedar Rapids
Rapt
Presunto Culpable
El Velador
Tabloid
This is Not A Film

Good 

The Descendants
Jane Eyre
La Princesse de Montpensier
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 
The Muppets
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Ides of March

Flawed
 
Contagion
Margin Call
Le Havre
My Week With Marilyn
Midnight in Paris
A Dangerous Method 
Miss Bala
Young Adult
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Margaret

Disappointments

We Need To Talk About Kevin 
The Debt
Take Shelter
George Harrison: Living in a Material World
Once Upon A Time in Anatolia
Incendies
Insidious
Hugo


Bad

The Iron Lady
Drive

Horrid

J. Edgar
The Help
The Skin I Live In
Beginners
Miral
Leap Year

Carnage

Roman Polanski has taken a clever but unimpressive play and made it better.
When I saw Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage on Broadway, I was entertained but underwhelmed. It's a neat but rather facile concept -- the veneer of civilization promptly chips away as two sets of parents discuss a fight between their children. The movie, with a screenplay by Reza and Polanski, uses basically the same material but instead of trying too hard for a meaningful message about the human condition, Polanski turns it into a zippy, exciting, mischievous farce. What seemed vulgar and heavy handed on stage, is elegant here.
In theory, adapting this play into a film sounds like a futile enterprise. Why would you want to spend an entire movie watching four people bicker in one living room? Yet in the hands of this master director, you forget you are in one room most of the time. The movie is precisely, elegantly crafted, the camera is perfectly expressive and the nimble, assured pace is bracing. This little chamber piece is a tour de force and master class in directing, with no self-conscious fireworks. (How I wish Polanski had directed We Need To Talk About Kevin). He can teach a thing or two to directors who let style run rampant. With Polanski, style is content; expressive and unobtrusive at the same time.
Polanski's gifts are not only his assured command of the medium; the mise en scene is fantastic and he is a great director of actors. In this version, the characters are more sharply defined. The material benefits from the camera's closeness to the actors' faces. The actors know this and go to town, doing their job with skill and excellence.
The cast is uniformly splendid, topped by John C. Reilly who is absolutely hilarious and pitch perfect as Michael Longstreet, a guy who behind his sweetness hides a good amount of contempt for his high-strung, politically correct wife Penelope, (Jodie Foster); Christoph Waltz as Alan Cowan, a dry, Blackberry wielding corporate lawyer, and Kate Winslet as his composed wife, Nancy. All four work beautifully as an ensemble. I was amazed by the lovely, unflagging flow of their collective energy. Of the four actors, Foster lacks the subtlety of her colleagues, and she seems a little over the top. Yet she is very compelling. She approaches Penelope with a tight, controlling fury and she is believably, valiantly self-righteous. Winslet can make tulips wither with one look, and her transformation from prim and proper corporate wife to drunken mess is flawless. Waltz is drily reptilian as a lawyer from hell, but he is likable because he is blunt. None of the actors condescend to their characters, which is why they are all so winning. It is also worth noting that for such a small film, Polanski recruited the best of the best: the great production designer Dean Tavoularis and costume designer Milena Canonero, the excellent cinematographer Pavel Edelman, and Alexandre Desplat's music is as elegant as the rest of the film. A  tasteful Brooklyn apartment has been created on a set in Paris and the narrow views of Brooklyn from the apartment and shots of Brooklyn Bridge park are done with subtle digital effects, since Polanski cannot set foot in the US.
The only thing that falls a bit flat is the ending, which seems abrupt and inconclusive, but Polanski seems much more in command here than last time around with The Ghost Writer. Carnage is a lot of fun.

Insidious

Boo!

 Very disappointing. A rip off of every other classic horror movie, including Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense, Paranormal Activity, The Exorcist, and any movie ever about a haunted house. I am willing to cut horror films major slack as long as they scare the living daylights out of me (and I am super easy. I surrender completely). If they do, as far as I'm concerned, they have achieved success, no matter how dumb they may be. If they don't, they are artistic failures.
Insidious scared me a couple of times, but it bored me more than it scared me. It bothered me that many of the genuine scares were marred by unnecessary sound effects that made them cheesier instead of scarier.  I wish someone came along that could scare us without all those doors creaking and slamming and musical effects that are tantamount to cheating. Oh, my bad. Stanley Kubrick already did that in plain daylight in The Shining. But the reason that movie works is because a man has gone insane and he wants to harm his family in a place where other human evil has happened. In Insidious the characters are such stick figures, that they are barely there and we barely care about them. The lovely Patrick Wilson is wasted because he doesn't seem to have a character. Children exist and then are dumped in the service of a plot with enormous holes. The weirdest things happen in this house and Rose Byrne acts like a zombie. What I call "The Holiday Inn Law" of horror movies ensues. When unexplainable shit happens in a house at night, the first rule of common sense in my book is for everybody to decamp tout suite to the nearest Holiday Inn. The great premise of this movie, that the malevolence will follow the inhabitants even into a Motel 6, is totally wasted because this movie wants to be all things to all people but it doesn't do it smartly. It's about ghosts and demons and people who travel outside their bodies, but it doesn't make any sense. The last act of this movie, which does not take place in the real world, is one of the most frustrating anticlimaxes ever. I could care less about what happens in the other world. What scares the hell out of me is what can happen to us here. It gets scary when the zombies and living dead and all those cranky souls come to pay us visits. Not the other way around.
There is something strangely static and lifeless at the core of this movie. Too much information is given in retrospect that stops the film in its tracks, while too little is made of potentially interesting material. Why is this family moving houses? Do the husband and wife get along? Do the children get along? Why bring along Barbara Hershey if you are going to waste her? I thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful Lin Shaye as the medium who is brought to set things right. She was awesome. In what must be a joke that falls utterly flat, a priest is summoned but he is soon dispatched. Then the medium arrives and she is not kooky or a midget, but a smart, no-nonsense professional. The poor woman is saddled with some ridiculous dialogue explaining her nomenclature for all things that go bump in the night, but she is still the best thing in the movie.
The biggest problem with Insidious is that it is not thrilling. It's too busy ripping everybody else off to show any kind of spark. 
Rosemary's Baby, for instance, may not be a classically scary movie. There are no bumps and jolts. Instead the fear is of madness and obsession and crazy neighbors. Of a woman who is alone with her deepest fears, in the middle of New York City. It is very funny, thrilling and extremely disturbing; the kind of disturbing that can haunt your dreams. Recently, I saw Jaws in its entirety for the first time. It is a thrilling movie. The gleeful mischief that Steven Spielberg is a genius at, his inventive, malicious playfulness, make sitting through it feel like a totally immersive adventure.
James Wan, the director of Insidious, holds himself in such high regard that he bills this movie as "a James Wan film", not once but two times in the opening sequence and even puts his name on a blackboard in a scene, lest we forget who is responsible for this derivative, non-sensical hodgepodge. But he totally lacks the spirit of unbridled creativity of more humble masters.

Best and Worst of 2010

What is it with the proliferation of Ten Best Lists? It is impossible for me to think of only ten movies in the course of a year. Reality is much richer than that. So let's cut to the chase:

Excellent

Carlos -- Olivier Assayas
Mother -- Joon-Ho Bong
A Prophet -- Jacques Audiard
Secret Sunshine (2007) -- Chang Dong Lee. 
Poetry -- Chang Dong Lee
The Robber -- Benjamin Heisenberg
Vincere -- Marco Bellocchio
True Grit -- Joel and Ethan Coen
Old Cats -- Sebastian Silva/Pedro Peirano
Tuesday After Christmas -- Radu Muntean
Aurora (especially when they release the shorter version) -- Cristi Puiu
Dogtooth -- Giorgios Lanthimos
Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work -- Ricki Stern/Anne Sundberg
Lebanon -- Samuel Maoz

Great

Black Swan -- Darren Aronofsky
The Fighter -- David O. Russell
Another Year -- Mike Leigh
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives -- Apitchapong Weeraseethakul
The Social Network -- David Fincher
I Love You, Phillip Morris -- Glenn Ficarra and John Requa
Four Lions -- Chris Morris
Fish Tank -- Andrea Arnold
Everyone Else -- Maren Ade
Exit Through the Gift Shop -- Banksy

Good

The King's Speech -- Tom Hooper
I Am Love -- Luca Guadagnino
Agora -- Alejandro Amenabar
Iron Man 2 -- Jon Favreau
Restrepo -- Tim Heatherington/Sebastian Junger
Inside Job -- Charles Ferguson
Fair Game -- Doug Liman
Client 9 -- Alex Gibney
Get Low -- Aaron Schneider
Brooklyn's Finest -- Antoine Fuqua
The Town -- Ben Affleck
City Island -- Raymond De Felitta
The Square -- Nash Edgerton
Shrek The Third -- Chris Miller/Raman Hui
White Material -- Claire Denis
127 Hours -- Danny Boyle

Meh

Revolución -- 10 Mexican directors
All Good Things -- Andrew Jarecki
Casino Jack -- George Hickenlooper
Please Give -- Nicole Holofcener
Shutter Island -- Martin Scorsese
Wasteland -- Lucy Walker
Splice -- Vincenzo Natali
The Ghost Writer -- Roman Polanski

Way Overrated

Winter's Bone -- Debra Granik
Life During Wartime -- Todd Solondz
Somewhere -- Sophia Coppola
The Kids Are All Right --Lisa Cholodenko
Certified Copy -- Abbas Kiarostami
Greenberg -- Noah Baumbach
Animal Kingdom -- David Michod

Super Bad

Love And Other Drugs -- Ed Zwick
Inception -- Christopher Nolan
The Tempest -- Julie Taymor
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger -- Woody Allen
Black Venus -- Abdellatif Kechiche
Entre Nos -- Gloria La Morte/Paola Mendoza
We Are What We Are/Somos lo que hay -- Jorge Michel Grau
Salt -- Phillip Noyce


Haven't Seen Yet

Toy Story 3

Did Not See

Eat Pray Love
Sex and The City 2
Hereafter

Smartypants Spookfest

 
For your Halloween viewing consideration, that is in case you decide to stick around at home instead of traipsing around in a ridiculous costume (you know you are too old for that shit):

Spook Your Intellect:
• The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) Fabulous adaptation of A Turn of The Screw, by Henry James. With Deborah Kerr as a governess that is going Britishly bonkers. The original "I see dead people".
• Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973) or, Dread in Venice. Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Venice and menace. What more could one want?
• Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) Catherine Deneuve loses it and there is an uncooked rabbit in the fridge. Yum.
• The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976). Hell is the neighbors. And your own mind. 
• The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978) with Alan Bates (need I say more?) Brownie points if you understand what's going on, but a classic of 70's atmosphere.
• Nosferatu (F.W Murnau, 1922; Werner Herzog, 1979). Max Schreck or Klaus Kinski?
Do them both!
• Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988). A blood-curling performance by Jeremy Irons as gynecologist twins. Your pap smears will never be the same.
• Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008). Let the right movie in. The original, not the remake. 
• Pretty much anything by David Lynch, the master of nightmarish kitsch.  Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive are my favorites, but Eraserhead could also do the trick.

Classics:
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1962). The one and only. You'll never trust a shower curtain ever again. (And Frenzy, and Rebecca, and The Birds, The Lodger... )
• The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980).
• Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). This should be the It's A Wonderful Life of Halloween.
• Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945) Four elegant, creepy stories, the best one being Michael Redgrave, ventriloquist and his evil dummy. Chucky is small potatoes.
• Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962). Super duper creepy B-movie.
• The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) Garish and effective.
• Carrie (Brian de Palma, 1976). Nothing is scarier than adolescence. Do a double bill with Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen. You see someone with acne and you will run for your life.

STSOOM (Scared The Shit Out Of Me): 
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1970)  Horribly horrible.
• Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998)
• The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). It did, so sue me.
• The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007).
• Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007). What can I say? I'm easy.

Got a beef with this list? Drop us a line in the comments.

Sympathy for the Devil

I sympathize with Roman Polanski. Before you lynch me, let me elaborate.
I do not sympathize with his criminal behavior. I do not think that the fact that he survived the Holocaust as a child, or that his wife and unborn child were murdered by the Manson family, or that he is a brilliant filmmaker, can ever justify his sexual abuse of minors. Fact is, had his trial not been a travesty, he would probably have served time, as he deserved. But the trial was a circus, because all celebrity trials are circuses and the presiding judge wanted to be a celebrity himself. All I was saying that the complexity of his bizarre legal process, the distortions of fame, the zeitgeist of the 70's, make his case far more complicated than screaming "off with his head" 40 years after the fact. I was promptly accused of blaming the victim. I don't. I blame Polanski and I blame the victim's mother for leaving her unchaperoned at a "screen test" with a notorious film director at the house of a notorious actor in the middle of the drug addled 70's.  But why all this extradition hysteria now? Is it because there is an Los Angeles DA running for office?  People all of a sudden become naive when it comes to selfrighteous moral indignation. 

The Ghost Writer

Except for a fantastic opening scene of magnificent, menacing simplicity, a spectacular closing scene and some very sly and delicious Polanskian touches in between, I must say I do not share the enthusiasm that the NY film critics and my friend Joel are bestowing on this latest film by my beloved Roman Polanski.
I enjoyed The Ghost Writer because it is gorgeous to look at (bravo, Pavel Edelman, director of photography). Because Ewan McGregor is gorgeous to look at, and so in a way is Pierce Brosnan. I enjoyed it because it has those little masterful stylistic touches that give me a frisson of pleasure in every Polanski film. Because there's Eli Wallach, 500 years old, still delivering his lines with a twinkle in his eye. And Tom Wilkinson, perfect as always. The wry, European sense of humor, the pristine beauty of the mise en scene. Some beautiful framing. Yes. But the script feels sloppy. It's like watching a Hitchcockian thriller and a political intrigue film that don't quite seem to jell together. There are several huge implausibilities that I had tremendous trouble ignoring. This may be forgiven of lesser talents, but not of Polanski, a director that, in my never humble opinion, is in the pantheon of the Gods of Cinema.
However, kudos to the production team for filming a movie in Germany and making it look convincingly like Massachusetts (something Stanley Kubrick was unable to do with New York in Eyes Wide Shut). I checked the credits because it looked way too authentic. Indeed, plates were filmed in the US and then seamlessly integrated to the film. Well done!
It is impossible not to read some of Polanski's personal backstory into his films. Whether this is right or not, it's a big part of the enjoyment. This film seems to be his little revenge against the US. Something like, "you puritanical hypocrites torture people, you instigate wars under false premises, you lie and you cover up and you lie some more, and you are still giving me shit over something that happened 40 years ago, and for which I was already tried, and punished in a court of law (and forgiven by the victim)".
I strongly recommend the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired for clarification on the very strange, complex and fascinating circumstances of his trial. Regardless of the fact that he acted despicably, he was given a very unfair trial by a crazy judge, which is why he fled. But I digress.
As the critics have pointed out, Polanski is a master of disquiet, paranoia and persecution. The reason why I adore him, is because he knows, like Hitchcock, that evil breathes among us, is within us, blooms unencumbered at all times.
Ewan McGregor plays the ghost writer for a Tony Blairesque character whose first ghost writer is found dead under mysterious circumstances. He starts getting nosy. It's a cover up story, reaching the highest echelons of government, but who cares if the CIA has infiltrated the British government? What else is new?
I'm much more disturbed by a rabbit slowly attaining putrefaction in Catherine Deneuve's apartment in Repulsion, or, in a similar but much more disturbing vein, Polanski himself going crazy in The Tenant. We know the CIA is everywhere. Next!
I also felt that even though the sense of menace was subtle and ever present, the pacing of the movie dragged a little. My biggest problem is that the plot is farfetched, contrived and a little puerile.
But there are many small pleasures. My favorite scene is Ewan McGregor going into the bathroom in a panic because his boss' wife is making the moves on him. He looks into the mirror and says to himself "Bad Idea" before proceeding anyway. Maybe Polanski wishes he had the presence of mind as he led a 13 year-old unescorted girl into Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi in the drug addled 70s?
I love his sense of humor.
Some scenes are just beautiful to look at. A gorgeous tracking shot on a little piece of paper being passed around from hand to hand. A caretaker futilely trying to rake some leaves against the cold Cape Cod wind, like something out of Waiting for Godot. That same man framed by curtains in the only scene in the movie where curtains are closed. Although I adore composer Alexandre Desplat, I felt the music was too overwrought, trying to be Bernard Herrmanesque without quite achieving it. Ewan McGregor's considerable charm kept me entertained. I just didn't buy the plot.

Polanski's Cul de Sac

And I don't mean his fabulous movie, but his legal travails in the US. A very informative and fascinating documentary about his case was at the Quad last year. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, provides a sympathetic look at what actually transpired when Polanski was accused of raping a 13 year old girl and furnishing her with drugs, among other sensational things that apparently did all happen. The problem was his celebrity and a narcissistic judge who tried to exploit his case to make himself a star. That was the real reason why Polanski skipped town, never to come back to the US.
Because his wife had been gruesomely murdered by the Manson family, because he had directed Rosemary's Baby, and because he led an unapologetically fast life, even after the murder of Sharon Tate, the press in this country was extremely biased against him. Terrible, silly things were said and written about him; that he consorted with the devil, that he summoned bad luck, that he killed his own wife, (things that have a whiff of the old antisemitic blood libel in them).
Well, I have my own bias. I adore him and I adore his movies (like the French, who made him a Chevalier of Arts and Letters).
The movie intimates, without saying it in so many words, that the press disliked him intensely because he was a short Jew with a weird accent, talent, fame and fortune. I think it is also because he was defiant. The kind of things that undid him in the public eye were his appetite for partying and his penchant for young girls. He refused to act according to the media's idea of good behavior, and in turn he gave them fodder to sell a lot of papers.
Now, having sex with a 13 year old girl is very wrong, no matter how much of a film genius you are. However, as is usual in actual reality (a construct that the media in this country, and much of its adult population, refuse to acknowledge), reality can be murky.
Yes, Polanski exploited this girl. But this girl was exploited by her own mother, a wannabe actress who brought her daughter along to crazy Hollywood hippie parties and who allowed her to go unchaperoned with the notorious Polanski to a photo shoot. Who in their right mind, right? But the mind is not usually right in the blinding presence of fame and fortune. The victim is interviewed in the film, and she basically just obfuscates. She doesn't say much, but her attitude does. I guess for some legal reason that goes unexplained, and that requires explanation, some of the her testimony is not shown while other is. This is problematic. But perhaps that's the deal she struck to appear on camera.
Still, it seems from her demeanor that the sex was not entirely non-consensual, that at her tender age she knew what a quaalude was from first hand experience and agreed to take one. Today, she doesn't act like a self-righteous victim. She seems to be more of a victim of the scandal that was unleashed around her, than a victim of the rape. Years later, we learn she settled a civil suit against Polanski and she publicly pardoned him. Hmmm...
Now, what happened after their tryst that led her to sic the cops on him? Did she get scared and come crying to Mom, or did Mom pick her up and saw her intoxicated and could tell what went on and decided to press charges? This we don't know from the movie. The woman refuses to blame her mom or herself. It's understandable, but there is a whole chunk of essential information missing in her account. It is the part of personal responsibility that is awol. And this is not blaming the victim, but maybe they would think of acknowledging at least that they made a mistake in trusting him.
As for the appalling antics of the judge in the case, same thing. He was blinded by the potential exposure, by the floodlights of fame. He loved handling celebrity cases and he asked to be given this case. There are revelations of shocking judicial misconduct in the film. It is also not explained why the lawyers for the defense and the prosecutor at first agreed to accommodate the judge's illegal demands. I wonder if today they wouldn't immediately scream for his removal. Still, Polanski was lucky he got himself a fantastic lawyer, not in the ultra-tanned Hollywood celebrity mold, but a straight arrow, and also that the prosecutor was not one of those power hungry guys that use cases like this to advance their careers. He was also decent and competent, it seems, and between him and Polanski's lawyer, they ended up protecting him from the judge's abuses.
The whole thing is endlessly fascinating, legally, morally, humanly.

In The Desert You Can't Remember Your Name...

Today, for instance, I was so happy to take a swim right outside my door early in the morning, that I locked myself out of my room. Apparently, it happens with some frequency in the rarefied desert air. However, since it is so darn hot, it was quite refreshing to wait for the maintenance guy in my dripping swimsuit, which pretty much dried out in seconds. While I waited, I even attempted some tai chi in the grass. Blame it on the heat, my darlings.


Then I took a ride through town in my ovenmobile, found the little downtown nestled against the spectacular hills (see below) and went to see Rosemary's Baby, whose amazing DP, William A. Fraker was there to tell stories about this legendary movie. He said he loves, admires and respects Roman Polanski. So do we! He said Polanski is a visual storyteller and that's because he comes from the Lodz film school. Hear, hear. (Yet listen to the way he uses sound. It is unbelievable).
The film still holds up. Visually it is a marvel. It is entirely disturbing in ways that one can't really rationalize. It is also very funny and over the top and it still gives one the creeps. This amazing film is 40 years old, people. It is fresher, and more daring than most of the crap made today. I have written about it elsewhere in this blog. I am a die hard Polanski fan.

At sunset, these mountains look incredible.

It's a good thing it is barely bearable to be outside in the middle of the day, because otherwise I'd be at the pool or communing with rattlesnakes in the desert. As such, I'm happy to go to the events of the festival where I will learn how to market my film, be discovered like Lana Turner at Schwab's and my life will change forever. Seriously, I want to see some shorts as well. See how we fare among the competition.

Inland Empire.