Coopted by Hollywood

I see the talented German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who gave us the excellent Hitler tearjerker Downfall (actually one of the scariest movies I've ever seen), was sadly coopted by Hollywood to do a completely unnecessary remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that has already had one remake by Philip Kaufman (I liked it). I have yet to see the original, by Don Siegel, which is probably the best. Apparently, this being Hollywood, and even though Mr. Hirschbiegel retains director credit (and to judge from the reviews, rather unwisely) three other directors were brought in "to amp up the action", including the monstrously overrated Wachowski Bros, from the Matrix, and one of their collaborators, from V is for Vendetta.
I feel sorry and angry at the poor German film director for following the money, thinking that he could retain in Hollywood the illustrious success and the independence of mind of his first film. Perhaps he thought that he could turn the great parable of the body snatchers into another tour de force of claustrophobia and mass deception. Sounds like a very interesting premise, provided you let him do it his way.
Why hire the guy if you are going to turn whatever he does into crap? It's like you hire Ozu, but what you actually want is Johnnie To. Why waste so much money, time and effort? Why pretend you want something artistic? Why waste everybody's time jerking off to pretension when all you want is farts, because the audiences, according to you, love farts and nothing but? It would save everybody involved a lot of misery just to fart it out as planned.
3. And if it turns out that it is not the big fart you imagined, have the decency to own it. It may not make you so much money, but it may actually be good.

On DVD: Shortbus

Since I meant to stay up to watch the Perseids, I finally got around to see what was collecting dust in my Netflix for months. I had two choices. Edmond, by David Mamet and Shortbus, by John Cameron Mitchell. We chose the second one, thinking a little explicit sex would be highly diverting. Boy oh boy, were we wrong.
There are two things that are routinely confused with art:
1. Good intentions. (In which the auteur wishes to inform the audience that his soul is pure, wise, tolerant, and ecumenical and he has the benefit of mankind at heart). This is the most pernicious of the two. When confronted with this one, run for your life.
2. Shock value. (In which the auteur has not outgrown his/her childish need to get attention by any means necessary, except he/she now thinks that by doing something deliberately outrageous he/she are in fact doing something original and brave).
Both together are a recipe not for art, but for kitsch, which is the opposite of art.
Shortbus is one such example.
It is a capital, unforgivable sin for a movie to promise to be erotic and then not deliver. Shortbus is awash in explicit sex, but it is absolutely, resolutely not sexy. Why? Either because the sex is joyless and selfish (as in the gay couple who struggles with monogamy and one of them is really depressed because he was abused, or as in the sex therapist, that, surprise, surprise, can't have an orgasm and spends an entire movie humorlessly trying to force one out); or sex is too joyful, as in an orgy room full of loving-caring people who look like a million bucks and who seem to be having a moderately nice time in fantasyland, and I mean the Disney one.
The sex in Shortbus wants to be both well intentioned and shocking and thus it is reduced to absolute corn. It's like watching a visual version of sex therapy (like that Canadian woman, Sue Something, and what could be less sexy?). Then Mitchell thinks he is brave for using very explicit real sex scenes, one homosexual one involving the blowing of the Star Spangled Banner into someone's rear orifice, for instance. This, because of its transparent need to shock, has quite the opposite effect. It is puerile and completely devoid of real shock value. Borat's rendition of the national anthem in that rodeo in Hicksville -- now, that was truly transgressive and much braver.
To cap it all off, there is a garishly hideous animated travelling shot over Manhattan I guess meant to connect the stories of the sex crazed New Yorkers that inhabit this particularly unrealistic universe, that makes this town look like a toy you buy at K-Mart. The movie feels long, the humor forced, the bathos unbearable. Unwitting kitsch may be fun once in a while, but kitsch that thinks it has something important to say is a fake and a waste of time.

Classics: Danton

At the moment we are undergoing a bit of an obsession with the French Revolution. Perhaps it is because we spent one month where every two blocks you see the three immortal words that look great carved in stone but that we haven't quite figured out how to achieve yet: liberte, egalite, fraternite. To know that these and other thoroughly enlightened concepts which gave rise to the modern state, to what we now consider democracy, came hand in hand with an unbelievable bloodbath, well, it is all very sexy and important and we wish to learn more about it.
So off to see Danton, showing at the Lincoln Center film retrospective dedicated to mon amour, Gerard Depardieu. Danton was directed by Andrej Wajda, the Polish film director, and was made in 1983 as a French-Polish coproduction to commemorate the anniversary of the French Revolution. At the time, it also famously resonated as a thinly veiled metaphor for what was happening with Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland. Today, it is worth seeing because what it says about the perversion of ideas by power unfortunately still holds (cf, the Bush Admin.); but also to watch two monster actors face to face: mon amour who plays Danton, and the great Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak, who plays Robespierre.
The movie is very stagy and theatrical, but it is a visceral and cogent illumination of how power corrupts and how idealistic and idealized heroes are all too human. The tour de force is the great scene between Danton, an unfettered sybarite with some sort of a conscience that the ideals he fought for and the institutions he helped invent are being perverted by the Terror, and Robespierre whose cold rationality has led him to guillotine pretty much everybody with a functioning head on their shoulders in the name of keeping those ideals alive (and with a shudder you notice that Robespierre's coldness reminds you of Dick Cheney, except the latter doesn't even have the good intentions, or a heart). It is not only a magnificent acting duel, with mon amour trying to charm and seduce Robespierre through food and wine and humor, and the other one cold as ice trying to guard himself from those advances. It is as precise and strategic as a chess game.
Students of acting: this scene is a master class in acting technique (beats, low and high status, listening, what the other wants, conflict, tension, you name it), but you never notice it because you are too taken by the intense drama that is unfolding across a table.
In any case, to cut to the chase, many heads rolled.
Later at night, as we walked home from a very satisfying chocolate malt and French Toast (like Danton, we are unfettered sybarites) we saw a woman rummaging in the garbage. On closer inspection, someone had thrown away a bunch of very respectable books, a veritable cache of culture. So what would be our joy and surprise, to find, sitting dejected near the gutter, Citizens, Simon's Schama massive book about the French Revolution! We may not have seen the meteors, but we believe that the universe is trying to tell us something.
The plan is to start reading Bertrand Russell's a History of Philosophy, and then do the massive Schama book. By the time we re finished with the two, if we are still breathing, we will be able to solve all the world's problems. Stay tuned.

Gods of Cinema: Bergman and Antonioni

In today's New York Times there are two tributes about Bergman and Antonioni, written respectively by Woody Allen and by Martin Scorsese. It is a lovely idea. But of the two, the Scorsese one is the real jewel. If Martin Scorsese were to give a Master Class in cinema, and he should, I would start lining up now. Not only are his enthusiasm and absolute love of film contagious, but he is a genius at articulating what a film does to the viewer emotionally, what it achieves artistically, why it is important. He is incredibly generous with his knowledge, he is eloquent and utterly illuminating. As with the best teachers, the ones who truly inspire, one learns something. Even as he says how the movie shocked him and changed the way he looked at cinema, he writes self-effacingly. It is not about himself. He gives all his thought and passion to the work of Antonioni, and to exhorting us, inviting us and seducing us to watch, learn and partake.
As for the Woody Allen piece on Bergman, it is an amusing personal recollection, but it is very different from Scorsese's tribute. It has more to do with Allen than with Bergman. And even though he enumerates in a list the reasons why Bergman is important (with all due respect, like a college student would in a term paper, just a string of clichés), he doesn't really explain what makes Bergman's films unique. He doesn't make you want to run out to watch the entire oeuvre, like Scorsese does. Woody is proud to have been friends with Ingmar. Fine. But the piece is very revealing in quite a different direction, and I'm sure quite unconsciously:

I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Precisely. Don't. Scorsese learned from Antonioni that cinema could be freeing, and that the camera could invent true, devastating emotional landscapes. Perhaps compulsive Scandinavian workaholism is not the best lesson to learn from Bergman, who had the advantage of being a truly gifted, creative being. Instead, it would behoove Allen's immense talent to churn out less half-baked films and try to recapture with less discipline but more artistic rigor the great comic genius he once was.

Master Class

In today's New York Times there are two tributes about Bergman and Antonioni, written respectively by Woody Allen and by Martin Scorsese. It is a lovely idea. But of the two, the Scorsese one is the real jewel. If Martin Scorsese were to give a Master Class in cinema, and he should, I would start lining up now. Not only are his enthusiasm and absolute love of film contagious, but he is a genius at articulating what a film does to the viewer emotionally, what it achieves artistically, why it is important. He is incredibly generous with his knowledge, he is eloquent and utterly illuminating. As with the best teachers, the ones who truly inspire, one learns something. Even as he says how the movie shocked him and changed the way he looked at cinema, he writes self-effacingly. It is not about himself. He gives all his thought and passion to the work of Antonioni, and to exhorting us, inviting us and seducing us to watch, learn and partake.
As for the Woody Allen piece on Bergman, it is an amusing personal recollection, but it is very different from Scorsese's tribute. It has more to do with Allen than with Bergman. And even though he enumerates in a list the reasons why Bergman is important (with all due respect, like a college student would in a term paper, just a string of clichés), he doesn't really explain what makes Bergman's films unique. He doesn't make you want to run out to watch the entire oeuvre, like Scorsese does. Woody is proud to have been friends with Ingmar. Fine. But the piece is very revealing in quite a different direction, and I'm sure quite unconsciously:

I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Precisely. Don't. Scorsese learned from Antonioni that cinema could be freeing, and that the camera could invent true, devastating emotional landscapes. Perhaps compulsive Scandinavian workaholism is not the best lesson to learn from Bergman, who had the advantage of being a truly gifted, creative being. Instead, it would behoove Allen's immense talent to churn out less half-baked films and try to recapture with less discipline but more artistic rigor the great comic genius he once was.