Justified S03E02 – Cut Ties

When I was thinking up this review, I planned to call it a step down from the season opener, but thinking about it more made me realize it was better than I first thought. It’s not as well structured as the pilot, and it suffers from a fairly uninteresting case-of-the-week, but it moves forward the overarching plot in very satisfying ways.

The most interesting part of the episode was seeing Raylan and Boyd joust from a distance: Raylan (thinks he) figures out what Boyd is up to, and tries to ensure that Boyd can’t get to his target, Dickie. Except, as always, Boyd is craftier than expected (he manages to get to Dickie all the same), and his motivation is not quite what we -or possibly even Raylan- think: killing Dickie isn’t his primary goal. Getting Mags’s money is. And surprisingly, considering what Ava says when Boyd gets released, it seems that was his intention all along, even before Raylan mentioned the missing money (“well over ten dollars”) in the first episode.

Which brings me to the second great element in this episode: the introduction of yet another new villain.  Animal gutting/carving/butchering has been a favorite trope this year in TV shows to introduce ruthless characters: there was the first scene with Tywin Lannister in GAME OF THRONES, Manny Horvitz in BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and now Limehouse, played by Mykelti Williamson. He gets a great monologue, too, which establishes him not just as ruthless but also as someone with a very distinct view of the world. He certainly won’t make it easy for Boyd to get his money, and I’m looking forward to seeing the black community (up to now represented mostly by Rachel) integrated in the Harlan web.

As for the rest of the episode, well, maybe it’s just that I tend not to find WitSec plots all that interesting, but it was a little underwhelming. It did have some redeeming value because it showed a wholly different view of Art. He’s often the comic relief, the cranky-but-kindly older boss, but here we saw him do what needed to be done, regardless of legality. It’s an intriguing development, but the resolution of the plot felt a little weak.

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned Carla Gugino yet. I like the Karen Sisco character, in principle**, and the fight at the hotel was nicely done, but she’s a bit underused here. She’s meant the reinforce Raylan’s doubts about his relationship, I suppose, remind him of the man he used to be, but she didn’t feel integral to the episode. It’ll be interesting to see if she comes back, and if they can do more with her then.

 **I know, I know, she’s technically NOT Karen Sisco because they don’t have the rights, but the character’s clearly based on her

Line (and line-reading) of the night? “Well now, Raylan, you’re talking to a man who’s sleeping with his dead brother’s widow and murderess.”

See you next week!

Justified S03E01 – The Gunfighter

Note: I wanted to try my hand at episodic TV commentary, and JUSTIFIED seemed the right show to start with. I’ll try to write up each episode in the season, and to have the write-ups online before Friday evening. I will assume that people reading this have either seen the episode or don’t mind being spoiled. 

The second season of Justified made good on the promise of the first one, and ended with the perfect goodbye for a great villain, Mags Bennett. Her exit left a bit of a vacuum, but there were enough threads left dangling – Boyd, Dickie, Wynn Duffy etc. – to make me look forward to the new season.

The first episode left me cautiously optimistic.

2011 in review – pt.1 (new films & cinema visits)

I made a resolution this year: I would watch one new-to-me film a day on average, and I would write at least one sentence about every single film I saw. I managed both goals: I saw 389 films this year, of which only 12 were re-watches, and I wrote them all up here. It was a great experience, exploring both the cannon and more obscure entries, deepening my knowledge of noir, trying to acclimatize myself to horror, and getting back into the habit of writing.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely I’ll equal this achievement next year: my thesis is due around August 1st, and I don’t expect to have a lot of spare time in the next six months. Knowing this only makes me more grateful that I made the time for movies this year.

I plan to do (at least) two year in review posts. This one focuses on the new films I saw, ranking them all, and will close with some statistics about my cinema visits.

La Piel Que Habito

Oh Pedro. You magnificent bastard.

I really should no longer be surprised. I did a count – this is the tenth Almodovar movie I’ve seen. I’m used to the vibrant colors and grand compositions by now, and I should no longer be surprised by the twists, the outrageousness, the sheer bat-shitness (bat-shittedness?) of it all. I spent the movie being first curious, then apprehensive, then highly uncomfortable followed by angry, and finally, when the twist finally starts emerging, shaking my head in both disbelief and admiration. Nobody else is foolish enough to attempt these things. But then again, I know of nobody else who could pull it off.

Read more after the jump, but SPOILERS beware. Usually I leave it at that, but really, I loved that I saw this film knowing next to nothing about the plot, and I would strongly recommend that people who a) have not seen this one but b) do want to watch it, stop reading right here.

TUMBLR – Legitimizing female desire, or: girls who like boys who kiss boys

As you may have noticed, I’ve kind of been sucked into this whole tumblr thing, and it’s kind of glorious and scary at the same time. From an outside perspective, looking just at Notes on Films, it looks like a normal (maybe slightly minimalist) blog, but there’s a whole interface behind it that’s more reminiscent of twitter: people following people, people “liking” posts and re-blogging them, etc. This also means that, like twitter, tumblr is anything but monolithic. If you’d put all the relationships in one of those sparse matrices BF works with and laid it out in graph form, you’d see all kinds of busy, intricately interlinked hubs with barely any connections between them. In what follows, some observations, and the meandering thoughts it inspired on the changes in the way female desire is reflected in current movies/media. Warning: long.

Adoring Anton

The hub I’m mostly in is the (classic) movie one, which seems to be dominated by fairly young girls (i.e. younger than me), and which is characterized partly by a lot of fawning over male movie stars*. One of the most prominent is current it-boy Michael Fassbender (just do a tumblr search for “sassy Fassy”, if you dare), but what’s most noticeable to me is the sheer diversity that’s on display: the classic heartthrobs make an appearance (Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, etc.), but there’s also tumblrs that feature Gene Kelly over and over, or Buster Keaton, or Robert Donat. There’s one girl who loved Anton Walbrook so much she got a tattoo of his name, and many others. Point is: people who still maintain that woman are “just not that visually motivated” can find literally thousands of counterexamples of tumblr, and that’s a good thing.

The Tree of Life

I’m always a bit amused at people who get angry because they thing someone has a “wrong” opinion of a movie – i.e. one that doesn’t line up with their own. It’s certainly possible to give an assessment of a movie that’s fundamentally mistaken, but our own subjective experience plays such an important part that the final verdict we offer says as much about ourselves as it does about the movie.

I am an atheist. Have been as long as I can remember – when I was six, only recently relocated to France, I swore to some older kids at school that I believed in God, but that was only because they were big and scary, and I had no idea who this “Dieu” character was anyway. My mother thought it was important for me to know the bible from a cultural standpoint, and I did like some of the stories, but I never connected with them, and they never seemed more or less true than, say, the Greek myths. I called myself agnostic for a long time, because it seemed arrogant to claim to know for sure, but at some point I decided that if believing in the existence of God was enough to call yourself a believer, believing in his absence was enough to call myself a atheist.

While I do have a problem with some aspects of organized religion, I don’t think all religion (or belief) is a bad thing. If people apply it only to themselves, and if it helps them derive some meaning or comfort or hope in the face of the fundamental meaninglessness of existence, who am I to begrudge them? Furthermore, religion has led to some of the most beautiful artworks made, whether in music or painting or literature, and I can appreciate it for that alone.

This is a pretty long introduction just to tell you that the religious parts of THE TREE OF LIFE, especially at the beginning and at the end, took me right out of the movie, and I don’t quite know why. It was the direct address to a mute God, in particular, that made me feel remote from the movie, like it was not meant for me, like I did not speak its language.

In defense of vegetables

It’s been a while since I dared immerse myself in a blogosphere dispute, but here goes. The whole thing started with a NYTimes piece by Dan Kois, talking about how he has less and less stamina for the “cultural vegetables” he feels he has to consume. A.O.Scott and Manohla Dargis responded, as did many others. I don’t pretend to be able to add new insight to the discussion, but it’s made me think, and I thought I’d put some of these thought on (virtual) paper.

The thing is, I understand where Dan Kois is coming from, to a certain extent. More precisely, I recognize the feeling that with some movies, the desire to have watched them is stronger than the desire to actually watch them. Films that stay on my watchlist for a long time, because in the moment, watching a short, entertaining noir or a fluffy classic Hollywood musical seems more appealing that doing the effort to immerse yourself in something more demanding.

That, however, is as far as I’m willing to go along with Kois, and not just because I disagree with his metaphor (just look at those veggies above. Don’t they look delectable? I don’t need any feeling of obligation to eat those). Digging in and watching these movies is, to me, almost always in some way a rewarding experience. Take one of his examples, SOLARIS. It took me a while to get up the energy to watch it, partly because my only previous Tarkovsky experience was in my first year of college with STALKER, and most of what I remembered was an insistent and annoying drip-drip-dripping sound, and a weird kind of drowsiness. But one night, after re-watching THE PASSENGER* for the nth time (with Nicholson’s awesome commentary), I felt in the correct mood to give SOLARIS a try.

Thor

I’ve been posting short things about films on tumblr lately, but this post expanded to the point where I thought I’d cross-post it here, too.

THOR is an entertaining, well-paced, action-filled opener of the 2011 blockbuster season. It’s often funny, it has an intriguing, conflicted villain (which is an improvement over the two IRON MAN movies), and Chris Hemsworth acquits himself quite well, especially in the Earth-based scenes. It also caters to the audience in pleasant ways: he walks around shirtless for a full minute -maybe two- and while I generally like less bulky guys, I have to say, da-yum*. The Asgard and Jotumheim scenes are all CGI-gloss, but I guess that could not be avoided. And I’m impressed Branagh managed to keep the film tonally similar to the IRON MAN movies, which is promising for further entries in this Marvel series.

Unfortunately, this is one of those movies where you can glimpse the scaffold beneath the story. For instance, from the way the story resolves, I would guess that THE AVENGERS will use Thor as a (semi-literal) deus ex machina. Also, I understand that the whole movie revolves around Thor learning a lesson, but his reversal is rather sudden and extreme. And there are more nitpicks: Hopkins really hams it up (though I guess it’s hard to underplay Odin All-father), Portman doesn’t quite pull off the scientific mumbo-jumbo (but I appreciated seeing a female physicist – we don’t get a lot of representation on-screen), and Thor’s quartet of friends didn’t really get much to do. All-in-all: worth seeing, but non-essential.

A note on 3D: in my city, I couldn’t see THOR in 2D, and this kind of pisses me off. It’s not so much the price hike (though 11 euros is quite a lot of money), but it’s an ‘upgrade’ I’d rather opt out of. I only seldom see the added value of 3D (the scene with the clown in TOY STORY 3 is the only example that comes to mind), and I don’t get the claims of realism: in fact it’s often detrimental to immersion. For instance, it doesn’t go well with fact cutting and hand-held-like shots, where it often leads the audience to look ‘through’ the action, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. It doesn’t combine with other cinematic tools, either: in THOR, there is a shot where the foreground suddenly becomes blurry because we’re supposed to focus on something in the background. In 2D this works as a depth indication, and it’s a trope we’re used to as a guide to the eye, but in 3D it just takes you out of the experience: if you were truly watching at a 3D images, you would be able to focus your eyes wherever you wanted. I don’t want to rule out all 3D (I hope they’ll bring out CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS here at some point), but it would be nice if it was an option instead of a mandatory drag, and if people realized how much 3D limits the director’s bag of cinematic tricks and acted accordingly.

*couldn’t find a good still of that for drooling purposes, sorry. Hope this one will do, instead.

Secret Beyond the Door

This post is for theFilm Noir Blogathon, details of which can be found here. Please consider donating to the Film Noir Foundation for the preservation of The Sound of Fury, and do hop over to the first link: there are so, so many great posts already, I almost hesitate to add my meager offering.

I first intended to write a post about Fritz Lang and gender relations, focusing especially on violence against women, but the subject proved to wide-ranging and diffuse. More specifically, I kept circling back to THE SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR, a Bluebeard kind of tale Lang made in 1947, starring Joan Bennett and Michael Redgrave. Warning: spoilers herein.

Any Bluebeard tale needs to deal with a few questions: why does the woman/girl marry Bluebeard? Why doesn’t she run away once she discovers the ‘secret beyond the door’? And, not unimportantly, what is Bluebeard’s deal? Why does he kill his wives?

The first wrinkle the movie presents us with is in the character of Celia. Her introductory voice-over (all about dreams and daffodils and fear of marriage) makes her seem like the stereotypical innocent, but the flashback we dive into reveals otherwise: Celia is reluctant to settle, and while she agrees to marry her brother’s dull & reliable friend, he thinks it wise to send her to Mexico to sow her wild oats.

She there, of course, meets another man – not a big surprise, considering the movie opens with their marriage. But it’s worth noting just how she catches his attention: by being enthralled by a knife fight between two men over a woman. Her friend is horrified, but Celia is powerfully drawn to this mix of violence and sex (incidentally, this is the same mixture that often draws us to noir). She barely even flinches when she’d almost hit by a thrown knife.

Hint: if you get picked up by a guy because he sees you love the mixture of violence and sex, marrying him might not be the smartest move.

Still, for all this heavy foreboding, Mark Lamphere seems fairly normal, even bland, though a tad sexist: there’s a fascinating conversation between the newlyweds about gender difference. Mark posits that men (or “human beings”, which is in his quote opposed to “women” and “children”) are rational, whereas women are intuitive. Celia makes a face. He defends himself, by saying that women can intuitively jump to a conclusion it might take a rational man days of rational reasoning (and so on) to get to. Celia, promptly and justifiably, pushes him off the hammock they’re laying on.

Mark also turns out to be prone to sudden mood swings, which soon interrupt the idyllic honeymoon. And then we come to his fort, where Celia not only finds his domineering sister, but also a son (with attendant Mrs. Danvers-like tutor) and the specter of a dead first wife – Rebecca, anyone? Creepier and creepier, it turns out during the housewarming party that the “felicitous” rooms her new husband told her he collected are all rooms where gruesome murders took place. Furthermore, while the movie doesn’t immediately point it out, they’re all murders of women. And there’s one room to which the door is ominously closed.

Ok, frankly, the concept of a “room collection”, even for an architect, is patently ridiculous. Still, the scene is powerful – and funny, as it’s commented on by a (female) psychology students, who proclaims that none of these murders would have taken place if only the murderers had sat down with a therapist. After all, who hates women except the repressed?

Of course, Celia just HAS to see what’s in that room – for her husband’s good, of course. She uses some wax to copy the key (in a really tense scene – Lang is an amazing director, and knows how to direct a thrilling sequence), and whaddaya know: it’s her bedroom. At first, this makes her suspect that Mark killed his first wife. But then *drumroll* she notices… that the candles are asymmetric. He means to kill her!

It looks, at first, as if she’s going to do the smart thing and run. And we get a nice little fake out: she sees a figure in the distance, she screams, there’s a fade to black and then we open back at the house, at a conspicuously Celia-less breakfast. We even get a courtroom scene, in which Mark attempts to protect himself, though the lack of features in the room clues us in to its non-existence.

But no! The dark, menacing figure was just her old fiancé, and somehow, this convinced Celia that she has to give her husband another chance. More specifically, SHE STILL THINKS HE WANTS TO KILL HER (I usually use italics for emphasis, but this warrants all caps), but she thinks there are, like, deep, repressed reasons for that, and she wants to get to the bottom of the matter. In other words: she doesn’t just try to stall, but she tries to talk him out of his murderous rage.

It turns out that Mark is angry because he thought his beloved mother once locked him in his room – but as Celia coincidentally knows, it was actually his sister. As if it’s not hard enough to swallow that a lifetime of misogyny (and even murderous rage at women) could be caused by a childhood prank, this clarification alone is enough to jolt Mark out of his trance, just in time to save his beloved wife from the fire lighted by the nanny (told you she was like Mrs. Danvers). And all was well.

I mock, but I really loved this film, despite its ludicrous elements, I love Joan Bennett in it (I’d like to take her character out for a drink), and I think it’s fascinating to think about. I don’t know how much Lang had to do with the plot or even theme, but violence against women is a recurring theme in his movies. In CLASH BY NIGHT, Marylin Monroe has a conversation with her beau about whether men have a right to smack their girlfriends around. In SCARLET STREET, Edward G. Robinson is henpecked by his wife, and eventually takes out all his bottled rage on Joan Bennett – though in that movie, she kinda deserves it.

The other big movie in this respect is THE BIG HEAT, in which the murder of a woman is a prime motivator for the hero, and violence perpetrated against another woman (Gloria Grahame) turns her into an instrument of revenge. In fact, in that movie, it can be said that Gloria Grahame’s character is a manifestation of Glenn Ford’s id, his violent inner safe made flesh, allowing the law-abiding cop to keep his hands clean, perhaps in illustration of Mark Lamphere’s thesis that men are ratio and women are instinct.

Of course, drawing these kinds of links is tricky. In Lang’s first two American Noirs, FURY (an alternate version of the story of THE SOUND OF FURY, the movie to be preserved) and YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, the women (both played by Sylvia Sidney) are faithful and supportive, even functioning as consciences, while in a later film, BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT, the murder of showgirls might be the subject, but the only truly heroic character is played by Joan Fontaine.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re a tenacious person, and I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you without a clear conclusion, or well, point. Fact is: Lang is most famous for M and Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, but his American work (of which I’ve seen only 8 out of 22) is worth exploring too, and he made a valuable contribution to film noir. THE BIG HEAT is the best one I’ve seen so far, but THE SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR shows his craftsmanship, is a fascinating variation on the “is my husband trying to kill me”-theme (see also: SUSPICION, GASLIGHT, even REBECCA)… and is a lot of fun, to boot.

Oh, and if you’d like to get me a birthday present? A donation to the Film Noir Foundation would be a great one!

COPIE CONFORME: film as a Rorschach blot

Warning: SPOILERS herein (not that they really spoil the movie, in my humble opinion, but YMMV)
Disclaimer: Rambling, run-on sentences, etc.

From the advance reviews from Cannes, I knew that Copie Conforme centered around an ambiguity: is the central pair a long-married couple pretending they’d just met, or are they two people on a first date who play at being a troubled married couple? It seemed clear to me after the movie that it was the former. When I turned to the friend I saw the movie with, however, and said “well, that wasn’t THAT ambiguous”, she immediately agreed… and said “yes, I mean, obviously they’ve just met”.

Furthermore, my former colleague Ronald, whose opinion I greatly respect, described Juliette Binoche’s character in his (Dutch) review as a woman on the verge on a nervous breakdown. My takeaway? That William Shimell’s character was cold, distant, and kind of a jerk.

Of course, different people seeing different things in the same movie (or any work of art, in fact) is the rule rather than the exception. One could even say that art that can only be interpreted one way, or that can inspire only one specific emotion, is hardly art at all. Still, maybe because Shimell’s character is said to be interested more in the perception of art than in the art itself, and also because of the vast difference in the interpretations, it struck me as an interesting aspect to focus on. What if the ambiguous nature of the film is intentional, a deliberately equivocal canvas for us to project our interpretation on? Something like one of those optical illusions where you can see either one of two images, but never both at the same time?

If we accept that the movie functions as a sort of cinematic Rorschach blot, the next question is: what does it reveal? It seems that my interpretation would mark me as a cynic, but then again, in the alternative take on things, the two central characters are the cynical ones. Do Ronald and I disagree on the characters because of our respective genders, because of a facet of our personalities, like a fear of commitment versus a fear of abandonment – or, hopefully, because of something less facile? And there is, of course, another alternative: maybe it’s because we side with a certain protagonist’s views on the value of copies that we side with them as a person, too – though I cannot say if this applies to me, since I haven’t quite made up my mind on the matter.

As for the “truth” of the relationship, it might all be much simpler than all that. After all, with so little to go on (the only “concrete” clue, the outside perspective provided by the son, points to the second option), what made me so convinced? Probably mostly a failure of imagination: improvising a courtship seems, to me, much simpler than convincingly acting like you’ve had over a decade of recriminations between you. I also can’t imagine why you would even want to imagine that when everything’s still full of hope – while I can imagine trying to re-capture the thrill of the beginning.

Whichever your take is cannot give a conclusive answer about your stand in the copy vs. original debate, since it cannot equivocally be determined which is which – and that, of course, is kind of the point. All we can say is which WE – or I should say I – think is more credible as an original, which feels copied.

Maybe a second viewing, later, will change my mind – but the movie will, of course, still be the same. In any case, I’m fairly sure I’ll be as fascinated as I was this time: it’s a wonderfully shot, wonderfully acted film full of twists and turns about two complex people engaged in a complex, constantly evolving dialogue about art and relationships – how could I not be?

P.S. It is tempting, of course (if only since it’s the movie of the moment) to draw comparisons to Inception. However, I think the ambiguity there is cheap rather than interesting: since a happy ending would have felt/been undeserved, and a straight out “he’s still dreaming!”-conclusion would have been both a cop-out and not entirely supported by the rest of the movie, Nolan wisely decided to leave everything in the middle. It’s telling that not only do I not have an opinion on which option is “correct”, but I couldn’t care less.