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!

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. The opening drags a bit, but establishes what it needs to – Raylan’s hurt but getting better, Winona didn’t leave, etc. – before starting the set-up for season three.

One thing that Justified doesn’t get nearly enough credit for is structure, and this episode offers a great example. After some scenes establishing that Boyd has the Bennett weed and others showing some gangster in trouble, we get a scene that introduces sadistic baddie Fletcher Nix – great name, by the way, the nihilism’s right there – and which serves a dual purpose: it establishes Fletcher as calmly murderous, and introduces both the rules of his “game” and the generic outcome (answer: not good for his opponent). The third to last scene mirrors this scene neatly: again, here’s Fletcher, his opponent (Raylan) and a third party (Winona). Again, the game is set up, the count down begins. Obviously, we know the outcome will be different, but I’ll admit I had no idea just how Raylan would get the upper hand, and his solution is both simple and brilliant. Meanwhile, previous scenes had heightened the stakes by emphasizing that Raylan’s injuries meant he’s not by far as good a shot as usual, and by reminding us several times that Winona is pregnant.

It would have been a great scene to end on, but there are two more to come. The first I’ll get to later, and reveals who the real new big bad is. And the last? Well, that resolves a question left hanging from a much earlier scene, in which we see Boyd Crowder coming to the station, getting into Raylan’s face about not letting him get his revenge on Dickie, and then attacking him. It’s a startling moment – Boyd is capable of vicious violence, as we’ve seen before, but he’s also smart, and this attack seems pointless, even counterproductive. The final scene reveals the purpose, however: attacking a Marshall gets you to federal prison, but not for too long. Just long enough to, oh, say, pop in, kill a dude, and pop right back out – which certainly seems to be Boyd’s plan.

Boyd can afford to go to prison for a while, it turns out, as Ava’s holding down the fort, and shows in this episode just how skilled she is. First she defuses a situation that could have gone really, really bad, especially for Devil. And when she shows Devil what her “ornery” looks like in a later scene, ooo-boy. I don’t generally condone violence, but her handling of that frying pan was the definition of bad-ass. I’m very curious to see what they do with Ava this season: last season showed her slow conversion to the criminal life, and I think it’ll be interesting to see her assert her authority in the Crowder gang  - and I hope the writers won’t wimp out and go down the Margaret Schroeder route with her.

Finally, let’s talk about Mags’ replacements. Fletcher is amusing (and his voice mesmerizing), but he’s basically already been beaten – of course, this was the case with Boyd too, in the pilot, so you never know*. And the big bad, it seems, will be the slick mobster Robert Quarles (got this from the A.V. club, hope it’s correct), who enlists Wynn Duffy in this episode after coolly shooting Duffy’s old boss and his secretary. I’m not impressed yet – the casually-talking-about-scenery-while-plotting-murder thing is a bit overdone by now – but that might just be because Margo Martindale left some very big shoes to fill. Shooting people is one thing – call me back when you bash in your sons hand because he disobeyed you. However, I’m willing to give Neal McDonough and his blue eyes a few episodes to get more menacing.

Overall, a promising start, with enough of the typical humor, a welcome return of both Tim and Rachel, and plenty to look forward too.

*I hadn’t read other reviews before writing this, but now that I have, it seems Fletched might be dead after all. We’ll see, I suppose.

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.

I saw 50 films this year that were released in 2011 in either the Netherlands, the USA, or both. I’ve ordered them all, partly to avoid all the disclaimers about the movies I have not watched.  I’ve coded them for easy reading: the top 10 for the Netherlands is simply the first ten movies on the list NOT including HUGO (which won’t come out here until February – I watched it while at a conference in the U.S.). For the U.S. top list, as much as I could make it with so many movies still out of my reach, focus on the red titles.

A final note before the list: these are not ordered by quality, nor even by how much I enjoyed them at the time. The order is determined primarily by how fondly I look back on a film, how many good/impressive/touching scenes I can remember, and how much I’d like to revisit it.

1. Melancholia* (von Trier)
2. Midnight in Paris* (Allen)
3. Hugo* (Scorsese)
4. Drive* (Winding Refn)
5. La Piel Que Habito* (Almodovar)
6. Black Swan* (Arononofsky)
7. Pina* (Wenders)
8. The Artist* (Hazanavicius)
9. Carnage* (Polanski)
10. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol* (Bird)
11. Beginners* (Mills)
12. Somewhere* (Coppola)
13. Fast Five* (Lin)
14. Super 8* (Abrams)
15. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy* (Alfredson)
16. 50/50* (Levine)
17. Another Earth (Cahill)
18. The Guard* (McDonagh)
19. The Tree of Life* (Malick)
20. True Grit* (Coen)
21. X-Men: First Class* (Vaughn)
22. Jane Eyre* (Fukunaga)
23. Source Code* (Jones)
24. Misterios de Lisboa* (Ruiz)
25. Blue Valentine (Cianfrance)
26. A Separation (Farhadi)
27. Rise of the Planet of the Apes* (Wyatt)
28. Captain America: the First Avenger* (Johnston)
29. The Adventures of Tintin: the Secret of the Unicorn* (Spielberg)
30. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt. 2 *(Yates)
31. Winnie the Pooh (Anderson & Hall)
32. Rango (Verbinski)
33. Carlos (Assayas)
34. Contagion* (Soderberg)
35. The King’s Speech (Hooper)
36. Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows* (Ritchie)
37. Thor* (Branagh)
38. Les Amours Imaginaires (Dolan)
39. Submarine* (Ayoade)
40. O Estrango Caso de Angelica (de Oliveira)
41. Hanna (Wright)
42. Easy A (Gluck)
43. The Mechanic* (West)
44. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn pt.1* (Condon)
45. Colombiana* (Megaton)
46. TRON: Legacy (Kosinski)
47. The Tourist (Henckel von Donnersmarck)
48. Bad Teacher (Kasdan)
49. Unknown (Collet-Serra)
50. Blitz (Lester)

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.

I want to start by considering the rape-revenge motif, which Almodóvar explores in interesting ways. It’s quite an effective trope: first you get the rape, which is violence but with ‘sex’ mixed in*, and which as a bonus marks the villain as utterly despicable (rape being second only to genocide, and way ahead of murder in the movie short-hand for evil). Then, in the revenge part, the audience has in a sense gotten permission to enjoy the violence dished out to the villain.

In the first part of the movie, Almodóvar seems to be following this trope pretty faithfully. A man invades the house, gags his mother (!), and has violent sex with Vera, the prisoner he finds – she’s admittedly not fighting him off, seeing a means of escape in him, but he ignores her desperation and the obvious pain she is in. Antonio Banderas comes back to the house and shoots him. It’s a jarring sequence, party because the rapist is in a tiger costume. I understand the motivation for this – it creates an ‘out’ for the viewer, creating distance with comedic details – but I don’t quite think it works. It’s too broad compared with the rest of the movie, and alienating. It is, however, a fairly straightforward illustration of the trope, complete with the woman falling into the arms of her rescuer.

Then Pedro starts complicating matters (and if you’re still reading despite the spoiler warning, seriously, stop). A flashback from Banderas’ perspective shows us that his daughter (of which we already know that she committed suicide) was raped, too. Then we zoom onto Vera’s sleeping head, and get … a flashback from the rapist’s point of view. It’s a rather different situation, but it again involves a guy, Vicente, who seems uninterested in consent, and who continues even when it’s explicitly denied/withdrawn**.    The problem is, despite the dire consequences for the victim, it’s not quite vicious enough for the trope, and we see the whole event – and what follows – through the perpetrators eyes. When Banderas comes to get his revenge, kidnapping him and leaving him chained up in a cave somewhere with only a barrel of water for an indeterminate amount of time, it doesn’t feel remotely satisfying. I even found myself excusing the rapist in my head, thinking of mitigating circumstances – I mentally slapped myself immediately, but still. I started getting angry at Almodóvar, even, thinking that this time he’d taken things too far – though I’d have been hard pressed to explain what I objected to most, the multiple rapes, the treatment of the rapist, or the fact that he made me feel sorry for one.

Then, way too late considering my familiarity with Almodóvar’s favorite themes, I realized what the twist was. I understood why the camera zoomed onto Vera’s face before showing us Vicente’s flashback: they are one and the same. Banderas’ punishment is much more elaborate (and, in a rather nasty way, poetic) than just imprisoning his daughter’s rapist: he’s going to make him understand what it’s like to be a woman – conveniently giving him a human guinea pig for his transgenic skin transplant experiments (on a trans woman***, natch – I can just hear Pedro giggling while he thinks these things up).  I doubt the plan included an actual rape, but that’s what happened, anyway – retroactively complicating the first instance of the rape-revenge motif.

There’s a third instance, too. After all, Banderas might not have committed rape, but a gross violation of bodily autonomy anyway. And he gets his. One of the most fascinating aspects of the movie is that it’s hard to know how to feel. Oh, he deserves it, absolutely. But Banderas gives such a sympathetic, tortured portrayal of this horrible man that the resolution doesn’t offer much in the way of satisfaction.

I love many of Almodóvar’s films, but I can’t deny his work can be highly problematic, especially when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality. On the other hand, he does explore these issues in very provoking, interesting ways, and I don’t think he’s ever thoughtless about it. In this movie, for instance, it bothered me how much Vera’s body was filmed and treated as an object, kneaded and molded as something inanimate, even by herself – until you find out that her attitude makes a certain sort of sense. Her body’s no longer her (or him?***), but indeed just something she inhabits.

Directors also use bodies as building blocks, of course, molding them into what’s needed – maybe the movie can even be interpreted as a comment on that.

*As someone who has a hard time watching these types of scenes despite not having any bad experiences in the department, it disturbs me that this appeals to people, but that’s a topic for another day.

**The scene does not make explicit whether she starts out wanting sex, or just goes along with it because she doesn’t know what to do. It’s not very relevant, in any case – the guy continues past the point where consent is clearly absent, and only eventually stops because she bites his hand.

*** Being a cis woman myself, I hope I did well with the pronouns in this piece. I’ve chosen to use the pronoun of the actor playing the character at that point in the story, since the identification of the character is unclear: she announces that she was “always a woman” at one point, but that statement’s surrounded by lies, and the transition itself was, of course, highly unvoluntary.

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.

Biebers, Pattinsons and Kens on steroids.

Of course, female desire, especially teenage female desire, has been influencing pop culture for ages. In my mom’s time, the Beatles were the recipients of teenage screams; when I was a teenager, it was boybands (who mostly left me cold) and Leonardo diCaprio (who, at the time, didn’t); today, it’s Justin Bieber and Robert Pattinson. I can’t say I understand the latest thought, but that’s completely irrelevant: I’m closer to thirty now, and these boys are meant to grace teenage bedrooms, not mine. They’re almost designed for it: blandly handsome (at least in the case of Bieber) and, more importantly, fundamentally non-threatening. They might awaken all sort of sexual desire, but they’re not terribly sexual themselves – in Pattinson’s franchise, he spends most of his time trying to AVOID sex. This plays into the idea that teenage girls are curious but a bit afraid, and well, I don’t really have a problem with that: in my case, that pretty much summed up my attitude.

After growing out of the screaming phase, though, it was apparently believed that woman just – I dunno. Got married? Lost interest in sex? There were heartthrobs, but they were supposed to be attractive because they were charming and sometimes handsome, but even when they were hot, the hotness was not as emphasized as that of any generic love interest. I know, I’m generalizing way too much here, and of course there were many hot stars, but let me remind you that for a long time, romantic comedies were dominated by Tom Hanks.

So I liked it when, in AUSTRALIA, Hugh Jackman had a true beefcake moment, throwing water over himself in slo-mo. I even appreciated the bulked-up men of TROY, more for what they represented than for how they looked. And now, the list is almost endless: THOR gets the camera attention that previously would have been lavished on his love interest, CAPTAIN AMERICA’s pecs are apparently awe-worthy even to the people around him, and not an episode of TRUE BLOOD goes by without at least one of the male protagonists going shirtless.

But let’s turn to TRUE BLOOD, for a second, because it provides the perfect illustration of the problem with this trend: Alcide. For those not watching, he’s a werewolf character, and he takes his shirt off a lot. It’s warranted, due to the changing and stuff, and it reveals an impressive eight-pack, which has only gotten more pronounced over time (you’re welcome). He is a hot dude, no doubt about it – so what’s the problem? Well, part of it is that he’s a werewolf and yet… has a completely hairless chest. This sounds like I’m nitpicking, but it shows just how pervasive the prevalent aesthetic has become: it’s all about smooth chests with rock-hard abs and not even a happy trail in sight. Put the torso’s of THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA next to one another, and I dare you to distinguish them. It was annoying enough that the concept of “hotness” was so narrowly defined and plastic for women, but it seems it’s going in the same direction for men: as the female gaze finally becomes a thing, it becomes more uniform and, well, boring.

And now, for something slightly different, but related…

Girls who like boys who kiss boys.

Guys like to see two girls kiss. This is such a standard trope it’s pretty much accepted as a given, and it really plays into the male gaze, taking female desire and transforming it into something that, once again, comes down to pleasing men. Girls who like to see boys kiss, however? That’s just weird. Right?

Confession time: I find it hot when two hot guys kiss. Don’t know why – though if someone has a coherent explanation for the phenomenon, I’d definitely be interested. I’ve just always liked homo-erotic tension in films and TV-shows, and finding out about slash fiction was – aside from fun – a big relief: I wasn’t such a freak after all. Some woman apparently found the thought of Harry and Draco’s hatred of each other being a disguise for Twoo Wuv so compelling, they wrote whole stories around it.  I still don’t know how common it is (some of my friends agree completely, others don’t understand at all), but a faction of GWLBWKBs is definitely present on tumblr – and more and more, we’re being catered too.

Part of it, I think, is because homophobia has become uncool in this past few year**. It’s really a recent phenomenon: remember BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, and how disappointing it was that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger apparently felt pressed to re-affirm their heterosexuality over and over again in interviews, with stories about how they prepared their kiss and everything? Now, though, we have Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law practically flirting on the press tour for SHERLOCK HOLMES, and on the press tour for X-MEN Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy were outright teasing the audience about maybe having had sex. I can’t help but think that this is partly because they’ve discovered that it sells: there are apparently enough girls for whom it adds a welcome thrill. Again: I’m not saying homoerotic tension is new, just that I can’t remember it being quite so blatant (and blatantly advertised) before.

Conclusion (yes, I mean there was kind of a point to the ramblings)

I think it’s a good thing that there are so many outlets now for female desire, and that it is more and more catered to even by the mainstream. There is a danger, though, of losing the diversity of tastes that is so apparent on tumblr. It’s nice to see something suggesting a female gaze alongside the male gaze, but let’s not forget the problems that male gaze has had: creating a (plastic, mostly unattainable, bland) narrow ideal that promotes a commodification of human bodies. That’s not been good for women, and it’s not good for guys, either. I’m not saying Chris Hemsworth in Thor wasn’t hot – I’m not saying Megan Fox isn’t hot, either – but it’s a pity to restrict our idea of hotness to them and those resembling them. As for homoerotic tension, I can only encourage its proliferation!

*Don’t get me wrong: these are very knowledgeable cinephiles, many of whom have seen a mind-boggling number of movies and whose opinion I respect. I concentrate on the lust here, but I don’t want to disparage them in any way. I feel kind of uncomfortable saying this, since it’s silly that this disclaimer is necessary at all – I can’t think of a single male critic who never comments on a female stars attractiveness, and this (almost, see: Wells, Jeff) never impungs their credibility.

**And how great is that, seriously? Of course, would be nice if reasons like, oh, plain empathy led to a decrease of homophobia, but it being uncool is probably a lot more efficient.

ETA: more on Magneto and Xavier’s torrid romance.

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.

It’s a pity, because I so wanted to love this movie. I did love big chunks of it, was moved to tears at some moments (including the one depicted above), managed to let myself be carried along by the tide for long stretches at the time. Had the movie stopped about fifteen, twenty minutes earlier (in any case before the overly elegiac beach scene), we would have parted on much better terms.

This is because I loved the middle section of the movie. Yes, indeed, the more conventional part, the part that makes some other reviewers lament that Malick lost his nerve. Is it really that conventional, though? Think back – when was the last time you got the chance to see a boy (or three) grow up? That you saw such a naturalistic depiction of childhood, filled with wonder but without idealizing children themselves, showing them as they try out personas, realize their parents aren’t perfect, look for their place in the world? And to see at the same time the struggle parents go through: you want to teach children the right way to handle the world, but how do you do that when you haven’t really fully figured it out yourself, or when you’re finding out your own attitude isn’t ideal after all? How to you prevent them from making the same mistakes you made while letting them be their own person?

These are the questions that interest me. They’re not necessarily answerable, not any more than the question “why do bad things sometimes happen to good people” and “why are we here”. But to me the questions about how to be a parent, how to be a child, are many times more essential than the existential ones, and more pressing. The way the movie addresses those questions made me consider my parents’ motivation, made me contemplate again whether I want to have children myself or not.

I suppose that’s why I wrote two long paragraphs about my atheism to start this piece.  For someone who believes that after death there is nothing but a big, blessed emptiness, the question of why we are on earth (or of why people die when they do)  is ultimately meaningless. The question of how to make the best of the time we have here is much more important. In the movie’s defense, it grapples with both these topics, and I appreciated the long “birth of the universe” sequence (a decidedly un-creationist view of creation) for putting life in perspective. But the final scene takes those wonderfully fleshed out, real people and takes them into the realm of abstraction, where I cannot follow.

THE TREE OF LIFE is a grand, ambitious film. I can admire it for that alone, and I don’t share BF’s assessment that “a lot of pretty pictures do not a movie make” – I have no problem with Malick’s elliptic storytelling or his digressions. But for me – and I don’t know if this is due to my atheism or if it’s simply philistinism – the movie was ultimately not successful.

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.

SOLARIS is, admittedly, a long movie. It’s slow, and it doesn’t bother with exposition much, and for a space movie it definitely takes its time to get into space. Did my thoughts wander while I was watching it? Sure. But was I bored? No – there’s enough to prompt thought, enough to see, and while the pacing is deliberate, it is, well, deliberate: planned, precise, etc. It’s a slow rhythm, but it’s a rhythm. Soderbergh’s remake gains something by being more lean and streamlined, and I think it’s an interesting film as well, but it loses the richness of the older version, and that’s partly because Tarkovsky is in no rush to get to the point – if there even is one.

Of course, I don’t like all ‘essential’ movies that I watch. Looking just at the ones I’ve watched fairly recently, I found PERSONA to be a very unpleasant experience, and thought LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD was as puzzling as HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR – and not in a good way.

The thing is: I don’t regret watching those movies, either. Furthermore – and that’s where I really depart from Kois – the fact that I didn’t like those movies very much doesn’t make me think the people who do must be faking it, or part of some big conspiracy to make others feel like philistines. Instead, it makes me wonder what I missed, it makes me want to read more to find out what those people see that I don’t. Doing this usually doesn’t make me change my mind – I still think PERSONA is needlessly grating – but I can still appreciate some aspects, and I understand the opinion of the admirers. I might not have enjoyed the experience of watching the movie very much, but I do enjoy that I now know what people mean when they mention the movie, and that I have enriched my frame of reference as a movie watcher.

Maybe that’s “aspirational viewing”. Maybe I, too, will grow disillusioned with it as I grow older. But I’ve never pretended to “get” a movie I didn’t**, and I hope I never stop believing that people can *gasp* have different tastes than I do. And I hope nobody will think I’m a poseur when I say I’d rather watch another Bergman movie than THE HANGOVER II.

* Antonioni is, of course, another auteur often called boring, but his movies are consistently fascinating to me, and THE PASSENGER especially doesn’t drag at any point. It might be a good entry point for people trying to get used to a less propulsive kind of cinema.

** Sidenote: this urge to “get” movies is one of the big problems, in my opinion. The idea that there’s this simple answer that accounts for all the mysterious elements, and that you can show off by saying you’ve understood it all. Great art is always open for many explanations and interpretations, and sometimes all you need to “get” is a mood, an impression, a feeling.

ETA: this is another great take on the topic, with bonus David Foster Wallace quotes. I like the analogy with different types of exercise a lot more than the food one.

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.

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!

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.