Boogie Nights

I caught this on tv last night (how is that possible? lots of beeps and black boxes), and it holds up surprisingly well. Out of all the movies I loved in high school, this is probably the one I wanted to see again the least. It felt exhausted the last time I saw it, with nothing more to give.

But the film gains some odd poignancy if you take it as a love letter to the cinema of the 1970s, and as regret for the forgotten promise that the movies seemed to hold for many back then. The film itself even hints at this when two characters discuss their love for the new Star Wars films. Those films, along with perhaps Jaws, are often accused of ending the period of creative freedom that the 70s represented. When you examine the conflict of the characters in Boogie Nights, a desire to make real art vs. the demands of the pornography business, it's hard not to see a reflection of what many may feel in Hollywood today. When the curtain falls on 1979 and the movie takes a dark turn in the 1980s, one feels that perhaps this fall from grace represents the end of the last best chance the movies had.

"Contemplation is not the willed stillness of the mystics but a willing surrender to never-returning moments. When we turn away from our all-too-human yearnings we turn back to mortal things. Not moral hopes or mystical dreams but groundless facts are the true objects of contemplation."
- John Gray, Straw Dogs

Life is only unbearable if it is unchangeable. This is the key to Hamlet's insight that life is unbearable.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

8 1/2

I think for most film geeks the transformation from passive film watching to whatever it is I do now occurs almost instantly. A single movie does it, and for me that movie was Apocalypse Now. I rented it because I had decided to see every movie I could about Vietnam, and the final act moved me so strongly, in a way I had never been moved before, that I was forever hooked on that experience. It was like encountering something deeper than my own life, something grander than my own experience.

So that's how it began with me and the movies. Like an addict, I would search out the "Apocalypse Now" experience, and I found it with an astonishing amount of regularity in the beginning. Pretty soon the classics section at Blockbuster grew thin, and with much trepidation I decided to start watching foreign films. 8 1/2 was the first one I rented, on a terrible VHS copy that managed to make such an astonishingly detailed film seem like a Monet painting.

I'm not sure why I chose it, but surely it had something to do with the cover; plain black with the title in white and the word "Fellini." It's an immensely confusing movie on first viewing. Fellini makes almost no effort to accomodate the audience, but the justly famous first scene represents, for me at least, the very height of artistic filmmaking. It communicates conflicts and emotions through purely cinematic means, and warns us that the movie we are about to see will respect no artificial boundaries such as "realism" or even "plot" and "intelligibility."

Despite it's reputation as a highly personal and artistic film (in fact a revolution in style at the time), 8 1/2 isn't difficult to understand once you get past that first disorienting viewing. If you can give yourself up to the moment (the best you can do when watching movies) it becomes richer than almost any other film I can think of. And giving in to the moment, I think, is Fellini's major point with 8 1/2.

It's a movie about making a movie that happens to be the movie we are watching. We have a director who seems to be making an autobiographical film, but can't seem to find the connecting thread. We see his parents, his first sexual awakening, his catholic upbringing, and an astonishing and incredibly beautiful evocation of the magic of childhood. These episodes and others are intercut with the director at present, exhausted and depressed, failing to make sense out of his memories. His mistress arrives, and soon after, his wife. As his life seems to get more and more confusing, he seems to sink deeper and deeper into his fantasies and memories, always failing to make sense.

Claudia is his dream girl, a beautiful actress with a part in his movie. She represents salvation, as we are told. Late in the film he asks her "Could you devote yourself to one thing, and one thing only?" As if to say, "What's the truth? What am I supposed to do? Why can't I find that one thing that will give meaning to my life?" She tells him he doesn't know how to love. She is just a girl.

He ponders suicide, and the memory of his mother scolds him for running away. We hear a gun shot, and it's unclear whether this is fantasy or not, but in any case this leads us into a scene of such transcendence it might just as well be taking place in heaven.

A philosopher who seems to hang around in the film begins a long speech. The best we can learn, he concludes, is silence.

The director sits dejected in his car, the film abandoned, over (making the suicide both a figurative and literal leap into nihilism). But they're all there, all the people in his life. His parents, his lovers, his long suffering wife. He feels so full, he says. Not empty anymore, but full. The transition is important, because in abandoning the One he finds the Many, and finally learns to love in a way.

Fellini represents this moment with a parade. All the people in his life, who we have met and come to know like old friends in the course of the film, come back and join hands and dance around the circus ring until the lights go out. A small boy, our protagonist in younger days, is left alone in the spotlight, and marches out into the darkness alone.

Partly, perhaps mostly, a justification for Fellini's flamboyant personal lifestlye, 8 1/2 is also a bittersweet embrace of all the pain, confusion, and joy there is in life. Maybe learning to love as Fellini sees it leads us back to Nietzsche. To love one thing in this life is to love everything.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Justin Timberlake

Now, since I owned and celebrated Justified what seems like almost a year ago (and hindsight tells me it was my favorite record of last year, just barely ahead of Lambchop and Neko Case), I am tempted to say this article's argument is a bit late. Nevertheless, since it does such a nice job of laying out that particular argument, and since it uses the exact same record that helped me to come to the same (shamefully obvious) conclusions, I figured it was worth a link. I still think the album as a whole is underrated though! Where's the side two love?

Irreversible

Always moving up. Since the story moves backwards, the straightforward revenge plot of the chronological narrative is transformed into something entirely different; quite simply it lifts us up back to innocence. This movie is the Fall in reverse.

It begins in a night club (though far more seedy than that!) where a brutal murder takes place right before our eyes. And, as it does at the end of every scene, the camera looks up, taking us back up a level. Eventually we witness the rape, which takes place below ground, and the camera seems to wistfully look up as she enters the tunnel to travel below the street. The reverse narrative creates a sense of horriblie futility, the suspense isn't in what will happen, just when. The corruption is preordained; it has already happened.

The final scenes go for broke and risk absurdity to create poetry by taking us back and up into purity. Much like in other films I have written about here, it is a sheer act of will on the part of the artist. But I think the title tells us he knows what it's good for. Here's to a film that's a great big sigh. Here's to a great unknown imagined beauty.

Who is responsible for Christ's death?

Of the five discrepant biblical accounts of Jesus' trial, composed decades after his execution by men absent from his trial, none are very helpful, nor are the disciples very trustworthy sources. We know that early Christians put great emphasis on staying on the Romans' good side lest they lose potential converts or, worse, be massacred or driven out of Rome and Jerusalem like their Jewish brethren. It is not surprising then that early Christians would blame "The Jews" (who were even then the universal scapegoats) for Jesus' death, and that Matthew would make sure that 2,000 years hence "The Jews" would still be on the hook, by attributing to the Jewish multitude the fantastic quote: "His blood be on us and on our children." A peculiar thing for a Jewish mob to shout, it must be said. The Gospel writers are exceedingly clumsy in dealing with the trial of Jesus. Again and again the Roman prefect Pilate comes off not as the iron-fisted autocrat we know from history but as a lame, ineffectual pamby who is prevented from setting Jesus free by the bloodthirsty Jewish mob. The scene stretches credulity. Likewise, many scholars dispute the accuracy of the Jews' claim that Roman law forbids them to execute Jesus. In fact, the Jews of Jerusalem executed each other all the time. They stoned Jesus' brother James, and only a year or two after Jesus' death they stoned Stephen, the traditional first Christian martyr. A well-known sign (in Greek) in the Jerusalem temple promised death to any non-Jew who invaded the inner sanctum.

Is it just me or is Seinfeld getting better with age? I used to think that the later seasons were getting progressively weaker. But watching them now, 5 years after the show ended, they seem perfect. I hope it is never released on dvd, since the show belongs in that wonderful slot right after the news forever.

It's almost staggering to see the number of gags and plot elements in every episode. Tonight's two episodes contained reverse peepholes, close talker, being assigned chores at a party, fur coats for men, purses for men, fight between Jerry's parents and George's, the "Executive" raincoats, George pretending to go to France, Elaine's boyfriend's inexplicable friendship with Jerry's parents, Jerry's father's ridiculous statements about Monet, Jerry refering to dancing as "stupid", George failing to deliver an "apartment warming" gift (tied in with his digust about too many gift giving occasions), too fat wallets (tied into back pain tied into the chair George doesn't deliver).

Astonishing, and that's nowhere near all of it.

"It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life. But what else is there to say?"
- E.M. Cioran

Solaris (2002)

On the commentary track on the dvd the director Steven Soderbergh talks about what he calls "pure cinema." I get what he means, but it's more difficult to explain than it would seem. It's not simply image driven narrative, nor is it a movie where people don't talk as much. The best term I can come up with is "visual poetry." I consider it a form of rythmic moviemaking, where tone, time, and space search for some sort of harmony. It's a cumulative effect, more than the sum of its parts.

This is considerably different from, say, Tarkovsky (who made the original Solaris, who attempted to hold shots as long as possible in a search for eternity in a transient art form). This is post-MTV cinema.

This style, also seen in In the Mood for Love, Beau Travail, and Molhalland Drive, is particulary suited to a story like Solaris, where characters are caught in their own emotional traps, outside space and time. It's appropriate then that when Clooney rejects the clone of his dead lover, it happens before he rejects her in the past, in real life. The mistakes he makes are curiously predestined, a type of orginal sin, if you will.

The final moments, then, make perfect sense for a movie so completely confined to the psyches of its characters. What is imagination for, if not for dreams of redemption? What then are the movies for?

Wow

If I was an evil warlock that is what my house would look like. I find it disconcerting that this type of architecture is, according to the article, on the way out. Either way, it's always nice to see peope respecting public spaces for something more than utility.

UPDATE: oh my god I just noticed the spider!!

Charles Taylor on Houellebecq's new book Platform. It's worth reading whether or not you care about or plan to read the novel. Here's a few excerpts:

There's no denying that part of the excitement of "Platform" is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation and, in Kael's words, to not deny the evidence of his own senses. It's no surprise that a writer who spends so much time equating what it means to be human with the ability to feel pleasure would be repulsed by the asceticism of Islam, would see the religion's prohibitions as life denying, would see its misogyny as particularly noxious. Far from feeling defensive about his position, Houellebecq aims here to put those who don't share his loathing on the defensive. Is he extreme? Unquestionably. But it's sometimes just this impolite extremity that can shake up complacent notions. And the challenge he is putting out is one that calls for an answer -- namely, what is it that keeps liberals from condemning a culture that embodies everything they rightly hate? The persecution of women and gays, the refusal to recognize a separation between church and state, state (and thus theocratically) controlled press, the impossibility of scientific inquiry.

"Platform" was written before Sept. 11, before the murder of tourists in Bali, before the attack last October on the Moscow theater, before the kidnapping of Western tourists in Algeria. Because it includes an attack on Western sex tourists by Islamic terrorists, "Platform" has been called prophetic. That is to deny the power and clarity of Houellebecq's vision, to indulge in what Berman has identified as the Eurocentrism that, following the fall of Communism, led the West to conclude that all those exotic, funny countries posed no threat to us. It's ironic that a writer who has been accused of racism has written a novel in which, though his narrator proclaims he has no knowledge of the modern world, the fates of the West and East are inextricably linked. If there's anything prophetic in "Platform," it's the section that must have seemed satirical to Houellebecq when he wrote it: editorials in French newspapers condemning the attack but saying that the Westerners had it coming. "Faced," one of Houellebecq's fictional editorialists writes, "with the hundreds of thousands of women who have been sullied, humiliated, and reduced to slavery throughout the world -- it is regrettable to have to say this -- what do the deaths of a few of the well-heeled matter?" You can hear echoes of that in Noam Chomsky's lie that as many people were killed in the American bombing raid in Sudan as in the Sept. 11 attacks, or in Michael Moore's contention that this is what happens when Americans want their Nikes.

My top ten movies as of right now (as in this instant!):

1. 8 1/2
2. Vertigo
3. The Lady Eve
4. The Shop Around the Corner
5. Umberto D
6. The Thin Red Line
7. Stalker
8. 2001
9. Hiroshima, Mon Amour
10. Throne of Blood

I tried to do that with as little thinking as possible, and I'm pleased with the number of comedies (2) that managed to show up. I'm not sure why I decided 8 1/2 was MY movie now, after thinking it was Vertigo for several years now. Maybe because I'm older I feel the need for ways of coping instead of exquisite tragedy (see also in this category Umberto D).

The object of this exercise is of course highly personal: to see what movies "stick" and what are simply passing moments. A total of four of these movies I have seen recently: Shop, Umberto, Hiroshima, and Throne of Blood. The rest seem to be fairly stable reference points for me and the movies, films that stand as singular experiences and points of comparison.