Ghost on Screen

The Pantheon (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 04:58:00 +0000

Jon's Picks
Rollie's Picks

1. The Third Man (-) Carol Reed, 1949
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (-) Stanley Kubrick, 1968
3. Citizen Kane (-) Orson Welles, 1944
4. City Lights (-) Charlie Chaplin, 1931
5. Taxi Driver (+2) Martin Scorsese, 1976
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (+12) Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928
7. Apocalypse Now (-2) Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
8. Rear Window (+1) Alfred Hitchcock, 1954
9. Vertigo (-1) Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
10. Magnolia (+4) P.T. Anderson, 1999
11. Goodfellas (-5) Martin Scorsese, 1990

12. Stalker (New) Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979
13. Raging Bull (-) Martin Scorsese, 1980
14. 35 Shots of Rum (New) Claire Denis, 2009
15. A Fish Called Wanda (+1) Charles Crichton, 1988
16. The General (+22) Buster Keaton, 1926
17. Sunset Blvd. (-) Billy Wilder, 1950
18. Wings of Desire (+75) Wim Wenders, 1987
19. It's a Wonderful Life (-8) Frank Capra, 1946
20. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (New) Werner Herzog, 1972
21. La Dolce Vita (-9) Federico Fellini, 1960
22. Do the Right Thing (-2) Spike Lee, 1989
23. Schindler's List (-1) Steven Spielberg, 1993
24. Breathless (+19) Jean-Luc Godard, 1960

25. Some Like it Hot (+8) Billy Wilder, 1959
26. Psycho (-2) Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
27. Casablanca (-) Michael Curtiz, 1942
28. The Godfather (-3) Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
29. Singin' in the Rain (+5) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952
30. The Bicycle Thieves (-1) Vittorio De Sica, 1948
31. 12 Angry Men (+52) Sydney Lumet, 1957
32. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (-22) Peter Jackson, 2001-03
33. The Shawshank Redemption (-2) Frank Darabont, 1994
34. The Shining (-2) Stanley Kubrick, 1980
35. Double Indemnity (-) Billy Wilder, 1944
36. The Blood of a Poet (New) Jean Cocteau, 1930
37. Children of Paradise (New) Marcel Carne, 1945
38. Dark City (+31) Alex Proyas, 1998
39. Persona (+33) Ingmar Bergman, 1966
40. Annie Hall (-3) Woody Allen, 1977
41. Tokyo Story (+10) Yasujiro Ozu, 1953
42. Monty Python's Life of Brian (-2) Terry Jones, 1979
43. King Kong (-2) Peter Jackson, 2005
44. The Wild Bunch (New) Sam Peckinpah, 1969
45. Chinatown (-17) Roman Polanski, 1974
46. Barry Lyndon (+24) Stanley Kubrick, 1975
47. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (-26) Stanley Kubrick, 1964
48. Fanny and Alexander (New) Ingmar Bergman, 1982
49. Beau Travail (-34) Claire Denis, 1999
50. This is Spinal Tap (-5) Rob Reiner, 1984
51. The 'Up' Documentaries (-3) Michael Apted, 1970,77,85,91,98,2005
52. The Gold Rush (+15) Charlie Chaplin, 1925
53. Manhattan (-4) Woody Allen, 1979
54. Mulholland Dr. (New) David Lynch, 2002
55. Touch of Evil (-3) Orson Welles, 1958
56. American Graffiti (-17) George Lucas, 1973
57. The Night of the Hunter (New) Charles Laughton, 1955
58. Amadeus (-5) Milos Forman, 1984
59. Once Upon a Time in America (-3) Sergio Leone, 1984
60. The Seventh Seal (-30) Ingmar Bergman, 1957
61. All About Eve (-4) Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950
62. Au Hasard Balthazar (New) Robert Bresson, 1966
63. Pulp Fiction (-40) Quentin Tarantino, 1994
64. The Mirror (New) Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975
65. Nosferatu (-46) F.W. Murnau, 1922
66. The Exorcist (+14) William Friedkin, 1973
67. American Beauty (-7) Sam Mendes, 1999
68. It Happened One Night (-26) Frank Capra, 1934
69. Duck Soup (New) The Marx Brothers, 1933
70. The Player (-9) Robert Altman, 1992
71. The Stranger (New) Orson Welles, 1946
72. There Will Be Blood (+10) P.T. Anderson, 2007
73. Bonnie & Clyde (-18) Arthur Penn, 1967
74. The Big Sleep (+5) Howard Hawkes, 1944
75. Shadow of a Doubt (-11) Alfred Hitchcock, 1943
76. Late Spring (New) Yasujiro Ozu, 1949

77. Nashville (-12) Robert Altman, 1975
78. Pickpocket (New) Robert Bresson, 1959
79. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (-11) Milos Forman, 1975
80. Easy Rider (New) Dennis Hopper, 1969
81. North by Northwest (-6) Alfred Hitchcock, 1959
82. Monty Python & The Holy Grail (-56) Terry Gilliam, 1975
83. On the Waterfront (-12) Elia Kazan, 1954
84. L'Avventura (New) Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960
85. Brokeback Mountain (New) Ang Lee, 2005
86. Children of Men (-27) Alfonso Cuaron, 2006
87. The 'Three Colors' Trilogy (-10) Krysztof Kieslowski, 1993-94
88. M*A*S*H (New) Robert Altman, 1970
89. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (-26) Mike Nichols, 1966
90. The War Zone (-9) Tim Roth, 1999
91. King Kong (-7) Marion C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933
92. Saving Private Ryan (-1) Steven Spielberg, 1998
93. Eyes Wide Shut (-57) Stanley Kubrick, 1999
94. Waiting for Guffman (-9) Christopher Guest, 1998
95. The Godfather Pt. 2 (New) Francis Ford Coppola, 1974
96. United 93 (-8) Paul Greengrass, 2006
97. Metropolis (-9) Fritz Lang, 1927
98. Modern Times (-9) Charlie Chaplin, 1933
99. Beauty and the Beast (-7) Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991
100. Point Blank (New) John Boorman, 1967

The Geometry of the Grey Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:38:00 +0000

Inception

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Three Stars

What we find in Christopher Nolan's "Inception", when we burrow our way tangibly into the landscape of the human dream, is not dormant emotions or suppressed memories or any other nakedness of the soul, but rather places. Surfaces. The cold, drab exteriors of modern architecture. Our subconscious populates these empty streets with meaningless faces, and when reality shifts, it is entirely literal. Buildings shift or explode, time slows, but the chronology of events remains strictly linear. "Inception" suggests a sterile dreamscape indeed. I am reminded of Stanley Kubrick, who over the course of his illustrious career created a body of work that suggested that the human soul, our desires, our memories, our very nature, could be deconstructed in such a way as to reveal a being as mechanical and clinical as turning gears (Consider "A Clockwork Orange", "Full Metal Jacket", "Barry Lyndon", and of course "2001: A Space Odyssey" among the rest of his work). Nolan however, has constructed for himself and for his film a set of intellectual rules that map the human psyche like layers in an onion, not so much for the exploration of the mind but simply for the purpose of creating an action thriller, and where Kubrick's films made bold assertions, Nolan merely ponders.

But alas, I'm being harsh. "Inception" is a good film. A very good film if all you want is a piece of slam-bang science fiction action. It certainly works better as a thriller than it does as an allegory, because its circumstances cannot account for many of the fundamental aspects of our dreams, such as those I mentioned above. Mr. Nolan allegedly spent ten years working on the script for "Inception" and it is easy to see, when all of the logistics of his world are considered, how he would need such time to streamline the story into something that isn't overwhelmingly complicated. What he is left with, though, is more of a premise than a story, and because the premise is so complex, there isn't room for much else.

Mr. Nolan's concept is less concerned with dream-states, it seems, than it is with our perception of time. Time, like many forms of measurement, is really quite relative. How long is an inch? How long is a second? Think about it. "Inception" assumes a series of layers within the mind, wherein the deeper one ventures, the faster one perceives time. Eventually, one reaches a point where time is perceived so quickly that we can experience an entire lifetime in the span of a night's rest. The problem here being, of course, that development within the dream cannot be physical, as it is technically unreal, and, because the mind can only construct a dream based on information already accumulated, mental and spiritual growth within a dream are inherently inhibited. That is to say, one cannot learn something new (i.e. grow) within a dream.

But here lies Mr. Nolan's variable - Inception. The implanting of a new and alien idea into the mind of another human via their dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) is a specialist in the practice of dream extraction, which involves the invasion of another man's mind through a controlled dream to remove (or extract) information for someone else. The process is achieved through a special device, which of course is portable in a metal briefcase and involves an I.V., and maintains, or so I assume, a stable dream environment and state of coherence for Mr. Cobb, who is tasked with the thankless challenge of working while he sleeps.

But in a setup so short and inconsequential that many viewers will forget about it entirely, Mr. Cobb is hired by the head of a shadowy energy firm (Ken Watanabe) to do the exact opposite - to implant a new idea into the mind of a young rival (Cillian Murphey) that would persuade him to dismember his father's company. The problem is simple. The mind will sense that the idea is foreign and reject it, so Mr. Cobb and his league of associates must find a way to make the man think he thought of it himself.

This is all, I must confess, terribly interesting in theory, but Mr. Nolan's film is bogged down by the weight of its own complexity. There are countless scenes in which characters sit, stand, or wander around and talk about the various rules and logistics of this technology (it all feels like a video game tutorial, where you are instructed which buttons perform which functions and which objectives should be pursued during which scenario), and almost no scenes where a character steps away from exposition long enough to reveal something about themselves that makes then distinct and engaging people.

There lies, on top of this central conflict, an underlying one involving Mr. Cobb's wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), but more I could not begin to say. Mal provides the central emotional arc of the film. Hers is the more tragic of their plights. Without her, the film would be almost completely without motive. "Inception" is under no circumstances a film of moral issues, but Mal by nature is one.

The second half of the film, which plays like a conventional heist movie, is rather thrilling, if more for the sake of seeing Mr. Nolan's rules in practice than out of any spiritual connection to his somewhat lifeless characters (Joseph Gordon-Levitt in particular is almost entirely void of identity). Nolan juggles the layers of his reality seemlessly so that we are able to follow it, and it is because we can comprehend it that it is exciting. We are seeing him deliver on his promises.

But I would like to think that Mr. Nolan didn't just spend ten years on "Inception" to create a conceptual heist movie. He has found a way to approach this material so that it is comprehensible, but not entirely engaging and not so that it has anything to say. This is in part because his concept of dreaming seems removed from mine, and because his characters are vessels of manufactured conflict and not real people responding to genuine circumstances. Nolan was so wrapped up in an idea that he forgot to make a movie.

There I go, being harsh again. I admit I wanted to like "Inception" more than I did. Give Nolan credit (I'm giving him a recommendation's worth). He is almost without question the only mainstream director with the intellectual ambition to approach such material, and certainly the only one capable of packaging it in a way that will appeal to nonintellectuals. To watch something so courageously thoughtful in a packed theater was refreshing. This must have been earth-shattering for those in the crowd who thought "Transformers" was a good movie. Nolan has reintroduced to popular culture the big idea, but sometimes in the cinema, an idea just isn't quite enough.

Rollan Schott
July 21, 2010

It's That Time of Year

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:46:00 +0000

Me and Jon are circling the drain of the annual Pantheon Draft, wherein we utilize a highly advanced and complicated system of back-and-forths, averaging, compromising, and eliminating to create a hybrid list of elite "favorite" movies. Last year's list can be found here. The lists, after probably the first five, will be radically different. This is not because the movies have so fluctuated in quality over the course of a single year, but because the term "favorite" is abstract and fluid and impossible to approach consistently. I think of Ebert's definition - which movie do I want to see again right now, right this very moment (in preferential order from one to a hundred)? I think of Jonathan Rosenbaum's definition - which great film is freshest in my mind, right now, right this very minute? Even the slightest variation in approach to our "favorite" movies can alter the substance of our list radically. More than a collection of great movies (indeed the greatest), Ghost on Screen's Pantheon is more an illustration of the way that our personal tastes develop, change, evolve and, again, fluctuate. Expect the new list to materialize sometime by the end of the month.

The Tragic Debris of Maturity

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:23:00 +0000

Toy Story 3

Directed by Lee Unkrich

Four Stars

Toy Story 3 might be the first family film made with people in their early 20s specifically in mind. I was nine years old when the first Toy Story movie was released. Most of the current crop of children weren't even a lustful thought in their father's mind when the first two Toy Story films were made. How fitting it is that this sequel is, in part, about the painful transitory period from childhood to adulthood, a period in which we shed our dependence, our awkwardness, and -- most tragically of all -- our toys.

Despite this treacherous subject matter, Toy Story 3 is a terrific family film -- funny, sweet, action-packed. Kids of just about all ages will, I'm sure, love it (although some segments might be a tad dark for under-5s). But I felt like this one was made almost specifically for me. Kind of like Pixar's 'thank you' to the generation of kids that bought the tickets that began their meteoric rise.

The movie begins just as Toy Story 2 began, at the end of an (imagined) adventure featuring Woody, Buzz, Mr. Potato Head and the rest of Andy's group of beloved toys. We soon learn that Andy is now 17 and about to ship out to college. Woody and the group feel neglected. Andy hasn't played with them in years, and the gang are reduced to concocting elaborate traps ("Operation Playtime", in which the toys steal Andy's cell phone, and make it ring in his toy chest) in order to receive the attention and affection they so desperately long for.

It isn't long before a divide forms in the group. Most of the toys believe that Andy has outgrown them, and think their best bet to find love again is to be donated to the local day care centre. Woody keeps the faith, believing that Andy still loves them, and that it'd be wrong and remiss of the group to abandon their owner.

After a series of events too humorous and delightful to go into in this review, the gang eventually find themselves in Sunnydale Day Care Centre after Andy's mother inadvertently donates them. The toys at the centre are led by Lotso (Ned Beatty), an apparently benevolent teddy bear who promises Andy's toys that they will find children who will love them just as much as Andy once did. Lotso even raises a tantalising prospect for the gang. They'll never be abandoned in the way that Andy abandoned them, because as soon as one group of children grows up and leaves, another one shows up to take their place.

To me, moments like this are evidence of the fact that Toy Story 3 was made with fans like me in mind. It's very tough to watch Toy Story 3 and not reflect on the way you viewed the first two films as a younger person. Every child will eventually grow into an adult, but they don't always know that. I don't think I completely understood that. We all once thought that our toys were always going to be the most important things in our lives. Toy Story 3 is bittersweet in that it reminds us of what we've lost -- but it simultaneously reassures us, because only grown-ups can realise just how great being a grown-up can be.

Toy Story 3 flies (or falls with style) for the same reasons that its predecessors did. A solid story, a sturdy emotional foundation, and enough interesting new characters to prevent it all from feeling a bit stale. Michael Keaton, particularly, does a brilliantly funny job in voicing a flamboyantly stylish Ken doll. There is, of course, a moral compass underpinning everything that happens in Toy Story 3, but Pixar once again differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack because they deal with their material with subtlety. Kids are smart. They'll pick up on the film's messages about friendship, loyalty, forgiveness and kindness. No need to resort to the sledgehammer mentality of movies like Happy Feet, in which the film's message is crammed into the last five minutes.

The toys eventually hatch a plan to escape from the day care centre and return to Andy. There are, of course, the usual dramatic obstacles in their way, including one very dark, but touching sequence in which the toys essentially concede defeat and accept the fact that they're about to be blasted to smithereens. Maudlin toy-mortality exploration aside, Toy Story 3 is done with a lot of good humour, pathos and visual creativity. And, of course, there is even an environmental message as the toys find themselves as first-person witnesses to what garbage has to go through before it winds up in landfill. I always wonder how children respond to these images. They probably assume that all that gross stuff that the grown-ups do is for a good reason. It isn't, really, other than to live beyond our (and the planet's) means.

Andy's mother weeps at the end of the film when he packs up and heads to college, and I did too. It was partly because it was just so nice to see all the gang together again, but mostly because Toy Story 3 nails exactly how it feels to reflect on one's childhood and realise that the happy, carefree child we all once were doesn't exist anymore. I don't mean to make it sound like Toy Story 3 made me sad, or depressed. There was an element of comfort in the natural cycle of the world in the way director Lee Unkrich wrapped up his story. Pixar's movies guided me through my childhood. I wasn't expecting them to guide me through my early 20s, too.

Jonathan Fisher

June 30, 2010

Jon's review of "Toy Story 3" is also available at The Film Brief

Huck Finn, D.W. Griffith, and the Re[Birth of a Nation]al Identity

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:46:00 +0000

Note: This is the project that more or less earned me my diploma earlier this month. It appeals to a more literature oriented audience, which accounts for "The Birth of a Nation" being summarized while a knowledge of the novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is assumed.

The evaluative debate over a distinctly “American style” in nineteenth century literature was largely reflected in the cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century. This essay will profile D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is commonly regarded as among the most prevalent literary works to carry the distinction of such a style, as suggested by its lengthy and secure presence in the canon of great American literature.

But when Huck Finn was published in 1885, the birth of the cinema already laid on the horizon. The next year, British film pioneer William Friese-Greene began work on a motion picture camera and projector. In 1890, the first modern movie camera, the Kinetograph, was built by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, via instructions from Thomas Alva Edison. In 1894, less than a decade after Huck Finn, the first Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City, a primitive movie theater in which patrons viewed minute long films by looking down into a box that played the film on a constant loop (Dixon, xii-xiv). As this technology expanded, so too did its celluloid capacity, and as films began to grow longer, the possibility of a narrative cinema was quickly recognized and explored. With this new technology grew a new artistic narrative medium, complete, it seemed, with its own unique language, just waiting to be discovered. Literature had developed and maturated the art of narrative structure, but the cinema was a new form and filmmakers were pressed to discover ways to effectively photograph such a narrative. At this time, the close-up was unheard of. So too was intercutting between scenes and fading out to represent the passage of time, among other techniques. Such innovations were among the countless achievements of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which gave a distinctly American voice to the cinema while other pioneers like Sergei Eisenstein of the Soviet Union and Yasujiro Ozu of Japan developed their own cinematic languages in their own respective nations.

What’s interesting is that the critical response and debate of value regarding these two works, Huck Finn and The Birth of a Nation, share striking similarities. Both were popular successes upon release. For both of them, the question of value involves separating content from form and, in some way, with the inherent significance of idealism in American culture and its representation in art. For Huck Finn, the focus of evaluation is narrative form and character consistency, distinguishing its infuriating final chapters, in which Huck passively falls back under the whims of Tom Sawyer while the noble Jim is subjected to unnecessary cruelty, from an exceptional opening and body that are regarded with almost universal enthusiasm. For The Birth of a Nation, evaluation centers more on technical form. The film codified the cinema, formulating and establishing fundamental rules and techniques that have affected literally every American film since, yet critics hesitate when admitting it to the canon of great American film because of the virulent racism of its narrative, a revisionist (though ignorantly so) dramatization of the reconstruction South in which the Ku Klux Klan finally saves the southern states from the politically corrupt, sexually predatory, and generally evil African Americans who had been granted control of the land by vengeful Northerners and Carpetbaggers intent on looting and punishing the South for their secession.

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of the Confederacy’s devastating loss in the Civil War and the reconstruction that followed with great Southern sympathy. At twelve reels and three hours long (by far the longest American film of its time), “Griffith was convinced [The Birth of a Nation] would change the look of movies forever. It was the kind of grand, sprawling epic which would move films into large theaters and make motion pictures an industry for the middle class, not just the working class. It was the kind of movie which would show audiences how action scenes could be combined with long, lingering closeups and fine acting in lengthy scenes to weave a seamless tapestry on film” (Chadwick, 97). The problem, however, would be with Griffith’s nineteenth century upbringing as a white southerner. “Griffith was raised on stories of the South’s wartime bravery and home front sacrifices” (Rollins, 58).

The film is presented in two acts, originally separated by an intermission. It was based on the novel The Clansmen, by Thomas Dixon, which was misinformed by the popular Southern myths of the reconstruction that permeated the nation. Before Griffith’s film adaptation, the novel was adapted into a stage production, and it is a powerful reflection of America’s racial perspective that the play was actually more successful in the North than it was in the South.

The first half of The Birth of a Nation paints a highly idealized portrait of the South in the days preceding the Civil War, with a patriarchal and sympathetic view of slavery and an elegant depiction of plantation life. Griffith tells this story through the eyes of two families, the Camerons of the South and the Stonemans of the North (though Griffith does cut away to scenes of historic significance, such as the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Surrender at Appomatox). The two families are well acquainted, sons from each having roomed together in boarding school, and during a visit by the Stonemans to the Camerons’ estate in Piedmont, South Carolina, a pair of romances form.

These two families are torn apart, however, by the outbreak of the war. In a particularly powerful moment, the two roommates, one in blue and one in gray, are shot to death simultaneously and fall upon one another on the battlefield. Griffith shoots these war scenes with an epic sense of scope and poetic realism. Film critic James Agee wrote of the sequence, “The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in The Birth of a Nation. I have heard it praised for its realism, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like…” The grandiose spectacle of the war concludes with Lee surrendering to Grant at Appomattox.

The second half of The Birth of a Nation focuses on the horrors the South faced at the hands of Northern Carpetbaggers and freed slaves in the wake of the war. Act II opens with the assassination of President Lincoln, who, though having signed the unfortunate Emancipation Proclamation, still served as the moderate buffer between the modest South and the radical North, who wanted to destroy the South out of vengeance. Following Lincoln’s assassination, Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), one of said radicals, rises to power and arranges for the corrupt mulatto Silas Lynch (George Seigmann) to run for Lt. Governor of South Carolina. White voters are disenfranchised and intimidated, and not only is Lynch made governor, but the state senate becomes almost exclusively black. Laws are passed that allow blacks to marry anyone they please, and require white civilians to salute every black official they meet. It is nothing short of tyranny.

Few blacks remain loyal to their masters. Those who don’t grow drunk on their new power and become a tyrannical majority, terrorizing and degrading the customs and traditions of the South. Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), who had earned the nickname “Little Colonel” during the war, is inspired to initiate the Ku Klux Klan after watching a pair of white children scare black children by posing as a ghost beneath a white sheet. Meanwhile, Stoneman rejoices when Lynch tells him he wishes to marry a white woman, having earlier decreed him “the equal of any man here,” but when Lynch says it’s Stoneman’s own daughter Elsie (Lillian Gish) he wishes to marry, Stoneman shows his hypocrisy by responding angrily, Griffith’s way of suggesting that neither Northern nor Southern whites respected the blacks. The North simply manipulated them as a way of exacting revenge on the South for secession.

During the film’s climax, Lynch takes Elsie hostage while the Camerons are held up in a cabin by black marauders. The Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue, saving both Elsie and the Camerons and restoring order to the south. The final shot of The Birth of a Nation shows the ghostly image of Jesus looking down contently on the success of the KKK, and the peace found between the north and south in their uniting against a common enemy – the freed slaves. A single nation, finally, was born.

The moral center of The Birth of a Nation is corrupt, yes, and is commonly recognized even as evil, so obviously the film’s content is not the reason it is so highly regarded. “Classic or not,” wrote film critic Andrew Sarris in response to the film’s lasting influence, “’Birth of a Nation’ has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can’t be ignored…and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word” (rogerebert.com).

Why can’t it be ignored? Roger Ebert notes in his comprehensive essay on the film’s significance, “Griffith assembled and perfected the early discoveries of film language, and his cinematic techniques have influenced the visual strategies of virtually every film made since; they have become so familiar we are not even aware of them… What are those techniques? They begin at the level of film grammar. Silent films began with crude constructions designed to simply look at a story as it happened before the camera. Giffith, in his short films and features, invented or incorporated anything that seemed to work to expand that vision. He did not create the language of cinema so much as codify and demonstrate it, so that after him it became conventional for directors to tell a scene by cutting between wide (or establishing) shots and various medium shots, closeups, and inserts of details… Many silent films moved slowly, as if afraid to get ahead of their audiences. Griffith springs forward eagerly, and the impact on his audience was unprecedented; they were learning for the first time what a movie was capable of” (rogerebert.com).

Yes, it was acknowledged as “outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word,” but only in certain intellectual circles. Until the 1960’s (obviously undone by the Civil Rights Movement), The Birth of a Nation was not only one of the most successful films ever made, but also the most revered. Upon its release in 1915, it was a box office megahit. Its audiences, then, obviously weren’t particularly offended. Ebert notes, “Griffith and The Birth of a Nation were no more enlightened than the America which produced them. The film represents how racist a white American could be in 1915 without realizing he was racist at all… That it is a mirror of its time is, sadly, one of its values” (rogerebert.com)

Because of the clarity of its position and the indisputability of its success, The Birth of a Nation is important as a cultural benchmark, and invaluable as a technical one. “In that case, The Birth of a Nation is worth considering, if only for the inescapable fact that it did more than any other work to dramatize and encourage racist attitudes in America. (The contemporary works that made the most useful statements against racism were Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huckleberry Finn)” (rogerebert.com).

Looking at the film through a modern lens, we cringe at Griffith’s prejudices and then dismiss them, marveling only then at its technical achievements, adding to those already been mentioned above: night photography, iris techniques (showing only a small, circular portion of the frame), and color tinting (which was often used to insinuate different lighting sources, such as daytime shots (sepias and grays), nighttime shots (blue), and shots illuminated by firelight (red), among others).

Perhaps the greatest testament to the film’s significance is that its significance today is all but invisible. The conventions and techniques it pioneered are now so commonly practiced that not knowing of them would leave an inexperienced audience to think the film was remembered only for its virulent racism. Without understanding just how many aspects of The Birth of a Nation a 1915 audience was seeing for the first time, it would likely seem a tremendous bore. Today, Griffith’s subsequent film, Intolerance (1916), which was made in response to the critical backlash against The Birth of a Nation, is more commonly seen. This is largely because The Birth of a Nation no longer needs to be shown to be appreciated. We can see its importance in any movie we choose to watch.

The arguments that surround The Birth of a Nation run, in many ways, both parallel and perpendicular to the arguments surrounding Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Both films suffer primarily from their conclusions, and as Huck Finn continues to grow in stature, the dilemma presented by its final chapters becomes even more pressing. That said, Huck Finn is generally criticized for a lapse in form that undermines a noble message. The Birth of a Nation, meanwhile, is criticized for a consistent and revolutionary formal achievement that amplified a deplorable message. Finally, and quite simply, evaluation of both works boils down to their depictions of race.

Leo Marx, in his essay, Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn, notes, “Today the problem of evaluating the book is as much obscured by unqualified praise as it once was by parochial hostility” (Marx, 291). If the value of Huck Finn is to be understood then it must first be distinguished, perhaps even separated, from its final eleven chapters, in which Jim is subjected to the freshly reappeared Tom Sawyer’s farcical scheme to “free” a slave who had already been freed by the detestable Miss Watson in her will - an act of charity blatantly not in keeping with the Miss Watson we were exposed to in earlier scenes. “Since the 1960’s [again], debates on the novel have shifted to the question of Twain’s treatment of race. Yet because views of Twain’s treatment of race often hinge on judgments of the ending, critics are no closer to reaching a consensus than they ever were. In fact, the status of the ending remains a topic of unresolved controversy today, and some adaptations of the novel solve the problem of the ending by rewriting it” (Graff, 277).

Leo Marx’ comprehensive argument against the value of the ending to Huck Finn writes, “the unhappy truth about the ending of Huckleberry Finn is that the author, having revealed the tawdry nature of the culture of the great valley, yielded to its essential complacency” (Marx, 297). This was the same complacency that made the theater production of The Clansmen a success in the “abolitionist” north. The problem is that, while D.W. Griffith was clearly a product of this complacency (if exaggerated into contempt by an upbringing further south), Twain demonstrated in the beginning and body of Huck Finn that he was above it – and not only above it, but aware of it. This is why the novel is now so heavily valued, and also why the ending is such a disappointing combustion of Twain’s themes. We must remember that if we are upset by the ending to Huck Finn, it is because the effectiveness of Twain’s preceding chapters had earned the right to upset us.

Of all the approaches to the stigma of Huck Finn’s concluding scenes, none are more concrete and straightforward than Ernest Hemmingway’s, who proposed in 1935 that, “if you read [the novel] you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys… This is the real end. The rest is cheating” (Graff, 277). Hemmingway’s recommendation is that we edit the novel ourselves, that we disregard elements of Twain’s original vision. This is easier to do in Huck Finn than it is in The Birth of a Nation. In Huck Finn we can amputate the final eleven chapters and be left with a novel that is, at least according to Hemmingway, ideal. But in The Birth of a Nation we cannot separate the close-ups and the fade-outs and the intercutting from the blackface and the intended rape and the heroic ride of the Ku Klux Klan. They are bound to one another. Martin Scorsese famously stated, “the cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” The Birth of a Nation contains frames in which revolutionary innovation and deplorable racism are intrinsically bound to one another, holding each others’ hands. They cannot be separated in the act of experiencing the film (though in canonizing it the two are more easily divorced, but more on that later).

All of this is a lead-in to the central dilemma that these two evaluative debates revolve around. Both Ebert’s and Marx’ essays state it explicitly:

“But is it possible to separate the content from the craft?” (rogerebert.com)

“…It is necessary to note that both critics (Lionel Trilling and T.S. Eliot, both of whom praised the ending to Twain’s novel) see the problem as one of form. And so it is” (Marx, 291).

The narrative arc of Huck Finn is made circular by its final chapter, which, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “brings us back to the beginning” (Eliot 288). However, it must jump the rails eleven chapters from the end in order to return to that beginning. “[The narrative of Huck Finn] is a jerry-built structure,” Marx says, “achieved only by sacrifice of characters and theme. Here the controlling principle of form apparently is unity, but unfortunately a unity much too superficially conceived. Structure, after all, is only one element – indeed, one of the more mechanical elements – of unity. A unified work must surely manifest coherence of meaning and clear development of theme, yet the ending of Huckleberry Finn blurs both” (Marx, 299).

Here Marx argues that Twain, in his final chapters, attempted himself to separate content from form by sacrificing the former to salvage the latter, that the consistency of his character development was perceived as being of secondary importance to the symmetry (or “unity”) of the narrative form. If this is true, and indeed it seems to be, then Hemmingway’s suggestion might not seem so discriminating. Content and form in Huck Finn peel apart eleven chapters from the end, and in these final chapters the two are clearly distinguishable, helping us to distinguish them earlier in the novel when they were more seamlessly integrated. The river for example, which had been a neutral, picturesque enabler for Huck and Jim’s adventures, emerges as a notable absence when it disappears from the narrative, and it is only here that we can clearly see what Twain had been using it as – a metaphor for fate and Huck’s acting on it of his own volition. The river suggests not Jim’s freedom from slavery, which is ensured some time before the end, but Huck’s freedom from Tom. If Twain’s narrative structure preserves symmetry, or “unity”, it does so by bringing Huck back under the spell of Tom Sawyer, at the same time that the river disappears from the story (much like Huck’s own independence from Tom) inexplicably.

The separation of content and form has long been the focal point of the two works’ respective discussion. The questions of value surrounding both The Birth of a Nation and Huck Finn suggest that critics would rather canonize only certain elements of an artwork than the whole of it. Both the novel and the film were successes upon release (though The Birth of a Nation considerably more so), so it must be noted that, as Ebert mentioned above, both works were, at least moderately, “mirrors of their time.” Does this not suggest at least an inadvertent desire to idealize America in our hunt for great American literature and film? What does it say when we would just as soon canonize the chapters of Huck Finn that criticize racism and slavery and “reveal the tawdry nature of the culture of the great valley,” while disposing, as Hemmingway recommends, of the chapters that undermine those themes, when it was the whole of the novel that sold so well in 1885? What does it say when we would just as soon canonize the technical achievements of The Birth of a Nation, while disposing of its unwillingness to recognize African-Americans as equal and legitimate members of American society, when the film was the biggest success the cinema had yet seen?

The debate of value need not concern itself with a work’s popularity, but any debate of “Americanness” surely must, as popular works serve as a reflection of the American perspective at a given time. Thus, debating the canon of great American literature or film must at least consider popularity, as it attempts to meld value with representation. Marx argues that “Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece because it brings Western humor to perfection and yet transcends the narrow limits of its conventions. But the ending does not… In the closing episode… we lose sight of Jim in the maze of farcical invention. He ceases to be a man. He allows Huck and ‘Mars Tom’ to fill his hut with rats and snakes, ‘and every time a rat bit Jim he would get up and write a line in his journal whilst the ink was fresh.’ This creature who bleeds ink and feels no pain is something less than human. He has been made over in the image of a flat stereotype: the submissive stage-Negro” (Marx, 295-96). And yet, Huck Finn sold 40,000 copies in its first year of publication (AmericanHeritage.com). Meanwhile, Ebert argues along similar lines: “It is a stark history lesson to realize that [The Birth of a Nation], for many years the most popular [film] ever made, expressed widely-held and generally acceptable white views… Griffith demonstrated to every filmmaker and moviegoer who followed him what a movie was, and what a movie could be. That this achievement was made in a film marred by racism should not be surprising. As a nation once able to reconcile democracy with slavery, America has a stain on its soul; to understand our history we must begin with the contradiction that the Founding Fathers believed all men (except black men) were created equal” (rogerebert.com).

Indeed, the desire to separate content from form may actually be subtly undermining the search for “Americanness” in great American literature and film. Through a modern lens, we must acknowledge the massive distance that the Civil Rights Movement has put between us and virtually all American artwork before the 1960s. To be an abolitionist in the early years of the twentieth century did not mean that one was not racist as we understand the word today, and to explicitly claim not to be a racist, as Griffith did when he said “To say that [I am racist] is like saying I am against children, as they were our children, whom we loved and cared for all our lives,” obviously does not dispel naivety and ignorance. Nearly twenty years prior to Hemmingway’s approach to Huck Finn’s final eleven chapters, Griffith responded to the criticisms laid against his film by editing a version of it that removed all of the Klan material. The last word on this issue must, finally, belong to Ebert: “…That is not the answer. If we are to see this film, we must see it all, and deal with it all” (rogerebert.com)

Works Cited

Browne, Alicia R. and Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. “The Civil War and Reconstruction.” The Columbia Companion to American History on Film. Ed. Peter C. Rollins. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 58-68.

Brown, Robert B. “One Hundred Years of HUCK FINN.” AmericanHeritage.com. American Heritage Magazine. Vol. 35, Is. 4. June/July, 1984.

Chadwick, Bruce. The Reel Civil War. New York Random House, Inc. 2001.

Dixon, Wheeler Winston and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short History of Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP. 2008.

Ebert, Roger. “Birth of a Nation (1915).” RogerEbert.com. N.p., 30 March, 2003. Web.

Potamkin, Harry Alan. “Remarks on D. W. Griffith.” American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Literary Classics. 2008. 51-55.

Tolson, Melvin B. “Gone with the Wind Is More Dangerous Than Birth of a Nation.” American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Literary Classics. 2008. 140-44.

Toplin, Robert B. “Slavery.” The Columbia Companion to American History on Film. Ed. Peter C. Rollins. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 552-57.

A Serious Man...Is That All There Is?

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:48:00 +0000

"Audaciously Funny, Original and Resonant!"

- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"Defiantly Original!"

- Thelma Adams, US Weekly

These are the two critic blurbs on my new copy of Joel and Ethan Coens' "A Serious Man", one of the two or three best movies of last year, which I finally managed to sit down and watch again after seeing it in theaters several months ago.

I don't know. Maybe it's the exclamation points, almost certainly provided by the package distributor (As they always are - Critics don't use exclamation points), and suggesting some kind of superficial, giddy fanboy hyperbole that so thoroughly mis-characterizes the Coens' achievement. "Funny" and "Original"? Is that all there is to "A Serious Man"? Every comedy is "Funny". I know this because the critic blurbs told me so. Do critics think "A Serious Man" is merely "funny", or do the distributors only want us to think so? Why did critics regard as merely funny(!) a film I approach with quiet reverie? Are they not seeing everything there is to see, or am I seeing something that isn't there?

I've read a few reviews for the film, and the focus is generally on the comedy, though some of the wiser ones (noted below) are keen to bind it to the tragedy. Even those who've recognized its cosmic overtones are sure to mention that it's funny(!) before they mention that it's tragic, horrifying, or, dare I say, profound - the kind of claims that are better served with a subtler period. "A Serious Man" is a tragedy inflected with humor, not the other way around. Most critics, it seems, fell for the guise.

"What [Larry Gopnick] encounters, apart from haunting music and drab suburban sacred architecture, is silence, nonsense and — from that metaphysical zone beyond the screen, where the rest of us sit and watch — laughter." (A.O. Scott)

"Is it a comedy? A tragedy? It’s right on the border, a broad Jewish joke that morphs into a jeremiad, a tale of woe that keeps you wondering if the punch line, when it comes, will make you laugh or want to kill yourself, or both." (David Edelstein)

“'A Serious Man' is a tart, brilliantly acted fable of life’s little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than “No Country for Old Men” but with a script rich in verbal wit". (Michael Phillips)

"But shouldering a weight of woes worthy of Job is Danny's father, Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the trials he must suffer are relentless enough to -- in a buoyant, comical way -- call into question the meaning of life and the nature of God's intentions for his chosen ones." (Todd McCarthy)

These are all claims I, for the most part, agree with, though for me, the fact that "A Serious Man" is funny seems unimportant. Yes it is, but that only compliments the underlying seriousness. The critics above seem burdened to mention the humor, even to center on it. For them it appears a distraction, as though they were somehow surprised that the Brothers Coen had made a dark comedy.

Maybe I'm alone, but I did not find the ending to "A Serious Man" the least bit funny, nor do I feel that it was intended to be. I find it devastating, well served by the irony of the Coens' humor thats real meaning, up to that point, had eluded us, but that was now embodied by the revival of that damned Jefferson Airplane song, driving home the nature of the folly, twisting one last time the emotional knife. Strange how the answers elude us until it's too late for them to matter. The Jefferson Airplane lyrics, the advice of the Rabbis, the words of advice Larry provided his brother, in dream and in wakefulness, that would have been so beneficially self-applied. That all of these moments are initially played as dark comedy make them, for me anyway, decidedly sad in retrospect. Looking back, I wonder how I laughed, but watching it again, that's exactly what I did.

Note: Many of these sentiments are reflected in Jim Emerson's review, which is the most comprehensive and understanding of all the reviews I've read on the film.

The Top Ten Films of 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:31:00 +0000

As Drafted by Jon and Rollie

1. The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war thriller/action movie could well be, as James Cameron put it, the Platoon of the Iraq war. Chillingly objective and unflinching, The Hurt Locker cuts to the core of why humans need (and in a disturbing way, want) war. One of the most powerful experiences of the last few years.
-Jon

2. Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino's World War II action/comedy/drama was not only the most fun I had at the movies all year, but it also fuelled some of the best online discussion of any movie released in 2009. Tarantino here applies his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema and its history, his astoundingly confident writing and directing style, and his deep love of movies to create one of the most memorable and hard-hitting films of his career, of 2009, and of this first decade of the 21st century.
- Jon

3. A Serious Man
The new Coen Brothers film epitomises everything I love about these film-makers. Deeply sardonic, quietly hilarious, surprisingly profound and, as usual, divisive as all hell, A Serious Man is just about the must-see movie of the year. This simple story of a man trying to work out why his life is falling apart discovers that in the Coen Brothers' world, there is no why -- shit just happens.
-Jon

4. Goodbye Solo
Ramin Bahrani, one of America's great directors of this decade, has done more than anyone else to dissect the nature of American multiculturalism. His films begin with cultural barriers and then move past them into themes that are universally human. Ethnicity offers only surface definitions. In one of the film's many great exchanges, Senegalese cab driver Solo, his reggae music turned up in the cab, asks William, a desperate old man who may be considering suicide, about his favorite music. We can be fairly certain that Solo never actually looked up the music of Hank Williams. What was important about that scene was the two mens' shared enthusiasm for music in principle. In the end, it is their shared understanding of each others' pains that elevates the film to such a powerful emotional pitch.
-Rollie

5. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman's exquisite "Up in the Air" is being called a "recession era fable", but I think the recession is more of a backdrop. A utilized backdrop to be sure, but what he's really up to here is a commentary on the growing psychological differences between us as Americans, the effects that accessibility and technology have had on such important institutions as love and family. Vera Farmiga deserves an Oscar nomination as the median of this theme, but then so does Geore Clooney, our generation's Cary Grant, as the tragic one man corporate firing squad who's home is between homes (if one can be said to be ahead of him) and whose family longs for his return only in passing. This is an important film, I think, and a must see. Does it deserve comparisons to Frank Capra's depression era films? Probably not. But Preston Sturgess perhaps? Absolutely.
-Rollie

6. The Road
I'm a tough cookie to crack at the movies, but I was nearly a blubbering mess by the end of The Road. Put it down to the performance of Viggo Mortensen as a man trying to guide his son through a hopeless post-apocalyptic world, the visual style of The Proposition director John Hillcoat, and the source material from one of the best of modern authors, Cormac McCarthy. The Road is almost completely hopeless, but for the dim light in every human that wants to help others, to be happy and optimistic. The sad suggestion of The Road is that we may be on a path that will extinguish that dim light forever.
-Jon

7. Paranormal Activity
Made for around $10,000, starring two unkowns and filmed in director Oren Peli's house, Paranormal Activity is currently sitting on a pretty $110 million dollar global gross. It deserves it. This is one of the scariest, cleverest, relentless horror movies since The Exorcist set the bar over 30 years ago. For about a week after seeing this film for the first time, I woke up at 2 in the morning, convinced that I'd heard something in my kitchen or living room. One thing this movie taught me is: don't try to film it.
-Jon

8. Samson & Delilah
Wildly regarded as the film that should have gotten the world-wide attention that Baz Luhrmann's overblown Australia did, Samson and Delilah is a depiction of the other Australia that most of us choose to ignore. The people of the community that Samson and Delilah belong to are increasingly without hope. Samuel Johnson famously said, "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of a society." That quote, combined with the way that Samson and Delilah articulates the nature of the Indigenous living-standards disaster in Australia, should force any number of us to take a good, hard look at ourselves.
-Jon

9. Up
Another year, another Pixar masterpiece. Up is perhaps the most fanciful Pixar film to date, a story of an old man tethering thousands of helium balloons to his house and taking off to find Paradise Falls, a place he promised himself and his late wife he would visit before he died. What follows is a wonderful visual feast, a beautiful story about the nature of friendship and the importance of never giving up on your dreams.
-Jon

10. Broken Embraces
Alive with its vivid color palette, Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces" is about seeing, about distinguishing, about understanding. With a brave performance from Penelope Cruz at its heart, "Broken Embraces" is a sumptuous visual feast and a touching melodrama to boot. What we see can be superficial. It can hide the most interesting of stories from us, disguise the most important of truths. But lodged in our memories are feelings that our eyes cannot steal from us.
-Rollie

We'll Be Back Before You Know It

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:33:00 +0000

Sorry for the extended lack of activity around here, folks. I've decided to let the Ghost rest for a few months while I finish up my bachelor's degree, among other reasons. Ghost on Screen will be up and running again in early May. Set your alarms.

Until then. You can find me blogging for the Daily Nebraskan at my blog Moving Pictures (also available at the sidebar). I am also doing my column for one more semester on great movies and an even dabbling in pseudo-legitimate journalism. In the meantime, Jon will likely be posting occasionally, so keep an eye out. Until then, long days and pleasant nights.

The Holiday Roundup Extravaganza

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:49:00 +0000

Greetings, ghosts. I hope life finds you living. Traveling and family events have kept me from posting recently, and as I gear up for my cruise in Mexico, said trend will likely continue through the next two weeks. But it's not all bad. Jon has recently unveiled his decidedly Australian top ten films of the year over at the Film Brief, which should keep you occupied for a bit, and the list of pieces on the horizon is far more exciting than the recent lack of action has been discouraging. Me and Jon should be returning from our international adventures around the same time, and will commence articles and podcasts discussing the best films of the year and of the decade. It should make for some thrilling debate. Unfortunately for me, the list of films I'm still anxious to see seems more exciting the the list of the best films I've already seen. Ergo, both lists will soon be made available. As for now, I've raced through a handful of movies in the few days between Christmas and the cruise, so here's my holiday roundup in neatly packaged form.

The Girlfriend Experience
Two and One Half Stars
Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" recalls an observation by Jack Nicholson on the set of "The Shining", defending director Stanley Kubrick's approach. He said, "You go mad with something like realism and then you come up with someone...who says 'Yeah it's real, but it's not interesting'." Such a problem plagues "The Girlfriend Experience", which is so deliberately improvised that it becomes a distraction. Soderbergh's poetic, often ethereal visual style is at direct odds with the blunt, droll exchanges that comprise the bulk of the film's substance.

The film is real, but that isn't necessarily why it isn't interesting. If you would like to know what Soderbergh is getting at, you need only listen to any one of the myriad conversations that permeate "The Girlfriend Experience", in which people carry on about the state of the economy, and the 2008 presidential election, during which the film is set. At a time of great economic turmoil, those who can still afford an escort at $2,000 an hour spend their costly time advising said escort where and how to invest her money, though the primary commentary of these conversations is that they're advising her to invest it at all.

The girl is Chelsea, played distantly by adult film star Sasha Gray. IMDB lists her performance in "The Girlfriend Experience" right between the films "Fox Holes" and "Roadside Ass-istance". That said, her performance here is an intelligent one, delicate and brave. And if she seems amateurish, well, Sodergergh goes to such lengths to make the entire project feel amateurish that it hardly matters. He clearly has a lot of confidence in his young starlet, leaving the camera on her for what seems like minutes on end as she listens to her boyfriends, er, clients ramble on through financial advice and questions about her profession and financial advice again. Soderbergh's film may be blunt and shallow, but Ms. Gray is anything but.

Goodbye Solo
Four Stars
Considering that so much time is spent looking over the steering wheel of a shabby taxi cab into the back seat, Ramin Bahrani's "Goodbye Solo" is a beautiful film. His characters are plagued by earthly problems, but they are not defined by them. Senegalese cabby Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) does everything he can and more for his suicidal patron William (Red West) but in the end it is his own demons and character flaws that stifle redemption, and he must admit defeat.

Bahrani, one of America's great directors of this decade, has done more than anyone else to dissect the nature of American multiculturalism. His films begin with cultural barriers and then move past them into themes that are universally human. Ethnicity offers only surface definitions. In one of the film's many great exchanges, Solo, his reggae music turned up in the cab, asks William about his favorite music. We can be fairly certain that Solo never actually looked up the music of Hank Williams. What was important about that scene was the two mens' shared enthusiasm for music in principle. In the end, it is their shared understanding of each others' pains that elevates the film to such a powerful emotional pitch.

Invictus
Three Stars
Clint Eastwood's "Invictus" is, in essence, a hammy feel-good sports movie that made me feel good. I can handle that. Eastwood, in his aging career, is not maturing however. He seems to be losing confidence in his audience's intelligence, a problem that plagued last year's "Gran Torino" as well. Too much thinking out loud. Too many heavy-handed emotional cues from the music or slow motion or otherwise, but it's Morgan Freeman's eloquent portrayal of South African president Nelson Mandella for which I am recommending "Invictus", for which I was made to feel good. Pay attention to Eastwood's exquisite opening sequence, in which privileged white children practice rugby on a neatly gated green lawn while impoverished black children play soccer across the street in a dirt pasture enclosed with chicken wire. The way Eastwood moves back and forth between them subtly allowing the disparity in abundance to balloon on its own until Mandela's victory procession slyly accentuates the divide between the two is exquisite. It is Eastwood's finest moment in terms of pure cinema since "Unforgiven".

Julia
Four Stars
If Job had been a con man, his caper would have progressed something like the crime catastrophe "Julia", directed by Erick Zonca. But more than debunking nearly every crime thriller cliche in the book, the film is a triumph for Tilda Swinton, who alongside Zonca creates a woman we both (or neither) care for and (nor) detest, but above all understand. This is one of those rare and valuable instances when a performer is confronted with a character of nearly infinite dimensions and understands every one of them.

Julia's plot to help her neighbor kidnap her son from his grandfather crashes over and over through the floor and comes to rest on a floor less stable than the one before. Swinton allows the twists and turns of the story to draw new and unforeseen elements, both positive and negative, from her character. Zonca wisely spends over a half hour with Julia to begin the film, observing her drinking problems, her nymphomania, her profound lack of compassion, so that when the crime finally happens it is developing out of her character, not the other way around, and everything that transpires from then on out feels absolutely inevitable. The film's final line is perfect. Funny and self-reflexive, yet enigmatic and foreboding, it is a perfect moment, which is always a good way to leave.

Nine
Two Stars
To say that "Nine" doesn't survive the transition to the screen would be unfair, because the film doesn't really make an attempt to transition at all. After all, what would a Tony Award winning musical do without a stage? I don't mean that necessarily as a criticism. Many films have stayed true to their theatrical roots and succeeded (think of Kazan's great "A Streetcar Named Desire"). No, the problem I have with "Nine" is the effect that said stage has on the source material, Federico Fellini's brilliant "8 1/2".

Fellini's wonderfully sardonic observation of the creative process seamlessly meanders between fantasy and reality. It is the seamlessness that's important. Not being able to discern the ideas from the inspirations, the dreamscape from the wakefullness emblematic of the artist's subversive venture, is itself the central theme of Fellini's film, which is the best film ever made about movie making. With "Nine", however, director Rob Marshall tells the concrete story of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the creative block hindering his massive new film "Italia" in one reality, then returns to the stage for musical numbers that symbolize his fantasies. Marshall's consistent use of black and white further sorts the mystery for us. The result is an adaptation of "8 1/2" that isn't so much an interpretation as it is an instruction manual, which greatly inhibits our ability to interact with it.

Day-Lewis is himself inhibited. One of the best and certainly the most selective of actors working today, the most we are allowed of the man's brilliance are in early scenes when his Guido speaks intuitively of the film-making process to a crowd of excited reporters. One of those reporters is Stephanie, played by the radiant Kate Hudson, and if "Nine" did anything, it was to remind me of how frustrating Hudson's career choices have been since "Almost Famous". The woman is tremendously talented, and here she seems almost to be satirizing her own career, as a superficial fashion queen with a warm, real smile.

Penelope Cruz and Marion Cotillard, both fearless, are also restrained from doing to their characters what they're capable of, and Nicole Kidman's plastic Claudia is an obvious homage to Anita Ekberg in another Fellini film, "La Dolce Vita". Marshall even brings her and Day-Lewis (whose Guido was initially played by Marcello Mostroianni, who also played the male lead in "La Dolce Vita") to a fountain in Rome.

The Road
Two and One Half Stars
John Hillcoat places nearly all of the emotional stock of "The Road" in the starkness of his cinematography. It only modestly succeeds. The cinematography is indeed stark, as was the case in Hillcoat's earlier film, "The Proposition", which was a good film. Unfortunately, he openly sidesteps the characterization necessary to make "The Road" poignant. A soft-spoken narration by the man played by Viggo Mortensen explains to us the stories he would tell to his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) about his wife(played in enigmatic flashbacks by Charlize Theron). These stories must be summarized in narration, apparently, because Hillcoat couldn't find time for moments of that kind of intimacy amidst an episodic narrative dictated by countless shots of the famished duo quietly navigating this beautifully realized post-apocalyptic world. It is a misguided decision. So much of "The Road's" plan of attack is based on the decay of beauty, particularly internalized through memory. Not showing us these exchanges is, I think, why the film never reaches the emotional firepower its gunning for.

This decade has offered an interesting evolutionary step for the post-apocalyptic thriller. "The Road", like Timur Bekmombetov's "9" earlier this year and Alfonso Cuaron's remarkable "Children of Men", have sidestepped the cause and effect progression of the apocalypse in favor of the inherited conflicts that follow. This deceased, gray world is so often more of a backdrop than a spectacle, and Hillcoat is keen to incorporate it into the narrative arc, to interact with it. The Man's resourcefulness reveals subtle details that make this world tragic without ever seeming nostalgic.

The dichotomy of Hillcoat's commentary is deeply rooted in the withering of compassion by earthly experiences and human interaction. Smit-McPhee's young boy is, as they always are, innocent, though Hillcoat wisely avoids making him cute or optimistic. His generosity is borderline Christlike. Mortensen's father is pessimistic, suspicious, reclusive, and attempts to project these qualities onto his unprepared son. It's a story that can be told in pretty much any setting. Think of Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", or Antoine Fuqua's "Training Day" or any other tale of idealistic youth revitalizing the values of their disenfranchised elders. The problem is that Hillcoat tells when he should show, and is perhaps too loyal to the barren dialog of Cormac McCarthy's novel to really capture a revealing and provocative atmosphere. But damn, that cinematography sure is stark. Expect an Oscar nomination for Javier Aguirresarobe.

Sherlock Holmes
Two and One Half Stars
Guy Ritchie is not a patient or talented enough director to handle the likes of Robert Downey Jr., who in "Sherlock Holmes" feels muted in a role begging for the exact opposite. I think the problem is that Ritchie is too quick to cut away. He doesn't understand the significance of a reaction shot, which is where the magic of an RDJ performance so often lies. The man could conduct a symphony orchestra with his eyebrows, and so often it is that final rise or fall or skewering of his brows that can make a shot or cap an exchange, a technique that Ritchie's headlong style does not have time for.

From a narrative standpoint, the mystery proceeds in a fairly straightforward manner, even though the film often doubles back on itself to poke us in the ribs and say "gotcha". It's subject, involving world dominion as they always do when one wants to up the ante, is nice and fun, and just almost makes sense after about five minutes of relentless explanation at the end. A technique involving Holmes rationalizing his way through the progression of a fight scene before executing it flawlessly is used about three times over the film's two hour plus running time, but is not utilized during the climactic fight scene. Ultimately however, the project fails to be engaging because it fails to properly develop its villain, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). Blackwood exists entirely in shadows and ominous exchanges on the street, and Holmes is locked in a one sided chess match which thoroughly deflates the tension.

Sin Nombre
Four Stars
A beautiful is world passing by, visible from the top of a train unintentionally carrying hundreds of desperate Mexicans north toward America, but in "Sin Nombre" that beauty is no refuge, not when you know its secrets. It is permeated by a vengeful gang who relentlessly pursue Casper (Edgar Flores) north, like the demons of his past. They are waiting for him at every station, at every open stretch of rail, anxious to pump him full of bullets for killing their leader. His one act of redemption, saving the beautiful Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) from rape and robbery from his own gang, provided him only with piece of mind and the promise of death. The twelve year old boy he recruited into the gang, ostensibly ruining any promise of a fulfilling or prosperous life, is ironically leading the charge against him. But damnit, if he can just get young Sayra safely across the border, he'll at least still have that piece of mind.

Up in the Air
Four Stars
Jason Reitman's exquisite "Up in the Air" is being called a "recession era fable", but I think the recession is more of a backdrop. A utilized backdrop to be sure, but what he's really up to here is a commentary on the growing psychological differences between us as Americans, the effects that accessibility and technology have had on such important institutions as love and family. Vera Farmiga deserves an Oscar nomination as the median of this theme, but then so does Geore Clooney, our generation's Cary Grant, as the tragic one man corporate firing squad who's home is between homes (if one can be said to be ahead of him) and whose family longs for his return only in passing. This is an important film, I think, and a must see. Does it deserve comparisons to Frank Capra's depression era films? Probably not. But Preston Sturgess perhaps? Absolutely.

Well I Wouldn't Want to Live There

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Three and One Half Stars

Much like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy earlier this decade, James Cameron has created with “Avatar” a world that I would like to experience first hand. I want to stand on the road-like branches of these mountainous trees. I want to see the moist glossy fauna of the forest floor illuminate under my bare feet and swim in the stainless crystal springs. I want to emerge from the cover of the canopy and the heavy fog and see the Hallelujah Mountains floating in the sky above me. More than anything else in “Avatar”, the lush and ethereally beautiful planet of Pandora is Cameron’s crowning achievement.

Plenty of people will argue that the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous race of shamanic blue giants, are the real technical accomplishment, but I would contend that they are one of the many components of Pandora, and a vital one as you’ll eventually understand. The Na’vi, with their slender, blue patterned bodies and feline characteristics, are somewhat of a miracle of motion-capture technology. They are wonderfully expressive and fully realized, and occupy the screen comfortably alongside their human counterparts, who are no more or less real, but rather share Cameron’s universe as beings of equal authenticity.

The Na’vi occupy the Hometree, a mammoth culmination of symbiosis resting over the planet’s largest known deposits of Unobtanium (clever), a metal that has attracted a hoard of humans (American, of course) in the year 2154 to the far away planet to mine it dry. The metal, and who knows how its function or location was initially discovered, is apparently vital to preserving life on Earth. The Na’vi, as one might have guessed, are less than thrilled with our presence.

The humans bring with them an arsenal of military technology and rock-em sock-em soldiers to secure the operation. The quaint, poison-tipped wooden arrows of the Na’vi are no match for our alloys and armors, but they have no intention of backing down. This is their land, thank you very much, and they’ll be damned if they’ll be chased off.

They do have a distinct advantage, however. Apart from the knowledge of the land, they can breathe the air, which is toxic to us. We wear masks for rudimentary activities, but for extensive outdoor work, we have designed the Avatars, organic replicas of the Na’vi infused with the DNA of selected scientists and soldiers. Their pilots, for lack of a better word, operate the Avatars with their thoughts inside sensor-ridden pods. The transition from human to Avatar is not permanent, which is an important element to the story. Their minds can be returned to their human vessels with the push of a button.

One of those minds is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine who was brought into the project after his twin brother, whom an Avatar was fashioned for, was killed in a mugging. Jake finds the freedom of his new body liberating, and his lack of preparation quickly finds him recklessly involved in the Na’vi tribe, under the watchful guidance of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Meanwhile, at the base, Sully is torn between conflicting objectives from the environmentally conscious Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and shoot-first-shoot-again-later military Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Lost yet? This is all just a broad outline of the establishing sequences of the film. Pandora harbors an interesting secret revealed later that reminded me of the oceanic consciousness of “Solaris” (1972). An inevitable relationship forms between Jake and Neytiri that doesn’t carry a lot of weight, but is adequate to move the story forward. Hitchcock once said that if you introduce a gun in the first hour of your film, that gun must go off. Well Cameron introduces a lot of guns, and they all go off in a final battle that pits among many other creatures and weapons, Jake’s mentally piloted Avatar against a humanoid robot piloted from within by Col. Quaritch in one of the film’s more subtle metaphors.

But rising above all else is the film’s immaculate spectacle, realized with an extraordinary eye for detail and a livid imagination. Cameron is much better at shooting these big budget action movies than his evil counterpart Michael Bay. He leaves the money on screen long enough for us to savor it, and places it in service of something more than just effects. The project is more palatable than other recent action flicks, particularly films like the monochromatic club to the face "Death Race" from last year. It is also well edited and choreographed, setting apart from this year's other mammoth budget spectacle "Transformers 2", which overdid the former to disguise the absence of the latter. Cameron has a superb eye for place and scale. Not for a second in “Avatar” does this universe not make perfect sense.

I suspect that much of the triumph that “Avatar” has become isn’t necessarily explicitly visible on screen. Cameron utilized many state of the art FX technologies, many of them he invented himself. What we see is more of an exhibition of product, a fun but clunky story seeing itself through in a utopian vision. Cameron was aiming for the heavens with this project. If he had to burn a few clichés to get there, well, I can forgive that.

Rollan Schott
December 18, 2009
Jon's review of "Avatar" is available at GoS' brother site, The Film Brief.

The Prodigal Son Defamed

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:20:00 +0000

Brothers

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Three Stars

Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers” comes out focused and prepared. It takes a strong warm-up lap, properly does its stretching and calisthenics, steps up to the blocks, and hits the showers. It is an excellent first two-thirds of a film.

Sheridan based this film of postwar trauma on a Danish film of the same name, in which a prodigal son is sent to war while his delinquent brother is saved from the battlefield by his own delinquency. Toby Maguire plays the prodigal son, Capt. Sam Cahill, in an intensely over-the-top performance. He has a wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two daughters, and they are, of course, quite happy.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the delinquent brother, Tommy, who houses a quaint shyness that makes it hard to picture him as someone who just got out of prison for armed robbery. The two men share a relationship that is respectful but under duress. Expectations, both failed and surpassed, have formed a wall between them, and their father (Sam Shepard) has laid the mortar.

Of the general plot, I will not go into extreme detail. The whole of the story is explained in the trailers, and if you’re like me, you felt like the trailer had only revealed the establishing sequences of the film.

Sam goes to war and is presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Grace is distraught, and Tommy, fresh out of prison, eases into her and her daughters’ lives as a surrogate father.

But Sam emerges alive and returns to his family, strung out, traumatized and paranoid. He senses a relationship between his wife and his brother and punishes himself for a life-changing decision he made while imprisoned in Afghanistan by allowing his paranoia to snowball into violence.

“Brothers” is, in many ways, a story that Michael Cimino told with “The Deer Hunter” in 1978, which was a far superior film. Both films deal with the psychological and emotional losses that soldiers face when returning from war.

Cimino’s film was more about the soldiers, though, and the emptiness that they felt at home after returning from Vietnam. “Brothers” assumes the reverse perspective of Grace and Tommy and how they attempt to recreate a family that was destroyed overseas.

Grace goes through the motions of the loving marriage she had with Sam before he left, but he is a different man now and their love seems one-sided. Grace is clinging to an idea more than a person, and her daughters respond to the new-found distance in their father with a growing fondness for their uncle Tommy.

Sheridan observes this family drama with great detail. The project is a bit too glossy to become completely involving, but the performances, particularly Maguire’s manic, bug-eyed intensity and Gyllenhaal’s gruff shy-guy warmth, bring gravity to the film and its themes.

Most importantly, though, the film ends far too soon, cutting itself off when it is only beginning to break into something genuine. Sheridan seems afraid to make the leap. He cuts his emotional ark short by mistaking the firing of a gun for the climax of the film, and tidies up to such an extent that he jeopardizes the very commentary he was threatening to make.

“Brothers” is a good film. Make no mistake. If I seem harsh it is because it got off a station too soon and, in so doing, amplified many of its other shortcomings. Consider simply that if it were not a good film, I would certainly not be complaining that it ended sooner rather than later. “The Deer Hunter” was more than three hours long.

Rollan Schott

December 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Loving Only Our Own Perceptions

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:35:00 +0000

Solaris

1972

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky made “Solaris” as a response to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” from a few years before, criticizing that film as too cold and detached to convey genuine emotion. He was wrong about Kubrick’s film, which is about evolving beyond our petty human sentiments and is transcendental of the ‘genuine emotion’ he accused it of lacking. But “2001” and “Solaris” are nonetheless excellent companions for one another. Kubrick’s film reaches out, while Tarkovsky’s reaches in.

They do have much in common. They are both science fiction films, they both explore the nature of man on a very broad scale, and they are both tremendously slow and meditative. Their aims are to use the vast and quiet stillness of space to reveal the truths of our existence, to take their audiences to a place of emptiness and reverence where they can contemplate these themes more clearly. Tarkovsky’s aim is to question what it is that makes us human.

Its brilliant concept is adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem. Earth has recently discovered another planet on the far outreaches of our solar system, which we have named Solaris. Studies have shown that the planet is covered by an oceanic consciousness that has the power to manifest itself as the desires of alien minds within its proximity. Russia launches a space station into orbit around the planet to investigate but after only a few weeks, contact with the crew has become mysteriously infrequent and nonsensical.

Russia selects their top psychologist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) to go to the space station and determine if further research can safely be conducted. He doesn’t particularly know what he’s getting into, and there is a significant chance that he is walking into a death trap, but he has struggled to carry on since the death of his wife two years before, and isn’t bothered much by the danger.

Kelvin boards the space station to find it in shambles from neglect. The crew wanders the halls quietly mad, nearly traumatized. They disregard Kelvin’s presence. They assume that he is not the real Kelvin, but a manifestation created by Solaris. This proves not to be the case, however, when Kelvin makes his way to his quarters and finds his wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) there waiting for him.

His wife is dead. He knows this. The crew knows this. She is a product of Solaris, which has probed Kelvin’s mind and manifested itself as his deepest desire. Khari does not know this. This is where “Solaris” elevates itself above standard science fiction fare. A lesser movie what have made the planet Solaris a malevolent mind that would aim to destroy the members of the space station by taking human form. But Khari is precisely how Kris remembered her, not just in appearance but in personality. She loves Kris as the original Khari had, and Kris can’t help but love her back, even though he knows she is not technically human.

Ultimately, Tarkovsky is asking us, how real are we if an artificial duplication of our soul mate can inspire the same feelings? Is it our fellow humans that we love, or is it simply the idea of them? What exists outside of our own perception of reality? These are not easy questions, and Tarkovsky certainly doesn’t have the answers. How could he? That he had the courage to ask them at all is telling of his brilliance.

Tarkovsky is often listed alongside Sergei Eisenstein as one of the most important directors of the Soviet Union, and the two filmmakers could not have been more opposite in their approach to the cinema. Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” revolutionized the concept of the montage, rapid cutting to juxtapose several images into a uniting theme. The “Odessa Steps” sequence in that film is among the most important seven minutes in the history of cinema. The camera cuts rapidly between innocent bystanders and the soldiers gunning them down. The average shot is about two seconds long.

But fifty years later, Tarkovsky’s films favored shots of twenty or thirty seconds. He felt that the long shot had the power to unveil certain higher truths that can only be revealed over time. His films move incredibly slowly because of this. They become reverential. They require that we slow down with them. A film like “Solaris” can only work this way. Tarkovsky gives us time to think about what he’s showing us, he wants to give us time to reflect, to recall our own memories and see them before us, rejuvenated.

Rollan Schott

December 7, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Are You Cussin' with Me?

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:07:00 +0000

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by Wes Anderson

Three and One Half Stars

There is a moment late in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” when Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Company pause to recognize a moment of serene beauty, a majestic(ish) wolf on an elevated stone before the backdrop of snowcapped mountains.

It seems like an ambiguous moment, or at least it seems like it’s meant to be ambiguous. What’s strange is that it isn’t. It’s a flat moment, relatively void of meaning. I was frustrated with this at first, but quickly realized that this moment isn’t about mysterious themes or hidden meanings. It’s a send-up of those same moments in other films.

Understanding this conceit is central to appreciating “Fantastic Mr. Fox” which relies on flat compositions and deliberate actions to achieve a dry and wildly audacious style of humor that Anderson has made all his own.

He occupies his films with characters who are either bored stiff with the roles they are meant to play or relish them with the enthusiastic thrill of classical theater. Consider the way two relatively similar characters inhabit this world.

Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), a wildly talented white fox with speed, brains, and a budding romance, trudges through the film with relative disinterest. It’s not that he’s bitter, he’s just, I don’t know, indifferent?

Mr. Fox, on the other hand, has the same athleticism and smarts, and a loving and devoted wife, and he walks upright and speaks in an assertive matter-of-fact enthusiasm that is most certainly on the smug side. His suave confidence lends the film much of its wit.

Mr. Fox, having sworn off chicken thievery at the request of his wife, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), moves his wife and son Ash (Jason Schwartzmann) out of their lowly hole-in-the-ground hole in the ground and into a lavish tree after assuming an occupation as a newspaper journalist (who nobody reads).

But his identity cannot be denied. He is a fox, after all, and foxes steal chickens. Mr. Fox plots to rob the three heavyweight famers nearby, Boggis and Bunce and Bean. He succeeds, of course, and the three outraged farmers plot to steal his hide in return.

Fox and his family burrow deep beneath their tree, meeting up with other members of the local animal population. Their misfortune is held against Mr. Fox, who seems unfazed, and tensions mount as the farmers try first to blow them out then to starve them out then to wash them out then…

Much of the humor in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” comes from moments outside the narrative, or at least moments that exist within the narrative that are not well-suited to its continuity. I can think of no better example than the poor bloke playing his banjo and improvising a song. The song itself is funny, but the response it garners is one of the biggest laughs of the year.

And what a deliberate movie this is. When the camera races in on a face you can almost hear Anderson somewhere off screen shouting “Aaand CLOSEUP!” The characters all say their lines matter-of-factly, their expressions artificial but strangely human. It’s almost as if they’re trying to slip the jokes past us.

But that moment with the wolf is still haunting me. It is a funny moment, over the top and obvious in its intentions, so what’s with the staying power? The secret to the film can be found here. That secret may well be that there is no secret at all, that the movie is what it is and should not shy away from its clichés, a theme that digs deeper than it seems.

Rollan Schott
December 2, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Before I leave this Earth, I will laugh at YOU

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Amadeus

1984

Directed by Milos Forman

Antonio Salieri cuts a pretty tragic figure in Milos Forman's Amadeus. In Amadeus' vision, the Italian composer was a deeply bitter and resentful man, brilliant enough to see just how special and extraordinary Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was, and perceptive enough to understand that he would never be able to compose music as easily and expertly as Mozart did. There is a moment in Amadeus in which Mozart has just composed and presented a new opera, proclaimed by the Emperor as the 'greatest opera yet written'. The opera climaxes, the crowd erupts and Mozart is smothered in adulation. The camera cuts to Salieri, sitting in a box, cowering in the corner and staring at the events unfolding before him. The look on his face is a combination of malice and self-pity, perfectly captured by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his performance. The central, burning question at the heart of Salieri's actions in Amadeus is "Why? Why Mozart and not me?"

Salieri's question is directed both inwards and outwards. Half-way through the film, Salieri disavows God, concluding that no benevolent higher being could be so cruel, heartless and callous to allow Salieri the ear of a genius, but the talent of an also-ran. This is compounded by Salieri's personal view of Mozart. One of the best things that Amadeus does is to present Mozart not as a brooding genius, but as an immature, socially stilted goofball with an odd laugh who delights in his own talents, but does not realise how painful his very existence is for Salieri. Every time Salieri witnesses Mozart's genius, the ease with which he pens masterpieces, it is a dagger in his heart. Amadeus is in part a story about the dangers of constantly comparing yourself to others. In the words of the Desiderata, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

Amadeus, despite its title, is actually about Salieri and his personal demons, the hatred that he harboured for Mozart while simultaneously admiring his work and talent better than anyone else. Since its release 25 years ago, when it emerged as a towering achievement and an Oscar darling, it has become widely regarded as the best 'Great Composer' movie ever made, precisely because it subverts the formula of the genre at every turn. Most movies about great artists focus on their personal struggle to create their art, the personal demons they face, and usually, their battle with whatever substance they choose to abuse. Amadeus takes almost all of that out of the equation by turning the story of Mozart into a story about how us mere mortals view the mega-talented. There is always a sense of self-comparison, however subconscious, when we observe the great achievers around us. In a peculiar and cruel way, their genius is both something to cherish, but also acts as a kind of mirror for our own shortcomings.

Amadeus presents this phenomenon by showing us stretches of both Salieri and Mozart composing. For Mozart, the process seems to be joyous and organic, and the music that came from him was enormous in scope and core-shakingly powerful. Salieri himself suggests that Mozart is taking 'dictation from God'. Salieri struggles away to create inoffensive-sounding jingles, but nothing really revelatory. Salieri recognises this better than anyone, which makes him feel worse. Then comes a heart-breaking moment when, at a masquerade ball, Mozart takes requests from the audience. When no-one can think of anything to suggest to Mozart, Salieri says (behind the anonymity of his mask), "Play Salieri". Mozart, drunk from the alcohol and fan-adulation, proceeds to play a Salieri piece, accompanied by a cruel impersonation of the composer, culminating in Mozart passing wind. The effect of this scene is magnified ten-fold because Salieri never removes his mask. While everyone is laughing at him, all we see are his eyes and mouth, cold and unmoving. Ouch.

Moments like this, reminding Salieri of his inadequacy next to Mozart's brilliance, compound until eventually Salieri decides to pose as Mozart's ally while surreptitiously working to tear the composer down. Via flash-forwards that frame the film, of an elderly Salieri confessing to a young priest, we see what a toll Salieri's relationship with Mozart was to have on his life. The elderly Salieri is a sad, remorse-plagued man. He is convinced that he killed Mozart, despite the evidence that Mozart died of tuberculosis. Even when on death's door, Salieri is torn between his love for Mozart's music, and the resentment he feels towards the man himself.

This remarkable film adaptation of Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), was based on the play by Peter Shaffer and came under the slightest of criticisms for Americanising the story, for making Mozart's character seem like an 'American buffoon'. I don't see it like that -- for me, Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart, while oddball, is one of the best lead performances of the last 25 years. In reducing the character to a joking man-child, Hulce and Forman express what so many of us suspect about geniuses. They can afford to be relaxed and casual because often their gift comes so easily to them.

Amadeus is a thrilling movie, set to a soundtrack of some of the most beautiful music ever written by a human being. It is a thriller, a character study, and sometimes even a comedy. Milos Forman, a Czech director who migrated to America to make his films, explored the dangers of being an outsider and running against the grain in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and even manages to express that theme here. Mozart's character, despite his genius, is very much an outsider. That is expressed through Hulce's laugh, body language, and even in the way Forman and costume designer Theodor Pistek dress him. There's something almost anarchical about Hulce as Mozart. The wigs don't seem to wear him as well as they do the Emperor and Salieri. He was like an 18th Century Sid Vicious.

Eventually in the film, Mozart does die. There is a suggestion that Salieri may have played some role in his death (within the context of the film, of course. Amadeus does not try to re-write history, only to interpret it to explore the inner workings of this version of Salieri), but right to the end Salieri was conflicted about his feelings towards Mozart. "Before I leave this earth, I will laugh at you," he secretly promises Mozart. Mozart's premature death must have been, in some way, satisfying for Salieri. But in the final scenes of the film, as Salieri helps an ailing Mozart transcribe his final masterpiece, it is clear that Salieri loves Mozart's music more than nearly anything. Salieri is a man that is unable to control his very human jealousy for the sake of appreciating the 'voice of God'. That is his tragedy, and Amadeus is a warning to the rest of us to be wary of falling into the same trap.

Editor's note: In preparing for this article, I re-watched "Amadeus" a couple of times on Blu-Ray. In 1080p high-definition, Milos Forman's thrilling film is elevated even more by the clear image and sharp sound. I recommend the experience.

Jonathan Fisher
December 1, 2009
Originally Featured at The Film Brief

A Vampire, a Werewolf, and an Antifeminist. What's not to love?

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:46:00 +0000

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Directed by Chris Weitz

One and One Half Stars

“The Twilight Saga: New Moon” is composed entirely of attractive people making voluptuous expressions, sometimes at one another, usually at the corners of the screen. The film is nothing more than a visual companion, a template of pretty faces that prepubescent teens can gawk at while they recall Stephanie Meyer’s popular novel in their minds. It is a single note held for two hours, littered with thoroughly irrational characters occupying a dimwitted story. But then again, the faces are pretty, the expressions voluptuous.

I guess that’s all that director Chris Weitz really intended. Most of the people who see this movie will already know its secrets, which makes it more of an exhibition for the bare chests of its toned male leads. Kristin Stewart, on the other hand, hardly ever even wears short sleeves. This is a tale of chastity after all.

“New Moon” picks up more or less where last year’s “Twilight” left off. Bella (Stewart) has just turned 18 and displays her innate knack for turning even the most modest of joys into cause for sorrow. With another year under her belt, she is reminded of the simple fact that she is aging, a curse that her pale skinned hubby Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) could fix with a little nip on the neck.

But alas, after an unfortunate incident at the Cullen family mansion, Edward decides, in the film’s only application of legitimate rationality, that Bella’s obsession with becoming a member of the elite undead is call for concern. The Cullens pack up and leave town and Bella is left, well, about as despondent as she seemed before.

Bella finds some arbitrary solace in the suspiciously buff Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), but is haunted by images of her beloved Eddy, usually advising her not to choose the stupidest option available at present (Don’t get on the bike with the potential rapist, Bella). Bella works out all by herself that making stupid decisions will summon this image of Eddy telling her not to make stupid decisions, so she goes into adrenaline-junky mode, fixing up a pair of bikes with Jacob, introducing hers to a rock, and then literally jumping off a cliff.

All of this is a prelude to the film’s primary revelation. I don’t feel as though I’m spoiling it for anybody when I say that Jacob is a werewolf, running with a gang of other werewolves who do a lot of running about topless in the rain until the story demands that they assume more animal like characteristics.

From here there’s some globetrotting, mind reading, and a lot more brooding. Bella and Eddy’s love for one another is exemplified in moments of tender dialog in which they talk about how much they love one another. There’s no real investigation of the couple’s feelings. They love each other, now shut up. Finally, after two hours and in true franchise form, “New Moon” ham-handedly sets up for the sequel. Tune in next year to see if Bella and Edward will continue to be miserably in love together.

Why this story is popular with women I will never know. Surely in an age of liberated, working, and independent women, they’re not sympathizing with Bella? Here is an eighteen year old girl who is more than willing to sacrifice her education, her devoted and loving father, and even her soul so that she can be with her high school sweetheart. Is this what you ladies find romantic? Bella needs a therapist, not a husband.

If “New Moon” sends a damaging message about women’s place in society (and it does), it’s because it is written by a woman who doesn’t seem to understand what that place is. Weitz does what he can with the material, but he’s too subservient to Meyer’s naivety to bring any substance to it. The project is undone by its obsessive loyalty, which is strangely appropriate.

Rollan Schott

November 23, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

But He Didn't Do Anything!

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:22:00 +0000

A Serious Man

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Four Stars

That poor Larry Gopnick. His wife is leaving him for his best friend. His daughter is stealing money from him to pay for a nose job. His son is stealing money from his daughter to pay for weed and listening to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. His leach of a brother spends hours in the bathroom draining a cyst.

One of his students may have bribed him to improve a grade on an exam. The student’s father may be suing him for accepting a bribe. Someone is writing libelous letters to the college in an effort to foil his bid for tenure. On top of bills from his divorce lawyer and his brother’s doctor, he’s been slapped with a $400 fee from the Columbia Record Club, of which he is not a member. He finds some semblance of solace in his beautiful neighbor, but she’s definitely the type of woman he would avoid if he knows what’s best for him. God only knows how those X-rays will come back.

Why is all of this happening? Why poor Larry? Why now, and why all at once? Is it something he did? Karma perhaps? Could it be because one of his ancestors allowed a dybbuck (A dead man’s lost soul) into his home? Could it be that someone upstairs just has it in for him? He keeps saying “I didn’t do anything,” which may or may not be the answer to all of his problems.

The Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man”, a reenactment of the book of Job set in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Minneapolis, is about a man’s painful search for answers that aren’t there, about how we try to prove our worth to fate rather than to ourselves. It won’t likely play at any nearby theaters, but I hope you take the time to seek it out. It is a tough pill to swallow, but it is also one of the year’s very best films.

Rollan Schott

November 20, 2009

Originally Featured in the Nelson Gazette

A Girl and a Gun

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:14:00 +0000

A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)

1960

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

He loves her, or maybe he doesn’t. She loves him, or maybe she doesn’t. It ends badly, or maybe it doesn’t.

This is how Jean-Luc Godard pitched his first film, “Breathless” (1960), which he made on stolen money with borrowed equipment and the above mentioned script. Perhaps no other film has been more immediately revolutionary. With “Breathless” began the French New Wave and with Godard a handful of courageous filmmakers like Reno, Truffaut, and Varda devoted themselves to the movement.

The French New Wave was, in essence, the cinema of the self-aware. Movies that knew and acknowledged that they were movies, in other words. This was anarchic. Godard and Co. had originated as film critics, and were blurring the lines between theory and practice. By knowing all the rules, they knew precisely how to break them, and to great effect.

With “Breathless”, Godard crafted a movie that knew precisely what it was expected to be, and did something else. Its characters lacked sentiment, their love lacked sincerity, its editing lacked continuity, and its tone lacked emotional cues. These are not faults. They are stylistic decisions. “Breathless” is infinitely entertaining because it reveals itself as a movie spitting in the face of movies.

Look at Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role as Michel Poiccard and you see the likes of De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson in embryo. America had seen its share of suave gangsters by 1960. James Dean and Marlon Brando were huge successes in the 40’s and 50’s, but they were tragic antiheroes. Belmondo plays Michel as a sniveling punk trying to conceal his naivety with an excess of testosterone. He was an indictment of masculinity, not a glorification of it.

Godard once said that all you need to make a successful movie is a girl and a gun, and “Breathless” is composed of nothing else. In the film’s first five minutes, Michel steals a car (exhibiting his nihilistic sexism by leaving his female accomplice in the parking lot), takes a joy ride out in the country, finds a gun in the glove box, gets pulled over, shoots the cop, flees back to town, and tries to convince his love interest Patrica (Jean Seberg) to run away with him to Rome. A girl and a gun.

There are many scenes in the film in which Michel and Patricia are alone in cars and bedrooms simply talking to one another about nothing in particular. Their conversations have a sort of music to them. Listen to the way they volley their indifference toward one another back and forth. There’s something kind of touching in the way they both try to push each other away, while still openly desiring the other’s company.

In the end, Patricia commits a fatal act of betrayal that doesn’t feel at all like betrayal. It feels almost playful in its spontaneity, as though it was just another volley in the game she and Michel were perpetually involved in.

“Breathless” was, in many ways, the only narrative film that Godard made. He gravitated quickly toward what he called “political cinema”, which dealt more with concept than it did with plot. As his career progressed, he slowly got farther and farther ahead of himself. He devoted a decade to his opus “Histoire du Cinema”, and has been ostensibly lost ever since. But there’s a romantic anarchy to his early films, which were alive with his love and understanding of the cinema, before he became desensitized to it.

There is a game that Michel plays with Patricia a couple times in “Breathless”. He calls it “Sour Apples”. He makes a series of exaggerated faces, giant grins, scowls, and wide eyes, all of them enthusiastic, but none of them sincere. That little game, in so many ways, is precisely what “Breathless” is all about.

Rollan Schott

November 20, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

The Mayans Predict a World Undone by Ambitious Cliches

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:06:00 +0000

2012

Directed by Roland Emmerich

Two and One Half Stars

Roland Emmerich, it seems, exists as a filmmaker for the sole purpose of destroying the planet more authoritatively than the last time Roland Emmerich destroyed the planet. His list of credits, in order (some titles excluded), include “Independence Day,” “Godzilla,” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” Look at these titles and you can see how he has steadily upped the ante. Emmerich lays pretty thorough waste to the planet in his latest, “2012,” which I suspect will become some sort of opus for end-of-the-world epics.

Some peculiar shift in the sun’s rays is his latest justification for worldwide pandemonium, transforming our sunlight essentially into microwaves that have cooked out planet from the inside out. And now, with the earth’s mantle melted and unstable, the tectonic plates twist, turn and tango into oblivion, and we humans are not strapped in for the ride. With this premise, Emmerich obliges himself to turn cities upside down, flood them, blow them up and scramble them around until China is a puddle jumper’s hop from Hawaii.

These events are primarily witnessed through the eyes of novelist Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who pieces together the pending disaster during an evening long vacation with his estranged son and daughter to Yellowstone National Park, when he stumbles across the U.S. government’s head geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and a hippie conspiracy connoisseur (Woody Harrelson) stumbles into him.

The government has long been aware, we learn, and have been assassinating anyone who threatens to release the information in an effort to avoid widespread panic. Soon rumors are surfacing of spaceships or something of the like being built to save a small, wealthy sliver of the human race. Jackson pieces it together pretty quickly. No one else has a clue.

From here Jackson and his estranged family join a typecast Russian bureaucrat who has tickets for him and his children to enter these survival pods, whatever they may be, and set off around the world to China, so that we might see that disaster has not confined itself this time to the United States alone.

As is usually the case in effects epics, the human story of “2012” is weak, populated only by stereotypes in place to shout expository lines and provide emotional cues. That the human drama is not the focal point of movies like this does not make this entirely forgivable.

Emmerich’s special effects are exciting and ambitious, but suffer from that artificial big budget gleam that prevents them from being particularly realistic and involving.

This brings me to “2012’s” biggest problems. Special effects, no matter how breathtaking, cannot carry a film for 158 minutes. A film that cannot invest its audience in its characters cannot convince them to care. After 2 1/2 hours of earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves, none of the previously mentioned phenomena can be particularly engaging if we have no stake in them.

“2012” is inspired by predictions from countless ancient civilizations who predicted that our world would come to an end on or around Dec. 21, 2012. Most notable of these were the Mayans, whose astronomical studies led them to believe that one of the many stars they had tracked would eventually collide with earth. We are close enough now, as NASA informs us, that if this were actually the case, we would be able to see this celestial body with the naked eye.

“2012” takes a different approach, one that deals not with “When Worlds Collide” sensibilities, but with the “When Earth Strikes Back” mentality that M. Night Shyamalan explored a couple years ago in “The Happening” and that Emmerich himself had already explored in “The Day After Tomorrow.”

I’m not sure the earth can be more thoroughly destroyed than it is here, which provides it with a sort of audacious charm that many people will probably enjoy. And for all the casualties and chaos, Emmerich remembers that what is really interesting about this material to us Americans is not how the human race will survive, but rather whether or not Jackson and his estranged wife Kate will get together again.

Rollan Schott

November 17, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

A Divine Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:57:00 +0000

The Passion of Joan of Arc

1928

Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer

The power of Carl Th. Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) begins in the eyes of Maria Renee Falconetti. In a performance that is routinely labeled the best ever put to celluloid, Falconetti cuts through all the defenses. “It really cannot be compared to anything else,” critic Michael Phillips observes. “It's beyond naturalism, it's beyond melodrama, it's beyond everything. It's just coming straight out of her soul.”

Lovers of film will inevitably arrive at Falconetti’s landmark performance at some point or another. It is not until you see it that you understand its significance. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” was her only screen performance. You do not watch it and see her other roles, peaking through. You do not fight off images of her face in different contexts. She exists only here, only as Joan, and she is so good that we can accept her as such without a moment’s hesitation.

Carl Dreyer fashioned his film about the trial and execution of Joan of Arc on the transcripts of the real trial, which still survive today (that would be them in the opening shots of the film). His only alteration was to condense what was actually a series of trials down to one, and chronicle the film on a single day when Joan was brought before an English court, berated, and burned at the stake.

The film covers the events of the trial, but it is not about the trial. Nor is the trial itself even about the trial. The moment that Joan steps into that courtroom, her inquisitors had decided her fate. Their only aim was to coax her into admitting herself that she had been led astray by Satan. Watch as the English judges try to corner Joan with misleading statements and loaded questions, and then watch as she musters the courage to confound them with exactly the right response. It is not because she is smarter or cleverer than they are, indeed she can’t even read. No, the judges simply were not prepared for someone of Joan’s sincerity and piety. They thought they could catch her in a lie, but there was nothing false about her.

Dreyer’s film is not concerned with whether or not Joan was actually decreed by God to save France from the English. All that is important is that she believed she was, and that the English had no intention of setting her free. This conflict was settled before it began.

“The Passion of Joan of Arc” has a long a tumultuous history. Dreyer’s original negative, which opened to high praise in 1928, was thought lost to a fire.
Notorious for filming multiple takes of a single shot, he was able to stitch together a shot for shot replica of the film using the second-best take of each shot. But the magic was gone. For many years, this second version was also thought to be lost to fire, but it would soon resurface. And then finally, in one of the most important discoveries in the history of the cinema, a copy of the original cut was found in the closet of a Norwegian mental hospital in 1980. The film was immediately remastered and rereleased and is now considered one of the greatest of all films.

I don’t take movies any more seriously than I do with “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. I approach it with a state of reverie. It has the power to move me in a way that no other film has matched. Films have drawn tears from me before, but never has a tear meant so much.

Rollan Schott

November 16, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

For Those of You Who Thought Health Care Reform Was a Waste of Taxpayers' Money...

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:40:00 +0000

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Directed by Grant Heslov

Three Stars

Albert Stubblebon III makes an interesting point. In the British documentary “The Crazy Rulers of the World” that inspired “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, he tells us, “You know the electron, or the atom, is mostly made up of space,” he said. “My space is made up of atoms. The wall’s space is made up of atoms. All you got to do is merge the spaces.” In other words, if you can realign your atomic structure, you can pass through the empty space of the atoms in the wall. You’ll know when you’ve figured it out, I think. Your clothes will fall to the floor.

Stubblebon was a U.S. Military sergeant in 1983. He was a part of Project Jedi, a small and confidential branch of the military who were trying to find ways to walk through walls, bend spoons, and intercept the thoughts of others. That this is true is why “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is funny. Director Gant Heslov treats the film mostly as a history lesson. No need to go out of your way to make this seem absurd.

There are essentially two stories at work. One is a history of the early years of Project Jedi, now the New Earth Army, how it was formed by a zenned out general (Jeff Bridges) and how it operated within and outside the tapestry of the military, as documented by a present-day journalist, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) who travels to Kuwait to pick up some story, any story, on the outskirts of the war.

He meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the New Earth Army, who is venturing into Iraq after sensing telepathically that he should. That the two should meet can be accredited only to fate. Anyone who can sense which way to turn at a fork in the road probably knows fate when they see it.

It is through Lyn that the flashbacks are constructed. He was the most promising soldier in the New Earth Army, the only one who once killed a goat just by staring at it. He recalls the Army’s rise and fall, how and why it was formed, how it was paid for, how it was received, how it was misused and how it was destroyed. All the while, Lyn and Bob are travelling deeper into the war looking for, well they don’t know what they’re looking for, but Lyn will know it when it comes.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is an intermittently funny movie, occasionally rising to the level of hilarity. Every major player in the film is given a memorable one-liner and director Heslov takes the right approach to the material. By looking at the paranormal the way the members of the New Earth Army did, as a reality, there is a kind of comic absurdity bubbling beneath the skin of the narrative.

But the film also spends far too much time waiting for itself, and its pacing issues reach their peak with its all too neatly packaged climax that wouldn’t have felt like one had it not loudly announced its arrival.

“More of this is true than you might believe”, reads the title card at the beginning of the film. Well, I believe that there are people in this country who find such madness plausible, and I believe that they have occasionally risen to stature of high office in our government. The United States military funded research in the field of paranormal weaponry. I think that title should have read, “More of this is true than you’d probably be comfortable with”.

Rollan Schott

November 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Broken Rules or Broken Promises

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:13:00 +0000

Pan's Labyrinth

2006

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a dark and scary fairy tale, an enchanting fable, a riveting wartime drama, a nightmarish fantasy about a young girl faced with impossible decisions of unavoidable consequences. It will be remembered as one of the best films of the decade.

The genius of Spanish director Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar winning screenplay is in its refusal to commit to the convention of a child’s imagination. The earthen faun (Doug Jones) in that ominous stone labyrinth could very well be merely a product of Ofelia’s (Ivana Baquero) imagination, but it may well be true that they are real and only she can see them. For me, the film takes on a new meaning with the latter explanation.

With the latter, “Pan’s Labyrinth” becomes a fully fledged fantasy, as opposed to being simply about fantasies. It belongs in the ranks of “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” this way. The film is simple in its setup and rich in its complexity. Twelve year old Ofelia and her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) move to a military outpost in Spain immediately following the Spanish Civil War. Carmen’s husband had recently been killed in the war and she has remarried to Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), who provides them with security and status but is unbearably cruel.

In a horrifying scene, he pummels the face of a trespasser who claims to have only been hunting rabbits. After killing him, he finds dead rabbits in his knapsack. “Maybe you’ll learn to search these assholes properly before you come bothering me,” he tells his soldiers.

A small battalion populates the outpost along with Vidal, fighting off guerilla resistance fighters in the surrounding woods who will not accept that the war has been declared over. One of the housemaids, Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), is spying for them. She forms a close friendship with Ofelia, whose mother is frequently ill from possible pregnancy complications and who has no other children with which to occupy her time. Because of this, the girl is often alone with her fantasies.

As soon as she arrives, though, Ofelia finds a stone labyrinth on the edge of the property. At its center she finds a mysteriously suspicious golem-like creature who calls himself a faun (and whose real name only the wind and the trees can pronounce). He explains to Ofelia that she bears the soul of a lost princess of the fantastical underworld. He guards the last remaining gate that had been established to let her back in, but she must pass a series of tests to prove that her essence is intact.

These tests seem designed to put her odds with the authorities and rules of this world, which makes them much more complicated than they might originally seem. Ofelia must make decisions based solely on her conscience, decisions that will inevitably result in punishment on one side or the other. She tries to play both sides, but this only makes an unholy mess out of the situation. The lines between good and evil vanish, and she must trust only herself. This is, after all, all we really have.

I saw “Pan’s Labyrinth” in theaters when it was released in 2006 and at first kept my distance. It was a visually arresting film for sure. Del Toro’s monsters are as real and original and fascinating as anything in modern cinema. But only when I returned to it recently have I begun to really peel away the layers of this remarkable film and realize just how many layers there are.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is an allegory for the all the complications of our childhood. Confusion, uncertainty, conflicting ideology. Often, our defining character traits are not the result of some valuable life lesson, but a difficult decision between unclear and painful choices that leave a lasting impression. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is about the complications of childhood we never grow out of.

Rollan Schott
November 13, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Ghost on Screen's Top 13 Horror Movies

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:30:00 +0000

Over the past one hundred years, horror has proven to be the most durable genre of the cinema. It has survived countless failures and relentless critical disapproval, and has continued to sell well since it was popularized in the thirties.

I think it is because fear is such a universal sensation, and that we have always been excited by its capacity to thrill us and to heighten our senses. The following thirteen films have done that. Many continue to do that. Here are the top thirteen horror films of all time. Why thirteen? Why not?

13. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Tobe Hooper shot “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” in triple digit heat in Texas over a period of about thirty sixteen hour (plus) shooting days. The result is about as close to sadism as high art can get and still be high art. Many think the film is based on a true story. It isn’t, but it’s a testament to the film’s raw power that its myth has become so engrained in American culture.

12. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

“Dr. Caligari” might not be the most frightening horror movie on the list, but it is the first. The film was a first in many ways. It contained the first wild twist of an ending, and it was also the first film to use set design and lighting to convey the distorted mind of its characters. It also scared its 1920s audiences out of their seats.

11. The Night of the Living Dead (1968)

George Romero invented zombie horror with “The Night of the Living Dead”, which was one of the first Vietnam era horror movies to exemplify the darker direction in which horror was headed. There were no gleefully creepy bumps in the night here. Romero deeply rooted his film in hopelessness and despair.

10. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Hannibal Lector has become one of the two or three most iconic movie villains of all time. Anthony Hopkins plays the role with a quiet but daunting intelligence, a man who gets under our skin because he so easily gets into the minds of everyone else. Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece is the most recent of only three examples to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay)

9. Freaks (1932)

Director Tod Browning had worked in the circus before “Dracula” (1931) launched him into the limelight. One year later, casting real circus freaks for all of the lead roles, “Freaks” destroyed his career. The film premiered only once in 1932 and was so shocking that it wasn’t shown again in the U.K. until the 1960’s.

8. Diabolique (1955)
Henry-Georges Clouzot pleaded to his audiences that they not reveal the shocking twist at the end of “Diabolique”, a gimmick that Alfred Hitchcock would later borrow for “Psycho”, among most everything else that made the film so revolutionary. Both films are inspired examples of sly misdirection.

7. Halloween (1978)

If director John Carpenter had patented the slasher movie formula he coined with “Halloween”, he would now own four islands in the South Pacific and half of Frito Lay. Modern horror movies begin here, with what has become one of the most profitable independent films of all time.

6. Jaws (1978)

Many people might not consider Stephen Spielberg’s aquatic thriller a horror movie, but note that for weeks after “Jaws” was released to theaters, beach attendance plummeted across the country. Why? Because people were scared to go in the water. If that’s not horror, I don’t know what is.

5. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Roman Polanski founded his paranoid chiller set in sixties Manhattan on the inherent fears of motherhood, that something could be wrong with your child while it grows inside you, that someone you know could be plotting to take your child from you. “Rosemary’s Baby” is a slow-burning candle in a room full of dynamite.

4. Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror) (1922)

F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” is the greatest vampire movie of all time. It will not scare movie audiences today, but I admire it for the beauty of its composition, and for the sincerity of its delivery. Complimented by the constraints of silent cinema, “Nosferatu” feels now like a half-remembered nightmare, the residue of evil left over after we wake.

3. Psycho (1960)

It’s hard to find any movie lover who doesn’t know the secrets to Alfred Hitchcock’s remarkable “Psycho”. The reason for this is simple. Hitchcock earns the right to manipulate us by selling his misdirections so sincerely. “It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences,” Hitchcock later revealed in an interview with Francois Truffault. “Nor was it a great performance…They were aroused by pure film.”

2. The Shining (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is like one of those closed-door mysteries as seen from the inside out. Nothing makes sense, because there is no one there to make sense of it. Widely regarded as the most epic horror movie ever made, “The Shining” was Kubrick’s most financially successful film and immortalized Jack Nicholson with the great horror catchphrase, “Heeere’s Johnny!”

1. The Exorcist (1973)

William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” dropped like a bombshell into theaters across the country just in time for Christmas in 1973. The result was a documented spike in church attendance. Ambulances were called to theaters to treat viewers who suffered violent panic attacks and seizures.

People fled theaters screaming. Those who stayed often wept or occasionally vomited. Televangelist Billy Graham declared that the original celluloid reel of the film was possessed by evil spirits. The Pope even took time to publically condemn the film. Unsubstantiated rumors would eventually surface of a devout Christian couple committing suicide hours after seeing it.

What a visceral movie this is, how mercilessly it preys on our sympathies. The tale of a beautiful twelve year old girl falling pray to the devil is in itself unsettling, but Friedkin’s realistic presentation and unrestrained courage pushed the project over the edge. Shots of young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) projectile-vomiting pea soup and stabbing her crotch with a bloody crucifix are images that have still not lost their staying power. When it comes to truly terrifying movies, “The Exorcist” is in a league of its own. It is a black, evil, soulless movie.

Rollan Schott
November 6, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

The Slasher That Started Them All

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:44:00 +0000

Halloween

1978

Directed by John Carpenter

Modern horror begins here, with John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978). Only “It Happened One Night” in 1934 created a more imitated movie formula (with the romantic comedy). This was the first big time slasher movie, a trend that is still as popular and as successful as ever. Like most formulas, however, we have fallen back on its reliability and forgotten that what made the first so frightening was its brazen originality.

The story is simple, and all the more powerful for it. In 1963 a young boy brutally murdered his sister. Fifteen years later, having not spoken a word while locked away, he escapes and returns to the same neighborhood on Halloween night to resume his business.

That’s it, and where a lesser movie would have dived immediately into the carnage, the Shape, as he is referred to in the credits, watches, studies, and waits. Carpenter pulls the tension unfathomably tight before letting it snap back in our faces. He builds the hype and establishes his characters, and all the while the Shape, later known as Michael Meyers, observes from a distance, waiting for nightfall.

By the time he goes into action, it seems as if he knows precisely where everyone is and where they’re going to be, and we can buy into it because we spent so much time watching him study these three babysitters on Halloween. The most important of these babysitters is Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first movie role. Curtis was picked for the role largely because she was the daughter of Janet Leigh, who made history with her early departure from “Psycho” in 1960.

Laurie has come to embody a very specific role in the slasher film. She was the innocent one, unplagued by premarital sex and thus destined to survive. Her friends were promiscuous. They drank and smoked. They had it coming.

Until “The Blair Witch Project” surpassed it in 1999, “Halloween” was the highest grossing independent film of all time, costing just under $300,000 to make and raking in well over $50,000,000. The film is a part of an elite group of truly scary horror movies that understand that big budget thrills can’t quite match the quiet (and inexpensive) dread of waiting.

Hitchcock once said that if you have a group of people playing cards with a bomb beneath the table, and that bomb goes off, then that’s action. But if the bomb doesn’t go off and the people keep playing cards, then that’s suspense. Carpenter shows us the bomb under the table in the first fifteen minutes, but these three girls keep playing cards for another hour before it goes off.

I suspect that there will always be a place for “Halloween” as long as there is a Halloween. It is such an exciting movie, such a taut thriller, that after all the imitations it still hasn’t lost its power to affect us. Not just any great movie can do that.

I will conclude with a quote from Roger Ebert’s 1978 review. “I'd like to be clear about this. If you don't want to have a really terrifying experience, don't see ‘Halloween’.”

Rollan Schott
November 5, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

The King of Pop Still Reigns

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:16:00 +0000

This is It

Directed by Kenny Ortega

Three and One Half Stars

“This Is It” works best as a eulogy. It captures the king of pop on stage, the only place he was ever really at home, still deeply passionate about his music and still in fine physical and vocal form during what we now know were the last few months of his life. The film should lay to rest most of the rumors about Michael Jackson, that he was too dooped up on tranquilizers and sedatives to perform, that he was alienated or isolated from those around him, or that he was just plain crazy. The Michael Jackson in “This Is It” is gracious, humble, intelligent, and keen. He treated his technicians and fellow performers with the utmost respect, and that respect was returned. The Michael Jackson in “This Is It” was a great a man.

It should be know that “This Is It” is not one of those ‘concert-experience’ movies like the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cirus have been cashing in on lately. It would have, though, if Jackson had not passed away between the time this footage was shot and the series of sold out London concerts where the serious shooting was meant to take place.

Fortunately the concert director Kenny Ortega, who also directed the film, kept quality cameras running for most of the rehearsals. Likely intended for behind-the-scenes special features or maybe some intercut footage cut between live songs of the feature, Ortega used the rehearsal footage to paint a portrait of Jackson and the farewell concerts he was preparing that is far more intimate and personal than a concert film would have been.

A concert film would have been just that – a concert on film. “This Is It” shows Jackson synchronizing with engineers, communicating with his backup dancers, making mistakes and correcting them, and doing so with grace and confidence. The man knew his music inside and out, and had a very particular vision for its presentation. He was fortunate to have such talented people around him to realize that vision.

Because the rehearsals were not meant to be the whole of the film, much of the footage is regrettably low in quality, often grainy or slightly out of focus. The limited number of cameras however, means that the average shot length is much longer than it might have been with more, so we get a cleaner, more revealing look at Jackson’s performances. Also, in a disappointing moment, Jackson explains to his vocal director that he isn’t singing to his full potential because he’s saving his voice for the shows.

I have always felt that Michael Jackson’s music was missing a key component if Jackson himself wasn’t there dancing to it. The music itself was always just well made pop music. It was the thrill of the performance that made Michael Jackson a superhero. There are times, though, when Jackson’s music does becomes political. His message is simple and pure, and delivered with heart. There is a monologue in “This Is It” in which Jackson explains his deep love of nature and the beauty of the earth. To quote any of it would be redundant. Like everything else in Jackson’s remarkable career, the magic is in the delivery.

Rollan Schott

November 5, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan.

A Man's Best Friend is His Mother

noreply@blogger.com (Ghost on Screen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:53:00 +0000

Psycho

1960

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

When Alfred Hitchcock released “Psycho” in 1960, he convinced every theater in the country to not allow anyone into the film after it had started. He didn’t want anyone coming into the movie unprepared for its plot twists. There are few people I envy more than those who step into “Psycho” without knowing its secrets.

The secrets of “Psycho” aren’t secrets anymore. They are the most important ‘twists’ in American cinema. Most people can recall the shower scene or Mrs. Bates spinning in her chair or Arbogast falling down the stairs, before they can recall what “Psycho” is really about.

This is justifiable, because the movie is about so many different things in succession. It is about Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and the $40,000 she stole, and then it isn’t.

Then it’s about Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) protecting the livelihood of his mother, then finally it becomes a procedural as the outside characters piece this mystery together and come to some rather shocking conclusions. Some of them we’ve been aware of for quite awhile, some of them we certainly have not.

He’s not always the focal point, but the heart and soul of the movie is Norman Bates, played perversely well by Anthony Perkins. Norman is an iconic movie villain, innocent, ordinary, cordial, and housing terrifying demons. He was the sweet, loving serial killer next door.

The focal point, to start, is Marion, a lost woman who commits a crime of passion with the detail and the emotional complexity of a plot that would surely stretch the full two hours of the film. It is one of the cinema’s great misdirections that Hitchcock commited fully to this story of stolen money and a scared thief on the run before completely pulling the rug out from under the first forty-five minutes, killing Marion and suddenly leaving the audience with no one to confide in. No one but Norman, of course.

Hitchcock makes this very much an exercise in vulnerability. We don’t yet know that Norman is the killer, but there’s a strange emotional allure watching him cover up the crime. Do we sympathize with Norman because he’s caught in the middle of this, or do we condemn him for not doing anything? In the end, precisely as Hitchcock had calculated, we side with Norman because there’s just no one else to side with. This is where the power of the film comes from. Hitchcock manages to move us right into the belly of the beast.

“Psycho” opened in 1960 to stunned audiences. Enormous lines and crowded lobbies kept the film in theaters for months. In many ways, the film set a new standard for the modern idea of the ‘event’ movie, which would not be bested until “Star Wars” came along some time later.

I am reminded of “Paranormal Activity”, which has become the “Psycho” of 2009. Crowds are filing in to prove to themselves that they can handle it. The hype surrounding both films had transformed them into a kind of rollercoaster ride, where screaming constantly was permitted, and no matter how scared you were, you left laughing at how frazzled you’d been. Theaters in 1960 were littered with cardboard signs demanding that audiences not reveal to their friends the secrets of “Psycho”. We owe it to the next generation of moviegoers to listen.

Rollan Schott
November 5, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan.