You can say what you want about Kevin Smith, but he is one committed dude. While shooting his first movie, Clerks, he worked a day job at a convenience store while shooting and editing at night. He kept this up for 21 days straight, until he literally fell asleep on the set. Clerks, as you might know, became an enormous hit and upgraded him from just a guy with a goatee and an ambition to one of the most promising new filmmakers of his generation. But instead of taking the money and run, like so many of his peers, he decided to stay and make another movie with the same people. And another. And another. All in all, he has made 5 movies, 2 shorts, 5 comics and an animated series about a fictional town over the years. You have to really like your friends to do something like that.
But liking people is something Kevin Smith is very good at. Besides working with basically the same cast and crew over the years, he is also one of the most empathic filmmakers working today. Especially in the realm of comedy it's commonplace to royally screw over your characters for laughs, but laughs like these are very rare in Smiths films. No matter how deep the people in his movies get in the crapper, they always remain likable and often even relatable. The laughs mostly come from either the characters themselves telling jokes to each other, or the sort of uncomfortable silences that only work when we care about the people experiencing them.
Also, every single one of his movies has at least 2 people with a goatee like that
But Smith has as characteristic that's even rarer for a comedian then being empathic: he's smart, and not ashamed of it. His work has touched some serious topics (including religion and homosexuality), but even when his movies are just about two retarded pot dealers there is some genuine intellect at work. The amazing thing is that this completely fits in with the humor of the film, which is often the dick-joke based kind. It's a unique quality, making you think while making you laugh.
Kevin Smith is a unique filmmaker. He's not exactly a genius, but we already have enough of those. Smith knows what he's good at, and then does that. He doesn't feel above making fart jokes, and uses his skills to make them really funny fart jokes. You can only applaud that sort of attitude. Alternatively, you could try to sell him some weed.
Alias
The man himself is in the video. How could I not include it?
This post is something of an anniversary: it's the 100th post on this weblog (if you discard the whiny shit I used to put here). So for the occasion, I thought it might be nice to give you a list of my favorite movies ever. This is not a list of the greatest or even necessarily the best movies ever. You might call it my own personal canon. I can heartily recommend every single one of these movies, and will probably write about some of them in the future.
So, let's start from the bottom and work our way up to the top.
20: Waking Life (Linklater, 2001)
The most recent entry into my list, and probably the strangest. But it's also a testament of what film is truly capable of if you overstep the boundaries of your assumptions.
19: Trois Couleurs: Blue (Kieslowski, 1993)
The first part of a magnificent trilogy, and in my mind the best. A movie about music, about how life always comes knocking on your door and about mourning. But mostly about freedom, and what it exactly means. A very peaceful movie, which moves you without really giving you any incentive to.
18: V For Vendetta (McTeigue, 2006)
One of the few movies that understands what "adaptation" means: translating an impression into another medium. It might not follow the letter of the book, but if follows the spirit with all its heart. An exciting and shockingly relevant view on repression, which had a lot more going on then you might think.
17: Sin City (Rodriguez, 2005)
Violence was never so stylish or so cool. Over-the-top, grueling and visually dazzling, this stands as one of the major triumphs of "the cinephiles cinema", movies made by and for filmnerds.
16: Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
Although there is a lot of love to be found in the works of Miyazaki, this is one of his few pictures in which there is genuine hatred. But, of course, it only makes the movie better by making the struggle harder and the opposing factions more humanly flawed. Not to mention the simply gorgeous animation.
15: The Kid (Chaplin, 1921)
Some things just never get old. It might not be the most ambitious of Chaplins movies, but it's without a doubt the most lovable one.
14: Amélie (Jeunet, 2001)
Quite possibly the most fondly remembered movie in recent memory. The timeless tale of a girl looking for love has enough warmth to be thoroughly lovable and enough quirk (the porn shop) to not be sentimental.
13: Juno (Reitman, 2007)
When my grandchildren will ask me how life was like when I was a teenager, I will show them this movie. It might be a little too self-aware for some, but self-awareness seems to be something we're very good in lately.
12: Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky: 2001)
The following conversation actually took place.
A Friend: "What would be good drinking games for movies?"
Me: "You could take a shot every time you want to kill yourself while watching Requiem for a Dream"
A Friend: "Then you'd drink yourself to death"
Another Friend: "Win-win!"
11: Fight Club (Fincher, 1999)
This just might be a movie where every single man alive can relate to in some way. Some see it as a manifesto for a new masculinity, others see it as a deeply ironic statement about the state of society and others see it as a reflection upon how women have come to regard men. Yet in every one of those guys, it wakes something primal.
10: Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino, 2009) This might seem an odd choice, as so many people herald Pulp Fiction as Tarantino's masterpiece. But I just like this one more. It's more mature and less gimmicky, while doing all the things we've come to know and love of Quentin.
9: Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987) In A Clockwork Orange, we see how an insane and perverted mind ravages through an eerily familiar urban landscape. It's a haunting vision: we see the clash of what we call civilization with something truly rotten. But in Full Metal Jacket, we see something even more haunting: how such a mind comes to be. It's a war film, but much more so a film about people in a situation that is basically a free-for-all. It ain't pretty, but no-one ever claimed war was.
8: Synecdoche, New York (Kaufman, 2008) I am very much in love with the work of Charlie Kaufman. He is one of the few writers working today who is both willing to shake things up and deliver films that just scream "clever", and this quality is never more apparent then in Synecdoche. It might not be to everyone's taste, but you can't deny the sheer balls-to-the-wallness of the artistic statement that is being made here.
7: The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999) Another unlikely choice. But as much as I liked Lost in Translation, it pales in comparison to the raw power of The Virgin Suicides. It's one of the few movies I know that is both powerful and very complex, although the latter isn't immediately apparent. Try watching it for a second time and constantly reminding yourself that the whole picture is basically the recollection that the boys have of the situation, and everything immediately gets a lot more layered. Also, scored by Air. Can't beat that.
6: Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003) Of all the Pixarmovies, this wins on sheer nostalgia value. But it could have been any of them, really. The magic of Pixar is still somewhat of a mystery to me (how do they keep appealing to children, teenager, adults AND critics?), but it's a mystery I'm perfectly fine not unraveling. It's amazing filmmaking, simple as that, and sometimes you just have to let go and enjoy.
5: Rejected (Hertzfeldt, 2000) The sheer entertainment value of this animated short is hard to explain. Imagine the following: you're sort of drunk, someone gets up and extends his arms, and shouts "MAH SPOON IS TOO BIG".
No? Oh well.
4: The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994) This movie made me realize how good movies could actually get, and after all these years it's still a fond memory. It might be a tad sentimental, but just try not to be moved when Red and Andy hug on the beach.
3: Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) Quite possibly the most loved film in the world after The Wizard of Oz, this movie is good from every which way you look at it. A killer story? Check. One of the best romances ever? Check. A great supporting cast? Check. Music, sets, atmosphere: check, check, check. It's a movie you just feel part of every time you watch it.
2: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975) If there's ever a movie with the words "guilty pleasure" written across it in glowing neon lights, this is it. It's not a great film by any measure, and in many areas it's just plain bad. But there is an irresistible mischief going on at all times, which makes it so much fun to watch. Sing along: "Science fiction, oe-a-oe, Double Feature"...
1: I'm Not There (Haynes, 2007) This is it. The big one. I've seen this movie over 20 times now, and not once have I doubted that this is the greatest movie I've ever seen. If Casablanca is my egomovie, and Rocky Horror is pure id, this is my Super-ego. It represents everything I love about film, and was in fact the reason I irretrievably fell in love with the medium. This movie is more then just a part of my back catalogue: it's part of who I am. My decision to study film was made after watching this movie, and every time I doubt that decision I'm Not There shows me what I'm doing it all for.
Here's me digging you, sir.
Alias
I've just put everything... in it's right place.
Okay, so I actually couldn't think of anything else besides The Final Countdown. Sue me.
The "games as art" debate is over. We won. Roger Ebert, who sparked off the debate, posted a rebuttal to his earlier statements that games never be art. So, yay for games? Well, not quite. Although I defended games' artistic value in an earlier article, I find myself resenting them more and more. And this has mostly to do with their lack of artistic value.
Yes, there are games that are art. Without a doubt. There's Braid, there's Shadow of the Collosus and there's the works of Jason Rohrer. And that's really about it. There are some more examples, but like the aforementioned they are mostly either relatively obscure or didn't exactly sell well. There is a crowd for art games, but they are vastly overshadowed by the legions of players who are dedicated to Halo, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. If you'd want to play, full-time, every genuinely artistic video game, and I mean every single one ever made, you could probably do so in a month. If you're slow. For comparison: if you want to watch every single artmovie that was made since 1972 (the year Pong was released) you'd be quick if you're done in half a year. And movies usually take a fraction of the time a game takes to complete. You'd probably never get done if you started on the books, assuming you read the newly released ones as well.
The major problem with games is that they explore only a tiny fractions of all human experiences. In games that star human characters they mostly just fight each other to the death. If a game even has dialogue for the player to partake in (and that's a big if) the themes of sexuality, boredom, pointless violence or rascism (to name just a few) aren't very likely to be dealt with in a mature and thoughtprovoking way. The state of diversity in games is even worse. I'm not saying that every game should explore these things, but they are simply a part of how human beings behave. If a game wants to go the extra mile, it has to address at least some of issues other then violence.
But that's where the crux of the issue might lie: games are, by their very nature almost, very bad at this. Allow me to explain.
First off, a games must be winnable, and winning the game must feel good. And as it turns out, most human experiences translate very badly into terms of winning and losing. Have you ever truly "won" a fight with a loved one? Have you ever really "won" at having a relationship? It's pretty clear that talking about situations like that in simple terms of winning and losing removes every nuance from them. Nuance which is crucial for properly portraying situations like these. The win/lose mechanism can even break a carefully built up nuance, something many players of the otherwise great game Ico might recognize. The absolute worst examples of this problem are the moral choice system which every game and their dog seems to have nowadays. Good and evil are some of the most difficult and fickle concepts in human society, over which philosophers have broken their heads for centuries. Simply reducing the choice in a situation to "good" (help the kitten from the tree while singing Morning has Broken) or "asshole" (set the tree on fire with a flamethrower that plays Slayer) isn't merely oversimplification. It's just plain stupid.
This picture tells the entire moral argument of Bioshock:
do I play evil which helps me play better or do I play good with a tactical disadvantage?
Secondly, most games nowadays are expected to have a certain length. If you can complete a game in a single three-hour sitting, most people feel cheated. Considering how expensive games are, this is completely understandable. But this also means that games can't really venture into deep emotional territory. Even if they find a way around the problem that people will get up and leave halfway and it will be practically impossible to build up emotion that way, it's unlikely that gamers will want to play a game that makes them depressed every time they get back to it. You'll sit down to get kicked in the balls once, but you won't sit down to get kicked in the balls three times in a row.
Thirdly, games allow for very little interpretation on the part of player. When you watch a warfilm as a pacifist, you can still take away a message of the futility of war from it. When you're actually forced to play the war, that becomes a little harder. I quit playing both Modern Warfare games after less then an hour because of this. In the first there was a part when I had to shoot NPCs in their sleep, in the second it was after the infamous No Russian mission. You can disgust a character in a movie or a book for his actions, but when you actively control this character things become a little more difficult. This argument doesn't really apply to RPG's, but the more freedom you give a player the more noticeable the things you can't do become. This what made me quit playing Mass Effect.
The most common solution to these problems is simply replacing human characters by aliens or fantasy monsters. Which, to be fair, is probably the best solution. The Super Mario games, for example, don't have the slightest pretension of artistic value, yet they are still universally loved. And you know why? Because they're fun. And this is very important: there is nothing wrong with simply being fun. Fun is good. I'm pro-fun in every medium there is. So, am I saying that games should simply give up any attempts to be artistic? No, of course not. But what I'm saying is that they shouldn't have the pretension of making any statement about the human condition when they're really not.
I have hopes for games as an artistic medium. Interaction with what you're exploring is something that's really new to media, and it offers a lot of genuinely fascinating possibilities. However, if game designers continue to fine-tune something that they will never be able to perfect, instead of coming up with genuinely interesting new ways of playing, I doubt there will ever be a mainstream game that has the emotional and intellectual complexity of a Citizen Kane, or even an Inception. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I definitely know there's something broken.
Alias
Because there are no really good songs about video games, here is some music from video games. Played by a guitar orchestra.
Most filmmakers would do fine without movies. They make art in the same way a novelist or a playwright make art: imagining something beautiful, and then expressing that through their medium of choice. If they wouldn't have film, they would just express themselves in another artform. But there is also a group of filmmakers that do things a little more different. Their art isn't told by way of the movie. Their art is the movie. People like Godard and Riami work like this, creating films that simply revel in the fact that they are films. But the person who has used this ethos more then anyone is Robert Rodriguez.
Rodriguez started out, much like his good friend Quentin Tarantino, as a massive filmnerd. His dad bought him a camera when he was 7, and he never stopped making movies after that. When he was 24, he scraped together 7000 dollars and made El Mariachi. He let his friends do the acting, and basically did everything else himself: writing, directing, filming, and editing. The fact that the movie got made is impressive enough all by itself, but the fact that is was well-received was even more astounding. To put it in perspective: Clerks was made on over three times as much budget, and that movie didn't contain a single action scene.
This man had sex with Rose McGowan and is
therefore infinitely cooler then you
Rodriguez work has been hit-or-miss since then, containing greats such as Once Upon a Time in Mexico and shitstains such as From Dusk till Dawn. But the thing that never changed throughout his career is that he steadfastly refused to grow up. He still stands behind the camera with the same enthusiasm of the 13-year old boy who sneaked out to watch crappy scifi movies at the drive-in. You might call his work immature, but it also has a sort of wide-eyed wonder to it which is impossible to resist. Just watch the opening credits from Once Upon a Time in Mexico:
Not a damn thing happens here. But what makes it such a blast to watch is its utter devotion to the possibilities of film. There are crane shots, shadowplay, jump cuts, weird transitions... every tool from the filmmakers box. Rodriguez is taking full advantage of every possibility he has, not so much to bring across a message, but to bring across his love for pure film. Watching his work brings back the eternal 15-year old in everyone of us, and with that he has found himself a nobler cause then many a filmmaker.
Alias
I have nothing to say about this song. Just listen to it.
2010 saw some very interesting music videos. This is not a rundown of the best of those, but an analysis of three of the more interesting ones.
LADY GAGA - BAD ROMANCE
We all know the song. It's not particularly remarkable, but it's a catchy and danceable tune that comes by on the radio now and again. I can say it's really my style, but everyone can sing along with it and it's far less obnoxious then most top-40 songs nowadays. But then there's the video:
What the fuck?
The "mainstream" has gone completely bonkers over the last few years, and this is a perfect example of that. The video has been compared with Stanley Kubricks work, and I can see why. So what, you might ask? Well, it's Stanley Kubrick. His movies were some of the most innovative and controversial of their day, and they still polarize cinephiles. Truly an renegade. And now a world famous singer has a video based on his work? And it has gotten over 300 million views? I have honestly no idea what this could mean. Is this a blend of high and low culture? A sign that there isn't a "safe and wholesome norm" anymore? Whatever it is, it's certainly something different then just a video of a pretty chick playing a song,
KANYE WEST - RUNAWAY
(I didn't embed this video because watching it in low quality completely destroys the effect. Click the link and watch it in HD.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg5wkZ-dJXA
The music is this short is from Wests new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He made quite a comeback with that album: after being called a jackass by no other then the president of the United States, Fantasy is now being called "the Sgt. Peppers of hip-hop" and "the best album in 10 years" by critics. It's pretty good, 's what I'm saying. But it's doesn't stand on it's own.
Kanye West is someone everyone has an opinion of: some people think he's a complete douchebag, some people think he's a musical genius, some people think both, and one person appears to thinks that he's the voice of our generation. That person is Kanye West himself. The funny thing, however, is that he's aware of the fact that many people hate him. He explicitly talks about it on the album, both defending himself and apologizing. And the video is an extension of the music. Everything is connected to each other: the video, the music, his public image, his image of himself. Everything is commenting and the other things, making them inseparably connected.
The film itself is also quite a on oddity. It's kitschy, over-the-top and generally just in bad taste. Yet somehow, West manages to make this strengths instead of weaknesses. The cinematography and the set design are both ridiculously pretty, but it's used for an aesthetic that I've never seen before. It's like a mix between high art and a hip-hop sensibility. Mixing visual art and music have been done before, of course. Just look at Pink Floyd's The Wall or R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion. But this is the first time I've seen it done with other music then rock. This might just be the first video of it's kind. A hip-hop opera, if you will.
THE ARCADE FIRE - THE WILDERNESS DOWNTOWN
(Because this is an interactive video, I cannot embed it. You can find it here: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/)
The Arcade Fire released the other record-of-the-year in 2010: The Suburbs. It draws on the memories that frontman Win Butler has of his youth in the suburbs in Houston. He has stated that the album doesn't try to glorify or condemn suburbia, but rather "[write] a letter from the suburbs".
The music video, set to the song "We Used to Wait", connects with this sentiment in a very unique but very effective way. When you go to that website, enter the address and press "play", your browser basically explodes. Windows pop up faster then you can manage to organize them, and they disappear just as fast and unexpected. The effect is rather unsettling. You lose control over that one place in the world that you have absolute, totalitarian control over: your computer. Even if it's only for a moment, you feel powerless.
I think this is where the music and the video meet. The music has a sense of remembrance over it about our childhood, and the video makes us feel like a child again. Powerless against the constant onslaught of new impressions that the world is at a certain age. It's a sense of hopelessness that will be instantly familiar.
What turned most heads about the project, however, was it's personalization. Before the video starts, you have to enter the address of the street you grew up in. Images and streetviews from Google Maps are then used in the video. It might sound a bit silly, but it really works. The video becomes about you, the viewer, instead of about the band. Quite the departure from the usual egotrip that is a music video.
The thing that unites these things seems to be it's medium of distribution: the internet. The Arcade Fire's video makes use of it in the most obvious way, but I get the sense that the other two also have a sensibility that people will watch it on the internet. It doesn't really matter if you watch away for a moment from Bad Romance, and Runaway knows that you can stop watching it any second and does everything to keep this from happening. The ways the internet is used (and not used) are really starting to come alive in this videos, making them much more vibrant then they used to be. I have no idea what 2011 will hold in store, but it sure as hell is going to be interesting.
We all owe a lot to Walt Disney. He and his
team have given us movies that are imaginative and colorful and have become
dear childhood memories for generations on end. A side effect to all this,
however, is that animated movies are now almost automatically labeled as
“kiddie movies”. This is a shame. Animation is as good a way to tell a story as
live-action, and in many cases it allows for things that are simply impossible
in “real” movies. Point in case: the films of Hayao Miyazaki.
Miyazaki is the head of Studio Ghibli, and
that name alone is enough to have many a filmnerd squeal with glee. Under his
supervision this animation studio (which is one of the last one left which still works
with hand-drawn animation) has created movies which should (and are beginng to
be) recognized as the modern classics they are: Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies, among others.
What a sweet old man.
The choice to keep working with the
time-consuming method of hand-drawn animation isn’t simple stubbornness, though. One of the adavntages of drawn animation is that everything in the frame
is put there by the same means. In effect, this means that the characters all
look like they perfectly blend in with the world, even if they’re non-human. In
live-action with CGI you can clearly tell which characters are real and which
aren’t (see Avatar), but in an
animation film humans can interact with demons, animals and forest spirits
without them looking out of place. And that is exactly what Miyazakis
characters do. Even though a normal world is sometimes hinted at (see the
beginning of Spirited Away), all his
movies plunge into a mystical world of shapeshifters, enormous insects and
witches.
Which is not to say his movies don’t mean
bussiness. Far from it. In Princess
Mononoke a giant demon-monster, who seems to be build entirely out of
crawling worms, attacks a village and kills everything around him until he is
stopped. This happens in the first ten
minutes of the movie. At the climax, a god is shot in the goddamn face. And
for those of you who have seen Spirited
Away: remember No Faces angry rampage through the bathhouse, eating
everything that crosses his path? Not the kind of stuff you’d call family
friendly.
Oh yes, that's EXACTLY what you think it is
A lot of labels have been put on the work of
Miyazaki: humanist, feminist, environmentalist. But I think those are hollow
statements. Miyazaki isn’t a political activist. He doesn’t try to make any
sort of point. He’s just trying to
tell a story. And if that means having strong female characters: so be it.
Which, truth be told, makes it a lot more enjoyable to watch. No-one likes
getting a point rubbed into their face, after all. Even if he has any cause, he
treats in the best way possible: not by telling everyone how right he is, but
just telling a story while assuming it.
What sets Miyazaki apart from so many other modern
filmmakers is that he isn’t cynical. He looks at the world with a child-like
wonder, and tells about it with the wisdom of an old man. He is one in a long
line of bards, the type of persons who tell the stories of their ancestors in
their own special way. And like the other bards, Miyazaki is too much
intertwined with his craft to ever give it up: even though he announced his
retirement in 1997, he came back four years later to makeSpirited Away, which promptly won him an Oscar.
Alias
And once again an Icelandic song for Miyazaki. What is it that makes their styles line up so well? Maybe it's the whole "island" thing, or all the fish... Well anyway, here is Sigur Rós
I'm pretty sure Mike Leigh doesn't actually exist. There were probably just some British actors who decided that no-one gives them any decent roles, so they just made a movie themselves.
Those last two sentences are lies, of course. Mike Leigh does actually exist, and he has made some pretty damn good films. But there is a grain of truth in that last bit. You see, when most people want to make a movie, they write (or find) a screenplay and then film it. Some people follow theirs religiously (Hitchcock once quipped: When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, “It’s in the script.” If he says, “But what’s my motivation?”, I say, “Your salary”) while other directors allow their actors a degree of improvisation. But what Mike Leigh does is something quite different.
Oh you sneaky fuck, you
First he creates a basic premise and a rough story line. Then he gets a bunch of actors together. He tells them who their characters are, and then lets them just live those peoples' lives for a few weeks. Not the fancy life that they will lead once the story starts rolling, just their everyday life. The best dialogue that come out of these sessions gets written down, and are later used in the film. And while filming, he often keeps the plot twists from the actors so he can register the genuine surprise on their faces.
You can imagine how this is pretty much the best preparation you could wish for as an actor. So it should come as no surprise that his movies always feature nothing but stunning acting from every single person involved. He has people playing in what ought to be award-winning performances in secondary roles, just because his main characters are so fantastic. Just watch David Thewlis (who deserves to be remembered for more then just playing Lupin in Harry Potter) acting his ass off in Naked, and you'll see what I mean.
I know I have used this image before. I don't care.
The major advantage of this is that Leigh doesn't have to flee behind flashy action to make interesting movies. He fully utilizes his fleshed-out characters to make small, human-focussed drama in the best sense of the word. Vera Drake, for instance, is about a woman in her fifties who illegally preforms abortions. And although it is impossible to doubt her good intentions (Vera is one of the sweetest, most selfless people in any movie ever), what she is doing is still illegal and, more importantly, doesn't always end right. When the police knock down her door after one of her "helpings" goes drastically wrong and the whole things comes crashing down (to the complete surprise of her entire family, who didn't knew about all this) we are faced by that classical dilemma: should one be judged by his intentions or by his actions? That is human drama in it's purest form.
Although a lot of filmmakers try to bring this to the screen, a surprising amount of them fail. Either they have to retort to interesting set pieces (which isn't necessarily bad) or they make a boring movie (which is in my opinion one of the worst things you can do). But Leigh mastered the tricks of the trade long ago, and he doesn't show any sign of stopping either. It's sort of uncanny actually. You know, I am sure about the whole "existence" thing, but I just realized I haven't screened him for secret mutant powers yet. More on this later.
Alias
Shiver me timbers, the dude is British! Wasn't there this one band from Britain that was pretty decent?
I don’t think that people properly realize how
incredibly strange the Coen Brothers’ films really are. They have an uncanny talent to lure you into the depths of their demented minds and make you feel just a little too
comfortable there. And before you know, a group of nihilists torturing a stoner
by throwing a ferret at his genitals doesn’t seem all
that strange.
Nothing to see here, move right along
I think this is one of the reasons some people
tend not to "get" their comedies: they don’t get funny until you realize how
absolutely ridiculous they are. Burn After
Reading, for example, is a movie that is made like a spy movie, but it is
actually about a bunch of absolute idiots who hump and kill each other over something that is completely worthless. There is this great
plot element about “classified” information that is really just some dudes
memoirs. They are not important. To anyone. But the movie is made with such
suspense it’s hard to pop this bubble. But when you do, laughter will ensue.
This actually makes sense in the movie
The Coen brothers have something you might call a rythm: first they make a noirish, serious movie, then they make a screwball comedy. Rinse and repeat. They have made 15
films so far, and only two of those don’t fit in that mould. But don’t think
for a moment that this makes their movies predictable. Especially their endings
are pretty unique: sometimes everybody ends happily ever after (Intolerable Cruelty), sometimes it’s
uncertain what is going to happen (Raising
Arizona) and sometimes everybody simply gets murdered (Burn After Reading).
But the thing that really makes their movies
differ from each other is their setting. Now, when most directors make a movie
somewhere, they either shoot in a place where the scenery is nice or somewhere
where they can rent cameras cheaply. But when the Coens make a movie
someplace, the movie looks and sounds like the spirit of that place. Fargo is set in Minnesota, and the
movie just gives you the chills, so cold does it look. Oh Brother,
Where Art Thou is set in the American South, and everything looks like the brothers dragged their celluloid through the Mississipi river.
They don’t use settings. They use places.
From Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Brothers themselves are notoriously
difficult to grasp, and their films never seem to truly open themselves either. There always is a little edge, a little something that can never really be explained. Maybe that's what always drives me back into the demented world they create. I don't know. The only thing I know is that I always return for seconds.
Alias
I could write an entire essay on how the works of Sufjan Stevens and the Coen Brothers share similar tones and themes. For now, let me just suffice in sharing this wicked song with you. It's from the album Illinois. Get that album. It's brilliant.
Fact 1: Pixar released their first film, Toy Story, in 1995. They made their second one (A Bugs Life) in 1998,and have since released a new movie almost every year (the only exceptions being 2000, 2002 and 2005). Besides this, they have released an impressive array of shorts.
Fact 2: With the exception of Cars, all of these movies and shorts are brilliant. Cars is just really good.
Fact 3: Pixar has managed to make some of the best sequels of all time.
Fact 4: This is one of the most impressive track records in the history of cinema.
Think about that for a moment.
What are you looking at?
Pixar has been around since the time I was four. Their movies have brought me endless joy as a kid, then endless joy as a teenager, and when I re-watch them there is just no denial that they are great movies. And I'm not alone in this: professional critics, who are very often three times my age, have lauded every Pixar movie in existence with praise. And that's not even to mention their great commercial successes.
How is this even possible? I have to confess that I don't know. I have some ideas, of course, but so does everyone else with any interest in movies. I have heard theories about their success ranging from their focus on storytelling to their emphasis on male leading parts. (Really. It's actually a pretty interesting idea, and the guy who wrote it down is one of my favorite critics, Moviebob. Check it out). But what personally has always impressed me the most is how many layers of meaning there are in these movies.
I can't really explain this without an example, so please watch the following scene from Toy Story:
What does a child see here? Buzz Lightyear is being overtly dramatic, and then falls for a very obvious joke. Oh, that silly Buzz! What do his parents see? Woody is openly mocking Buzz, but he is actually jealous because he has been replaced as Andys favorite toy. Buzz, however, is still in the delusion that he is actually a spaceman, instead of just a toy. Drama! And what does a pretentious nerd like myself see here? Severe denial of their condition as toys by both characters. Buzz, of course, doesn't realize (or doesn't want to) realize why he exists, while Woody doesn't seem to grasp the true consequences of accepting this. If your purpose in life is to please a child, he will one day discard you. You will be mercilessly fired from your position. But is this a bad thing if you have served the purpose of your existence before that? And this is just what you can make out from a fragment of little over a minute.
Swoon
Pixar came into existence when the Disney empire started sucking (I.E. just after The Lion King was made) and have since made some of the best Disney movies ever. So it's not strange that they were purchased by said company in 2006. Disney itself has only made about 2 decent movies in the time that Pixar has been around (Fantasia 2000 and Brother Bear, to be exact), so I feel safe to say that the torch has been passed. A new generation of animators has risen, and if their previous work is any indicator we can expect some very, very exciting things. Walt Disney would be proud.
Alias
I love Randy Newman, Pixar loves Randy Newman, so here is a song by Randy Newman.
Clint Eastwood the actor will always be remembered as one of the great archetypes of American masculinity, along with the likes of Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and John Wayne for an earlier generation (and Bruce Campbell for the nerds). His stoic turn as The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy is just as legendary as Ennio Morricones music for those films, but he wasn't done after that: his legacy cemented itself with the more mainstream Dirty Harry movies, in which he growled one-liners like "Go ahead... make my day" in a way that no man could have done better. The stonefaced badasses he played have since then inspired many an actor, and he has become one of the more legendary male screen performers in the history of Hollywood.
Clint Eastwood the director, on the other hand, is a completely different and actually a lot more interesting story. Like most other actors who took up directing, he has starred in the majority of his movies kept playing the same characters as he has always been known for. But what sets Eastwood apart from people like Sylvester Stallone or Kiefer Sutherland (also notably manly men) is that he preceded to make drama movies that have the ability to make rocks cry.
Also, he can point at someone and say "pew pew" and still be fucking terrifying.
Eastwood himself, if a general impression can be had from his Wikipedia page, seems to be not unlike the characters he plays in his more recent films: hard, no-nonsense and not particularly content with the way things are going (he has said that he dislikes both Democratic and Republican politicians because they "spend too much money"). Yet in this rotten world, both he and his characters always seem to find something worth fighting for.
Eastwoods career as a director begun as early as 1971, but it wasn't until 1992 that his directing became as celebrated as his acting. In that year he made Unforgiven, which deconstructed the exact genre Eastwood made his career in: the Western. The archetypical gunslinger character in the movie tries to redeem himself, but in the end can't escape his past and returns to the drunken massacres of his early days. The "cowboy" might have been considered cool in his heyday, but now he was just a sad old man with a bad disposition and a shotgun.
But it seems that the older the man gets, the better his directing is getting. In the last ten years, he made Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Changeling and Gran Torino, which were all good to brilliant. And although I haven't seen them all, his other movies from the 2000 have gotten rave reviews as well. What these movies have in common is that the main character always seems to fight against systems that are seemingly impossibly to defeat. Be it becoming the boxing champion as a woman who is too poor and too old for it, be it rounding up a violent street gang in your eighties. And if any victory is achieved it is always at great personal cost, often even lives.
And with this, Eastwood seems to return to the human drama at its most fundamental: the Greek tragedy. The classical tragic hero is always left devastated by the whims of the gods and their destiny. And in the same way, Eastwoods characters are in the end always defeated by the system they're up against. But Eastwood has one thing going for him that the Greeks didn't have: he understands what a bittersweet ending truly means. And I'm sure I am not the only one who might have shed a dignified tear at the end of one of his movies.
Alias
Can I think of any other old man who, despite looking more and more like an old potato, still keeps fighting the system and doing magnificent work in the process? Why, of course! Bob Dylan! Also, Scarlett Johansson stars in the following video, so I strongly urge you to watch.
The top of the list of "greatest directors of all time" is usually comprised of the same few names: Alfred Hitchock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorcese. Some non-english directors usually make the list (Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa and Eisenstein), but that's about it. Those are the guys whom people agree on are the best filmmakers ever. But to me, there appears to be one massive omission: Billy Wilder. Only the worst of filmnerds seem to have so much as heard of the man, let alone seen his movies. And in my humble opinion, this is a gross unjust to one of the most awesome filmmakers that ever lived.
And the thing is: I don't understand it. I can see why many people would not appreciate someone like Bergman, since he makes very slow-burning and meditative pictures. But that is not what Wilder did. He made comedies and thrillers, and very funny and very thrilling ones at that. Maybe the filmnerds shun him because his movies don't aim to be the highest of art, but that still doesn't explain much. This is a man who made some of the best pictures of all time, and it's time everybody realizes this.
Nobody might be perfect, but he got pretty damn close.
I will now list four reasons why you should remember the name of Billy Wilder.
1. Unlike most other "old" movies, Wilders movies are really fast-paced
I sometimes hear things along the lines of "old movies are boring". But when I am done murdering the person who said that, I always have to admit they do have a point. Movies nowadays move at a much faster pace then 50 years ago. This can make epics like Lawrence of Arabia quite tedious for people who are not used to that sort of thing. But the funny thing with Wilder is that his movies move at a pace that is perfectly fine for modern standards. His comedies, in particular, feature dialogues with so many jokes on both sides that it's sometimes hard to keep up. You almost forget you're watching a movie that is almost fifty years old. Which is exactly what cinema should be: timeless.
2. He wrote awesome scripts
Wilder was one of those directors who also (co)wrote most of his scripts. And the cool thing about Wilder is that he was both a good director and a good writer. There are not many people who can really say this: Woody Allen maybe, but not really many more people. He wrote dramatic stuff, he wrote funny stuff, but all with an enormous sense of cool. Here are some quotes from Some Like it Hot alone:
Sugar: Water polo? Isn't that terribly dangerous? Junior: I'll say. I had two ponies drowned under me.
Sugar: I come from this musical family. My mother is a piano teacher and my father was a conductor. Joe: Where did he conduct? Sugar: On the Baltimore to Ohio.
Sugar: Oh, Daphne, how can I ever repay you? Jerry: Oh, I can think of a million things. [Sugar gets into bed with him] Jerry: And that's one of them!
And these are just the jokes that don't require any context to be funny.
Also, this.
3. His movies has stood the test of time.
The funny thing about Billy Wilders themes is that they are as relevant now as ever. Some Like it Hot is about two men who dress up as women to hide from the maffia. Most of the jokes in the film are about the difference between men and women and pretending to be somebody you're not to get lucky. In the time of gay marriage-debates and Facebook this isn't too alien a subject for many people. The Apartment concerns the abuse of power in the workplace and extra-marital relationships, which in a time of economic depression and a higher divorce rate then ever might hit a lot closer to home then most modern movies. And Sunset Boulevard is about the paradox of stardom in Hollywood, and how we eagerly accept new stars yet brutally drop them when their time is done. Not much seems to have been learned in the meantime.
4. Three out of the four movies I have seen of his have a car chase in the first ten minutes.
You just can't argue with that.
Alias
This song is pretty much my definition of "sexy" as a positive.
a : a distinctive manner of expression (as in writing or speech)
b : a distinctive manner or custom of behaving or conducting oneself
(source: Mariam-Webster online)
Georges Méliès was one of the pioneers of early filmmaking. He was a magician before picking up the camera, and much of his work is filled with very clever stage tricks. His most famous work, for example, revolves around a group of scientists being shot to the moon in an enormous bullet where they meet a gang of vicious moon-monkeys who explode when thrown to the ground (hey, it was 1902). And though his works might tell simple stories, he used his enormous creativity to constantly dazzle audiences. His tricks might not fool anyone nowadays, but his style is still effective in taking you on a journey.
And I think that is the same way Darren Aronofsky will be remembered 100 years from now.
Allright, let's back up a bit. Darren Aronofksy (1969) is an american filmmaker who has thus far made five feature films: Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan, which isn't out yet. He is perhaps best know for his strange, esoteric style which sometimes seems to be more important then the story. Style over substance, some say. I... don't really say anything. My usual reaction to an Aronofsky film is stunned silence.
Wooooooooooh.
If you strip it down to the very minimum, Aronofsky basically tells the same story every time: someone has big plans that get ripped to shreds by things that have nothing to do with them, devastating them in the process. But just focussing on his stories would be a gross unjust to his art. Aronofsky's works can best be understood on a level that lies beyond simple storytelling: the emotional level.
Let's take Requiem for a Dream, for example. I admit without any shame that I cried at the end of that movie, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who was positively devastated by it. But just the story of the druggie going to hell is not something that I would normally consider all that affecting. Yet if you throw in the colors, the strange camerawork, the short and ultra-fast montages and Clint Mansell's haunting music, it becomes nigh unbearable.
Also, the eye. Oh my god, the Eye.
Style is usually something that conveys the mood of a scene and supports the narrative that way. But what Aronofsky seems to do is use the story as a frame to hang up his style. Not everyone may like that, but I know I certainly do.
Alias
P.S. Also, when the dude makes a movie, he doesn't shave his beard until it's done. That is just freaking awesome.
The music.... well, it can't trump the master, but it definitely hit me.
There seems to be some sort of divide in indie music nowadays. On one side there are the bands that play noisy, rough pop with harsh and streetwise lyrics, inspired by The Velvet Underground. Think The Black Keys, The Dirty Projectors and Mark Lanegan. On the other side is passive-aggressively sweet music which sounds smooth as butter, inspired by The Beatles. Think Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura and Air.
What this has to do with movies? Well, I think the divide can be noted there as well. Think of Darren Aronofsky, Lars von Trier and (arguably) P.T. Anderson in the first vein, and Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson in the second. The directors in the second category often even incorporate the music of the second category in their movies. So what has any of this to do with Jason Reitman? Well, I think he might use the "smooth" style both more true to form and better then anyone nowadays.
Despite his rapist beard.
Jason Reitman has directed three movies so far: Thank You For Smoking, which was about lobbyists, Juno, which was about teen pregnancy and Up in the Air, which was about the personal tragedy that the current economic crisis has caused. Yet Reitman has the cunning ability to make delightful comedies off of these heavy topics without making fun of them. The jokes arise from the characters themselves, not from the (rather dire) situations they're in. If anything, the lightness of his tone in juxtaposition with the brevity of his topics might just make them more palpable.
And his tone is very light indeed. The dialogues are incredibly smooth and snappy, the music is quirky and the colors are shiny and happy (although a little less so in Up In the Air). But there is always some inescapable solemnness in his scenes, something that keeps it from silly. Be it Juno's pregnant belly, be it the briefcase that George Clooney's character drags around in Up in the Air. To make the connection back to the music; it's the same I-don't-know-what that makes Belle and Sebastian songs so happy and so sad at the same time.
Or Calvin and Hobbes.
Reitman does a thing with comedy that the likes of Chaplin and Wilder have done in the past: mixing hilarity with important issues and getting away with it. I'm not sure whether he deserves a place among those giants jet, but if he continues this way I am sure he will get there.
Also, he finally has given J.K. Simmons some decent roles. That deserves some praise at least.
Todd Haynes’ movies might just be the most polarizing that are made today. Cinephiles can mostly agree if a director is good or not in a general sense, but Haynes can split even the most agreeable of filmnerds. And it’s not even that some like his work and others don’t: even within his oeuvre some movies are completely burned down while others are absolutely raved over. Empire Magazine, for example, gave 2 of his films an extremely low rating of 1 star, but the other three 4 or 5 stars. And while I’m Not There is my favorite film ever, somebody I showed it to called it one of the worst films he had ever seen.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. Todd Haynes was born in 1961 in California and is openly gay. This was an important theme in his first movies (especially Poison), which quickly got him coupled to the New Queer Cinema. This style is dominated by gay directors and often addresses homosexuality (for another example: Gus van Sandt). And while being gay (and a general sense of outsiderness) has continued to be important in his movies, he quickly showed himself capable of rise above the movement and won an Oscar with Far From Heaven, a movie about a broken (hetereosexual!) marriage in the fifties.
He also looks a bit like Bill Gates
He is also a very literate filmmaker: all of his movies are based on the works of poets, writers and musicians (especially those with good lyrics). But instead of just adapting their stories to the screen, Haynes tries to capture the essence of their work and person in his movies.
This works particularly well in his music films. He has made films on Karen Carpenter (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story), David Bowie (Velvet Goldmine) and Bob Dylan (I’m Not There). What makes these artists especially interesting is their image. Carpenter was presented as a wholesome, all-American singer, but struggled with anorexia behind the scenes and in the end even died from it. David Bowie is renowned for his constantly changing personae. Goldmine might in fact not even be about Bowie himself, but about his early seventies alter ego Ziggy Stardust. And no less then six different actors in I’m Not There play Bob Dylan, to signify his ever-changing personality and music.
Most films about music are either straight documentaries or concert registrations. But what Haynes does is so radically different it’s hardly surprising it often bewilders people. Instead of starting out from the facts about an artist, he seems to start from their ideas. Instead of showing us their lives from moment to moment, we are presented with the image of the artist and how the artist relates himself to this. Instead of showing us the times, he makes us feel the Zeitgeist in which he operated. He often blatantly ignores what really happened to give us an impression of what it would have been like back then. Not in the way an outsider would have witnessed it, but for the people who were living the music. His movies are more like visual poems then anything else.
I cannot guarantee you will like his movies, but you will definitely have an opinion on them. And I can guarantee that you have never seen anything like this before.
Alias
P.S. I noticed that I always talk about weird movies that I just so happened to encounter, but I write for a public of course. So my question to you is this: are there any movies, or filmmakers, or anything movie-related that you would like me to talk about? Leave a comment. I am going on hiatus after this week until late august, so if you assign me anything I will probably have figured it out by then.
This is a song I have been listening to way to much the last couple of weeks, and it kind of fitted.
