The Lives of Others

Last year’s Foreign Language Academy Award winner reads like old New Hollywood. Weird, since it’s about the GDR. Think 70s Scorsese and Coppolla, so much so that some scenes are probably homages to The Conversation. Worthwhile for most viewers, myself included, as a history lesson. We should all know Stasi. But did it have to be so damned sentimental? Nein. Distracts from actually existing democracy.

Half Nelson

Since school has been over, and LOST and American Idol ended their seasons, and now that The Office is in re-runs, I’ve had a helluva lot of time for DVD watching. Might try to write about a few this week.

Half Nelson came pretty well recommended from a trustworthy handful of friends. I just watched it this afternoon. After hearing about it, I marvelled at how the creators would pull it off — a teacher by day, a crack addict by night. I worried that it would slip into Dangerous Minds bathos. At best, I thought that it might achieve a sort of edgy sentimentality a la You Can Count on Me. It definitely fell hard into the latter category, and was in many ways kind of unrelenting.

The film seemed willing to accept the fact that the lead character’s drug and personal problems could have stemmed from the real, core problem of having to live in a racist, warmaking United States with few avenues for self-expression, compassion, or caregiving. I think this point of view is accurate, and since it is too often made a joke of in other culture and casual conversation, it was surprising and refreshing to see it on-screen.

A strong counterargument to this sort of thinking, though, and one that I think is at least in part right, is that the willingness to destroy oneself because of one’s social conditions results equally from one’s own sensitivities. There are many people sincerely disturbed by the state of the world and the state of the United States, but they don’t all smoke crack. (The fact that that last phrase almost sounded like a cynical joke is telling. It wasn’t meant to be.)

Ultimately, I am still unsure whether or not to read the film as an allegory or slice of life social realism. I guess it can be both, but it’s a difficult combination. I think that the film got the lead character’s descent into drug abuse and depression fairly right, but its depiction of the school where he worked and the life of its adolescent characters was a little strange, if not just downright wrong. The public service announcement history reports, filmed in a head-on Godard or Spike Lee style, offered by the students on events like Allende in Chile and Attica, etc. might have been interesting if you didn’t already know something about their subjects, but for me, they screwed up the pacing of the movie. The voice of social justice was dilluted. And this made the ending, too, for me, and for at least one of the people I watched the film with, unappealing, flat, and kind of empty. Another of our number dug it though.

Probably a film that I will watch again and one that I can definitely recommend with my usual caveats about the basic dissipation of the independent cinema.

DVD Review: Marie Antoinette

I feel compelled to write today for several reasons:

1) I haven’t written in an awful long time.
2) Even in my absence, I’ve continued to get a fair number of hits per day.
3) I’ve gotten two positive comments in the past week, and
4) I have something to write about.

What is that something? Well, if you read the title of this post, it should be obvious, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. Quite a while ago, I stated on this blog that I was really looking forward to this film, but I never got to see it in the theaters. I think it came out around the time that I was starting school, so I was just way to busy to get to the theaters much in those days. When it showed up on Netflix, I was again psyched even though the film disappeared from public consciousness fairly abruptly and got fair to middling reviews.

Frankly, I loved the movie. I want to write “stunned,” but it wasn’t really that. The film is a little bit too much of a music video to have the *pop* of a stunner, and I kind of knew what was coming; but it’s certainly good, much better than Coppola’s last film Lost in Translation, which I now view as a total snoozefest; and probably better than the Virgin Suicides, which I only saw a long time ago in the theaters, but which I remember being similarly snoozeworthy.

Marie Antoinette is flat in many ways, meaning that it’s all about surfaces, emptiness, the waning of affect, etc, but it’s a monumental and engrossing flatness. The cinematography is wonderful, the costumes are gorgeous, the men and women in the film are hot. It’s really great. It’s clearly a homage to a lot of past filmmakers and films, in particular, Kubrick’s middle- and late-periods, all sorts of surrealist filmmaking, and especially Josef von Sternberg’s great and underappreciated Scarlet Empress. So many elements of that latter film are lifted wholesale that Marie Antoinette often just feels like a remake recast in France instead of Russia. Certainly, the new film is probably just as much of a fantasy as Sternberg’s classic, but to me, that was the whole point. There are far too few pure fantasies projected on screen anymore (in the phantasmic, ghostly, mystical, magical sense), and to me, that’s a loss for cinema, especially the independent cinema, which is now so totally obsessed with secular realism. The choice of Marie Antoinette as the subject of this fantasy is historically and politically fascinating, as is the visual and sonic milieu into which Coppola injects her. Admittedly, it was probably going to be hard for any movie that includes songs from New Order, Aphex Twin, Gang of Four, and the Cure, among others, to really disappoint, but this one certainly didn’t, and it went beyond all that to truly impress me.

I would like to write more about the film, and more of substance. I jotted this stuff down very hastily, but I really need to do some work before I go out tonight to see Acid Mothers Temple. Psyched for that . . . Might write on it later.

DVD Review: Inside Man

I watched two Spike Lee movies this weekend.  On Friday night I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. or so watching Jungle Fever on HBO in my hotel room.  I can’t say for sure whether or not I’d ever seen that one before.  A lotta scenes rang a bell.  Maybe I saw some parts censored on TV before.  I don’t have much to say about that one because I did miss the beginning.  Obviously, it’s an old film and I’m not sure if it’s held in great esteem.  I also don’t remember whether or not when it came out it got a lot of press because it was well reviewed, or just because it was controversial.  Either way, I actually thought that it held up quite well as a record of early nineties racism and the crack epidemic, and even though Spike’s treatment of black/Italian relations was not exactly sensitive, I thought it was honest, sincere, and risky.  I give the filmmaker credit for all that.  But this review is of Inside Man.

First of all, I should admit that I watched the film in pieces as I did my laundry, both on my computer and on my TV, so I can’t really speak exactly to how the film was paced or photographed.  I bring this up because it’s a caper, a heist film with an action plot, and since I can’t comment on the pacing or cinematography, I’m obviously missing two essential elements that make any heist film work.

But I can say that on the small screen, and in pieces, it did work.  I, for one, was constantly surprised throughout by each plot twist and turn.  I’ve been watching the DVD commentary and I have noticed that Spike gives away a few more details than maybe he needed to, which I didn’t notice the first time around, but there are also a lot of great details that one could only pick up on upon a second viewing.

Like I say, the film is a heist film and the heist plot works well, but it is also a clever allegory for and commentary upon the rise in racial tension and diminution in civil liberties in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001.  Here the film really grabbed me.  At points, I was afraid that Spike was going to buy into a sort of callow left-wing patriotism. (“Sure these infringements on our civil liberties are bad, tsk, tsk! But maybe, just maybe, we need to give a leetle to get a leetle.  After all, Arabs are scary, right?” or something like that.) But Spike, in my opinion, never gave into that unfortunate temptation.  In fact, he included some great scenes commenting upon anti-Indian, Arab, and Sikh racism, and he also included scenes that touched upon his classic complaints against racial, sexual, and economic injustice.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for me, the allegory works in a way that other recent political allegories, Syriana in particular comes to mind, just didn’t.  Here the allegory doesn’t needlessly stand in for some larger social problem, it models the larger problem on a manageable scale.  As a Marxist might say, the allegory models and represents the totality, as Spike sees it.  I’m not kidding, I really think the film is that good, but for that reason, it’s also a sort of case study in dialectical criticism’s possible shortcomings.  Right now, I’m very positive about the new media’s ability to model the totality and raise consciousness. I think that this film offers an interesting case study because it models the totality so well, but does it raise consciousness? This is questionable and will have to be played out, that is, carried forth or carried out, over the course or more than one film.  In fact, I might suggest that in order to really have revolutionary cultural impact, fillmaking like this would need to turn into a movement first.  Anything’s possible.  (And I apologize if this is all a bit obscure.)

And in closing, I would be remiss to mention that the film is not perfect, even politically.  In fact, I was fairly turned off by some of its gender politics, as is typical in a lot of Spike’s movies.  I think that he and Denzel were trying to be charming here in an old school Humphrey Bogart sort of way, and some of it does actually play, but more of it just falls flat or seems kind of creepy old man-ish.  Some chauvinists just never learn.