The 25: Coda

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Thanks to everyone who followed along with me on The 25. One reoccuring column down, about fifty more to go.

In anticipation of Raimifest Budd and Friends over at Sci Fi Media let me write the weekly quiz. The mad fools.

All joking aside these guys are good people. So check em out!

The 25: Part 25: The Z Channel

“There but for the grace of God go I.” It was something my Mother taught me to say. And to this day if I see someone destitute, someone hurt, someone sick, that’s usually the first thing that flashes through my mind. If that sounds haughty or snobbish to you that is not how it’s meant. On the contrary, it’s very humble. The key word there is “I” not “there”. The acknowledgement that were circumstances just the slightest bit different I could be exactly where that other person is. If you prefer “There but for the grace of an uncaring void go I.” I won’t stop you. It comes down to just the same. A whole lot of our life comes down to us being extremely, almost unfathomably lucky.

Because as much as I like to bitch about my circumstances, station in life, thwarted ambition and quiet desperation whenever I take two seconds to think beyond my immediate mindset I can’t help but feel extraordinarily lucky. I mean holy shit you guys, I get to write about movies. What’s better a small, but ever growing, number of people actually take the time to read what I have to say about them. In a world filled with darkness, pain and misery, in which people have to fight everyday to survive, I get to write about movies. Who gives a shit if I get to make a living doing it? I get to do it. Given that I half expect to spend my old age in a world that resembles that of The Road Warrior (or when I’m feeling optimistic Children Of Men) I have a feeling that this will grow all the more incredible to me as the years go on. It might not amount to much more then some merry fiddling while Rome burns in the background, but I’m grateful to be able to make my music all the same.

The reason I bring it up, is because those seven little words go a long way to explaining why I feel able to watch the story of Jerry Harvey. And yes, relate to it. This may be a man who ended his life and the life of an innocent in an act of evil. But circumstances are all that keep his story from being my own. I mean gee the story of a alienated loner, raised Catholic, who struggled with depression and other mental issues and fell in love with the movies as both an all consuming passion and a means of escape from a hostile world? Why would I relate to that?

But let’s back up a bit.

Z Channel is the story of Jerry Harvey a programmer and screenwriter, who in the mid eighties took a struggling LA cable station and made it a haven for cinephelia. In the process he rescued the directors cuts of The Wild Bunch, Heaven’s Gate, and 1900, gave independent and unloved movies a home and spread the love of cinema like a virus. Jerry also struggled with addiction, depression, and paranoia before he tragically ended his life in the murder suicide of his wife.

The film is among other things, the loveliest tribute to movies of which I know (One of those other things is the best film to bare the name Cassavetes. Yeah I said it.) All movies; old and new, Hollywood and indie, foreign or domestic, good or bad. It’s the only movie I know of that captures that excitement, the hunger of the first time a budding cinephile realizes just how much stuff is out there. Backed up by beautiful clips narrated by the likes of Jim Jaramusch, Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne, Robert Altman and FX Feeney.

Yet no matter how light and enjoyable the movie gets it always circles back around to it’s heart of darkness. Harvey staring out accusingly in stills with haunted brown eyes or hiding behind avatar shades.

I recognized myself in that stare back when I first watched this film. And it was a surprise for me to realize that I no longer do. I no longer nod knowingly during the anecdotes. For better or for worse I’ve lost that tunnel vision. A Magnificent Obsession film still is, but no longer my only one.

No doubt, at least in part, because I saw this film. Few have made me take as many good hard looks in the mirror. And I can’t say I’m sorry to have seen it change. The kid who first watched this movie was without any real friends, a kid who felt entitled and angry, unable to see past his own pain to anyone elses. That was a kid who if he had managed to make movies would have made films that no one wanted to see. Because beneath all of the love they would have been hollow. I feel sorry for that kid. But I can’t say I miss having him around.

Not that it’s like I don’t think and write about film more then 99% of the world’s population. I’m just fully aware, to borrow a phrase from another writer, “That art is the support system of life. Not the other way around.”

I started this cinematic authobiography a year ago in an attempt to retrace my cinematic roots. Now I have and I eagerly await the next step. Because that is in the final analysis the one thing so wonderful about film. A next step is always assured.

(Tomorrow we’ll conclude The 25 with a special coda. Thanks to all who have followed along on this experiment.)

The 25: Part 24: Battle Royale

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

(Look there's no two ways about it. This one got away from me. I tried trimming it down but the piece didn't quite work for me. The subtitle of this project was "A Cinematic Autobiography". This entry is simply more autobiographical then most. If you just want to know what the hell I thought of Battle Royale I cheerfully invite you to skip the first 1,000 words)

Most writers don’t seem to want to discuss Ain’t It Cool New’s effect on film criticism, the way conversation skirts around an uncle imprisoned on unspecified charges when the rest of the family gets together for Thanksgiving. Yet like it or not they’ve done so much to define it. The democratized everyone with a laptop and the requisite amount of snark is a film critic model we all enjoy (?) today is thanks to AICN. I write about film on the internet, and you, presumably, read about film on it. Which means both of our roles have been by a large extent defined by AICN.

Which yeah certainly has its drawbacks. Chief among them, The Talkback, synonymous with the lowest form of discourse on the Internet for good reason. And yes they’ve got as much blood on their hands for the endless circle of hyperbole and hype that constitutes such a discouraging amount of what passes for film criticism on the internet. For me the dividing line as a reader came when they stopped doing script reviews. The Script reviews represented a no holds barred philosophy that the site simply doesn’t have anymore. A take no prisoners “We’re going to tell everyone exactly what kind of shit you’re selling” aesthic that single handedly brought down entire films. When they stopped doing that, it signaled a willingness to play ball with the studios and the site was never really the same after that. I still make AICN a daily stop over my coffee as they’re a good source of information, but there’s nothing there that is actively dangerous to anyone any longer.

But despite all that I come not to bury AICN, but to praise it. What AICN did that made it truly valuable was they for the first time opened the doors on the Hollywood sausage factory for everyone to see. Exposing the ugly world of reshoots, rewrites, and demographic focused test screenings for all the world to see, all with the studio execs standing there in their bloody aprons, blinking in the light, wondering what the fuck just happened.

Further more, AICN was there to document the DVD boom from the beginning, and as a result became a tireless advocate for older films and archival prints. I might not have much use for Knowles as a critic, but as a historian and programmer he has my full respect. It was through AICN first that I learned Criterion and Kino had the good stuff. It wasn’t just the classics, it went out of its way to get the word out on the B films the second runs. And I was introduced to a hell of a lot of films and filmmakers through AICN.

Here’s a list. just spit balling off the top of my head, of films and filmmakers I know I was introduced to thanks to AICN: Prime Cut, Shaun Of The Dead, Bullet In the Head, Sam Fuller, Brides Of Dracula, The whole of Brian De Palma, Seijun Suzuki, Darren Aronofksy, Jean Pierre Melville, Ghost World, Fight Club, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Buckaroo Banzai In The 8^th Dimension, Knife In The Water, The Iron Giant, Monte Helleman, Near Dark, Mario Bava, Ong Bak, Suspiria, Brazil, Out Of The Past, Master Of The Flying Guillotine, Richard Linklater, Alfonso Cuaron, The Wicker Man, The Long Good Friday, The Grifters, The Harder They Come, The Taking Of Pelham 1,2,3, Charley Varrick, Guilmero Del Toro, Oldboy, Peter Jackson, Stephen Soderbergh Gun Crazy, Southern Comfort, Murder My Sweet.

The fact is that for all the missteps, reading AICN has made me a better and more adventurous film watcher. And if there’s one young reader of Things That Don’t Suck who will be able to say that because of me, then I will humbly consider my job a very well done one.

Which brings me to one more point (I swear to Christ we’re going to get to Battle Royale) because there was certainly one writer who was based at AICN who influenced me as a critic as well as a viewer.

I make absolutely no secret of the fact that I consider Drew McWeeny to be the primary influence on my criticism, both stylistically and philosophically. He’s my Lester Bangs. The first person to ever make me want to really engage a movie by writing about it and one of the few critics who can change my mind, positively or negatively as to whether I’ll see a movie in the theater. It wasn’t so much his prose, though that’s certainly been an influence as well (I can hope). Lucid, always readable, backed by an exhaustive knowledge of film history but never swamped in jargon, conversational without losing authority and with an occasionally employed dry absurdist wit that will burn like napalm when he spies a deserving target.

But it’s the passion he brings to bear on the films that I really try to emulate. To read McWeeny is to see modern film as a war and its history as a gift that is almost sacred. When McWeeny is truly engaged by a movie either positively or negatively he positively bleeds for it.

The other element of Drew’s criticism that I always seek to emulate is how unabashedly empowering it is. Drew never writes about some obscure film just to demonstrate how much he knows about film history. Or how nice and far his viewpoint is outside of the mainstream, or to shut down your argument with his superior knowledge. He does it to galvanize you. Snap you out of your complacency with the films that studios and marketing departments fall over themselves to spoonfeed you. I truly believe that if there’s any value to what we as bloggers do it’s in providing a counter myth. We offer other options as to what’s out there. Whether it’s older films that you’re expected to forget about, genre movies that are too disreputable to be worth your time, or foreign movies that are simply supposed to be outside the viewers purview, we point to these films and say “There are other options.” And McWeeney more then anyone else showed me how that was done.

Which brings us back to Battle Royale, which seems to me to be the ultimate AICN movie. It’s a movie staring a present day cult icon directed by a latter day one. It has a gruesome urban legend premise, but is also a genuine piece of cinema, not just a gimmick. And most of all it’s a secret handshake, one that tells you that you’re one of us. It is a movie with no marketing campaign, no outside entity trying to shove it down your throat. While there might be cooler, more obscure films to name drop, if you are aware of Battle Royale it’s for one reason and one reason only. You care about film.

Battle Royale has had a surprisingly big footprint for a film that still has not technically had an official release in the US. You can see it in Susan Collin’s Hunger Games and in the gleeful carnage of Stephen King’s (unsurprisingly a big booster of the novel) Under The Dome. The Story has become almost a phenomenon in and of itself since its ghost release, with both the novel it was based on and the subsequent manga adaptation becoming independently popular.

Some would argue that this is merely the residual influence of Lord Of The Flies. One can hardly come across a review of Royale that doesn’t make some mention of its older more respectable brother. Yet there is a small but crucial distinction in Battle Royale’s story that crucially alters its message and makes it’s finger prints completely distinct.

The difference and this is a key is that while Lord Of The Flies is a novel which derives its horror (or if you prefer it friction) from how thin societies veneer is. Aghast at how quickly Politics, Religion and good old fashioned English Good Sportsman ship fall by the wayside. When the chips are down and societies comforts, restraints and controlling influences removed it’s not long before waiting one’s turn for the conch is quickly replaced with beating in Piggy’s brains and saying one’s evening prayers morphs into worshiping a dark God made manifest by a rotting pig’s severed head on a stick.

In Battle Royale however it is society that is the cause of the madness and carnage, not the cure for it. Battle Royal is a story of institutionally enforced madness. It is not the base nature and animal instinct that forces the children to devolve into murderous savages, it’s the edict of their own government. It’s only some vestiges of decency left in them that eventually allows two of the victims to become more then pawns in the grisly game.

In short the horror of Lord Of The Flies is the horror from within. The horror from Battle Royale is all about the horror from without. Kinji Fukasaku said the message of his film was “run” and he meant it. Golding would sadly counter that there’s no way you can run.

In it’s own horribly grizzly and twisted way Battle Royale is a much more optimistic piece of work then Flies is.

The other thing that sets Royale apart from other would be copycats is director Kinji Fukasaku. Fukasaku had one of those careers that seem powered by Quantum physics, responsible for some of the absolute classics of 70’s Japanese Gangster cinema, Sympathy For The Underdog, The Yakuza Papers and Graveyard Of Honor, as well as Tora, Tora, Tora and the immortal The Green Slime and Message From Space.

While another more modern director would be all too eager to give the film a distancing ironic sheen ala Matthew Vaughnn (Or even a contemporary of Fukasaku's. Imagine the film in the hands of Seijun Suzuki or Christ forbid, Takashi Miike.) director Kinji Fukasaku remained a director of the old school. The film despite it’s rampant amount of gallows humor (most pointedly in the cheery J-Pop instructional video used to introduce the rules of the game) never makes Battle Royale enough of a joke so that we can laugh at it.

That’s the thing that makes Battle Royale linger when so much other empty shock has gone the way of yesterday’s memes. Battle Royale doesn’t want to make you laugh. It doesn’t want to amuse you or make you stop in the middle of the film to send a text telling your friends about this fucked up movie you’re watching. Fukasaku does not want you to find this cute. He wants to shock you, he wants to enrage you, he wants to sicken you. And for me at least, from the moment the chubby kid opens fire with a cross bow he’s successful. It’s engagement with the viewers by any means necessary.

Part of it’s my age. My generation was one that didn’t need to go to the movies to see footage of school kids opening fire on one another. The ghosts of Kleboid and Harris were our boogie men. Maybe that’s why Battle Royale never has the comfortable intellectual distance of satire for me, it might take a hellish amount of bureaucratic rambling to get The Battle Royale Act passed, but I found it all too plausible to believe that once it was everyone would start playing along. Many have pointed out that the act in itself doesn't make a great deal of sense. Since the class fated to battle to the death is picked at random it wouldn't be an effective deterrent. But to me that's just the perfect last turn of the screw. It's not a deterrent, it's just a petty awful revenge.

Yet Fukasaku is too crafty a filmmaker to simply try to force his outrage on you. Battle Royale is as stylishly directed and relentlessly paced as any great action movie. Juxtaposing the beauty of the island arena with the ugliness of the actions there in and once again highlighting the unnaturalness of the violence.

Envelop pushing is so often just empty sport, what makes Battle Royale such a powerful movie is that it is completely worthy of it’s premise. But it is a premise so strong and ugly that it’s doubtful an American distributor would have been able to look past it. It needed an independent voice, someone unafraid to highlight it. Luckily that’s just what it got. Luckier still there’s a whole lot more of us out there now and man if we ever start living up to our full potential…

The 25: Part 23: Brazil

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary then that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd; above all they must think it startling. They must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment.

-GK Chesterton-

Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The Wrong Man was presented to me as The Right Man. I accepted him on good faith as The Right Man. Was I wrong?

-Jack-


There are films that are nightmarish and then there are films that unfold in with the relentless persistence of a nightmare.

The trouble with Brazil is the nightmare had bled over. Gilliam’s world of terrorism, torture, arrest without warrant, media manipulation, and eternal eavesdropping was looking mighty familiar by the time I first saw the film. We were all living in the world of Information Retrieval. But what I didn’t realize is that we are now all living in Sam Lowry’s world as well.

We all to one extent or another create a little world from the pieces of the big one, which we find bearable (Mine is called Things That Don’t Suck, welcome). I embraced Gilliam’s idea of freedom through solipsism. Faced with a frightening world on the horizon and a friendless existence at school, the idea of escaping inside my own head. A place were no one could touch me had a certain appeal.

Yet it is this very thing that disturbs me the most when I watch the film today. Like most truths it doubles back on itself. The inside of your own head is an escape yes, but it is also an imprisonment.

But let’s back up for a moment. As Ebert reminds us it less important what a film is about then how it is about it. And I can think of few films that get along with the “How it is about it” segment of the equation better then Brazil. It’s a masterwork of design, a sprawling parallel universe built from the ducts up with perverse nightmare logic. A film, perhaps the only one in Gilliam’s oeuvre, which has the distinctive energy of a vision fully realized.



Brazil to a certain extent functions as the most epic Monty Python sketch ever concocted. While Python exaggerated the little invisible absurdities of day to day life in order to make them unignorable Brazil presents a world in which there is nothing but absurdity no longer invisible. If there is a message that creeps up in all of Gilliam’s films it is that though chaos can be destructive, than chaos in a controlled system is unthinkably worse. The bureaucracy of Brazil has devolved into a perpetual motion machine dedicated to making everyone trapped within it as miserable as possible.

It only takes one moment of unpredictably, wonderfully envisioned by Gilliam as a literal bug in the system, for the life of our everyman, Sam Lowry, and the lives of countless others to be destroyed. Insanity becomes compound, there is one mistake, and then the gears of the system work ceaselessly to enforce it. And no one can ever say “This was a mistake.” Because if you do say that then you’re saying the system doesn’t work, and it’s much easier to get rid of you then the system.



Jonathon Pryce is one of the most capable cinematic everymen in recent memory. He’s so perfect for the role because he seems so entirely the sort of person this should not be happening to. Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins and Jim Broadbent make great work from small roles, inhabiting them so well that one could be forgiven for thinking Gilliam grew them out of Petrie Dishes for the express purpose. Robert DeNiro turns in great work as Harry Tuttle the one person ever on screen who seems capable, or interested, in subverting the system and makes one wistful for the day when De Niro was such a capable pinch hitter it was scarcely worth mentioning. Perhaps most impressive is Michael Palin one of the most striking examples of the banality of evil caught on film.

The lone weak spot in the film is Kim Greist who just doesn’t have the charisma for Sam’s dream girl (and I say that as someone who has an avowed thing for tomboys). She alone doesn’t seem to inhabit the same world as her characters. The only one who doesn’t understand the reality of her situation. When she storms heedlessly into the ministry of information demanding Buttle’s release it doesn’t seem as if she is heedless and passionate in her quest for justice, it just seems as if she hasn’t read the script very carefully.

But the real star of the film is Gilliam. Whose twisted vision has never been better realized. In all honesty if ask to choose a favorite of his films, I’d probably prefer the dark puzzle box that is Twelve Monkeys and yes perhaps he need not have drowned Bob Hoskins in shit. But these end up being minor quibbles in the face of what Gilliam accomplishes. Any idiot can make images that look wild and trippy, what Gilliam does here is something much rarer. His world does not give off the feel of something exaggerated, but rather one seen clearly. It’s our world with more acute perception then our own. The important thing isn’t that Gilliam can see that horrid statue in the center of the Ministry Of Information, or the rotting baby faces who patrol its hall. Rather the troubling thing is we cannot. Brazil is not a satire; it’s damn near a Lovecraftian artifact.



We talk so much about a director’s vision, but rarely has that term seemed more appropriate then with Brazil.

The 25: Part 22: Vanilla Sky

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

This Is a Revolution Of The Mind

If I had a magic wand that would allow me to change the reputation of a single movie, I would choose Vanilla Sky. It is not a perfect film, and like many of the films I was obsessed with from the early 2000’s, it seems slightly dated and a little awkward in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

But I still believe this to easily be the most underrated film of the last decade. This is a movie that articulates how we live today. How our minds are colonized by a million disparate strands of pop culture. We are both subjected to it and we do it voluntarily. Bombard our minds to an endless barrage of sound and image, concept and word, and never once think about what it’s doing up there once we get past the initial sensation. We humans are codified creatures and each and every day we take in enough code to damn near overload our circuits.

Vanilla Sky is the only movie I know of that documents that phenomenon, or is even seems aware that it is happening. Which pinpoints the moment when an abstract concept like “Father” becomes Gregory Peck, where “Love” becomes Freewheeling and “Infatuation” Jeanne Moreau. It never gets the credit for it.

The film confirms Cameron Crowe as one of the great contrasters of sound and image. Again and again he finds the perfect song to counterpoint his sequences for maximum impact, a murder set to Todd Rundgren, a meltdown to Good Vibrations. I mean the film opens with Audrey Hepburn dancing to Kid A. Seriously just how perfect is that? Crowe’s playing a key here that I don’t think we’ve ever seen him do before and is doubtful we’ll ever see again. Aggressive, at times downright abrasive the film has one of the sharpest visual imaginations of any film released in the decade. It keeps a steady stream of surreal imagery; hologram Miles Davis, Homer Simpson peering voyeuristically into Cruise’s apartment window, Cruise stumbling drunken through a club Janus Faced, the dizzying final plunge, that keeps you genuinely off kilter. The film starts with its justly famous Times Square sequence. Tom Cruise in Time Square, one of the world’s most famous people, in the world’s most populist places entirely alone except for the sound and image of the wall screens. It’s a disconcerting image to say the least.

And at the center of it is Tom Cruise. What to say about him in the movie? If I put together a video of every bizarre physical and vocal tics that Cruise runs through in this film out of context, it would run ten hours. I’m not sure how it would work, it just would. It is in some ways a different performance to watch now then the one Cruise actually gave ten years ago. Before these tics signified the tricks and charms that Cruise, an actor of genuine if limited talent, always used to get by. At the opposite end of the decade, with oh so much baggage and a distinct dimming of star power in between these two points, they now seem a bizarre form of Thetan mugging. Part of Cruise’s appeal was that he always seemed apart somehow. The difference is that it used to be charming and now it’s creepy.

So perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look then a Cruise performance generally warrants. This is the last time that Cruise could play a “Master of the universe” type without baggage. And it’s interesting to see just what he does with it. For one thing it is perhaps the apex of the masochistic streak that caused Cruise to deform his face or at least wear a grotesque mask in just about every film he appeared in. He does both here to great affect and it’s here that Crowe makes the nonlinear structure of the film more then just a gimmick. Taking a smash cut from Cruise coasting through a life of privilege to him in a darkened cell shrieking “THERE WAS NO MURDER” while wearing a latex gimp mask is startling to say the least. It has always been an odd fact about Cruise that the uglier a character he plays, either morally or physically, the better he is. And when he’s desperately abusing his doctors (“Go ahead play Jazz”) or drunkenly lurching across the club floor, a despondent lump of rage and self pity he’s entirely convincing. It is only when he plays David Aames as man of privilege and ease that his performance seems brittle and mask like.

But despite the mileage it gets from Cruise’s star power, not to mention the performances of Penelope Cruz and Cameron Diaz as obscure objects of desire, (as well as solid performances from Jason Lee, Noah Taylor, Timothy Spall, Tilda Swinton, Kurt Russell and a blink and you'll miss him appearance by Michael Shannon) Vanilla Sky is still primarily a film of ideas rather then people (Though Crowe ever the humanist never lets the former completely overwhelm the latter). It’s the sci fi elements that seem to cause a lot of people to keep connecting with the film. In all fairness this particular pump was primed with me from The Evangelion finale and plenty of Phillip K. Dick. With whom Vanilla Sky shares a feeling of indignation (“Mortality as Entertainment!?!?”) and absurdity.

Really though the sci fi element is just a macguffin, albeit one the film spends an awful lot of time on. The idea at the core of Vanilla Sky, how our imaginations have been colonized and to a certain extent cannibalized by pop culture, and how lethal strains of guilt, anger, and regret are too powerful for something so simple to repress.

I can’t accept that any film that features a sequence as discordant as Cruise’s Meltdown set to Good Vibrations is anything less then a great movie. And when Cruise starts shrieking “Tech Support” at the top of his lungs to a mind that has turned on him, I can’t help but feel a shudder of something that feels dangerously close to recognition.

The 25: Part 20 & 21: Sherlock Jr. and Shoot The Piano Player

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

Chaplin or Keaton. Truffaut or Godard. These are of course not merely questions for cinephiles but the questions. Like The Beatles V. Rolling Stones or Frank Miller Vs. Alan Moore, they don’t merely tell you about your tastes, they tell you about yourself.

The strange thing about my set of answers is that they contradict each other. Only a true cynic is supposed to choose Keaton over Chaplin and only a sloppy sentimentalist could prefer Truffaut to Godard. So I contradict myself. It won’t be the first time or the last.

In both cases it comes down to a pure gut level reactions. I enjoy and respect Chaplin’s films. I’m in awe of Keaton’s. It’s not as if I don’t like Chaplin. It’s that I can comprehend him. He’s a genius pure and simple. But his are the films of an extraordinary man visiting the ordinary. While Keaton’s are the films of ordinary man making himself extraordinary. Chaplin’s films coast along buoyed by the zephyrs of genius, Keaton’s on the other hand always seem earth bound. The result not of divine inspiration but of craftsmanship so fine and single minded that it borders on obsession.

Virtually every scene in Sherlock Jr. has a precision to it that frankly makes my head hurt. At a scant forty five minutes Sherlock Jr. packs in enough great scenes for an entire career. It serves as a perfect distillation of what makes Keaton great… And hell with it, why don’t you just go ahead and watch this one along with me.

The film starts off with a slow burn. The kind of humor, like the gag of Keaton continually finding the dollars in the rubbish before being forced to give them back are the types of routines that he would have no doubt perfected in his days on the vaudeville circuit. They could easily be performed on the stage. It’s not always wise to read to much into a director’s supposed motivations. Particularly one who played things as notoriously close to the chest as Keaton did. And yet, it is so easy to believe this intentional, a taste of the old to contrast the new. Of all of Keaton’s films Sherlock Jr. is the most cinematic. It positively bursts with the possibility of what a sharp mind and a camera can accomplish.

Normally it’s Chaplin whose considered the great master of the close up. But here too I think that Keaton is the superior. If only by virtue of his generosity. Take the above shot of the Shop Girl, after she has just turned down Keaton's attempt to buy the most expensive box of candy at a discount. The shot has little to no bearing on the plot. The character aside from a quick moment with Keaton’s rival is never seen again. But that moment adds so much, that look equal parts affection, solidarity, and amusement create a character were Chaplin would have only had an impediment.

Minute Fourteen launches the film into its first real virtuosic sequence. Keaton’s deadpan referred not only to his face but the way he presented his set pieces.

A sequence like that looks almost comically simple, until you stop and think about the precision and practice it must have taken. Yet it all looks so effortless. And it’s only about the sixth most complicated sequence in the film.

The theater sequence is of course the most complex scene in the film. And the most justly famous. If watching this sequence doesn’t give you something akin to the screaming mimi’s I can only conclude you know very little about film production. Creating a sequence like this now would cause someone to break out in cold sweats. Creating it then places Keaton somewhere far beyond the level of virtuoso. Word’s can’t do it justice. Just watch.

The film ends with one of the most breathlessly executed stunt scenes ever recorded. A ten minute compendium of the impossible that just keeps escalating.

But it’s not just awe that draws me back to Keaton. And it’s not just the fact that his films are fall down hilarious (Did I mention that?) His films were just as ahead of their time thematically as they were in technique. Look at the end scene, with Keaton literally taking his cues about what to do in real life from the film he’s watching. That sequence is so far ahead of its time that it laps its contemporaries. While his contemporaries were content to treat it like a toy, Keaton, like Munrau knew exactly what the cinema was. And he would never quite get the credit he deserved for it.

A lot of the credit for the introduction of self consciousness to cinema ended up going to the French New Wave boys and the two kings at the movement’s center. While in the case of Keaton Versus Chaplin I retain a large amount of affection and respect for the opposite number, in the case of Truffaut and Godard my feelings are completely binary.

Simply put I don’t respond to Godard films. At all. There’s something on what feels like a chemical level that keeps me from responding to his work. Truffaut’s early death and Godard’s Highlander like life span have long been proof to me that the good die young and the bastards live forever.

My love for Truffaut was equally immediate and complete as my disdain for Godard. The delicacy of his films, that mixture between their passion and innate shyness, the complex emotional state of his characters and Truffaut’s engrained humanism and compassion for them. And above all the love of cinema expressed not through mere regurgitation but in exhilaration at the act of creation itself.

I know that it is 400 Blows and Jules And Jim that are the canonical classics. But so help me I prefer Shoot The Piano Player to the both of them. Shoot The Piano Player, is based off of David Goodis’s pulp novel. A story of a mild mannered cabaret piano player who is dragged by fate and familial ties back into the life of criminality he’s worked so hard to sever himself from. Dire consequences result.

While both The 400 Blows and Jules And Jim are the more openly emotional films, Shoot The Piano Player is paradoxically, his deepest felt. Like its hero the film is steely and taciturn on the outside, a raw nerve within.

And yet for all the pain in the film, Shoot The Piano Player never feels dreary. On the contrary it is among the most light on its feet films of The French New Wave. A cinematic movement renowned for its nimbleness. The film seems positively giddy at what it can do. When a cabaret singer performs a song (in its entirety) the lyrics bounce jauntily across the bottom of the screen as if inviting the audience to sing along. When one of the criminals makes an oath to his young kidnap victim on the health of his mother, we’re treated to an insert shot of the old lady keeling over in a silent film style gag. Or take the film’s central knife fight which swings from violence to pathos, to humor, to violence again in a scene that shifts tone approximately a dozen times in a single scene. In each instance one can almost feel Truffaut’s nervous style. “Can I do that?” one hears him ask, “Well I guess I can.” Is more often then not the answer.

But when the film intends to bruise and it does, the film has no trouble shedding its stylistic innovation. The reason is simple. While Godard would use such tricks to tell you that you are above the narrative, Truffaut uses them to tell you that you are never above the narrative. It is the narrative that brought you here in the first place.

Shoot The Piano Player is the film that best articulates the differences between Godard and Truffaut. Goddard dissected the B Movies of his past so he could have an intellectual response that was above them. He manufactured cinematic valentines to his own cleverness and chic politics. Truffaut dissected them to discover what it was that made him so deeply feel them in the first place. As a result Godard’s cinema is ultimately one of detachment while Truffaut’s is one of furious attachment.

Like Keaton at the end of Sherlock searching for clues Truffaut is all to aware that the movies matter. They may be illusions. But nothing is an illusion inside our heads.

The 25: Part 19: Donnie Darko

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)




We bring a lot to the movies we watch. It’s no secret that personal experience affects how we watch a movie, it’d be odd if it didn’t. Does Broadcast News have more significance for me then someone else because I lived out the Albert Brooks leg of that particular love triangle? Does Dogma intrigue me more then most because I share Smith’s Catholic School education, fascination with the possibility of the divine, and engrained smart ass streak? Does The Royal Tenenbaums hit just so because I see so much of myself and my family reflected in it? The answer to each is Undoubtedly.

But every so often a kind of reverse osmosis happens and a movie insinuates itself into your life and being. I’m not talking about the dazed, narcotic, happiness that comes from the first viewing of a movie that you know will become a favorite or one that articulates something within yourself. I don’t know if I can even quite put it into words. All I know is that watching Donnie Darko is more like taking a bite out of one of Proust’s Madeline’s then watching a movie. I watch it not alone but with my sixteen year old self sitting on the couch next to me brought back vividly to life.

(My beloved Aero...)

Not to go into to much detail about why the film resonated with me so deeply, or what happened that night to make that resonation stick (There are parts of myself I like to keep private. Even in the age of blogging.) But the night I first saw Donnie Darko seems to be the last night of my childhood as well as the first of the long confused adolescence that followed. If this perhaps gives the film some unearned significance for me, then so be it. If you’ve been following this blog you know that for me the movies are an intensely personal experience. As I get older I find I have less and less use for "objective" film criticism, I doubt such a beast exists. Every critic who is worth anything is a prism as well as a reporter, and I always have felt that its part of my due diligence to express as fully as I can to the reader just what that prism contains.

The detractor’s of Donnie Darko, mostly those who caught it on its second wave of buzz, usually condemn the movie as an ungainly, awkward, overblown mess. To a certain extent I would agree, yet at the same time I’d argue that there are probably no three words that better describe adolescence, and any movie that deals with that subject, and is not a little ungainly with its sincerity, awkward with its ambitions, and overblown in its emotions is doing something seriously wrong.

I will concede that the film’s success did have a lot to do with its timing. Many have remarked about the reverse serendipity that had a film about a mysterious plane crash come out a mere month after 9/11. But it wasn’t so much the specifics of 9/11 that Darko seemed to so eerily and completely capture as the feeling of dislocation it brought.

It happened to come out at a moment when a bunch of scared teenagers had just watched the world fall about around them and found in Donnie an able surrogate. True no giant Bunny Rabbits showed up on the golf course to tell us the world was about to end. But to a suburban kid who had been taught all his life to believe in American invincibility and watched that lie implode in on itself on September 11th, The Lone Bunny Of The Apocalypse would hardly be more of a deviation from the norm.

But in all honesty, it’s not the apocalyptic overtones, monologues about Smurf sex, “Grandma Death” narrative puzzles, Donnie’s scenes of “stick it to the man grandstanding”, Kelly’s striking Wunderkid imagery, or any of the other things that so deeply impressed me at sixteen, that really resonate with me now.

Oh don’t get me wrong those things are fine. But what strikes me now, is Kelly’s human eye, the one that has only shown up intermittently in his subsequent films (Don’t get me wrong, I have a certain affection for Southland Tales and more then a certain affection for The Box, having found it to be one of those happy movies that markedly improves with each viewing). It’s Donnie’s Mother’s reaction in the psychiatrist office, when told that her son is likely slipping into Schizophrenia, one of the most heartbreakingly realistic portrayals of how someone reacts to a loved one’s mental illness I’ve seen in a film and her later perfect response to Donnie’s question “How does it feel to have a crazy son?” It’s the halting sweetness in Gretchen’s and Donnie’s relationship, Donnie staring at the long ago picture of the smiling Roberta Sparrow, its all the little messy human moments.

Because that’s what makes Donnie Darko so special. What has allowed it to still resonate ten years on, now that the novelty of its strangeness has worn off and to keep its reputation intact despite the sayers of neigh. At it’s core beneath all the brainteasers, mythology and games, it remains a simple human story (The fact that Kelly’s next film was nothing but brainteasers, mythology and games sans human story goes a long way to explaining that film’s ultimately doesn't work) one of a young man trying to survive in a baffling, occasionally hostile universe, while maintaining some measure of happiness and grace. Now I don’t know about you, but that still pretty well describes my day to day life.

And that’s why though I always watch Donnie Darko with my sixteen year old self next to me on the couch, it never feels like a simple piece of nostalgia to be tucked safely away in the past. Like all the movies that become part of our life it provides a continuity between who I was and who I am, and where those two things overlap.

The 25: Part 18: Ghost In The Shell

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider the best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

“Incorrect I am not an AI. My code name is Project 62501. I am a living thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.”

-Ghost In The Shell-

I assure you that shit blew my mind back in the day.

Some movies stick in the mind just by virtue of getting there first. Had been I exposed to the idea’s of replication and the implications it has in terms of identity, particularly in the digital era, by William Gibson, Stanley Kubrick, Phillip K. Dick, Neal Stevenson, or hell even Steven Spielberg first, I may have not reacted so strongly. But the fact is that Ghost In The Shell DID get there first, and those ideas DID connect with me on a very primal level. Shaping not so much the way I view the world as the questions I wanted to ask about it.

But it didn’t just affect my ideas about life, but filmmaking and genre. Ghost In The Shell transcended the ideas of genre as thoroughly as Katsuragi and The Puppet Master transcended the ideas of consciousness. Ghost In The Shell taught me Genre has upon it only the limitations the creator’s of it, and you as a viewer set. You’re restricted only by the story you tell and the strength of the metaphor you create.

Ghost In The Shell tells the story of a government black operative who is caught up in a battle between dueling government agencies to control, contain or destroy an entity called The Puppet Master. A sapient being that spontaneously generated from “The Sea Of Information.”

What is truly amazing is how prescient and fresh Ghost In The Shell still feels fifteen years later . Both in style and ideas. Like William Gibson our world has simply caught up to it.

The film is in a sense built around two set pieces, a chase through and gun battle in, a crowded Farmer’s Market that creates a future world as vivid, believable, and immersive as any I’ve ever seen. A sprawl where people seem to actually live, rather then a simple Neon Depository. All this while delivering a running gun battle worthy of Woo at his very best, which makes good use of the rules and physics of the world it has established (note the metal roof crumpling under the weight of The Major's cybernetic body).

(I've always loved this insert shot of the assassin bracing himself with his foot before opening fire. Such a small detail but adds so much realism and danger)

The other involves a long dreamy montage at the center of the film. At the center of which comes this series of shots.

















The above series of shots is engaging because we don’t know how literarily we are supposed to take it. Is the sight just a consequence of the heroine’s disconnected fugue state, or is this the ultimate result of the cheapening of identity that this film prophesied and the digital era promises. It’s worth noting that Joss Whedon won plenty of accolades for essentially copying this film’s technology and moral debates verbatim.

This is a more visual piece then I’m usually do, if only because the movie’s strength’s rest so strongly in them. And I’m not simply talking about empty style, but the communicativeness of the images. This pathetic lost look of dawning incomprehension, the look of the damned, on the ghost hacked would be assassin, as he realizes just how little he knows about “himself” is worth a thousand wordy monologues about how fragile a construct identity is.

And I happen to know this because Ghost In The Shell actually does contain a thousand wordy monologues on that subject.

And here lies the rub for a lot of people with this movie. Ghost In The Shell plays long for a movie that just barely cracks the eighty minute barrier with the help of two long credit sequences. Personally I mean that in a good way. It’s a hallmark of Mamoru Oshii as a filmmaker that he takes his damn sweet time when it comes to pace. And for me his meditative evocative montages are highly affecting. The above montage has a “sister” of sort late in the film just before the climax that focuses on what are basically the action sci fi equivalent of pillow shots accompanied by a low atonal guitar. A striking moment of quiet before the gruesome finale that I always find beautiful and haunting.

Unfortunately long didactic monologues are also a trademark of Oshii which means that the film is filled with shots of the characters staring directly into the screen, delivering paragraphs of dialogue that seem like the result of an epic night of brainstorming between Hideaki Anno and Lana Wakowski.

Speeches like this...

"There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience. I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries."

-Delivered in a single uninterrupted breath by an actor who only seem to vaguely comprehend what she’s saying cannot help but come off as Hokey. Some of the problem probably stems from me watching The American Dub (I’m normally a sub purist but considering that the dub was the version I watched and rewatched after taping it off of The Action Channel at fourteen it seems only fair) But all the blame can’t be put on the dubbing. A pedantic ranting monologue by any name…

It must also be admitted that narrative clarity has also never been Oshii’s strong suite. And Ghost In The Shell is no exception. Oshii is splendid at communicating his idea’s and action visually, but not his stories. True the task of condensing a long running manga series into seventy five minutes is never easy. But it might have been wise for Oshii to not place quite so much emphasis in the plot on the cloak and daggering of fictional bureaucracies whose function and relationship to each other are vague at best. It also carries with it (as those who have seen the above wildly unrepresentative poster that began the article) that special tang of gender confusion that only anime can have. The kind that makes The Major genuinely one of the most well rounded, capable, and interesting female characters in Science Fiction and yet has to strip down to her lovingly detailed skivvies whenever she wants to use her technology.

Still if the film is overly earnest in its ideas it is only because it is so obviously taken with them. The vibrancy of the world and the radicalness of its concepts and ambition won me over such petty flaws then, and they do anew each time I rewatch Ghost In The Shell.

The 25: Part 16/17: Aguirre The Wrath Of God/ A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)

So the I was around fifteen, I’d explored world cinema, the American classic style, and even had begun to dip my toe into the wild world of cult movies. I was beginning to feel pretty cocky about my vocabulary. What more was there to see?

There is no more dangerous time for a cinephile then the time when he first begins to fool himself into thinking he knows something. It’s a pattern I’ve seen countless film fans fall into, the happy complacency with a few hundred films to revisit. Only occasionally making room for the odd contemporary film.

It’s death for a student of film. And if you’re extremely lucky you get to see a few films that let you know just how small your palate is.

And that’s why no matter how disparate these film’s might appear, in my mind their intrinsically linked. No two films so violently expanded my horizons. And thanks to them, the day I stop seeking new experiences at the cinema, the day I’m convinced I’ve seen all it has to give, will be the day I’m lying cold in my grave.


Of the two, Aguirre is perhaps the easiest to understand as a shock to the system. I had just fallen under the tutelage of Ebert’s grandfatherly prose, and was drawn to the film by his Great Movie essay. I don’t know what I expected… No that’s a lie, I do know what I expected because the Hollywood version of Aguirre The Wrath Of God is depressingly easy to imagine.

One can picture it now, the scenes of the frightened conquistador’s trembling in the jungle being picked off one by one by an unseen force. A Predator-lite, with plenty of ambient sound, tense low angled shots, and frenzied character actor’s screaming “WHERE ARE YOU!!” into the jungle, a handsome, perhaps gone slightly to seed leading man in the role of the charismatic Aguirre, desperately trying to lead what remains of his conquistador’s out of the jungle, as a budding romance kindles between him and his deceased captain’s wife, and his plucky daughter learns to live in a man’s world. This is before the climatic battle between himself and the Indian tribe in which he gains their grudging respect. Ending up cleansed in his struggle for survival from his nasty imperialist impulses.

You know, some horseshit like that.

What I got was a mixture between holy man’s vision, and delirium induced vision of ants crawling out of one’s skin. A meditive journey into death and madness, filled with unforgettable images, and “ecstatic truth”. To say it was nothing like anything else I’d ever seen before, would be an understatement. As our doomed legion drift’s farther down the river each either reverts to base and cruel animal nature, or into philosophic abstraction. Until the unforgettable ending scene in which Kinski struts around a sinking raft amid a pile of corpses, talking about marrying his (dead) daughter, while he squeezes monkey’s in his fist.

And Oh Kinski, what have we here, bulging eyes, and thick, sensuous, rotten lips drawn into a rictus, remembering you’re supposed to have a hunchback perhaps 40 percent of the time.

But it wasn’t just the madness, it was Herzog, whose style of filmmaking was so different from anything else I’d ever seen that it may have well as been. To say Herzog lacked the concerns about the norms of narrative filmmaking would be an understatement. But his films were so unabashedly narrative.

Cinema wasn’t just a language, it was a language vast enough to contain a foreign one. It was simply put a rush.



But while Aguirre was an attack on the conventions of cinema I held. Almost as much of a threat as a promise. A Personal Journey Through American Movies With Martin Scorsese, on the other hand, presented a perfect example, and articulation of what I considered and consider cinema to be. A quasi mystical passing down of experience through the ages. A retelling of the experiences of common humanity and ideals, occasionally ugly common humanity and ideals, through the ages.

Unlike all other art forms, I would argue that the cinema is primarily not a reach inward, or a reach outward, but a reach forward.

A Personal Journey Through American Movies, proved a warm illustration of this. With Scorsese acting as the ideal tour guide, opening up the history of film as a nourishing buffet. Cementing Scorsese as the ultimate master, the ultimate teacher from whom I would always try to learn.

The filmmakers who this film introduced me to are almost innumerable, but just off the top of my head there’s, Sam Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Vincent Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Griffith, Von Stroheim, Wild Bill Welleman, William Wyler, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, and Robert Aldrich.

That is, if I may be vulgar, that’s a shit ton of movies.

Simply put no single act of cinema going expanded my vocabulary and palate more. No single act of cinema going so made me a better film fan. It was a gentle quantum leap. A mellow but firm reminder that I was only a student. That there was always more to learn,

I can only hope that this will always be so.