And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to ... Iran

In a piece in The New Republic, "How Iran Produced the Best Film of 2011 — and What Americans Can Learn From It," the always worthwhile David Thomson persuasively asserts that the Iranian film A Separation, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi...

...seems to me the best film of 2011. It is one of the Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Picture, but by any sense of justice in any nation (let alone the self-assessed greatest in the world) it would have been nominated for Best Picture before anything else.

Says Thomson:

The ways in which the characters in A Separation struggle for truth and honor, while yielding sometimes to compromise and falsehood, is not foreign to us. Few other films made last year give such a striking sense of, "Look—isn't this life? Isn't this our life, too?" In a complete world of film-going, we should no longer tolerate the label "foreign film," especially since it seems likely that a film from France in which the French language remains tactfully silent is going to stroll away with Best Picture. The Artist is a pleasant soufflé, over which older Academy voters can wax nostalgic. But A Separation is what the cinema was invented for.

Roger Ebert, praising the film, spoke with its director, Asghar Farhadi, who's also Oscar nominated for his original screenplay. Farhadi noted the often fraught state of world-audience filmmaking in his home country:

Mostly people have liked the movie. It has had a large audience and fortunately has evoked a lot of discussion, which is exactly what I hoped would happen. Seeing people gather in little groups after each screening to discuss the film: That's exactly what I wanted, and gives me a nice feeling. It was also well received by the critics in Iran. But the official reaction was mixed. Being cautious towards commenting on the film was the common thing in all their reactions. Officials are used to judge the film and the film-maker together. And they know that we don't agree on a lot of subjects. Well, let's just say that they can't make any comment without reservation. We have a proverb in Iran: 'a hit on the nail, a hit on the horseshoe'.

Citing a piece in The Guardian about that "official reaction" backlash in Iran following the film's success in the West, Anthony Kaufman at Indiewire suggests that the success of A Separation puts a critical finger not only on the movie, but also on "Iran's often complex relationship with its artists" and the regime's "highly nervous" reaction to how the country is represented to the world:

At a time when relations between Iran and the West couldn't be more contentious, you'd think a good work of art could help break down some walls between them. But no government--not in the U.S. either, I should add--likes to let someone else come along and make bridges without their approval. It takes away their power. And I think that's one of the reasons why the film isn't being universally accepted at home. Success spoils the government's ability to censor and control. 

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

"Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor."

That Buster Keaton influence sure is clear, from the look and disposition of the central character to the windstorm that combines Steamboat Bill, Jr. with L. Frank Baum.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is utterly charming, and also one of the five animated short films now up for an Oscar.


The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

For your consideration — "So much for that 'Intermission' " edition

Addenda to my December 21 collection of "the Year's Best Movies" lists:

• The 40 Best Films of 2011, according to the Pop Matters staff. X-Men: First Class ahead of A Separation?
• New York Magazine: Vulture Critics' Poll: The Complete 'Worst Movie of 2011' Ballots — A comprehensive gathering, with some thoughtful and conversation-starting (or teeth-gnashing) choices, occasionally with a little added commentary. Jack and Jill appears to set the bar, to no one's surprise.

Also not surprisingly, you'll find some titles shared across both of those lists.

Meanwhile, Julie at Misfortune Cookie offers the Best overlooked and underappreciated performances of 2011 and Roger Ebert declares They wuz robbed.

IndieWire/Press Play: The winners of the Vertigoed contest — In response to the foofaraw (given a wobbly rocket boost by Kim Novak) over that pivotal scene in The Artist scored to a distinctive Bernard Herrmann cue from Hitchock's Vertigo, the Press Play staff launched a contest among their readers. Rule #1:

Take the same Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in this memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.... Is there any clip, no matter how silly, nonsensical, goofy or foul, that the score to Vertigo can't ennoble? Let's find out!

And so they did. The results are in. Click here for the full scoop on the contest, its criteria, and the judges, followed by the Grand Prizewinner — STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, by Jake Isgar — the four finalists, and some special awards (e.g., Citation for Homoerotic Grandeur: TOP GUN by De Maltese Valk).

My glowering assessment of that Vertigo cue in The Artist is here.


NPR: Movie Titles That Might Have Been — From Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars, That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate to (wait for it) American Pie.


How many movies will we watch over a lifetime? AD Jameson is keeping track of his own number — 1,925 so far:

That doesn’t sound like too many, not after fifteen years of avid cinephilia. But to put it in some perspective, that’s roughly 128 feature films/year, or about one every three days. ... We found last week that there have been at least 268,246 features made. (Since then, the IMDb’s count has grown to 268,601.) So I’ve seen little more than .7% of them—and remember, I think that IMDb count far too low.

Why he has given so many poor ratings to contemporary movies:

The more you watch from the present day, the more garbage you’re bound to see—but your conclusions will be your own. Conversely, the further back you go, the more you’ll be guided by the opinions of others. (If nothing else, what’s available will be largely determined by what’s remained popular.)

"What if..." Movies reimagined for another time & place — Artist Peter Stults asks "...what if movies we were all familiar with were made in a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it?"

Watching "The Artist", feeling the "Vertigo"

Last night Elizabeth and I caught a SIFF Cinema screening of The Artist, which is already appearing on a number of 2011 Top 10 lists, occasionally in the #1 slot.

I found it attractively shot, charming, and enjoyable most of the time, though it didn't Wow me as much as I anticipated given the Oscar-buzzy hype and the lustrous trailer (see below). The story is too slight and too reliant on trite melodrama conventions (and big lifts from Singin' in the Rain), which fit the time period but don't, in my opinion, fully provide sufficient substance. The screenplay is curiously thin even given the faux-"silent film" format — partly, I think, due to a number of missed opportunities, especially in the second half. (And Penelope Ann Miller needs some stern words with her agent.)

On the other hand, the three leads — Jean Dujardin as a Douglas Fairbanks-like silent screen star washed up with the advent of the "talkies," Bérénice Bejo as the bit player who achieves Hollywood stardom, and Uggie the dog as the loyal pooch who saves the day — are marvelous and must be signed for a remake of The Thin Man, pronto. Elizabeth and I had already come to love Dujardin from the two French "OSS 117" spy-film spoofs (also directed by Michel Hazanavicius and featuring his wife Bejo), and now we learn the guy can dance Gene Kelly-style too. Yet it's Bejo who's the breakout star for me. She held her own as the co-lead with Dujardin, while doing it, as they say, backwards and in high heels. Together they have an easy chemistry, and I hope the success of The Artist means we'll be seeing more of both of them, singly and together, for years. And seriously, Uggie gives one of the best canine performances in decades.

As a pastiche of the black-and-white "silent" cinema of yore, The Artist is appealing and good-looking (though hardly accurate-looking), with some clever touches. However, the conceit wears thin without further narrative oomph starting around the half-way mark.

Trumping much of the good stuff on display, though, is one peculiar element that sore-thumbed a key scene for me: Late in the story, when Dujardin's George Valentin has hit rock bottom, having lost his career and his chance at true love, he wanders Hollywood like the Ghost of Movies Past. What jarred me during it is the choice for its musical scoring — Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" from Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo (YouTubed here).

Now, I may be just a big ol' film geek, but it's not as if Vertigo is some obscure forgotten film, or that Herrmann's work isn't one of Hollywood's more famous and distinctive movie scores. I love Herrmann's music in Vertigo and others, but it threw me right out of The Artist as I was sitting there asking, almost out loud, "What the hell is music from Vertigo doing here?" Instead of joining George Valentin in his cinelicious despondency, I had visions of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak dancing through my head.

By my lights, that particular motif doesn't wed itself naturally to the scene in The Artist. It's hardly an ideal bit of scoring for the moment. For one thing, using it is the very definition of uninspired, even in our pop culture of mashups and creative appropriation (which I agree can be artful and inspired).

Secondly, the piece is distracting as it brings to mind a real (and better) movie made nearly 30 years after the story's setting.

Thirdly and most damningly, it's almost mawkish as it tries hard to make us feel something, thus kneecapping any earned feeling the scene may elicit. To me, it felt as though someone was trying to tap my emotional memory of Vertigo and hijack it for the scene in The Artist, rather than crafting the scene so that it generated the emotional layering on its own.

During those minutes of being kicked out of the movie's narrative, my mind wandered. I was curious whether Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" landed there initially as some temporary scratch track filler that Hazanavicius decided he liked well enough, or else using Herrmann's music was less expensive than rescoring the scene with an original piece.

So when I got home I did what people do when disconcerted in the 21st century: I googled. Here's what I found:

A.O. Scott's New York Times review notes the Vertigo lift as one of The Artist's built-in cineaste references.

According to the film's English press kit (PDF), Hazanavicius played mood music from vintage movies on the set:

The shoot being silent, did you give your actors much direction during the takes?

What I did was play music on the set and it literally carried them. So much so that at the end, they couldn’t do without it! I played mostly Hollywood music of the '40s and '50s: Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Frank Waxman, but also George Gershwin, Cole Porter... I used SUNSET BOULEVARD a lot but I also played THE WAY WE WERE and even Philippe Sarde's music for THE THINGS OF LIFE. It's a beautiful melody and I knew Jean has a particular relationship with that theme. I didn't warn him the first time I played it and I knew that by playing it on set I'd trigger something during the take. That’s exactly what happened. I did the same with Bérénice when she arrives in hospital; I played the theme from LAURA, which she loves.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Laura Emerick's 'The Artist' is director's love letter to early Hollywood includes this unhelpful quote from Hazanavicius:

"The 'Vertigo' music is here to help shape the emotional structure of the climax.... But it's also heard in the finale [of 'Vertigo'], and the theme worked perfectly here. It helps to create a sense of resolution."

Finally, an A.V. Club interview with Hazanavicius addresses the lift directly:

AVC: Like your OSS comedies, The Artist has a Hitchcock influence—you use Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score for a pivotal moment in the movie. Was that intentional?

MH: For The Artist, the music from Vertigo came in post. I guess all the directors in France are influenced by Hitchcock, because he’s the perfect visual director, in my eyes. So I guess, yes, certainly he was an influence, but it wasn’t a reference. I mean, I wasn’t watching Hitchcock movies, I was watching silent movies. But when I was writing the script, I was listening to a lot of classical composers, and there was a lot of music from movies in that, and the music from Vertigo was one of them. So when we were editing, I went back to the script and told the composer, "There are nine narrative blocks where we need nine big scores." So I gave him all the points of what kind of emotion the music should have. And for that particular scene you're speaking of, I wanted something special. I wanted it to be the final movement. I wanted a slow love theme, and the music from Vertigo just fit perfectly. And it's not Herrmann's score, in fact, but the score re-orchestrated by Elmer Bernstein [from 1992].

After seeing that sequence cut together, our composer [Ludovic Bource] used that style as an influence for the rest of the music he created for other parts of the movie. I'll admit it's strange to have the music from another movie in your movie, but finally I chose to accept it.

Okay. So there's the answer. Not a very satisfying answer, but at least he addressed the question. I too love Herrmann's music and if I were writing a darkly moody love scene I'd have it in the background too. But it is indeed "strange" and it did toss me out of a key moment in The Artist. I recovered, of course, even if it did niggle at me until I got home and sought answers to my burning question online.

So file this post under Curiosity, qualified satisfaction of.

The year in rearview

It's that listy time of year. Naughty vs. nice, art vs. commerce, Tree of Life vs. Twilight, etc. Movie critics, film pundits, and cine-bloggers are compiling their summations of what happened, or didn't, onscreen in 2011.

Here are some I find most useful and meaningful. Between now and January I'll be adding to this list as more appear.


The Atlantic: Richard Lawson's The Best Movies of 2011

A.V. Club: 15 Best Films of 2011

Roger Ebert's Journal: The Best Films of 2011 and The Best Documentaries of 2011

GreenCine Daily: Best of 2011: Supporting Performances

The Guardian: The best films of 2011: Peter Bradshaw's choice

IndieWire: Annual Critics Survey 2011 and overview article

io9: Best and Worst Science Fiction/Fantasy Movies of 2011

L.A. Times: Year in Review: Kenneth Turan's best film picks of 2011

Movie Line (Stephanie Zacharek): The Artist, Tinker, Midnight in Paris: Stephanie's Top 10 Movies of 2011

Movie Morlocks (TCM): The Top Twelve Genre Films of 2011

MSN:  

• Top 10 Movies of 2011
• Contributors' Individual Top 10 Lists (Sean Axmaker, Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Richard T. Jameson, Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan) 
• MSN Movies Bloggers' Top 10 Lists
• Users' Top 10 Poll

The New Yorker (Richard Brody):  The 26 Best Films of 2011

The New Yorker (David Denby): The Best Films of 2011

The New York Times: Riding Off Into Civilization's Sunset — Stephen Holden's Top 10 movies of 2011

NPR: 2011 In Film: Bob Mondello's Top 10 (Plus 10)

Online Film Critics Society: 15th Annual OFCS Awards Nominations

The Oregonian: Top Movies of 2011 — Shawn Levy — Mark Mohan — Mike Russell (pleased to see 13 Assassins here)

Salon: Andrew O'Hehir's The 10 best movies of 2011: Brilliant movies for a bleak year 

Scanners (Jim Emerson): My First 2011 "Ten Best" List

Slant: Top 25 Films of 2011

Sunset Gun (Kim Morgan): Magnificent Melancholia: 11 Best of 2011

Time: Richard Corliss' Top 10 (one of those annoying click-through formats, but glad to see Rango there). And the Top 10 Worst.

Time Out London: Time Out's film team nominate their favourite movies of 2011

Village Voice: 2011 Film Poll, including J. Hoberman's Personal Best. The Critics List is here. Click the names to see individual votes.

Also looking back at the year in movies:

Ferdy on Films: My Year at the Movies, 2011 and Confessions of a Film Freak, 2011

Glenn Erickson: DVD Savant picks the Most Impressive Discs of 2011

Huffington Post: Best Films Of 2011: 11 Great Films You May Have Missed

IndieWire: The 30 Top-Grossing Indies of 2011, Led By Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris'

IndieWire: A Complete Guide To 2011-12 Awards Season / Summary of Winners

IndieWire: Indiewire's Greatest Hits: The Top 10 Reviews From 2011

io9: Lessons that 2011 Has Taught the Entertainment Industry

New York Times: Old-Fashioned Glories in a Netflix Age by A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis

New York Times: A Year of Disappointment at the Movie Box Office

The New Yorker: Anthony Lane's The Year in Movies: Gladness, Despondency, Madness

Slate:  

1. The Movie Club Entry 1: What movies gave you the goosebumps this year? How about nausea?
2. Entry 2: Why I loved Melancholia, and why Tree of Life left me cold
3. Entry 3: If Hollywood made more movies like Bridesmaids, garbage like Sherlock Holmes might bother me less
4. Entry 4: Can you admire a movie without enjoying it?
5. Entry 5: Bridesmaids proved a comedy could be big and brash and rude and still fully, proudly female
6. Entry 6: A defense of The Artist, offered without disclaimers or shame
7. Entry 7: They don't make bad movies like they used to
8. Entry 8: There is no single movie this year that everyone is excited about

'Hugo' — Dear Martin Scorsese: Thank you for making a movie just for me

At Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL, I make a practice of not "reviewing" major studio movies currently in wide theatrical release, and I'm not about to start now. After all, the internet is so replete with film reviews and commentary that aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic will probably soon achieve their own Borg-like hive-mind sentience and enslave us all to rewrite our lives as three-act rom-com screenplays. No doubt you've already selected the professional, amateur, or webby pro-am hybrid critics/reviewers/pundits who speak to your personal cinematic sensibilities (I sure have). And — bottom line — no one's currently paying me to do so.

But I will say this much: Great Chaplin's ghost! Hugo sure in a damn fine movie.

It's the mighty Scorsese's charming, gorgeous, beating-hearts-on-sleeves love letter to "the magic of the movies" and the fun of storytelling (in all forms), and especially to the vintage cinema he has championed throughout his career. Regular readers here already know that Scorsese's and Hugo's unconcealed treasuring of silent-era greats such as Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, Fairbanks, and especially the pioneer at the center of the film's story, Georges Méliès, speaks right to my cinephilic lub-dubber.

Is this the Martin Scorsese we know from Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, and Shutter Island? Arguably, no, although the sheer experienced filmcraft on display throughout Hugo is never short of masterly.

Instead, the Scorsese we get this time is the zealous collector and encyclopedic fanboy-turned-pro who for years I've found giving passionate cineaste testimonials on DVDs such as Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Public Enemy (wherein he appraises Cagney's performance as where "modern screen acting begins"), Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach and The River (Hugo's Monsieur Frick, as played by Richard Griffiths, looks a lot like Renoir, the scenes with the steam train engineer and his fireman quote outright Renoir's 1938 film La bête humaine, and Renoir's name appears in the closing credits list of Acknowledgements), and a dozen or more other films. And that's not including the full-length commentaries to his own movies.

Throughout Hugo, we see the love light in Scorsese's eyes, and it's flickering at 24 frames per second. 

Here's an "easter egg" I'm looking forward to when I get the movie on Blu-ray — name-checking all the period movie posters that festoon several of Hugo's scenes. I caught Fantômas and Judex (two pulp hero adventure serials directed by Louis Feuillade), Charley Chase's Why Men Work (as "Pourquoi les hommes travaillent"), a poster of Chaplin without a film title (rights issues?), a colorful illustration of Chaplin forebear Max Linder, and others panning by too quickly to capture in my memory.

Even Méliès had his predecessors in the Lumière brothers, and they receive a significant nod as Méliès recounts how he got started in filmmaking during a carnival screening of their "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station." Later, in a montage sequence, we glimpse just enough of several later films to identify them, such as the The Great Train Robbery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Intolerance, The Thief of Bagdad, Tumbleweeds (William S. Hart's last movie), Keaton's The General, Chaplin's The Kid, and Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box.

I'd love the eventual disc to add a track that annotates Hugo's filmic homages, for they are abundant and pointing them out would create added value illumination. (Hey, if anybody on the production end wants a hand with that, just contact me here, 'kay?)

Plus, Hugo speaks between the frames about the creative process, both explicitly in the film's narrative and implicitly in the way it was made. I can't shake the notion that we're glimpsing Scorsese celebrating the tortuous, thrilling, clockpunky act of movie-making itself, like Chaplin using The Circus as a vehicle to comment about the often precarious art and craft of being funny.

The film aims itself right at my limbic system even in its incidentals. For instance, the whole thing is set in my own mind's-eye image of romanticized Paris at the turn of the 20th, with Django Reinhardt playing his gypsy jazz in a café where James Joyce shares a table with Salvador Dalí. We get those mammoth steam locomotives barreling through Paris' Gare Montparnasse station, so evocative since I was a kid. And suffusing the setting and storytelling — all that brass clockwork, gears within gears; visit my house and you'll see that I have a thing for old clocks.

Hugo is being marketed as a "kids film," and I guess technically it is that. Its screenplay is conventionally structured enough to attract parents looking for nonthreatening mainstream "holiday family film" fare. Sacha Baron Cohen's Inspector Gustav comes within his mustache's width of tipping over into Disney cartoon villain mode before being given some redeeming dimension when it counts.

But it's not only a "kids film." There's plenty on tap for those of us in the higher age brackets, especially those of us whose love of movies encompasses far more than the latest 'splodey summer blockbusters.

And yet I'm so glad it is a "kids film."

For one thing, here's a movie in which the plot, and therefore our two child leads, drives forward with an appreciation not only of movies — but also of books: of reading, of discovering the world and engaging your authentic self via leather-bound covers and the Narnia-like expanses of bookshops and libraries.

Precocious Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) finds joy in trying out new words as she leads Hugo (Asa Butterfield) from his clockwork warren within the Paris train station walls through the looking-glass/wardrobe/pirate ship/TARDIS that is Christopher Lee's (!) bookshop, a storefront cathedral so piled high with shelves and stacked-up volumes that he might be living in an Escher drawing. To Isabelle the shop is "Neverland and Oz and Treasure Island all wrapped into one." The fact that she can also recite Christina Rossetti gets them out of a sticky predicament with Inspector Gustav early on. Give her another 15, 20 years and there's my dream girl. (In fact, she's Elizabeth, so big win there.)

As the plot's gears start turning faster, Hugo repays her in kind by leading her into a story of their own beyond the written page. "This might be an adventure," she observes, "and I've never had one before, outside of books at least." 

While I'd say that Lee's bibliophile shopkeeper could have used a moment or two of his own for some development, he earns his keep in the film by giving Hugo the talisman he needs right when he needs it most: an edition of Robin Hood that, the man says, is innately meant to be Hugo's. It's a moment that sets in motion Hugo's act of reigniting the storyteller's spark within morose old Méliès.

When they discover the missing clues they need to solve the mystery of the heartbreak embittering Isabelle's "Papa Georges," it happens within a library. There, the adult guide they encounter to get them into Act III isn't a wizard or a talking lion or a pirate. He's a movie buff and, most crucially, an author.

And the "reading is fundamental" angle is not conveyed with a heavy hand. It's naturally integral to the narrative and not slathered on like a dose of "good for you" broccoli on a dish of ice cream.

During the showing, I observed the kids packing our audience — ages 6-13, I'd say. I was pleased to see them so engrossed and entertained. They squealed as if opening birthday presents during the recreations of the authentic "old timey" Méliès films. I was happily surprised when they fully engaged with the scene where the two leads sneak into a showing of Harold Lloyd's famous Safety Last, the kids in our audience responding to Lloyd dangling from the clockface as much as Hugo and Isabelle did. They laughed at a quick gag from Keaton's The General. (What they'd think of Louise Brooks and the entirety of Pandora's Box should probably be run by their parents first.)

And when it was all over, they applauded. 

So now I'm wondering: Given Hugo's critical and commercial success, and given its likely "long tail" staying power as a Scorsese film, is it possible that we'll now see a generation of kids grow up with more familiarity of silent-era cinema, from Méliès forward, and with a fuller understanding of where the movies they enjoy come from — than any generation since ... well, since ever, even their great- or great-great grandparents who were those first movie audiences?

I'm going to click Publish Post hoping so.

Thanks, Mr. S.

Music: Django Reinhardt
Near at hand: Gifts from London for Judy and Dan

The Sci in our Fi, no. 3 — "Blind me with science" edition

Here's a timely follow-up to this post, and this one. I just created a new label/tag for this topic.



Regarding Steven Soderbergh's new biomedical thriller Contagion, it's Jovana J. Grbić's view that it lets scientific accuracy drag the plot's momentum. Ordinarily I'd raise a Spockish eyebrow at a movie review from Chemical & Engineering News, but Dr. Grbić is creative director of the Los Angeles-based ScriptPhD, which "specializes in science communication in entertainment, advertising, and media." ScriptPhd is therefore an enterprise I respect and encourage.

As a realistic depiction of a bird flu-type epidemic, "Contagion" attempts to right some of the scientific wrongs of the 1995 film "Outbreak," which played more like a conventional zombie movie than a warning parable about the global reach of modern infectious diseases. The scientific blunders in "Outbreak" include an unauthorized person walking out of a secured government lab with a sample of a deadly virus (without gloves, no less), scientists and civilians walking into a Biosafety Level 4 lab without proper personal protective equipment, and an unrealistic rate of viral spread.

"Contagion" manages to sidestep such scientific inaccuracies. If anything, it is a science film masquerading as a public service announcement to raise awareness about the possibility of such an outbreak and show that widespread panic can be more dangerous than the virus itself. That’s a lofty goal, to be sure, but too many minutes are invested in forcing actors to deliver technical language, along with clunky lines explaining their meaning. The balance between scientific accuracy and storytelling ultimately has to tip toward storytelling—the linchpin of all compelling films.

As regular visitors here know, I'm I big proponent of that last sentence — and you also know that a film that puts extra effort into getting the science (and the scientists) as accurate as possible gets extra appreciation from me. I haven't yet seen Contagion, but knowing that it "manages to sidestep such scientific inaccuracies" increases my likelihood of seeing it sooner rather than later, in a theater rather than weeks from now via Netflix. I wonder if Dr. Grbić is underestimating the tolerance and capacity of the average audience member, and I'm curious to see whether I'll feel that Contagion invests "too many minutes" in grounding the story in reality, or that it stretches my "emotional attention span too thin."

Over at NewScientist.com, Ferris Jabr expresses a differing reaction: Contagion's "exhilarating pace never sags, even in scenes that have the potential to bore people out of their minds." He adds that Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Burns "keep the viewer's attention as they explain statistics like the all-important R0 - the average number of people an infected person infects - and truths about the scientific process...."

Of course, a great deal depends on how well the actors sell the technical language, and we're talking Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Winslet by herself may whisper the CDC's Avian Flu page in my ear any time she chooses.

In any case, I expect to at least applaud the film's refreshing effort toward b.s. avoidance.

ScriptPhD's full article on Contagion expands on the Chemical & Engineering News piece, and includes a Q&A with Natasha K. Griffith, the film's technical biosafety consultant.

I've been itching for a good new Andromeda Strain for years now. Wait, maybe I should phrase that differently.

The inevitable has arrived

Finally, Brad Pitt has officially become Robert Redford.

Elizabeth is so okay with that.



From the dept. of synchronicity: at 48 years old in 2011's Moneyball, Pitt is the same age Redford was in 1984's The Natural.

The Future (2011) — Miranda warning

With Miranda July's The Future now opening in theatrical release beyond the festival circuit, I'm moving my May write-up from the Seattle International Film Festival screening to here and now.


The press blurb that lured me in:

With droll humor and touches of magical realism, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) tells the story of a young couple who decide to take thirty days to explore their destinies. This whimsical experiment leads to some surprising revelations about the uncertainty of what the future holds.

I like Miranda July. Rather, I like the concept of Miranda July: multimedia performance artist, musician, writer, actor, film director, and fellow erstwhile Portlander at the same time I lived there. I've enjoyed her short fiction. Her 2005 writing-directing-acting debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, made a strong impression, so this, her sophomore film, has been on my anticipation list. Critics' ten-for-a-dollar descriptors such as "quirky" and "surreal," or even the grandiloquent yet leaky umbrella term "magic realism," typically don't put me off, and indeed can be suitable attractors for me.

Miranda July's The Future is indeed quirky, with segments of dour whimsy that employ the surreal to explore the dissolution of an L.A. couple's relationship through magic realism tropes — including voice-over narration that's ostensibly from a cat, a man's desire literally stopping and fragmenting time, and a full moon that gives indifferent relationship advice.

For my tastes it's also, like Me and You and Everyone We Know, a shade too "twee" and "precious" — other easy descriptors that, especially when coupled with "self-seriously," do tend to push me away. 

In any case (and despite its current standing as 2011's most defiantly unmemorable title), I went into The Future fully prepared to engage with it through every port. And so I did for roughly the first half.

After four years together and each in their mid-thirties, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are examining their rote, unfulfilled lives and forecasting a rote, unfulfilled future coming fast. For Jason, turning 40 is just five years away, and 40 is practically the same as 50, and after that, well.... "It's too late for us," he glums. Starting with the film's title, this theme of time getting away from us is central here.

They plan to adopt a damaged cat, Paw-Paw (whose cloying high-pitched narration comes voiced by July) from an animal shelter. But because Paw-Paw has been injured in the wild, the couple must wait 30 days until the cat's injuries heal at the shelter before cementing their relationship in its cat-owning phase. They imbue adopting the cat, like every other mundane shift in their flat-affect lives, with the life-quaking importance of childbirth or a death sentence. They characterize the waiting period as "our last month ever."

So with 30 days to get their capital-L Life shit together, they focus on "being alert" to everything around them, being open to opportunities to find themselves and actualize their true personas. (Or whatever the current phraseology is.) Jason literally pulls the plug on his job as a phone-in tech support drone, and Sophie quits her position teaching dance (rather, "dance") to five-year-olds.

There's the setup, the premise that hooked me enough with its humor and my willing questions about what colorful surprises July was going to unfold like origami out of these two drab, emotionally and vocally monotone, empty characters. (Later on, Sophie's flat affect remained so changeless and severe that, by the last half-hour, I wondered if she was meant to be brain-damaged. Honestly, I did.)

And for a while their thin story continued on satisfactorily: His determination to encounter new people and experiences quickly lands him in another drone job, this time selling young trees as a door-to-door environmental activist. (When Sophie notes, "You're not environmental," he replies that he appreciates the outdoors being out there somewhere.) On his route, he engages with an eccentric elderly man who seems to need Jason's attentions as much as Jason needs to feel engaged with a human being in the same room. Meanwhile, Sophie's frustration at her immediate failure to fulfill a simple goal — one new YouTube solo dance video for each of the thirty days — soon lands her into an affair with a drab stranger (David Warshofsky) in the suburbs.

At this pivot point, the film gradually started detaching itself from me like a damaged retina. Once Jason discovers the affair, July shifts to a darker tone and a Donnie Darko vibe. As time unlocks from a linear progression, July piles on the inexplicables. What is suggested when the moon (in the voice of the aforementioned eccentric elderly man) tells Jason that by laying his hand on guilt-ridden Sophie's head he has made 3:14 in the morning last for days? How much, if any, of Sophie's affair and submersion in suburban wifely humdrummery is real or some splintered-time dream-state? Why does the man's young daughter want to bury herself in the yard up to her neck? And then there's the yellow shirt that crawls by itself until Sophie uses it as a conceptual-dance body-condom.

Again, on paper none of those should push me away. Here, though, with Jason stopping and splitting time to prevent losing Sophie, with the moon giving him uncertain wisdom, and Paw-Paw interjecting in July's squeaky child-like voice with dislocated, seemingly tacked-on meditations on waiting and wildness and death and the afterlife (two finger-puppet cat paws are all we see, so it's not unequivocally clear exactly who or what that voice is supposed to be), what I wished to find intriguing soon became merely annoying, followed by similar annoyances, then still more stacked drearily further until ... as I checked my watch ... I disengaged wholly from the narrative, the characters, their relationship, and whatever meaning or import July was trying to impart through it all.

If there are, as the promo copy states, "surprising revelations" to be had in Miranda July's The Future — perhaps the shiver of an experienced truth expressed in a new way, or some unique turn of the prism through which I see life, relationships, or the reality-warping effects a dissolving relationship can have on the inner and outer lives of its participants — I missed them. Or else I saw them and yet still hoped to be surprised.

We've all experienced our own relationship crashes in our adult lives, and certainly I've been in Jason's position: that desire to just stop the crunch's forward motion, to make it all not be happening, to suspend reality long enough to fix the broken bits. "If only" spoken as an alchemical incantation rather than an impotent whimper. Likewise, I so, so get Sophie's frustration at her blocked creative self-expression. And yet rather than feel the shiver of penetrating identification with what was happening on the screen, I experienced no revelation more surprising than a desire to shift in my seat.

Movie-watching being, ideally, a two-way experience, I'll cop to some likely fault or missing component in my half of the equation. Rather than brushing it off as some error on July's part, I feel as though I came to this particular screening unequipped with whatever built-in code key I should have to decipher whatever she was trying so resolutely to communicate. After all, I appreciate movies that try to make me work for it, that ask me to be a co-player in the communication. In this conversation at least, July and I were speaking on the same frequency for about an hour before she started adjusting the dial in ways that didn't engage me enough to keep up.

As a filmmaker July displays a skilled, artful eye and a certain welcome economy in her craft. But narratively, The Future struck me as analogous to a university-press novella whose author was so determined to be "literary" with 21st-century mod magic-realism technique that she exchanged the Story for the Aesthetic, leaving both damaged and under-served.

For what it's worth, a fellow audience member behind me, as the lights came up at the end, sighed with the chill wind of discontent and said, "Good thing she added the cat."

The Future played at Sundance, and Sundance-buzz reviews such as here (indiewire.com), here (nymag.com), and here (film.com) liked the film more than I did, so their experience with it may align better with your own, should you choose.

Music: The Decemberists
Near at hand: Tin House 41

"Every day we are alive there are millions of untold stories...."

One Day on Earth - Motion Picture Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo.

This trailer is the first glimpse of One Day on Earth, an ambitious motion picture shot by thousands of filmmakers in every country in the world on a single day: October 10, 2010. The trailer alone includes footage from 90 individuals and organizations. The producer/director Kyle Ruddick is currently editing down 3,000 hours of film and is asking for help via Kickstarter to complete the project. I don't know about you but it gave me chills.

At Vimeo:

ONE DAY ON EARTH creates a picture of humanity by recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world. We explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together.

Founded in 2008, ONE DAY ON EARTH set out to explore our planet’s identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

via Christopher Jobson

Random thoughts on "Midnight in Paris"

It's good. I just like having a reason — finally, after how long? — to type that.

Midnight in Paris is not one of cinema's "greats," or even one of Woody Allen's ultimate postmortem Top 5 bests in my estimation. (In my book that Top 5 would be Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Love & Death, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Sleeper, Radio Days, Stardust Memories, Bullets Over Broadway, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Shadows and Fog.... What, you really want only five?)

But Midnight in Paris, it is good, and that's enough for me at this point, my bar having been ratcheted down so far over the years. I'd call it his best since Bullets Over Broadway in '94. And for this life-long, card-carrying Woody Allen fan-devotee-acolyte-aficionado*, one bludgeoned to dispirited peevishness by more than a decade of one subpar Woody Allen movie after another — that it didn't outright piss me off is a blessed relief.

Midnight in Paris moves along with a jaunty rhythm and pace that feels as natural as filtered water in an artificial stream in an over-landscaped garden. Still, that's a welcome change after so many of Allen's prior films since the '90s that sputtered fitfully like the rusty flow from a clogged faucet.

Granted, Mighty Aphrodite ('95), Everyone Says I Love You ('96), Deconstructing Harry ('97), and Sweet and Lowdown ('99) are on my DVD shelves because I generally like them, albeit sometimes more for their parts than for the sums thereof. But Celebrity in '98 was that unforeseen, unspeakable thing I thought I'd never experience: an utterly unwatchable Woody Allen movie. Since then, so many of them have ranged from bland and unrewarding to Oh please no just stop!

The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda.... Okay, generously, each had one or two good bits or moments, maybe, some fleeting wisp of the old Woody glitter that actually seemed to make the surrounding drudgery even worse. But even with strong casting they were instantly forgettable while you were watching them. The wretched Anything Else ('03) ruined Christina Ricci for me.

The widely praised "comeback" film Match Point (2005) was a big step back up toward the light. But while it struck me as a film engineered with watchmaker precision, it came off as just as coldly mechanical. Its follow-up, Scoop ('06), slid me right back to the exasperating ho-hummery. I didn't even bother with his next one, Cassandra's Dream.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona ('08) didn't outright wow me but it did give me hope. That is, until Whatever Works ('09) had me throwing up my hands and blowing out the votive candles in front of my framed Annie Hall one-sheet poster.

For the past several years I've despaired at the thought that the comic who said "On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down" would discover whether or not that's true before proving that he had one more good movie left in him. Not a great one necessarily, not a crowning masterpiece, although wouldn't that be a fine way to go out? Just one more that didn't leave me summarizing my response with a shrug and a sour-apple frown and a non-ironic "Meh."

And now?

I nod to Dana Stevens at Slate who said it this way: "Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris ... is a trifle in both senses of the word: a feather-light, disposable thing, and a rich dessert appealingly layered with cake, jam, and cream. It's the first Woody Allen movie in a long time that feels good going down, even if it doesn't stay in your stomach for long afterward."

Right from the beginning Midnight in Paris mines past Woody Allen films: obviously Manhattan in its opening montage and Frommer's Travel Guide settings, and the superior The Purple Rose of Cairo in this story's origami fold of that film's core fantasies. Also familiar are Midnight's themes (celebrity worship, inspired art vs. commercialism, mismatched romance, infidelity), its narrative set-up and structure, his characters (no, not characters, really: single-stroke character sketches), their relationships and interactions, their dialogue, even line readings.... There may be nothing here that you can't find several close analogs for in his previous work.

The key, though, is that he recycles good stuff from his peak years, c. 1977-90. If you've seen two or three or four of his films from those years, then went into Midnight in Paris with no clue whatsoever who'd made it, arriving late enough to just miss the opening credits, within five minutes — ten, tops — you'd recognize it as a Woody Allen film. But hey, if someone's going to do a loving pastiche of Golden Age Woody Allen films, it might as well be Woody Allen.

The core of Midnight in Paris has apparently been percolating within Allen for nearly 50 years. During his early career as a standup comic in the 1960s, his great "Lost Generation" bit gives us Allen reminiscing about his time in Europe hanging with Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway punching him in the mouth. (Its audio is YouTubed here.)

Then in a 1977 New Yorker story, "The Kugelmass Episode", an unhappy humanities professor learns to transport himself at will into works of fiction and interact with his revered literary characters. A few years ago one of my own stories was anthologized alongside it in a university literature textbook.

In a movie career shot through with images and themes of nostalgia and romanticized Golden Ages, is this an expression of Allen's nostalgia for his own personal Golden Age? "The past is never dead. It's not even past," said Faulkner, who in the movie gets name-checked as a just-off-screen presence.

Then again, by the end of Midnight in Paris Allen upends that notion by revealing the folly of nostalgia and saying, essentially, "Fuck that." At last, here's his wistful sigh accompanying an acceptance that the past, personal as well as historical, is another country best viewed from a safe distance. Perhaps our Golden Age really is always right now.

Owen Wilson: Always likeable and reliable. Here he's the expected Allen proxy, yet he manages to wrest the role out of the shadow of past Allen-alikes and make it all his own. It's "the Woody Allen role" played with commitment by Wilson, not by Wilson "doing" Allen. Gil's Paris-in-the-1920s fantasies are an extension of the Allen we've known for decades in films and comic prose, and Wilson's performance lets us experience those fantasies with blithe acceptance of the make-believe.

All the same, Gil's not much of a character. Like everyone else in the film he's written with the depth of a business card, and it's a credit to Wilson, not Allen, that Gil isn't unlikeable on that point alone. Gil's personal "journey" is practically defined by its low stakes and its brazenly painless wish-fulfillment resolution, complete with luminous Léa Seydoux inevitably positioned just so for him at the fade-out.

Rachel McAdams: I've liked her ever since Slings & Arrows and it's fine to see her breaking out to A(ish)-list status. Too bad her strident Inez, Gil's shrewish fiancée, is written to be more Plot Device than a fully realized human being. Whatever does Gil see in her to the point of being engaged to marry her (moreover, gaining her horrid Tea Party Republican parents as in-laws)? What does she see in him, frankly, given who she is and what she wants? We come away without a clue because both Inez and Gil are drawn so superficially.

I have to wonder: after seeing McAdams take a lead in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes and now in Midnight in Paris: Did her agent maneuver a contract clause requiring directors to frame glamor shots of her ass? Not that that's a bad thing. But once again it's as noticeable as a Pepsi logo product placement ad.

Corey Stoll doesn't play Hemingway. He plays Kevin Kline 20 years ago playing Hemingway. And he's terrific at it. He speaks only in the distilled parodic, two-fisted Hemingwayese we might imagine (rather, that Gil imagines) was "Papa's" honed conversational style, and it cracks me up just sitting here remembering it. But not for a minute did I believe that was actually Hemingway.

Meanwhile, Kurt Fuller as John, Inez's father, channels Alan Alda from Crimes and Misdemeanors and Everyone Says I Love You.

Adrien Brody: "Dah-LI!" Heh.

Michael Sheen as Paul, the pedantic prick — "If I'm not mistaken," I've known this guy in numerous forms over the years. I confess there were times when I've been this guy. His position, however, as the other half of the Inez Plot Device exists only to hand Gil a gold-laminated Get Out of Jail Free Card. Inez's affair with him exists simply to, lickety-split, absolve Gil and end his relationship with her. What should be a powerful scene in the film instead simply grates with its lazy utility.

Marion Cotillard as Adriana — Yes, please.

It's nice to see Quai de la Tournelle on the Left Bank, under the arches of Notre-Dame, used again as a setting. It's where Goldie Hawn danced on air in Everyone Says I Love You, and here it's the spot where Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill, inspired) stages what's probably only the latest in a series of public freak-outs.

Speaking of seeing, the striking cinematography (an Allen hallmark) by Johanne Debas and Darius Khondji, coupled with Anne Seibel's production design and art direction, provides a high percentage of the film's appeal, and it's interesting to watch in particular how they give Gil's timeslipped period encounters a rich, dreamlike luster.

Shakespeare and Company — Ah, of course.

For whatever reasons of his own, this time Allen chose to concentrate his energies on crafting a light meringue, all air and sugar, not a main course weighted down with the usual meats and fats of Dysfunctional Human Dynamics and the Angsts of Existence. (Those are here too, but in eyedropper doses.)

Does Midnight in Paris work better because it is so lightweight, such candied ginger? I'll take the layers and nuances of an Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, or Stardust Memories any day, but, given Allen's output so far this century, he seems far more at home and assured with the ginger. It's an unexpected shift, but apparently a wise (or at least creatively strategic) one.

Also gone is the bitter anise that has for years been his films' dominant aftertaste. I still want to shake Allen by the shoulders and shout, "Yes, mortality sucks! Learn to cope with it!" At least this time he does in fact seem to be coping with it, or taking steps toward getting there, in his singular way. So now after the shoulder-shake I'd then take him to a club for Louis Armstrong's "Potato Head Blues" and propose a toast to having made it this far.

Its climax (such as it is) arrives when Gil announces his moment of clarity, and a facile Author's Message, by uttering "I'm having an epiphany. It's a minor one, but still." The moment struck me as Allen poking through the screen to acknowledge the wafer-thin mint he has whipped up here. If so, I'll take it over the gassy, charmless pork dishes he's offered over the past ten, twelve years.

I'll watch Midnight in Paris again, and my adding the eventual Blu-ray disc to the span of shelf space devoted to Allen movies is certain. That's a sentence I haven't been able to write in a long while, and it feels good to finally do so now. If it's the last time, ever ... yeah, I can accept that as a pleasant little dessert to go out on.

All the same, it feels good to actually look forward to his next film, The Bop Decameron, now shooting in Rome with Penélope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, Ellen Page, Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg, and Roberto Benigni.

Gives me hope, it does. Maybe he'll go out with another masterpiece yet.


Via FilmDrunkDotCom on Vimeo and /Film.

* Nobody can do Woody's "Moose" bit as well as Jason Alexander, but mine would give him stiff competition.