Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 23, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

Revisiting Edgar Wright’s bitingly funny, pixelated mash-up of geek culture and romantic comedy tropes, this time with the Lovely Wife, I was struck by how relaxed the film is about its ambitions.  Compared to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which are deliriously fun but embrace their respective generic legacies a little too unquestioningly at times for my taste, Scott Pilgrim always retains a touch of the sardonic.  And yet it never acquires the grating self-satisfaction that plagues so many satirical films.  Perhaps it’s just that Wright’s full-throttle comedic approach smooths over the rough edges.  However, a second viewing and a thumb-through of the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel reveals that the film’s admirable balancing act flows directly from its strength as a shrewd adaptation.  Bryan Lee O’Malley’s manga-tinged black-and-white funny books necessarily lose some of their indie scruffiness in the translation to the big screen, but Wright’s approach is in a different key than the slavish (or desperate) devotion of a fanboy.  He preserves the visual inventiveness of the comics, borrows liberally from O’Malley’s writing (sharpening the quips with his own sheer velocity), and uses his chosen medium to fine effect.  Exhibit A: The characters of the comics, who are lovingly written but often pictorially indistinguishable with their wide eyes and unfussy lines, are each brought to striking and distinctive life in Wright’s film by a succession of marvelously cast performers.  Secondary characters such as Scott’s snide roommate Wallace Wells might be caricatures, but Kieran Culkin makes him memorable, dammit, and not just with the prickly lines he spouts, but all the wonderful details of his physical performance.  (Culkin’s slightly tipsy, archly helpful delivery of “Scott! Look out! It’s that one guy!” might be one of my favorite throwaway moments this year.)  This sort of creative doodling and the exploitation of cinema’s potential—its actors, motion, sound, and so forth–is what makes Scott Pilgrim the film such a pleasurable experience.

Quick Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 (France)
Director: Jan Kounen
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love.  Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow.  The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair.  British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots–and inevitable implosion–that can occur when two like-minded souls collide.  Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration.  These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love.  In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.

Film Diary: Miami Vice (Unrated Director’s Edition)

2006 (USA)
Director: Michael Mann
Viewed: August 9, 2010
Format: Blu-ray – Universal (2008)

The film’s relatively recent vintage notwithstanding, the dreaded consensus seems to have already decreed that Miami Vice belongs in the lower tiers of Michael Mann’s oeuvre.  However, the film has its lonely and dogged boosters, among them Slant luminaries Ed Gonzalez and Nick Schager, as well as Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies blogger Kevin J. Olson.  Truth be told, it was Kevin’s recent appreciation for the film that provoked me to finally visit Mann’s contemporized vision of Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs’ neon-drenched world.  While I can’t share the aforementioned writers’ assessment that it is a great work, there is far more roiling beneath Miami Vice’s slick surface than might be immediately apparent.

The film’s design lustily embraces the faint air of the ridiculous that permeated its namesake television series, at least when it comes to the fashions, cars, and architecture.  The world of Miami Vice is one where undercover narcotics officers drive Ferraris, dwell in dazzling condos, and pilot speedboats in their off hours.  The cops and crooks alike possess flawless Caribbean fashion sense, sip mojitos behind velvet ropes, and have access to an unlimited supply of firepower, gadgets, and vehicles.  Yet Mann presents this world without a wink or a titter, with absolute conviction.  It is as though the goal is to submerge us in kitsch to the point where we can no longer detect that it’s kitsch.  The effect is undeniably heady, particularly when paired with the film’s lurid, domineering aesthetic.  (The sky itself essentially becomes a canvas for Mann to paint with some truly astonishing hues.)  Miami Vice is an aggressively cool film, but it never seems to be striking a pose.  It just happens to have been filmed in an aggressively cool alternate universe.

Mann, who also wrote the screenplay, has a focused and elegant conception of what Miami Vice should be, and he is scrupulous about keeping it on track.  There are action sequences, but it’s not really an action film. The chases and gunplay primarily serve as jittery releases of dramatic tension, rather than delivery devices for drama.  It’s a story about cops, but it’s not really a police procedural.  Mann fetishizes the visual language of law enforcement rather than its logistical minutiae.  Given that the film maintains the director’s preference for emotional chilliness (or at least a forlornness that precludes flamboyant emotional clashes), it can’t really be regarded as a character study.

So what is Miami Vice?  Ultimately, I think it proves to be a surprisingly simple tale of moral vexation, where the triumph of righteousness—and the tears that result—was never in doubt.  While Mann has long exhibited an absorption with male honor codes, his focus has always been on the proximate consequences of such codes.  Here he takes a much more melancholy, even meditative approach, particularly in his presentation of the male-female dyads of Sonny-Isabella and, to a lesser degree, Rico-Trudy.  Rarely have characters in a Mann joint smelled their unhappy fates on the wind with as much precision as these four, and yet they are still willing to luxuriate in fleeting moments of pleasure, joy, and human intimacy.  Whatever the film’s flaws or self-imposed restraints, its tone is an undeniable achievement: Mann evokes decadence and moral peril without the aura of doom. Miami Vice is ripe with the sensation that this fallen world cannot accommodate compromises or hesitation, and will never forgive us our bad choices.

Film Diary: The Damned United

2009 (UK)
Director: Tom Hooper
Viewed: August 9, 2010
Format: DVD – Sony (2010)

This prickly tale of the rise and fall (and subsequent humbling) of notoriously sharp-tongued football manager Brian Clough provides an array of unexpected pleasures.  To be sure, the film boasts a worthy pedigree.  It was adapted by Frost/Nixon and The Queen writer Peter Morgan from a novel by David Peace, who also penned the Red Riding quartet, which was itself adapted into one of the finest British films of the past decade.  However, director Tom Hooper was not known to me, save by reputation as the helmsman of all seven episodes of HBO’s lauded John Adams.  Accordingly, it’s rewarding to witness Hooper’s adroit handling of The Damned United’s twin timelines (a structure that echoes, among other works, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild), as well as his determination to tweak sports movie conventions.  There are plenty of histrionic confrontations and tearful reunions, all of them entirely unsurprising, but for a film about football, it boasts remarkably little gameplay footage.  Hooper and Morgan keep the focus on Clough’s personality: his unflagging ambition, unfortunate taste for conflict, and self-destructive hubris.  It’s a daring thing to make a sports film about the limits of personal achievement, even if the subject is a manager rather than an athlete.  The Damned United’s full-throated commitment to its themes is impressive, and that commitment drips from every frame and performance.  Cinematographer Ben Smithard’s striking recreation of 1970s England is exquisite, from moldering Leeds to sun-kissed Brighton.  And while Michael Sheen doesn’t quite seem to inhabit the same world as his fellow performers, his portrayal of Clough—the startling blend of priggishness, throbbing ego, and lip-curling desperation—is mesmerizing stuff.

Film Diary: About Schmidt

2002 (USA)
Director: Alexander Payne
Viewed: August 2, 2010
Format: DVD - New Line (2003)

Film Diary: Metropolis (The Complete Version)

1927 (Germany)
Director: Fritz Lang
Viewed: July 26, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

My first experience with Metropolis was, unfortunately, a relatively cheap DVD that was apparently released after the film’s American copyright had lapsed.  You can imagine the quality.  I have never seen the 2002 Murnau Foundation / Kino International restoration, so the new “Complete” Metropolis now enjoying a limited theatrical release in the U.S. was akin to a brand spanking new film to my eyes.  This iteration of the film seemed almost twice as long as the version I had recalled.  Certainly, the narrative is more coherent, although still not without its plot holes.  (As Glenn Kenny wonders, where exactly is the army that Joh Fredersen was presumably going to use to crush the workers’ rebellion?)  The “Argentinean footage” that was the impetus for this version of the film is in rough shape and not especially revelatory, but it does provide more connective tissue, so to speak, rounding out aspects of the story that might otherwise have seemed even more perplexing.

To contemporary sensibilities, the film’s treacly message of cooperation and moderation seems like naive, feel-good moralizing, a ridiculously flimsy attempt to resolve the fundamental conflict between capitalism’s grinding indifference and socialism’s revolutionary flame. However, the visual achievements on display here are undeniable.  And yet, for all of Metropolis’ seminal design and stunning ambition—and those crowd shots do look remarkable on the big screen—the most fascinating aspect of the film for this viewer remains its curious (and under-developed) attitude towards robotics and artificial intelligence.  Here we have one of the first cinematic depictions of a machine crafted to resemble a person, and yet such a marvel becomes secondary to the film’s enthusiasm for sheer spectacle and its half-baked portrayal of the antagonism between management and labor.

Nonetheless, I think that the way that the Robot Maria is portrayed in the film is quite revealing.  Our contemporary conception of artificial intelligence is tightly entwined with the notion of cold rationality, where even the most fearsome mechanical being (a Terminator, say), is assumed to simply be following its programming with ruthless efficiency.   From the moment she attains consciousness, however, the Robot Maria displays an almost comically malevolent lust for chaos and destruction.  Brigitte Helm’s astonishing performance—which is grotesque even for a silent film portrayal—shrieks one message loud and clear: this woman-thing is bad, bad news.  Helm conveys an automaton that visibly revels in its role as an instigator and idolatrous object.  Heck, she’s laughing with satanic glee even as they lash her to the stake for an old-fashioned witch-burning.  The portentous use of biblical imagery simply bolds and underlines the current of moral terror that Helm establishes with her performance.  One wonders whether Lang and writer Thea von Harbou thought that all artificial beings would necessarily turn out to be wicked monsters.  Or perhaps Rotwang’s own ambitions were so tainted by sorrow and vengeance that his creation was inevitably corrupted?  Who can say?  The film doesn’t, so we’re left to speculate.  Nonetheless, the Robot Maria’s almost manic need to destroy strongly suggests a deeply skeptical view of humankind’s capacity for creation, well before words like “android” even existed.

Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream a Little Dream

Inception
2010 (USA)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Viewed: July 22, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

“Ambitious” is a term frequently affixed to films solely due to the scale or complexity of their production, whether the work in question is one of the opulent, magisterial epics of old or a contemporary blockbuster that recruits battalions of computer wizards for its virtual world-building.  One could say that Christopher Nolan’s Batman films warrant the label, if only because of their fulsome design and dizzying scope.  However, Nolan’s taste for the ambitious is focused foremost on narrative, as epitomized in the disorienting, reversed chronology of his breakout art-house noir, Memento.  Two years after The Dark Knight trampled everything in its path, that film’s sprawling, relentless, and often preposterous plot nonetheless endures as a grueling feat of sustained anxiety and twenty-first century terror.  Now we come to Inception, the first feature written solely by Nolan since his 1998 debut Following, and it is, if anything, a doubling down on the director’s fascination with convoluted storytelling.  Who else but Nolan could weave a tale that unfolds simultaneously in four linked dream worlds, where time dilates to varying degrees but always ticks inexorably forward?  Who else would have the heedless ambition to even attempt such a thing, to convey such an elaborate scenario through the language of film? Who else but Christopher Nolan would even want to try?

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What’s It Like to Be the Bad Man?

The Killer Inside Me
2010 (USA)
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Viewed: July 12, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 noir novel The Killer Inside Me is not an enjoyable film, at least as one usually applies the term to a movie-going experience.  Nor is it without vexing structural flaws.  And yet it is an undeniably fascinating work, an absorbing and unnervingly insistent portrayal of a murderous mind that joins the ranks of cult notables such as Mary Harron’s American Psycho and John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.   However, the gaze of Winterbottom’s film reaches back to a more distant point.  Specifically, to Psycho, whose particular cinematic genius the film cannibalizes and assimilates into its own strange approach.  Working from a screenplay by director John Curran, Winterbottom maintains a literate awareness of Hitchcock’s seminal thriller throughout his film, without resorting to shameless appropriation or self-conscious homage.  Thompson’s novel has made the jump to the screen before, in a 1976 Stacy Keach vehicle directed by Burt Kennedy.  However, the new film does not carry the telltale odor of a flimsy remake, nor that of an adaptation overly beholden to its source material.  This new take on The Killer Inside Me is insolent and distinctly cinematic.  It ambles along a lurid, eccentric path on an unsettling mission: to convey both the hideous normalcy and incomprehensible disconnection of the psychopathic mind.

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Late to the Game: Sherlock Holmes

2009 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: July 11, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - Warner Brothers (2010)

Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle’s sleuth, while preserving Holmes’ spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective’s talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics.  Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director’s approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London.  However, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character.  Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason.  Still, there’s plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie’s flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer’s lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight.  Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.

This Is the End, Beautiful Friend

Toy Story 3
2010 (USA)
Director: Lee Unkrich
Viewed: June 21, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli)

I’ve previously observed that the most gleefully gratifying aspect of Pixar’s triumph over the realms of American feature animation has been the burgeoning thematic sophistication of its films, which have evolved from wholesome entertainments into nimble and sensitive works of art.  However, I’ve also long held the perhaps heretical view among Pixar aficionados that Toy Story and Toy Story 2, despite their charming qualities and seminal status in animated cinema, seem, shall we say, slighter than the later-model Pixar efforts.  The first two chapters in the saga of Woody and Buzz Lightyear are unambiguously lesser films when held alongside subsequent films.  Little in the first two Toy Story films compares to Ratatouille’s virtuoso storytelling, WALL•E’s sweeping sci-fi explorations, or Up’s adroit blending of giddy thrills and profound sorrow. For this reason, there is a rich sense of fulfillment to be had in Toy Story 3, quite apart from its inherent sensory and emotional pleasures.  Director Lee Unkrich—here taking solo helming duties for the first time—expands the scope of the studio’s most familiar franchise to encompass delicate matters such as emotional abuse, the sting of betrayal, class-based tyranny, and the specter of mortality.  Yet Toy Story 3 never loses sight of the fundamental appeal of pint-sized adventure in the perilous wilderness of suburbia, nor of the essential pathos of growing up, here handled (as always) with the utmost care.  The third chapter in the Disney / Pixar behemoth reveals itself to be the best: gorgeous, intricate, a little frightening, and shamelessly touching.

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