films

Jim Hoberman on Film After Film

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Attended an interesting lecture tonight at the SVA theatre on 23rd Street:

J. HOBERMAN
Rounding the Digital Turn: CGI, Cyborg Cinema, and the New Realness
Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 7 pm

Cinema was the universal culture of the 20th century. But that was then, before Jurassic Park and The Matrix, not to mention videogames, digitally projected gallery installations, and YouTube. Is the cinema, as we knew it (or thought we did) over, or has it only suffered a narcissistic wound? Film critic and author J. Hoberman discusses some of the issues raised in his new book Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?

Hoberman discussed how digital developments took us on a different "turn" from André Bazin's idea of "total cinema" (all-encompassing, real, objective) into what is now predominantly animation, a completely different, highly artificial art form.

Yet he gave many paradoxical examples of how the "real" of film is still represented in these mechanized fantasies:

--In Avalon, animated video games are made more tangible through the use of live actors filmed with grainy, monochrome stock. The final level of game reality, which the plot has been leading up to, gives us ordinary color, stereo sound, un-treated footage of the actors walking around the streets of a contemporary city.

--The only non-CGI element in Wall-E is a clip from a conventional film (Hello Dolly!).

--After three hours of exposed artifice and stagecraft, shot digitally, Dogville climaxes with a credit-sequence montage of documentary, objective (very grim) photographs of America during the 1930s Depression.

During the Q&A afterward I asked him if he had seen the director's roundtable on YouTube where Quentin Tarantino announced the imminent end of his moviemaking because "this digital shit wasn't what I signed on for." (Or words to that effect.) Hoberman hadn't seen the clip but reminded us that this great lover of conventional cinema got his education in a video store watching hundreds of tapes of old movies.

three movies we won't be seeing, ever:

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Lincoln - in this biopic, miserable hack director Steven Spielberg, who yearns for respectability so badly it's killing him, misrepresents Abraham Lincoln as the first Hollywood liberal.

Django Unchained - one slave's payback is a pitiful feelgood substitute for a depiction of a general revolt, but any such depiction would have to show the resulting retaliatory massacre to be the least bit historically plausible, and that's just too grim for a movie.

Zero Dark Thirty - torture or no torture, an exciting suspense film celebrating extrajudicial murder is not a great idea. The "hit" punished a crime that had a zillion lingering questions instantly put to bed when the snuffing took place.

new Roadside Picnic translation; Stalker compared

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Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's science fiction novel Roadside Picnic resurfaced last year in a new English translation. Highly recommended -- it's a much smoother read than the 1970s version's probably more literal transcription from the original Russian. If you haven't read either, the plot centers on a mysterious region of earth called The Zone, left behind after a visit by extraterrestrials who never communicated with us except by means of the junk they left behind, which one scientist hypothesizes might be the refuse of the titular "picnic" -- meaningless to the aliens but profound to us ants. "Stalkers" are humans who go into the Zone and comb through the aliens' garbage, which is full of lethal traps. Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker was loosely adapted from the book.

Some of the new translation's ease of reading comes from replacing '70s slang with current idioms (no one said "he was checking her out" back then, not that we really needed that) but there is also a conscious attempt to streamline the prose. What's missing is a certain poetry/difficulty/awkwardness that contributed to the feeling that you were reading a novel from a truly foreign culture, with different mores and certainly a different political system. The Strugatskys wrote the book as if it took place in the West (possibly the Pacific Northwest, either in the US or Canada) but its intrusive and bumbling bureaucrats seem very "Soviet" -- less so in the current version but the taint is still there. As for the missing poetry, for example, "mosquito mange" is now "bug trap." It's a much clearer and more accurate mental image of the phenomenon the Strugatskys describe -- invisible "graviconcentrates" that cause a body or thrown object in the Zone to move (or even be held in place) in a manner contrary to physical laws, as opposed to a parasite-borne skin disease -- but part of the pleasure of the original translation was wrapping your mind around strange phrases that correlated (or didn't) to unearthly phenomena beyond your comprehension.

That's what the book is about, and it's already suffered one major misinterpretation in Tarkovsky's film, or rather, self-misinterpretation, since the Strugatskys wrote that film's screenplay, several years after their book. Tarkovsky treats the novel as a religious allegory (and later claimed that the only thing the film had in common with the book were the terms "Zone" and Stalker") whereas the book is having none of that. What happens in the book's Zone -- a blighted area oddly prescient of the landscape around Chernobyl, filled with those eldritch artifacts -- may be strange but it's not subjective based on one's degree of religious belief, as it is in Tarkovsky's ambiguous film. The reader is veritably assaulted throughout the book with the objects, effects, and aftereffects of the Zone, described in minute detail. These range from benevolent technologies that the stalkers pull out at great personal risk, such as perpetual batteries, to highly dangerous products such as "hell slime" and "heat lamps," sought by criminals and unscrupulous governments, to behavioral horrors such as the mutant children of stalkers, the revived corpses from cemeteries near the Zone, or the epidemic of lethal bad luck that follows people who live too near the alien visitation area and later emigrate to other cities. The book asks how much we would change as humans in response to so much mystery and horror, or even what it means to be human when the Zone has seemingly limitless potential to transform us into something else.

Tarkovsky had no special effects budget (or desire to use them) so the "alien-ness" of the film's Zone is suggested with eerie synthesizer music and close-cropped shots of an exotically dilapidated, post-industrial landscape in the former Soviet Union. Nothing much happens in the movie, and our fear of the Zone is mostly a matter of pregnant silences and the lugubrious Stalker informing us how dangerous it all is. The movie has a "surprise" ending that tells us the Zone is real, which it greatly needed after two hours of watching three middle-aged men stumbling around the woods and confessing their anxieties. The movie's big payoff -- entering "the room" where supposedly any wish is granted -- is an anticlimactic shaggy dog tale. The movie even has a dog wandering around the Zone that accompanies the Stalker back to his squalid apartment (whereas animals in the book's Zone tend to be crushed flat). The movie exudes atmosphere and its sound and cinematography are stunning but -- let's say it -- it's no Roadside Picnic.

we hated tony scott's films

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Made some mean tweets after ultra-crap director Tony Scott did himself in, but they didn't seem as cruel after I found the mother lode of justified Scott hate.

Eileen Jones:

The heinous film that made Scott an A-list Hollywood director, Top Gun, helped define that truly, mindlessly despicable era of 1980s American culture. For the rest of his life, Tony Scott proudly wore the red baseball cap he’d donned while shooting Top Gun, till it turned pink and ratty with age atop his bald head.

Commenter thomzas (same link):

In both Man on Fire and The Last Boy Scout the broken man has to kill as many people as possible to gain acceptance from the family unit. Typical action stuff maybe, but the docile smiles the mother and daughter wear at the end of Boy Scout are like something out [of] Jonestown.

Man on Fire was [a] fucking nasty piece of work. A man regaining his self respect through torture and bloodletting, with Christopher Walken (as Tony) telling us it’s all for a righteous cause. It’s like the morons who wholeheartedly cheer on Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver have made the film they really wanted to see.

Commenter CensusLouie (same link):

Enemy of the State: Someone took a look at The Conversation and decided it needed more Will Smith. WHY, Gene Hackman!

[...]

Man on Fire: Anyone who says this was a good movie needs to watch the subtitle scenes again. Those things would embarrass a music video director.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEJ7AjQnfbc

netflix normalizing again

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Blurb written by Netflix:

Calendar
1993
Atom Egoyan directs and stars in this painfully honest account of an Armenian photographer's search for love in spite of himself. His marriage in tatters, he starts dating again, but can't quite jump in with both feet, and his heart, first. With every date, he puts the women through the paces, asking them to make sexually charged phone calls to others. When he finally meets his match, his ex suddenly comes back into the already murky picture.

A commenter's correction:

Netflix's review of this film seems off (they tend to 'normalize' some films in their reviews): The spurned husband doesn't start dating again but rather hires actresses to portray woman similiar to his wife in an apparent attempt to come to grips with her leaving and how she left. It's much more interesting than just dating! This is a simple, droll, and very thoughtful film about the subtle break-up of a long-term relationship of a couple played by Egoyan and his wife and collaborator, Arsinee Khanjian.