Lost In Translation

Joy Division

Joy Division, the documentary by Jon Savage, is a good companion piece to Control, which is essentially the fictionalized version of the same story. It has all the talking heads of people who were relevant to the rise and fall of Joy Division as well as live performances and various other artifacts.  I was surprised to see that several scenes that I thought were embellished from the film were actual occurrences, like the time that Bernard Summer hypnotized Ian Curtis to see if he had experienced any previous lives for example. The film is a more artistic rendering of the same story, but both examples are compelling in their own rights.  However, I would have to say that the documentary is probably more for serious fans, whereas the film version can be appreciated for the cinematography and dramatized aspect of the short, intense life of Ian Curtis.

Sydney Pollock R.I.P.

I must admit that I was a fan of the director and his acting.  His performance in Woody Allen's Husband and Wives stays was masterly and I think because of it, it is one of Woody's best post-Annie hall films. His films always struck me as well made and interesting, Absence of Malice was one that I used in class when I taught journalism, Tootsie, a classic comedy deserves another look, Three Days of the Condor is a classic thriller, and so on...Slate's Dana Stevens gives hims  a good send off:

Sydney Pollack's best movies tended to share this polemical element, the crossing of swords between evenly matched equals. Take, for example, an early scene in Tootsie where Pollack, playing Dustin Hoffman's beleaguered agent George Fields, gravely informs his client that "no one will work with you." Hoffman's character, the unemployable Michael Dorsey, truly is (as Fields believes) an insufferable pain in the ass, and also (as Dorsey himself insists) a brilliant actor who deserves the role of a lifetime. (The fact that Hoffman and Pollack famously butted heads during the filming of Tootsie, with Hoffman wanting to play the character for broader farce than Pollack would allow, no doubt adds to the dialogue's satisfying crackle.) "The essence to me of all good drama is argument. I can't say that either side is a thousand percent right," Pollack once said. In another interview, he elaborated: "Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument; two people in conflict that see life differently."

28 Weeks Later

I really enjoyed Danny Boyle’s breakout hit 28 Days Later the first time around. It looks like it’s becoming a franchise with 28 Months Later, which I recently saw. It picks up where the last one left off and England has been quarantined and is being rebuilt with the help from the American military, one of the commanders Idris Elba seems out of place for me since he played Stringer bell on The Wire. The always-reliable Robert Carlyle stars as one of the survivors who is haunted by an incident where he was forced to leave his wife behind as they were attacked by zombies. I don’t to give too much away but it's a clever screenplay by Alex Garland with a lot of action and suspense. There’s plenty of great cinematography and amazing locations in London.

The New Cult Canon: The Rules Of Attraction

I really liked The Rules of Attraction, in fact I liked it so much, I read the Brett Eason Ellis novel AFTER seeing it. And I liked that equally as well. Then again I liked Killing Zoe as well. The AV Club's Scott Tobias gets the best parts right, this one:

The key point is that Sean, Lauren, and Paul—and by extension, perhaps, Gen-X'ers of a certain age and social station—are solitary bodies, not accessible or knowable to the people with whom they come into contact. In the film's brightest moments, Avary puts their individual isolation in thrilling visual terms, starting with an opening sequence that introduces them at a party by following one character for a stretch, then rewinding time to focus on another. The effects are as fun to watch as a ball-and-paddle set in 3D—vomit projecting back into a drunkard's mouth, scattered pool balls zipping into their original formation, etc.—but they also give the impression of people who occupy the same space, but are fundamentally disconnected. Then there's this incredible split-screen sequence of Sean and Lauren meeting in a school hall, set to the strains of Donovan's "Colours":

And this one:

Still, cult movies are often remembered more for scenes and sequences than they are as complete works, and in the DVD age, where chapter stops isolate the highlights, The Rules Of Attraction offers plenty of re-watch value. Avary loads his screenplay with spiky bits of comedy—Sean bedding a girl by passing off a Counting Crows song as his own acoustic creation; a line about the age of consent ("Old enough to pee, old enough for me") that's shocking enough to repulse even predators like Sean and Victor; Lauren's roommate (a luscious Jessica Biel) explaining the difference between "bulimic skinny" and "anorexic skinny"—and he captures Ellis' collegiate wasteland perfectly in broad strokes, even though he misses some of the particulars. But mostly, he succeeds in finding visual solutions to a novel that peskily resists them, and the essence of Ellis' work survives intact. Ellis-haters might call this a dubious achievement, but if you can't appreciate sequences like this short-film-within-a-film about Victor's trip to Europe, I for one have no use for you:

Repentance: Constantine's Sword

I was raised Catholic, and although I don't consider myself a Catholic anymore, I found Andrew O'Heir's interview with Catholic author James Carroll in Salon (the subject of the documentary Constantine's Sword) about the history of the Catholic church fascinating. I may have to search out one of his books, and I would be interested in seeing the documentary as well. Here's the lead in:

Partway through my conversation with James Carroll about the Roman Catholic Church and its long history of religious intolerance and anti-Semitism, the former priest turned bestselling author and journalist actually pauses to give Mother Church a break. "You know, you have to be as old as I am to appreciate how much the church has changed," he says. (Carroll is 65.)

"The church I was born into, the church of Pope Pius XII, was totally on the side of war," Carroll says. "In the Cold War, the Vatican was a staunch ally of the better-red-than-dead impulse, and for the first half of the 20th century the church was consistently on the wrong side of history." (As I told Carroll, my own father, who was raised in Ireland in the 1930s, remembered the church collecting pennies for Francisco Franco, so he could carry on the fight against godless communism.)

But in the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical challenging the idea that there could ever be a just or righteous nuclear war, and for the last 40 years the Vatican has been a vocal critic of all the overseas military adventures launched by the United States. That draws Carroll's attention back to the day's news, and to his mounting sense of irritation -- and something deeper than that -- with the current pope. "I don't know why Pope Benedict doesn't make that an issue on this visit," he says, his ire audibly rising. "I don't know why he insists on celebrating George W. Bush, a man who is presiding over an outrageous, unjust war. That strikes me as totally inconsistent with the positions the Vatican takes."

Carroll is forever appointing himself the task of demanding that the church live up to its own ethical and rational standards, and forever finding it impossible. As with all true Christian martyrs, his passion is born of love. He is frequently attacked by the Catholic League and other defenders of the faith, but Carroll is no outsider. Although he left the priesthood in 1974 (he is married to novelist Alexandra Marshall and has two grown children), he is still a Catholic, still a communicant and still a weekly Mass attendee.

In his role as the peripatetic narrator of director Oren Jacoby's new documentary "Constantine's Sword," a travelogue-style film adaptation of Carroll's magisterial book of the same name, Carroll cuts a deceptively mild and scholarly figure. But the word he keeps using, in his prose, in the movie and in conversation, is a weighty one: "reckoning." Carroll believes that Christians, and especially his fellow Catholics, must come to grips with the past. They can't claim to be a force of morality and integrity until they face the church's painful history of anti-Jewish libel and persecution -- and face it in what he terms a spirit of "repentant change."

The culmination of Christian anti-Semitism, of course, arrived under the Nazis, but "Constantine's Sword," as its title may suggest, is at least as much about the Roman and medieval eras as about the Holocaust. At 96 minutes, Jacoby's film cannot accommodate all the extended digressions into history, mythology, geographical rumination and personal reminiscence that make Carroll's book (at 700-odd pages) such a rich and absorbing experience; it's more like a highlights tour of his worldview. He travels from Rome to the Rhineland, from Auschwitz to Colorado, interviewing biblical scholar Elaine Pagels, former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and megachurch pastor Ted Haggard (just before his male escort-related fall from grace), among many others.

Carroll's objects of contemplation are various and his approach is always sober and reflective. He finds the roots of anti-Semitic violence in the Emperor Constantine's sudden conversion to Christianity, which came in a vision as he was crossing a bridge over the Tiber. He visits the tomb of St. Helena, Constantine's mother, who purportedly went to the Holy Land and brought back the True Cross. He visits the medieval German towns that Crusaders purged of Jews on their way to kill Muslims in Palestine, finds a letter of warning that Jewish philosopher-turned-Catholic saint Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XII in the 1930s, and considers his own trajectory. The son of a leading conservative Cold Warrior, Carroll became an antiwar activist as a Boston University chaplain in the early 1970s. (As readers of Carroll's memoir "An American Requiem" already know, his father was an important Air Force general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.)

Along with the 2000 bestseller "Constantine's Sword" and the National Book Award-winning "An American Requiem," Carroll is the author of many other books, including "House of War," his 2006 "biography" of the Pentagon (the building where he spent much of his childhood), the 2004 "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War" and several novels. He is also a columnist for the Boston Globe, and spoke to me from his home in that city.

The Savages

I’ve been looking forward to seeing The Savages mainly because it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, who single-handedly makes any movie more entertaining. On critic used a slot for his Top films of the year with “Any movie starring PSH.” He did not disappoint as the career theater academic who joins his struggling playwright sister in taking care of their aging father who falls into dementia. Laura Linney is terrific as the sister barely getting by as a temp whose life is stagnating, especially in light of the comparison of her role as the opposite steadfast and wise Abigail Adams in the current HBO series John Adams. It also tackles a subject that is rarely looked at in films, taking care of the aged, but I think it reflect reality where offspring often settle far away from parents and the fact that fractured families sometimes create awkward situations where responsibility for the aged and infirm is hard to assign. I was a bit unnerved by the role of Gbenga Akinnagbe as Jimmy, the good-natured Nigerian caretaker at the nursing home. He has played the steely cold killer Chris Partlow on The Wire for several years. That being said he pulled it off. It was a funny, sad and ultimately entertaining film with excellent lead performances.

Into The Wild

I have to say I have heard a lot about Into The Wild, as a book and film, and wasn’t really interested in the modern day Henry Thoreau who died in the wilds of Alaska. But a friend convinced me to see the film version directed by Sean Penn. I have to admit that I was drawn and captivated by the story AND the images in the film. I guess I would even concede that the book is probably pretty entertaining given the fact that I immensely enjoyed Krakauer’s book on overzealous Mormons, Under The Banner of Heaven. I thought I ought to just check it for a little bit one night, and ended up transfixed and watching the film to its grim conclusion at 3:30 in the morning. I guess you have to be that young to make those uncompromising types of decisions that Chris McCandless made about society and his wish to escape it-that led to his death. He'll never know that type of thinking softens with time.

Wong Kar Wai WTF?

Wong Kar Wai's new American film has been getting mixed reviews and doesn't seems as strong as his early work. Slate's Dana Stevens looks at My Blueberry Nights and Grady Hendrix reevaluates Wong Kar Wai's career and suggests he's been making the same film throughout his career and I think he's onto something. For me the pinnacle was realized in his masterpiece In The Mood For Love. But 2046 and My Blueberry Nights (from what I hear) seem like surperfluous variations on the theme of longing that should have been out of his system after making films like As Tear Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angles, and Chunking Express.

Stevens says:

I've never quite gotten the point of Wong Kar-wai, a cult Chinese director over whom many do, in fact, swoon. In the Mood for Love made me covet a closet full of custom-made cheongsams and a recording of Nat King Cole singing "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," but I can't for the life of me remember anything about the story. Even so, that film had a resolute purity of tone that convinced you Wong knew exactly what he was doing. My Blueberry Nights feels much more hesitant and awkward, which may be a problem of translation (the script was co-written by Wong and crime writer Lawrence Block) or a function of Jones' first-time acting performance. There's a curious mismatch between the surface of the movie and what lies beneath it. Wong's technique is layered and detailed like a couture gown, but the story it hangs on is as generic as a seamstress's dress form.

Here's some commentary from Hendrix:

Even his collaborators were getting bored. "I feel that 2046 is unnecessary, in retrospect," Christopher Doyle said to the Guardian. "I think probably Wong Kar-Wai realized that somewhere, and that's why it took so long. You do realize that you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say more? I think you have to move on."

But Wong couldn't move on. He had always been fascinated with his childhood in 1960s Shanghai and Hong Kong, and his post-2000 work has been an extension of Days of Being Wild—replicating its cinematography, sets, costume design, and characters. His latest, My Blueberry Nights, is set in contemporary America and should have been a new direction. But it comes off as desperate, playing like a greatest-hits version of his '90s filmography performed by an all-white cover band. His visual motifs of clocks and countertops, no longer carrying the shock of the new, feel as empty and shopworn as fashion advertisements.

David Simon Film References

(SPOILER ALERT SEASON 5 OF THE WIRE)

After the last episode of The Wire there were multiple interviews with David Simon and I noticed that he referred to several classic films when discussing ideas that he incorporated into the show. For example, in the second to last episode where Omar gets shot by Kennard, the little shorty from the corner, was supposedly inspired by Sam Peckinpa’s The Wild Bunch, which I had never seen in its entirety. So I checked it out to see if the cultural references were there. The opening sequence where a group of kids put scorpions in a red ant nest and watch the carnage easily informs the beginning of the Wire episode where Kennard and some other kids are torturing a cat. One of the Wild Bunch's feared killers is killed from behind by a lesser character a child, but it’s not clear that I was the child who killed him or one of he other soldiers who shot from behind. He also mentions the idea that not all heroes are not all good, and this goes back to watching Kelly’s Heroes (which was also an inspiration for the brilliant Three Kings) with his sons who realizes that the good guys are doing something, robbing a bank that isn’t good. This is something the cops and politicians do all the time on The Wire. Somehow I missed these earlier cultural touchstones, but I found both of them entertaining in their own right as well.

Herzog and Morris

The Believer March/April edition has an interesting free interview with directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris:

WERNER HERZOG[FILMMAKER]

IN CONVERSATION WITH

ERROL MORRIS[DOCUMENTARIAN]

“FOR YOU TO STEAL A CHARACTER OR A STORY ISN’T REAL THEFT.
BUT TO STEAL A LANDSCAPE, THAT IS A VERY, VERY SERIOUS CRIME.”

Things Werner Herzog and Errol Morris have done together:
Visited serial killer Ed Kemper in prison
Visited Plainfield, Wisconsin, to investigate the murderer Ed Gein
Dug up Ed Gein’s mother’s grave to see if she was still there (almost)