Here’s that Rainy Day: a near-masterpiece

Under the weather: Elle Fanning and Jude Law in A Rainy Day in New York

I already knew Elle Fanning was a good actress long before I finally settled in to watch – over Valentine’s Day weekend, no less – Woody Allen’s utterly marvelous and unconscionably delayed film, A Rainy Day in New York, a work that in a sane world would be cause for delight rather than (Trumped-up) controversy. I’ll get around eventually to my disdain and contempt for how an unholy troika of Farrows (Dylan, Mia, Ronan) exploited and trashed the Me, Too movement as a vehicle for their lies and propaganda, but in the meanwhile – and ultimately, forever – there’s the movie itself and its soul-stirring, wryly amusing, ruefully well observed virtues. Although Allen paid homage to Fellini’s great early film The White Sheik within a segment of his clever omnibus To Rome With Love, here he devotes an entire canvas to similar themes of seduction via the movies.

Irrational Man

When Woody Allen outstretches his hand in the direction of irony, his filmmaking goes fatally, abysmally wrong. In the dreadful You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a failed novelist played by Josh Brolin steals a manuscript by an unknown first-time author presumed to be deceased, presents the work as his own, and then learns, as the novel has gone to press, that the supposedly dead writer in fact lies comatose, with an excellent chance for complete recovery. William Sydney Porter might have blushed at the coy cheapness, yet Allen handled the twists and turns with an economy of movement, a glide. In Stranger, however, the stolen novel was but one thread in a movie with at least three narratives overlapping. In Irrational Man, a philosophy professor embarks on murder as a pastime, and the film, which has no distractions from its central story, proceeds at a glacial pace through the inspiration for killing, the extensive plotting from preparations to stalking the victim, and the equally extensive unraveling of the jaded academic’s “perfect” crime.

Irrational Man belongs to the genus of Allen films where one finds Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the deplorable Scoop, and the aforementioned Tall Dark Stranger, as well as such debacles from the 1990s as Celebrity, Sweet & Lowdown, Shadows & Fog, and the positively grating Mighty Aphrodite: that is to say, at the very bottom of the trash heap. Even so, until Irrational Man, I would never have described an Allen film as boring. But this one bores: it is monotonous and one-note throughout, a fault exemplified by the director’s incessant soundtrack cues to Ramsey Lewis’s distastefully jivey misinterpretation of the gospel anthem “Wade in the Water.” What exactly, in Allen’s mind, links an African-American spiritual to a scenario of a desperately overweight white man committing homicide? And I’ve also never heard the word “Bullshit!” bandied about so freely in an Allen film – it’s as if the actors were expressing their true feelings about his script.

Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Irrational Man (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)

Even more damning than all of the above, Irrational Man revives Allen’s use of voice-over: Voice-over that explains every single, solitary thing in front of our eyes. This technique completely killed Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a movie that might have skirted by on the charms of Bardem, Cruz, the scenery were it not for Christopher Evan Welch’s booming baritone gunning everything down. Zak Orth did the same for the much lesser You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, leaving almost no breathing room amidst its squalid vignettes of contemporary London. (That said, a few of the actors did good work: Gemma Jones succeeded at creating a thoroughly and believably annoying eccentric mother, especially in the scene where her daughter berates her, yet Jones holds fast to her quixotic beliefs; Anna Friel had a momentarily invigorating cameo as a struggling painter about to hit it big and the underused Pauline Collins a pleasant one as a cheerful psychic.)

Our media culture learned nothing from Aurora

In the small hours of the morning that the Jonah Lehrer scandal broke, I had devoted a little time in crafting a letter to the editor of The New Yorker magazine re the Aurora, Colorado multiplex massacre. My letter went unpublished. Possibly, it went unread altogether, given the excitement inherent to the Lehrer saga. Once again, a major publication had hired a haircut in drag as a man. Naturally, the bold and unflinching cannot hope to compete with that.

Over the past two weeks, however, the story of the Aurora shootings has receded from public purview awfully fast. The story goes on—and will go on—for the injured. The industry apologists, the herd mentality do-nothings, the mewling press screening junkies, who kept sweeping away any possible interpretation of media culpability for the killings, appear to have won another round for their status quo.

So, then, here’s what I had to say to Messrs. Remnick, Denby, and company:

Letter to the Editor, The New Yorker

Regarding David Denby’s essay, “The Massacre in Aurora: Can You Blame the Movies?” the answer to his rhetorical question is overwhelmingly yes. One can, one may; one should.

The author writes: “But when I talked to some very smart young friends about it, the … perverse cruelty was exactly what they thought was cool. For them, the dissociation from emotion freed an aesthetic response to extreme acts, to beauty.” One wishes to suggest to Mr. Denby that these “very smart young friends” are not nearly as savvy as he allows himself to imagine. The very reliance on disassociated thrill-seeking as an acceptable reaction to gratuitous violence on-screen (indeed, as the only response conceivable to these callous young people), of viewing simulated violent acts solely in terms of aesthetics, pretty much betrays intellectual failure and a total lack of emotional intelligence. In other words, their hipster viewpoint is a cop-out.

Four summers ago when I panned The Dark Knight, one of the chief shortcomings of the movie, it seemed perfectly plain, was that the violence on incessant display connected to nothing. Christopher Nolan’s endless acts of death and terrorism were presented blandly—without a sense of horror or outrage, let alone grief. The bombs detonate, the buildings combust, the triggers pull, and what are we, gathered there in the dark, expected to think or feel? Are we afraid? No. Angry? No. Empathy? Definitely not. Or how about a sense of triumph? No, not that either. And with the possible exception of The Joker “making a pencil disappear” in an early scene, none of The Dark Knight’s assembly line sadism seemed to be geared for snickering guffaws.

So Nolan denies us laughter, horror, fear, sadness, pity—more or less the entire spectrum of what even lovers of trash might want to have evoked for them. What then is the desired response?

The Dark Knight amounted to a peculiarly bad kind of porno film, a porno film that

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Overall, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives doesn’t surpass his previous work, the near-masterpiece Syndromes and a Century. The problems that cropped up in the second half of Syndromes are here as well. In both movies, the writer-director leaves a hazy, rural district behind for contemporary urban settings. The cinematic heart so prevalent in country life yields to the filmmaker’s less than original observation that modern life is shallow and enervated. Weerasethakul needs to move beyond this, because it hobbles him as an artist and leaves you/me/us empty and cold at the end of his work—when we should still be privy to the elation in which he earlier held us tight.

In Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul exercises his shaman-like gift for enveloping us in a dream-state further than he has before. The ease with which the director gets the viewer to accept a ghost wife keeping company her very much alive husband (draining his diseased kidney and dressing the wound, while placidly answering his questions re the afterlife) narcotizes the right audiences who are intellectually, spiritually hungry for someone’s—anyone’s—insight into where our essence goes when the body’s thrown away, and so it’s with resentment that

Savaging two Colin Firth movies for the price of . . .

Why I've avoided The King's Speech. Until now.

More than a year after seeing it, I remain so thoroughly appalled by the memory of Tom Ford’s gay victimhood hatchet job on the Isherwood novella A Single Man that I cannot forgive Colin Firth for his participation in the Ford debacle. As the lead actor, Firth ought to have had acquaintance enough with the source material to raise objections to Ford’s gutting of the author’s intent. Firth, however, went along for the whitewash.

Let’s see if I can remember, without recourse to the notes I took for an unwritten review, some of the reasons why A Single Man stood not only as the most loathsome movie of 2009, but very likely as the most incompetent literary adaptation of all-time.

To begin with, as I finished reading the book the night before I attended a press screening, I thought, “This is unfilmable.” Isherwood’s interior creation would require someone with a powerful visual imagination—or perhaps a radio dramatist—to translate the work from the mind to the collective experience. It seemed unlikely that a fashion plate turned first-time filmmaker would have such dexterity, yet as long as Ford was faithful to the events of the novella, the movie might still be sufficiently compelling. Except that Ford wasn’t faithful at all. He cheapened and degraded and trashed Isherwood, emptying the book of any idea or recognizable human feeling that it contained. Ford’s Single Man opined for the era of televised cigarette commercials; it comported itself with all the gusto of soft-core gay porn, a dumbing-down for well-dressed illiterates with a hard-on for their own consumerism.

Isherwood’s novella had two Asian characters. Surely there were at least two Asian Americans in southern California of the early 1960s. Ford omitted one of these and cast a blonde white as the other. He did away with most of the work’s site specificity and eliminated all of the novelist’s environmental concerns that related to a constantly expanding Los Angeles. (George, the protagonist, mourned the loss of the landscape to sub-divisions; Ford, one senses, would have gone out for drinks with the developers.) The novice writer-director turned Isherwood’s meticulously drawn, deliberately ambiguous supporting character Kenny into a totally obvious fag in angora. At the end of the book, George, played in the film by the overrated Colin Firth, dies in his sleep sans warning. Ford grafted onto the narrative an insulting deus ex machina in which George carried around a revolver all day, intent on committing suicide, but then perishes of a heart attack ere he can squeeze the trigger. Whew, the audience didn’t have to think for itself! If Ford’s liberties with the text weren’t straight out of the Donald Kaufman School of Acme Screenwriting, then what would’ve been?

Even more offensive than all of the above, however, was

Cinco de Mayo at the Robischon Gallery

Yours truly attended Wednesday’s opening reception at the Robischon on Wazee for DAM Contemporaries’ Summer Salon series. The galleries were overflowing with revelers, the wines were exquisite, and the gourmet nibbles, particularly the expertly disguised tempeh-circulars in piping hot marinara, were well worth several trips to the buffet table. Denver style being what it is, I was the best-dressed man there, at least from the socks down, in my LL Bean Indigo Aspens.

As for the art, since all of it was contemporary, most of the work on display was quite bad. The paintings managed to be undistinguished; the photogs, however, were memorable, even if for less than stellar reasons.

Best of the lot was Bill Armstrong’s Blue Sphere series, a quartet of soft/cool C-prints influenced by Kandinsky’s “spiritual color theory,” according to Mr. Armstrong’s notes. David Sharpe’s trio of pinhole blow-ups Eastern Phenomena also gave the eyes and the mind something to dwell on. These wide-screen canvases (42 x 63 in.) were, naturally, dimmed around the perimeters, lending his panoramas of East Colorado landscapes (migrant workers facing the viewer in one, unattended parasols by a lake in another) an uncertain sensation of peering through slowly focusing binoculars.

And the worst? Hands down, Li Wei’s paean to the global fixation on “stupide,” a set of self-portraits in which the artist depicts himself being decapitated in various ways. China, I think, is pretty much dead at this point, vis-à-vis the visual arts, as anyone who read my ACAF ’08 write-up won’t be surprised to learn.

Still, despite the lack of anything Mexican, ‘twas a nice whiling away of a twilit Cinco de Mayo. — NPT

May 7, 2010

Redacted from Salon‘s Oscar coverage

My ultra-brief tenure at Salon.com came to a screeching halt with the non-publication of this, my third and final short piece for the play-it-safe-unless-it’s-vulgar online rag. I didn’t bother to watch the Academy Awards ceremony (I haven’t for several years), yet when Andrew O’Hehir asked the correspondents of “Film Salon” to chime in with their respective 2 cents, I penned the following. The timid O’Hehir refused to run my commentary, preferring instead a collage of totally unmemorable opinions, none of which have stood the test of time. Shortly thereafter, the democratic atmosphere of “Film Salon” bit the dust. Instead of being home to divergent voices, it became the near-exclusive enclave of O’Hehir and his hamfisted-buffoon-in-arms, the much beloved (though not terribly perceptive or eloquent) Matt Zoller Seitz. Leaving aside — for the nonce — how being a popular critic amounts to being no critic at all — here is what the rest of you were denied the opportunity to read:

Suggested headline: After party turns deadly when Streep whacks Bullock with a French silk.

No, but seriously, Andrew, the best picture win by Hurt Locker feels as though it were decreed by our betters at Halliburton, as a means of conditioning sheep-like Americans into acceptance of an endless state of war as the new “norm.” Obama hasn’t and won’t do anything to right the wrongs of the Cheney/Bush legacy he inherited; the Republican who’ll be elected President in 2012 won’t either. This anointing of the apolitcal Hurt Locker, a movie essentially about guys just doing their jobs, thus indicates the futility of questioning why — why, why, why those jobs need to be done in the first place. In laymen-speak, it’s about keeping the U.S. economy permanently crippled, stupid, while the patriotic myth that our military keeps America “safe” waxes mindlessly, senselessly on. Ask anybody who’s ineligible for unemployment benefits how safe he or she feels knowing that our boys are blowing stuff up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the capacious topic of mindlessness, Academy members who voted for the reptilian-faced Republi-sweetie Sandra Bullock were more or less voting for her cleavage. It would have been nice to see Streep win, and to win for a comedy, no less. Sandy, at least, ought to have had the good taste to remember John Simon in her acceptance speech. Without his praise for her off-Broadway endeavors 22 years ago, she might still—deservedly—be waiting tables. — NPT

March 8, 2010

Noted briefly: Oscar noms

Given that our nation’s critics (almost all of whom are center-right in their reacting) failed to champion Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, and Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, it is scarcely a wonder that the three most engaging films of ‘09 were Oscar shut-outs (save for Imaginarium’s nods in costume design and art direction). Demetri Martin, Larry David, and Christopher Plummer all should be in the running for Best Actor, instead of the current crop of granite-faced milquetoasts thrust on parade.

Continue reading at Salon.

Films of the decade: The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Several of the decade’s most beguiling cinematic risk-takers flew well under the radar. Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated, warmly received in its native Britain, has yet to cross the Atlantic, although the writer-director’s perceptive gaze at a mature woman’s summertime fancy toward a young hedonist has “art-house hit!” stamped all over its passport. Other expectation-defying films were openly jeered (Spike Lee’s She Hate Me, Woody Allen’s Anything Else) or held captive by archaic copyright laws (Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues).

But of all the masterworks denied their rightful place in the noonday sun of mainstream recognition, the one dearest to me is Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose.

Continue reading at Salon.

Zero would be more like it: Notes on Nine and Broken Embraces

What makes Rob Marshall’s Nine so peculiarly bad is its sheer self-congratulation. We’re incessantly told how important, how fascinating the director Guido Contini must be, and we as viewers are expected to take this on faith, but never once does Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) do or say anything even remotely intriguing. The movie has no real subject; it’s proudly about nothing. Not the arid nothingness of a Van Sant movie, but a boring sort of Condé Nast nothingness. If the real-life Federico Fellini had been as dull and as mopey as his fictional counterpart Contini, no one would have ever staged a Broadway musical [loosely] inspired by the autobiographical 8-1/2 in the first place, which means we could have been spared this present debacle that masquerades as entertainment.

Day-Lewis gamely tries to personify a song-and-dance man, yet his integrity as a performer works against him in a Rob Marshall movie. When Day-Lewis, in his first solo number, climbs the spiraling soundstage staircase that rises into the dark, it ought to be an iconic moment, but there’s magic neither in Marshall’s airless staging nor in his unimaginative camera work.

But back to that nothingness: It’s vitally important to Nine, because that’s all there is.

Continue reading at Slant.