(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)
Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.
There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”
This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.
So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.
If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.
This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.
Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.
One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.
Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.
I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.
(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)
Showing posts with label the arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the arts. Show all posts
Sunday, February 08, 2015
Sunday, February 01, 2015
ON TO OSCAR, 3.
American Sniper. As I suspected, the political obsessives were watching, through their Zhdanovite lenses, a very different movie than the one I saw, which is both more interesting and weirder than what they describe.
Chris Kyle is a good Christian Texan whose father taught him to shoot and that the world is made up of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (basically a more Christian version of the dicks-pussies-and-assholes analogy from Team America: World Police). Kyle internalizes the lesson, including the contempt for both sheep and wolves contained in it; when U.S. embassies are blown up in 1998, he quits his fun but purposeless cowboy life to sign up with the Navy Seals (yeah, it does seem weird; Eastwood rushes through it); Nineeleven finally sends Kyle into combat in Iraq, where in the ruins of the cities he more or less gives up on sheep entirely and just tries to kill Iraqis who are trying to kill his fellow sheepdogs. Oh, in between '98 and '01, he meets a lady who likes him, marries her, and gets her pregnant (don't worry, I'm not eliding many grace notes there).
This all happens very quickly, bookended by a flashback from Kyle's first kills: First a child, then a woman try, surreptitiously at first, to blow up his comrades. Kyle takes them out from a rooftop. Another SEAL tells him as he prepares to fire that if he's wrong he'll get his ass thrown in Leavenworth; but he's not wrong, he saves his men and his illustrious career as a sniper and (this word gets thrown around enough to become loaded) "legend" is launched.
This first part of the movie teaches us everything we're going to learn about Kyle -- that he's capable of intense focus, charming when he wants to be, believes in what he's doing and isn't afraid to say so. In other words, he's like a Clint Eastwood hero, except for one thing: No sense of humor. He does have some mildly funny lines, but nothing on the order of "make my day" or "there are two kinds of people -- those with loaded guns and those who dig." There's no irony to him, nor the reflectiveness than gives a man irony. He does what he does, and never questions himself for a minute.
And that's why, throughout the remainder of the film, Kyle doesn't see a lot of things that Eastwood makes very obvious and that even other servicemen, even his own brother, are able to see: That they're only defending each other, and Kyle is only killing so many people in defense of them, because they insist on coming back, over and over again, to a place where no one seems to want them. He also can't tell that he's suffering from massive PTSD attacks (and by the way, I don't think anyone's shown transient mental illness better than Eastwood does here). I'm not even sure that, when he begins his mercy missions among wounded warriors near the end, Kyle knows what happened to him. And he gives no indication that he's expecting what's going to happen to him at the end.
Once that first section is over with, the movie gets really weird. A seminarian turned SEAL reveals to Kyle that he's lost faith in his God and this war; later, when he's killed in an ambush, his mother reads his anguished letter about the war aloud at his funeral -- it's barely coherent, as his mother is breaking down with emotion; later, Kyle, apparently in the midst of another stress attack (and therefore pretty much devoid of emotion) says it was actually the letter that killed his comrade. Then there's the scene where Kyle calls his wife on the phone from the middle of a firefight -- a firefight he caused because, against orders, he had to take a magic mile-long shot to kill his nemesis, which alerts all the local jihadis to the squad's presence -- and tells her tearfully that he's ready to come home. When he does get home he sits in a bar watching a basketball game; his wife calls and he tells her, "I just need a minute."
And there's the scene where Kyle's goading a severely disabled vet, in the easy, friendly way he goaded his own comrades back in the field, to get his shots to hit a target. The goading works; "I feel like I got my balls back," says the vet. He keeps making shots, and gives Kyle a look that doesn't seem entirely friendly. "Who's the legend now?" the vet tells him.
But the legend is Kyle, of course; as the credits begin we see archival footage of the real Kyle's coffin borne along the Texas highway, lined with people saluting and waving flags. They see things the way Kyle did. Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs; do what you have to do and don't cry about it. Eastwood knows his Ford, and what Ford said about what to do when the legend becomes fact. I'm not shocked the movie's such a hit.
Chris Kyle is a good Christian Texan whose father taught him to shoot and that the world is made up of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (basically a more Christian version of the dicks-pussies-and-assholes analogy from Team America: World Police). Kyle internalizes the lesson, including the contempt for both sheep and wolves contained in it; when U.S. embassies are blown up in 1998, he quits his fun but purposeless cowboy life to sign up with the Navy Seals (yeah, it does seem weird; Eastwood rushes through it); Nineeleven finally sends Kyle into combat in Iraq, where in the ruins of the cities he more or less gives up on sheep entirely and just tries to kill Iraqis who are trying to kill his fellow sheepdogs. Oh, in between '98 and '01, he meets a lady who likes him, marries her, and gets her pregnant (don't worry, I'm not eliding many grace notes there).
This all happens very quickly, bookended by a flashback from Kyle's first kills: First a child, then a woman try, surreptitiously at first, to blow up his comrades. Kyle takes them out from a rooftop. Another SEAL tells him as he prepares to fire that if he's wrong he'll get his ass thrown in Leavenworth; but he's not wrong, he saves his men and his illustrious career as a sniper and (this word gets thrown around enough to become loaded) "legend" is launched.
This first part of the movie teaches us everything we're going to learn about Kyle -- that he's capable of intense focus, charming when he wants to be, believes in what he's doing and isn't afraid to say so. In other words, he's like a Clint Eastwood hero, except for one thing: No sense of humor. He does have some mildly funny lines, but nothing on the order of "make my day" or "there are two kinds of people -- those with loaded guns and those who dig." There's no irony to him, nor the reflectiveness than gives a man irony. He does what he does, and never questions himself for a minute.
And that's why, throughout the remainder of the film, Kyle doesn't see a lot of things that Eastwood makes very obvious and that even other servicemen, even his own brother, are able to see: That they're only defending each other, and Kyle is only killing so many people in defense of them, because they insist on coming back, over and over again, to a place where no one seems to want them. He also can't tell that he's suffering from massive PTSD attacks (and by the way, I don't think anyone's shown transient mental illness better than Eastwood does here). I'm not even sure that, when he begins his mercy missions among wounded warriors near the end, Kyle knows what happened to him. And he gives no indication that he's expecting what's going to happen to him at the end.
Once that first section is over with, the movie gets really weird. A seminarian turned SEAL reveals to Kyle that he's lost faith in his God and this war; later, when he's killed in an ambush, his mother reads his anguished letter about the war aloud at his funeral -- it's barely coherent, as his mother is breaking down with emotion; later, Kyle, apparently in the midst of another stress attack (and therefore pretty much devoid of emotion) says it was actually the letter that killed his comrade. Then there's the scene where Kyle calls his wife on the phone from the middle of a firefight -- a firefight he caused because, against orders, he had to take a magic mile-long shot to kill his nemesis, which alerts all the local jihadis to the squad's presence -- and tells her tearfully that he's ready to come home. When he does get home he sits in a bar watching a basketball game; his wife calls and he tells her, "I just need a minute."
And there's the scene where Kyle's goading a severely disabled vet, in the easy, friendly way he goaded his own comrades back in the field, to get his shots to hit a target. The goading works; "I feel like I got my balls back," says the vet. He keeps making shots, and gives Kyle a look that doesn't seem entirely friendly. "Who's the legend now?" the vet tells him.
But the legend is Kyle, of course; as the credits begin we see archival footage of the real Kyle's coffin borne along the Texas highway, lined with people saluting and waving flags. They see things the way Kyle did. Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs; do what you have to do and don't cry about it. Eastwood knows his Ford, and what Ford said about what to do when the legend becomes fact. I'm not shocked the movie's such a hit.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
ON TO OSCAR, 2.
Birdman. At first I wondered why Iñárritu was sticking all that magic realism into a perfectly good New York backstage drama. It made me suspicious; maybe, I thought, he just didn’t want it to be All About Eve all over again, and that’s why he gave the central character, Riggan, washed-up former star of an old superhero franchise, the superhero himself as an alter-ego who spurs him to narcissistic fantasies and then (spoiler) destruction — you know, the way Jimmy Cagney told Raoul Walsh, when they were trying to figure a way to make Cody the gangster in White Heat more interesting, “Why not make him nuts?”
Still, White Heat’s a pretty great movie.
There is something old-fashioned and melodramatic about the Birdman Broadway plot: Riggan has put himself in hock to finance his stage adaptation of Raymond Carver stories (hello Room Service!) and it’s a mess (hello The Bandwagon!); he loses an actor during tech week, but rejoices when a young phenom steps in (hello 42nd Street!), only to find that the phenom is a total snake-in-the-grass asshole (hello Eve Harrington!).
Of course Iñárritu’s mise en scène is a little more, um, ambitious than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, and the main thing about Emmanuel Lubezki’s holy-wow camerawork isn’t the single-take illusion (though that helps with the paranoid-schizo vibe) but how grubby he makes everything look, from the backstage tunnels to the canyons of Manhattan — I don’t think there’s a clean surface in the movie until we get to the hospital. And the story itself has some very contemporary modifications beyond the Birdman bit, like Riggan’s tough relationship with his daughter who’s just out of rehab. Still, there’s enough razzle-dazzle in the dialogue that even the scene that (spoiler I guess) ends in a Sapphic embrace plays like something from Out of The Frying Pan (“Why don’t I have any self-respect?” “You’re an actress, honey”).
So why the weird stuff? Well, I think it’s like this: Riggan isn’t happy. But it’s not because he’s about to lose his shirt. No, it’s because he’s doing what actors do — but unsuccessfully, aimlessly, because he doesn’t really believe in it. (The play looks awful, and his why-Carver explanation is just ridiculous.) When the phenom starts throwing around actorly shit about “truth,” it drives Riggan crazy — particularly when it works on his daughter — because he knows he’s not coming up to scratch on that score and he thinks he should be. But the truth the phenom's talking about is limited, it’s grubby and narrow and circles in on itself. And the costumed superhero is coming around because Riggan is realizing he prefers something else — and, despite what we might have assumed if the movie didn’t show us different, it isn’t his old tattered stardom. It’s magic. Even when no one else sees it, even when it’s insane, he has it. And with that he can fly. We see him fly.
We don’t see him fall. Does he fall? But with that question the movie, and all its tunnels and circles, is over.
Bonus spoiler: I don’t know if it means anything but I have this in my notes: He shoots off his nose to spite his fate.
Still, White Heat’s a pretty great movie.
There is something old-fashioned and melodramatic about the Birdman Broadway plot: Riggan has put himself in hock to finance his stage adaptation of Raymond Carver stories (hello Room Service!) and it’s a mess (hello The Bandwagon!); he loses an actor during tech week, but rejoices when a young phenom steps in (hello 42nd Street!), only to find that the phenom is a total snake-in-the-grass asshole (hello Eve Harrington!).
Of course Iñárritu’s mise en scène is a little more, um, ambitious than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, and the main thing about Emmanuel Lubezki’s holy-wow camerawork isn’t the single-take illusion (though that helps with the paranoid-schizo vibe) but how grubby he makes everything look, from the backstage tunnels to the canyons of Manhattan — I don’t think there’s a clean surface in the movie until we get to the hospital. And the story itself has some very contemporary modifications beyond the Birdman bit, like Riggan’s tough relationship with his daughter who’s just out of rehab. Still, there’s enough razzle-dazzle in the dialogue that even the scene that (spoiler I guess) ends in a Sapphic embrace plays like something from Out of The Frying Pan (“Why don’t I have any self-respect?” “You’re an actress, honey”).
So why the weird stuff? Well, I think it’s like this: Riggan isn’t happy. But it’s not because he’s about to lose his shirt. No, it’s because he’s doing what actors do — but unsuccessfully, aimlessly, because he doesn’t really believe in it. (The play looks awful, and his why-Carver explanation is just ridiculous.) When the phenom starts throwing around actorly shit about “truth,” it drives Riggan crazy — particularly when it works on his daughter — because he knows he’s not coming up to scratch on that score and he thinks he should be. But the truth the phenom's talking about is limited, it’s grubby and narrow and circles in on itself. And the costumed superhero is coming around because Riggan is realizing he prefers something else — and, despite what we might have assumed if the movie didn’t show us different, it isn’t his old tattered stardom. It’s magic. Even when no one else sees it, even when it’s insane, he has it. And with that he can fly. We see him fly.
We don’t see him fall. Does he fall? But with that question the movie, and all its tunnels and circles, is over.
Bonus spoiler: I don’t know if it means anything but I have this in my notes: He shoots off his nose to spite his fate.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
ZHDANOV'S CHILDREN.
I like Clint Eastwood movies, therefore I want to see American Sniper, therefore I hope it's good. But I have to say, the political ravings about the movie are pretty annoying. Like a lot of people, I thought Dennis Jett's review based on the trailer at New Republic was stupid; but, as I've pointed out before, conservatives do this sort of thing all the time and no one cares -- because no one expects them to treat films or any other works of art as anything but propaganda. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:
Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:
Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.
I’ll reserve any serious comment on the film until after I have seen it – I guess I’m just not up to the standards of The New Republic –Haw haw.
– but whether or not American Sniper is “pro-war,” it appears to be resolutely and proudly pro-soldier. And that is a giant factor in moviegoers’ enthusiastic embrace of it. Note that American Sniper isn’t afraid to showcase the painful and difficult parts of military life for soldiers and their families, and my suspicion is that audiences love that part, too – because showing the pain makes it honest. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and company don’t want to tell you only one part of Chris Kyle’s story. They want to paint as complete a picture as they can in the running time that they have. If you made the story about the battlefront, without the home front, or vice versa, you would only be telling about half the story.So in the very next breath, Geraghty reviews the film he didn't see -- though I suppose "serious comment" is the crossed fingers behind his back. (This is the sort of thing I did as a kid when I wanted to pretend I had seen some big movie of the moment. I wonder if adults do this anywhere but in the pages of rightwing magazines.)
Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:
Next, chunky iconoclast Seth Rogen weighed in with his observation that American Sniper reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Bastards. What a scumbag. This came after we conservatives stood with him when the Norks threatened him over The Interview – even to the extent of watching his piece of garbage on VOD – while his hero Barack Obama whined about people actually exercising their free speech rights.First, this supports my perception that the only part of arts journalism conservatives genuinely relate to is gossip columns. They don't know what art is, but they sure know who did what to whom! Second, it figures that Schlichter would be enraged that Rogen didn't repay the debt Schlichter imagines he owes "we conservatives" for yelling about North Korea in blogs and switching off porn for a couple of hours to watch this bro-com. Everything is politics to these people; movies, plays, novels, and choc-o-mut ice creams have no value for them except as symbols on a bloody flag to wave at their base. Sometimes I think when they relax at home in front of the TV, they actually watch a placard that says HOME ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT (CONSERVATIVE).
Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
ON TO OSCAR.
The nominations are out, and spurred by some vestigial urge from my showbiz days I'm working on seeing the big ones and reporting back here whenever I get a chance.
The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson heroes don’t usually have life-or-death crises; they suffer from misunderstandings. Some of these misunderstandings are large and threaten their happiness, but they’re nothing that can’t be straightened out, for in the Anderson universe good will and reasonableness are always popping out from around a corner, ready to set things right. Even criminals don’t give Anderson heroes much trouble. (The pirates in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou were less of a threat than the Pirates of Penzance.) His movies have been like children’s-edition versions of Dickens, which is a large part of their pleasure, and also their limitation — they have a great range of amusing characters and incidents, but the viewer is always aware that this is not quite the world.
The Mitteleuropan fantasyland of Zubrowka, in which The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, is not quite the world either — the visuals are rich as frosting; you can see how much pleasure Anderson gets from the very idea of an early-20th-Century alpine funicular. There is also the very Andersonian mentor-pupil relationship of Monsieur Gustave, the Hotel’s brilliant concierge whose aplomb, we come to realize, is not only inventive and industrious but magnificent and brave, and Zero the Lobby Boy, who climbs but is not a mere climber, which Gustave recognizes by instinct and seeks to encourage. And around many corners come many helpful people to lend Gustave and Zero support — most memorably the secret order of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys.
But these helpers can’t do everything. There is a probate matter that has the appearance of a misunderstanding, and Deputy Kovacs attempts to deal with it as such; he is (spoiler) murdered for this misapprehension. His assassins, and Gustave’s and Zero’s main nemeses, are Dmitri and his enforcer Jopling, two genuinely savage creatures beyond the reach of all sentiment or reason, whose evil industry seems a match at least for the energy and good faith of our heroes. Also, from near the beginning of the film a great war threatens, and in the end it does more than that.
The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from Anderson. The amplified grandeur of the Lubitsch-y, cinema buffa settings make it even easier than usual to expect them. But Lubitsch for all his kitsch was pretty wised-up, and I think Anderson is getting to be, too. Much has been made of the film’s inspiration by Stefan Zweig, not least by Anderson himself. I take him at his word: The melancholy for a vanished world — a world, as Zero, seen in his old age in the framing device, tells “the Author” was probably vanished even before the story began, but embodied and upheld by Monsieur Gustave — feels genuine, and informed by the sadder lessons of history and life. It’s not that kindness and its effects have left the world; just that their value has to be treasured and transmitted, maybe in movies like this.
That framing device makes the point beautifully. We see the message passed by elderly Zero to the Author, and the Author passing it on, through literature (and through difficulties which are only suggested but which to anyone who lived in the 20th Century will be perfectly clear) to his people. The evil in this world, this seems to say, does not refute the rosy Anderson idea of life; rather, vice-versa. Our problems, that is, may not all be misunderstandings, but when we insist on understanding we can yet triumph.
The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson heroes don’t usually have life-or-death crises; they suffer from misunderstandings. Some of these misunderstandings are large and threaten their happiness, but they’re nothing that can’t be straightened out, for in the Anderson universe good will and reasonableness are always popping out from around a corner, ready to set things right. Even criminals don’t give Anderson heroes much trouble. (The pirates in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou were less of a threat than the Pirates of Penzance.) His movies have been like children’s-edition versions of Dickens, which is a large part of their pleasure, and also their limitation — they have a great range of amusing characters and incidents, but the viewer is always aware that this is not quite the world.
The Mitteleuropan fantasyland of Zubrowka, in which The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, is not quite the world either — the visuals are rich as frosting; you can see how much pleasure Anderson gets from the very idea of an early-20th-Century alpine funicular. There is also the very Andersonian mentor-pupil relationship of Monsieur Gustave, the Hotel’s brilliant concierge whose aplomb, we come to realize, is not only inventive and industrious but magnificent and brave, and Zero the Lobby Boy, who climbs but is not a mere climber, which Gustave recognizes by instinct and seeks to encourage. And around many corners come many helpful people to lend Gustave and Zero support — most memorably the secret order of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys.
But these helpers can’t do everything. There is a probate matter that has the appearance of a misunderstanding, and Deputy Kovacs attempts to deal with it as such; he is (spoiler) murdered for this misapprehension. His assassins, and Gustave’s and Zero’s main nemeses, are Dmitri and his enforcer Jopling, two genuinely savage creatures beyond the reach of all sentiment or reason, whose evil industry seems a match at least for the energy and good faith of our heroes. Also, from near the beginning of the film a great war threatens, and in the end it does more than that.
The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from Anderson. The amplified grandeur of the Lubitsch-y, cinema buffa settings make it even easier than usual to expect them. But Lubitsch for all his kitsch was pretty wised-up, and I think Anderson is getting to be, too. Much has been made of the film’s inspiration by Stefan Zweig, not least by Anderson himself. I take him at his word: The melancholy for a vanished world — a world, as Zero, seen in his old age in the framing device, tells “the Author” was probably vanished even before the story began, but embodied and upheld by Monsieur Gustave — feels genuine, and informed by the sadder lessons of history and life. It’s not that kindness and its effects have left the world; just that their value has to be treasured and transmitted, maybe in movies like this.
That framing device makes the point beautifully. We see the message passed by elderly Zero to the Author, and the Author passing it on, through literature (and through difficulties which are only suggested but which to anyone who lived in the 20th Century will be perfectly clear) to his people. The evil in this world, this seems to say, does not refute the rosy Anderson idea of life; rather, vice-versa. Our problems, that is, may not all be misunderstandings, but when we insist on understanding we can yet triumph.
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS.
Today's events call to mind my foray into cartooning. 2006, bitches. I don't want to hear any shit from sub-literate wingnuts about dhimmitude today.
It's out of context but, as this whole blog continually shows, context means nothing to psychos anyway.
It's out of context but, as this whole blog continually shows, context means nothing to psychos anyway.
Thursday, December 25, 2014
MURRAY CHRISTMAS.
And, the obligatory:
Tidings of comfort and joy.
UPDATE. That Big Star song is one of the few Christmas songs I can stand anymore. I must say this is a pretty good version of "Carol of the Bells" though:
Too bad he couldn't wait to come in at the falsetto part. Maybe with some practice?
UPDATE 2. Not a bad time to re-up my old Village Voice holiday compendium of "The Five Most Miserable Christmas Songs."
UPDATE. That Big Star song is one of the few Christmas songs I can stand anymore. I must say this is a pretty good version of "Carol of the Bells" though:
Too bad he couldn't wait to come in at the falsetto part. Maybe with some practice?
UPDATE 2. Not a bad time to re-up my old Village Voice holiday compendium of "The Five Most Miserable Christmas Songs."
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