Screen Savour

Media Month: March 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:53:00 +0000

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951): It hardly seems coincidental that the director of photography, Leo Tover, and the composer, Bernard Herrmann share a title card in the opening credits to The Day the Earth Stood Still. Both of those elements, together, help push Robert Wise’s Cold War allegory above much of the other science fiction fare from the 1950s. Tover delivers moody, saturated tones of light and dark, and Herrmann’s use of theramins and electric organs created the archetypal alien film score that would be emulated for years. The Day the Earth Stood Still was among the first — and remains among of the best — of those sci-fi message films, tackling the complicated issues of paranoia, international policy, war, security, destruction, and humankind’s decidedly prickly relationship with advances in technology. The film is clear in its politics (unapologetically pro-U.N.) and equally apparent in its religious overtones (Michael Rennie’s Klaatu, on a mission of save the people of Earth, assumes the name “Mr. Carpenter” at one point and experiences overt resurrection). But it’s Wise’s direction and synthesis of the elements that helps deliver a thrilling, suspenseful film. ★★★★½ (of five)

The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993): If I were asked to select films that demonstrate the importance of a director, one of those films would have to be Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Here is a film, a period piece based on Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, that rises far above most others in its genre due to Scorsese’s choices and eye for cinematic majesty. The art direction (by Scorsese regular Dante Ferretti) is impeccable, the cinematography of Michael Bellhaus is wonderfully relaxed and picaresque, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing keeps the film running smoothly. But important to mention too is that Scorsese and co-screenwriter Jay Cocks give themselves time to explore Wharton’s novel and don’t feel rushed to compression (The Age of Innocence would also figure into any list of good films adapted from novels). And the cast, from Daniel Day-Lewis to Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder, bring a simmering quality to the suppressed emotions of turn-of-the-century New York. Day-Lews in particular captures the torn quality of a man caught in a difficult situation, and fits right in among Scorsese’s many other protagonists. ★★★★½ (of five)

Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944): This twisty and mysterious noir has remained one of the genre’s most watched, thanks in no small part to Otto Preminger’s able direction and a screenplay that keeps the viewer guessing throughout. The titular Laura (Gene Tierney) is the stated victim in a murder investigation conducted by a hard-nosed NYPD detective (Dana Andrews). As his investigation continues he encounters Laura’s fiance (Vincent Price) and her wealthy, foppish menor, an influential newspaper column played by Clifton Webb in a steal-every-scene-you’re-in performance. But things are not as they seem, and far be it from me to disclose anything further to those unacquainted with the film. Part of the strength to Laura is that not only does it take risks involving story twists and rounding unforseen corners, but it does so with a sense of utmost confidence. And as anyone ever caught in a noirish web knows, confidence can be ensnarling. ★★★★ (of five)

Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986): The driving force of Oliver Stone’s Platoon is the unspoken phrase “war is hell.” It’s manifested well as visual and aural elements: the film’s great success is portraying what the Vietnam War was like from the perspective of the “grunts,” the men in the jungle who faced not only the stated enemies but their inner demons, their fellow troops, and skin-crawling residents of the jungle. The cinematography by Robert Richardson provides for a panoramic view of war, and wisely eclipses and obscures the Viet Cong from the audience, delivering a sense of constant confusion and forcing eyes to explore the screen. Less impressive, however, is that the film’s philosophical and political inclinations also boil down to “war is hell,” as brief and as shallow as that phrase is. Perhaps war films do not need to have a great, ambitious message — and I think there’s an argument to be made that they don’t — but Platoon could have knocked me over completely if its tatement didn’t seem subordinate to its technical achievements. ★★★★ (of five)

Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954): Despite its many flaws, the first Godzilla film still comes together — barely. The key, or glue you might call it, is the metaphoric potency that gives the film a startling sense of power; watching it almost sixty years after its initial release, and almost seventy years after the atomic bombs decimated two Japanese cities, the fear (and the failure of anyone to do anything to alleviate or cure that fear) weighs heavy on the viewer. This pre-personality Godzilla, stirred awake through nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, is a fire-breathing killing machine, as apathetic to its victims as an insentient object, and scenes of the victims and destroyed objects are eerily reminiscent of post-Nagasaki documentary footage. Though the film possesses this undeniable urgency, the problems still abound; the scenes of destruction could use some editing, the cinematography is murky and dank (no doubt to conceal the seams on the rubber suit), and by relying on the single metaphor to carry the film, the actual screenplay doesn’t do much work. Still, there is an impressive score by Akira Ifukube, and if the scenes of the monster in action don’t quite deliver, there’s always the memorable, chilling sound of its scream. ★★★½ (of five)

Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005): I’ve always been a bit of a biopic apologist, but in order to succeed, the film must avoid the trap of simply showcasing an individual’s life and instead have something insightful to demonstrate about its subject and the way the audience, or society at large, is reflected in her or him. James Mangold’s study of Johnny Cash provides moments of sheer delight — a penniless and desperate Cash auditioning for Sam Philips, a rousing recreation of the live show at Folsom Prison, the way Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) plays off of, and deeply frustrates, June Carter (a magnetic Reese Witherspoon) in their pre-marital days — but it avoids the difficult aspects of exploring its subject with much more than a cursory survey. The result is a typical Hollywood gloss of an infinitely more fascinating person, a film that adheres too rigidly to the five-act narrative structure. Great soundtrack, though. ★★★½ (of five)

Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978): After a string of successful comedies, Woody Allen branched into drama with Interiors, the story of three sisters and the disillusion of their parents’ marriage. The film has been criticized for being too “Bermanesque,” which I don’t necessarily think is a problem; in fact, I think it was a bold and noble move for Allen to channel a cinematic hero. The problem as I see it is that Allen loses himself in the material, and the resulting film — rigid, chilly, intriguing — is unfulfilling precisely because it has no voice of its own. The characters come across as rough drafts of the sort of upper crust, erudite, artistic personalities that Allen would write much better in the 1980s. Diane Keaton and Richard Jordan provide an exaggerated, though engaging, portrait of depressive writers struggling to balance family with art. ★★½ (of five)

The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925): The tremendous history surrounding this film — an early experiment in feature-length stop-motion animation by the special effects guru who would later spearhead the animation in the vastly superior King Kong (1933) — makes The Lost World more of a necessity to view from the vantage point of history instead of entertainment. The truth is while The Lost World brings with it many silent cinema charms, it lacks any compelling storytelling aspect to balance the draw of the technical work. ★★ (of five)

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) (Woody Allen, 1972): Once-controversial questions about human sexuality are isolated and ridiculed in seven vignettes under the direction of Woody Allen. A Medieval fool tries to seduce a queen with an aphrodisiac, a mad scientist conducts strange sex experiments, Jack Barry hosts “What’s My Perversion?” — all ambitious in their attempted anesthetization of sex and fetishes, but in the end also painfully unfunny. Most famous perhaps is the final vignette, which illustrates a “mission control”-like center inside a man’s brain that prepares, puts into action, and calls the shots as the man struggles to have sex. Tony Randall plays The Operator in sterling deadpan; Allen himself plays a sperm who’s afraid of looming death — no surprise. This vignette is rightly remembered as the closest the film comes to actual comedy. ★★ (of five)

The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens, 1965): This bloodless and passionless (I don’t use those terms ironically) rendering of the Gospels fails to fully capture the aspects that make Christ — purely from a narrative and character standpoint, with all religiosity aside — such an engaging and powerful individual. Part of the problem is definitely Max von Sydow’s robotic interpretation of Christ, but the entire film is stagey, stodgy, and disjointed. Perhaps it is best known today for the cavalcade of celebrity cameos (most famously John Wayne’s appearance as a centurion with a single line of dialogue). Charlton Heston appears as John the Baptist, but for some reason outfitted as if he was a caveman. He plays the camp card infinitely well, though. When confronted by a soldier who says “I have orders to bring you Herod,” Heston seems primed for Planet of the Apes as he calls back, “I have orders to bring you to God ... heathen.” ★½ (of five)

Media Month: February 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:51:00 +0000

Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931): From early high school English classes through the entirety of my adulthood life, the “Universal Horror” film I’ve seen the most is unsurprisingly James Whale’s Frankenstein. Admittedly, it’s not a film I’ve always professed an open fondness for, but it’s a classic of its genre and its era that’s always been easy to appreciate and grows on one with time. The impressive art direction and production design set the mold for other standard “horror” films. If Whale doesn’t capture the exact scientific and philosophical dimensions of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, he does capture the conflicting emotions that surround dichotomies — life and death, homicide and self-defense, innocence and guilt, organic and artificial lifegiving, release and responsibility, etc. — and manages to turn one classic into new one. ★★★★½ (of five)

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936): The infinitely charming William Powell is Godfrey, a “forgotten man” living with other neglected men near the city dump. He’s picked up by Irene (Carole Lombard), the younger daughter in a wealthy and obnoxious family, to be their new butler. (“Can you butle?” “Butle?” “Yes, we’re fresh out of butlers.”) The film is often referred to as an early screwball comedy, but it’s screwball in premise only; it’s better to consider this film a sly, stylish, and impeccably escapist Depression-era comedy of errors that jabs at the ineptitude and misplaced melancholy of the well-to-do. I won’t reveal the film’s pivot point, but knowing what you likely know about comedies of errors and mistaken identities, you can probably guess who has a surprise in store for the rest of the characters. ★★★★ (of five)

Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946): “I hate you so much that I would destroy myself to take you down with me”—if there’s a better line that encapsulates the essence noir, delivered with more firepower than Rita Hayworth brings to Gilda, I’ve yet to hear it. The screenplay, by Jo Eisinger and Marion Parsonnet, crackles with snappy dialogue, and it establishes a strong triangulated conflict between Hayworth’s Gilda, her ex-husband, Johnny (Glenn Ford), and his employer, Ballin (George Macready), Gilda’s new husband. The production values, including Rudolph Maté’s cinematography and the numerous costumes, are particularly noteworthy for their style. Hayworth is absolutely stunning in Gilda and brings to the film a disarming amount of eroticism and sex appeal. But what makes the role one for the ages is not just that she looks nice but that she plays dirty. ★★★★½ (of five)

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948): Welles’ noir is another in the long line of director vs. studio skirmishes that marked the early part of his career. This time the feud was with Columbia Pictures, which meddled with the film’s final editing and tinged most of this love-and-deception story with damning averageness. Still, the film maintains what seems to be Welles’ frenzied, energetic imprint on the scenes themselves. And the film has its list of high points as well. Surely it must be one of the first depictions of a rendezvous in an aquarium, where there are startling juxtapositions of ugliness and beauty (Rita Hayworth contrasted with a moray eel, anyone?). The cinematography is also a typical Wellesian adventure, with oblique angles and impressive crane shots and moody lighting. The first forty minutes or so are routinely melodramatic, but in the film’s second half, the viewer can see what truly interested Welles about the project — the breakdown of language (the overlapping dialogue is a particularly nice touch) and the literal hall of mirrors that comes with romantic and relationship betrayal. The final moments are almost worth the wait alone, as Welles dives into one of the most avant-garde cinematic sequences to come out of a Hollywood studio before 1970. ★★★½ (of five)

The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980): Director David Lynch entered the mainstream with this tale of “John” Merrick, an Englishman with such severe deformities that worked in a carnival sideshow as the “Elephant Man.” Merrick, played with extreme poignancy by John Hurt, is rescued from the sideshow by Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) and exposed to the harsh realities of bourgeois society. The film is shot in stunning black and white and has impressive production design and makeup. As is par for the course with Lynch, there are a few wanderings down the rabbit hole in this story, but a surprising amount of the tension and examination stays surface level. The Lynchian motif of macabre-vs.-mundane circles back on itself as the film considers what it means to be exploited and whether a tolerance of exploitation shifts according to the perpetrator (and is Lynch a perpetrator of exploitation as well?), and as it considers how an outcast will always be an outcast, no matter how welcoming society seems. Perhaps it’s the fact that the experimental Lynchian elements are restrained that I’m led to wish he’d indulged his bizarreness a little more and let the simmering elements boil over. ★★★★ (of five)

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, 1991): This documentary is a helpful, if at times irksomely self-mythologizing, secondary text to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 masterpiece Apocalypse Now. Bahr and Hickenlooper weave together interviews of the film’s central figures with Eleanor Coppoala’s filmed diary during the process of shooting Apocalypse Now. There isn’t a lot of thematic ground covered in Hearts of Darkness that can’t be deduced from a careful reading of Apocalypse Now, but the documentary functions on its own as a look into the turbulence of the creative process, particularly of those who become focused to the point of madness on achieving a certain artistic vision. The documentary’s glimpses of how Apocalypse Now could have been are more satisfying and thought-provoking than what was re-edited into the original for Coppola’s 2001 experiment, Apocalypse Now Redux. ★★★★ (of five)

Dexter (Seasons 1-3; 2006-09; Showtime): The television adaption of Jeff Lindsay’s novels about a blood splatter analyst with the Miami Police Department who’s also a serial killer himself is an addicting, satisfying romp through abnormal psychology. Dexter Morgan operates under a code of his deceased father, who taught him to let loose his inner darkness on the city’s worst of the worst. What I admire most about this show, now in its fifth season, is its tremendous sense of plotting—the writing crew certainly knows how to craft stories that span over multiple episodes and hook the audience. On an episode-to-episode basis, the writing can be a little too campy for its own good. (The voiceover, which I initially couldn’t stand, has grown on me out of exposure and exhaustion; I simply can’t think of any other way to give the audience that much access to Dexter’s inner monologues.) And of course I greatly admire Michael C. Hall, who perfectly straddles the line of civil and creepy. ★★★★ (of five)

Community (Season 1; 2009; NBC): One of the more inventive current network television shows begins rather formulaically but eventually finds its own voice by the end of the first season with meta-humor, parody, and a whole-hearted embrace of the quirky. That’s a good thing, too, because sustaining an entire television series on the odd characters and relationships that take form in a community college environment would have likely proved impossible. Instead, Community becomes a send-up of American entertainment that occasionally verges on absurdity. (One character, a student who possibly has Asperger syndrome and relates to the world through TV and film, becomes central to a GoodFellas spoof and is given the opportunity to say the line “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in a Mafia movie” in voice-over while the screen freeze-frames on his face.) Why the show isn’t receiving more critics’ and industry accolades is beyond me. ★★★★ (of five)

Recapping the Oscars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:24:00 +0000

Well, that was ... something.

The show was disappointing — belligerently unfunny and lacking all affability — and largely, so were the results. Time and time again, the winners proved themselves to be the central element of the showing, excepting presenter Kirk Douglas, who brought more energy and verve and genuineness than almost anyone else at the ceremony. What began inauspiciously (hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway doing the full 1990s Billy Crystal by “appearing” in the nominated films) ended just as inauspiciously, with Steven Spielberg at the microphone holding the envelope and providing a caveat for the ages: just as many great films lose Best Picture as win it.

Some of the highs and lows:

• Early in the night I tweeted, “Most of those who complained the Oscar season was boring have started off 0-2.” And that’s pretty much the way the rest of the night went. I correctly predicted 16 out of 24, exactly two-thirds, which is my worst Oscar prognostication in three years. (In 2010 I guessed 18 right, and in 2009 I guessed 17 right.) I missed Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Documentary, Makeup, Original Score, Original Song, and Short Animated Film. If I hadn’t changed my prediction from Inside Job to Restrepo at the last minute, it would have been the first time I correctly predicted all of the above-the-line categories. Oh well—there’s always next year.

• My preferences overlapped with the Academy at a three-year-time low also, with only 6 out of 24, including: Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Editing, Original Score, Visual Effects, and Documentary. (Although I professed a ballot preference for Exit Through the Gift Shop, I’m not sad at all that the magnificent film Inside Job won for Best Documentary.)

• This was one of the most evenly split Oscars in a long time. No film took home more than four awards, including the Best Picture winner. Tied with The King’s Speech was Inception, with four technical awards, followed by The Social Network with three, and Alice in Wonderland (!), The Fighter, and Toy Story 3 with two. I like it when the Oscars spread the love, but Alice in Wonderland is my pick for worst film of the year, so there’s definitely a limit to acceptable love-spreading.

• I mentioned how the winners drove the show forward. Some of the better acceptance speeches included Aaron Sorkin, David Seidler (the best speech of the night), the director of the short film God of Love, the director of Inside Job, and Colin Firth.

• The show itself, if I may speak more analytically to its failures, was tonally off almost from the get-go. Much of what the Academy tried to do in the theater didn’t transfer well to televisions at home. Some segments went on far too long; some seemed so fleeting it made one wonder why they tried it at all. Although the failure for the humor lies with the show’s writers, James Franco deserves to be knocked around for acting like he couldn’t wait to go home. (In some respects, he acted like this before the show even began.) Anne Hathaway had white-knuckle charm even as she plowed, self-knowingly, through one bad joke after another. The show reached such an abysmal low that when Billy Crystal himself appeared on stage, not many people seemed to want him to leave.

• With The King’s Speech as Best Picture winner, I should say the Oscars have awarded better and the Oscars have awarded worse. I like the film quite a lot, though I’m not sure it’s one for the ages. Perhaps, though. We simply never know.

For more of what I liked and didn’t like, keep an eye out for my Best of 2010 list, which should arrive in a couple months. Until the next awards season, it’s back to film criticism.

If I Had a Ballot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 22:31:00 +0000

“I still think awards are stupid. But they’d be less stupid if they gave them to the right people.” — Ron Swanson, Parks & Recreation

Here are my Oscar predictions and preferences. If my previous track record is any guide, I’m wrong on about twenty percent of these — and hopefully a few preferences become realities.

Best Short Film & Documentary Short Subject
I haven’t seen enough of these to cast a ballot with confidence.
Will Win Short Film: God of Love
Should Win Short Film: N/A
Will Win Documentary Short: Strangers No More
Should Win Documentary Short: N/A

Best Animated Short Film
I have a soft spot for this category, which is (perhaps) my favorite of the below-the-line Oscars. I loved Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage, which is a beautiful and striking and lovingly animated short film. I also enjoyed Pixar’s Day & Night, a poignant examination of differences, and The Gruffalo, a British adaptation of a children’s book that features many celebrity voices. The latter two are probably where the contest is, and the winner typically is the longest of the shorts, which would be The Gruffalo. Yet, it seems a little thin so Day & Night might swoop in.
Will Win: The Gruffalo
Should Win: Madagascar, Carnet de Voyage

Best Visual Effects
Although the visual effects field was expanded from three to five, most of the nominees this year are exactly the kind of tired, regurgitated effects that fulfill more-is-more Academy preferences instead of useful, resourceful, compelling CGI. Inception — with its reality-defying dreamscapes — will take home the gold and, of this weak field, rightfully so.
Will & Should Win: Inception

Best Sound Mixing
Nothing in the Academy bylaws dictates that voters understand the differences between Sound Mixing and Sound Editing — or even what they are — which is why the winners in these categories tend to be loud, blockbuster films or better-loved films. Never mind how theater-vs.-home experiences alter the perception of sound. Inception is the likely winner, but each time I’ve seen The Social Network, I’ve marveled at how its soundscape balances all the elements and allows Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue to remain crystal clear.
Will Win: Inception
Should Win: The Social Network

Best Sound Editing
Ditto here what I noted in Mixing. These categories are so different it’s rare (in my opinion) that the same film should earn both awards. Inception will be a worthier winner here than in Mixing, but still not the best sound editing job of the year. For that, turn to the subtle, atmospheric, naturalistic sounds and snaps of the western landscape in True Grit. The Coens’ sound team, nominated in both categories for work on No Country For Old Men, is among the best sound crews in the business.
Will Win: Inception
Should Win: True Grit

Best Original Song
It was a bad year for original songs in films. My prediction, written by Alan Menken, feels a little derivative of his earlier work. I enjoyed A.R. Rahman’s song the most.
Will Win: “I See the Light” from Tangled
Should Win: “If I Rise” from 127 Hours

Best Original Score
Alexandre Desplat, the hardest working composer in the film business, is a good bet here. A great dark horse would be John Powell’s high-spirited, Celtic-infused melodies and evocations of friendship that back How to Train Your Dragon. The best score is the unorthodox fusion of electronica and classicism in The Social Network.
Will Win: Alexandre Desplat, The King’s Speech
Should Win: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, The Social Network

Best Makeup
To be honest, I haven’t seen any of these nominees and I haven’t lost any sleep because of that. The more-is-more theory of Oscar voting would predict a win for The Wolfman. The maybe-ostentatious-crap-was-nominated-but-we’re-not-that-desperate theory of Oscar voting (cf. Transformers) says Barney’s Version might prevail.
Will Win: Barney’s Version
Should Win: N/A

Best Editing
Without Inception editor Lee Smith in this category, it’s a safe bet to call it for Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, who serve the rhythms of Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire Social Network screenplay.
Will Win & Should Win: Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter, The Social Network

Best Costume Design
Colleen Atwood’s complex yet gaudy duds for Alice in Wonderland might prevail here, but I suspect this will another boat lifted by the rising tide of The King’s Speech. A better choice would be the thematic threads of I Am Love.
Will Win: Jenny Beaven, The King’s Speech
Should Win: Antonella Cannarozzi, I Am Love

Best Cinematography
Nine-time nominee and long-time Coen collaborator Roger Deakins will likely strike gold this year for the impressive work on True Grit, which, in addition to rewarding Deakins, also fulfills the postcard replica standard the Academy often brings to this category. Matthew Libatique’s richly textured and fluid work on Black Swan is practically a ballet in and of itself, though.
Will Win: Roger Deakins, True Grit
Should Win: Matthew Libatique, Black Swan

Best Art Direction
I suspect this will be another of the technical categories that The King’s Speech brings along with its Best Picture win. It wouldn’t be my vote, but its art direction is still better than any of the travesties nominated in this category last year.
Will Win: The King’s Speech
Should Win: Inception

Best Foreign Language Film
How does one predict a category that requires a voter to see all the nominees? Well, it’s difficult unless you’re on the ground talking to actual Academy members. If the last few years have been any guide, a fallback option is to predict the film most likely to be the safe median of five. I’ve only seen Dogtooth, so I’m not in a position to say which film should win.
Will Win: In a Better World
Should Win: Check back in a few months.

Best Documentary
This much can be said: 2010 was an impressive year for documentaries. One could have easily doubled the size of this category. I’ve seen four of the five nominees — Waste Land is my blind spot — and each is impressive. The Academy typically aims big with this award (“Best” often means “Most Important” by their standards) but what that means is unclear. Could it be the politically savvy Inside Job? The intense and harrowing Restrepo? The tongue-in-cheek art criticism of Exit Through the Gift Shop? Another in a come-from-behind? For weeks most Oscar bloggers have had Inside Job as the prediction; at the last minute there’s been quick switching to Waste Land. I’m switching too, but guessing a different film.
Will Win: Restrepo
Should Win: Exit Through the Gift Shop

Best Animated Film
It’s almost enough to make you wonder when Pixar is going to give someone else a chance. Toy Story 3 takes this in a cake-walk, although The Illusionist would be a very, very worthy alternate.
Will & Should Win: Toy Story 3

Best Original Screenplay
Usually this is the stronger of the two screenplay categories, but I tip my hat to the adapted field this year. Three of the five original screenplay nominees have critical problems. David Seidler is a careful writer, but Mike Leigh’s Another Year is another of the director’s stellar examinations of the human condition.
Will Win: David Seidler, The King’s Speech
Should Win: Mike Leigh, Another Year

Best Adapted Screenplay
It’s unlikely anyone can topple Aaron Sorkin’s crackling screenplay for The Social Network, more likely than ever to score a win here.
Will & Should Win: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Best Supporting Actress
I just don’t know what to make of this category. At some point or another, four of the nominees — Melissa Leo, Helena Bonham Carter, Amy Adams, and Hailee Steinfeld — seem as if they could be possible victors. The wave of support for The King’s Speech might even truly lift Carter’s boat if Leo and Adams split and Steinfeld doesn’t emerge strong. Hell, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they called Jacki Weaver’s name.
Will Win: Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Should Win: Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Best Supporting Actor
That Christian Bale is poised to win this category for an unremarkable scenery-chewing performance in a mediocre film is a source of great consternation for me. Perhaps the only thing more frustrating is the omission of Andrew Garfield. I’m holding out for a Geoffrey Rush upset, which seems quite possible. He’s my number two vote, anyway.
Will Win: Christian Bale, The Fighter
Should Win: John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone

Best Actress
There’s little doubt that Natalie Portman does the most acting in this category (i.e., clearest on-screen acting), but does that alone earn one an Oscar? While Black Swan sends all its arrows in her direction, and she suffers them well, there’s little to no lining behind her to buoy her performance above a spectacular freak-out. It’s not my number-one choice, at least; for that the contest is more fierce between Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine and Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole.
Will Win: Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Should Win: Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole

Best Actor
Colin Firth will soon join the ranks of the people who should have won the previous year and will win go on to win not as a conciliatory gesture but for genuine, powerful acting. What’s still up for debate is my personal vote: Firth and Jesse Eisenberg gave two incredibly resonant performances: one a man physically struggling to speak, the other desperately yearning to be heard. In many respects they’re the opposite of each. Firth brings life to an almost instantly likable character with a difficult impediment, while Eisenberg brings a measure of likability to an impediment-free twentysomething. Comparing the two side-by-side might be a future project of mine. I literally had to flip a coin and leave it to fate to decide.
Will & Should Win: Colin Firth, The King’s Speech

Best Director
Tom Hooper snagged the Director’s Guild Award, which is basically a silver bullet when it comes to this category. There’s always a 10% chance it’ll go to someone else, and of those who are stepping out on a limb, many are predicting David Fincher might be lucky. That’s an awfully big “might,” even if it’s more artistically appealing. I’m no Oscar historian, but I do know a think or two about the award’s history, and splits are quite unlikely. When a film has a show of love as strong as The King’s Speech has among the Academy, it’s dangerous to pick otherwise. Still, my fingers are crossed. Also, for all of Black Swan’s problems (screenplay-related), Darren Aronofsky would be deserving as well.
Will Win: Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
Should Win: David Fincher, The Social Network

Best Picture
If you love film and care about the outcome of the Oscars at least one percent, you do so likely because of the possibility that a winning film might be seen by people who might not otherwise have watched it at all. If you love Black Swan, or The Fighter, or The Kids Are All Right, or any of the other films nominated, you want as many people to see your beloved film — reward the artist, enrich the mind, encourage more work, champion your darling of the year. For me, of the ten nominees, that film is The Social Network, which is likely to lose this evening. That’s okay; it’ll join a long list of great films that turned up short of the big prize. And although the blogosphere has circled the wagons and painted The King’s Speech as a usurper to the crown, I have nothing against the film and in fact actually like it quite a bit. It just doesn’t resonate for me as a great film. Oscar could do better; Oscar has done worse.
Will Win: The King’s Speech
Should Win: The Social Network
Preferential Ballot: The Social Network, Toy Story 3, The King’s Speech, True Grit, Winter’s Bone, Black Swan, Inception, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, The Fighter

In the coming months, I’ll slip back into this blog post and edit these categories somewhat after I catch up with some of the films I’ve missed. I saw many more Oscar nominees this year than I anticipated, what with having a new job and a new baby at home. And hopefully in a few months I’ll be ready to post my Best Of 2010 list.

Until then, I’ll be live-tweeting the Oscars at my Twitter account, @ScreenSavour, so if you’re online there, come follow along. Monday I’ll have a wrap-up and the obligatory “now-let’s-get-back-to-watching-movies” sigh of relief.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:43:00 +0000

d. Francis Ford Coppola / USA / 153m.

At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now made its world premiere, the director said something during a press conference that is as an important a place as any to begin discussion of the film:

My film is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.

Coppola has been rightly derided for the arrogance and pretension of such a statement, of equating a frenzied production of a movie to an actual calamitous war, but in many respects it’s an intriguing proposition to consider. What is the relationship, if any, between the chaos of a film’s production and the subsequent chaos captured on film? Must a filmmaker and the crew experience the truly harrowing highs and lows in order to create the most realistic — most expressionistic — depictions of fear, anxiety, and turmoil? Is a war film likelier to resonate with the audience if making the film is also a battle or a journey through the darkest corridors of the soul?

That metaphoric drumbeat — “war is hell, war is hell, this film was war, this film was hell” — plays almost ad nauseam in Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), which pieces together after-the-fact interviews with cast and crew and footage shot on location by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor. The Coppolas are very insistent on the point that their journey in making the film was as much of a journey into the darkest corners of the soul as the film’s protagonist, Willard (Martin Sheen), a fraught Army captain sent on a mission upriver into Cambodia to assassinate Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an AWOL colonel. In fact, the Coppolas are so insistent on the point that it begins to get under one’s skin after a while, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable to the discussion of the film’s success.

I can’t speak to what it must have been like for Coppola and his crew to film in the jungles of the Philippines, their stand-in for Vietnam. Principal photography took 238 days. Filming was sidetracked by a typhoon, the Philippine government, and mental and physical problems among the actors and crew. The leading man was fired; the replacement had a heart attack. The script was incomplete, with Coppola toiling away into the night doing rewrites and many of the actors simply improvising their lines. Drugs were rampant. The studio was nervous, money ran out, and Coppola invested his personal Godfather fortunes into the film. Nor can I speak to whether it’s an authentic hell, as I didn’t fight in Vietnam and have never participated in a war. Everything I know about the film’s behind-the-scenes story suggests it was the nightmare it’s been portrayed to be. What I can speak to — the only thing I can speak to — is the sort of film Apocalypse Now became: a milestone of American cinema and one of the best films about war.

The film is not subtle; carnivals of horror rarely are. Coppola, in revising an early script from John Milius, doesn’t paint with a small brush. Tigers jump out of the jungle. A helicopter attack led by the aptly named Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” permanently altering the popular impression of the composition for a generation. A carabao is ritualistically slaughtered and spliced to juxtapose the film’s ultimate kill. Humanity is laid bare in the film’s spectrum. This film’s Kurtz, in similarity to the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (the film’s source material), is baldly presented as a corrupted ideal — the ravaging power of colonialism, the futility of American-led containment through ground war, a bull trying to “do good” in a china shop. Even the title itself invokes the tense duality of awe and catastrophe lingering on the precipice or, perhaps worse, occurring in the very moment.

These expressionistic elements, however, are the origins of the film’s tremendous strength, and what has been frequently cited as the film’s weaknesses — the episodic structure the journey upriver, the stark and mysterious third act, the anticlimactic final moments where explanation is supplanted by stillness — are instead better viewed as existential rejoinders to the shocking and inexplicable elements of war, the way the world begins to fall apart and what once made sense becomes maddening. Apocalypse Now is a collection of strange and haunting moments, emotions, sounds, and visuals held together by alarm, a sensation that closely mirrors the unexpected aspects of war. Whether this is an accident or, as Rob Humanick puts it, a cunning use of “what are obviously troubled elements to subversive and ingenious ends,” is ultimately beside the point. Many war films collapse under the weight of cliche or cleanliness, and while Apocalypse Now doesn’t prove a war film must have a turbulent production in order to capture war’s splintering effect, it does suggest that a successful rendering of war must provide a new (unseen, unheard, unfelt) and disquieting experience.

In order to stand apart from its peers, a war film must present something that feels fundamentally new. Cinema will never be able to capture the true reality of war — as Samuel Fuller once suggested, there would need to be a sniper in the theater actually shooting audience members in order to capture that — but it can come close by magnetizing the audience either through extraordinary realism or unsettling surrealism. Apocalypse Now falls into the latter and succeeds through its frenzied aural and visual elements. The soundscape, crafted by a team that took home that year’s Oscar, has a hallucinatory effect that weaves rock music and synthesized battle noises and spirals deep into the ear. The cinematography of the great Vittorio Storaro is fluid, revealing, and expertly handled. The camera often moves with the same creeping slowness of the patrol boat gliding downriver. In fact, throughout the film’s first half there always seems to be something moving: whether it is a single soldier moving across the bottom of the screen or a black helicopter moving across the top, a smoldering fire caught in the right side of the frame or smoke billowing in the left. In the famous helicopter attack sequence, the frame is often crowded and layered, the eye pulled in numerous directions, each shot revealing previously unseen from the prior viewing.

This stylistic device is balanced in the film’s final third by the heavy shadows that eclipse much of Brando’s Kurtz. Although the result of Brando’s vanity and general refusal to be photographed in light (which would have revealed the weight he’d gained), the simplifying but focused effect plays well against the film’s earlier, densely composed moments. For all the trouble Brando caused Coppola during the filming, his presence on screen in Apocalypse Now is arresting, and what he says — part poeticism, part nonsense, all in all captivating — gains potency as he remains the cynosure of Willard and the audience.

Coppola’s interviews in Hearts of Darkness reveal that, more than anything, he feared the film emerging as a form of unadulterated pretentiousness. For a film that succeeded so monumentally in its first incarnation — and without his, or anyone’s, guiding interpretation — he’s remained strangely fickle about its elements, even going so far as to re-edit and re-release the film in 2001 as Apocalypse Now Redux, with a restoration of its previously excised, and increasingly sought after, footage. That fickleness often manifests itself as defensiveness, and one begins to sense that Coppola will never be satisfied with the product and will never see the film the same way the rest of the world does. Perhaps that’s related to his emotional, financial, and psychological investment in the film, perhaps not: regardless, the film is a towering achievement. Few attempt something so ambitious, and even fewer succeed. When it ends, with the patrol boat back on the river and the empty silence without ending credits, the film severs itself from the viewer, but it lingers — and lingers, and lingers — and, whether appreciated or not, is not easily forgotten.

Media Month: January 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 14:24:00 +0000

Welcome to Media Month January 2011, the first of what I hope will be many installments of essays that review my media consumption in the preceding month. Due to a number of factors — career, family, writing of fiction and poetry, etc. — my schedule rarely permits me to post with frequency, but that desire to comment on cinema remains as strong as ever. With the Media Month format, hopefully I’ll retain a bit of a presence in this small corner of the film blogosphere.

January is a notorious dumping month for new cinema in theaters, so I spend most of my Januarys catching up with Oscar-nominated films and films from the previous year in attempt to have my best-of list completed by March (if possible) and be able to cast an “ideal” ballot for the Academy Awards. This January has been no different, and I’ll hold off on assessing 2010 films until I’m ready to disclose my list and my ballot. What has been different this January is balancing film-viewing activities with relocating to a new college for an English faculty position, raising a two-month-old son, and acclimating myself to a new community. What follows seems like a small amount of films, but with all the 2010 releases I’m leaving out of discussion, I feel like I’ve been submerged in cinema.

There isn’t much of a rhyme and reason to the films I chose to watch this past month, except for a few primary factors. I tended to favor films I could watch with my wife (our two-month-old son is keeping us from going out on dates, so we’re watching more movies together at home), and I tried to catch certain selections that were slated to leave the Netflix streaming service. Unexpectedly, most of the films I watch were from the 1990s, a rather curious decade whose popular offerings seem to be aging in discordant ways.

Take, for example, Boogie Nights (1997). Paul Thomas Anderson’s examination of the soaring highs and nightmarish lows of the porn industry echoes with the influences of panoramic and pop directors like Altman, Scorsese, and Tarantino without managing to come within striking distance of any of them. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Robert Elswit and impressively acted by a large ensemble including a startlingly good Burt Reynolds, the weak thread in the fabric of Anderson’s quilt is his own screenplay that spreads the wealth too thin. Although numerous characters possess interesting qualities, few reach the level of development that would allow for complete audience identification, so the film relies on the essence of the performances (always a good thing) and pre-existing generalities (always a bad thing) to carry through many of the story arcs. Couple this with the fact that Anderson — pining to reach the level of visceral cinematic violence proffered by Scorsese and Tarantino — regularly resorts to tactics that feel cartoonish in comparison and Boogie Nights turns from full of potential into potential unfulfilled.

Or consider Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), another wonderfully acted film with notable production values that falls just short of surpassing the trappings of typical historical melodrama. Were it not for the sometimes patchy editing, Elizabeth would ring as a success driven by Cate Blanchett’s magnetic, shrewd performance as the monarch in the early days of her reign, when neighboring royalty wanted either her hand or her head and the Catholic Church rallied its bishops in ardent opposition to her policies. Whereas the film stutters on some technical issues, it absolutely needs Blanchett to be at her best in order to be even watchable — and on that count, it succeeds. The supporting cast varies in terms of quality, from a weak Joseph Fiennes to a loopy Vincent Cassell, from an over-utilized Richard Attenborough to an under-utilized and perfectly cunning Geoffrey Rush.

Queen Elizabeth’s life seems suited to dissection through a sliced, reworked biographical depiction of her. On the other end of the spectrum is Charles Chaplin. “If you want to understand me, watch my movies,” he opines in the unrelentingly frustrating biopic Chaplin (1992). It’s impeccable advice to be sure — even Chaplin’s weakest films provide more sparks of life than Richard Attenborough’s film, gnarled through clunky direction that attempts to capture as much of the icon as possible, misses numerous opportunities to explore the emotional complexities of what it meant to be arguably one of the most famous men on the entire planet. A scene at a bar where Chaplin is harassed by a World War I veteran for making films instead of fighting loses its power when stacked against droll love conflicts and Chaplin’s tawdry love life. Each of Chaplin’s major films are relegated to mere minutes inside this film, which again misses an opportunity to dig deep and explore the psyche and passion of the comedian who produced politically aware films such as Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Robert Downey Jr. earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal, which includes both stupendous miming and not-so-stupdenous work as off-stage Chaplin. The recently late John Barry’s lovely score, mixing melodrama with an evocation of silent comedy, was also nominated, and arguably should have won.

Revisiting a pair of Michael Mann films from the 1990s — Heat (1995) and The Insider (1999) — revealed films that were less rich than I had previously considered. The primary selling point of Heat continues to be the famed pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, a cop and a criminal respectively. There is some admirable work done within the film, including some nicely choreographed and pulse-raising action sequences balanced with steely and spare moments that would qualify for Raising Tension 101. There’s an admirable stab at illustrating the conflict of profession versus domesticity as well, as the film’s men stand in contrast to the film’s women. But if Mann is able to masterfully control the moment, he’s less able to control the mammoth quality of the film in totem. This ebb and flow doesn’t quite (pardon the egregious pun) generate the heat that is necessary for complete success. The Insider, however, has better rhythm but inferior structure. In that film, there are actually two insiders: Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a dismissed tobacco company executive, and Lowell Bergman (Pacino), a CBS News producer. Wigand blows the whistle that Big Tobacco was well aware of the addictive power and danger of cigarettes while Bergman finesses Wigand into a story for 60 Minutes. The resulting fallout tears apart Wigand’s personal life, which is the emotional heart of the film, and sends Bergman into a rage against the system after the corporate chiefs nix Wigand’s story. The performances remain strong, but the central flaw arrives through narrative unevenness and the resulting emotional disconnect. Mann and his co-writer, Eric Roth, tell the story chronologically and swing too far from Wigand toward Bergman in the second half. While the behind-the-scenes look at CBS News makes for some thrills under Mann’s steady direction, Bergman’s story doesn’t carry the heft of Wigand’s.

Lighter fare from the decade, like My Blue Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1990), provides entertainment but nothing much else. A riff on the story of Henry Hill — he of Goodfellas fame — starring Steve Martin as a mobster gone into Witness Protection and the FBI agent (Rick Moranis) charged to protect him, My Blue Heaven scores some easy laughs without breaking new ground. Within days its comic elements fade from memory. Worse for the wear is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), which today seems more like an impeccably assembled time capsule of late ’80s excess than a gripping drama about power, greed, and the cutthroat atmosphere of lower Manhattan’s business sector. But as a time capsule candidate reflecting the antic, brutal, out-of-the-chaos-comes-cohesion filmmaking abilities of Stone, Wall Street doesn’t pass any test. Michael Douglas, an Academy Award-winner for best actor in a weak year, chews the scenery but not much else. The film is as stiff as over-gelled hair or a starched collar. For a better look at the naked elements of human nature, turn to Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages (2007), in which Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney portray siblings caught in the inadequacies of life as they put their ailing father into a nursing home.

What should come as no surprise to the regular readers of this blog is that my heart lies with older offerings, and I was pleased to be able to see Leo McCarey’s great Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) for the first time. The film has earned a reputation for having one of the most hard-nosed endings in the history of Hollywood, a moment so achingly beautiful and sad that one would never expect a major studio offering today to end in such a way. (“It would make a stone cry,” Orson Welles reportedly said.) And it is true that McCarey doesn’t turn away from the hard reality that elderly parents are often ignored or pushed aside by their children, no matter how well-intentioned those children can be. The film has magnificent pacing and a screenplay steeped in universal emotion, and it remains as relevant and powerful today in a beautiful restoration by the Criterion Collection. Rome Open City (1944), the first of Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist war trilogy, is also available on Criterion and worth the time. Famously shot on the tightest of budgets and with whatever film stock Rossellini could find mere months after the Allies liberated Rome from its Nazi-occupation, the film is a strong profile of ordinary Italians who are struggling externally and internally when caught between their occupiers and the Resistance. Rome Open City encapsulates a similar, yet different, feeling of emotion exhaustion, although most of its unflinching characteristics are borne out expressively, on screen. It is a fine, early example of its neorealist genre and of its country’s cinema during the 1940s.

McCarey and Rossellini aside (and one other film, which will appear with its own review soon), the foray into film this last month was not as completely satisfying as a foray into episodic television. I watch the first few seasons of Parks & Recreation (NBC) and Modern Family (ABC), which are available through Netflix and the premium subscription to Hulu. Both shows follow the single-camera, laugh-track-free, documentary-esque format made popular by a spate of recent network television successes like Arrested Development and The Office. (30 Rock, while eschewing documentary format, nevertheless embraces the single-camera format.) In fact, those shows are particularly helpful guides, as Modern Family bears resemblance to Arrested Development and Parks & Recreation bears resemblance to The Office. Each takes its predecessor a step further — Modern Family weaves three core nuclear units into a larger tapestry, creating a larger ensemble than Development; Parks & Recreation, once it settled into a groove and found its voice in the full-run second season, took the often surreal and highly comic office environment and spliced in governmental satire and created characters that seem more robust and complete than the Americanized version of The Office, which lost steam after its third season. For someone who usually doesn’t watch much television except in DVD and instant-streaming formats, these two shows proved to be exceptionally bright spots to counteract winter doldrums.

I don’t quite have the time to explore the literary offerings I consumed during January, but let me give some recommendations of books I read that I enjoyed: The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (edited by Kevin Young, an eclectic mix classic and contemporary verse exploring the innumerable facets of grief); Beowulf (the Old English epic translated by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney); Gideon’s Trumpet (a chronicle of the landmark Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright with in-depth at how the court functions, written in superbly clear prose by Anthony Lewis); and 1 Henry VI (Shakespeare’s classic examination of power-hungry factions that cause the state more harm than good, largely considered to be literature’s first “pre-quel”).

Coming up: an ideal 2011 Oscar ballot, the best films of 2009 (only a year late!), and a standalone review of Apocalypse Now because I have too many thoughts on it to be constrained to the Media Month feature. Until then: what was the best film, new or otherwise, you saw during January?

Ratings:

Film
Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937): ★★★★½

Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945): ★★★★

The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999): ★★★★

My Blue Heaven (Herbert Ross, 1990): ★★★½

Heat (Michael Mann, 1995): ★★★½

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997): ★★★½

Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998): ★★★½

The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007): ★★★½

Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987): ★★★

Chaplin (Richard Attenborough, 1992): ★★

Television
Parks & Recreation (NBC, Seasons 1 & 2): ★★★★½

Modern Family (ABC, Season 1): ★★★★½

Screen Savour in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:11:00 +0000

It goes without saying this blog has been quiet for some time now. It will come back to life for 2011.

The incarnation will not be the same. Time is simply not as abundant enough for me as it once was — I'm now a full-time college faculty member, a husband, a new father, a dog-walker, a writer, a reader, an avid NPR listener, etc. I love film, but writing about it requires a great deal of time, energy, focus, and revision to meet the standards I want for myself.

What I'll introduce for Screen Savour in 2011 is what I'm calling Media Months. Because I can't write here daily (or, realistically, even weekly), I'm going to write one essay throughout each month tracking the art I see. I will write primarily about film and literature, but I will also discuss television, music, theater, museums, photography, and any other artistic venture that draws my attention through the month. Each Media Month article will appear at the end of the month and will include mini-reviews, ratings, analysis, and musings. I'll also finally finish my Buster Keaton series, give my personal picks come Oscar time, hopefully write about Fritz Lang's sound era, and maybe try another film series if I'm feeling particularly ambitious (the Marx Brothers, perhaps?).

Let's hope it works. I'm winging it, and we'll see what happens.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 21:52:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton & Charles Reisner / USA / 71m.

It’s difficult to begin a discussion of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. anywhere but the film’s famous shot, perhaps one of the most famous in all of cinema. The front facade of a house has broken free of its moorings during a cyclone on a Mississippi River port and falls onto Keaton, who’s saved only by the fact that he’s standing in the exact location of the second-story window’s course. It glides right over him, leaving him standing bewildered. The shot is brilliantly executed (more on that in a moment) and it never grows old to watch, but the reason to begin with it happens to be something else entirely. I like the shot in the larger context of Keaton scholarship because it symbolizes his approach to filmmaking: chaos and mayhem swirl around the stone-faced comedian, trying only to keep his footing in the world around him.

The idea behind Steamboat Bill, Jr. came from Charles Reisner, who had worked with Charles Chaplin on The Kid and The Gold Rush. (Producer Joseph Schenck hired Reisner as Keaton’s co-director.) It’s one of Keaton’s most domesticated plots, as it is not merely Willie’s pursuit for the girl and the approval of her family but also the pursuit for approval from his father, Bill Sr. (Ernest Torrence). It is the unseen mother’s idea that the two be reunited after Willie graduates from college, but with his striped-blazer, heavy suitcase, tiny mustache, and beret, Willie is nothing like his steamboat captain father. The mere sight of Willie sends the father into histrionics (implicitly suggesting the father do away with the preppy Willie, the first mate advises: “No jury would convict you”).

The father’s first order of business is to make Willie presentable, buying him a new hat and shaving the “barnacle on his lip,” and then teach him the ways of his steamboat, a rickety vessel named the Stonewall Jackson. Bill Sr. has been feuding with another steamboat entrepreneur, John James King (Tom McGuire, looking eerily similar to an elderly Robert Frost), who — because this is the world of silent movies — has a young and attractive daughter (Marion Byron) that the protagonist finds remarkably lovely.

The first part of the film runs on the standard Keatonian formulae: extracting humor from the moments when he can’t live up to society’s (or his father’s) expectations for masculinity; struggling to understand the complexities of riverboats; and his inability to shed the preppy air he’s acquired while away at university. There is nothing particularly barbarous about the humor here, and little requiring Keaton’s comic ingenuity. Instead, the appeal of the first half is subtle and what deserves closer inspection is Keaton’s directorial choices.

Keaton’s ability to successfully utilize spatial dimensions becomes apparent in the cyclone that closes the film, but he provides some sly reminders of spatial construction through his direction and framing. Willie arrives by train, promising he’d wear a white carnation in his lapel. What follows is some misdirection humor, where almost all the men aboard the train are wearing white carnations in their lapels, but the real reason the father cannot find Willie amongst the travelers is that Willie has gotten off at the wrong side of the depot, literally on the wrong side of the tracks for the whole scene. These unknown moments continue into the film, such as Willie’s visit to the barbershop, where we realize that the co-ed who he loves has been sitting the adjacent barber’s chair the entire time.

The spatial construction is nowhere near as nuanced as The General, which makes great use of small sets contrasted against larger environments, or The Navigator, where the boat must become a continually surprising and providing set. It might initially seem ironic that the steamboat plays such a minor role in the course of the film, but the decision is quite cunning. When Keaton does make use of the boat in this film, he occasionally retreads his previous work in The Navigator. By keeping the steamboat out of the film’s major plot points, he manages to avoid derivation, although the first half of the film is still plagued by a comparatively slow build-up.

The film takes a turn and improves above its ordinary beginnings following the arrest of Bill Sr. for attacking King in anger, and shortly after he’s put in jail, the cyclone arrives. Keaton wanted to end the film with a flood, but due to tragic floods in the United States shortly before and the prohibitive costs, Keaton substituted in the cyclone. It is the superior choice for numerous reasons, primarily because it reinforces what Roger Ebert calls “a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony.” Keaton and his crew destroy an entire town. There are strong winds that prevent walking, creating a strange but metaphoric conflation of stillness and movement. There are flying boxes, collapsing walls, and swinging fence doors. He becomes caught in a bed that blows around the town. He latches onto a tree that is uprooted by the wind and blown into the river while he hangs onto the trunk. It is natural having its way with the short man who does everything he can to avoid being swept away.

The famous falling-wall shot wasn’t entirely new to Keaton, but it had never been attempted on that scale. He’d done a variation on it in his short film One Week, and the stunt actually repeats itself in different versions through the rest of the cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (More than once he opens a door and walks through while the entire wall collapses.) “The clearance of that window,” Keaton said later, “was exactly three inches over my head and past each shoulder. And the front of the building—I’m not kidding—weighed two tons. It had to be built heavy and rigid in order not to bend or twist in the wind.” Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes that Keaton’s entire crew besought him not to go forward with the stunt. Reisner wouldn’t direct the scene and left the set. The story editor almost quit. The cameraman who eventually ran the film for the film ended up looking the other way in fear. Keaton, however, had it perfect in one take. Kerr:

It is stunning in a special way, Keaton’s way. It is not, for instance, frightening, as a similar shot of [Harold] Lloyd’s might have been frightening. When Lloyd stunted, he meant to terrify; and he increased the audience’s agitation by letting us see how agitated he was in the situation. Nothing of the sort here. Buster is placid. The wall falls impassively. When it has fallen, wall and Buster have arrived at an entirely equitable relationship. There is nothing to scream about.

At the end of it all, Willie encounters sort of the ultimate test of masculinity of a Keaton film, where not only the girl-in-distress requires rescuing but his own father and her father need saving as well. (And the ending, where a priest is saved from the river, is pure Keatonian magic.)

Synchronized sound came to Hollywood in 1927, but Keaton’s producer, Joseph Schenck, was not worried. “Talking pictures will never displace the silent drama from its supremacy. There will always be silent pictures,” he predicted, which we know now is certainly untrue. Steamboat Bill, Jr. was Keaton’s first film released after the popularization of sound, and fortunately it remained silent. (Sound would not have been available to Schenck’s independent studio, but nevertheless: sound would have distracted the spectacular cyclone sequence.) What would not remain for Keaton was independence. After the completion of Steamboat Bill, Jr., Schenck informed Keaton that he would close shop. Keaton, working as an independent auteur with Schenck’s financing for the last eight years, would have to find a new home and enter what would become a troubling stage in his career. Steamboat Bill, Jr. then marks the quasi-end to Keaton’s independence and filmmaking, and though not conceived to be such, it is a proper capstone. It’d be a masterpiece were it not for its slightly unoriginal first half, but the second half nudges it up in the ranks.

College (1927)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:55:00 +0000

d. James W. Horne & Buster Keaton / USA / 61m.

College, Buster Keaton’s ninth feature, is not exactly a bad film, but it demonstrates how wildly sporadic genius can be. It is, at its core, Keaton on auto-pilot — and by most historical accounts, consciously so. Biographer Marion Meade introduces the film in her book Cut to the Chase by noting Keaton set out to do a film that required as little ingenuity as possible, and on that standard you could say he fulfilled the small expectation he set for himself.

Released in the same year of The General — what many consider to be his, or perhaps the, high-water mark in silent comedy — College plays instead like a less mature offering from earlier in his career. The comparison might be unfair, because few films are counted among the caliber of The General, but College is not even among Keaton’s upper-tier work. It is minimally inventive and largely predictable, hindered in part an episodic gag structure reminiscent of his shorts or an awkwardly assembled film like Three Ages.

Now—yes, it is something akin to a cinematic truth that a Buster Keaton misfire still lands within a reasonable distance of the target. College isn’t a pain to sit through, but its treats and creative flourishes are few and far between. (As Walter Kerr says in his essential volume, The Silent Clowns: “College is weak Keaton because —for the most part—it could have been just as well done by Harold Lloyd.”) The film is hindered by a plot that is go-go-go-for-the-girl and not much else, not even a gargantuan gag that swoops in to save the film as there is at the end of Keaton’s Seven Chances. The story here is of bookworm Ronald (Keaton) who must take up athletics to impress a girl named Mary (Anne Cornwall) for whom book smarts isn’t nearly as appealing as the triumphalism of sports. Many of the jokes involve the trials and failures and ultimate successes as Ronald attempts to win Mary. A few, like a bit with a javelin, succeed. Most others, like an uncomfortable and unfortunate race-based humor with Keaton in blackface, don’t.

Keaton can be an exhausting figure to watch on-screen. Thirty-two at the time and still in excellent physical condition, Keaton performed all his own runs, dives, leaps, and falls. However, for the first and only time in his silent career, for College Keaton used one stunt double — a U.S. Olympic pole vaulter who performed a gag Keaton chose to sit out. Later Keaton said, “I could not do the scene, because I am no pole vaulter and I didn’t want to spend months in training to do the stunt myself.” I certainly can’t, and won’t, blame him, but it is a historical fact that looms heavy over a film that embodies mediocrity. Keaton was in fact known to devote months to perfecting a desired sequence or action, and the failure to do so here speaks volumes about the actor-director’s lukewarm attitude toward the film.

If College is remembered for anything today, it may be its final moments. Not surprisingly, most critical scholarship on the film is devoted to what might be the era’s bleakest “happy ending”: after Keaton has spent the entire film attempting to woo the girl of the dreams, he wins and weds her. Immediately following this joyous occasion, however, is a series of quick fades, each showing the couple as they grow older and older and then: a tombstone. Kerr asks:

What is this abrupt slap in the face doing at the end of an otherwise unquestioning love story? It takes no more than eleven seconds of playing time to deliver its chill, and yet it undoes on the spot all the yearning, the struggle and the victory, of the narrative. The bitter candor—and it is bitter—is not prepared for; it not only takes us by surprise, it seems to take Keaton by surprise, as though a truth too long suppressed had turned to bile and erupted with volcanic force. It’s still funny, because there is truth in it; but it is bleak indeed.

Bleak, perhaps, to leave some sort of unique stamp on the film. Halfway through the 1920s, Keaton had begun to realize audiences would only tolerate so much ingenuity; when it strayed too far from the plot or become focused too exclusively on Keaton instead of both he and his love interest, it didn’t play well during screenings. And because the plots were always about a boy pursuing a girl (either to save her or win her), it imposed some restrictions on the personal touches Keaton could put onto a film. It was the first external force to mainstream Keaton, and a film like College suffers for it. The ending here is outside the box and shocking in its wit: if you want matrimony and ‘til death do us part, then part we shall by death.

Recapping the Oscars

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:08:00 +0000

I went into the home stretch of the Academy Awards fully expecting to miss the show. I was out of the States, unplugged from the Internet and without access to network television. I believed this year’s show was to go down in my personal history alongside the show in early 2007, the only other Oscar telecast I’ve missed this decade, when a second-shift journalism job kept me from seeing Martin Scorsese snag his Best Director award and The Departed — my pick of the five nominated films, the only time it'd happened that decade — go home with Best Picture.

Ah, but I hadn’t counted on a cable channel carrying the feed. TNT, broadcasting the exquisite Spanish language, carried the show. After dinner and loitering near a craps table, I managed to catch the latter half from a crowded bar, sipping White Russians in tribute to the role that should have landed Jeff Bridges an Oscar.

It would have been fitting if I’d missed the whole show, considering how strongly I was gunning for The Hurt Locker to win. It is one of the best releases of 2009, and I’m absolutely thrilled it took home six Oscars, including Picture and Director. Its story is invigorating for a film critic who perpetually finds himself on the side of the loser, and refreshing that such a small but powerful film can topple an undeserving behemoth such as Avatar. It went home with three Oscars, all of them tech, and that feels just about right to me.

Let’s get to some run-down stats:

• I predicted 18-of-24 when you consider the entire ballot. I missed all three short films (ouch), Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, and Sound Editing. If you take out the short films and go solely with the main categories, I was 18-of-21, which was just a tad better than the 17-of-21 I went last year. Meanwhile, my preferences lined up 9-of-24, which is fewer than I'd have liked but rewarding because I agreed with Picture and Director. (Other preferences that won: Supporting Actor, Animated Film, Editing, Score, Song, Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects.)

• Because I had so many correct predictions, there were few surprises. The three main categories I missed each provide an interesting angle for discussion. Perhaps it is a reflection of my film geekdom, but Sound Editing was the most surprising. I thought Avatar had it in the bag, but I was thrilled to see The Hurt Locker snag it. When I first heard Precious, a film I didn’t care for, won Adapted Screenplay away from Up in the Air, which I found to be among the year’s best, I was shocked. But the shock wore off, and the more I thought about it, the more I simply came to realize I undersold its popularity among the Academy. (That it turned up in Best Editing should have been a sign that Mo’Nique would not be the only victory the film received.) It is clear the Academy is okay, or at least confused enough, to embrace digital cinematography.

• There was a complete rout of my predictions and preferences in the short film categories. Few anticipated Music by Prudence or The New Tenants would win their respective categories, and most people believed Logorama was too crude for the Academy members who shuffle out into the theaters and screen all five shorts before they're allowed to cast a vote. But the voters still had a few surprises up their sleeves and proved once again that while they might be predictable in the Documentary and Foreign Language Film categories (which also require attendance), they're anything but predictable when it comes to the shorts.

• The show itself: an incomplete blah. The bar where I sat was rather loud and I was hardly able to hear much of what was said by the hosts, the presenters, or the winners. When I was able to hear what people were saying, it didn’t carry the gravitas I’d have hoped it would. The Best Actor/Actress presentation was laughably sycophantic, and I would have preferred Kate Winslet and Sean Penn just to grace the stage, read the nominees, and award the trophy. It was difficult to stomach that the show cut segments and ran long for five personalized introductions.

• One final note: watching the second half among people who don’t make awards-season twists a top priority and who hardly saw any of the films was a shocking experience. The Hurt Locker was never referred to by name; it was always “the bomb movie.” Avatar, George Clooney, and Sandra Bullock had tremendous support. One sexist jerk who walked in during Kathryn Bigelow’s wonderful acceptance speech shouted out, “Blah blah blah blah, I love being an actress, blah blah blah blah.” If you think the idea of her win making history is rather blase, just remember there are still people for whom the idea of a woman director is completely foreign.

I’m scrambling to finish watching missed films from the last year, and soon I’ll be ready to post my best films of 2009. Until then and the next awards season, however, it’s back to film criticism.

If I Had an Oscar Ballot, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:46:00 +0000

A few months ago, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis summarized the Oscars with typical acerbity: “Let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them.”

A pithier and truer verdict might not ever have been rendered. But, were it only so easy! When we say we hate the Oscars, what we mean is that they favor publicity to artistry, honor lesser achievements as stand-ins for someone’s entire body of work, and purport to reward the best in film while typically bestowing laurels upon mid-range selections. Yet how can you not get a kick out of it all? I like the Oscars in the same way I like federal elections or the AFC playoffs. It’s a race, with ups and downs, honoring the “best” in film.

Therefore, I like to play this game every year with the Oscars: who’s going to win, who should win, and who should have been nominated. First, a few disclaimers: My predictions are my best guess on this day. My preferences are the nominated films and individuals I’d like to see win, and I’ve chosen them because I think they’re the genuine best of their categories (none of this “he/she is due” yarn—that’s the real bullshit). Wherever possible, I’ve tried to limit my preference to one single choice, like I’d be faced with on a ballot, but sometimes it’s too nuanced for that. The “Should Be Here” selections include 2009 U.S. releases that didn’t make the cut for whatever reason — perhaps ruled ineligible by the academy’s rules and regulations, or passed over in lieu of some lesser film. I don’t claim to have seen every 2009 release, so these suggestions are based solely on my film knowledge as of today.

And the categories are:

Best Animated Short Film
• French Roast
• Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
• The Lady and the Reaper 
• Logorama 
• Wallace & Gromit in “A Matter of Loaf and Death”

Nick Park has tremendous goodwill among the Academy. He’s 5-0 when it comes to the gold, and he’ll probably win again this year for his latest Wallace and Gromit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death — familiar territory, but at 29 minutes, the longest of the bunch (Oscar rewards length here) and with the most significant story development. Few of the other four probably stand a chance, but let’s consider them anyway. French Roast and Granny O’Grimm have issues for opposing reasons (the former is nicely animated, but terribly dull; the latter is lively, but poorly animated). Logorama, submitted by France, is a witty and vulgar short that skewers the prevalence of marketing and corporations, but runs far too long on concept alone. I’d suspect the one that has an outside chance of knocking off Park would be Spain’s The Lady and the Reaper, a well-executed if slightly flawed comic battle for a dying woman between the Grim Reaper and a cocky surgeon that recalls (and falls short of) the classic shorts of Chuck Jones. It’s hard to deny Park’s film is objectively the most accomplished of the five, even if its characters are starting to taste a bit like week-old bread. He’ll win, and he’ll deserve it, but I’ll be rooting for The Lady and the Reaper on fresh-blood grounds alone.

Prediction: A Matter of Loaf and Death
Preference: A Matter of Loaf and Death or The Lady and the Reaper
Should Be Here: The Cat Piano, Partly Cloudy

Best Live-Action Short Film 
• The Door
• Instead of Abracadabra
• Kavi
• Miracle Fish 
• The New Tenants

I want to give a brief shout-out to Miracle Fish, which I found captivating in its strangeness for almost the entire running length. Its final moment however, when it literally fades to nothing and avoids the tough implications of the “ending” it delivered, screws over almost everything that came before. I suspect it and two other films — Kavi, a.k.a. Slumdog redux; and The New Tenants, a bleak and trashy piece of hipster flare — can be written off. The crux of this race will come down to The Door and Instead of Abracadabra, which poses a significant problem.

The Door is a finely crafted short film with startling images and cinematography, deep emotional currents, and genuine suspense. It is the story of a family following the Chernobyl disaster (the straightforward identification of which it, better or worse, averts from the audience until the final credits) and a man’s quest to retrieve a piece of his past. But the ending leaves a sour note in its heavy-handed repetition. Instead of Abracadabra, meanwhile, puts forth a complete story arc of a struggling magician and his relationship with his family, but represents rather conventional comic filmmaking. Abracadabra’s levity was received well at screening I attended, due in no small part to the antidote it provided to the starker preceding films. Yet I’m going to give the edge to The Door, which might prevail merely because it’s “about” something larger than itself.

Prediction: The Door
Preference: The Door or Instead of Abracadabra

Best Documentary Short Film
• China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
• The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner 
• The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant 
• Music by Prudence 
• Rabbit à la Berlin

Of the three short film categories, this year’s strongest is the documentary field. The live-action and animation fields suffer from a collective funk in which none of the five stand out as compelling selections, but the short documentaries offer diverse topics and styles. Ironically enough however, the category front-runner seems to be The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, which, while timely and relevant enough, doesn’t announce itself as powerfully as the competition. Rabbit à la Berlin is a surreal angle on the history of the Berlin Wall “through the eyes of rabbits,” so it can probably be disqualified from Oscar consideration but nevertheless is an absorbing and mesmerizing 45 minutes. I was also captivated by The Last Campaign, an even-handed piece exploring the subject of death-with-dignity laws through the campaign of Washington state’s former governor who has Parkinson’s. For me The Last Campaign is a close second to China’s Unnatural Disaster, a heart-wrenching portrait of grieving parents angry at their government after the devastating 2008 earthquake. These are three great shorts, each worthy, but one is too large to ignore.

Prediction: China’s Unnatural Disaster
Preference: China’s Unnatural Disaster
Should Be Here: Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak

Best Visual Effects 
• Avatar 
• District 9 
• Star Trek

Let’s just say that if Avatar doesn’t win this award, there’ll be something seriously rotten in the valleys of southern California. I’m not a cheerleader for Avatar in any respect except its visuals, and if it deserves to win anywhere on the ballot, it’s here. District 9 made the most of its budget, but the results were a mixed bag (the spaceship hovering over Johannesburg was great, but the aliens failed to integrate fully). And although I like Star Trek as a film the best of the three, its effects haven’t quite earned a reputation like the other two. Particular shame on the Academy for failing to acknowledge Henson Co.’s skill in bringing the characters of Where the Wild Things Are to life.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Avatar
Should Be Here: Where The Wild Things Are

Best Sound Editing
• Avatar
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds 
• Star Trek 
• Up

Sound editing — the creation and recording of sound effects — seems to be a category that has Avatar’s name all over it. Nominees here are frequently action films (re: loud), films heavy on special effects (re: loud), or animated films (re: occasionally loud), and Avatar has all three. The sound editing crew was charged with the task of creating an entire aural world for an organic planet populated with fictitious creatures without straying too far outside of the familiar. They succeeded, and might have been my vote, if it hadn’t been for Star Trek. You could argue that the rules were looser for Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin (with help from the legendary Ben Burtt) because they were free to invent sounds that required no root to reality, but I’d argue it required more creativity, balance, and selectivity. When it comes to space adventures in 2009 anyway, Star Trek proved more satisfying to the ears.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Star Trek

Best Sound Mixing
• Avatar 
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Star Trek
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Nominees for sound mixing—the synthesis of all sound elements into a singular soundtrack—tend to be action films or films heavily influenced by music. I suspect the race here, like much of the ballot, will also come down to Avatar and The Hurt Locker. The argument for Avatar would include the company it keeps with other ground-breaking “big movie” winners from the last twenty years that picked up both sound editing and Mixing, films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Matrix, The Return of the King, and King Kong. These films tend to have liberal usage of special effects and gargantuan sequences, descriptors that fit Avatar nicely. The argument for The Hurt Locker would have to include the company it keeps with war-film mixing winners like Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, and Saving Private Ryan, and is complicated further by the fact that there is a 50/50 shot that this category will follow the Best Picture winner. History aside, a stronger argument for The Hurt Locker is its complete sonic integration of multiple sound elements to help mirror the chaos and confusion of dangerous situations and the skill to pull back and leave an eerie silence engulf the audience when needed. This has actually been one of the trickiest categories for me this year, and until a few days ago, I was solid with The Hurt Locker as my prediction. But now—I don’t know. I'm on the fence, doubting that the nuanced will be rewarded over the colossus, but crossing my fingers and going there anyway.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker

Best Original Song 
• “Almost There” from The Princess and the Frog 
• “Down in New Orleans” from The Princess and the Frog 
• “Loin de Paname” from Paris 36''
• “Take it All” from Nine 
• “The Weary Kind” from Crazy Heart

The notoriously fickle original song category disqualified many wonderful songs this year as usual, but exceeded my expectations by somehow resisting the treacherously bad “I See You” from Avatar and the banal “Cinema Italiano” from Nine. That said, four of the songs here are still middling-to-poor, with the lone exception of Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett’s “The Weary Kind.” A country western song seemingly penned by an old and broken soul, it serves dual roles as a non-diegetic theme of Crazy Heart but also a powerful diegetic comeback ballad for Bad Blake. Plus, the song itself packs more of a punch than the film’s entire script.

Prediction: “The Weary Kind”
Preference: “The Weary Kind”
Should Be Here: “Help Yourself” from Up in the Air; “Hideaway” from Where the Wild Things Are; “You Got Me Wrapped Around Your Little Finger” from An Education

Best Original Score 
• Marco Beltrami, The Hurt Locker 
• Alexandre Desplat, Fantastic Mr. Fox 
• Michael Giacchino, Up
• James Horner, Avatar
• Hans Zimmer, Sherlock Holmes

First, let’s get out of the way that no one is having a better run of film scores than Alexandre Desplat, who penned scores for five 2009 releases and should have picked up an Oscar for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year. Outside of James Horner’s rather routine score for Avatar, I think there’s a lot to like about this year’s original score category: the offbeat work by Hans Zimmer in Sherlock Holmes, the subtle but effective score in The Hurt Locker by Marco Beltrami, and of course Desplat’s effective (if a little light) channeling of Wes Anderson’s eccentricities in Fantastic Mr. Fox. I’d have swapped out Horner for Abel Korzeniowski’s haunting score for A Single Man (which I’ve heard, though not seen) but even then I’d still want to the award to go to Michael Giacchino for his tender work on Up. Pixar prominently featured his work in the film (particularly the emotional montage in the beginning), and it is immediately recognizable and evocative.

Prediction: Up
Preference: Up
Should Be Here: Abel Korzeniowski, A Single Man

Best Makeup
• Il Divo
• Star Trek 
• The Young Victoria

Not to be too reductive, but many of Oscar’s technical categories live and die by how noticeable they are: films with the most cuts take home editing honors, films with the most elaborate sets take home art direction, etc. I think there’s a tendency to appreciate that if a film has made it this far, it’s doing something right, so you should honor the one that has its “rightness” most visibly on display. If that follows through to this year’s make-up category, Star Trek should walk away with the statuette: the film brought the classic makeup of the series into the modern age, and voters will likely remember Spock’s ears or a Romulan’s face (never mind that more voters have probably seen the film than the other two combined). My choice is Il Divo because I was completely unaware just how much make-up went into transforming Toni Servillo into Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. It was convincing enough to be a hell of a surprise later on, and certainly utilizes its make-up in the most meaningful of ways.

Prediction: Star Trek
Preference: Il Divo
Should Be Here: District 9

Best Film Editing
• John Refoua and Stephen E. Rivkin, Avatar 
• Julian Clarke, District 9 
• Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
• Sally Menke, Inglourious Basterds 
• Joe Klotz, Precious

This year’s editing field should be a no-brainer: of the five, no film benefited as much from precision editing as The Hurt Locker. The cutting by Chris Innis and Bob Murawski created a spatial atmosphere on screen that was at once claustrophobic and paradoxically all-encompassing while sacrificing none of the tension. The result is an embedded sensation during the film’s taut action sequences, where the viewer is thrown into a bomb-difusing squad as concerned with the explosive on the ground as they are from the peering eyes positioned on top of neighboring buildings, all of which we experience. The other nominees did not put forward as impressive work as Innis and Murawski, nor as impressive as Dana E. Glauberman’s clean and efficient work on Up in the Air or the Coen Brothers (as Roderick Jaynes) in A Serious Man. A surprise nomination should have been in order for Sugar, an underrated baseball drama by directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Boden’s editing, coupled with Andrij Parekh’s cinematography, presented as realistic a portrait of what it’s like to be in the middle of a baseball game as I’ve seen in a film.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker
Should Be Here: A Serious Man, Sugar, Up in the Air

Best Costume Design
• Colleen Atwood, Nine
• Catherine Leterrier, Coco Before Chanel
• Janet Patterson, Bright Star
• Sandy Powell, The Young Victoria
• Monique Prudhomme, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

I usually find myself aboard the “stop-rewarding-fancy-period-dramas” train when it comes to the Academy’s costume design category, so it’s with an expansive recognition of irony that my vote is for Janet Patterson’s lovely and subtle costumes in Bright Star (sadly the film’s only nomination), a film that actually engages its costumes on a cumulative level. But subtlety has never been the strong suit of the Oscars, which elevates the chances of eye-poppers like Sandy Powell, with strong but routine work in The Young Victoria, and Monique Prudhomme, behind the trippy costumes of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Because the category has a tendency to reward anything older the McKinley Administration, it appears Powell will pick up her third Oscar.

Prediction: The Young Victoria
Preference: Bright Star
Should Be Here: Colleen Atwood, Public Enemies

Best Cinematography 
• Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker
• Christian Berger, The White Ribbon
• Bruno Delbonnel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Mauro Fiore, Avatar 
• Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds

Beside the obvious question of how the preferential ballot and 10 Best Picture candidates will pan out, Sunday should resolve another lingering question of the Academy’s tastes: will it embrace the all-digital (and special-effects-driven) cinematography of Avatar? All signs point to a deep and understandable hesitation. That’s not to deny the complexity of Mauro Fiore’s task as cinematographer on the film, but it is to suggest that the overlap between visual effects and cinematography creates a Vinn diagram with a bit too much space for some voters. Personally, I’d be among them: I have a greater respect for Barry Ackroyd’s embedded lens in The Hurt Locker and Robert Richardson’s lean and mean reincarnation of classical Hollywood cinema in Inglourious Basterds. Christian Berger’s work on The White Ribbon also gains my respect (lit for black-and-white, shot in color, and desaturated), and it is always a pleasure to see foreign-language films land nominations in categories outside Best Foreign Language Film, but the work comes in below Ackroyd and Richardson, who already has two Oscars to his name. Although Avatar poses a great risk across the technical field, this will go to The Hurt Locker.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: Inglourious Basterds
Should Be Here: Lance Acord, Where the Wild Things Are; Greig Fraser, Bright Star; Eduard Grau, A Single Man

Best Art Direction
• Avatar 
• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
• Nine
• Sherlock Holmes
• The Young Victoria

What were Academy voters smoking when they nominated the five films for this category? This is a rather pathetic slate of nominees for what is usually a lively and competitive category, although these films bear the hallmarks of Oscar’s fingerprints: flamboyant period pieces, stylish musicals, and fantasies. A more original and deserving slate of possible nominees is available by me below, but considering what my options are from the official category, my preference would have to go to Sherlock Holmes, which delivers the eye for period detail and the creativity of the detective himself. The likelier winner will be Avatar, which boasts a threat in almost every tech category, even if its art direction and set decoration were more the result of skilled computer technicians and illustrators. With the word “art” in the category title, you have to give the advantage to Avatar, I guess.

Prediction: Avatar
Preference: Sherlock Holmes
Should Be Here: Any or all of the following with vastly superior art direction: Bright Star, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Inglourious Basterds, Public Enemies, The Road, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Foreign Language Film
• Ajami 
• La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow)
•  Un Prophète (A Prophet) 
• El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes)
• Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon)

“Film X will never win Best Foreign Language Film, and that’s a high compliment” has become the punch-line to what’s become a rather sad joke of a category. That’s not to say the films themselves are jokes, but the process of selecting the nominees for film not in the English language is chuckle-worthy at best and cringe-worthy at worst. Fold the exclusive selection process with the edict that voters must prove they’ve watched all five, which undoubtedly skews the demographic audience, and the result as been some interesting, if not surprising, selections come Oscar night. (Note: The watch-’em-all is not a bad rule; hell, the results often suggest they ought to implement it for every other category.) The year boasts two well-known entries, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and three lesser known entries from Israel, Peru, and Argentina round out the category. I wasn’t floored by any of the five, to be perfectly honest, but I found A Prophet — which has garnered much love among critics — to be the most compelling of the group. Its violence and slower narration will probably exclude it from many ballots, and odds are better that the Academy will go with something a bit more conventional. In the end, I like how Slant Magazine spun this category: If this were the 1950s/1960s, the auteur work of The White Ribbon would prevail; if this were the 1980s/1990s, brutal reality of A Prophet would end in victory; but this is the 2000s/2010s, so the winner will probably be Westernized traditional fare like The Secret in Their Eyes.

Prediction: The Secret in Their Eyes
Preference: A Prophet

Best Documentary Film
• Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
•  The Cove
•  Food, Inc. 
• The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers 
• Which Way Home

What an activist field this year. The front-runner is The Cove, an investigation into the slaughter of dolphins by Japanese fishermen that has sparked the ire of many. There is no denying the force of what The Cove attempts to accomplish as a piece of politics; you’d have to be one cold soul not to flinch, grimace, or tear at the awful sight of the self-aware panic in the dolphins and the subsequent blood-filled waters, but as a formal text, I’ve long though The Cove became too preoccupied with the actions of its crew as opposed to the heart of their mission. For most of the awards season, my vote was loyally in the camp of Food Inc., an exposé into the food production industry that difficult to sit through on a content level but which was crafted with commercial ease in mind. Robert Kenner’s documentary sat on my alphabetical year’s-best list until late December, when it was slowly pushed out by other films, one of which is Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. It is a shattering documentary that examines life in junta-controlled Burma through footage shot illegally and exported out of the country. All three of the nominees I’ve seen speak to my inner liberal, but of the three, Burma VJ is the most formally ambitious and successful.

Prediction: The Cove
Preference: Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
Should Be Here: The Beaches of Agnes

Best Animated Film

• Coraline
•  Fantastic Mr. Fox
•  The Princess and the Frog
• The Secret of Kells
•  Up

Expanding the animated film category from three nominees to five couldn’t have come at a better time. The year was one of the best for animation in recent memory. Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox are on my list of the year’s best films. A surprise nod for The Secret of Kells, a beautiful Irish film about the Viking invasion in the sixth-century, renewed my belief that the Oscars can launch good and obscure films from mere abandon into instant publicity. They should have done for Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max, one of the best films of the year. Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo would have nicely rounded out the category. (Coraline and The Princess and the Frog are the weak links.) The Pixar powerhouse legacy will continue with Up, its five nominations (including Best Picture) making it an unstoppable force, but my own heart is torn between Up and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Prediction: Up
Preference: Up or Fantastic Mr. Fox
Should Be Here: Mary and Max, Ponyo

Best Adapted Screenplay
• Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, District 9
•  Nick Hornby, An Education 
• Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, and Tony Roche, In the Loop 
• Geoffrey Fletcher, Precious
•  Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

I judge an adapted screenplay on three qualities: 1) its success as a screenplay; 2) how meaningfully it transforms the source work; and 3) how it differentiates itself from the source work to become a film. By those standards, there aren’t many screenplays on an annual basis that I think become worthy of this award. This year’s category is certainly stronger than last year’s (where, out of sheer necessity, I voted for Doubt). District 9 has numerous problems, the screenplay most prominent among them; Precious proudly displays its adaptation in its full title, and should be commended from adapting Sapphire’s voice-driven stream-of-consciousness P.O.V. into a mainstream film. I’m thrilled Nick Hornby received a nomination for An Education, although the script’s tendons and threads sometimes show through. The team behind In the Loop provided some of the year’s greatest laughs, and if the Oscars offered a most inventive adaptation of the work fuck, this would win in a heartbeat. As it stands, however, I was never convinced the film took its satire to the next level and it ended as a good, though no great, screenplay. The Oscar will, and should, go to Up in the Air, which took Walter Kirn's first-person novel and grew it into a wonderful character study that is relevant and smart.

Prediction: Up in the Air
Preference: Up in the Air
Should Be Here: Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Single Man, Where the Wild Things Are, and because the Academy corralled it into the “adapted” category, Bright Star

Best Original Screenplay

• Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker 
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
•  Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman, The Messenger 
• Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man
•  Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, Up

Of Oscar’s twenty-four categories, this year the strongest is Best Original Screenplay. But that’s not surprising for two reasons: first, I’ve long believed the original screenplay category holds a truer, though no precise, lens to the world of mainstream film in a particular year than the Best Picture category. Consider some of the previous winners: Milk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation, Fargo, etc. Second, the original scripts are typically better fare. This category isn’t perfect, mind you, but I can’t patently object to any of the above titles, four of which are on my year’s-best list. Up is another gem from Pixar, A Serious Man is a bleak and crackling existential comedy from the Brothers Coen, and The Messenger (written by two non-Americans) nails the American process of grief and suffering during wartime.

I suspect the race is between The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, but it’s difficult to say which will prevail. A screenplay award could be a way of guaranteeing Tarantino an award for Basterds. I’ve long considered Basterds to be a misread text; it speaks to me not as a vengeance fantasy, but a film about the morally suspect ways we as moviegoers root for vengeance and as a war film that upends our traditional notions of language, how we talk about movies and how we define heroes and villains. I’m not entirely sure that’s how Tarantino wanted it to be read, but as it is, I personally found its screenplay more rewarding than The Hurt Locker’s, which is peppered with vivid details and psychological analysis. Still, none of the others come as close to capturing the image of an ideal original screenplay than the offbeat existentialism of A Serious Man.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: A Serious Man
Should Be Here: Olivier Assayas, Summer Hours; Adam Elliot, Mary and Max

Best Supporting Actress
• Penélope Cruz, Nine 
• Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air 
• Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart
•  Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
•  Mo’Nique, Precious

Earlier this season, when Mo’Nique suggested doing P.R. rounds for Precious was essentially pointless because everything voters needed to know about her performance was on the screen, I nearly leapt from my chair and tracked her down to deliver the largest hug a critic could muster. I adore that sentiment, and it’d be nice if more actors took that approach. After winning practically every supporting actress award all year, she’s the favorite to win, and I’ll be thrilled watching her take the stage and walk away with gold. The supporting acting categories have begun a slow drift into the fields of villainy, and Mo’Nique’s turn as the abusive mother in Precious couples nicely with Christoph Waltz’s baleful scourer in Inglourious Basterds. The role even contains an awards staple: the show-stopping, heart-pounding monologue. It is not, however, the performance that struck me the most of the five. For that I’ll have to commend Vera Farmiga as the cool and calculated travel companion that holds her own against George Clooney in every shared scene of Up in the Air. It’s an impressive performance in the opposite of every way that Mo’Nique’s is impressive: Farmiga is restrained, balanced, a master of false impressions and steely sexuality who is able to compartmentalize her life in even a way that shocks Clooney’s character. Never mind that a win by Farmiga would keep with the villain theme.

Prediction: Mo’Nique
Preference: Farmiga
Should Be Here: Marion Cotillard, Public Enemies

Best Supporting Actor

• Matt Damon, Invictus 
• Woody Harrelson, The Messenger 
• Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
•  Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones 
• Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Let’s dispense with a few formalities: Matt Damon was nominated for the wrong movie (he’s better in The Informant!), Stanley Tucci was nominated for the wrong movie (he’s better in Julie & Julia), and thank god that Christopher Plummer was nominated at all (his first!?). Now let’s talk about the heavy-hitters. Few performances were as arresting this year than Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. It’s equal parts “who-the-hell-is-this-guy” and “holy-hell-what-a-performance.” I cringe at the suggestion of Bob Mondello from NPR that we should shuffle all the acting categories together regardless of gender for a Best Performance and Best Supporting Performance, but if we did, Waltz would have been vote in whichever category he’d received a nomination. Tarantino has suggested he couldn’t make the film until he found the right Hans Landa, and I think on that mark the typically self-aggrandizing director is humbly correct. My runner-up selection for would easily be Woody Harrelson, as an experienced and emotionally wounded bearer of bad news in The Messenger.

Prediction: Waltz
Preference: Waltz
Should Be Here: Peter Capaldi, In the Loop; James Gandolfini, Where the Wild Things Are; Anthony Mackie, The Hurt Locker; Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles

Best Actress
• Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side 
• Helen Mirren, The Last Station 
• Carey Mulligan, An Education
•  Gabourey Sidibe, Precious 
• Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

Last year I called Costume Design for The Duchess while officially predicting The Curious Case of Benjamin Button would take home of the gold. My call was correct and my prediction fell through, but any Oscar watcher has to make one or two from-the-gut picks in hopes of an upset. This year, the Best Actress category is almost atomically unstable in comparison to the other acting fields, and thus the likeliest for an upset. (Just mentioning the category in some circles also brings out those who are atomically unstable, too.) Personally, I was more impressed by the performances of Carey Mulligan in An Education and Gabourey Sidibe in Precious than I was by Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side or Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia. I’m holding out hope that a vote split among the two leading contenders will deliver either Mulligan or Sidibe to the stage come Oscar night. Right now, most signs point to Bullock winning in this category for her work. It’s not a performance for the ages, but it works inside its (awful) film. However, merely because I want to be a bit contrarian and am looking for a serious Oscar pool upset, let me give you five reasons why I think Meryl Streep will win:

1) The Screen Actors Guild and the Academy Awards do not go hand-in-hand. Only twice in SAG’s 16-year history has its awards and the Oscars synched 4/4. The last time it happened was 2004, so you might think that we’re set for it to happen again. But statistically speaking, someone who won a SAG Award this year will not go home with an Oscar. Bullock won at SAG, and Actress is this year’s most contentious and this year’s least locked category.
2) If Kate Winslet hadn’t been placed in the lead actress category last year for The Reader, there’s a good chance Streep would have won her third Oscar for Doubt — and the Oscars love to correct their errors and oversights.
3) Never bet against the establishment candidate, and always remember the Oscars don’t like to be told what to do. This is Bullock’s first nomination, and she’s a populist figure to win, a once-in-a-lifetime-shot, but ask Bill Murray and Mickey Rourke how that turned out.
4) The biopic factor. Julie & Julia has a lot going against it (including only one nomination), but one of its awards-season strengths is the portrayal of a famous person. Every Oscar ceremony since 1998 has had a winner who played a real person; while this year’s actress category features four portrayals of real people (Bullock, Mirren, Mulligan, and Streep), Julia Child is certainly the most famous and recognizable among them. And note that frontrunners Waltz, Mo’Nique, and Jeff Bridges all play fictional characters.
5) Streep hasn’t won gold since 1983. Since then, she’s been nominated 12 times. I suspect many voters are thinking she’s overdue.

Naturally those in support of Bullock can cite other indicators as to why she’ll win, and they’re certainly convincing enough. She has the support of many Hollywood figures, both before and after her nomination. This may be her only shot at an Oscar, so why not give it to her? She’s charming, she’s self-effacing, she's been generous with the P.R., and she has the wind behind her back, and...

Okay—look—I’m a nervous gambler. If I were putting money on the line, I’d mark Bullock a hundred times out of a hundred. So, it’s Bullock. But if Streep wins, you’ll at least have to give me the benefit of my math.

Prediction: Bullock
Preference: Mulligan or Sidibe
Should Be Here: Abbie Cornish, Bright Star; Mélanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds; Yolande Moreau, Séraphine; Tilda Swinton, Julia

Best Actor
• Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart 
• George Clooney, Up in the Air 
• Colin Firth, A Single Man
•  Morgan Freeman, Invictus
•  Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Jeff Bridges, here with his fourth nomination, has never won an Oscar and his turn as an alcoholic country singer who turns himself around in Crazy Heart will serve as a lifetime career award. Unfortunately, the screenplay for Crazy Heart doesn’t give Bridges enough to do to infuse true power into the character and the performance is not as brilliant as others by Bridges, whom I love dearly as an actor. In any event, his late entry into the Oscar race (Fox Searchlight distributed the film just in time) certainly knocked off any chance the other four actors had. Morgan Freeman portrayed Nelson Mandela well in a bad film; George Clooney was unfairly derided as “playing himself” as axe-man in Up in the Air, and he’s terrific in the film, working with everyone nicely without stealing the spotlight. Jeremy Renner, in a stunning role of depth and determination that shoulders the weight of The Hurt Locker, is a close second to Colin Firth, a grieving and suicidal professor in A Single Man who lost his significant other in a car accident and is fumbling toward acceptance.

Prediction: Bridges
Preference: Firth
Should Be Here: Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans; Soulévmane Sy Savané, Goodbye Solo; Michael Sheen, The Damned United; Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man

Best Director
• Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
•  James Cameron, Avatar
•  Lee Daniels, Precious 
• Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
• Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

This category may not be a “lock” per se, but I don’t know a single person willing to bet against Kathryn Bigelow. So let’s take her out of the equation for just a moment.

Last year I cast my imaginary vote for David Fincher, director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was not among my favorite films of 2008 and would not have received my vote for Best Picture (although it did well in my imaginary tech categories), but I responded to and respected Fincher’s overall vision for the film and what he accomplished outside of the screenplay concerns. It was similar to the reaction I had with Avatar, which is also a flawed film from start to finish, but I don’t think you can downplay the scope and accomplishment James Cameron brought to it. I will never be able to wrap my mind around the idea of Avatar for Best Picture, but if Cameron were to pull off some miraculous upset, I could at least seen the justification in it. Ditto for Quentin Tarantino and Jason Reitman. (I didn’t like Precious, so Lee Daniels earns my congratulations on his nomination.) Inglourious Basterds and Up in the Air are the best films yet from their directors, but they couldn’t be further apart: the former is messy and slaphappy homage to cinema, while the latter is a clean, measured, and controlled character study.

That said, the discussion is utterly moot because of Bigelow. She crafted one of the finest war films in recent memory, and the first truly great fictional feature film to handle the Iraq War. Her vision on The Hurt Locker is in many ways a wild amalgam of the best decisions from Cameron, Tarantino, and Reitman. She utilizes the raw power of cinema to create an immersive experience in a war zone, and because the rest of the crew — from the actors to the editors, from the writing to the cinematography, from the sound mixers to composers — are also firing on all cylinders, it highlights her achievement even more.

Prediction: Bigelow
Preference: Bigelow
Should Be Here: Jane Campion, Bright Star; Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man; Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Picture
• Avatar 
• The Blind Side
•  District 9
•  An Education
•  The Hurt Locker
•  Inglourious Basterds 
• Precious
•  A Serious Man 
• Up
•  Up in the Air

Most Oscar nominations are foregone conclusions (as Meryl Streep once noted, “the best acting all year is when the winners act surprised”), but for the 2009 Academy Awards, there was still the hint of genuine curiosity. Would opening the Best Picture category to ten let in more popcorn-friendly films of a lesser quality or smaller films of higher quality?

The answer, we’ve discovered, is a bit of a mixed bag. Had the category stayed at five, most likely the Best Picture nominees would have been Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, and Up in the Air. (We can deduce this from the Producers and Directors Guild Awards and from this year’s Best Director category.) As I see it then, the rest of the five slots were a +2/0/-2. A Serious Man and Up making the cut are positives. I’m indifferent toward An Education as a total package, and while I would have preferred something else, I don’t find its inclusion particularly cringe-worthy. District 9 and The Blind Side come in as negatives. It turns out that when you let the academy nominate five extra films, what happens is a mirror of when they nominate five films total: a few deserving, one middle-of-the-row, and a few undeserving. If I could go back in time, I’d suggest they just stick with five.

Now the new question will be how the Academy’s preferential voting system will affect the results. I’d call it a three-way race between Avatar, The Hurt Locker, and Inglourious Basterds. The first has practically made more money than the other nine nominees combined, but suffered a typically fatal blow of not securing a writing nomination or a single acting nomination; the second has hit nearly every precursor in its path to victory (PGA, DGA, WGA, ACE, and variations guilds and critics’ associations); and the third has a passionate, if limited, following as well as possible high-rankings on voters’ preferential ballots.

If I could vote, I’d go with The Hurt Locker, although I admire four other films here — Inglourious Basterds, A Serious Man, Up, and Up in the Air, all of which hold a spot on my year’s-best list. Any of them winning would be fine, and any of the other five winning would be frustrating. I predict the Academy will follow suit, given the precursors Locker has scored. But we simply don’t know how it’ll play it out; the Academy’s taste is at times mercurial (cf. Gladiator, Crash). Avatar winning would absolutely unprecedented but wholly logical on a few levels.

It feels strange to make The Hurt Locker as my official projection, considering I’ve been on the side of the film that won Best Picture only once this decade (in 2006, with The Departed). I’m holding my breath and crossing my fingers I will be again.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker
Preference: The Hurt Locker
Should Be Here: Bright Star, Mary and Max, Sugar, Summer Hours, Where the Wild Things Are
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Here are my predictions and preferences one more time:

Best Picture
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Best Director
Will and Should Win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

Best Actor
Will Win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Should Win: Colin Firth, A Single Man

Best Actress
Will Win: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Should Win: Gabourey Sidibe, Precious

Best Supporting Actor
Will and Should Win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Mo’Nique, Precious
Should Win: Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air

Best Adapted Screenplay
Will and Should Win: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air

Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Should Win: Joel and Ethan Coen, A Serious Man

Best Animated Film
Will and Should Win: Up

Best Documentary Film
Will Win: The Cove
Should Win: Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country

Best Foreign Language Film
Will Win: The Secret in Their Eyes
Should Win: A Prophet

Art Direction
Will Win: Avatar
Should Win: Sherlock Holmes

Cinematography
Will Win: Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker
Should Win: Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds

Costume Design
Will Win: The Young Victoria
Should Win: Bright Star

Editing
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Makeup
Will Win: Star Trek
Should Win: Il Divo

Original Score
Will and Should Win: Michael Giacchino, Up

Original Song
Will and Should Win: “The Weary Kind,” by T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham, from Crazy Heart

Sound Editing
Will Win: Avatar
Should Win: Star Trek

Sound Mixing
Will and Should Win: The Hurt Locker

Visual Effects
Will and Should Win: Avatar

Animated Short
Will and Should Win: A Matter of Loaf and Death
(However, I Hope Will Win: The Lady and the Reaper)

Documentary Short
Will and Should Win: China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of the Sichuan Province

Live-Action Short
Will and Should Win: The Door

As a frame of reference, last year I correctly predicted 17 of 21 categories (I missed Actor, Foreign Language Film, Costume Design, and Sound Editing, and didn’t predict the short films). My preferences, however, lined up only 7 times out of the 21 — Actor, Supporting Actor, Animated Film, Documentary, Art Direction, Make-Up, and Visual Effects.

We won’t know until Sunday how good these predictions are, but if they go this way exactly as I foresee it, my new nomination preference overlap is more than 50%—13 of 24. That’s a hell of an improvement, but still a long way from reflecting the state of cinema as I see it.

Golden Globe Reactions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:55:00 +0000

Everything I think about the ceremony last night is best summed up in my @ScreenSavour Twitter feed from the broadcast: lots of pith and sarcasm. If you think awards shows are trivial, then the Golden Globes are Trivial-with-a-capital-T. Yet it’s too much fun for me to resist pulling out a needle and popping an over-produced balloon, so I had my fun.

Of course, the most interesting parts of the ceremony — Up winning Best Original Score, Jeff Bridges winning Best Actor — are eclipsed in the Monday morning discussion by James Cameron, who won Best Director for Avatar, which also won for ~~Silliest~~ Best Drama. (It’s the best “drama” of the year like The Hangover is the best “comedy.”)

I’ll be the first to say I don’t know what Avatar’s fortunes last night mean in regard to anything awards-related down the road. All night, awards-watchers I respect were calling out that someone’s nice acceptance speech at the Globes all but cemented an Oscar in a few weeks, but then, when something they didn’t like won, they cautioned everyone to relax because it’s “just the Golden Globes.” This seems like double-dealing spin at best. The Golden Globes are either worth something (no matter how small) or they aren’t. If Christoph Waltz and Mo’Nique win in the supporting actor categories at the Oscars, it’s not because of their genuine and sincere Golden Globe speeches; it’s because they’ve been cleaning up at almost every award show since December.

In any event: I'll be interested to see just how many people tuned in to the Golden Globes and whether there will be an Avatar effect from the audience. The producers spent the whole broadcast essentially pumping the audience for its victory at the end of the show, and no doubt a lot of people were rooting for the film to win. The Oscars will be mindful of that, I believe, if for no other reason than they're quite sensitive over The Dark Knight fiasco last year. (Incidentally, as far as quality blockbusters go, The Dark Knight runs circles around Avatar.)

I’ll have more awards season chatter when the Oscar nominations are announced. Now back to some legitimate criticism.

Rewinding 2009: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:48:00 +0000

Reviews of Avatar, Away We Go, Bad Lieutenant, and The Cove, plus 10 one-line reviews.

Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film.
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If I understand the PR and punditry correctly, the goal of James Cameron’s science fiction epic Avatar is immersion — a chrysalis of cinematic completeness, wrapped in the beautiful visuals of a computer-generated world and whisked away on a dreamlike adventure. Using this as a benchmark, Avatar is a mixed bag. For every moment it draws you into its world (and there are many, this is a gorgeous and gigantic technical achievement), there is another moment where its clunky and ham-fisted screenplay pushes you out.

Yes, Avatar is a dizzying spectacle of performance-capture technology and computer-generated imagery that envelopes the audience and brings everyone sitting in the theater into its world, the alien planet Pandora, where a U.S. Marine (Sam Worthington), occupying an avatar of the alien species, is sent on a reconnaissance mission to displace the species. (His loyalties shift as his knowledge grows.) It’s not difficult to admire the ambition and hubris on Cameron’s part that went into imagining this film, which cost in the $300-million range and relies on technology that’s been in the works for something like the better part of two decades. Only time will tell how influential this film’s style and special effects will be, but as you’re positioned in your theater seat, it feels like the door has been opened to a world of new cinematic possibilities.

However, even if its pioneering use of technology makes it the movie-going event of the year, Avatar in its totality is far from the year’s best offerings. While narrative subtlety has never been among Cameron’s strengths, the fundamental failings of the storytelling here — wooden dialogue, bloodless characters, a cliched script that makes no attempt to conceal the scaffolding of its rather sophomoric “Big Ideas” — are particularly egregious. What baffles me is that if you’re going to invest this much time and money into the possibility of cinematic history, why wouldn’t you spend a few more weeks at the drafting table or the writers’ room, tweaking (or radically changing) the script and turning Avatar, which already promises visual uniqueness, into a fresh work of sci-fi? (Even Star Wars, a film that borrows generously from archetypal characters and heroic mythos, found its own breath and pulse.)

The blame and praise fall equally onto the shoulders of Cameron, who serves the film as director, writer, and producer (and in various other capacities, I’m sure). You can tell where his allegiances lie, how he’s stacked the deck, and how he’s buying off the moviegoer. All that is a bit unfair, and even though the film is ultimately effective, it’s only minimally so. Cameron created an addictive new world without bothering to move the one we currently occupy.

________

I’m not sure director Sam Mendes could have helmed a more different film after his 2008 drama Revolutionary Road than 2009’s Away We Go. The former, a beautifully daring yet flawed adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel, peered into the tortured and destructive marriage of a couple where the 1950s bled into the early 1960s. The latter, from an original screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, peers into the life of — surprise! — a couple genuinely in love. This is perhaps not traditional fare for art, but it works with ease and pleasantry in Away We Go. Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are in their thirties, happily together and deeply in love, but a little lost as they struggle to discover where “home” is before the birth of their first child. The film is a bit of a road comedy, where they take off and try our new locations and visit kooky friends and family. Krasinski and Rudolph are comfortable and likable, and the film is sweet and warm, with well-written touches of humanity. Though by no means perfect, it is a small, affecting love story that is a welcome respite from Hollywood’s bankrupt romantic comedy machine.

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I can imagine a few circumstances under which Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage, would not be a success — for example, if it hadn’t been directed by Werner Herzog or starred Nicolas Cage. As simplistic as that response may be, it does seem to encapsulate this film’s strengths and the bizarre, twisted pleasure taken in seeing post-Katrina New Orleans through Herzog’s lens and watching Cage play an unstable, corrupt police officer who spirals further out of control than you can potentially imagine. Terence McDonagh, Cage’s character, steals drugs from criminals and the confiscated stash in police headquarters, pays regular visits to an escort girlfriend, uses violence and intimidation, and routinely breaks police protocol. It is a shocking and unhinged performance, the sort of role Cage will do out of the blue when he isn’t wallowing in blockbuster trash, and his character’s (I think it’s only his character’s) mania is riveting: he snorts, he shakes, he hunches, he snaps, he smokes, he twitches, he cackles, he pistol-whips, he blocks a person's assisted breathing machine, he randomly pulls out an electric razor and shaves during an interrogation. It is at once a parody every police procedural in existence but also an over-the-top performance that raises the stakes. The screenplay, adapted by William Finkelstein from the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara, offers little beyond the limitations of the genre, but Herzog’s lens captures an array of strange scenery and capitalizes on the bizarre. I have no doubt that this Bad Lieutenant could have been played entirely straight, but the way Herzog and Cage duck and twist into darkly comic realms allows the film to stay one step ahead of the audience. If you don’t end up laughing and asking yourself what the hell is going on, you’re not paying attention.

________

The Cove commits the cardinal sin of the activist documentary: it conflates the subject with the self when the two are decidedly unequal. Insofar as its subject is concerned, the film is a heart-breaking and horrifying look into the Japanese dolphin industry, the corrupt practices of Japan’s participation in the International Whaling Commission, and the spread of toxic mercury that follows the consumption of dolphin meat. The discussions that emerge through these parts of the film feel essential, although the way it builds its thesis is often hindered by a series of unfinished threads. But when the film becomes less about the dolphins and more about the brave antics and espionage-like tactics required of the filmmakers to capture their footage, The Cove loses its soul. The director, Louie Psihoyos, is the co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization that produced the film. The essayistic bend to this slice of agitprop is not the problem; it’s the distance and perspective. Under the direction of someone less interested in glorifying the filmmakers and activists, the film would have been tighter and more focused on

I won’t deny the power of the final images captured by the hidden cameras — men killing dolphins; dolphins struggling for life; the cruel handling of dead dolphin bodies; the bloody water that seems straight out of a horror film. They are unsettling and haunting. They sent chills down my spine and brought tears to my eyes. Yet, when I finally classified the feeling of discomfort that lingered after the end of the movie, it was as a combination of sadness at the images and frustration at cheapness of the filmmakers’ self-aggrandizing. Am I glad a film like this exists? Yes, for the reason that it brings attention to this issue. But am I glad that film is The Cove? The answer to that question is more complicated.

________

• Earth, a re-cut and family-friendly version of BBC’s groundbreaking documentary Planet Earth, captures a lot that miniseries’ beautiful images, but suffers from an annoying voiceover that dumbs down the quality; certainly not recommended for anyone who can watch the miniseries instead.

• I found The Hangover to be one of the funnier films of the year, an unexpected and full-front assault of vulgarity, but now that 2009 is complete, I can only remember laughing but not what it was exactly that earned that laughter except a bizarre performance by Zach Galifianakis and a surprise cameo by a tiger.

• I Love You, Man: a funny but forgettable film.

• Extract: A not-so-funny but forgettable film.

• The Girlfriend Experience = Steven Soderbergh at his experimental worst.

• The first hour of Notorious is an above-average biopic of the early years in the life of rapper Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, but once the character hits it big, the film’s ambitions narrow rapidly.

• Rumor has it that Christian Bale fought to have the entire focus of Terminator: Salvation shifted from the Marcus Wright, a prototype cyborg character played by Sam Worthington in a a good performance, to vapid resistance hero John Connor, which might easily qualify as one of the worst screenplay decisions of 2009.

• Woody Allen’s Whatever Works doesn’t work.

• Although the goal of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist seems to be conscientious audience repulsion, in reality the most offensive quality to the film is how frighteningly dull, sloppy, and self-absorbed it is (not to mention its heavy-handed aspirations of portraying depression, mania, grief, and humankind’s connection with religion and the natural world).

• Monsters vs. Aliens may not be the worst film of 2009 (many contenders left to go), but it’s among the least enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a movie in quite some time; at every turn this DreamWorks film misfires in its attempt to satirize and honor the science fiction b-movies of the 1950s, and it’s safe to say that the talented writers and dreamers at Pixar have no legitimate threat against them for title of greatest contemporary American animation studio.

Rewinding 2009: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:16:00 +0000

Reviews of Invictus, Funny People, In the Loop, Julie & Julia, and District 9.

Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film. Following last year’s example, I’ll be reviewing movies from across the like-dislike spectrum over the next few months, culminating in a (relatively complete) best-of list by the Oscars.

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Morgan Freeman plays a really good Nelson Mandela in Invictus, a really bad movie about Nelson Mandela. Actually, Invictus approaches Mandela from an oblique angle, focusing on the first year of his presidency in South Africa through the lens of the 1995 World Cup rugby match, where the S.A. team brought together blacks and whites in the shaky years after the defeat of apartheid. There are some biopics that need a narrative device such as this, but I’m not sure the story of Mandela is one of them; had it not been for Freeman and director Clint Eastwood, it’s difficult to see how this script — which rather clumsily engages the themes of reunion and race relations — would have ever be taken seriously.

There are few men like Mandela, after all: a brilliant and canny leader who valued forgiveness and reconciliation, who managed to put aside all the indignities he suffered and lead a nation out of its moral chaos. Mandela's presidency was an act of intranational diplomacy, with the precision of a laser and the subtlety of a master-class politician, and his life is one of the most poignant stories of the twentieth century. Invictus does a disservice to him and his legacy by clomping around, vanquishing subtlety, and announcing its intentions at every turn. Eastwood, functioning on autopilot, is lazy with visual cues, and the tone-deaf script is in competition with the cinematography to keep everything superficial and convenient. Moments like the 1995 World Cup exist; they are crucial moments of community, sometimes calculated and sometimes not, that can bring together feuding factions and resonate louder than any spoken apology. Invictus makes no attempt to capture that sensation as anything close to organic. The result is deeply shameful, particularly when you consider just how powerful Freeman is. Great men do not deserve films this derisory.

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With a name like Funny People, you might expect Judd Apatow’s third directorial effort (after The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) to be, you know, funny; instead, it turns out to be about people. Not to be mistaken, let me say that the film is humorous, certainly good for a few laughs; but in this look into the lives of comedians—the famous, the fortunate, the flailing—the adjective “funny” is defined less by its connection to the humorous than it is to the strange, the unusual, and the offbeat, embodied in George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a sophomoric actor diagnosed with a rare blood disease; side effects include realizing where his life was misspent and a friendship with a young comedian, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who George takes under his wing with a mixture of selfishness and desperation. The strength of Apataow’s films is finding the humanity within unlikely characters, and at least as far as his directorial efforts are concerned, he’s turned it into a profitable enterprise by splicing such psychological analysis into the raunchy comedy genre. After a rather stellar first-hour, Funny People struggles through an overlong midsection (total running time is close to a two-and-a-half hours). In the end it emerges ultimately as a rewarding demonstration of Apataow’s ambition and a realistic portrait of everyday struggles and the means we use to conceal them. It’s not a great film, and it doesn’t nail funny-haha, but in its own way it nails funny-sad and proves the unlikeliest characters are capable of redemption.

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Let’s get this out of the way: the British political satire In the Loop is clever and quick, a film that delivers some good laughs and, heaven knows, owns the political allegiances of my heart. But let’s also acknowledge from the outset that it never really arrives in terms of sheer ferocity. The film concerns two diplomatic corps, American and British, jockeying for power (and when that doesn’t work, the mere illusion of power) as the two countries accelerate a potential war in the Middle East. The appeal here is in the language; writer-director Armando Iannucci’s screenplay is an icy sidewalk of barbs, jabs, and every conceivable conjugation of the word fuck (“Fuckity-bye” as a sign-off is among my favorite). But it’s a sort of witty slipperiness that masks itself as something sharper than it is. I spent the entire running time waiting for In the Loop to pull out the big knife and finally stab its victim, to make its definitive statement, but instead the film ends on a series of a thousand paper-cuts. Hey, if the object is to make them bleed to death, that’s one way to go. It just sure isn’t as efficient as it could be.

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Like Invictus, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia delivers a partial biopic that is not an out-and-out success. It is the story of a contemporary blogger named Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who finds strength and assurance as she works her way through the cookbook of Julia Child, played in a coming-of-age story of her own by the impeccable Meryl Streep. The two stories feed (and feed off) each other, although the clear winners by the end are Streep, who sublimely channels Child, and Stanley Tucci, who plays Julia’s devoted husband Paul. The film has a heaping dose of charm and sweetness, which can’t be undersold, and there is a good deal of pleasure to be had through its humor, cuteness, and warmth. But there is never any escaping the fact that Julie & Julia this is one half of a potentially great movie married to one half of a rather standard movie. What’s worse is now Streep has already played Julia Child, and a full-length look into her life, her career, and her personality will probably not happen any time soon. Oh well: I’ll settle for what I can get.

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District 9, a sci-fi parable from debut director Neill Blomkamp (and producer Peter Jackson) that’s part apartheid allegory and part video game, is all the evidence necessary that the situation and the story are complementary yet profoundly discrete narrative elements. Aliens, having parked their spaceship above Johannesburg, become abused on earth at the hands of humans, who force them into a ghetto and attempt to profit from their intergalactic weaponry. The film begins as a faux documentary, clearly evincing the themes of prejudice, racism, and social justice. It’s easy to swept away in the potential — at least until the story begins, and the missed opportunities, the hopscotch plot, and Swiss cheese logic quickly sour the experience. This alternate universe Blomkamp constructs leaves too many essential questions unanswered and too many threads untied; much like the themes it initially puts on display, the film fronts an attitude and an angle that isn’t backed up with heavy thinking, and its attempts to go for the heart are often scattershot. I can admire the trajectory Blomkamp gives the film, but it is unwise to aim high if you have no intention of following through. And if I feel too let down, it’s only because I believe it could have been possible.

Awards Season, 2009 Edition.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:53:00 +0000

Leading the pack as usual, today the National Board of Review has unveiled its list of the year's best (American) films. Awards Season is now in full swing — cue up the critics in the gallery.

I have split feelings on this time of year. I tend to view awards cynically but I am an unabashed fan of film lists for a number of reasons, primarily because they're just so much damn fun to make as a critic and very helpful to read as a viewer. You can read my take on film awards and best-of lists from a column of mine on the subject from around this time last year; my opinion hasn't changed much.

So, yes, I'm looking forward to the best-of-the-decade lists as well as the year's best-ofs that will appear in the next few months, and will do my best to link to some of the more intriguing and provoking collections. My own lists, regarding 2009 specifically and the decade at large, will no doubt be delayed. I've been consumed with teaching and my thesis work and haven't had much of a chance to view too films this autumn and winter. My favorites from the year so far would include Goodbye Solo, The Hurt Locker, Public Enemies, Summer Hours, Up, and Where the Wild Things Are, but there are still dozens more films that I have to see and there's no guarantee any of the preceding titles will show up on that final list. There's not even a point in listing everything I haven't seen; it'll be tedious for you and embarrassing for me.

I do hope that this means I'm back to blogging, at least for a few months. It'll still be sporadic, but the hope is there will be a short story collection on the other end that all of you will have the chance to read in print one day.

The General (1927)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:25:00 +0000

d. Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton / USA / 75 mins.

"It's got to be so authentic it hurts," Buster Keaton is to have said to his staff before they began production on The General, his late-era silent comedy about a powerful locomotive and its hapless conductor who manages to deliver a strategic victory in the throes of the U.S. Civil War. The authenticity abounds: the mise-en-scene is steeped in it, as if there's a complete Mathew Brady photograph hovering just slightly off screen; the performances are sweet and playful, and Keaton the director and writer invokes his patented level of emotional simplicity that works well in his world of social and romantic abeyance.

And does it hurt? Anything but.

Today, and probably for the foreseeable future, Keaton will be remembered primarily for The General. Is this his best film? I don't know. It's not my personal favorite (Sherlock Jr. wins my heart), but then again, Keaton's tremendous talent is evinced by the fact that he made multiple masterpieces — each different from the rest, but nonetheless, discernibly his — and the title of his "best" is bestowed on different films by different critics.Where the conversation becomes tangled in respect to The General is sort of a strange place. I think you can read the film two ways: it's either a great film made by Buster Keaton, or it's a great Buster Keaton film.

The difference appears negligible or tenuous, but the two are profoundly different. I've found those who don't hold the film in the highest of regards typically don't believe it's the latter, and that position has been held for decades. When it premiered in 1927, audiences and critics rejected it because it fell below expectations for "a Buster Keaton film." They asked: where are the belly laughs, the pratfalls, the zany stunts and acrobatic high jinks that define the comedian's work, that make him truly great? When compared to his hilarious treasures before, the film stands the chance of appearing prosaic. Personally, I think there is enough of a thematic base (and certainly enough comedy) to argue it's a "great Buster Keaton film"; but even if it's not, I think its greatness as a film, one that happens to be made by Buster Keaton, is beyond dispute. It is clean and ambitious and efficient and enthralling, something that is both of this world and so exacting as to seem of a very different one as well. It has a structure and narrative flow that is largely outside anything else Keaton attempted.

That feeling seems rooted in its size: a genuine, and unexpected, epic. "What is surprising is not that there are so few [silent comedy epics]," Walter Kerr writes in The Silent Clowns, "but that there are any at all. For there had been no such form until these two [Chaplin and Keaton] saw a way to it." Chaplin, as usual, got there first, with The Gold Rush, released in 1925. It's a big and bold blend of pathos and silliness, plucking the Tramp from his normal territory and relabeling him as The Lone Prospector, searching for gold and love in the desolate North Slope. Although Chaplin's films until that time do not feel limited in the strictest sense of the word, they do feel comfortable in the boundaries of a singular community. The thrill of The Gold Rush, its perfection aside, is a filmmaking spirit as adventuresome and exploratory as the history it recounts.

So why then, to twist a phrase, does size matter at all? Kerr suggests it's because the epic and the comedy do not go hand-in-hand. Epics are fraught with "serious implications and historical moments and a hero who can withstand the strain by matching it with his ambition." Humor can crumple under massive scale because the comic hero becomes lost in a blur of his surroundings. And so much of comedy is played out in the nooks and crannies of narratives, detached from the world and relatively isolated. To make a silent comedy epic is to create something that candidly honors character and story in a way that is not as superficial as most comedy where such things are dispensable as long as there's a laugh at the end of the tunnel.

Chaplin may have officially gotten there first, but Keaton had been working toward it all along, in a more tactile and cinematic way than Chaplin. Most of Keaton short two-reel films, made and released between 1920 and 1923, have the vision and scope of something in the five- to six-reel range, and he'd been exploring the limits of space along the X- and Y-axes in nearly every film that preceded this. Our Hospitality, his first feature film that was not cobbled together from linked short films, was set in the nineteenth century and incorporated much of the technology and attitudes of its time. Sherlock Jr. rose up like a tower at the intersection of reality and celluloid, and Go West brought Keaton out into the unpopulated prairies of the American frontier.

This story came to Keaton by way of Clyde Bruckman, his chief prop-man and frequent writing and directing collaborator. Bruckman, serving here officially as co-director, had spotted William Pittenger's The Great Locomotive Chase, a historical account about a group of Union soldiers who planned to sneak into the South, hijack a train, and breakdown the Confederacy's abilities of transportation and communication. Anyone who knows Keaton even through his choice of films could have predicted an enthusiastic response: a plot set in the past (a favorite time-frame for him) and involving a train (a favorite mode of transportation). Keaton chose to invert the drama by setting the point-of-view from that of the Confederacy, a decision that works thematically and provides no contextual controversy because it's not rooted in any political motivation and instead thrives on the dramatic irony of the heroes being well-known losers. Keaton's character, train engineer Johnnie Gray, is in love with Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), who wants to see him enlist in the army at the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnnie suffers a double setback when the South determines that he is, ironically, more valuable as an engineer than as a soldier and his failure to be recruited is misread by Annabelle. Their relationship falls apart, and he and his beloved train, the General, go to work for the South. When she and the train are kidnapped, however, he must venture into enemy territory to save them.

To capture the era, the aforementioned attention to detail was staggering: Keaton's crew built railroad cars, trolleys, stagecoaches, wagons, and houses for the sets; he had intentions of filming in the South, securing an entire tract of railroad in Tennessee and, quite remarkably, receiving permission to use the original General locomotive. (They bowed out upon hearing the film would be a comedy.) Instead, Keaton found a place to work in Oregon, where he found equally suitable railway tracks, put two trains on loan and bought a third, which he destroys with technical glee in the film's grand and fiery finale.

The bizarre contradiction inside The General is that it feels both older than its production date of 1926 yet also years ahead of its time while possessing, as Kerr notes, "the peculiar quality of dating at all":

We quite forget that we are looking at work done in the 1920s and tend to identify the pictures we are watching with the period of the narrative. This is only in part due to the fact that it was a costume film to begin with; many costume films of the 1920s are transparently sham today. It was more nearly due to Keaton's integral relationship with his background. Both Keaton and Chaplin had developed personal images iconographic enough to be timeless. Chaplin had developed his—baggy trousers, mustache, cane, derby—resolutely, carrying it with him wherever he went. Keaton, more naked, had made a virtue—even a philosophical fetish—of his very adaptability; he could swap one costume for another and continue to ride with its outlines. He was wedded to matter, and no matter that the matter changed shape.

Past and present, comedy and epic, underdog and victory, North and South, expectation and delivery—the recurring motif of The General is its multiple genuine thematic contrasts, and perhaps the most noticeable is the tension between Keaton's desperately sought realism and inherent artificiality. If there's a case to be made that The General is not Keaton's funniest film, or his second or third funniest (and I think such a case can be made rather easily), there's an equally strong case to be made that it is his most expertly crafted and deftly geometric film, both in the cinematography and the plot. Keaton observes a remarkably strict and symmetrical five-act structure for the story—introduction, chase, rescue, chase, conclusion—that is so clearly delineated over the course of the film that it invokes an almost Shakespearean rhythm. It's often said that Keaton defied the odds and proved it possible to create a dramatic chase using only trains, which are limited in mobility by where the tracks go, although the reality should be considered as even more of a feat than that. Keaton delivers not only one good chase but two, into the North and out of the North, each unique and with fundamentally different obstacles. Neither ever seems to dissipate in excitement.

The symmetry and geometry of the plot are further reflected in the framing and cinematography. The General utilizes an entire countryside for its adventure, the dual directions of the train tracks and the world out into the fields. (In one brilliant shot, Johnnie chops wood for the engine while the Northern army advances in the opposite direction behind him.) Kerr says comedy and epic are diametrically opposing forces because "the little man becomes difficult to find in so much mass," but Keaton avoids this problem by letting the film alternate between spacious and claustrophobic. The camera makes good use of the small confines inside the trains and rooms, and goes out of its way to avoid losing the sight of Keaton. If the film doesn't feel like an epic at all, it's no doubt due to the fact that Keaton had already made a career of being the diminutive man against larger and more foreboding elements; The General is simply a natural extension of that.

As is the case with many of the films we treasure today, The General was a bit of a disaster upon its release. In her book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, Marion Meade writes that its premiere kept being pushed back week after week. Test screenings went badly; it had been more than sixty years since the Civil War, but the topic touched a nerve with many audiences members, who recoiled at its use of war as prelude to comedy. Critics—most, though not all—seemed to need their thesauri to identify new and harsh adjectives. United Artists was seen as a poor distributor (a second blow to Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, as the film's production price tag ballooned to more than $750,000, or nearly twice the proposed budget), and the title was seen as inadvertently vague and elusive. Yet Keaton always held it in his highest esteem, and in the end he had good reason to do so. Whether you see The General as a sort of film expected from Keaton, or whether you see it as something below his typical comedic acerbity, this is a film for the ages—a true silent masterpiece.

Battling Butler (1926)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 06:15:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 71 mins.

Warning: Spoilers.

It was a simple and winning formula: Buster loves a girl but she doesn't quite feel the same, so he must embark on a journey that turns rather perilous, proving not only his love to her but his ability to withstand the elements as a man should, eluding forces of nature and other suitors, to win her affection. Ideal? Perhaps not, but in many cases it proved to be comic gold, and Keaton, who led his gag and prop team to reinvent the formula for film after film, did it better than many. He deviated from it rarely, and even when he did — in a film like Go West, for example, where the girl is replaced with a friendly cow and his journey is to protect her from the slaughterhouse shipyards — the overall effect was not too different. Battling Butler, however, is a significant exception. It is not among Keaton's great films, but it is notable for the way it inverts and redistributes his patented formula. This isn't a film about a low- or middle-income man who desperately tries to get the girl; it's a film about a rich man who wins her rather easily and then begins a lie that makes him work to keep her.

Much like The Navigator and a few shorts before it, Keaton plays his standard dandy character, this time a Mr. Alfred Butler. Butler's father, seeking to toughen his son, sends him out into the forest to rough it for a while — or what passes for roughing it when you're wealthy (a valet played by Snitz Edwards, hot baths, newspaper delivery, skinned animal rugs, etc.) He and the wild do not get along, and his inability to fire a rifle lands him in hot water with a country girl (Sally O'Neill), with whom he soon falls in love. The two are seen as an odd match by all, but they're sweet together; in a great scene he escorts her home at dusk only to find he doesn't know the way back to his tent and she then escorts him home. Her burly family is skeptical, and Butler's valet, attempting to talk up his boss to the mountain clan, says he is "Battling" Butler, a boxer who shares the same name. They then approve of the marriage, only to have the timing be perfect for them to rally around Keaton's character when "Battling" Butler is to participate in a high-profile bout.

Does the fact that the protagonist is trying to retain the girl's affection instead of win it make the stakes seem any less important? Perhaps a little, and maybe only negligibly because the story still fits nicely into the Keaton universe of wry takes and taxing chores. Keaton did play a stock character that changed sometimes dramatically from film to film. Whether he is down on his luck or well-to-do, his films possess a nihilistic quality as if the universe is actively working against his tenacity the way gravity works against his actual physicality. Keaton does give himself numerous tasks and challenges to overcome, including rigorous athletic training (and eventual bouts, including some sloppy footwork in the ring) that keep him on his toes until the facade.

There's a tendency to compare, or much rather contrast, silent comedy's most famous boxing sequence — the featherweight Tramp using a referee for cover in Chaplin's City Lights — to the boxing scenes in Battling Butler. Most of us cannot help the fact that we're all but certain to have seen a Chaplin masterpiece before we see a minor Keaton, so there's a tendency to temporally view Battling Butler as something in the shadow of City Lights, a ridiculous proposition since this film precedes Chaplin's by five years. Nevertheless, it's all too rare that the comedians overlapped in critical scenes. Keaton, the more physical of the two, predictably embraces the more painful elements of boxing, unlike Chaplin, who spends time deftly avoiding his opponent. Keaton becomes trapped in the ropes of the ring and finds himself on the receiving end of a few punches. And unlike Chaplin, according to scholar Marion Meade, Keaton's boxing work sidelined him a few times: once when he fell out of the ring and hit his head, and once when he strained a ligament in his leg jumping into the ring.

But the differences, as they exist, reach maximum distance at the end of the film. If Keaton began Battling Butler seeking to invert his traditional formula, then he also seemed intent on having its ending invert a traditional formula as well. In most of his comedies, his character would either evade the bad guy or comically come to defeat him. But when the real "Battling" Butler shows up at the end of the film and begins to move in the girl, Keaton emerges rather heroically — almost like a Fairbanksian swashbuckler — to put in a serious, dramatic boxing fight in the locker room. It should be no surprise to anyone to observe how fit and athletic Keaton really was (after all, there's no other way he could have performed all those stunts), but there is still something shocking and thrilling about watching Keaton throw himself into a serious fight that more than makes up for the rather muted stakes.

Still, it's quite bewildering that Battling Butler proved to be the most popular, thus most financially bankable, of Keaton's silent films. It was a vindication for Keaton, who considered it among his favorite films, but an astonishment to most critics today. Through the ways that it immediately shifts in an unexpected direction and lets the surprises move and build upon each other, Battling Butler is surely never a disappointment, just a curious chapter of Keaton's work. To invert his classic narrative structure, to insert an honest shot at genuine drama through a decisively unfunny boxing sequence at the film's end, is (oddly enough) almost a move toward the mainstream for Keaton. Battling Butler does invoke the aura of other adventure comedies from the era, and there are moments when it distinctly feels like something Harold Lloyd might have explored if given the opportunity. But when considered against his masterpieces, it doesn't pack the same punch. Then again, there's probably nothing more Keatonian than going against the grain — in all respects — and achieving success.

Go West (1925)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:28:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 69 mins.

Around the midpoint of Buster Keaton's western comedy Go West, our hero — a man from the east who is out of his element in the frontier, descriptively named Friendless — is asked to brand the cow for whom he has developed a sympathetic and convivial camaraderie. His approach is distinctly Keatonian: apply a little shaving cream to her hind quarter, trim away some of her hair, and let that stand instead of a painful branding. But the scene also reflects what's wrong with this middle-brow but not altogether problematic film. Keaton's own approach to the material mirrors his character's careful shave. It's a little here, a little there, and a gentle pat at the end. Compared to the fast and frenzied world of Keaton's more searing pictures, Go West is a little limp.

The film's strengths are in its themes in rather familiar territory: Friendless (Keaton) is a bit of a loner struggling to find fulfillment in an Indiana town who heeds the long-heralded advice of Horace Greeley: go west, young man! However, once he arrives, he realizes he's not much more of a success there than he is back east — maybe more so as the rancher cowboy lifestyle doesn't quite seem to fit his skill set. His one joy forms in the unlikeliest of places, a relationship with a Jersey cow named Brown Eyes, who he spends the rest of the film trying to save from a journey to the slaughterhouse.

Although the territory is familiar, the execution is not — or at least not as tight, focused, and inventive as Keaton's previous works. It is not so much that the film occasionally stumbles as it is that the film never seems to lift off. This is heavy with plot and story, frequently without any of the physical prowess that makes a Keaton film what it is. Some have theorized the film is a sly take on the romantic films coming out of Hollywood, but Go West is no more critical of conventional love and romance than the self-deprecating and outsider takes on romance in Keaton's other films. (Incidentally, Go West is the only Keaton film where he doesn't whisk off into the sunset with the female lead.) The behind-the-scene dynamics could explain why it lacks the impresario's touch. Keaton drafted the story and directed the film almost entirely on location in Mohave County, Arizona, but lost much of his regular creative and technical crew. Writer Jean Havez died unexpectedly, and writer Joseph A. Mitchell left Keaton to work for Universal; Keaton's loyal gagman Clyde Bruckman took meantime work on Harold Lloyd's For Heaven's Sake. All three had been instrumental from his short films through his early masterworks like Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., and The Navigator.

Most of the slapstick is handed off to others, with Keaton standing as the calm center, particularly when he lets a train full of cows out onto the streets of Los Angeles and attempts to nonchalantly avoid them. Keaton's on-screen relationship with Brown Eyes might be the most impressive stunt in a relatively stunt-free film (at least by Keaton standards). Marion Meade, in her essential book Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, notes that Keaton trained the cow with a rope halter and by feeding her tidbits. In a little more than a week, he and cow had bonded so well he could lead her around with sewing thread tied to his finger. Life began imitating art, and the cow wanted to follow Keaton as far as his dressing room. That anecdote alone is ample demonstration of how delightful the synergy between Keaton and Brown Eyes is. Go West is obviously not without its charms, but the fact that it is rather heavy and sentimental is unexpected and unfulfilling.

Seven Chances (1925)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:53:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 56 mins.

On the whole, Buster Keaton's films tended to be developed as original screenplays, with gags, scenes, or broad themes worked out well before he knew exactly what was going to happen in a narrative. Sherlock Jr. was to be about dreams, he knew, but how and why he didn't; The Navigator was to incorporate a $20,000 abandoned ship, but to what ends was not immediately clear.

Seven Chances, however, began as a previously written stage play, purchased for Keaton by someone on his staff. Keaton didn't care much for the play — its many plot complications did not suit the sort of bare-bones storytelling needed in silent comedy — but he took on the project obligingly and began morphing into something that was closer to his style. Unsurprisingly then, as it labors to set up the premise of a soon-to-be-27-year-old man (Keaton) who must be married by 7 p.m. on his 27th birthday to inherit his grandfather's $7 million, Seven Chances leads off as a fairly conventional comedy by 1925 standards. Yet as it progresses, the film becomes something distinctly Keatonian, the focus on the narrative becoming looser and looser until he embarks on one of the greatest chase scenes in the totality of silent cinema.

The crux of the film's first half essentially hinges on repeated rejection. Keaton's Jimmie Shannon does love a girl, Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer), and she loves him as well, but the courtship process has taken the two an inordinate amount of time (illustrated in an early and surprising two-strip Technicolor sequence that opens the film, where Keaton and Dwyer stand in front of a house as the seasons dissolve in the background and a cute Great Dane puppy grows and grows). Upon hearing the news of his potential fortune, he earnestly proposes to her, but errs in checking his watch as he does so and she kicks him out. Jimmie and his partner, Billy (T. Roy Barnes), desperately need the money to keep their business afloat, so Billy attempts to solicit any woman to marry Jimmie so the money can be his. But woman after woman rejects him (or, in the film's lousy ethnic humor, he recoils in a mistake of planning a proposal to women neither white nor Gentile). Finally, in an act of desperation, Billy places an ad in the newspaper detailing Jimmie's dilemma and saying he'll marry any woman who shows up at the church — and hundreds of eager and ruthless potential brides do.

The film has heart and moxie, even if it can seem disabusingly cynical on the subject of love. The one girl he does love rejects him on the basis of miscommunication; the girls he pursues simply to make it to the altar reject him on superficial grounds; and he rejects an entire mob of wedding-crazy and angry women to spare his own life. It is redeemed by its fairly predictable ending, which is necessary to illustrate that Seven Chances is not an entirely misanthropic affair and is ruled by its unmaterialized sentimentality. The beauty of Keaton producing this play instead of some other comedian (Charlie Chaplin might have just wanted the money, Harold Lloyd might have just wanted the girl, Groucho Marx would have wanted both but in a more lascivious way) is that he walks a tightrope of emotions. We as viewers sympathize with his plight of needing a bride to earn an inheritance, and we want to see him succeed, but Keaton portrays Jimmie as a character who is never satisfied with the journey and who keeps Dwyer's Mary close to his heart. By the time the final chase arrives, it earns its excitement and suspense because we have forged a connection with Jimmie.

Keaton has control over the first half, even if the premise isn't his, but the second half almost breaks apart neatly from the first to become unmistakably his. After the mob of women arrive at the church, he must escape them, and the chase scene that ends the film is among Keaton's best. He equals the sheer magnitude of the urban chase in his 1922 short Cops, but spreads the energy across a horizontal rural plane. He traverses a marshland and avoids the buckshot of hunters trying to bag a duck; he leaps objects and slides under cars; and most impressively, he evades an avalanche of rolling stones.

After a test screening of Seven Chances, during which the audience began laughing riotously after Keaton accidentally dislodged a few small stones while running downhill and caused them to tumble after him, he went back to the scene of the crime and filmed an entirely new sequence with what seems like hundreds of rocks, ranging in sizes from those about as large as a basketball to gigantic boulders. That scene alone is probably the most famous of the film, and a great example of Keaton's inherent comic instincts and his ability to improvise and deviate from the slated vision for the opportunity to earn more laughs. And it's here, in the miraculous finale, where the film's reputation is cemented.

The Navigator (1924)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:11:00 +0000

d. Donald Crisp & Buster Keaton / USA / 60 mins.

Buster Keaton, much like silent comedy's mega-star Charles Chaplin, liked to improvise, and perhaps his most expensive improvisation was The Navigator, a film that had all of its pieces before it knew what to do with them. Keaton's art director, had informed him that a soon-to-be dismantled ocean liner had become available, and Keaton convinced producer Joseph M. Schenck to invest $20,000 into the ship to secure it for a film. Schenck did (although a bit begrudgingly, it's been reported). So after an enormous expenditure and with an entire ocean steam-liner at his disposal, Keaton sat down with his chief gagman, Clyde Bruckman, and finally asked the big question: What are we going to do with it?

The result turned out to be The Navigator, an artistic and cinematic success that went on to be the comedian's most profitable film at the time. The story he and his crew created does not stray too far from typical Keatonian narratives; he plays a well-to-do and pampered rich man named Rollo Treadway who is struck with the urge to be married one day, but the girl (Kathryn McGuire) for whom he pines, named Betsy O'Brien, rejects his proposal. Through a series of mishaps he and she both end up on the empty ship, which is sent out to sea and leaves both the pampered characters to fend for themselves — make their own food (a decision to use six coffee beans to make a gallon proves disastrous) and try to find safety (they scare off a ship that could have helped them when they send up the quarantine flag for attention because it's the brightest flag).

Social status and technology then recur as key sources of Keaton comedy, and both leads carry their weight equally and seem tortured equally by the uncaring mechanics of the ship. Mechanics aside, they're both haunted by what they assume are ghosts on board the ship, including a brilliant sequence where a photograph of a frightening man is tossed out by McGuire and lands on a hook above a porthole, swinging back and forth while Keaton is trying to sleep, as if a face keeps looking in on him. (I'll also give a shout-out to a particularly funny, if Chaplinesque, struggle with a deck chair and a moment where Keaton tries to shuffle a soggy deck of chairs.) Although McGuire appeared in only two of Keaton's films — this and Sherlock Jr. — she brings to the screen a comic poise that you rarely see silent comediennes exhibit. Rollo may have proposed to Betsy in the beginning of the film, and slowly builds up a camaraderie with her as they spent time abroad the ocean liner, but it would almost be incorrect to label her a romantic interest. She lacks the chance to exhibit the physical humor Keaton could conjure out of seemingly nothing (she may or may not have had any), but she undoubtedly serves much more as a comic partner in The Navigator.

Donald Crisp, who made regular appearances in D.W. Griffith's films and served as an uncredited assistant director on The Birth of a Nation, was brought in by Keaton to direct the "straight" scenes of The Navigator. The decision turned out to be a mistake as far as Keaton was concerned when the rather humorless Crisp began meddling in the film. Consequentially, Keaton re-shot everything and is generally regarded as the sole director of the film although Crisp's name remains on the credits.

Even though the film is completely Keaton's, and is a success by any measure, I'm not sure the social satire and the man-versus-machine humor is quite as effective here than in other Keaton features. Certainly it cannot be forgotten for an absolutely bravura sequence that appears toward the end. When the ship stalls out near an island of cannibals that pose a clear and obvious threat to the two socialites, Keaton must don a diving suit and go underwater to fix the ship's broken propeller. It's among the earliest underwear scenes in cinema, filmed at Lake Tahoe because the studio tanks were too small for a life-size propeller. Keaton finds nothing lacking in terms of underwater humor: he washes his hands although he's at the bottom of the sea, and he uses the local fauna to his advantage (a lobster's claws help cut wires and one swordfish comes in handle to fence with another swordfish).

Nearly all of Keaton's films made and released between 1920 and 1929 possess the miraculous quality of blending entertainment, humor, and cinematic skill, but The Navigator has its fair share of ardent defenders; Walter Kerr, in his seminal book The Silent Clowns, calls it "one of Keaton's two perfect films" (the other being The General). Without a doubt I think the film is very good, although it falls short of of masterpiece status. It's always struck me as Buster Keaton's most mechanical film, and not just because one of the "stars" is an retired ocean liner. As I've written before, one of Keaton's surest strengths as a director is delivering a tactile atmosphere through the mise-en-scène; you can almost hear the groans of the hull and smell the cold, wet metal. But the joy of a Keaton film is the journey to a faraway and comic place while being able to feel close to Keaton on screen. He's distant in The Navigator, and though the film as an entire production is marked with distinguishing Keaton characteristics, his lead performance isn't. It's a small gripe for an otherwise splendid film.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:01:00 +0000

d. Buster Keaton / USA / 44 mins.

It is an exhausted but perpetually romantic cliche that the movies are perhaps the purest artistic incarnation of our sleeping hours. In both, we enter into the comfort of a dark room, relax, and find ourselves whisked away into an incomparable dreamlike state where our minds are alive and nothing is impossible. Every film, even the ones that attempt to evoke uncontaminated realism, possesses a fraction of this illusory quality, and some more than others. Spend just a few minutes with a Buster Keaton film and it's clear he is among the latter. He uses his body on-screen in ways that often shouldn't be possible, and uses the practically limitless capabilities of cinema's ability to deceive to create scenes that range from unlikely to just downright impossible.

The most ethereal of his films is Sherlock Jr., for the ways it disintegrates the boundaries between reality and cinema. It is essentially a film about (a) film, one of the earliest metacinematic experiences that was disguised as something much more ordinary. This was the earliest Keaton film I saw, and it continues to be my personal favorite — which, I suppose, shouldn't be all that surprising to those who know Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window is my favorite film of all time. Like Hitchcock's, Keaton's is painstakingly crafted. Both are imminently accessible yet infinitely layered, and sing complex and unrestrained praises of the medium in which they appear while producing the most enjoyable work of art possible. Few experiments are more difficult than creating a work of art that adequately reflects, praises, and comments on its medium; few, if any, come as close as these films to creating such a work that also reaches perfection.

The triumph of Sherlock Jr. is the triumph of the quotidian and of the universal. Keaton plays a likable movie theater janitor and projectionist, hapless in life and love but aiming for something better. His dream is to become a detective and to win the affection of a girl (Kathryn McGuire), but his progress toward either dream is thwarted when a villain (Ward Crane) sets him up as a thief and attempts to win the girl. He returns to his job a distraught man, and as he falls asleep behind the theater's projector, he dreams his way onto the screen, where the characters have been replaced with the people of his own life and where, as his dream persona of Sherlock Jr., he is for once able to move deftly, skillfully, and acrobatically to solve the case.

Dream states were not new territory for Keaton by 1924. The early part of the decade was still a nascent age for film, and the narrative device of a dream had allowed him to get away with scenes and sequences that depart from reality while not profoundly disrupting audience interpretation. In shorts like The Love Nest and The Frozen North, Keaton used the dream as an excuse to explore an exotic location. But his short The Playhouse, in which Keaton uses multiple exposures to play more than twenty roles in the span of just a few minutes, has more in common with Sherlock Jr. in the opportunities it afforded Keaton to create in the netherlands of possibility.

The contrast works well. In the opening scenes, the primary comic emphasis is on slapstick and pure jokes. There's a wonderfully simple sequence where he finds $3 in the trash outside the theater but soon finds himself losing it in a series of unfortunate events. Shortly thereafter, his "How to Be A Detective" book suggests he follow his suspect closely, and Keaton and Crane perform a pantomime where Keaton mirrors his every step only inches behind him. But once Keaton enters the film, the other side of Keaton emerges: the stunt-work, the choreography, the diligent planning of nearly every moment. It is in these moments — in our dreams, when anything seems possible — that Keaton shoots a perfect game of billiards (all avoiding a single ball, which was planted as an explosive), jumps through a window and perfectly into the clothing disguise of an old woman, and makes a daring escape on the handle-bars of a motorcycle that zips through potential crash after potential crash, all while not knowing there's no one driving it.

The cinematic legacy of Sherlock Jr. may be less about its superb entertainment factor (at 44 minutes, it seems too scant to be a feature film, but it exists without an ounce of fat) than it is about its superb filmmaking factor. It is a complete synthesis of performance and form. Walter Kerr, in The Silent Clowns, notes Keaton demurred all claims of intellectuality in his films and stubbornly settled with a classically stone-faced line of, "I was just trying to get laughs." But, Kerr notes, that doesn't negate the reality that Sherlock Jr. nevertheless shows Keaton to be a brilliant analyst of film, particularly in the early scene of Keaton being transported from one landscape to another (only to trip over, fall, or spin in the shock that he is somewhere new) with the speed of a splice. Writes Kerr:

... the sequence illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis was in not Keaton's head. It was in the film. He went past celebration and worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors. Art is often something done before it is something thought: Keaton's impulses were not only stronger but more accurate than any verbal formulation he might have chosen to offer for them.

It is tour de force filmmaking: special effects created purely with the aid of mathematics, celluloid, and scissors instead of computer rendering software. That scene so baffled audiences and colleagues that cameramen and directors were reportedly heard to boast around the corners of Hollywood that they'd seen it multiple times and still had yet to discover how Keaton had actually managed to create the illusion, to transport himself between locales without seeming to move a muscle. Two decades went by before he revealed the secret: first he meticulously measured the distance between the camera and himself, then he developed the last frame from the previous shot and placed it inside the camera's viewfinder, where his cameraman could coach him into lining up with himself. Thus the irony reveals itself: when you see the sequence play out on the screen, it appears to be the product of miraculous technology; but the technology was rather ordinary, and instead, it was Keaton's corporeal control and poise that proved to be more miraculous. (Sherlock Jr. tested the endurance of his body in other ways as well. While filming a scene where he falls from the trough of a water tower and lands on a set of train tracks with hundreds of gallons spilling out onto him, he broke several vertebrae. He suffered severe migraines in the years that followed but only realized he'd actually broken the bones when a doctor told him during a routine insurance examination that it had healed well.)

That tension between the film's outer narrative (Keaton the projectionist, trying to become the detective and win the girl) and the film's inner narrative (Keaton the detective, solving crimes with über-sleuth panache) does not drive Sherlock Jr. on its face. By the time of the climactic motorcycle sequence, it is possible that most people — myself included, practically every time I watch the film casually and do not force myself to track its machination — have become so consumed with the inner detective story that they have forgotten the film's narrative origin. But of course that's no accident. Robert Knopf calls the whole inner story "one of the longest narrative disruptions in Hollywood cinema," an altogether fitting description because films usually deliver two-hour disruptions in the human condition. They transport us somewhere new and allow us to become something we are not. Sherlock Jr. rejoices and relishes in that fact; by setting forth on an audacious journey to codify that sensation into the physical language of film, it delivers one of cinema's most flawless spectacles.

Our Hospitality (1923)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:33:00 +0000

d. John G. Blystone & Buster Keaton / USA / 73 mins.

If you enter Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality through the back door of time, you might not immediately appreciate it for what it is. Having now re-watched Keaton's works in chronological order, it is easier and more rewarding to see this film as a giant leap forward for Keaton, his first true feature film as a director even if it is technically his second (Three Ages, released earlier in the same year, was three shorts spliced together). The film has an entirely different rhythm and pulse than anything Keaton had done before; it is mature storytelling, with a straightforward and occasionally dramatic and satirical narrative positioned first and the comedy serving as a successful buttress.

Contextually, Keaton's films are often set on the cusp of something — the moment civilization is about to roll forward to something else, with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. That metaphoric straddling shouldn't be surprising considering how acrobatic Keaton was; his stunts occupy that same plane, always partially under control and always partially out of control. Our Hospitality is a riff on progress, refracted through the seeming absence of progress. It finds itself at a technological nexus, a time when bicycles didn't have pedals yet and trains (a Keaton favorite, this time a working model of Stephenson's 1831 "Rocket") bounced up and down on tracks.

The human story is also an on-the-cusp variety. Based on the famous feud between the Hatfield family and the McCoy family, Keaton plays Willie McKay, a surviving member of a family that has been feuding with the Canfields for generations. On the train-ride South, he strikes up a friendship with a lovely young woman named Virginia (Natalie Talmadge, at the time Keaton's wife), but neither knows the other is the member of an opposing family. Upon their arrival, Willie finds himself embroiled with Virginia's brothers and menacing father (Joe Roberts, a Keaton regular who suffered a stroke during production and died shortly thereafter). Willie manages to find a moment of eerie and foreboding serenity by becoming a guest in the Canfield home after the elder Canfield has decreed that as long as he is a guest, he will not be harmed. Once he steps outside, however, that's another matter.

Keaton intentionally set the film the antebellum South (to give himself the opportunity to play with the era's technology), but the decision also infuses the narrative with palpable geographic tension. Keaton's Willie may have been born in the South, but he was raised in the North and returns to his birthplace as a Northerner seeking to settle his family's estate. The story does not make clear what his subsequent intentions are: will he move to the South if he has inherited the mansion he dreams of, or will he merely handle all that is necessary and come back North where his family now lives? Either could be seen as an affront to the traditional respect of a culture. More pressing for the film is his connection to the Canfields as a McKay.

The title could be read as a mockery of Southern hospitality, yet the film does not venture to taunt a particular culture. Indeed, it is an undeniably grim title: what is hospitable about a family that wants to kill you but is being polite enough not to do it while you're in their home? But the human condition is undeniably grim as well, and as the final moments of the film demonstrate, it is not a cultural obstacle the characters must traverse but rather the human condition. An embroidered axiom that hangs on the walls of the Canfield estate converts the father — a standard message of loving thy neighbor — but that message is not directed at any one person or people, but rather people on the whole. It is not a victory of politics because the film was never interested in its characters as walking metaphors in the first place; instead, it's a personal victory, a victory for Willie who has not only saved the girl but managed to marry her as well. (The parting shot is rather hilarious, too: once the truce is called, Willie, who has until that point been the subject of a chase, begins unloading numerous firearms from his pockets. Although he might not have been willing to fight in the name of his tribe, he was ultimately willing to defend himself so he could be with the girl he loves.)

More importantly, there's not a flat note in the film. Our Hospitality possesses a forward momentum in its narrative that is generally lacking from Keaton's shorts, which possess more of a circular narrative that takes a situation and mines it for all its comic gold rather than pushing it to another place. But it doesn't venture too far away from what we could expect of Keaton — namely a good chase, some fantastic stunts, and a few simple gags, scaled back so as not to interfere with the plot. (In one of the best, Willie, trying to stall his departure from the Canfield home, repeatedly hides his hat under a seat but a feisty dog keeps retrieving it for him.) It is not one of Keaton's funnier films, but I don't see that as a strike against it. What it lacks in laugh-out-loud humor it more than makes up for with its charm and handsome character.

Writing about Keaton's stunts is in many ways as effective as writing about the choreography and performance of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers — at some point words begin to breakdown and oxidize into useless tools; the event simply must be seen to be believed. The breathless climax of Our Hospitality, set on a rushing river which ends in a waterfall, is one of the great scenes in Keaton's oeuvre. (And in one of his many brushes with death while making films, he actually almost drowned shooting his struggle of being sent down the river.) He finds himself dangling over the waterfall, a rope tied around his waist and attached to a log that has become jammed in some rocks. He is desperately trying to free himself and reach safety on nearby rocks when he is called into action to save the girl, who is caught in the current and headed toward the fall. Those who have seen it can't forget it, and those who haven't should as soon as possible.

Three Ages (1923)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:34:00 +0000

d. & Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / 63 mins.

Although considered to be Buster Keaton's first feature film, Three Ages is really no more than three short films about love during various eras of human civilization cut and woven together. Keaton admitted as much, too. Willing to perform outrageous stunts in front of the camera, behind it he was a rather shrewd and cautious businessman. If feature-length Keaton turned out to be a failure or unpopular with audiences, his thinking was that he could return to Three Ages, tear it down, and reassemble the pieces into three short films.

This fact does not diminish the overall enjoyment of Three Ages, which manages to build good will during its running time by coalescing into a tongue-in-cheek parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance — a film that billed itself as "love through the ages." For Keaton, the eras are the Stone Age, the age of the Roman Empire, and contemporary 1920s America; the relative constants are that Keaton plays his poker-faced paradigmatic character in each epoch, trying to win the affection of a young woman (Margaret Leahy, in all three) and butting heads with another suitor (Wallace Beery, in all three) and the girl's father (Joe Roberts, a crossover from Keaton's short films).

The Stone Age and Roman Empire segments both provide lighthearted entertainment, spoofing contemporary attitudes about love and society, particularly our technology, which always seems to fascinate Keaton. He sends up golf, parking spaces, automobiles, meteorology, gambling, and bicycles, which all tend to amount to nothing but throwaway gags. Although the Stone Age segment is imminently forgettable, the Roman scenes do contain a bit of wicked creativity on Keaton's part. In one gag he succeeds during a chariot race despite a freak snowfall when he attaches skis to the bottom of his chariot and forgoes the horses for sled dogs; in another, parodying the biblical tale of Daniel, he is thrown into a lion's den where he and the big cat become friendly after he volunteers a manicure. It is silly more than anything else (the lion is so patently fake and immobile you don't expect any harm or threat), but it's not without a certain charm.

Of the three, it is actually the modern era segment that proves superior. It is the closest in theme and style to the shorts Keaton and Cline had been making the preceding three years, and if it had been released on its own as a short, it would probably rank among Keaton's best from that period. The jokes in this section are far superior, including his participation in a football game that pre-dates Harold Lloyd's famous football game in The Freshman (it also provides more laughs than the sequence in that film as well). As one might expect, Keaton's size and fear factor heavily into the humor of the football sequence, but he also utilizes camera placement and spatial fields to create certain effects, such as distancing himself from the other players and allowing the unsteadiness following a particularly tough tackle to play out across the field. In another scene, he pulls the audience along as a phone booth that holds his character is picked up, moved out of a building, and onto the back of a pickup truck. In the best Keaton sequences, the mise-en-scène has been calibrated carefully and there is a tangible sense of objects, and although the camera doesn't move to reflect any wooziness or dread during the moving of the phone booth, the film nonetheless evokes such a response from the audience and by taking his time, Keaton winds up for a great punch-line.

After all, comedy, if it is anything, is part art and part science. While it was evident in his independently-produced short films that Keaton already had the dynamics of comedy under firm control, there's a particular scene near the end of Three Ages that I think demonstrates his mastery quite well. As with his shorts, the film is a balance of action and inaction, of measuring the situation for the right response — subdued, proportional, or overdone— and of targeting his performance to fit the particular space captured on film. Keaton does not merely attempt to circumnavigate our expectations, but to slice through them like a tornado-blown needle. In the scene I speak of, Keaton is being chased and is making his way across rooftops when he reaches a gap between buildings that is too wide to jump. From the moment he begins (in his performance) to process the distance between the rooftops and whether he could actually make such a jump to the actual moment he jumps, exactly seventeen seconds elapse. Such an amount of time feels rather insignificant, but the scene is performed in one unbroken take and is loaded with the suspense of what he will do coupled with the tension already felt in the pursuit. We are able to watch him as he (and we) are invited to solve the dilemma. Naturally, he being Buster Keaton and we being silent comedy spectators, there is an expectation that he will jump, and he does; there is also an expectation on our parts that the jump will not be perfect, but we are heretofore left guessing how exactly it will culminate.

What happens is ultimately beyond expectation. He jumps, but he misses the building, falls through a few awnings, grabs onto a gutter pipe which becomes unmoored and swings him down, sending him through a window, across the floor of firemen's quarters and to the firehouse pole, where he then falls through and lands abruptly onto the ground-level floor. This sequence is sharply edited with multiple cuts (but still not too many; Keaton always wanted the audience to know it was him on screen). Without missing a beat, he stands up, now as dazed as we, and sits down on the back of a fire engine bumper. The beat now is infinitesimally longer than the time between his landing and his move toward the fire engine, but it is nonetheless discernible, enough time for us comprehend what has happened. We are given just enough time before the fire engine, supposedly on this whole time, suddenly leaves the firehouse garage. That sequence — the film's most remarkable action sequence — is exactly twelve seconds, or five whole seconds shorter than the essential inaction that preceded. It is a crucial cinematic move for the comedian's part, and it is wondrous to see how deft Keaton at blending the art of his performance with the science of his editing to achieve the maximum comedic and disorienting effect.

Keaton always contended that such artistry was never at the front of his mind while he was making films. Fair enough. I'll take him at his humble word and say that perhaps what he was doing was not explicitly conscious. But there is little doubt in my mind that he was the sort of person who could naturally feel the pulse of an audience and had an internal timing mechanism that was virtually peerless. Because he wore all hats during production — actor, director, producer, writer, stunt coordinator, etc. — he was able to incorporate that timing into all facets of the film. The scene I described is one of countless moments in Keaton's work where a viewer can marvel at how well the viewing experience synchronizes with the film's creation, even more than eighty years later. And while Three Ages as a film in its totality is not among Keaton's best, what would have been the short film reflecting modern age romance certainly is. The other two, while not great, are at least fun and complement the overall intention.

The Short Films of Buster Keaton (1920-1923)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:34:00 +0000

d. Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton / USA / Nineteen shorts, 394 mins.

The short film is often a forsaken art, uncounted by many in catalogues of great movies and spuriously rejected on the premise that bigger equals better. When treated as a launching pad, the short film will feel like nothing but — a couple sets, small-scale slapstick, a limited cast. D.W. Griffith made almost 400 of them in the span of a few years; Charles Chaplin turned out one per week while working for the Essanay and Mutual studios. Once studios realized people would sit for an hour and a half to two hours, shorts began losing their luster; once the dawn of television occurred, mainstream shorts had become a near-relic.

But the short films that Buster Keaton made between 1920 and 1923 — nineteen of them, co-directed and co-written by himself and Edward F. Cline with occasional work by Mal St. Clair — are frequently an exception to the idea that shorts are inherently less satisfying and less accomplished than feature films. At their best they exhibit gusto and enterprise lacking in many feature comedies, from this or any other era. And at their best they dispel the theory that you can't do something grand on a small scale. Indeed, while Keaton's true masterpieces would come later in long form, his short films don't suggest he was holding back anything. In films like One Week (1920), The High Sign (1921), and The Electric House (1922) he constructed elaborate, expensive, and ingenious sets with no less attention to detail than his work in features. In The Playhouse (1921), he flashes his technological mastery of cinema by using multiple exposures to play more than twenty different roles, and in Cops (1922), dozens and dozens of extras fill out an entire police force that chases him through the streets. They're unique even in the world of short comedy and work in a way few other shorts either attempted or achieved.

This success is no doubt tied to two important elements. The first is incidental: Keaton's producer, Joseph M. Schenck, provided the largesse and independent approach that gave Keaton the opportunity to make the films he did, initially these two-reels and later five- to six-reels. The second is contextual, therefore perhaps more crucial: Keaton saw film as film. He would not have been able to do what he did in any other art-form, and this knowledge seemed to both liberate and invigorate him. Chaplin's shorts tended to be more performance pieces set around the Tramp persona, the benefit of film being that the Tramp could appear on the farm in one and backstage at a movie in another; although the sets changed, the straightforward and clean production pattern did not. As Chaplin began pushing the boundaries of the medium's presupposed limits — making four-reelers like A Dog's Life and Shoulder Arms in 1918 — his films grew not only in length and scope but prestige. Keaton, on the other hand, embraced the possibilities of cinema early. His first two films, One Week and The High Sign (the latter was released in 1921, but filmed before One Week) created wildly different scenarios. Whereas each Chaplin short felt like simply the next stop on the Tramp's long journey through the universe, each Keaton short was like a universe within itself.

Much like his feature films, the shorts provide a close-up inspection of Keaton's psychology and what fascinated him as a thinker. Certainly the most prevailing interest he had was with the tension between man and technology — specifically how such technology designed to provide comfort ended up causing so much pain. One Week, one of Keaton's best, follows him as a newlywed attempting to build a do-it-yourself house that he and his bride have been given on the occasion of their wedding. What seems like a sweet gesture is undercut by a grim sense of premature failure, a lopsided, oblique monstrosity that leads to sheer mayhem and must be moved to the correct lot after construction. But there's an intriguing disconnection between the technology gone awry on screen and the technology perfected behind the camera. The Scarecrow (1920) introduces us to Keaton's Goldbergian cleverness, where a house is filled with multi-tasking elements: a sink turns into a bench, a phonograph turns into a stove-top, and a bookshelf opens into a pantry, all designed to provide chuckles but none of which contributes to the ultimate goal of the film, to provide a chase sequence. The entire premise of The Electric House is that Keaton, mistaken as an electrical engineer, is put in charge of wiring a home in order to put it on the vanguard of technology. The staircase becomes an escalator, a mechanized billiards table funnels the balls into a display case and then re-racks them for the players, the food is served on a miniature train, and so on.

The electric house within The Electric House fails, at least as far as the characters on screen are concerned; it is a dangerous home that malfunctions, most notably in the way its escalator sends its inhabitants flying out of windows. The short itself rolls out resplendently, and it is executed with tactical brilliance by Keaton and his crew. Perhaps his most perfectly executed gag film is The High Sign, where an unemployed Keaton (he portrayed unnamed men in most of his shorts, so I'm going to use his name as something interchangeable with his characters) wanders into town looking for a job and accidentally becomes mixed up in a murder plot. The gags there are simple, ranging from an obscenely large newspaper that seems capable of unfolding infinitely to the antics caused by Keaton's clumsy handling of a rifle. His search for employment leads him to accept positions both as an assassin and as a guard of the same man. The centerpiece of the film is a rigged house, full of trap doors and secret walls, which come in handy for the spry and agile Keaton to evade the gang that has his hired him to do the hit-job when he decides to protect the target and the target's daughter.

What becomes evident watching a Keaton short is that, while all silent comedies seem oriented around the slapstick gag, the director differs from his contemporaries in one important way: he was as concerned about the role of technology on-screen as he was about utilizing technology in the process of making movies. He was an early master of cranking the camera at different speeds to create the illusion of frighteningly fast action, such as in Cops and The Blacksmith (1922), the latter of which continued his fascination with man's use of technology. In that short, he plays a blacksmith's assistant who takes over the busy with disastrous results when his boss is arrested. The Blacksmith is one of many films Keaton made where he rather seamlessly blurs the lines between time and technology, a conscious attempt to evoke the simplicity of a bygone era. There's a gentle and respectful humor in The Blacksmith when horses or manual labor are concerned, and a more sinister and destructive humor where luxury is present (the nice car he is called to work upon is destroyed through a Keatonian mix of oil, fire, and heavy devices crashing into it).

As an innovator, Keaton also explored double-exposure, and there's no better example of this than The Playhouse, his great short film from the second year of production. The film opens with a dream sequence in which Keaton attends a vaudeville show where all the performers and the entire audience are played by Keaton — no less than 25 characters by my count, of all ages and genders, appearing through clean editing and skillful use of multiple exposure. Of course The Playhouse also represents another Keaton motif: his self-denigration through a rather pointed take on socio-cultural masculinity. Keaton was fit and healthy (how else could he have done all his own stunts?), but he was a diminutive five-foot-five, drawn into exaggeration when standing next to his regular shorts co-star Joe Roberts, who was barrel-chested and stood six-foot-three. The Playhouse puts Keaton's stage-hand character in the position where he must act like an ape to cover up for the fact he loses a monkey meant to perform with the star of the show. Time and time again Keaton drew on his physical stature to create the set-ups for these jokes, much like Chaplin did regularly in his career. You can spot Chaplin's influence in Convict 13 (1920), an early Keaton short where he is wrongfully mistaken to be an escaped convict and is sent off to prison, where Keaton must survive against larger gentlemen. My Wife's Relations (1922), while not a particularly brilliant short, nonetheless sees the smallish Keaton accidentally wedded to a large and boisterous woman, whose large and boisterous family push Keaton around until they think he is the heir to $100,000.

But Keaton's films always possess a double-edged take on the notion of masculinity. Keaton aims for laughter because of his size, social status, class, or profession, and this is contrasted with other larger men, but he rarely loses based on size alone. In fact, size is often the contributing element in his (often momentary) victories. The chase, Keaton's third and final recurring device in his shorts, is dealt in his favor because of his size and fitness. In one way or another, all his films are a chase — Keaton chasing something (a girl, typically) or someone (an authority figure or upset father, typically) chasing him. His ultimate chase film, and perhaps his definitive short film, is Cops, where a rather innocent mistake on Keaton's part leads to a city's entire police force chasing him through the streets — although that might be simplifying it a bit too much. Cops is actually Keaton's most surreal film, a portent to later films that would capitalize on his dissociative brand of storytelling. It is almost two one-reel shorts glued together by the presence of a subtly metaphoric anarchist. It begins as most Keaton romances do, with an emphasis on culturally defined masculinity and a girl saying he must go out and make something of himself in order to earn her affection. In attempting to become a success he comes into possession of some belongings in a rather dubious way and then, while riding a wagon into the middle of a police parade, accidentally catches a bomb through by an anarchist. (Naturally, he uses the burning fuse to light his cigarette.) Then the short switches gears and he goes on the run from the entire force, evading them with the help of any and all found-objects — ladders, fences, cars, etc.

In addition to mastering the chase film, Cops reveals another intriguing aspect of Keaton's persona: his bleak humor. He outmaneuvers the police with his cunning and athleticism, but even after proving he is physically up to the task, the girl rejects him and he sadly allows himself to be embraced by the police. The short ends with the shot of a tombstone and his pork-pie hat setting askew atop it. Such bleak humor pervades many of his shorts. Convict 13 takes the notion of gallows humor literally. Hard Luck (1921) is a pitiful Keaton repeatedly failing in his attempts to commit to suicide, and The Frozen North (1922) features a scene where Keaton, riffing on the cold-blooded melodramas of William S. Hart, walks into a cabin and assumes his wife is with another man. He shoots them both, only to discover he's walked into the wrong cabin.

Lest I give the impression they're all jewels, I should note that of the nineteen, less than half are films I would strongly recommend (a full list is printed at the end of this essay). While such comparisons to Chaplin are ultimately fruitless and chiefly irrelevant, in their totality Keaton's shorts lack the general uniformity that Chaplin exhibited at Mutual Studios; but conversely and importantly, there are few if any genuine duds in the bunch, so even when they don't quite come together, there's a surprising amount of pleasure to be had along the way. Neighbors (1920) is often seen as one of the better films, but it only delivers half-way for me. In the film, Keaton is attempting to see a girl in an apartment across a courtyard but has a run-in with a police officer who thinks he's black after a mishap with soil and a mishap with black paint. The humor is strained, but the finale — a choreographed sequence in which three men are stacked on top of each other and bounce back and forth across the courtyard, going in and out of apartment windows — is one of the more inspired teamwork gags. In The Boat (1921), Keaton aims to take his family out onto the water in a craft he made himself except it's too hard to pull out of the garage, leading to the collapse of the entire house as he tries to squeeze it through the frame of the garage. The Boat takes Keaton's joy of large-scale property destruction to new levels; it's not every day that a short film shows an entire house, a car, and a boat virtually destroyed for the sake of a laugh. But there's a risk to humor like this in Keaton's universe, which has always been alluring because he world is tangible and often so realistic it invokes the conceit of surrealism. The Boat provides a set-up almost too fake for its own good: after the boat completely sinks, the title card "You can't keep a good boat down" appears and the boat, wonderfully dry and safe, reappears in the next scene as if nothing had happened. It's a distracting break in the traditional Keaton milieu of things that seem possible even if they aren't.

And although there is plethora of originality in these shorts, some have become dismissible because Keaton would refine a certain element in a better film later. The Balloonatic (1923) offers a vertiginous joy-ride as Buster accidentally climbs on-board a flyaway hot-air balloon, but the bulk of the short is him surviving in the wilderness alongside a girl with whom he's fallen in love — scenes and gags done better in the features Our Hospitality and Battling Butler. His short Daydreams (1922), of which only an incomplete version survives today, presents Keaton as a boy determined to make something of himself in the city so he can win a girl's affection, but in the end he becomes chased by police officers in a retread from Cops, released earlier that year. (Although the short is noteworthy for a single scene where Keaton dons a disguise and looks vaguely like Chaplin's Tramp.) The antics at sea in The Love Nest (1923) are in performed in a slightly different, but better, form in The Navigator.

But still, there are many who believe Keaton's shorts are better than his features. Considering them as a whole, I can't say I'm one of them; I will say, though, that One Week, The High Sign, and Cops should be essential viewing for anyone interested not only in comedy or silent films but cinema in general. They are masterpieces in their own right, more sophisticated than perhaps any other silent shorts I've ever seen, and represent on a small scale the already expansive and wild vision Keaton possessed and would bring to life in his features.

The shorts, ranked first by star and then chronologically:

One Week (1920): ★★★★★
The High Sign (1921): ★★★★★
Cops (1922): ★★★★★

The Play House (1921): ★★★★½

The Scarecrow (1920): ★★★★
The Goat (1921): ★★★★
The Blacksmith (1922): ★★★★
The Electric House (1922): ★★★★

Convict 13 (1920): ★★★½
Neighbors (1920): ★★★½
The Boat (1921): ★★★½
Daydreams (1922): ★★★½
The Balloonatic (1923): ★★★½
The Love Nest (1923): ★★★½

Hard Luck (1921): ★★★
The Frozen North (1922): ★★★
My Wife's Relations (1922): ★★★
The Haunted House (1921): ★★½

The Paleface (1922): ★★

Buster Keaton: An Appreciation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:22:00 +0000

I first saw Buster Keaton on a snowy night in January, a few weeks into the spring semester of my freshman year in college. It was during an introductory film course, and weekly screenings were held Monday evenings in the biology building, which had an empty theater big enough to hold the approximately 150 enrolled students. As so often is the case with introductory film courses, we began with the origins of cinema. That night's screening included Sherlock Jr., one of Keaton's many masterpieces, although at the time I knew neither Keaton's name nor the possibilities in the world of silent comedy. It's now been many years since that night. I don't remember anything else we watched; probably A Voyage to the Moon and The Great Train Robbery, and maybe even a Griffith or Chaplin short, but I can vividly remember Keaton — Keaton and the dollars outside the theater; Keaton on top of the boxcars and taking a nasty spill when hit with a torrent of water; Keaton and the billiards table; and Keaton in the most memorable of sequences, straddling the handlebars of a motorbike and cruising down a highway of near-misses thinking there was someone actually driving the damn thing.

And I remember that I hadn't laughed so hard at a film in a long time. After the screening was over, I bundled myself back into my layers and made my way back to the dormitory. This was at a Midwestern university in the depths of winter, the trees heavy with ice and the patches of grass covered in wind-blown snow; the maintenance teams were out in the full force, dropping rock salt on the roads and sidewalks, but the results were hardly perfect. Shortly before reaching a key crosswalk, my left foot touched a spot of black ice and slipped out fast behind me. I stumbled but kept my balance, preventing myself from falling onto the sidewalk. And then I asked myself the sort of question I've come to ask myself time and time against when my klutziness got the best of me: How would Keaton have handled that?

It's a question a viewer comes to ask himself numerous times in a Keaton film. Perhaps not necessarily how such a thing will be done, but what exactly Keaton is going to do. Modern psychology teaches us that our understanding of humor — ultimately resulting, if all goes according to plan, in a laugh — is formed largely within a brain that isn't built for such a thing. We are always trying to solve something in black and white, our brains so focused on logic and reasonable prediction that when something incongruous to our expectations occurs, our brain has to shift gears in an attempt to make sense of the words or the action. It is a shift in expectation, so often formed through illogical behavior, that stimulates sections of our brains. It's why a Groucho Marx punch-line that can hit your mind so bluntly — the words steer you in one direction, the pun shocks you back to earth.

Keaton — born Joseph Francis, he earned the nickname "Buster" performing as a young man with his vaudevillian family, known for being able to "take a buster" in the way he could fall — plays this expectations game in his comedy. In the best of Keaton's films, things rarely turn out the way we expect they will. It is not simply that he will fall, flee, or fly, but it is what awaits him at the end of that momentarily airborne journey. This works because Keaton's is also a comedy of space, of expertly constructing and implementing set-pieces down to the millimeter so that everything goes according to plan. That plan, of course, is for everything not to go according to plan for the character on screen. When Keaton jumps from one building to another, for example, there is a good chance that Keaton-the-character has drastically underestimated the distance and fails in a gloriously funny fashion; Keaton-the-director, who performed all of his stunts, knows exactly the degree to which he will fail and has it worked out perfectly. In an important way this is different from standard slapstick. David Thomson notes that most silent comedies "did little more than film the comedian's 'act,'" which usually included some sort of slapstick or physical humor; but Keaton's films are elaborate works of art built with the camera in mind — in other words, films, not mere performances. Chaplin, who also made films and avoided simply performing an act, often fell as well, but in a way that tried to defy gravity. Keaton fell in a way that worked with gravity; his world is occupied with physical objects that have real weight and often real consequences.

I have no answer to the question of who was better, Chaplin or Keaton, nor do I have a specific answer to the question of whether I prefer one to the other. Most days I'm able to address the issue by saying my heart loves Chaplin and my head loves Keaton. I tend to agree with Andrew Sarris, who says the difference between the two is the difference between poise and poetry, that Keaton should be acknowledged as a "superior director and inventor of visual forms" (note the obfuscation of whether his films were better), and that unlike Chaplin, Keaton's films proved inimitable. But I also find myself agreeing with Walter Kerr in the sense that Chaplin is instantly accessible because "his comedy is contained entirely in his persona, a persona so multi-layered that it cannot be exhausted." Film critics split hairs when they try to decide who's better, but if Keaton is comes ahead for many, Kerr argues in The Silent Clowns, it's because he was more "compulsively analytical," a trait that speaks well to a critic's mind. Keaton is at once an observer and a participant in his own films. While Chaplin's persona has remained a relative constant in film appreciation, Keaton's films have produced ebbs and flows of attention, although today they have acquired as fervent a love among some as any auteur.

But perhaps no other auteur needs his works to be as delineated as Keaton. By today's standards, his career feels shockingly short. He began in the 1910s, playing second-banana to Fatty Arbuckle in a series of short films, and ended his career writing jokes for other comedians and appearing in cameo roles in film and television in the 1950s and 1960s. But these films do not encapsulate what is meant by "the films of Buster Keaton," the way we might mean something when we say the films of Hitchcock or Chaplin. Keaton's self-designed output — his true work as a cinematic auteur — was entirely constrained within one decade and made entirely in glorious silence. His first independent release (and thus the beginning of his filmography from most perspectives) came out in 1920; what is regarded as his last was released in 1929.

And as if that was not complicated enough, we must consider this peculiar (for Hollywood, at least) aspect of Keaton's personality: he was comfortable letting a co-director claim a title card all to himself. Toward the end of the silent era his name is strikingly absent from the films he made, at least from the director, producer, and writer cards; and yet, they were all cut of the same cloth, all blueprinted by Keaton himself. Take one look at Steamboat Bill Jr., with the character's furious struggle against a storm and that famous falling wall, and say with a straight-face that such a film is more the development of Charles Reisner instead of Keaton. Some might claim that is auteur theory run amok, but it is undeniable that Keaton was the mechanic behind all his contraptions, buoyed by his producer to choose most of his own paths and develop his own vision. Writes Roger Ebert: "[Keaton] usually used the same crew, worked with trusted riggers who understood his thinking, conceived his screenplays mostly by himself. ... Like Chaplin and Lloyd, he was a perfectionist who would reshoot sequences until the laughs worked, would take as long as necessary on a single shot, would supervise every element of his films. No filmmaker has ever had a better run of genius than Keaton during that decade."

This independence and artistry is documented in numerous Keaton biographies, and it is reinforced by fact. Keaton, like Chaplin, worked best in the realm of loose scripts, open shoots, and on-screen experimentation. Producer Joseph M. Schenck, Keaton's brother-in-law and the man behind Arbuckle's comedies who helped transition Keaton into a solo career, afforded the filmmaker an independence to develop his unique brand of comedy and filmmaking without much interference. That was the era of the Keaton masterpieces.

Critics and scholars mourn the fall of Keaton for the same reason we mourn the early fall of Orson Welles: they were geniuses crushed by the studio. Schenck and Keaton (against the advice of everyone, including Chaplin) sold Keaton's contract to MGM, where he was able to make two more films — The Cameraman and Spite Marriage — with relative freedom until the intersection of two disastrous developments: the indifference of the studio system's bottom line and the emergence of sound. Although someone like Alfred Hitchcock flourished in defiance of the studio system's often unreasonable constraints (often undercutting his producers and slyly playing a game of give-and-take to get what he wanted), Keaton was not the kind of artist who could hold up under such a boss. He was fired from MGM in 1933, an alcoholic who had lost his wife, and forced into joke-writing and cameos to make his living. Whenever he went behind the camera again in the sound era, the results were not the same.

And yet, could it have been any other way? As we shall see over the course of this month, Keaton is often revered as the most silent of the silent comedians. Kerr writes that Keaton was silent in the way of "stillness of emotion as well as body, a universal stillness that comes of things functioning well, of having achieved occult harmony." For film critic James Agee, the silence was critical in how Keaton sought to create his cinematic world: "He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood."

Maybe if silent films had not fallen out of favor as quickly as they did, and if the studio heads at MGM had been more appreciative of Keaton's creative process, he could have been able to continue making film after film, delighting audiences with his slapstick, his pratfalls, his intricately constructed set-ups, his masterful attention to detail behind the camera. Or maybe he, unlike Chaplin, could never have made the transition to sound, even if he hadn't foregone his independence. (Although certainly there are many who contend Chaplin never fully transitioned into the sound era, either.)

Keaton lived long enough to see a slight resurgence of interest in his films, driven in large part by a 1949 article Agee wrote for Life magazine that trumpeted "Comedy's Golden Era." He died in the mid-1960s without seeing the steps taken by the film criticism and academic communities to place him in the pantheon of great American directors. He did not suffer the egomania that Chaplin did — in Keaton's autobiography, he calls Chaplin the greatest of the silent comedians, whereas Chaplin's autobiography doesn't even mention Keaton — so perhaps he expected to float away into the cinematic limbo of Harold Lloyd or Harry Langdon. Perhaps, too, he could not have imagined that sixty years after Agee he would still be the subject of retrospectives, this time in the fields of film theory, history, and criticism in academic environments, articles and books, and blogs across the Internet.

Taking into consideration that I have already examined the films of Chaplin, my summer series on silent films must involve the works of Keaton. I have heard Keaton's voice, but I cannot hear it in my head now, the way I can call up the purring tones of Chaplin's well-spoken but faded accent. Keaton is silent in all the best ways. Today he is loved, but still not in the same way as other film directors or stars. Unlike the characters he plays on screen, Keaton as a director needs that extra boost from writers willing to lend it to him. In Agee's retrospective on silent comedy, he wrote: "Perhaps because ‘dry’ comedy is so much more rare and odd than ‘dry’ wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly." The next month on Screen Savour will be an act of not caring mildly, of diving into Keaton's films with the same energy he had when diving into water. Or a window. Or a car. Or between a man's legs. Or over a man's shoulder. Or any number of possible maneuvers that made Keaton unmistakably Keaton.