Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 7 — 2006

Previously: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005...
Two quick notes, skippable for the disinterested. The Decade Review Revue continues because I always meant for it to take a long time, spread well past when your list-collating people are collating lists of such things. Not because we are now properly in a new decade — as a man once said, "Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully" — but because I enjoy this project and can take my time. See, reviewers and columnist types — those with niceties like editors, paychecks and readers — have to do constant pulse-taking and odometer-checking as they jog their beat. So right about now they're, what?, supposed to be writing about awards and/or festivals and/or generating think-pieces about, like, what celebrities wear to court. Daaamn, that's a harsh gig, but I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'. Surely this is a stubborn exercise in what my sixth grade teacher politely called “divergent thinking” but the post-mortem on The 2000s is not done till we’ve weighed all the organs and sewn it back up.

One of the reasons the "Two Zero Zero X" lists take so long to write is that I make a point to investigate a lot of films from each year that I hadn't caught up with and rewatch anything I have not seen in awhile. So, logically, the more recent the year of inquiry, the less time I've had to see everything I'm interested in. But I'm finding that it doesn’t really matter. Gaze, for instance, at this original Best of 2006 round-up, and note that it doesn't look much different from a mash-up of the list below plus a couple of foreign film holdouts from 2005 and a couple of items that would show up on this 2007 list. We're entering territory largely already covered, since this journal's inception in 2005. So dread the upcoming day when I have to discover if I really have more to say about Grindhouse (2007!), but in the meantime, welcome to 2006, which isn't so different from last time we visited 2006...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2006

10. V for Vendetta (dir. James McTeigue, scr. Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, from the comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd)

Well, you can draw this stuff, but that doesn't mean you can film it. The V for Vendetta comic that Alan Moore wrote between 1982 and 1985 extrapolates a political dystopia out of '80s Thatcherism and sets against it a sort of man-against-the-system freedom fighter missing link between archcriminal terrorist Fantômas and the proto-superheroics of The Shadow. It is an almost-direct-engagement of contemporary political situations by way of enlargement. The polemics on-page are located at the inflamed ends of a spectrum, which is the position from which, gods bless him, Moore always makes sociopolitical argument, which is to say that the comic is about Fascism v. Anarchy. The older and wiser Moore gets, the more he boils human power struggle down to these terms, which makes for compelling art and zero tolerance for, say, American and Australian filmmakers futzing around with his book. Multipurpose metaphor, of course, is how one builds things to last.

Of the transition from agitprop comic to the McTeigue/Wachowskis/Silver poli-sci-fi film, Moore offered the astute criticism that the metaphor has been remolded to a sort of contemporary American liberal response to neo-conservativism. This is, of course, meant as a complaint, but might as well be a compliment, because, Jesus, ain't that something? Joel Silver surely has his own peculiar voice as a producer, and the verdict may be iffy on the voice of Mr. McTiegue, but part of the Wachowski project thus far has been to dance a highly subversive ballet on the stage of the monolithic studio system without allowing the sundry associated pressures to interfere with their choreography. The decade's preferred commercial spectacle genres were superhero action and nerd fantasy literature adaptation, and, 2006 being Life During Wartime and a Dark Time for the Nation and Post-9-11 and all, V for Vendetta is rather a break in continuity in this pop art dialectic. It sprays graffiti on the broad, oppressive walls of Batman Begins, and, because it wears a mask, can walk right up and do its business in broad daylight.


9. Black Book (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Verhoeven, Gerard Soeteman)

There is something of the same work being done in Black Book as in decade fellows The Pianist and Inglourious Basterds, in that cine-serious authors with hearty, ironic senses of humor have made deep-probe adventures set in non-battlefront corners of World War II, and largely in reaction to how the war is depicted and discussed at the movies. In their particular ways, Polanski, Tarantino and Verhoeven find their tendencies to puckish perversity roused by an interesting unresolvable tension: war, this war in particular, provides a marvelous toy chest with which to build stories, and is at the same time the most disgusting thing of which human beings are capable.

Black Book is then a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the ark popped open at the beginning, and the whole adventure story scorched by punishing fire. Verhoeven and actress Carice van Houten go on an epic marathon run with heroine Rachel Stein as she tries to outrun the razing of the European landscape, hopping and dodging through story-modes and transforming from refugee to resistance fighter to girl spy to revenger. If John Rambo grunted that to survive war, you have to become war, here are a dozen variations on what he might have meant, and they all boil down to the constant, increasing moral compromise. Whatever you do to survive in the moment, you pay for later. Whoever is on top after the battle needs a scapegoat. If a principle is exhibited in this formula it is the conservation of mass: all that shit is going to end up dumped on somebody, over and over, forever and ever. If there are tips provided on how to survive the ordeal of existence, they are that once in awhile chocolate can save your life, and never climb into a coffin before it is your time. This is Man's Inhumanity to Man as action-adventure spectacle, and a Thrilling Survival Tale of the Enduring Human Spirit in which history is chronicled in one endlessly long black book.

8. Gumby Dharma (dir. Robina Marchesi)

Shucks, back in 2009 I had hoped Gumby Dharma, the epic-in-miniature biographical documentary about Art Clokey, would find a good distribution channel and lead to sudden widespread interest in Clokey's animation, and there would be a bunch of exciting articles about Gumby for me to read. None of this happened, and, worst of all, Art Clokey stopped motion on this plane of existence early last year, passing away on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88. The bulk of his work remains poorly represented on modern home video formats and Gumby Dharma has shown on the Sundance Channel and was finally released on video in March, 2010.

Documentaries about filmmakers and their work are in no short supply, and in sundry form litter the Special Features menus of a thousand DVDs. Gumby Dharma is automatically interesting for those who value Clokey’s work, but it also builds a case for its subject as a filmmaker worthy of study beyond just the recognizability of Gumby bendy toys. This work begins by telling Art Clokey's story without flinching, which means personal and professional triumphs are not inflated beyond their context, and death, drugs, disease, loss, abuse and bad behavior — those examples inflicted by Clokey or upon him — are met head-on. If that is not extraordinary for a 21st century documentary, please, please do not forget that we are still talking about Gumby cartoons, and that this is a story that has never been told with such depth and honesty. This is not to paint Gumby Dharma as some sort of scandalous exposé of Art Clokey; it is, rather, a complicated, naked, and ultimately joyous portrait of a man, an artist, an animator, a filmmaker.

Last time around, my notes focused on the film's excellent formal choices and valuable research and historical testimonies, and delicately rendered profile of Clokey. I do not want to lose sight of what I feel is Gumby Dharma's overriding thesis, which is that the animator possessed a unique vision of the world and was able to channel that into undulating, speaking, dancing clay. All that passion and pain, curiosity and fear, weirdness and love pulse through Gumby; Gumby skates and plays along the path, and he is the path, the ball of clay, the heart, the part, the enterable book, the blade of grass, the you.


7. A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, scr. Linklater from the novel by Philip K. Dick)

These things cannot be defined in tidy syllogisms or anything, and this isn't about, like, rules, man. But to help sort things out, we might say that: Obviously not all films about drugs are proper head movies. And at the risk of offending, what I'm talking about with this classification does not include a vast majority of stoner comedies, nor the sort of SFX-heavy audio-visual spectacles one might use as an in-home Laser Floyd show. A great head movie A) is about and/or is an investigation into consciousness expansion and/or warping, and/or B) examines, encapsulates, and/or explains the human experience with an eye that is part anthropological, part philosophical, part spiritual. Hints that the film might open up with a chemical key are optional. Whew!

A Scanner Darkly has those qualities, so by my count Richard Linklater has two fine head movies under his belt, and a handful of interesting experiments (the Before Sunrise/Set diptych and Waking Life, which are earnest almost-theres, Slacker, which plays better straight or very caffeinated, etc.) Where the beautiful and fuzzy-hearted Dazed and Confused wafts by on a Circle of Life/Family of Man buzz, A Scanner Darkly is paranoid, doomed, tragic, cottonmouthed. Fueled on dread, it is set entirely during that bad moment you are coming down, notice your fingernails are way too dirty, there is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, and maybe you're not coming down after all. So get this: undercover agent Bob Arctor goes so deep under that he ends up investigating himself, and watching with a detective's fascination as the twin serpents of Id and Superego begin uncoiling from their cosmic hula around the center pole. Do try this at home, but maybe not in public.

When last we saw Keanu Reeves on this journey, the effect was opposite: Neo staring back at the threshold of perception, seeing the code beneath the skin, and finally learning to sense the gold that unites it all — no glass, no scanner. If Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap freakout Beowulf accidentally captures the acid-vision nightmare that humans are weird-eyed puppet husks being jerked awkwardly around too-vivid sets, reenacting some kind of mythological parody, the computer rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly serves a not dissimilar function. Here the stage is made vague or simplified with outlines and color planes, while the surface of the players players crawl and squirm; the whole world is covered with a thin metaphorical hide, a construct, a mask, a cartoon envelope that can't quite be peeled back but isn't quite telling the truth.

6. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (dir. Gore Verbinski, prd. Jerry Bruckheimer, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)

Curse of the Black Pearl reformed the theme park ride’s impressionistic story of skeletal pirates, hoarded gold and the wages of sin into particularly buoyant four-quad fantasy action adventure. With the scant narrative materials of the theme park source material used up, Dead Man's Chest scrapes up the unused themed visuals (fireflies), settings (bayou), and ambiance, then goes about the business of transforming the Pirates of the Caribbean series from a potential string of cast-connected sequels into a trilogy proper, and that is an exponentially more difficult exercise. That is, Dead Man's Chest has to connect forwards and backwards to make three scheduled films into a one massive three-chapter story. To illustrate the difficulty and ambition of that task, consider that while remembered as "trilogies," The Godfather is not built like this, Star Wars is not built like this, and so forth. Pirates is outsized, long-form original storytelling, whether it is "branded" as a concern of a major corporation or not. On the business end, where all films are merchandise, someone in a suit seems to have remembered that the merchandise is still art, that despite all their cruise lines and shopping mall emporiums, The Company is still in the business of stories and characters.

This is all simply to say that despite the increasingly pre-drinking-age milieu of the Summer Movie Game, the Pirates films are unusually committed to and serious about that game. They are crafted with the belief that an audience is invested in the tale and the world, so every nook, cranny, and cannon is crammed to the brim. Completely, seam-burstingly overstuffed, to be sure, but this middle chapter in particular is a Valu-Pak film; it's so much movie. There is faith here that this story should be dense and all subplots should intertwine and motivate each other, that sets should be rich with detail, every single character should grow or change or be tested — that each of them is someone's favorite player and so should have a hero's entrance, a crowning moment of cool, and a dramatic exit — and that half the spectacle is of actors acting. That makes it noisy and exhausting, but heartening next to most of its glib, insincere competition — say, Universal's Mummy movies.

Pirates is blessed with a glinting edge of perversity— an eye for grotesque design, admiration for mischief, a hard-on for the masochistic dimension of heroic sacrifice, and not a little bit of out-of-the-blue weirdness. It is far more sexed-up than Lord of the Rings, and more tripped-out than Harry Potter, breezier than both by several factors. If the comparison to fantasy-lit classics of their kind seems unfair (or unfounded), consider that Pirates is aiming exactly that high, and that ambition alone is pretty damn cool. With this installment, it becomes clearer that in its overstimulated noggin and wistful heart, this story is about mortality, about the death of imagination and adventure at the hands of global business expansion, cultural imperialism, colonization — about fun withering in the brutal sun of finance. In this light, that the Pirates of the Caribbean movie overlay onto Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride does a tragic disservice to both the park and the films can only be bitterly fascinating.

5. The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Baek Chul-hyun)

The monster is big, but could probably fit in your living room if you have high ceilings. We traditionally read human-size monsters as a warped Us or a feared Other, and the bigguns as metaphors for some pressing sociopolitical terror, both are favorite subjects for extensive probing with psychoanalytic theory, and fair enough to all that. The best of the best, from King Kong to Mothra Vs. Godzilla, Q — The Winged Serpent to Jurassic Park, find some magical way to make the ground-level, people-sized story as compelling as the beast rampage and about something besides mere survival. That is no mean feat.

The Host injects intense big monster mayhem into a droll dysfunctional family comedy, warping it into a search-and-rescue abduction suspenser as the Park family looks for their youngest member who has been swiped by the creature, and frames it all in Brazil-style paranoid government thriller. Somewhere near the center of this is another superlative performance by Song Kang-ho as Gang-du, the monster-napped child's scruffy nitwit slacker father. Song plays Gang-du something like Shaggy in mourning having lost Scooby, beginning with literal pratfalls and emotional slapstick, until the lovable cartoon dope is hardened and seasoned with hellfire, and somehow coming out on the other side as a lop-sided, smushy-hearted hero.

So we have here a daikaiju black comedy sprouting agitprop polyps and one can't really predict where it's going, what will happen next. This is not to say that The Host plays as a crazy quilt mash-up, or is as nuts as, say, #3 below, or dreams of being something other or "better" than a giant monster picture. Instead it dreams bigger, striving to be the best giant monster picture it can be.

4. The Notorious Bettie Page (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)

You don't get to be notorious all by your lonesome. "Notorious" is a reputation, and that requires observers to cast an opinion. It goes without saying that pinup models are the locus of much fantasy projection — that's pretty much what they're for. Besides the obvious, consider the imagination fuel of even innocuous swimsuit cheesecake photo. We might imagine the scenario suggested by the photo, or the circumstances of the photoshoot itself, the unseen photographer and the photographic apparatus. We imagine those body parts not on display, hidden by wardrobe or pose, imagine the dimensions not captured in 2D. We imagine the model in movement, imagine her voice, and imagine a personality onto the mute, frozen figure. When we look at Bettie Page, we project an imagined Bettie onto her.

Harron and screenwriting partner Turner begin The Notorious Bettie Page with a basic map of the strategy that will branch out through the film. Adult bookstore customers inquire about the selection of under-the-counter specialty photos ("unusual footwear" stuff, if that means anything to you), but in short order the shop is raided by cops: one trenchcoat crowd replaces another, and Bettie Page finds herself summoned before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography and juvenile delinquency. So there we have it, two audiences hunting for the same photos but imagining their own Betties for their own reasons and to their own ends, and the flesh-blood-and-bangs Bettie the cause of it all, or tied up in the middle of it, or maybe just there and being Bettie.

Now any old model, real or invented, could potentially serve as subject here. Harron, Turner and Gretchen Mol — their flat-out sparkling, bubbling, fully-carbonated Bettie — never indicate for a moment that they've distilled the ultimate secret true story of their subject. Rather, the film suggests that any biography by its very existence imposes a narrative on the raw data of a life and creates a character in the process. To tell the story of Bettie Page is to make Bettie Page into a story. This, Notorious indicates, has its potential virtues and pitfalls, but is the process by which identity and legend are built.

It has to be Bettie, or at least she is a perfect subject. Page's latter-day immortality as cult pin-up is the reason this biopic exists, and that interest was stoked by the apparent mystery of What Became of Bettie Page? By the mid-'50s she'd become the most photographed model in the world. She worked in nearly every form of non-explicit adult photography, from Playboy centerfolds to 8mm catfight films to underground bondage photo clubs to burlesque revue movies. That's a lot of audience, a lot of imagined Betties. What Bettie Page meant in the middle of the 20th century is not what Bettie Page meant by the end of the century, by which time she'd become America's retro sex icon of choice, plastered on comics shop walls, motorbike gas tanks, and photobooks destined for the coffee tables of the très hip across the nation. That's a lot more audience, and more Betties. The interim is legend, speculation, rumors, stories. And where was Bettie? Unaware that this was happening, that anyone cared about antique nudie pictures, that so many ghost-Betties had come to life.

What The Notorious Bettie Page does that is so intelligent and kind — charitable, really — is suggest that all of our fantasies of Bettie Page — those sexual and political, those that would make her victim or legend, those that would see her in bondage or in angel wings — are legitimate and integral parts of her biography, and her extensive body of modeling work continues to fascinate and inspire, which is the legacy of that work. The photos and films, you can have. The story, whichever you prefer, you can have that too. But only Bettie Page lived the life, and that is not something to solve and explain. That, you don't get to have.

As she once said in Striporama (1953), her only speaking role on film, "I'm illusion!" "You mean you're not real?," gasp the baggypants comedians who would possess her. Replies Illusion Bettie: "Of course I'm real."


3. Brand Upon the Brain! (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, George Toles, Louis Negin)

Guy Maddin — the character in Brand Upon the Brain! and director of Brand Upon the Brain! — puts a fresh coat of whitewash on the island lighthouse where he grew up, and feverishly reminisces about his childhood loves, traumas and love-traumas, dramatized as careening melodrama/mad scientist/teen detective/wild child/evil mother/incest romance/zombie horror/steampunk melodrama and made in the style of, um, a Soviet montage/German expressionist/Hollywood silent comedy/abstract cheesecake peepshow. That's all literal as it is metaphorical, and though this is poetic interior autobiography and rumination on the nature of Memory and Self, nothing could be more accessible: it's sex-fixated and silly, the plot never stops moving for five seconds and it's a knee-slapper front to back. No doctors or lit majors need to assist with the decoding, as the plum-syrup narration will do it for you, and it's impossible to be inscrutable when everything is on the table.

Maddin's lighthouse is famously stocked with out-of-fashion early cinema, pulp fiction and avant-garde clutter, but fret not, all you have to do is experience the sight of how that stuff branded his brain, and learn in short order what is so special about all that moldy old stuff. Maddin is, in these blatant ways forever fetishistically gazing at a silver-emulsioned past, a memory eating itself up like nitrocellulose decomposition, but is also forward-thinking, evolutionary. Everybody and their mom knows how to psychoanalyze a filmmaker based on how he frames a shot, can pick out Major Themes from table setting mis-en-scène, and knows which props are phallic and which ones criticize American foreign policy. So what if, asks Guy Maddin, we start with the assumption that this work is already done, and set archetypes and personal symbols on a romp through a story-space that purports to dive straight into the psychosexual miasma of the artist's head? The result is a wholly original breed of comedy, an exciting new kind of storytelling, and cliché-decimating entertainment built entirely out of clichés so disused you've never seen them before.

2. The Black Dahlia (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy)

Certain crimes — big, terrifying, era-defining crimes, mainly — speak to us with layered voices, at first seeming to be manifestations of some core societal fear, but ultimately telling us more about what we are afraid of than actually confirming those dangers, prejudices and myths. e.g., in the moment it can appear, through spin or sincere interpretation, that the Manson Family crime spree confirmed dark fears about hippie culture, drugs, rock music, California. Certainly those events and those figures spoke to a significant portion of the population in exactly that way. But those crimes were so singular, Manson himself so exceptional, the scene so one-of-a-kind that, really, it doesn’t say such a thing at all. In that case, we’re left with a tragedy about this particular nutjob con man, his brainwash victims and their subsequent non-symbolic coincidental murder victims. This is not a cozy thought, but in the ensuing hysteria and excitement Charles Manson is given a constant public forum, and the families of victims are forever caught in this ugly saga. That Family of victims extends on out along this fractal arm, from Roman Polanski in the micro to the entire Love Generation in the macro. When this feedback loop is turned up loud enough, somewhere in the mix Manson’s code-speak bilious rants end up being made true: you wanted a Devil, he’ll be your Devil.

After the tawdry facts of a crime, and beyond the personal aftermath for survivors, the further tragedy is in the myth-making. If we’re adept at keeping our eye on the birdie, the underlying theme tends to be how good the media is at finding an angle to sell a story. Even if we’re dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11/01 or Jeffery Dahmer, data points are not a story: you need a narrative hook. The big ones leave us all scarred, even if that mark is only across the imagination. So:

Meanwhile, over in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue, Elizabeth Short is transfigured in death into The Black Dahlia. And that particular body, with those particular memory-searing, picturesque mutilations, might have captured public imagination for a few weeks, but that’s not The Story. The Legend of the Black Dahlia is that this poor Massachusetts girl wanted to be in pictures, and ended up in pieces. That seems to say something; about this untamed town that wants to be a desert; about this Boulevard of Dreams littered with the shards of broken would-be starlets; about a Dream Factory that is really a high stakes business running on the blood of pretty young things; about a Tinsel Town adorned with razor wire.

That would be the legend, of course, and it’s a good one — so good that its whirlpool sucks down L.A. “supercop” and local celebrity pugilist Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, doing impotent moron in meltdown like a champ). Poor sap only lasts, what? A week?, so caught up is he in dead white girl mania and troubling, circling questions that are not beside the point, but not conducive to solving the crime. What is this strange system by which starry-eyed women offer themselves up to men with money and cameras? Is this germane to the question that James Ellroy says is at the heart of this mystery, which is: why do men kill women? We note here, that this is the kind of thing that Short's murder makes one think about. Blanchard can't reconcile the black alchemy that discards the bodies and leaves the immortal part on a screen and made of light. He can't make it add up, and as is the hotheaded flatfoot's fate, ends up pursuing the Dahlia into Hell — that is, his throat slit and body fed into the furnace by his mob-connected informant. Blowing out of this world as a spectacular, blinding, horrifying supernova is no substitute for the dream of being a star.

After all is said, done and revealed, Blanchard was scrambling through life to protect an image. His fancy home is funded with stolen money, his career accomplishments puffed up, his promotions earned for their P.R. value, his fame-making boxing win a rigged fight, his live-in girlfriend poses well on his arm but he isn't sleeping with her. In his main squeeze, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson who, you know, poses well and adequately fills out an angora sweater), Blanchard has built a perfect rescue narrative; she's an ex-prostitute-gone-gold-hearted, and he helped her go straight. His motivations are not just covering up his culpability, living a lie or faking it till he makes it. He protects the ones with a good Story.

This is the guy who is "supposed to be the hero," as per the real protagonist, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett wearing a hat), who holds an ice pack to his aching skull as his partner's corpse is fed into the inferno. Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, then, promotional nicknames invented by the LAPD, which ostensibly describe their boxing styles, more or less indicate their personalities ("I can't move! I never move!" wails glacial Bucky), and indeed one rages and one is slow to thaw. But it's bullshit, too. "You're a political animal!," the Deputy D.A. chastises the broken-down Blanchard. So are they all, and for the Bucky and Lee it means they're pawns, moved to Homicide and put on the Short case because they're the Supercops. Don't you read the papers? They're characters in someone else's story.

If Bucky is tortured by Beth Short at first, it is because the media ruckus over the dead white woman — whose link to The Industry is not even a whisper of a dream, whose movie-derived nickname is entirely posthumous and newspaper-invented — is drawing him away from important cases he could be closing. And maybe, he tells Lee, this Beth Short wasn't such a nice girl. i.e., the crime needs solving, certainly, but maybe it needn't be glorified, made legend. As Charles Manson often points out, he wasn't shit until you put all those TV cameras on him. But.... there stands Kay in her underwear, and sliced into her back are the initials B.D. As it happens, that stands for "Bobby DeWitt," her old pimp. It stands, symbolically, naturally for Black Dahlia. That doesn't go away when you blink. "Who are these men who carve themselves into other people's lives?" the V.O. ponders, and as serendipity would have it, B.D. are the initials of a renowned director of thrillers, horror pictures and neo-noirs who happens to be directing the scene.

The tale connects Paul Leni's Expressionist melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928) — a horror film for all intents and purposes — with a (fictional) stag reel starring Short. In direct connection, both are shot on the same set (a frankly insane conceit), the former inspiring the later, a beautiful link in the film's chain of mouth trauma that begins with Bucky's symbolic castration when he loses his choppers in the boxing ring. It is a chart of cinematic lineage, as well, in which German avant-garde technique moves overseas and mingles with hardboiled detective fiction, and the resultant new genre baby eventually grows up and Brian De Palma falls in love with it and has to make The Black Dahlia. In these and sundry other ways, De Palma implicates and investigates himself among those who mythologize this crime specifically, but more generally cleave bodies on screen and burn images onto imaginations.

Bucky solves this one, insofar as he learns the details of Elizabeth Short's death. He follows the money, of course. And all are implicated — De Palma and Mack Sennett and the men with the cameras, media and politicians, institutions and underlings, gardeners and carpenters. By the end, Bucky finds the housing development under the Hollywoodland sign was built of rotten wood and hides a film set with a murder shed out back. The very city itself is a façade constructed of corrupt materials. He might've guessed earlier, when the unstable town vibrates in an earthquake. When we leave Bucky, he's still hearing the crows, still seeing that body on every empty lawn. The facts and the legend are both etched on him now. The big ones leave us all scarred.

The citizens of this Los-Angeles-as-black-hole play at being human beings, covering their faces with flimsy masks to indicate profession, social strata, gender, identity and character (arche-?stereo-?)type. The faster they put on their costumes, the faster they are ripped away by the howling void swirling at the center of The Black Dahlia. It is blacker than black in there, so black we need the French to name it. We call it noir.

More on Bucky in Noir-land, symbol-chains and metafic here.


1. INLAND EMPIRE (dir., scr. David Lynch)

David Lynch's shot on video horror movie tops the very short shortlist of that lowly genre's unabashed masterpieces. It is not as bizarre spectacle as Boardinghouse nor as depraved and feverish as Splatter Farm, but it has many fine qualities and is scarier. INLAND EMPIRE was received, ignored, and criticized in a manner that means mounting a defense, writing a simple appreciation and beginning a cursory exploration all amount to the same thing. Insofar as INLAND EMPIRE is a difficult work, three roadblocks typically greet those having difficulty, and rather than demerits, they are simply its qualities. 1) INLAND EMPIRE is a piece unabashedly shot on digital video, and arriving in theaters with the announcement that Lynch has no future plans to shoot on film. 2) INLAND EMPIRE announces itself as a narrative feature and contains abundant plot information but is firmly rooted in modes of avant-garde cinema that include the non-narrative and entirely abstract. 3) The narrative of INLAND EMPIRE is consistently oblique, but explicitly links itself to mystery stories. It seems to offer thousands of clues and few conclusions. At its most explicit it seems to suggest that it might be solved, at its most opaque it seems to suggest that something crucial and meaningful is being missed.

Speaking of solutions, these problems are all, naturally, intertwined. If there is any help to be found below, I would suggest instead that perhaps if you are sitting in front of INLAND EMPIRE with your eyes pointed at the screen, then you do understand INLAND EMPIRE. Unless your eyes are closed.

Lynch often foregrounds the materials used in the creation of his art — like a Jackson Pollack drip painting, the fabric and construction is the subject. Even his figural paintings are dollopped with paint and scribbled on, flat-planed and collaged. Think of the puppet robin meant as real in Blue Velvet or his film-loop-on-sculpture "Six Men Getting Sick" or the incandescent "Premonitions of an Evil Deed", a stunt film of poetry and prowess shot on a Lumière camera. INLAND EMPIRE is boldly, proudly a video project, exploiting and exploring those things only video can do. The result is Lynch's most abstract feature since The Straight Story (1999) and most experimental since Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1990). That is, a true experiment of the let's-see-what-happens variety, this one exploring the visual qualities and editorial rhythms of consumer grade digital video, and in shooting hours and hours of scenes with no master blueprint for assembly.

How to Watch INLAND EMPIRE may be, as Roger Ebert once opined of Dune, to let it wash over you like a dream. This is, in this case: don't fight it. It is the same advice Lynch gave critic Martha Nochimson when they looked at a Pollack together: you do understand it, he told her, I saw your eyes moving across the painting. To engage that dream any more analytically will find one scrambling for purchase, just as in a dream or maybe as when trying to explain one. Some things that happen, you're at a loss to articulate, some are intuitively understood. Anyhow we're squarely (well, asymmetrically) on the shoulders of Laura Dern as actress Susan Blue, who is warned off making the film On High in Blue Tomorrows, and then walking alongside Susan playing Nikki Grace, who is perhaps her own person or several people. An issue that frequently arises when discussing Lynch's film is that the filmmaker finds increasingly sophisticated ways to preserve what he loves about Mysteries, and that love is not in the solving but of luxuriating in Mystery itself. As Sandy asks Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, "you like mysteries that much?" And Jeffrey answers: yes. So analytical language will be wrongheaded at worst, coy-sounding at best. It is not that Lynch films can't be written about, but the task is like tracing letters in smoke or drawing diagrams on wet paper with a fountain pen filled with perfume. And yet, here we are.

This free-associative ebb and flow creative process births a work about a film struggling to be born — or perhaps resisting its creation — and documents the challenge put forth to Laura Dern. Never positive during shooting where her character had been, or where she was going, Dern is ultimately playing an actress grappling with a role. This is a film of linking and connection, disparate geographies, identities, chronologies that peer at one another through torn membranes, down dark hallways, through burn holes in fabric, ruptures in spacetime. Passageways are important in Lynch's work, and all of the films contain a signature movement/image in which the camera descends/dives/probes/is-sucked-into a mysterious black hole: moving deeper into Another Place. In Lost Highway, Fred Madison wanders into a dark corner of his windowless home and emerges somewhere in his own echo chamber head. Blue Velvet famously tilts down from the sky, dives underground, enters a severed ear, reemerges from a reconnected ear and gazes back to the heavens. INLAND EMPIRE is a series of tunnels sliding into one another, connecting back on themselves.

Susan Blue's task is to fully understand Nikki Grace, and to do so she ventures all the way inside and inside out — for Susan to understand and become Nikki, she'll have to plumb the mystery of herself. Along the journey she finds and embodies a replicating chain of Lost Women, ventures all the way to the heart of the universe to find the most lost of souls, and in the end perhaps she does not fix everyone, but finds them. Susan gathers the lost to her and they rejoice.

And these are the keys to INLAND EMPIRE, but there are so, so many keyholes to be tested. Like Mulholland Dr. on back to Eraserhead, INLAND EMPIRE begs to be played with, have its pieces shifted, riddles catalogued and links tested. The puzzle-solver is not on a fool's errand, but is engaging INLAND EMPIRE as designed: playing an infinite game.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 6 — 2005

Previous installments: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004...

The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2005


10. Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (dir., scr. George Lucas)

A far-too-gushing write-up from 2005 can be found here, republished for the Star Wars Blogathon.

With an element of gross misstep and a boggling triumph in every scene, this age's designated popcult touchstone epic marches and meanders to its in/evitable conclusion, and Star Wars ends. The end is the beginning is the end, as unspooling contradictions writhe beneath the surface of George Lucas' primal and personal glossy space opera. A full-frontal merchandising assault is mounted on the same stage as a politicized Greek tragedy about how genocidal dictators are born. Bleeding-edge tech is harnessed to create photorealistic Amazing Stories covers. Every major beat of the story is etched in marble, but destiny's grim march is constantly interrupted by noodling asides. The unreined imaginations of a hundred creature, costume, environment and spaceship designers are funneled through a director with no filter for kitsch, cliché, or dorkiness, and a stadium full of lightsabers cannot slice through the resultant clutter. The downward-sloping arc of doomed protagonist Anakin Skywalker is designed to take him from slave boy to slave cyborg, and focused on the moment when he will murder his pregnant wife, but when that defining moment arrives the cause of death is something like lack of will to live. The biochemical mechanics of the Force are explained, but in such a way as to explain nothing. Moldering Yellow Peril caricature villains are merged with amphibians in papal hats and named after Republican politicians.

The nominally straightforward plot is confused, baffled, and rerouted through twisting blind-corner mountain roads. Nothing so agonizingly prevized on every level from galactic to midi-chlorial has ever been so sloppy and strange.

We have here a series of children's films with images of decapitated and dismembered fathers as a major visual motif. There is something going on in the Star Wars prequels at direct odds with certain conventional wisdom that they are vapid, soulless, lazy, cynical cash-grabs: Bad in some conventional, grinding, anonymous fashion. They are many things, but normal they are not. They are profoundly weird and more than a little bonkers.

This shadowed half is intended to balance the bright-hearted Episodes IV-VI. Within the six-movement film cycle, the Episode I-III trilogy climaxes and resolves with a fall from grace, leaves the universe charred and smoldering and thus primed for new hope. In an infamous, much scoffed-about preproduction documentary clip, Lucas tells his team that the films are "like poetry." A peculiarly formal poetry they are, carefully metered, rhymed and assonated, highly allusive and steeped in mystic esoterica. E.g., General Senator Binks may not be funny, but his real role in the mythos is of the Holy Fool, and his place in the poetics is to rhyme with the sidekick life-debt of Chewbacca. Where the story does not work, the schematic is rich. Trash, perhaps, but singular, epic trash.

Revenge of the Sith specifically finds its director in purposeful, less spastic form, confident in the forward thrust of the film and not just isolated sequences. A sleek black helmet is lowered over the burnt skull of a little boy who once insisted that he is a person and his name is Anakin, and the weight of six films bears down and presses the mask to his face.

9. Sin City (dir. Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, scr. Miller)

Set in a cherry-picked L.A.-New York-Vegas-Chicago-Detroit of the troubled imagination, Sin City is a film on a shopping spree to fill a cart with its favorite elements of noir, hard-boiled detective, cop thriller, and vigilante stories — essentially all of crime pulp — and is very probably bad for you. For cartoonist Frank Miller, the exciting parts of those genres are flappy trench coats, sensitive but impossibly tough guys, absurdly large guns, Madonna/whore complexes, serial killers with grotesque M.O.'s, tar-black irrationally placed shadows and glowing rim lighting, and a pervasive air of moral, mental and physical rot. Those looking for complex detective plots, sophisticated, dimensional femmes fatales and human-scale violence with realistic repercussions need not apply. Apart from the caricatured chiaroscuro, the reference point for Sin City is less Late Show Bogart movie than the sort of lurid crime magazines with a brand of hyperbolic violence Stephen King once charitably described as "gushy." Adapting Miller's comics for the screen, Robert Rodriguez takes the difficult road and assumes that while Frank Miller's psyche looks like a difficult place to live, it is a pretty hilarious, entertaining place to visit.


8. The Proposition (dir. John Hillcoat, scr. Nick Cave)

Hard, mean land, it seems, has made hard, mean men of its residents. Or perhaps they were drawn to this, their ideal landscape, as Hell was built for demons and the damned. If the classic genre theory reduction says that Westerns are About Civilization versus Wilderness, Law versus Freedom, Order versus Chaos, White Hat versus Black Hat, etc, to The Proposition this may as well be Mad Dog versus Mad Dog, or meaningless as Late Breakfast versus Brunch.

Bull-man Captain Stanley enlists captured outlaw Charlie Burns to put down his rampaging criminal brother, Arthur, somewhere in the hellscape of 1880's Australia. The collateral is to be younger Burns brother, Mikey, scheduled to walk or hang on Christmas Day, pending Charlie's success. As Charlie wanders, drinks, and laments, Stanley finds himself forced to protect Mikey from the wrath of the community. And everyone is compromised, every hand is bloodied, and man clings to the lie he needs to get through the long, boiling days.

Nick Cave's score is in wistful, hypnotic mode, and his screenplay is in brutal poetic mode that casts every human as killer, victim or ethereal outside observer. This is the shortlist of options as the characters trudge through the sun-pounded outback, looking for their place in the universe. Stanley aims to civilize the land, but in familiar, eternal, sickly comic Kubrickian tradition, has tragic ideas of what that means, how to do it, and insurmountable circumstances working against him. The cycle of history turns the wrong way. Stanley's brand of civilization cannot abide the criminals, cannot survive the rough justice the townspeople would like, and cannot truly coexist with the native population, and so the contradictions will be written in blood, gunpower and pain.


7. The Call of Cthulhu (dir. Andrew Leman, scr. Sean Branney)

The geeky, obsessed cabal of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society focus their efforts to create the Lovecraft adaptation of the highest fidelity to the source material in all of film history, and display sizeable cinematic prowess and good taste throughout. The simple and clever conceit that makes The Call of Cthulhu soar is to pastiche the fantasy film style of 1928, when the story was published, as if Lovecraft were being adapted in his own era.

Though some of the accuracy of the attempt at silent Expressionist style is dubious, on the whole it smoothes over the rough patches of semi-pro production. Arch performances, unrealistic sets and handmade special effects become strong artistic choices in a creaky / wildly stylized aesthetic, rather than flaws to conceal. Lovecraft's globe-jumping, disjointed, epistolary plot structure remains intact, and his antiquated, lugubrious purple prose is ingeniously transformed into irrationally-lit, oneiric images.

The way the story is built is more about pace and increasing scale than plotting. Notes left by a deceased academic relate tales of increased activity among demonic cultists around the world, and eerie, otherworldly clues point toward the awakening of a transdimensional alien god. Cthulhu is too twisted and feverish to be flattened into three acts, disinterested in character drama, but is full of vivid imagery and snowballs to a thrilling, monstrous and cosmic climax on a sea voyage to an uncharted, newly risen island.

Part of Lovecraft's enduring power is in the dread sense that the stories themselves are unstuck in time and space. That there is something Wrong with them, or maybe with the writer. That maybe he is slightly mad, or a visionary, or both. That the stories are doing something to you. Though he casts a long shadow over all mediums of fantasy art, these are the Lovecraftian qualities never captured in screen adaptation. Simultaneously hokey and august, the feverish Call of Cthulhu strays closer to those mad mountains than any motion picture dream-quester before it.

6. Manderlay (dir., scr. Lars von Trier)

For the fancy-schmanciest art movie on this list, I’m going to drop the pretty talk for a minute. Lars von Trier makes fairly accessible art films, full of ideas, discussion points for later, and crazy formal experiments. They also have strong stories that are communicated in a relatively normal way and movie stars from all over the world. So von Trier is a good starting place for understanding how normal, unfancy, untrained never-took-a-film-class people can get a lot out of art cinema, and with a little work even find it fun and exciting.

I dunno if the gods love a good provocateur, but I know I do. It is good for audiences of the arts, casual and serious alike, to be challenged and affronted. People don’t like to be fucked with. That is understandable in real life, but art is a great place where we can be provoked and irritated without actually being personally injured. It’s okay to be bored during an Andy Warhol film, because he really is trying to bore you, get you to a place where you think about why you’re bored, what about the movie is boring you, and what it means to be bored. Maybe it even makes you mad. Maybe the guy is fucking with you. Did you really leave the house and pay money to watch a guy sleeping? You did, and Warhol is certainly fucking with you. Maybe that’s a scam and you could make a movie like that, too. You could, but you didn’t. But you win in the end because you just had a meaningful sit-down with some challenging art, and that experience went beyond “liking” or “not liking” a movie.

Lars von Trier is also certainly fucking with you. In his case, the stories are emotionally direct and brutal and he’s honestly working out issues that are personally troubling and painful to him. But they’re also a joke. Not a trick or a prank on you for having feelings about the put-upon protagonists that von Trier abuses. The joke is about how extraordinarily cruel the universe seems to be. The nature of drama is conflict, so melodrama piles on as much misery as possible, and it’s funny, interesting and beautiful that we still respond to this, even when as absurd and excessive as in a von Trier plot, even when as minimally presented as Dogville and its sequel, Manderlay. It seems impossible to forget the artifice when the sets are a giant black box with white lines on the floor and the buildings have no walls, but it is possible, too, because we kind of do forget. This isn’t necessarily a difficult, distancing way to tell a story that we have to work at to figure out or how to look past. It is potentially a stripped-down, simple way to tell a story without unnecessary stage dressing, like telling ghost stories around a campfire.

Anecdotal evidence says that some people (Wikipedia would put a tag here that says “[Who?]” and the answer is “some Americans I read on the Internet”) don’t like that von Trier frames Dogville and Manderlay as films about America. This is apparently because the writer-director isn’t American and has never been here. Now maybe some of Those People are spouting off, haven’t seen the movies, and just don’t like the idea of the rest of the world having opinions about America. That’s weird for a lot of reasons, but if I may characterize the nation (this is what blogs are for!), the country is pretty much a big showoff and wants the other countries to talk about it at parties, so here you go, this is what one troubled, weirdo filmmaker from Denmark thinks. I know you can handle that, America. But giving Those People the benefit of the doubt, it’s great that they take issue with von Trier’s Land of Opportunity movies. It means that they’re engaging with the films and interpreting them.

Interpretation is necessary, because von Trier doesn’t actually make definitive statements. He doesn’t put forth an articulated thesis that he perfectly illustrates, but worries through complicated problems at length, and doesn’t resolve them entirely or come to definitive conclusions. Dogville is about things like the pitfalls of charity, kindness, capitalism, the work ethic, and the unbridgeable gap between ideals and their application. Manderlay is about those things plus American race relations, slavery, power dynamics, the meaning of freedom, democracy, and historical trauma. When we talk about those things in Real Life, we usually take a position, have an opinion that we cling to, and shout a lot. Von Trier gives individual characters strong opinions, puts them in conflict, and usually has something awful happen to everyone. His own position is not necessarily in the mouth of anyone onscreen or even easy to suss out. When the stage is cleared at the end of Dogville, all that is left is a God’s eye view of the void and a furious, snapping dog. I’d guess that’s as close to a mission statement as von Trier gives.

In Dogville's case, maybe von Trier uses the town of Dogville to stand for America the Real Place, or to represent the national character, or as stand-in for any capitalist nation, or the entire sphere of human society, or all of those, but it’s also just the isolated, specific, imaginary mountain town of Dogville. Now, in Manderlay, our old pal Grace is leaving in the car with her gangster dad, and she transforms from Nicole Kidman into the more starry-eyed and sincere Bryce Dallas Howard, and happens upon an Alabama plantation where the resident slaves aren’t aware that they have been legally emancipated for seventy years. So, being Grace, with her superiority complex, good intentions and deep sense of social justice, she sets about forcing the slaves to be free. This being von Trier, that plan will go about as well as expected, which is to say not well at all.

If your Manderlay discussion club needs some prompting, bounce over to the Rotten Tomatoes patch and see how the Fresh (32% of Top Critics!) and Rotten alike mostly agree that this is some kind of indictment of some aspect of something. Some critics find a scathing statement on President Bush’s Iraq war in the way Grace pushes freedom upon the Manderlay slaves — using machine guns if necessary — but doesn’t have a solid plan in place for the clean-up phase. Some critics find a condemnation of well-meaning liberal tendency to rush in, meddle and foist assistance on others without understanding the situation or helping people to help themselves. Some critics say both those things without noting the confusion of targets. But wait, does von Trier even know the particulars of contemporary American conservatism and liberalism? This seems doubtful.... Iraq war, sure. But also Vietnam. Also every time anyone ever forced anyone to do anything for their own good. Manderlay is more like a frustrated, angry satire of no-win situations, especially those shitty circumstances you’ve inherited, must take action upon, want to set right, but there’s no clean, correct way to do it.

What belief systems do we get to impose on others? How does America move past its historical atrocities? Specifically, how do white people feel about and deal with the legacy of slavery? Broader: how does anyone in the world deal with these kinds of traumas? How do they haunt us, how do we remember them and move forward, and what do we do when confronted with their residue? Have we truly dismantled and discarded our racist stereotypes? Which ones are gone, which persist, which could reoccur? Why do we continue perceiving truth, allure or usefulness in stereotypes that we know are hateful and untrue? When do you help people who don’t want help? How hard should you try to help? When have you accidentally imprisoned someone with your ideology? How complicit are minorities and the oppressed in their own subjugation? Sorry, I got lingo-y there on you. Point being that some of these topics are painful to consider in private, infuriating to discuss in public, but all necessary to confront.

Now maybe Lars von Trier is fucking with you, and maybe that’s a good thing. What separates the great provocateur from the chortling wiseass? How do we tell a challenging, serious artist from a naughty attention-mongering huckster? Well, that's part of the fun, isn't it?


5. Serenity (dir., scr. Joss Whedon)

In which Joss Whedon does the impossible, or at least attempts it, and succeeds to an implausible degree, and completes the birthing of the rumpliest and philosophically humane science fiction for the screen in decades. The impossible task of Serenity is to act as second (er, third) pilot episode of Firefly, season finale (should the film have performed better), and probable series finale for a failed-culted-resurrected television show. It has to do this without the broad cultural awareness of Star Trek, which would otherwise be a logical comparison. It attempts to function as a self-contained feature film, a continuation, a conclusion, reiteration and encapsulation. As a film that, in all reality, exists thanks to the support of a network of vocal fans, it wisely attempts to satisfy those supporters and thus mustn't bore them with repetition but needs to introduce a nine-crew member ensemble cast and the precepts of its SF universe.

The central mystery tease of the series is played out, namely What is Up with Wise-in-Her-Madness Teen Waif Stowaway River Tam? This being Joss Whedon's playground, the answer is obviously that she got kung-fu powers after patriarchal powers tampered with her personality. The stories can't all meet their tidy, intended endings. That option was lost years ago. So some of the Serenity's crew of bandits and fugitives are get the short shrift, but the single most important story arcs out beautifully: fourteen episodes of Captain Mal Reynolds accepting the part of outcast, outlaw, lost cause, unloved cynic pays off as he resolves his bad faith, stands unshackled and free. Roaming the frontier space after fighting for the losing side of the Unification War and resigning himself to a life of scavenging, running and smuggling, what we have here is a man trapped — like Howard the Duck — in a world he never made, restless, frustrated, and chasing an undefined Something.

Whether he could use some faith, purpose or just some inner serenity, Mal certainly needs to free himself from bad faith. And he does, in shining Existentialist hero fashion, release himself from that moral death-grip, realizes his inherent, unstrippable freedom in the universe. The Alliance isn't Inherently Evil Empire Par Excellence, but ideologically stifling; as Mal is being smothered more than most, he's in the best position in the 'Verse to notice and do something about it. And that's how Serenity pays off the character arc properly.

Mal's circumstances "force" him into outlaw role, but he wills himself into semi-cooperative inertia through all of Firefly, and he tells himself: I'm a bad man, I'm on the run, I'm struggling to survive, human relationships are barely tenable, and I have no choice in the matter. It is not that he plays victim, but Mal sees his unsatisfactory life inhibited by circumstance, blind to the myriad courses available to him. He's not "free" because he doesn't acknowledge himself to be free. Were Firefly-Mal singing the theme song, the refrain "you can't take the sky from me" is wistful and ironic, but by the end of Serenity it is a true, defiant statement of purpose.

In less fancy terms, Mal needs to stop feeling sorry for himself, and gets inspired to action because he finds something to stick up for, namely the right to feel sorry for himself.

This is the extraordinary par for a Whedon-engineered course. All three of his lead TV protagonists have been plagued bad faith, constrained by roles and external belief systems. Buffy Summers doesn't need to just grow up and accept that she's the Slayer: she needs to locate a viable moral space in which to live, give herself permission to have problems, accept that she is grown up but not Solved, and that circumstance may suck, but you're never out of options (and ultimately says the hell with being The Chosen One). Angel doesn't need to Fight For Redemption! Not when there's (probably?) no God, everyone who matters to him has forgiven him, and he's going to "hell" anyway: he needs to reconfigure his sense of purpose, moral system and definition of "redemption," moment to moment, for all his un-life (and ultimately says the hell with any further reward).

And Mal, too, chooses what kind of man to be. He's not redeemed. But he's something like free.


4. A History of Violence (dir. David Cronenberg, scr. Josh Olson, from the comic by John Wagner and Vince Locke)

Here’s the problem for diner owner Tom Stall, who lives an idyllic, calm life in small-town Indiana: gangsters show up and say he’s mob deserter Joey Cusack and his nature is to murder people. Tom denies this for a good while, and Viggo Mortensen plays the affable straight arrow family man with all his bodily cells except a couple muscles somewhere in his jaw and some that calibrate pupil dilation. Something is wrong, or was wrong, or is about to be wrong.

What does it mean for a film to be truly Cronenbergian? It must take more than inventive grotesque biological mutations. That’s a signature plot trope, not a quality, not a style. A video-playing chest-vagina is an example, not a theme in full flower. Cronenberg infuses his unpredictable, uncompromising take on genre pictures with a profound human sadness, a wintery melancholy that pervades whether his bent lens is trained on the sex thriller, the tragic monster saga, the psychic assassin yarn, pervy transgressive horror, adaptation of modern lit classic, or crime drama. The inner turmoil of protagonists explodes all over their physical reality in spectacularly gooey, messy or at least violent and traumatic form, and the mysterious transmutations of perception and reality, identity and form get blurrier, blurrier, meltier, meltier. So tooth-shooting guns made out of gristly flesh are in short supply, and A History of Violence sounds like somebody's term paper subtitled "Evolutionary Stasis and Sociological Satire in the Films of Stanley Kubrick," but the picture is inescapably Cronenbergian.

They used to make terse, starkly poetic, dolorous and doomed crime pictures approximate six per week back in the 1940s (coincidentally circa when Cronenberg was born), when everyone had problems with their souls due to the trauma of the war. Nobody is exactly sure what David Croenberg's trauma is, if any, but it causes him to make purposeful, confident cinema that glides along scene to scene like a mean animal that knows where it's going.


3. King Kong (dir. Peter Jackson, scr. Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, story Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace)
Also available here are lumpen extended thoughts about Kong '05, the first film written about at length on ExKin.

The rarest of unnecessary remakes is one that not only assumes thorough familiarity with the original, but wants its audience to hold that original forever in their hearts with religious awe. King Kong '33 is an Ur-film, a primal, godlike thing that lives in human consciousness like the Old West, the Christ story, and the Oedipal complex. Kong has no company but The Wizard of Oz up in that stratosphere. Chaplain does not live there, not Casablanca, nor Citizen Kane. Just Kong and Dorothy.

It is, then, not possible to really remake King Kong any more than one could rebuild the Great Sphinx of Giza or raise a baby to be Muhammad Ali. Peter Jackson would not replace, revise or improve upon King Kong '33 even if he could, so King Kong '05 is what exactly? A meditative deconstruction and expansion? An extended film appreciation essay? A public display of affection? Sure, sure, and sure, and Jackson's King Kong is a dream journal. The accumulated flotsam in one man's brain from a lifetime of dreaming about King Kong. The result is sentimental and strange, juvenile one moment and sophisticated the next, and all things considered (including peeks at ill-conceived, long-ago screenplay drafts), possibly the most naked and honest approach the filmmaker could have taken.

Every thought that Peter Jackson has had about King Kong and could possibly weave into his film is crammed into the loom, including those dangling in contradiction and unresolved (e.g.- it is an adventure at heart or maybe it is not an adventure). But key among those threads is a theme in Kong '05 wherein each man kills the thing he loves. Obsessive, bottomless passion proves throughout to crush the fragile dream. It comes to bear most spectacularly for Carl Denham and Kong himself, but behind the curtain we sense Peter Jackson pacing in worry, knowing that the act of creating this film is not so different from hauling the giant gorilla across the sea and placing it on stage in Radio City Music Hall. And will that crazy scheme work? Can Peter Jackson ever be done with King Kong? Can any of us? Will it kill the beast, or will the ape unleashed kill the showman? Don't worry, folks. Those chains are made of chrome steel.

2. Grizzly Man (dir. Werner Herzog)

It is Man versus Nature as environmentalist Timothy Treadwell attempts to live among Alaskan grizzlies. It is Man versus Society as the National Park Service tries to prevent Treadwell from breaking the law. It is Man versus Self as Treadwell struggles with the the personal issues that cause him to shun life among humans and delude himself about how beneficial his presence is for his beloved bears. It is Man versus Destiny as Treadwell is inevitably killed and eaten by a bear.

And Grizzly Man is ultimately Man versus Man, in an ideological war between the self-designated protector of the bears and filmmaker Werner Herzog, who assembles Treadwell's own documentary footage and freely editorializes. It is impossible not to do so, as the fascinating, outlandish star blathers and rages and shoves his hands into fresh bear dung, pesters and taunts massive animals while insisting to his camera that the creatures love him, and gathers approximately zero useful data about bears. Treadwell's footage is bracingly beautiful, and absurdly hilarious in its own disconcerting, tragic way. In one of the movie year's most indelible scenes, Treadwell has his hat stolen by a wild Fox, who he has named Ghost and tries to treat as a pet. Ghost the Fox scampers off to his den with the cap, and Treadwell wails about the theft, the violation of his trust by the naughty animal, and never gets his hat back. Whether one sympathizes with Treadwell or agrees with Herzog that nature is a brutal, inhospitable, impassive force, one has to admit in the face of the evidence that a fox will steal your hat and just not give a shit. Nature is like that.

1. Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (dir. Park Chan-wook, scr. Park, Jeong Seo-kyeong)

Mashing up the chain-reaction kidnapping plot of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and the extensively-premeditated revenge tale of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance concerns the elaborate score settling between convicted child murderer Lee Geum-ja and the man who actually did the deed. And between Geum-ja and her daughter Jenny, long lost to adopted parents. And with the families of several other murder victims. And between Our Lady of Vengeance and God.

The emphasis is on themes of identity and art, prep work and improvisation, and the hair-fine lines between sacrifice and degradation, grace and wrath, atonement and —wait for it — vengeance. As she examines a specialty firearm crucial to her painstaking scheme, Geum-ja is warned that ornamented gun is entirely impractical. She does not care, and murmurs only that it is beautiful, and every piece of her scheme must be beautiful. The death angel's day job at a bakery sees her excel at the decoration of tasteful, fancy cakes. As her life has been wrecked, her world shattered, Geum-ja reinvents herself with a purpose, and that plan is an elegant confection. Revenge is all she has, so it must be beautiful.

Central to that plan is complete full-body transformation, several times over. Before imprisonment she was a schoolgirl in over her head. The publicity circus around the crime recasts her as an angel-faced monster, and here begins the long, treacherous snaking of The Plan. As far as news media and prison personnel can see, in the arms of the penal system, Geum-ja becomes a repentant saint-in-training; so the Kind-Hearted Geum-ja facilitates her own release. Meanwhile, she wins the gratitude of fellow inmates by donating organs and murdering bullies; so the sisterly bonds forged and debts are incurred that may be paid off outside prison walls. And once outside, Geum-ja's decorations shift once more. Like a superhero suiting up, she paints on red eyeshadow, dons the coolest high-collared leather coat available, and chops off her finger in penance. If it is not artful, it is not worth doing.

Byzantine and intricate as Geum-ja's plan is, the film’s chronology is rewired into flashbacks and temporal cutaways. Information appears when and if the audience needs it, and not before, surprise reveals of causes after effects, as if the plot has gotten ahead of itself or Geum-ja’s scheme has outwitted the storyteller. The heroine undergoes (undertakes?) such radical behavioral shifts, transforming herself as required to achieve her next goal, that like Kill Bill, Lady Vengeance becomes a revenge quest as journey of identity. Where The Bride is winnowed down and built back up, Geum-ja is in a constant state of becoming.

Park Chan-wook lands his camera on unexpected views, literalizes metaphors without warning, frames to communicate dramatic relationship as much as compositional aesthetic and hops between scenes with flashy transitional devices. So the beatific Geum-ja prays and is crowned with the glowing aureola of a religious icon, or we glide between rooms on intercom cables to reveal one scene listening in on another, or a subtitle is rattled onto the screen by an overhead shot of tabletop coitus. Each scene has a little formal surprise in store. In one remarkable sequence the captive villain about to feel the wrath of Lady Vengeance is forced to translate from Korean to English and back again as Geum-ja communicates with Jenny. Blocked as a line of linked subjects with the translator in the middle, a gun pointed at his brain, split screen effects and simple editing gradually blur the geographical staging. The translator is gradually forgotten, disappears from the screen, though his voice continues. Halfway through the conversation the mother will stand with her back to the child, but Park continues cutting their close ups as if they are facing each other. In these moments, as Geum-ja makes her confession (through the mouth of a man also being forced into confession by repeating her words), states aloud her intention to kill, articulates as best she can her understanding of sin and atonement, she uses the act of her revenge as a statement. She literally makes her victim speak for her.

So what we have here is an exploration of the value of ritual, the role of the symbolic act in the invention of identity. Upon her release from prison at the beginning of the film, Geum-ja rejects a symbolic brick of tofu presented by her Christian comrades. It isn't a coded object with a secret meaning to unlock: its meaning is explained, and explicit. Shucking off the Kind-Hearted persona, Geum-ja requires more than a costume swap, and with high heels, red eyeshadow and burning cigarette in hand seduces the teenage bakery assistant. She has to transgress the boundaries of the Kind-Hearted to transform herself. And so she progresses, marking each step of the way with ritual and symbol, imbuing her quest with meaning beyond personal revenge.

"Atonement" is at the center of Geum-ja's Great Work, but for the film it is more a question than a purpose. That violence begets violence is a given in Park's Vengeance Trilogy, and here the Lady aims to atone by killing her guiltier partner in crime. And this outlaw justice, as outlaw justice is sometimes wont to do, actually may "solve" something — namely uncovering and halting a serial killer — but that is not the same as atonement. The damage to Geum-ja's original victim and his family is already done, and for this she can apologize, revenge, repent, and even affect positive change, but cannot undo. The pattern of destruction has encompassed more murder victims, but none can be saved. There is, however, another child and another parent wounded but struggling for air: there is still a chance for Geum-ja and Jenny. If Lady Vengeance wants something like redemption, wants to atone, wants her world set right, she'll have to forge the tools herself.

Lady Vengeance may famously fade to black and white in its director’s preferred version, but there is no black, white, or grey in the world of the Vengeance Trilogy. There are actions and consequences, impossible choices, and a cast of characters backed up against the wall. Everyone here is a victim of circumstance. Blackness swirls around them, but before they are enveloped, they will try, as Lady Vengeance says, to “live white.” All we can do is try.

Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 5 — 2004

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