Ray vs. Gumby

Ray Liotta as Ray Sinclair contemplates the unexpected appearance of Gumby in Something Wild, 1986 dir. Jonathan Demme, scr. E. Max Frye.
This three-second bit of business is one of dozen of fine throwaway pleasures in a pretty goddamn rousing performance. Come to think of it, most of Something Wild's delights are in a hand-decorated telephone, a background performer's body language, the fluorescent pink letters on a t-shirt; it's a bric-a-brac movie. There is a killer moment in Liotta's final scene as the actor swipes a meaty paw across his pallid brow, leaves a bloody palm print dripping from his hairline, and it looks for all the world as though his brain is bleeding.

The film undergoes two or three major tonal shifts — part of the fun and sense of play is that one never knows what is going to happen next, even though a capsule summary of the plot would indicate a boilerplate screwball romance throwback in which a free-spirited wacky dame pesters an uptight square until he loves her. So that's Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Audrey "Lulu" Hankel (Melanie Griffith) plugged into the Susan Vance and Doc David Huxley parts, or maybe the Clarence Worley and Alabama Whitman parts, because you never know when someone will get murdered or naked or, more importantly, how serious or cartoony the next curve will bend.

Now there's a sort of interesting subtext to the final movement of Something Wild, where bank-robber ex-boyfriend criminal on the lam Ray appears as a dark agent of Lulu's wicked, troubled past and his relentless pursuit has a quality of karmic horror. The first sections focus on Lulu assaulting Charlie's worldview, forcing him to transgress personal boundaries, and assisting in his ego death by way of "losing" his wallet, and helping him self-actualize through fashion therapy and a parade of new identities. Where the opening acts see Lulu broadening Charlie's horizons with the magic of her particular charms, after Ray intrudes the tables turn and the reinvented Charlie has to fight to maintain the relationship and as She fixed Him now He has to fix Her — thesis, antithesis, synthesis and all that. In counterpoint to Ray-as-Lulu's-shadow, it has (sorta) been noted by Demme, it is as if Charlie's sheer niceness through his life provides him with a spontaneous network of helpers — convenience store clerks and scruffy motel owners, rather than woodland sprites, if you will, but we're not here to plug Charlie Driggs into the Monomyth (not right now, anyway).

Ray is then a golem on the hunt (though this is just a made-up appropriate metaphor, it conveniently ties in with the forehead-wiping upon permanent deactivation — we might compare Ray to a twitchy Terminator or greaser Pumpkinhead; anyway, a vengeful ghoul animated by buried sins of the past). For a moment the universe throws him an omen, the pasty golem contemplates the Zen example of the green clay boy. Ray barks out a spazzy laugh, chucks Gumby out the window and speeds off in a hotwired car.

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.

Ten Favorite Films of 2007: Pt II - My Ten Favorite Films of 2007!

Just in time!

10. Trance State: There Will Be Blood (dir., scr. Paul T. Anderson, yeah-right-based on a novel by Upton Sinclair)

Perhaps misanthrope oil baron Daniel Plainview eventually gets everything he wants, in the last moments of There Will Be Blood. He hunches and teeters alone in his wasteland basement bowling alley, eating greasy meat with his paws, all social pretense and facade burnt away, nothing but boney, scraping madness. All he wanted ever was to be the only human on the tattered surface of the planet. Through determination and will, he conquered the world of men as best the pamphlet explains; biggest house, most money, most power. Through monomaniacal focus, his madness has winnowed the human race down to one man, Eli Sunday, and on his private island, Plainview clubs to death the only other beast. And he wins. He's finished.

What do you want There Will Be Blood to say about history? About capitalism? Or about religion or power or the shaping of American society? Consider your answer carefully. Consider that There Will Be Blood might not say any of those things. Maybe it doesn't say anything. It emits a low, long dissonant tone that terrorizes the inner ear and forces the vision to blur out in a field of black and brown spots.

Ideas for suggested allegorical reading are wired like tantalizing wrong paths through There Will Be Blood. For starters, Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, simmering with internal apocalypse) as avatar for capitalist drive, his nemesis Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) as Christian fundamentalism emboodied, but this circuit is dead. They are not opposing forces, for Eli's holy man act is a sham, Plainview's fierce self-interest is not in opposition but a variation. So then, maybe they are twin demons. But both are straw men as symbols. If There Will Be Blood were to posit them as dual ideological forces that shaped the nation, the more scathing indictment would be if they worked together as cynical manipulators; but that's hollow and doesn't work. Unless the statement is that these pervasive, potentially nasty sets of ideals shaped, and continue to form the terrain of the nation, forever irreconcilable, at each others' throats. But then...

And so it goes, the ominous vibration of There Will Be Blood shaking apart any pat solution and drowning any sloganeering. Not a statement, but a story (and how rare is that for a supposed historical epic in 2007?). Plainview and Sunday are instead, characters in a game of Who Is Worse? Both men may be bilking a fortune from worker-followers for peronal gain, both armed with callow low regard for humanity and a finesse for PR, but who is worse? Plainview's simple goal is to hard-win enough success to build an isolation box, where as Agent Smith of the Matrix might put it, he needn't be infected by the stink of humanity. He announces as much, in the best glimpse between the crags of Plainview's emotional tundra, telling his long-lost brother that indeed "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking". And so he tries to build a fortress of solitude, which seems attainable because when Mr. Plainview intends to meet a goal, such as accumulating all the oil or hauling his broken-legged carcass out of a gold mine shaft, well. He does it.

Paul Thomas Anderson's deep humanist steak slashes through There Will Be Blood, for there is something vulnerable, understandable, and misguided in Plainview's soul-sick journey. The picture is an un-epic, narrowing its focus on one unknowable character, until the lens is so close to the slide that perhaps we do know Daniel Plainview after all. Maybe not to sympathize with, and maybe it is too much to bear, but his bottomless stubbornness is one we come to understand. The stated, demonstrated attempt to wall himself from human contact is a frail-winged effort to begin with. Plainview undertakes an enormous amount of difficult labor in pursuit of a nihilistic non-dream. He's not pursuing happiness, not comfort, not pursuing anything. Just aloneness. As his business requires regular contact with others -- his adopted son taken as "partner", other oil men, the communities he financially rapes -- Plainview is bound and destined to fail because the pursuit is self-contradictory. We may be reminded of a lesson learned by Julie Vignon in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blue (1993), but illustrated in inverted fashion. As Julie attempts to run from the force of love, only to find that wherever you go, someone ends up caring, Plainview wants to burn every bridge across the river of souls, but they just keep regenerating. The rancher he ignores while buying land because it's too much effort to pay a personal visit ends up blackmailing him. He abandons his son but ultimately has to deal with him. Eli Sunday bedevils him for a decade, even when Plainview has locked himself away, and possibly undergone psychotic break. And so on. People keep getting in his way, the problems of responsibility and power impossible to solve. If there is a seachange in this man, it is akin to a computer memory writeover, block by block replacing Plainview's seething hate with raging madness.

There Will Be Blood, like Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, seems to emanate from the peculiar psyche of it's central character. It is not quite relayed from Plainview's "point of view" or his "perspective" or precisely duplicate his mind's eye, but holds the man at the center of a muddy, relentless spinning vortex. Paradoxically, the story is simple, straightforward, monosyllabic, but the film unfolds with bewildering opacity. Strange narratological gaps and baffled staging and shooting strategies continually turn the film into disorienting, oblique poetry. There Will Be Blood seems afflicted by some frightening synesthesia. It begins with a vignette that looks like grubby charcoal sketches, about Plainview metaphorically dying in the gold mine and being reborn as a hard thing spat from the earth. It ends with the beginning of 2001, in which apes discover the first tool -- a bludgeon -- and seize control of the water hole. The soundtrack whines and drones like composer Johnny Greenwood is making music by circuit bending Plainview's brain. It is impossible to tell what is going on with any characters on the periphery (which is everyone excepting?/including? Plainview), including some who may not exist. Jack Fisk's set designs are likely historically authentic, but the spindly derricks and makeshift settlements look torn from pulp s-f paperback covers, more so when blazing with massive sails of fire. Daniel Plainview stands before the sheets of flame, angry astronaut in black silhouette. He's not adventuring. He's not questing. He has no wanderlust. No lust at all. He wants to be alone. He wants to be Not Here. He's finished.

9. Sit Closer Together and Keep Your Ruddy Hands Inboard!:
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (dir. Gore Verbinski, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)

You know what happens to men who fall in love with the sea. These notes are less about the filmmaking and plot of At World's End itself, than on the bountiful shape and psychoacoustics of this three movement sea shanty. Critically maligned, beloved by fanfic writers, attended by every man, woman, child and key-stealing dog in the world, the curse of the Pirates films is that they are barely taken seriously by anyone. I was reminded recently that upon exiting Dead Man's Chest, my first reaction was to effuse: that was a lot of movie.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End is a whopping daedal pageant. Three movies, for it's a Trilogy Proper, wide-scoped and chapter-structured as your Star Wars, your Lord of the Rings (the second and third installments written and shot back-to-back Matrix sequel style). Every square foot of its beachhead littered with buried treasure, the jungle is dense with thickets of story, tangled character arcs fusing together, branching apart. The Pirates trilogy is loaded with stuff; boatloads of colorfully painted characters, a whole population so driven by their own desires, passions and miseries they never quite become an ensemble, bouncing around a vast, richly imagined world, a map with no dead space, every mountain, island, township, cove and crevasse hand sculpted with care. The Imagineers have gone all-out, barred no holds, tended every detail. What we have, then, is the motion picture equivalent of Disneyland. No? Yes? Sort of.

From one perspective, Disneyland is nothing but a walk through a thoroughly imagined, obsessively art directed garden. Meticulously landscaped, a planned environment that is attractive from every angle. And it's pretty, but it is not intended to engage any emotion but delight. This is not an unsympathetic perspective. While there is an impressive sense of narrative elements at every turn, these stories are generally sketchy (Haunted Mansion, Pirates), impressionistic (the "story of the land" narratives of Big Thunder Mountain, the Matterhorn, the landscaping itself) or require extratextual referents for coherence (the movie-themed dark rides). Disneyland, in its attractions, rides and shows, does not tell us stories of any depth (besides the historical narrative of those of us emotionally attached to the development and history of the park itself; Disneyland, in every window and tree, is also crammed with stories). The counterargument goes that Disneyland pummels the imagination and the walking tour through mechanized, preplotted semistories provide only, as Douglas Copeland put it, "Adventure without Risk". The Pirates films share this design sensibility, creating gilded fantasy map, packed with eccentric detail. They are funland environments to visit on long movie vacations.

When the animatronic pirates duel and loot and carouse in Anaheim or Orlando, there is no context but the generalized milieu of High Seas Adventure, a hint of Spookhouse Karmic Retribution (ride-story in reverse: here are the corpses among riches -> here are the sins that landed them here), and otherwise it is a parade in limited motion: we float past the floats, march past the merry band. The Pirates movies however, are a story proper.

There is a plot development in Fritz Lang's dreamy jittery crime thriller M (1931), in which the leaders of the criminal underground hold a meeting and decide something must be done about the child killer giving crooks all over town a bad name. We've seen plenty of sit-downs between crime boses, but M's idea that each criminal specialty has an organized union with representatives who attend problem solving and policy conferences shoves an already distorted nightmare vision of Berlin into a dizzying fantasy world. It takes a story, a setting, a feeling that was already riveting and pops off the top to reveal the story is full of folded space. The surface area grows, exponentially. At World's End has a scene not unlike the M crime council, a convention of the pirate Brethren Court, a plot surprise that reverberates back through all three films. These other Pirate Kings were always there, out having adventures of their own; the social structure was always in place. We just didn't get to hear about it until now.

There are the wild unruly dreams and shortcomings of the characters, the fuel called "motivation", and there is adventure here, which may be of arguable risk and variable investment for the audience, but there are stories, and they are About something. World's End is an occult-tinged, melancholy tale of frontiers stretching thin, of modern civilization tightening around the neck of wanderers and dreamers, of what it means to be free -- in a sociopolitical sense, a personal sense, a spiritual sense, in, ultimately, an existential sense -- and of the value and peril of passionate love; whether that be for a lover, for power, for property, for adventure, for rum or the sea. But you know: You know what happens to men who fall in love with the sea. Though somewhat schematic by the fifth act (the Pirates pictures adhere to something like Shakespearean structure rather than modern Hollywood drama rules), the eight principals and a half-dozen supporting players are all working through some personal variation on the themes. At World's End is a Dusk of an Era elegy, like The Wild Bunch, and Once Upon a Time in the West, but the sunset is falling over a world of fantasy and romance; it's about the death of frivolity and dreaming.

8. STOP PLAYING DONKEY KOOOONG!: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (dir. Seth Gordon)

I can beat Super Mario Bros. in less than six minutes. I can even do it drunk sometimes. I don't know down to the second, but my casual glance-at-clock timing puts my best speed at 5:18-ish. Browsing the scoreboard of Twin Galaxies, the "official" rule-keepers on such things, I see this would place me as the 5th best Super Mario Bros. player in the world. Huh.

This is an idle boast. For the time to be officially recognized, I'd have to tape myself achieving such a time attack and begin the video by displaying my TV and Nintendo and the A/V hookups and... I'm yawning already. Because trying to beat Super Mario Bros. as fast as possible is a hobby of mine, but I'm in no way serious about it. I'm not in it to prove something. Or compete. Just for fun. The fastest (sanctioned, no exploitation of programing glitches) time in the world is currently 5:08. To that, I give an appreciative whistle. Most people don't have a context for the difficulty of playing at that level. 5:08 is superhuman. It would require such discipline and effort to shave even five seconds off my time that it doesn't sound fun to me, but ye gads, it makes me grin to watch any attack under 5:15. The catch is, I wonder if my attitude would be different if I were anywhere close to #1. That question is, in part, what makes The King of Kong work as such an affecting exploration of the human competitive drive.

Story: A giant gorilla grabbed a lady and took her to the top of a construction site, dispatching barrels and fireballs with eyeballs to snooker the hammer-wielding Mario from saving the dame.

Approximate symbol-figures as seen in the documentary The King of Kong: Our Donkey Kong is Mr. Billy Mitchell, the champion high-scorer of classic arcade gaming since the early 1980s turned hot sauce magnate, possessed of a 1) singularly poor grasp of social niceties and 2) atrocious fashion sense, 3) ferocious gaming skill and determination to excel at everything he undertakes. The Mario (technically: "Jumpman" not yet the Japanese-Italian of corporate mascotship) is Mr. Steve Wiebe, ex-Boeing employee turned math teacher, soft-spoken suburban dad, generally likable schlub.

The beauty for which these warriors vie, the damsel in distress, is the high score on the 1981 Nintendo arcade game Donkey Kong. Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell may not be cool guys. But they're goddamn amazing Donkey Kong players. You know, Babe Ruth wasn't that cool of a guy, either. Mitchell has the world record, has since '82. Wiebe beats it from his garage. Mitchell fights back. Game on. As the intro screen for each level of Donkey Kong asks, "HOW HIGH CAN YOU GO?"

The fireballs and barrels? Sundry other retro gamers, all of whom are exotic species of the total nerd genus, most portrayed as Mitchell sycophants and sometime flunkies. If there is a King of Kong stand-in for the perilous construction site, the row of red girders itself, it must be the institution of Twin Galaxies, competitive gaming's self-appointed regulatory committee founded by Iowa arcade owner Walter Day, who seems to wear nothing but his referee uniform. They all seem to be in completely unnecessary conspiracy to deny Weibe's high score from entering the books.*

Of each of these characters, organizations, behaviors, and events, The King of Kong asks the same question: Why? Why the fuck are you doing this? It may be a pertinent question that will always get funny or revealing or frightening results when asked of any person, fictional or otherwise, but King of Kong begs the question at every moment.

Director Seth Gordon has shaped his footage into a strong traditional underdog sports story with surprising left turns that seem out of an unfilmed early Zemeckis-Gale script. The found narrative is more engaging than fictional sports stories because the suspense is real rather than scripted, even if only a limited audience is inherently interested in watching championship level Donkey Kong play. The game is difficult. The controls are a bit stiff, the game physics are screwy, and there are randomized obstacles that require improvised solutions. An efficient expository section of King of Kong runs viewers through Donkey Kong 101, outlining the mechanics, and slides right into DK202, with some advanced tactics (Wiebe explains "you can actually control the barrels!" Dude, don't tell people that!). The sequences plunging into the subculture of competitive classic gaming are deft filmmaking, because there's an enormous amount of information to plow through, the least of which is the hurdle of explaining that the hobby exists at all. It's not about the game though, but a sweet and desperately hilarious character comedy of non-confrontation. Mitchell engages in long, passive-aggressive battle to thwart Wiebe. In response, Wiebe patiently plugs away at his game cabinet, sometimes quietly crying. His calm and humility seem an admirable contrast to Mitchell's preening Type A bragging... except when joining the monastic order of Donkey Kong means he can't drag himself away from the machine to find work, tend his marriage, wipe his kid's butt, or readjust his sense of self worth. Why are they doing this?

Billy Mitchell is The King of Kong's ace in the hole. He's constructed as the plot's villain, arrogant and mean-spirited. Why is he doing this? The portrayal may be a dubiously truthful manipulation on Seth Gordon's part, for the real Mitchell has a family and friends, does charity work and seems to be so serious about being the public face of retro gaming because he believes it is a wholesome passtime for kids, and that he's a viable role model. But he aids and abets the filmmakers because he never lets down his guard, never lets slip the public persona that would let him be seen as anything but an A-1 Winner. By being so guarded and simultaneously so transparent, Billy Mitchell becomes one of the most fascinating screen characters of 2007.

*[Ed. Note: Twin Galaxies wants you to know the truth is a little more complicated. Also more "boring".]

For the curious, my Donkey Kong high score is a pitiful 60,400. Checking the Galaxies board I see I would rank as the 51st best in the world. Don't be fooled. This is only because no one bothers to submit such low scores, and nobody can touch the top dogs.

7. Strange Beast: The Host (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Baek Chul-hyun, Bong, Ha Won-jun)

The generally juvenile tone of the average kaiju eiga or Harryhausen extravaganza is not really a weakness, it is just what prevents well-adjusted adults from taking them seriously. Excluding King Kong, and not really excluding King Kong, the Achilles heel of giant monster rampage pictures is the story of the humans being terrorized by the enormous beasts. Even as I type this, I'm formulating a list of exceptions to the rule, but it seems beside the point. With The Host, the concern simply no longer applies. The core of the picture is a bittersweet family comedy about the barely functional Park family, and how the abduction of youngest member Hyun-seo draws to the surface the finest qualities and interpersonal battles of the adult depressives, screwups and idiots. The abduction just happens to be at the hands (prehensile tail?) of a slimey bone-barfing river monster. We'll mainly latch onto Gang-du, the girl's father and all around slovenly slacker. Song Kang-ho plays Gang-du as if half awake, bleached blonde shag hanging in his bleary eyes; it's a terrific sloppy clown performance and the dope sparks with life when his resourceful child enters the room. She's less his daughter than a big sister and indulgent playmate. Gang-du's dad, TV favorite Byeon Hee-bong, is angry, nagging, frustrated with his three adult children, as even as his daughter national medalist archer Nam-Joo chokes in the middle of a competition. Lithe, dolorous Bae Doona plays the archer as if staggering around with an unexhaled sigh in her chest.

The Host is also formed of sociopolitical themes; American military presence, ecological disaster inspired by real events leading to the pollution of the Han River, a satire of Agent Orange, government cover-up conspiracy and bureaucratic incompetence all propel the story. This political commentary is continually complicated and wavers between reserved criticism and anarchic black comedy; whenever the finger seems to be pointing, the joints are crooked. In the The Host, all manner of agents are responsible for special contributions to/manifestations of anxious, confused society. From the small and personal -- Gang-du's brother Hae-il is a burned-out drunken ex-youth protester who's lost his cause -- to the large and national -- the army basically puts Seoul on martial law lockdown and manufactures a cover story that the river creature carries a deadly virus -- to the vast, universal: cultural malaise, the sick joke humor of fortune.

That it has a social conscience or politicized subconscious, does not make The Host unique, among even giant beast films. The catharsis of watching our cities spectacularly destroyed creates a therapeutic space in their stead. Like all good giant monsters, everyone is responsible for this one. It's summoned by whatever dread and sadness is inflicting a society at the time. Whether the host city is NYC '33, Tokyo '54, London '61, Seoul '06, monsters arrive as guests. They help us work it out.

No, what makes The Host stand out is its focus on story driven by characters and emotions. By various turns the film mutates from black political satire through suspense rescue drama, goopy gross-out horror of the variety that is one regurgitation from high comedy, child-in-peril crisis drama, slapstick melodrama, and family comedy. It seems unnecessary to point out that these things tend to be about the dysfunction and peculiar functions of lovable eccentrics; all families are eccentric up close, all comedy is about dysfunction small or catastrophic, thus has it always been, from sitcom-square My Three Sons to Wes Anderson's repressed mod circuses. While it leaps some of the hurdles of giant monster opuses that trip up unsympathetic audiences, it does so without succumbing to the jangled nerve hip shocks of Extreme Asian Horror; The Host shifts fluidly between these highs, poking its head down interesting alleys as it runs around the city willy-nilly.

6.I'm Alive at Last!/ And I'm Full of Joy!:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (dir. Tim Burton, scr. John Logan from the musical by Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler)

Hot Topic wardrobe and whimsy-sick Tod Slaughter trappings aside, Stephen Sondheim's Sweeny Todd was not a natural, comfortable fit for film adaptation by Tim Burton. The the intricate spatter-patterns of this most vehemently misanthropic of musicals are antithetical to the ideals and tendencies in Burton's work beyond anything but surface aesthetics. Sondheim's obsidian slab of a show glistens with hate and anguish at every facet, a massive black mirror of humanity that reflects nothing but the struggle of men to use and feed off one another, the only possible responses anger, fear, madness, the only choices loss of dignity, or to join the wicked game. Unjustly jailed, and having lost his wife and daughter to the grotesque appetites of Judge Turpin , Victorian-era barber Benjamin Barker returns to London, damaged and looking to reclaim his life. All forces having conspired to demolish the last scraps of the barber's happiness, Barker loses his grip, and finds his calling, and reinvents himself as Sweeney Todd, scarred, charred demon bent on revenge. Revenge on the Judge. Revenge on the weak man he used to be. Revenge on the London class system that pins its residents in place like catalogued moths. Revenge on human nature. Revenge on God. So he slashes as many throats as he can seat in his barber chair, and bakes them into pies with the assistance of landlord-cum-business partner Mrs. Lovett. This ugly premise does not exactly unfold or arc so much as fatalistically tighten around itself. After the Prelude, the very first number announces the map of the story: "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit..." Todd dives in. Is there a bottom? An exit? Or just more black hole?

While all of Burton's films have launched wounded dreamer protagonists against a world designed to grind them down, his sense of humor is silly, childlike and corny. He may make movies about ghosts and living corpses and men who dress up as giant bats, but his tone is still Famous Monsters -- or more like Cracked Monster Party -- not grim, not joyless. Tim Burton is a romantic and soft-hearted filmmaker, and Sweeney Todd is deeply cynical, and cruel. Assuming the director is engaged with his material (not always a safe assumption with Burton), it is natural that his abundant visual imagination could reconfigure the stage show with suitably soaring cinematic language. And soar Burton's camera certainly does, with a curlicue baroque style that doubles Sondheim's musical latticework. Without betraying the show, Burton latches onto what is passionate and tragic and funny about Sweeney Todd. Without being slavish and submerging his style, or resistant and betraying the musical, Burton has directed an uncompromised personal take on the show.

My bias in musical theater is for actors who can sort-of sing over singers who can sort-of act. As Sweeney, Johnny Depp acts his way through songs, and that is the proper strategy for a semi-singer to survive a musical. Depp figures out how to sell a song by making his limited range and shaky breath support part of his characterization, smoldering inside as if he's swallowed a fireplace log. It would be great if when Sweeney explodes in "Epiphany", Depp could've opened up his middle voice more, but he's not holding any such surprises. His accent tends to go ragged when he's rushing through difficult passages and the need to enunciate Sondheim's boggling rhyme barrages start to overwhelm Depp's usually seamless character work. That said, he's at his best when surrounded by other adequate voices, so in "Pretty Women" with Alan Rickman (as Turpin, dour as usual, but unusually perverted), we're not hearing a dream-cast at work, but two great actors are acting through the song in a compelling fashion.

If Sweeney Todd has a major shortcoming, it is the casting of Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett. To her credit, Bonham Carter has reinterpreted Lovett as less shrieking harridan, more wildeyed and wispy -- not 180 degrees from Angela Lansbury, but maybe 120 degrees -- but she is a weak vocalist in a role that traditionally requires a shrill, loud set of pipes. She can't keep up, and rather than go too mush-mouthed (which is still a problem) through the crazier parts of "God, That's Good!" and "Worst Pies in London", she affects a breathy / raspy speak-sing delivery to pull her through. So Bonham Carter gives an otherwise snazzy half-hinged performance without being able to control half an actor's tools for expression; she's fighting her voice for two hours. She pushes her past her range in the "My Friends" duet, and it sounds like she's hurting herself. The only time time Bonham Carter's voice is interesting is a totally crazed "By the Sea," which the movie transforms into a comic show-stopper. Tim Burton has imagined it as a series of acid-bright colored picture postcards staged by Charles Addams, and the whole number is so hysteria-driven that Bonham Carter's cracked vocal makes sense, even if she's not doing the music any service.

I dunno how you cut that score down. With 3000 leitmotifs stitching the show together, any reductions start to do structural damage to scenes forward and backward. The film does pretty admirable editing work in the face of hard choices, and the majority of cuts are logical (the signature "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" is painful to lose, this show's musical anchor has lyrics which add no narrative information) or make gut-level sense (I miss "Parlor Songs" but...). The gutted "God, That's Good!" and final act (important reprises like "No Place Like London" and "City on Fire" don't pay off in the movie) may make those with sensitive ears wince, though. The paring of the music means the secondary plots are slimmed, and sapped of emotional resonance; this Sweeney is less epic, but also steelier, sharper, colder: this is Sweeney Todd shaved dow the central love triangle of a man, his hate, his razors.

Bonus Buffy obsessive gripe: Anthony Stewart Head spotted at "The Contest". Look, either give the people Head, or don't, Tim Burton, but don't tease.

5. Sweet Lime: The Darjeeling Limited (dir. Wes Anderson, scr. Anderson, Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola)

Three affluent dopes with their hearts, brains and better impulses in various stages of arrested development, ride a train around India in hopes of spiritual enlightenment or maybe nothing, hauling Daddy's baggage the whole way. The Darjeeling Limited is that blunt about what it is about, that the central symbol is the literal equivalent of the colloquial metaphor, and being ported about by the characters. That is the standard shape of Wes Anderson's stories; adventures and external plot circumstances don't force characters to confront symbol-demons of their internal-conflict-as-scripted, rather, his characters tend to exhibit preoccupation with their own emotional crises, and that is the plot itself. It is hardly Rushmore's subtext that Max Fischer's story of unrequited puppy love and of ambition outstripping talent are made concrete in the illusory Eden of Rushmore Academy: Max knows it, he says it out loud. It is not a secret in The Life Aquatic that Steve Zissou knows he's on a sea voyage to bond with his possibly-son Ned Plimpton and not really to avenge a dead friend by killing a shark: he says it out loud. These surprising self-aware announcements do not come at the terminal end of clichéd Journey to Knowing, but somewhere in the middle. None of these persons are on the trip they think they're on.

So in The Darjeeling Limited, Francis Whitman, who is Owen Wilson but with different brothers and his face banged to shit and bandaged up, asks, apropos of very little, "Did I raise us, kind of?" The track to self-discovery he thinks he's on is... well, he's already come to terms with the idea that he kind of raised his brothers. And Jack (Jason Schwartzman, coping on-screen with the notion of being a sex symbol for disaffected youth) already knows he needs to get over his bitchy, manipulative ex and stop hunting easy sex. And Peter (Adrian Brody, distracted, irritable, self-loathing and self-satisfied in equal measure) knows full well he needs to stop shutting out his wife, man up and be a father very soon. They all three know they'll have to do these things without a central guiding male role-model. This tendency in Anderson's writing is gratifyingly smart and more compelling than watching plywood humans who can't figure out their pretend problems until the third act, because it says that we manufacture dramas to distract ourselves while avoiding the core problems, without belittling or bleeding the poignancy and comic agony of immediate circumstance. The Darjeeling Limited believes the Whitman brothers have a larger, more fundamental problem, that of acknowledging a world outside themselves. It may be less that Wes Anderson People simply need to stop feeling sorry for themselves than to recognize when sorrow is an appropriate reaction.

The above doesn't sound terribly different from personal lessons hard learned that pass for character growth in any drama, but what Anderson illustrates is closer to small epiphanies, subtle but crucial shift in behaviors. By virtue of sheer primal impact, Darjeeling's most shattering sequence is one in which the brothers have been exiled from the train -- the cozy blue Limited itself -- for the crime, as Divine would've put it, of persistent assholism. Forced to continue on foot, the Whitmans witness children from a nearby village falling into a river, and jump into rescue them. One of the boys dies. There is a sun-drenched, colorful slow motion funeral. End emotional setpiece. Because the film's (all five of Anderson's films, really) principle mode is comic deadpan droopiness, the inevitable moments of unironic violence and pain leap out, announce themselves like a pop-up book. Darjeeling is not saying anything so callow as that the idiot white men needed to witness the death of a native child to cheer them up. The brothers are part-way down the track already, and though the end of the film may show them triumphantly shedding their father's luggage and leaping aboard a new train, it presents nothing like fully healed, solved, fixed human beings. Certainly this rescue, this death, this funeral do not fix them, or even immediately wash away the Whitmans' self-absorption and clueless Orientalism (Peter's earnest, embarrassing, condescending, wrenching reaction is: "I didn't save mine"). But they erode a little bit.

If there is a climax to Darjeeling, it is a flashback chapter, a cold grey urban parallel to the Indian funeral, as the brothers cause a scene at an import auto mechanic, stubbornly insisting on driving away in their father's broken car and holding up the burial in the process. Dad's car, of course, doesn't work. This readymade working-through-shit moment doesn't seem to have affected any of them at the time. That the incident is retold as one of Jack's transparently autobiographical short stories seems to propel some actual working through of their shit. And in this free-floating meditation on the transformative value of aimless travels, maybe there is another "climax". Maybe every anecdotal little scene is built with its own climax. How often, after all, can one pinpoint moment of life-changing revelation?

As a road picture/ journey narrative the literal destination, which Francis has covertly planned, is reunion with the estranged Mother Whitman. Sister Patricia, actually, as she's become a nun. In a few brief scenes that are deceptively uneventful and simultaneously peel back the bandages on a goodly chunk of the preceding story, Anjelica Huston wafts around the convent in the Himalayan foothills, ethereal and saintly. The mother speaks gently, tries to soothe her boys, and behaves as a model of Christian patience and general flower child floaty good-vibeiness. And in the morning, she is gone. Ditched the family again. In Patricia's firm, plain-spoken, loving demeanor we might understand Francis' parental, order-giving tone even when telling his siblings to join him for booze and smokes. In her utterly selfish constant abandonment of her children, we might understand Francis' desire for control and family structure. We might understand Jack being hung up on his controlling ex-girlfriend, as well as his running away from intimacy while he pretends to pursue it. And better comprehend Peter's fears about parenting, and love-hate sense of wanderlust. We might see some concrete evidence of how this damage was inflicted.

Patricia's intersection with the brothers Whitman at this point, is one of The Darjeeling Limited's finest magic tricks. Patricia very possibly thinks she's being completely selfless with her entire life, going so far as to devote herself to God and missionary work; paradoxically, she's running away from her fears and responsibilities; paradoxically-squared, she may well believe that after her brief encounter with her sons, disappearing once more is what they need: the boy-men need to tend their own wounds, battle their own tigers. Ironically, having gone to great lengths to retrieve their mother, being abandoned and rather stranded is exactly what they needed as a blunt lesson in what their mother is like. It is in her presence that Francis, who has been conspicuously wrapped in facial bandages the entire film, is able to say out loud that his motorcycle accident was a suicide attempt. If Francis sees himself as stand-in parent, he also can't let himself show a certain brand of weakness in front of his brothers. Sensitivity, longing, vulnerability of a kind, but not death wish, not this despair. He frames the crash as a life changing near-death experience, which it may well be, but doesn't reveal the depth of his pain until he can maneuver into a position where he is not proxy parent, i.e. before their surviving parent. Francis isn't connecting with his mother. She disappears. He is ultimately confessing to his brothers and to himself, in front of a comforting illusion. The mirage dissipates, the confession stands.

Francis finally peels back his bandages before his brothers in silence, examines the ugly network of scars, sighs, and concludes that whatever stint of the journey is concluded, he has healing left to do. As a beautiful line of narration in The Royal Tenenbaums goes, "Immediately after making this statement, Royal realized that it was true."

4. One of God's Hands Is Gentle, the Other Is a Fist:
Gumby Dharma: The Story of Art Clokey (dir. Robina Marchesi)

Note: Gumby Dharma is a 2006 production, and was first screened at festival that year. Its first wide public screening was on California PBS station KQED in 2007 (where I first saw it, after champing at the bit since the Arizona screening). More than a year later, in September 2008, it debuted nationally on the Sundance Channel. I may not get around to a 2008 Favorites anytime soon, so I write about Gumby Dharma here because it may have slipped under your radar, and it is not one that should get away. I greatly wish the film had been picked up for wider distribution, but it is available on import DVD from Australia.

In the 1956 cartoon "Gumby on the Moon", the curious bluegreen hero is about to open the door of his spacecraft and for a split second, for a single frame, the hand of Art Clokey can be seen holding the Gumby puppet upright. The hand of the Creator appears and is gone just as quickly. So brief, gentle and unexpected is the intrusion that most viewers will never notice. If commentators and historians of Clokey's work have failed to spot this poignant frame, it is largely because those critics do not exist. While generally conceded to be charming and benefiting from the goodwill of Baby Boomer nostalgia, Gumby cartoons have never been subjected to much critical scrutiny, usually being dismissed as unfunny, plotless, cheap-looking, amaturishly animated kid's stuff. Gumby is, however, all of those things and none of them. The Gumby shorts personally handcrafted by Clokey are not driven by anything resembling causal plot logic (Gumby goes to the moon because he can, then he is attacked by moon creatures, then he gets too cold and freezes, then his dad climbs a fire ladder into space, then Gumby's in a hyperbaric chamber, then he skates off down the hospital corridor = ?), nor are they beholden to the gag-based structure of comedy cartoons.

The closest thing to a critical or historical survey of the shorts is Gumby: The Authorized Biography of the World's Favorite Clayboy, a 1986 scrapbook-style photobook and big type episode guide by Louis Kaplan and Scott Michaelsen. In between pictures, the authors engage in loosey-goosey free-associative essays with a tinge of Eastern mysticism on topics like "Gumby Artist" and "Gumby Racer" for 150 pages. Completely weird and highly recommended, the book is also nigh useless as an episode guide, as the multiplaned punning, rhyming and frankly stoned zen koans infect even the capsule plot descriptions. Whether one finds Authorized Biography annoying or a gas, it is a step toward rehabilitating the cartoons as Something More. Kaplan and Michaelsen simply tip readers in the right direction. Clokey's animation depicts a universe at play to be explored, toyed with and riddled out, but which never becomes less inscrutable; deeply spiritual in its pervasive mystery, even as the only underlying sense of Order and Design is a common absurdity and unlogic. We might say this of film authors from Buñuel to Ed Wood, Jr., but Clokey's stories are actively about the investigation and experimentation of a highly curious inquisitor into the mysteries of the spirit, physics, the experience of the world.

Gumby Dharma helps to reframe the Gumby cartoons to be read with the kind of generosity demonstrated by Kaplan and Michaelsen in the Authorized Biography. At last, here is an unflinching portrait of Clokey as a fully rounded human being. Gumby Dharma documents a falliable man and how his life informed his work, in deeper regard than the scant autobio elements pointed out by previous commentators (e.g. the bump on Gumby's head was inspired by a funny haircut in an old photo of the animator's dad, Arthur Farrington). His contradictions and inadequacies are laid as bare as Clokey's triumphs and influences. The boy traumatized by his mother's abandonment becomes a man who abandoned his own family as an adult. The spiritual seeker began on his path to enlightenment because of the lures of free love and drugs. The man who channelled belief in a benevolent, playful universe into his work is tested and wounded by the tragic death of his daughter Ann, and, Gumby Dharma proposes, the struggle to maintain balance, faith, life, is manifest and sorted through in the experimental, self-financed short "Mandala", a film by turns harrowing and reassuring. In an unforced, eloquent sequence near the end, the Clokey with abiding faith in the cycles of nature and eternal spark of the spirit finds his belief flagged, shaken by the death of his beloved second wife, Gloria. She loathed the physical torments of aging, Art explains with rending frankness. The older Clokey is shown in grainy, poetic black and white footage that calls back to home movie footage of Art as a boy. This simple cinematic gesture builds a bridge across the decades, from the curious young amateur filmmaker to the wizened animator reflecting on mortality, and they are at once the same soul and a man transformed.

The documentary does a stellar job deliniating various eras of Gumby cartoons. When Clokey left his family, his first wife, Ruth Clokey, took over primary creative duties. and this run of shorts is distinctly different. Gumby Dharma even suggests with a judiciously chosen clip from "Goo for Pokey", in which the little horse is terrorized by an obsessive female blob and panicked when he finds himself confined to her clutches, that her shorts may be worth equal, separate scrutiny in the future, even as the biographical focus remains on Art. It alo plainly explains the financial motivations luring the Clokeys to produce the Davey & Goliath series for the Lutheran church, rather than swallow the traditional party line about the animator's personal values.

An apparant misstep even becomes something special: talking head interviews with the animated persons of Gumby and Pokey, weighing in at regular intervals. A similar cutsey gimmic in the They Might Be Giants documentary Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns) (2002) -- celebrities reciting song lyrics as spoken word pieces-- ended up hamstringing that film's attempts to enliven standard format. It is too cute at first, but the conceit becomes touching when the clay characters comment on even the most troubled and painful moments of Art Clokey's life. The pitch-modified nasal croak emitting from Pokey is the voice of Clokey himself. His son, animator Joe Clokey, has long expressed that if Gumby is the childlike soul Art wants to be, and strives to maintain, Pokey, pragmatic, a little cynical and sarcastic, is who Art really is. Having Clokey comment with sympathy, regret and some scorn on his own life through the mouthpiece character with which he most identifies edges the interviews from sublimely silly into profound.

So, too, the wistful, strange sight that unspools behind the end credits roll. Alone and so very old, Clokey stands in a field of flowers, all the legend stripped away, and he is after all, just a man, imperfect and human an artist as ever walked the field. Sometimes he even stuck his hand in the shot. And he dances. And Gumby appears among the blossoms. They dance together, and flawed and jerky as their movements may be, they use their time to celebrate the world's splendor, frame by frame.

Gumby Dharma may never force a broader audience to reevaluate Gumby, but it's impossible to walk away from the film and not understand that Art Clokey was trying to impart something he felt was important to an audience. There is just as much, if not more, adventure, peril and wonder to be found in baking a cake or doing yard work as in flying to the moon or being a cowboy. It is no mistake or mere budgetary restraint that most of Gumby's sets and props were children's toys. The world is built of playthings.

3. This Machine Kills Bob Dylan: I'm Not There (dir. Todd Haynes, scr. Haynes, Oren Moverman)

Around the time I'm Not There was released I was spending a lot of time with "Tangled Up in Blue". For about a month, I think I listened to the song between five and ten times a day. I took a dozen pages of notes trying to chart it all. Probably won't do anything with them. When it comes to Dylanology, the devout are so studied and reverent that I am barely fluent by comparison. It is a remarkable song; deceptively narrative, it is a kind of poetic cubism some distance from Gertrude Stein, that continually plays verbal games to reorganize time and space to offer new perspectives. On one hand it's impossible to figure out, on the other hand, every reorientation of the puzzle story and the listener's relative position provide a rich experience. As you listen harder, the pronouns keep slipping, the chronology becomes increasingly open-ended, the narrative becomes more cavernous. As you try to pin him down, Dylan resists all the more. "Tangled Up in Blue" begs scrutiny, only to prove inscrutable.

Anyway, I'm Not There is built kind of like "Tangled Up in Blue" in that regard. Todd Haynes' theory being that Bob Dylan is built kind of like that. Hold it, back up, waitwait wait. It's not about Bob Dylan at all. No. Bob Dylan is not in the movie at all. It's about "Bob Dylan." What is this thing? I'm Not There is not really a biopic. It does not document its subject's life or creative life or a critical period in his life. It's not a character study. It's not even necessarily a narrative film.

So what is this thing? I'm Not There is music criticism on film. It is an interpretive, analytical essay about the work of Bob Dylan, and takes as part of its precepts that the work includes public persona and biographical myth-making by the artist, the critical community, the audience, and other artists. Have you a favorite Dylan song? Album? Era? It probably

you connected with it. "Tangled Up in Blue" is vaguely about a relationship and it ended, and the lovers keep crossing paths forever. To me that makes it, you know, romantic and about the love of your life who you can't escape. It speaks to me about the (myth?) of your One True, even though it's also about the troubled realities of relationships in practice

then you've read something into it or connected it to your personal continuity, you've been part of the construction of "Bob Dylan". You're part of I'm Not There. And the I'm Not There you carry around in your head, in your iPod selection of choice Dylan tracks, in the Top Five you'd recommend to a friend looking for an in with B.D., they're all different than Todd Haynes'. So we may be distraught if his I'm Not There differs too strangely from our own strawman Dylan.

what I'm Not There provides, a collection of mathematical naive sets:
insight about the music, not the man; insight about the man, not the life; insight about the life, not the facts chronology record every breath nothing can escape without being documented ... suddenly we've never been further from the truth. This is the moment Dylan appears, honking on his harmonica, unrecognizable and the least important of the splintered figures we have met~~~ [[NOTE remember to flesh this out re: what "insights" these are vis-à-vis concrete examples in the film. Saying this doesn't make it so == unless it is self-evident at this point.]]

insight about the failure of biopics: at best, they don't try to inform us about the artist's work at all, just document the life. At worst they seem to tell us that art is nothing but fragmented pieces of someone else's life experience. That's bullshit. That's pretentious, lying bullshit, and I can't believe any artist would say such a horrible, ugly thing about art in general, let alone about a fellow traveller. I'm Not There says the opposite things: you can't know someone through their art, that is not the point. You can't know Bob Dylan by staring at the facts of his life. You can't know anyone by staring at the facts of their life. You can't know anyone. You don't know yourself. There isn't anyone. No one's there. Poof.

Maybe the most crucial Dylan is Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, the freewheelin' folk kid, troubador hero to coffeehouse jerkoffs who think they are working men. Most crucial because it is that Dylan, one of the most beloved personas, that Haynes links directly to Born Again Dylan, dullest and most disappointing in Slow Train Coming and Saved. That's beautiful. That's irritating to Dylan fans. That's smart.

Maybe the most crucial Dylan is Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, a movie star playing Rollins who then acts like an asshole all the time and gets divorced from his wife. Strange idea floating through several reviews of I'm Not There : that Ledger is not playing a Dylan variant. But he is, and a vital one. The Dylan that recorded Blood on the Tracks and was an asshole who got divorced from his wife. This is Dylan if he weren't a musician. Without the music and mystique and history to romanticize the man, given what we know/imagine about his private life, and given what seem to be direct dispatches from his brain in songs like "Idiot Wind": this is a Dylan with nothing left but the asshole. That's smart. I can see why it's irritating to Dylan fans.

I'm Not There is a biopic. It is just impressionistic and

It disobeys all rules of that genre as they have ever been understood. Or not. There is some precedent for I'm Not There in Ken Russell's Lisztomania (1975) and 32 Short Films about Glen Gould. Biopic -- genre is user defined. after I'm Not There, the genre is reconfigured. there are more possibilities endless possibilities. King Creole is a biopic as much as Jailhouse Rock, certainly more than John Carpenter's Elvis telefilm. I'm Not There is about the music the connection forging, now-sympathetic, now-critical way that Mystery Train is about Elvis

It is possible to walk into a room, ready to take notes and observe, find the subject stripped bare, plain and naked before the observer, and still find that their essence eludes you. When attempting to chronicle a life and observe someone else's soul in motion, perhaps the only definitive observation is: I see you, but that does not mean I know who you are. Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.

The Notorious Betty Page (2006) is as great a biographical film as exists on planet earth, and directly engages the issues of image making and the means by which audiences form a feedback loop with the artist ???? Dylan and Page are both Obscure Objects to be sure, but Page's primary creative job was to be an image and fantasy figure, while Dylan flirted with cameras and confessional autobio songwriting to purposely throw up oblique walls between artist-art-audience realtionships %%flesh this out? or not ### Dylan has done his fair share of ironic posing and mask play and obfuscation through persona (and what do you think, is Self Portrait ironic, or not?). Similar habits may be observed in Bowie or Prince or Marilyn Manson, as fellow musicians who seem to need a new character through which to record every record, but they are builders of miniature worlds... Dylan's of a subtly different breed; perhaps Tom Waits, The Residents, Bjork, Elvis are closer relatives. Their interests just shift eclectically, madly and their full-immersion in their new artistic passions leaves even their bodies, clothes, public statements dripping with a fresh coat of

why is Dylan's Jewishness squashed out by the film? Because Dylan repressed his Jewishness? Because it doesn't? Because it's busy with other busyness?

Even given the

blanchett purposefully shows some of the stitching up the side of her performance, when she's dylan performing as dylan in front of the press. he was always good at put ons, but blanchett is better. dylan always eventually blew his cool when pressed (use "pushed" you used press 2 sentences ago) too far or forced to hold up the act too long (maintain, not hold up)

(she gets something about BD that i'm never sure he understands himself; like charlie manson, interviewers refuse to hear what he's actually saying, and when the answers are poetic or cryptic, they refuse to decode or play language games. Dylan and manson both refuse to meet interviewers halfway. w
== she's also "doing" the BD we kknow too much about, hve too much wildlife footage of him, has the heaviest lifting to do. why recreate scenes that already exist in Don't Look Back? is because Blanchett finds ways of looking back at them really hard and making them truer and funnier than when bob said them did them was them ; ; ;
)

6 actors (eeeh seven?- nine?) maybe but before you're done you've seen them play through at least 20 "dylans" before we're done - whose done? who is?

Dylan seems an apt subject for this underground-styled blowapart of the modern biopic, but it could be anyone. It certainly helps ++ +he longer the career, more extensive the catalog, vaster the public imagination on the subject. in a way (absolutely) maybe no what perhaps the notion that multiple actors should ===== fill in --- is the least transgressive violation of biopic standard op proc in

richard gere as billy the kid is easily the most crucial dylan for i'm not there, though (he? the sequences? the lack of easy reference points for the mr joneses? ) these mudsplattered frontier circus scenes have proven most difficult for critics/ imdb boards? why do i read the imdb boards? The Kid is paradoxical axolotlly the celebrated hardcore favorite dylan who is entombed in the basement tapes but tromping around the old weird ameri
ica

just saw it from a different point of vie

six (seven? who's this Kris Kristofferson narrator? and Dylan IS in it at the end.; Robbie playing Jack is a 10th..) bobs, dylan shot through a prism, rainbow of

spectrum of not-there-ness

but i don't know what it is

even given that,

not ther
e

2. What is Past, or Passing, or to Come: No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, scr. J. Coen, E. Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy)

There's blood on packed dirt. Blood on linoleum. Blood on metal, on concrete, on glass and rock. The scrubby, hardscrabble landscapes of No Country for Old Men birth a compacted chase thriller of three men tracing each others' paths as if following the lines cracked into sunbaked impacted soil. They play a game regarding the possession of a satchel full of $2 million in drug money. The players: Llewelyn Moss, the scrappy trailer park welder and 'Nam vet who stumbles across a sandblasted wax museum of a crime scene and pinches the unclaimed bag of cash. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, face of dusty rock, eyebrows like desert shrubbery, unable to grasp a solid lead on the case, but duty-bound to move forward. Anton Chigurh, undeterrable hit-man hired to to reclaim the money, able to extricate himself from any situation, usually leaving a corpse or two or four in his wake.

As a modern Western noir, No Country unfurls and retangles with the Coen's customary classical precision, characters partially understanding where they're going, who they're after and why. There is a tensed, spooked charge in the air, a measured, ominous pace and hypnotized eye for odd tactile details of physical operations, textures, thought processes and maneuvers: Moss slides the money case into a motel heating duct, Chigurh disinfects and stitches a hideous leg wound, a crumpled cashew wrapper twists and crackles on a countertop, Chigurh does a walk-through of a bloody raid in empty motel room, all documented in methodical detail. The Coens seem to have inherited this creeped-out chill from Jean-Pierre Melville's crime pictures. Even when nothing is happening, the movie is in catatonic, dry-mouthed panic.

As the men chase and run and shoot and bleed, No Country for Old Men keeps prodding us to take a step back from the game -- promise, it will not spoil the engrossing hunt-&-chase story -- and inspect the players, how they play, why, and what their stakes may be. And from this crow's eye view: Here is a document of the human condition, and how it is constant even as the participants perceive nothing but change. Here is an allegory of the principles that keep the universe glued together, even as it appears to observers stationed inside one fractal node that everything is coming apart at the seams. Here is a meditation on the mystery of How Things Work, from the nature of the mind of God to the furrows left in a millimeter of dust by dragging a satchel through a heating duct. As the characters repeatedly warn one another, something is coming, and you can't stop it, and you can't see it. But maybe from up here, blood trails, rivers and shoe scuffs on the floor will form patterns.

It is from Sheriff Bell's vantage we frame this country, the facts plain and tough, their meaning and shape tough to catch in your hand. Tommy Lee Jones plays Bell as visibly soul-wounded and wearied by everything from slaughtered dogs to bad coffee, eyes registering something between sadness and bewilderment at every moment. Bell plays the No Country game with his mind on the past. A quick study of crime scene clues, he is able to piece together logical, flawless narratives of what has happened hours or seconds before he arrives in the tableaux of violated landscapes. He reconstructs the drug deal shootout without missing a beat. He notes the condensation on a milk bottle as evidence that he's barely missed crossing paths with Chigurh by wincing to his deputy: "Now that's aggravating."

Aggravating, and never gets him anywhere. Bell is necessarily a step behind the other players. Way behind. When Llewelyn Moss is finally defeated, our view narrows by one character. It is through Bell's eyes that we wheel up to Moss's body, we can piece together what happened, and know we're still too late. In brief opening narration, he casts a romanticizing eye to his lawman ancestors, wistfully boasting that they didn't even carry guns, and mourns what he perceives as the falling of society into chaos. And this, he cannot fathom. Initially baffled by a lack of retrievable bullet after Chigurh kills a man with a captive bolt stunning pistol, he later tells Llewelyn Moss's wife, Carla Jean, an anecdote about cattle slaughtering, and mentions that very firearm in passing. Does he make the connection? Realize it, but understand it no longer matters, never mattered? He apologizes: "My mind wanders."

In the film's final act, while visiting his wheelchair-bound uncle Ellis (your hero and mine, Barry Corbin), the retired sheriff shoots the younger old man the story of how his Uncle Mac died. Shotgunned by Indians, drowning in his own blood, a death more excruciating than any depicted in No Country. It's not, Ellis suggests, that Ed Tom is "overmatched" by a rising tide of madness in the world, but he's rendered himself overmatched through, as Ellis puts it, "vanity." When Ellis admonishes that "What you got ain't nothin new," the "what you got" may be Ed Tom's internal crisis, may be the present ghastly crime spree, may be darkness of mere being. Solipsism, defeatism, nostalgia, vanity: Bell throws up defenses against an inherently, eternally structureless existence. If something is coming, he knows, it is something wicked. The fear isn't just that he has outlived his era, but that if his moral absolutes are no such thing, if he's operating in a meaning-void, he sees no way to continue.

The old man stares out a window into the no-country and explains: "I always thought when I got older, God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't." He faces a senseless universe, asks for sense, and when it does not answer, does not know how to fill the silence.

It is with Llewelyn Moss' immediate life-and-limb struggle to evade Chigurh's silenced rifle that we're invited to identify. Moss plays differently, in the moment, squirming out of situations as they arise. Josh Brolin, wearing a determined scowl, mutters sardonic, monosyllabic commentary on his own thought processes throughout. He opens a document case full of cash, looks around for those who surely want it, weighs his options, knows he's taking it, knows it's a bad idea, and sighs: "Yeah." He's taking it anyway. You can know human nature and your own failings and still fall victim. He is adept at hiding things -- stowing the money, concealing weapons, sending his wife out of town -- and practical, cool-headed in action. When being chased by a truck, he runs to a river. When a dog is dispatched, he swims to shore, dries and reassembles his gun, and takes care of business. Like Bell, Moss is hampered in the game by shortsightedness and sentimentality. Until all other possibility is exhausted, he fails to realize the money bag houses a tracking device. Fails to consider that his home is full of indicators that Carla Jean would likely hole up at her mother's house. While an expert in the moment, Chigurh has the leverage. While Bell is warned that he "can't stop what's comin," Moss gets an exchange with a flirtatious motel resident, moments before he's killed. She notices he's nervous. He says he's "lookin for what's comin". "Yeah," she says "but no one ever sees that."

Moss' pragmatism links him to the unflappable Chigurh. But Moss plays tactically, trapped in circumstance, and his opponent has a wide-view strategy. We meet him while being arrested by one of Bell's deputies. He goes quietly, bides time staring at nothing. At split second of first opportunity, loops his handcuffs around the cop's neck and keeps them there, still staring at nothing as a man thrashes and dies on top of him. Dressed like Stephen King's tricky demon Randall Flagg, face fleshy and immobile as if Novocain numbed, eyes black and watery, Javier Bardem makes Chigurh's every movement deliberate, practical, forward moving. He drives around with his gun on the seat. Never leaves a murder without checking his feet for gore. Drops every tool from his hand as soon as it has served its purpose. When the task is set, the goal in mind, Chigurh is going to blast a hole through as many uncertainties as he can with force of will. "You know how this is going to turn out, don't you?" he asks Moss via telephone, his dark, croaking voice has a weirdly polite calm, and mostly groans orders and demanding questions. And Moss: "No. Do you?" Chigurh: "Yes. I do." Because that is how they play. Chigurh has his eye on the future.

Chigurh and Sheriff Bell are linked as well. They're both operating under bad faith. Bell waits for a clue, waits for God, waits for his dream-Father to light a path, and waits. Chigurh sees the same signs of a chaotic, unprincipled existence, and forges his own elaborate cosmic plan to take its place. A scheme in which he is an agent of fate, he is the cards which his victims are dealt, causally dictated by an unfathomable set of choices and luck. To those potential victims not an immediate threat to his life or standing in his way, Chigurh offers games of chance: call this coin flip, and, once, answer the equally dicey question "Do you see me?" (can the victim confirm he will not report Chigurh was there? Rhetorical indication that "sure as you see me, I'm shooting you"? Or is it possible this man Bell compares to a ghost is truly invisible in that moment? All of the above?). Chigurh insists on the coin flip, tries to explain its weight and consequence to the players, but his attempts at human dialogue are so blunt and self-centered that his questions and explanations, attempts to slice through the bullshit of social nicety, come off as terrifying non sequitur. "'Now' is not a time. I said 'what time do you close?'," he prods a gas station owner, who sputters "Generally around dark" and in response gets only a derisive "You don't know what you're talking about, do you?" The real problem is that no one knows what Anton Chigurh is talking about. He cannot articulate the the complicated rule system that he believes binds him to his task. One can only guess at the psychological motivations of the psychologically unsound, but Chigurh seems to need structure and meaning as much as Ed Tom Bell.

In Chigurh's first coin-flipping minigame with the gas station owner, he makes the teleological argument that the 22-year causal chain of history brought a quarter to this moment. Though those movements were not charted, here in this moment while under observation, its next movement can be predicted with 50% certainty. If something is coming, perhaps Chigurh can limit its potential outcome. So too, he superimposes his own terms, making laws for the universe for the same desperate reasons Sheriff Bell clings to the laws of man. Is it plea or demand, then, that he does not want the gas station owner to pocket the life and death quarter, for fear "it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is." Chigurh has endeavored to make the coin meaningful, cannot bear to see that stripped away.

In the final coin-flip, Chigurh shows his hand, the limit of his philosophy. Carla Jean Moss refuses to play the made-up game, won't call the flip, even tells him: "The coin don't have no say. It's just you." But the man who cannot be caught, who tracks no blood, who wields weapons of fire and air and silence, who seems, in one of No Country's several unanswerable mysteries, to evaporate from a motel room with no exits as Ed Tom Bell seems to have him cornered, Anton Chigurh cannot comprehend an existence of absolute existential freedom. He presses his case, as if he doesn't understand Carla Jean, retorts "Well, I got here the same way the coin did." He seems to mean that fate and purpose carried the man and the quarter to this task. He is ironically pointing up that indeed, Chigurh and the coin got here because he chose the destination.

Bell can't stop it, Moss can't see it, Chigurh believes he can head it off at the pass... Whatever it is, it is coming, and you'll deal with it or not, the coin don't have no say, just you, and it's still coming. Surely, one of those things is death. That has a nice fatalistic ring to it, and eventually gunfire, old age, car crash will clean out the countryside. But there's also more life. That, too, is coming, and you can't stop it. No Country for Old Men is Texas, 1980 as existential chessboard; dense as if impacted by hot sun, millennia of weather beating it down, and at the same time sparse, wide, open as the line of the rocky horizon, and the boundless, measureless space above.

1. Amor Trashy: Grindhouse (dir., scr. Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino + friends)

Yes, but do you love the cinema?

Has any filmmaker in history packed his films so full of love as Quentin Tarantino? Tarantino makes movies like grand rococo palaces built of what he has learned, and in tribute to everything he loves. The knick knack references, namedrops, and quotations littering the floors are the first to catch our eye, but they are vast as anyone's interests and obsessions, from the finest in American breakfast cereal to $400 bottles of Cristal champagne, Clutch Cargo cartoons to Claude Chabrol. This pile of details can be overwhelming, thigh-deep mounds of board games, Shaw Bros. tapes, rockabilly 45s, heaps of fetish objects, sparkling with light from the murder holes, surfacing the grotto. But the mortar holding the repurposed pop memorabilia decoration in place, the stuff of the ceilings, walls, floors, the fabric of the films themselves, is love too. Love of people and faces, speech and laughter and screams, of individual humors, flaws and virtues: of actors and characters. Love of the possibility of structure and surprise, genre classicism and deconstruction, the entertainment value of glee, fear, flop-sweat and repulsion: of stories and getting lost in them. Love of color and music, speed and slow, the jazzy rush of sugar and fuzzy blush of liquor, of film stocks and blood, screenplay and sigh, soundtrack and smoke: Quentin Tarantino's films have the joy of life. I think the French have a way of putting that.

Mr. Robert Rodriguez has an admirable aspiration, endangered in the modern arts. His pictures aim to entertain as hard as possible at every moment. With D.I.Y. practicality and impatience, he hoists onto his own shoulder the duties of every single technical and creative task that he can. This has a natural hand-crafted appeal, but sometimes works at cross-purposes with Rodriguez's greater goal: a master craftsman brings control of technique to achieve superhuman entertainment that even ambitious, hardworking mortals cannot. Not being a master of all crafts, Rodriguez films sometimes have a lumpen quality. So be it, because sometimes they hit their intended mark with absurd, splintering force. His immediately previous adult feature, Sin City (2005), was the movie equivalent of eating a whole box of cordial cherries in one sitting. He clearly loves the act of making movies, and though the result is often like watching children in Don Post monster masks staggering around the garage while a Bolex whirrs, Rodriguez will risk life and limb to put Fun on a screen.

So these fellows, who, whatever else one wishes to say about them, are sick-in-love with the cinema, bring their complimentary talents to Grindhouse. Two movies that are one movie. While Tarantino in particular has been accused of making movies "about" movies, what that criticism really means is that the artist is at best insulating his work against life, at medium-bad a collage artist, at worst a thief or hollow-voiced parrot. It's a sucker's complaint that Grindhouse is inauthentic. "Exploitation" is a market-defined genre, cynical from conception, shallow by birth. But at over three hours running time, Grindhouse had better be up to more than puppy-dog-eyed imitation. Insofar as Grindhouse is about exploitation movies, it makes a case for their simple, titillating pleasures and rarified, transgressive complexities. And it simultaneously goes about a full-blooded demonstration.

At its loftiest, Grindhouse illustrates that exploitation films of various stripe are a special cinema playground where we work out feelings ugly, lovely, unnameable, grapple with issues vital to the souls of men, women and beasts, with certain advantages and without certain hang-ups of arthouse film or popular Hollywood cinema. On the film's release I wrote at length about the way Grindhouse functions as invite-only celebration and open-armed initiation (and if you made it this far down the page, what's another half hour? Read at leisure.).

There's something more direct and vigorous playing out in Grindhouse. As with the best of slasher movies, women-in-prison movies, monster movies, blaxploitation movies, cannibal movies, etc., etc., Grindhouse engages the parts of the brain and body that get no nourishment from mainstream entertainment sources. If one's mind flashes on the fact that there are currently very expensive films built solely of property destruction, bleeding and fighting, it may seem the cineplex has co-opted the grindhouse. But no. The sensory thrills of Grindhouse are of the wind in your hair as a car speeds down a country road. The tang and bloody richness of good barbecue. The lazy haze of getting stoned and watching the rain. The peculiar funniness of dumb unfunniness. The unexpected self-revelation of artists working under constrained time, budget, genre requirement. The humanized erotic spectacle of interesting-looking people, not lit from their best side, sweating, eating, greasy and exhausted from a long day shooting. The fragrant surprise of a new liqueur jolted into your mouth when one trusts a friend to serve mystery shots. The texture of film grain, blur and roll of aging VHS, the bad 16mm print's scratch the jump, and as it moves and tears in the projector, the grind.

Everybody likes movies. Grindhouse asks: but do you love the cinema?