Shine A Light

Despite the fact that I’m a longtime Rolling Stones fan, or perhaps for that very reason, I’ve long resisted catching their stadium show whenever it rolls through Chicago, reckoning with a sniff that a Stones show had long since become a night of empty entertainment for boomer attorneys, their clients, their secretaries and the whole lot's kids.   However, I couldn’t resist this concert picture filmed by Martin Scorsese and 18 of the foremost cinematographers in the world last year at New York’s Beacon Theatre.   I simply had to see the Master shoot and cut his favorite band.   After all, it was the Stones' music—its drama, its menace—that, reacting with the image, ignited some of the most thrilling moments of his cinema.  

On the other hand, some would argue that Scorsese has arrived at a point in his career where the Stones have been for decades: producing work that, while still exciting, is but an echo of what they created at their peak.   My critical instincts braced me to see a geriatric band go through the motions.   But from the moment Keith Richards hits the opening riff to “Jumping Jack Flash”, it’s impossible not to be excited by this kinetic, exhilarating picture, and why try?   The film is a celebration of energy sustained into the golden years by old favorites: the energy of the spinning, hip-shaking, charging, shimmying Mick Jagger—that most active of seniors—and the energy of Scorsese’s filmmaking, with its whip pans and zooms and flying camera, capturing that forever fascinating onstage dialectic between Keith’s cigarette-dangling, blasted, joyfully dissolute pirate and Mick’s approach to rock & roll as exuberant high-impact aerobic workout.

It’s not a connoisseur’s set-list the Stones play in this movie: there are no rarities, and the freshest tunes played are nearly 30 years old.   Still, there’s something so satisfying about the sound that this film showcases: Charlie popping the snare, the nasty, snarling guitar interplay between Keith and Ronnie, Mick’s raw holler.   I never tire of it.   There are generous helpings of songs from 1978’s “Some Girls”, still one of their most fun-to-listen-to records.   There are three special guests: young Jack White (who leads the White Stripes, one of today’s hottest bands) duets with Mick on the transcendent "Loving Cup"; it’s clear from White’s beatific expression that he loves this song as much as I do.   Venerable Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy joins the band for an intense “Champagne and Reefer”.   Christina Aguilera belts out “Live With Me” admirably, but her style brings things perilously close to “Stones night” on “American Idol”.  

The Stones have been doing this for 46(!) years now; at their best, they were the best.   So what if this show is not at the level of “Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!”—of course it isn’t.   But this is still a band that has some bite left.   I remember reading an interview in the 80s in which Keith was asked about the skull ring he’s long worn.   He replied that he wears the ring to remind himself that we’re all the same under the skin, and the fact of the mortality we all share is writ large on the deeply lined faces on the screen in this life-affirming picture.   It’s the subtext of every show they play now.   In the face of it, they’re still having fun, still gathering no moss.   Here’s hoping to catch them on their 50th anniversary tour when it rolls through town…even if it means dodging boomer elbows.

Rating: ****

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- Apr 26, 2008

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This is the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who was stricken, out of the blue and in the prime of life, with “locked-in syndrome” which rendered him completely unable to move except to blink an eye (his other eye had to be sealed shut).   With the help of caring nurses he painstakingly dictated a book, making words by blinking through the alphabet and stopping when he reached the letter he wanted.   This French film is based upon the memoir he blinked out, but its true subject is the human mind’s resilience.  

I heard Arthur C. Clarke in a rebroadcast interview on the occasion of his passing a few weeks ago say that “Being completely wheelchaired does not stop my mind from roaming the universe”; likewise, Bauby’s mind compensated for his locked-in syndrome by generating sense-experiences spun from his vast explorations in literature, poetry, film, history—refracted visions of Brando and Ozymandias, Graham Greene and Balzac.   Empress Eugénie came to him in the night, offering comfort.  

The director is Julian Schnabel, and his filmmaking reflects his painter’s eye for form and line and color.   He places the camera in Bauby’s head so that we experience how intolerably claustrophobic was the condition to which he awoke, trapped in his own head with his reverberating thoughts—which, amazingly, are amusing (in a caustic sort of way).   (The tone of this film is much more earthy than sentimental).  

Max Von Sydow has a small but wrenching part as Bauby’s father.   The well-chosen, evocative soundtrack features songs by Tom Waits and Joe Strummer.    

Rating: *****

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 - Apr 11, 2008  

Funny Games

Troubled by the consumption of commodified violence of the sort churned out by Hollywood, Austrian director Michael Haneke made a clever provocation in 1997 entitled “Funny Games”, the story of a family on vacation at their summer home—husband and wife and young boy—who are mentally and physically brutalized by two lissome young intruders with psychopathic personality disorder dressed in tennis whites and golf gloves.   To show the consequences of violence, the part Haneke reckons Hollywood leaves out, was the point.   It was one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen, yet I thought it fascinating—a rigorous, complicated, dialectical piece that wanted at once to sound the tocsin and to work as a harrowing narrative that expertly manipulated genre codes and artfully modified time and space.  

The idea motivating this new shot-for-shot American remake starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the mother and father is apparently to inject this adrenaline machine into the bloodstream of the American media-industrial complex.   It is an extraordinarily precise recreation, down to shot angle and length—I read that Haneke even procured the blueprints from the house used in the Austrian version so that the Long Island house would have exactly the same layout.   Watts gives an absolutely fearless performance: being the victim of the sort of scenario depicted in this film is amongst the worst nightmares a human being could imagine, and she goes there, all the way.   And young Devon Gearhart is absolutely convincing as the son—the terror in his eyes is so real.    

Like the original, the remake is brilliant cinema qua cinema.   Consider the lengthy shot of the blood-streaked TV screen showing a droning Nascar race: a complex visual synecdoche.   Take its use of sound: there’s no score, so in the background we hear birds chirping and, as the day turns into night, the buzzing of crickets; these ordinary sounds are somehow more disturbing than a pulse-pounding score.   Late in the film we hear a dropped golf ball rolling across the floor before we see it; because of what’s come before, we know that this sound signifies another round of horrors.        

There’s another twist: we realize that the leader of the two intruders seems aware that he’s in a movie.   From time to time he speaks directly to us.   Here Haneke is dragging out into the light the relationship between the film and the audience.   After the father calls out “That’s enough!” the young man turns to us and asks, “What do you think?   Do you think it’s enough?”   When Watts sobs, “Why are you doing this?” he replies, “You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of entertainment!”    

And so the American remake stirs anew the restless questions raised by the original: Is this film profoundly immoral…or deeply moral?   Does Haneke loathe the audience, or is he acting in our interest?   What interests him more: implicating us, or showing us how we’re being manipulated?   Is the film hypocritical?   Personally, I think Haneke can justify everything that happens in this movie.   However, because “Funny Games” is a provocation, anything one could say about it is fair enough, I suppose, except for one thing: you can’t say it doesn’t make you think.   Meticulously designed to be a bone in the throat of the consumerist system, it still can’t be easily swallowed.

Rating: ****

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- Mar 25, 2008

The Savages

"The Savages" is a film about a certain kind of relationship (brother and sister) and about being a certain age (late thirties/early forties).   It’s also about being a certain type of person, one who finds his or her raison d’etre in the sort of art that has never troubled the radar screens of everyday people—in this case the “theatre of social unrest”—and who is not quite equipped to function in the world run according to everyday criteria.   I related to all that!   In fact, the character of the brother, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, reminded me not only of people I’ve known, but also of people that I’ve on occasion been.   (“It looks like the Unabomber lives here”, comments the sister, played by Laura Linney, when she first espies her brother’s book-strewn quarters).   He’s a disheveled academic teaching Brecht at what appears to be a community college; at 39, she’s still temping at dead-end cube jobs while writing plays on the side.   The story begins when the sibs are suddenly called on to deal with the onset of their estranged father’s Parkinson’s.   The father, played by Philip Bosco, is a product of the New York tenements; he’s sour and miserable and he was a lousy father to boot, crossing the line that separates New York-volatile from negligent rageaholic.   How a man of no sensitivity whatsoever somehow managed to produce kids who grew up to love theatre is one of the life mysteries plumbed by this film.   They must have found something there they needed.       "The Savages" is an honest picture, nicely mounted by writer/director Tamara Jenkins (“The Slums of Beverly Hills”).   She’s made a tragicomedy for the sort of audience who might “get” a line like, “We’re not in a Sam Shepard play here”.   She has a knack for drawing these theatre and film-loving people: we get the feeling she’s based them at least in part on herself.   And yet, while she’s adept at sidestepping cliché and predictability, much of this film nonetheless has the feel of the familiar about it.   And since there’s no love lost between the sibs and their dad (they hadn’t even seen him for years before he got sick, didn’t even know where he was living), the audience can end up feeling a bit like the Savage kids, not quite sure how to react or what to feel, unsure whether we feel anything at all.   The film doesn’t flinch, which creates a (not uninteresting) dissonance in the context of comedy: surely we’re not meant to laugh when the old man can’t make it to the bathroom on the plane and his pants fall down and he wets himself? In the future "The Savages" will be a treat discovered by connoisseurs of screen acting in the course of going back to catch everything done by two of the best of our era, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney.   Hoffman, with his deep, intelligent laugh, is absolutely right as the depressed scholar of the Theatre of the Absurd; it’s a case of an actor’s persona melding perfectly with a role to create a memorable performance.   Still, it is Linney as the sister who is really the main character, a neurotic dissembler who’s had a largely disappointing life and seems to feel she’s owed something.   That description makes her sound awful, so it’s a testament to Linney’s acting and Jenkins’ writing that we see the fundamentally decent and empathic person that she is, the compassion she shows towards a father who never showed any.   Towards the end of the film we witness a rehearsal of her semi-autobiographical play which shows her wish to have been able to literally lift her brother away from their father’s rage.   (Similarly, Bosco, while not having much in the way of dialogue beyond stereotypical old man kvetching, still manages to make the father pitiable through his facial expressiveness).     If you’re like me, you’ll delight in “The Savages” for its many moments that seem to reflect your own life—and be thankful and grateful that many of its moments do not.        Rating: **** Key to ratings: ***** (essential viewing) **** (excellent) *** (worth a look) ** (forgettable) * (rubbish!!) - Feb 20, 2008

Persepolis

About three years ago I, along with many others, was gripped by the first volume of Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”, a book which is usually referred to as a graphic novel (i.e., a literary comic book), though it’s really more of a graphic memoir, slightly-fictionalized, about her childhood in the late 70’s in Tehran, her teen years in the 80’s in Austria (where her parents sent her to escape the increasingly repressive Islamic revolution), and her young adulthood in the early 90’s when she returned to Iran before finally settling in Paris.   Now comes this gripping, charming French animated version of Satrapi’s book, bringing to life its simple yet expressive drawings.   Why tell this very personal story in animation?   I think for the same reason she initially chose to do it as a comic book: because it _is_ such a personal story, drawings allow her a visual expressiveness that can capture not just what happened but how these events _felt_: for example, the scolding old women in their abayas look like snakes craning down on little Marjane.  

“Persepolis” certainly puts things in perspective.   I mean to say, during my student days I was a campaigner for free speech, focusing on freedom in music, but to see Western popular music sold black-market style by “psst!”-ing fellows in trench coats, while amusing, is also to see what repression really looks like.   The teenage Satrapi thrills to punk rock and heavy metal; thrashing away in her room to Iron Maiden, she is exhilarated by loud, wild music in a way universal to modern adolescents, but the anti-authoritarian music is also a lifeline to freedom for her in a way quite particular to her context.   Likewise, when near the end of the film Satrapi tells us, “freedom always requires sacrifices”, everyone can relate to what she means, but I also became suddenly and acutely aware that freedom cost her in a way that I daresay I’ll never be called on to know.   For example, her beloved uncle, a communist, was executed for his politics.  

What sticks with me most about the movie, though, is not its politics: it’s her relationship with her wise Grandma.   I think of them wandering together through the cold streets ravaged by the war with Iraq, stopping to get hot beans in a cup from a vendor.   Grandma, who put Jasmine flowers in her bra, who was always against whatever foolishness or outright evil was going on around them in society, whether it was the U.S.-backed Shah or the fundamentalist Islamics, but who also cautioned Marjane against harboring bitterness and revenge in her heart as being corrosive to the soul.   She taught Satrapi that the most important quality in this world can be summed up in a word: integrity.   That’s why it’s painful late in the film when Satrapi as a young woman betrays her grandmother’s teaching by getting an innocent man in trouble to save her own skin.   And how cross her grandma is when she tells her!  

If one of the reasons we go to the movies is in the hope that through their stories we can come to understand other people a bit better, then “Persepolis” is a valuable movie, and especially so at a time when W. makes sabre-rattling noises in Iran’s direction.   Though it’s also important to understand that Marjane Satrapi represents just one strata of Iranian society, a liberal, highly-educated strata.   She’s the very model of a modernist intellectual, a proper one: when she looks to the heavens in times of trouble she sees another bearded figure sitting at the shoulder of God: Karl Marx.   (This odd couple seems to get on pretty well, though God looks a bit fed up.)  

Rating: *****

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- Feb 1, 2008