Picture's Up

Roger Ebert: 1942-2013

I first became aware of Roger Ebert as one half of “Sneak Previews,” or “At the Movies,” or whatever the show was called when I was a kid.  Apart from vague memories of bad sweaters, petulant arguments, and the ending tagline “the balcony is closed,” I don’t have much recollection of Siskel and Ebert’s show from those days.  Its strongest legacy may be that for years I thought of Ebert as the second half of a compound name, with “Siskeland” invariably preceding it, in thought if not in speech.

When I was about 14, I received – possibly as a birthday or Christmas present – a copy of Ebert’s book, the 1988 edition of the “Movie Home Companion.”  This fat tome contained more information about movies than I had absorbed in my life up to that point.  If as a child I had mainly thought of movies as a delivery mechanism for tales about the Galaxy Far, Far, Away, as an adolescent I had Ebert’s writing to thank for the understanding that film was an art form decades old, continents wide, sophisticated and mature.  At the back of the book were essays like “My Ten Great Films, and Why,” in which I first learned about “Vertigo” and “Taxi Driver” and “Citizen Kane.”  In his review of Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” Ebert wrote that it “is the kind of film that makes you want to go and see a Scorsese movie.”  What did that mean, I wondered?  What was a true “Scorsese movie”?  I would find out two years later when, at the Kahala Mall outside Honolulu on Christmas Eve, I saw “Goodfellas” for the first time.  Ebert’s writing opened up names, worlds, contexts, vaults full of material that I knew it would take me decades to peruse.

A few years later, as a high school student, I attended a symposium at the 1991 Hawaii International Film Festival in Honolulu.  Ebert was there, moderating; I remember watching him walk down the aisle toward the stage.  The talk had some connection to local high schools – perhaps the featured speakers were alumni – and Ebert amusingly mangled the schools’ names, rendering my alma mater Punahou as ‘Puna-HOW.’  One component of the talk focused on the tortuous development process by which screenplays were acquired by studios and turned into movies.  A teenaged smartass, I raised my hand and asked why, if the development process was so involved, so many terrible screenplays ended up getting produced.  The room laughed, and Ebert with it.  I don’t remember what comment – if any – he made about my question, but years later, when I was a full-time scriptreader and deeply embedded in that dubious development process myself, I wondered if Ebert had been as annoyed at that pissant, holier-than-thou adolescent as my own older self would have been.  Probably not: Ebert, after all, had no skin in the game of making movies, only of watching and describing them.  He would, I imagine, have welcomed any snot-nosed kid who expressed however clumsily a desire to hold Hollywood’s feet to the fire and stand up for quality.  I like to think he spared me a kind thought that evening.

The TV show was always around in the background, and seemed until Gene Siskel’s shockingly early death as if it would go on for decades more.  But I gravitated more toward Ebert’s written reviews, in which he perfected a clear, crystalline style that seemed drawn more from some post-Twain mainstream of American colloquial writing than from the relatively hermetic world of film criticism.  His reviews were often bigger, deeper, richer than the movies they ostensibly addressed, and were roomy enough to contain delightful digressions on life in general.  At the end of his review of Richard Linklater’s “SubUrbia,” Ebert wrote: “There is, I believe, a seductive quality to idleness. To be without ambition or plans is to rebuke those who have them: It is a refusal to enlist in the rat race, and there may even be a sad courage in it. But what Linklater sees is that it is so damned boring.”  At the beginning of his “Swingers” review, he wrote: “…the new American frontier is the all-night diner, with Formica tops and ketchup and sugar on every table, and a waitress who writes down your order on a green and white Guest Check. And in these coffee shops, which reach out like an endless progression of stops on the highway to fame, there are countless young men like the heroes of ‘Swingers,’ who are so near to stardom they can reach out and touch it, and so far away they can't afford to pick up the check.”  Passages like this are all over his reviews, nuggets to be excavated.

And, of course, Ebert’s satirical side could be savage.  I have never read a better put-down than the concluding paragraphs of his “Armageddon” review: “Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. ‘It will obliterate your senses!’ reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. ‘It will suck the air right out of your lungs!’ vows Diane Kaminsky.

“If it does, consider it a mercy killing.”

When I was a young hopeful film student, I envisioned a day when, having made my mark directing some brilliant debut feature, I might sit across a restaurant table from Ebert for an interview.  Then, I would think dreamily to myself, I really would have made it.  Such vanities blanch into triviality when I think of the last years of Ebert’s life – how, having made it to a degree few may dare to hope for, he was struck by a ruthless cancer that destroyed his broad jaw; and how, where weaker men would recede into despair, he doubled his industry, embraced new media, and produced some of the best work of his career.

Before we were all bound to hate it

Below is an email I wrote in 1999 describing the experience of watching The Phantom Menace on opening night at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  It is of some historical interest.  I have acceded to the conventional wisdom that generally loathes the prequels, though if you got me drunk enough I would have to hold forth at some length on the details, reservations, and qualifications.  But yeah, Phantom Menace was pretty bland.  It was still quite a thing to be seeing a Star Wars movie directed by George Lucas at that time and in that place.

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Having obtained four tickets for the 3:30 A.M. Tuesday night showing at the Mann's Chinese theater, Josh and I didn't anticipate much difficulty in finding friends to share them with.  Surprisingly, though, getting rid of the two spare tickets was not as easy as we thought.  I offered one to Gabriel, who had already committed to a 9:00 Wednesday morning showing.  He didn't want to go, feeling it would be too taxing to bounce directly from one showing to another.  He called his friend Glenn (a former NYU grad student), who also decided he couldn't make it.  Rob thought about it, but decided against it, wanting to get sleep in preparation for HIS tickets at the Century City Cineplex Odeon theater at 4:00 P.M. Wednesday afternoon.

Would we be forced to scalp two tickets to the hottest show in town?  Where were the Star Wars freaks?  Where were the people who were willing to see the movie at THE theatre, on the first night, where all the freaks with light-sabers and Darth Vader costumes would be?  Alas, all gone?

So then I left a message for Adam, offering him a ticket.  To my amazement -- given our relapse in communication over the last two weeks -- he returned the call and said he would be glad to go.  Hurdle one eliminated.  I spent much of Tuesday afternoon -- in between reading and covering screenplays -- coordinating the final battle plan with Adam and Josh over the phone.  Adam said he had another friend, a co-worker named Erica, who wanted to go as well, but she would join us in line at about 2:30 A.M.

Josh, Adam and I settled on meeting at Josh's place at 10:00 P.M., then going over to Hollywood and getting a feel for the line.  I attempted to get a nap in the evening, but was unable to sleep, and passed the time watching TV.  My mounting anticipation was alloyed by so many other emotions.  Foreboding that the film would suck.  Fear that the old magic would be gone.  Fear that the midnight showing would be the only cool screening, and the 3:30 would end up being half-empty.  And the final question: aren't I too old for this?  Don't I already know Phantom Menace probably won't be as good as Election, to name just one recent film?  And over all these fears loomed the spectre of Jar Jar Binks.  But that's already a Star Wars geek cliche.

I picked up Adam at Starbucks near his home at 9:30 P.M.  That in itself was an episode-within-an-episode, seeing as how I hadn't seen him in almost a year.  We quickly settled into an easy conversation mode, and as I drove toward Josh's apartment, we caught up on old times, mutual friends, current fencers, and so on.  If tonight would serve no other purpose, it would at least solidify the renewing of my friendship with Adam.

We arrived at Josh's apartment.  I parked; we buzzed Josh, and he came out.  The plan was for him to drive us all, since he works in a building near the Mann's Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard, and could get into the parking garage for free.  Exiting the garage, Josh's back door got caught in the opening garage-gate (don't ask), but soon we were on our way.  To Hollywood.  To the Mann's Chinese.  To the culmination of 16 years of waiting...

After parking, we walked the few blocks to the theater, which was lit up, its marquees proudly displaying the "Star Wasr Episode One the Phantom Menace" banner.  The facade of the theater was brightly lit, and there were numerous media vans parked nearby, including one from the Sci-Fi channel and various local news stations.  I saw at least one reporter doing a stand-up in front of the boulevard.

But what of the line itself?  There was something underwhelming about it, on first sight.  Rather than a miniature city of rabid Star Wars fans, a sprawling quasi-Kosovo of tents and staged light-saber battles, all we saw was an orderly and rather small line which turned the corner around the theater and stretched perhaps only a block and a half beyond.  There were some signs ("Jesus is the Force," said one), but there was still something rather subdued about the whole affair.  I remembered a longer line for  the "X-Files" movie.  We ascertained that this line was for the 12:00 showing, which had not yet let in.  Where were the 3:30 people?  Apparently nowhere.  No line at all, yet.  My fears grew yet stronger: what if Josh, Adam, Erica and I were the only people freakish enough to even go to the 3:30 showing?  What if the joke were on us?

Deciding we had plenty of time to get in line, we hopped across the street to catch dinner at "Hamburger Hamlet."   This particular "Hamburger Hamlet" has the distinction of a large Indiana Jones mural on the back wall, contributing to the whole "Hollywood" feel.  We ordered and settled in, though I was leery of drinking my soda, wondering if bathroom facilities would become a problem (of which more later).

From our vantage at the window-seat of the Hamburger Hamlet, which looked out directly upon the Mann Chinese across the street, we could see things beginning to heat up.   We saw at least two Darth Mauls in full red make-up wielding red light sabers.  One of the Mauls was particularly scary; he had aluminum foil wrapped around his Sabre and wore a seriously pissed-off expression.

Suddenly, a coterie of Star Trek fans began marching back and forth in front of the theater, waving signs saying "Kirk not Kenobi," "Wars is Hell," "Kirk never kissed his sister," "Spock 3:16," "Yoda is a puppet of the government," and the like.  Things began to tense up between Trekkers and Star Wars fans and the few LAPD officers posted on the Boulevard seemed about ready to pull their night-sticks and do some Rodney Kinging.  But alas, our hopes of a full-scale riot never materialized.  Adam ran outside and took several photos of the Star Trek picketers.  Later on, Josh and I found the "Kirk never kissed his sister" sign and grabbed it.  I took it home -- a souvenir.

We ate our meals.  By the time we had finished, it was past 11:00 and the line for the midnight showing was gone, having been let into the theater.  To our chagrin we saw that a sizeable line for the 3:30 showing -- already three deep and extending a block beyond the corner -- had appeared seemingly out of thin air.  We paid our check, hurried across the street and took our places in line.

Thus began The Wait -- four hours which cannot equal Harry Knowles' multi-day odyssey, but which nonetheless had a quasi-epic quality.  As the line began to build behind us, more and more people queuing up, my fears were calmed: maybe this show wouldn't sell out, but it would be plenty crowded.  And more and more light sabers were becoming visible among those in line.  I felt vindicated: there were enough freaks left over that the 3:30 showing would be quite an experience.

How did those four hours pass?  Josh made regular trips to the building where he worked, bringing one of us each time to go to the bathroom inside (by the end of it, the security guard was getting pretty pissed off).  I waited for over a half an hour alone while Josh and Adam -- whose insides had been done a number by the cheeseburger he'd ordered -- went on one such sojourn.  Meantime what did we see?  We saw a scary man standing in the middle of the road wearing only a trenchcoat and a Darth Vader mask.  He did not appear to be standing in line.  Adam and I were convinced he would pull out an Uzi and spray the crowds.  Moments later he was gone -- vanished?  Shortly afterward a full-scale Darth Vader came, wearing the complete mask, costume (replete with blinking chest-plate) and with the inevitable red light saber.  Many from the line -- including Adam -- snapped photos of him, and he gladly posed, soaking in the attention like Julia Roberts at a premiere.  In addition to the two (or rather one and a half) Vaders, and the two or three Darth Mauls, I saw one Obi Wan Kenobi, perhaps a dozen light sabers, and a three-year-old in a Biker Scout helmet.

So it went.  The time passed, and not too slowly.  Along the way I bumped into Scott Bly, a former fellow USC student whom I'd fallen out of touch with.  He gave me his card.  I guess at least one such meeting was inevitable.  Erica showed up at 2:00; a moderately cute blond girl who strikes me as just the sort of woman Adam always seems to be befriending.  We sat on the pavement.  Josh and I passed the time asking Star Wars trivia questions to each other.  At first our tone of voice was ironic, but soon we were seriously trying to stump each other.  "What docking bay is the Millenium Falcon in at Mos Eisley?"  "What cell-block is Princess Leia held in?"  "What is the name of the General who gives the briefing in Return of the Jedi?"

At last the line began to move.  Some cheered.  There was a palpable feeling of excitement in the air.  We moved forward, a little at a time.  It seemed they were letting the people in by sections rather than all at once.  We formulated a plan: we would split into two groups, Josh and I, and Adam and Erica.  Each group would try to find 4 seats.  Whoever succeeded would contact the other group and we would take our seats.

An attendee stood to check our tickets outside the building.  Suddenly Josh couldn't find his.  While I nearly had a heart attack, he emptied his pockets in a desperate search for the elusive paper square.  At last he found it.  We moved on.  In a daze, we gave our tickets to the ticket takers.  We ran -- ran -- into the auditorium.  It had begun.

My impression of that yawning cavelike interior of the Mann's Chinese is first of all of red -- lush plush red, the seats, the carpets, everything.  Already most of the middle seats were gone.  Josh and I ran to about the fifth row and grabbed four seats.  Josh went to get Adam and Erica.  We then changed our minds and found four seats a couple of rows further back.  Not bad seats at all -- toward the center, toward the front.

By now there was an undeniable electricity in the air.  The only thing I can compare it to is a rock concert -- there was that level of energy in the crowd.  I saw a Darth Maul a few rows down and over.  In front of the yet-blank screen stood perhaps a dozen people with cameras, taking pictures of the audience.   Josh, Adam and Erica went back out to get popcorn and drinks while I held on to the seats.  Two guys came out front and started a chant: one side of the theater would scream, "Star!" then the other side would scream "Wars!"  The chant fizzled at first, then caught on.  I joined in.  "Star!"  "Wars!"  "Star!"  "Wars!"  Then a guy ran to the front brandishing a large banner of Jar Jar and tried to start a chant of "Jar Jar Binks!  Jar Jar Binks!"  This chant didn't take, though it elicited plenty of laughter.  There were some, apparently, who had already decided they were going to love hating Jar-Jar more than they would hate him.

Adam, Josh and Erica took their seats burdened with popcorn.  The lights dimmed.  Ear-splitting cheers.  I screamed.  I whooped.  I clapped till my hands stung.  The din was deafening.  This was it.  The climax of 16 years' waiting.  My fears about the 3:30 showing had been unfounded: though not perhaps sold out, the show was almost full, and the freaks were out in force.   Legions of light sabers danced among the anonymous rows.  All was well.

The previews began, and were almost totally drowned out by screaming.  There was "Anna and the King."  (Some people clapped for Chow Yun Fat).  There was "Titan AE".   (negative reaction).  There was "The General's Daughter" (very negative reaction).  And there was "The Beach," which elicited an onslaught of anti-Leonardo sentiment.  People were screaming things like "Fuck you faggot asshole" to the large Leo looming on the screen.  Adam leaned over and said to me, "You don't need to be Deanna Troi to sense hostility here."

Up came the sound-system promos.  The THX one was the same old one, where the thing breaks down and the little robot flies around fixing it.  One audience member screamed, "Hurry up and fix it!"

When the Lucasfilm logo went up, the screams (including mine) were so loud that nothing else could possibly be heard.  As loud as they were, their volume seemed to double when those magical words, "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." came onto the screen.  I screamed myself hoarse.  I waved my arms around.  The theater was lost in noise.  The climax came with the trumpet fanfare, the bold untarnished "Star Wars" logo like an emblem of youth, and the beginning of the title credits streaming back into the distance.  Our screams were so loud that we couldn't even hear the music, but in all our minds' ears it was present.

When the film itself began, it was amazing how quickly the crowd quieted down.  These were, after all, Star Wars fans, and they didn't want to miss a line of dialogue.  I found my brain playing catch-up with my eyes.  There was a kind of afterglow in the early minutes of the film -- a sense of unreality.  Could we really be watching a NEW "Star Wars" movie?  Could it really be?  It was.

Of the film itself I will say little until I know that you've seen it.  All I will say at this point is that nothing could possibly have lived up to our enthusiasm in those first seconds, and so the climax of the night was when the words "Star Wars" first appeared.  I have now seen "Phantom Menace" twice (in the space of about 15 hours).  My adult critical sense says certain things, my inner child says others.  It's hard to assimilate the experience of watching it -- the mind reacts on more than one level, and not without contradictions.  After extensive post-movie discussion with Josh, Adam and Rob (with whom I saw it for the second time) I'm still unraveling my overall opinion of the movie.

What I will say is this: I'm glad I went to that freaky 3:30 AM showing at the Mann Chinese.  For perhaps fifteen minutes, as the film started rolling, I was a child again.  It's a cliche, of course, but there really isn't any other way to describe it.  And I'm not sure any cultural cue, any movie or song or TV show, could achieve the same thing in me, or in the others of our generation who feel the same way.  I'm grateful for having been able to experience it again, even if only briefly.  Was it a transcendent experience of cultural unity?  Probably not.  But it was a moment when one became the crowd, when one felt larger than oneself, and thus was a pretty exhilarating 15 minutes, independent of what qualities the film itself may or may not have.  Mind you, I have many thoughts on the film.  But that is another story...

Ecce Movie

I'm accustomed to think of drama as the art form which most significantly predates cinema.  After all, when you put on a play, you get a bunch of actors, have them recite a bunch of lines from a script, tell them where to stand on the stage while reciting those lines, and then invite an audience to occupy rows of chairs and watch them do it.  This is an awful lot like movies, in which an audience occupies rows of chairs and watches a screen on which there are (usually) actors reciting a bunch of lines from a script.

Such a perspective, however, necessarily undervalues the pictorial component of cinema, in favor of its dramatic and literary dimensions.  When we consider cinema as spectacle -- as the specifically visual recreation of events or places or historical eras that the average person could never actually witness -- painting begins to seem like a closer ancestor.  I'm particularly thinking of the large-scale, sensationalistic (and at times deliberately tittilating) historical artworks that were popular in the 19th century.

Above, Antonio Ciseri's 1871 painting Ecce Homo recreates a New Testament scene in a way that seems directly to prefigure Hollywood's biblical epics of eighty years later.  Of course, the painterly recreation of Biblical scenes is a staple of Western art going back to the Renaissance and beyond; but the priorities in this composition are subtly different.  If the composition, carefully framing Christ and Pilate against a window, adheres to the traditional goal of visually encapsulating a central dramatic moment of Biblical narrative, other aspects of the painting are subtly placing the emphasis elsewhere.  Consider the naturalistic lighting, the massive architecture, the meticulous detail in the clothing and props, the thousands of 'extras' placed on the street below and ramparts above.

These are elements that could not exist onstage.  And their artistic effect, taken together, seems to me to have less to do with an illustration of Christ's passion, than with a desire to create a window onto another world.  Ciseri seems fascinated most of all with the problem of how to recreate a lost era, a time and place inaccessible to himself or his audience, and he applies his painterly technique in an effort to make us feel, however briefly, that we are inside the painting with those characters.  Ciseri recreates the 'You Are There' sensation in a way that drama could never do.  We have here, in a two-dimensional image hanging on a wall, a portal into a vanished world: one frozen moment in time called back to us from the lost centuries.  Once the images begin to move, you have D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. De Mille, William Wyler, Joseph Mankiewicz -- the authors of grand and vulgar period spectacles.

"I am their patron saint."

Sooner or later, I must get around to Amadeus.  It's one of those films of which, for me, it's insufficient to say that I admire it.  In a sense it created me -- contaminated me with its conception of art and artists, excellence and mediocrity, influence and envy.  Certain of its lines of dialogue, gestures, facial expressions, are never far from my thoughts.  A day probably doesn't go by -- certainly not a week -- when some sliver of this film doesn't drift through my brain.

I was first introduced to the film on videotape, a couple of years after its theatrical release; my father, a classical music aficionado, bought the tape and eagerly pointed out to me his favorite scenes.  Particularly moving to him -- and, later, to me -- were the sequences in which F. Murray Abraham's Salieri described some passage of Mozart's music in the wistful, wounded way of a man torn between admiration and resentment.

Though its depiction of Mozart as a vulgar man-child seemed revolutionary at the time -- I had, prior to this, imagined all great classical composers merely as soullessly noble marble busts -- there is something deeply conservative at the core of the film and the Peter Shaffer play that it's based on.  Mozart's talent is seen as something ineffable, indescribable, as unattainable to mere mortals as knowledge of the divine.  Paradoxically, this view might be considered demeaning to Mozart, as it undervalues the very human effort he must have put into his work.  'Like taking dictation from God' -- was it really as effortless as that?

It's proposed, in Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Outliers,' that the key to excellence is to spend 10,000 hours practicing a particular craft or task.  Is the key to Mozart, then, merely that he got started on his 10,000 hours earlier than most, with a rigorous taskmaster of a father to keep him focused on his business, and so was able by late adolescence to move beyond the technical and to invest his work with the human emotion that makes it meaningful to others?  Does such an explanation account for the difference between him and, say, Camille Saint-Saens, who had a similarly prodigious childhood yet whose ranking as a composer is somewhat lower?  Of course, it's folly to view composers in a vacuum, as self-contained entities; every artist's life is contingent, a function not only of internal gifts and training, but of historical events, cultural currents, artistic rivals, financial circumstances, and so on.

But back to that ineffable 'talent.'  To the religious-minded -- as Amadeus's Salieri clearly is -- it may be defined vaguely as a 'divine spark' -- some immaterial quality bestowed by God on a privileged mortal; or, perhaps, the musical ideas themselves are actually conceived by God and then simply passed down to the chosen vessel for transmission.  God then becomes the true Great Composer, the Mozarts and Beethovens mere copyists.  Again, a rather demeaning view.  From a secular or materialist standpoint, 'talent' -- as distinct from background and training -- must be defined differently.  It must boil down to some physical difference in the brain, which in turn has a genetic or developmental origin.  Is there a gene for music?  (As it happens, others have asked this question too.)

I've gotten off track a bit, and barely scratched the surface of Milos Forman's wonderful film, which I'll have to revisit again later.  I will merely leave with a recommendation to see it if you haven't, and also to see it if you feel you don't "get" classical music.  As a former girlfriend once said, if watching Amadeus doesn't make you start to like classical music, then probably nothing will.

'She's so refined... I think I'll kill myself'

Well, heck.  This blog's starting to get seriously cobwebby.  Between the tumbleweeds rolling by, and the endless comments from hawkers and athletic shoes, Picture's Up is looking a little down in the mouth.  To say the least.

Just to keep things from decaying too far, I'll interrupt my working day with a brief rumination on 'Singin' in the Rain,' the blu-ray of which I received yesterday and promptly popped into my home entertainment system.

Truth be told, I prefer the dancing -- overall -- in the Astaire/Rogers musicals, but it's because the non-musical scenes in 'Singin' in the Rain' are so entertaining that I concur with the conventional wisdom labelling it 'Best Musical Ever.'  That is, perhaps, a paradox; but after all no musical can sustain wall-to-wall music -- at least, very few can; and you ought to be fully engaged while the actors are just plain talking, rather than waiting for the next big song-and-dance number.

'Singin's' gags vis-a-vis the silent-to-talkie transition just never get old, nor does Douglas Fowley's magnificently exasperated turn as Lockwood-and-Lamont's long-suffering director (which performance I must file away in my cabinet of evidence for the proposition that overacting is sometimes exactly the right choice).

Roger Ebert once noted in a review to 'That's Dancing!' -- a sort of 'leftovers' sequel to 'That's Entertainment!' -- that the filmmakers were starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel by selecting the 'Moses Supposes' sequence for their anthology, since 'Make 'em Laugh' and the title number had already been used for the previous film.  Odd, then, that I enjoy 'Moses Supposes' maybe more than any other number in 'Singin' in the Rain,' nowadays.  I love the self-satisfied expression on Donald O'Connor's face as he trades off with Gene Kelly.  There's a collegial quality to this number -- two top-flight pros admiring one another's chops while luxuriating in the sheer athletic pleasure of their skill.  The sequence's odd conclusion -- a sort of cinematic annihilation of a Poindexter-y diction coach at the hands of two high-spirited frat boys -- has always struck me as ever so slightly unsettling.  Plus, I wonder how many takes it took to get that 'Vowel' sign to stick just right.

I'm not the first to say so, but the 'Broadway Melody' sequence is a definite structural miscalculation.  Impressive in its own right, the self-contained number feels completely detached from the rest of the film, does nothing to advance the story, and stops dead the headlong momentum of the plot.  It should have been cut, and whatever the beguilements of Cyd Charisse's lovely legs, I'm often tempted to fast-forward past it.

Ode To Oy

I just finished watching a lamentably pan-and-scanned version of Copying Beethoven on Netflix.  This movie made my ears prick up when it was released five or so years ago, because I'm a Beethoven fiend, but lackluster reviews placed it on my Eternal Backburner.

Having finally seen it, I can say that it is very tastefully directed.  I mean that in the most insulting possible sense.  That's not to say it's a bad movie, exactly.  It's just tasteful in that dull Oscar-bait way.  As I was watching it, watching the extremely competent cinematography and the yeoman set design and costume work and highly professional acting, I wondered to myself, "why is this not cinema?  What is going on here, directorially, to keep it mediocre?"  And I'm not sure.  It's really rather a well-made film.  It just can't get out from under its own Mirimax-ness, its own late-November-Oscar-Movie-ness.  Which is a pity because Ed Harris embodies Beethoven better than I thought he would, bringing coarse vulgarity, brute physicality, and childlike enthusiasm to the role.  He is a better, more rounded Beethoven than Immortal Beloved's Gary Oldman, though the latter more precisely resembles the famous stormy portraits.  The shaggy middle-aged uncouth artist is hardly a new trope (think Nick Nolte in New York Stories), but here and there I saw moments where I imagined, yes, that is probably just what Beethoven looked like walking down the street or crouching over his piano with a weird ear-horn on his head.  So I cherish that.  Because, as I said, I'm a Beethoven fiend.

But on the blu-ray player to my left, on the bigscreen, simultaneously, was John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  And I swiveled back and forth between these two movies, thinking 'cinema - not cinema' and then questioning that thought.  Do I respect the Huston more simply because I was told, growing up, that I ought to?  But here's the thing about it: it's written visually in a way that Copying Beethoven, for all its staid competence, is not.  The shots in Sierra Madre hardly ever require the assistance of audio to make narrative sense -- it works as a silent almost as well as it works as a talkie.  And there's a rough-hewn, engraven quality to that imagery; certain stills might have been pulled out of a Durer sketchbook, if Durer had ever gone to Mexico.  Look at the shot in which Bogart, having gone mad with lust of wealth, tries to fall asleep all alone in camp and is overtaken by foregrounded flames that with supreme obviousness signify Hell.  The bright paranoiac gleam in Bogie's eyes, set against the dark grime of his face, burns itself into your consciousness by its very unreality.  Fred C. Dobbs is a caricature, but a supreme caricature; we ridicule that dialogue, that tone of voice, to this day, because we can't divest ourselves of it.  Yes, the flames are incredibly on-the-nose, but what of it?  You remember them; and, as Harold Blum once praised Tolstoy's 'Hadji Murad' for its 'finely obvious' quality, I feel justified in doing the same for Sierra Madre.

Copying Beethoven ends with a shot of heroine Diane Kruger -- Beethoven's copyist, natch -- walking into a magic-hour meadow in a shot that might have been taken in 1978 and directed by Terence Malick.  So there's that.  For the rest, it's not really a movie you need to see unless you're a Beethoven fiend or an Ed Harris fiend.  Being both myself, I don't regret the ninety minutes spent.

Ralph McQuarrie, 1929-2012

Star Wars's debt to Metropolis is particularly evident in this early illustration of C3PO by the late and very much lamented Ralph McQuarrie.  The picture moves me because it shows the working-out, the process by which the aesthetic of the Star Wars films would come into being and take on its own tenor.  It hasn't yet set itself apart from its forebears.  The pronounced androgyny of C3PO is striking here -- the hips seem feminine, the chest masculine, as though he belongs to both sexes, or neither.  Of course, a robot needn't have any sex at all, although Anthony Daniels as much as anyone settled that question in the final film.

Anyway, McQuarrie's influence on the Star Wars films is incalculable, and the influence of the Star Wars films on the dreams and playtimes and narrative proclivities and inner monologues of a generation of individuals (to which I belong, and I have the unopened Kenner action figures to prove it) is also incalculable.

Quint at Ain't It Cool News has appended a number of McQuarrie's illustrations to his obit; scrolling through them, you're struck by the vivid colors, the beautifully balanced compositions, and the meticulous detail (note the snow encrusting a rebel soldier's boot, for example).  Seeing those familiar objects -- light sabers, TIE fighers, AT-AT walkers -- compressed to simple, elegant two-dimensional images makes them seem fresh again, and reminds us that it's as a work of design, as much as storytelling, that Star Wars resonates so strongly with us.  The film's characters, acting, and dialogue had their strengths and weaknesses, but the design, the look of the thing, was absolutely off the charts, and McQuarrie had an enormous amount to do with that.

The illustrations also remind us that Lucas's true genius, in the creation of the original 1977 film, may have been for collaboration.  I don't think the screenplay for Star Wars is as well written, as a piece of sheer wordsmithing, as many an unproduced sci-fi screenplay I've come across over the years.  But Lucas's vision -- which was, essentially, to transplant the aesthetic of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials to the era of modern movie special-effects -- was powerful enough, and argued persuasively enough, to corrall some of the supreme talents in their respective fields: John Dykstra in special effects, Ben Burtt in sound design, John Williams in scoring.  And Ralph McQuarrie in design.

As a kid I got an expensive coffee-table book, "Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects," and spent uncounted hours paging through it, until the glue at the binding started to come apart.  It was instrumental to my burgeoning understanding that movies are things that get made, that take thousands of hours of hard work by dedicated professionals, and that even the tiniest details -- the briefest shots -- may require enormous amounts of effort to get just right.  I think of Mr. McQuarrie, patiently working away at his drafting table, using whatever inner design logic and visual sensibility he had earned over the years of his own apprenticeship, producing the first drafts of images that would later be blazoned on a hundred million retinas on fifty-foot screens in the cavernous dark of the movie theater, where, as George Melies and a century's worth of his descendants knew, simply anything was possible.

I apologize for waxing poetic.  My heart is in the pictures there with McQuarrie.

My Top Eight Movies Of 2011

Paul Bettany, Margin Call

 

Movies and I didn’t get along in 2011.  Some of the most acclaimed entries – such as, for instance, The Tree of Life or Take Shelter – left me in a state of bemused respect rather than real admiration or authentic response.  Oscar hopeful The Artist amused me as far as it went, but didn’t make a strong enough impression to get on any list of mine.  It would be damning with faint praise to say that X-Men: First Class was the least objectionable superhero film I saw all year; in truth, I genuinely enjoyed it, from the amusing scenes of Professor X’s swingin’ London youth to the clenched intensity of Michael Fassbender’s Magneto.  Heck, Hugh Jackman’s cameo may just have been the biggest laugh in movies in 2011.  But again, I just can’t bring myself to put it on a 10-Best list.  Maybe it’s been unfairly tarnished by my general sense of overwhelming ennui with the superhero genre and all things fanboy-esque.  Hanna?  Sharply directed, shot through with antic fairy-tale resonances.  Didn’t leave me with much to ponder an hour after I left the theater.  A Dangerous Method?  Notched up my respect for Keira Knightley as a thespian, but I’m not sure if I could sit through it again.  Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for movies.  All year long.

That said, below are the movies that punctured my pissy mood and stuck with me.   I missed too many essential 2011 films (A Separation and Melancholia, to name just two) to make even a humorous claim to this being some kind of definitive top-ten list.  In fact, it’s not a top-ten list at all.  I could only come up with eight.  Sorry, 2011.  It wasn’t you; it was me.

8. Limitless

Fine, it’s a potboiler thriller of seemingly-limited aesthetic ambition.  It’s also one of the only films in 2011 that showed me something I hadn’t seen before.  In visualizing the hyper-intelligence unlocked in Bradley Cooper when (in a classic Faustian bargain) he pops pills of mysterious origin, Limitless’s director Neil Burger hits upon a wonderful visual-effects solution: a series of prolonged zooms in which space seems endlessly to be compressing itself into two dimensions yet still pulling us forward.  Hats off to the visual-effects mavens that came up with this technique; I may pick up the blu-ray of Limitless just for those shots.  Much was made of the mind-expanding visuals in Malick’s Tree of Life and their relationship to Kubrick’s legendary Stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But for my money, there was more mind-expansion, at least on a visual level, going on in this little genre exercise.  It doesn’t hurt that it’s a well-acted, for-the-most-part-smartly-written tale that gets a lot of mileage from its theme, which is nothing less than the fulfillment of human potential: something we all agonizingly, heartbreakingly wish for, however far out of reach it may be.

7. The Adventures of Tintin

I more or less learned to read by paging through Tintin comics in my youth, so I have a strong bond with its plucky hero, he of the tufted hair and nonexistent personality.  The Indiana Jones films always seemed to me to be Tintin writ large, and so it seems the most natural thing in the world that Steven Spielberg would return to one of the ur-texts on which he modeled his famous adventure franchise.  The most delightful thing about this film is the way it has allowed Spielberg to expand his own filmmaking technique – to take advantage of the animated format by plotting out impossibly long takes of giddy momentum and dazzling intricacy.  The film stumbles when it attempts to slather some rudimentary character-development onto its classically one-dimensional protagonists – I couldn’t get any more interested in Haddock’s struggle with alcoholism than I would want to see Falstaff at an AA meeting – but as long as it stays kinetic and breakneck, it’s grand fun: maybe the purest expression yet of the film-as-ride, and another of Spielberg’s many late-career rebukes to the post-Bruckheimer incoherence of modern action cinema.

6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

As a partisan of Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, and of the BBC miniseries generally, I wasn’t too hopeful for this film, and I walked away from it not altogether satisfied.  The screenplay, competent though it is, feels too compressed and is unable to draw out the full emotional resonances from John Le Carre’s source material.  That said, Tomas Alfredson’s English-language debut gets a number of things very, very right.  England has never looked greyer, more dour and depressing, and the business of spycraft is as anti-Bond as you can get – a world of stale drudgery, tacky office parties, inter-office backbiting, and occasional, brutal, banal violence.  You can luxuriate in its misery: these are not happy people, and we don’t want them to be.  It’s high praise to say that Gary Oldman, in a supremely understated performance, comes within inches of owning Smiley as completely as Guinness did.  Those reptilian bespectacled eyes, that knowing stretch of mouth that seems simultaneously a smile and a frown, that indestructible air of weary, threadbare moral fiber: you sense that Smiley embodies the only thing that makes the west the Good Guys in this corrupt and corrupting clandestine struggle.

5. Margin Call

Yet Oldman’s is only my third-favorite male performance in 2011.  My second-favorite belongs in Margin Call, the underrated financial-meltdown drama that for my money featured the most accomplished ensemble cast of the year.  There are several winning performances – including Kevin Spacey’s humane-yet-compromised Company Man, Simon Baker’s cautious, calculating shark, and Jeremy Irons’s wickedly charismatic mogul (whose line about a golden retriever might be the second-funniest moment in movies last year) – but the one that stays with me most is Paul Bettany as the spiky, sharp-tongued Cockney in charge of the banking organization’s Risk Management team that discovers the shit is about to hit the fan.  Can this be the same guy who played Darwin in Creation, and Dr. Maturin in Master and Commander?  What a wonderfully versatile performer.  Here, he’s pissy and selfish, yet possessed of more moral clarity than anyone except Spacey – and perhaps more even than that character, as Bettany doesn’t waste energy on futile protestations to show off his conscience.  He has a scene on a skyscraper rooftop that is Oscar-worthy and would, in a juster world, have netted him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

4. Young Adult

Speaking of favorite performances, here’s mine in the double-X-chromosome category.  I never saw Monster so don’t know whether Charlize Theron deserved that Oscar or was simply being congratulated for her willingness to submerge her exquisite beauty in prosthetics and makeup.  Whatever the case, she shows here a talent worthy of the classic screwball comediennes of the ‘30s.  This chick has got control: she can work a slit of the eyelids or a pause between lines like nobody’s business.  Her acting style feels wonderfully classical, all externalities and bodily awareness, and she’s perpetually ready for her closeup.  This is a maturer effort from both Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, lacking either the airbrushed slickness of Up In The Air or the self-conscious cuteness of Juno – good movies both, but neither in the league of this one.  Theron’s perpetually-juvenile, alcoholic heroine is a human wreck I can get behind – she reminds me (lamentably) of myself, and her friendship with Patton Oswalt’s crippled nerd develops in directions as human and affecting as they are improbable.

3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Now we come to my favorite performance of 2011, if performance it be.  I will leave it to others to divvy up the credits between Andy Serkis and the visual-effects animators who brought his Caesar the Chimp to digital life; in any case, this is not merely the most emotionally compelling movie protagonist of the year, but it’s one of the purest depictions of the vaunted Hero’s Journey in movies ever, full stop.  Never mind James Franco’s guilt-ridden scientist: he gets ample screentime but is merely a midwife for the real story, the tale of one young ape’s journey from orphanhood to a false home, through separation and pain and brutality, and to mastery of his true environment.  When he turns his angry eyes to Franco from within his cage at the animal preserve, exposing the full range of hatred and betrayal; when he defeats another ape in single combat and wins the hearts of his compatriots; we are there, locked in, captivated, in a way that only cinema can do – in a way that, explicitly, cinema discovered, almost 80 years ago, when Merian C. Cooper discovered the humanity within Kong’s stop-motion-animated eyes.  Caesar is Napoleon, Alexander, or, yes, Caesar: the will to power fully expressed, the wounded ego bringing itself to fruition in an exercise of leadership and charisma on which the fate of nations will hang.  How desperately we want to actualize ourselves, but how heavy a price the world may pay for it!  It’s gripping stuff.

2. The Descendants

I said that Margin Call featured the year’s most accomplished ensemble cast.  I had to give that a long hard think before committing it to prose, because Alexander Payne’s The Descendants – probably the best film he has yet made – gives it a run for its money.  There is such beautiful acting in this film, and the least of it comes from Clooney, who serves ably as the star-center of the drama yet doesn’t stretch beyond his familiar notes much.  I think of the supporting cast that orbits him: Beau Bridges, couching sinister steel in surfer-boy bonhomie; Robert Forster, making bad-tempered hostility seem so intrinsic to his being that it hardly gives offense; Judy Greer, who flitters anxiously between baked-in good manners and needy anxiety; and Shailene Woodley, as Clooney’s troubled teenage daughter, who gets a scene in a swimming pool that just might break your heart.  I love that Payne has abandoned the shield of ironic humor and decided to tell a straight drama – he came close in About Schmidt but allowed an on-the-nose oom-pah-pah score to undercut his intention.  This time the direction is assured, confident – even, dare I say, masterful.  There are two scenes toward the end, one on a boat and one on a couch, both of which came close to bringing me to tears.  And, Pixar excepted, not a many filmmakers can get me there.

1. Moneyball

 Moneyball is everything Hollywood filmmaking ought to be: smart, entertaining, mainstream in the best sense of the word.  It’s hard for me to pinpoint just why this movie clicked with me so strongly, but it’s probably because it’s about the victory of nerds over jocks.  I’m a nerd; always have been.  I’m not a jock; never will be.  So when nerdy Jonah Hill tentatively walks into a room full of aging crusty hardened bad-tempered baseball jocks, and, under the benevolent protection and guidance of reformed jock Brad Pitt, blows their preconceptions to smithereens with simple goddamn logic, I am so there.  Fuck you, jocks.  You go, nerd!  Simple as that.  Now, I have no idea whether Moneyball is faithful either to its source book or to the reality that inspired that book.  I don’t much care.  Salieri didn’t murder Mozart, and Amadeus is slander, but it’s still one hell of a movie.  As an added bonus, Moneyball gives us one of Brad Pitt’s greatest acting moments: his reaction shot of pure shell-shocked parental love after his daughter sings that anachronistic song in the guitar shop.  It’s wonderful stuff: almost as signal, in Pitt’s career, as “what’s in the box???!!”

Ding! Level Up

I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica this evening, in a 70mm print that, while occasionally faded and scratched and dinged up, was often wonderfully sharp (you could almost read the tiny print on those ‘Explosive Bolts’ warning signs) and managed to convey all the majesty and grandeur one might reasonably expect for $12.50.  One of the Aero’s treasures is that it brings not only big-screen projections of classic films, but also attentive, attuned audiences with which to watch them.

I have known and loved this movie all my life, almost since before I knew what movies were.  At some inchoate age I was dragged to a revival screening of 2001, probably by my cosmically-minded mother.  I struggle to remember those first impressions.  I think Ligety’s Requiem, music that is heard in association with the Monolith, all crashing brass and restless sopranos, struck me at a very early age as something both sacred and terrifying.  I remember most especially the glowing eyes of the apes in the nighttime.  The bared teeth, the flailing limbs; the “Dawn of Man” sequence stuck with me the most powerfully as a young child, quite possibly because I’d slipped off to sleep sometime around when Heywood R. Floyd was setting foot on the moon.  As a family we were early adopters of the VCR, and one of the first videocassettes we had was 2001.  I’m not sure if I ever popped the thing in of my own accord, but I distinctly remember the box lying around the living room entertainment center cabinet.  The film may seem absurd on a 13” screen at VHS resolution, but I’m sure it all seemed very high-tech in the late 1970s.

By the time I was a teenager coming into film school, I had decided that 2001 was probably the best film ever, and I’ve never fully been able to persuade myself that it’s not, although I don’t respond to Kubrick in quite the same ways now as I did then.  I suppose my preference for the movie came down to its neat combination of two aesthetics: it was both a sci-fi movie and an art-movie.  Consequently, a sci-fi nerd-turned-cinephile such as myself could embrace it.  In a sense, 2001 was my bridge to (as Obi Wan would put it) a larger world: it provided safe passage from the Star Trek IIs and Aliens of my adolescence to the Jules and Jims and Floating Weedses I would encounter as I pursued more serious film studies.  Kubrick’s film was always there, always obtuse and incomprehensible enough that liking it never seemed pedestrian or uncool; yet always entertaining with its eye-boggling production design, mysterious extraterrestrials, and insane murderous computer.

I tried this time to look at the film more skeptically than I have in the past.  Kubrick was not some preternaturally wise Sage of Art; he was just a guy from the Bronx with a good eye for camera composition who got interested in new-age ideas of extraterrestrial influence and got caught in the wave of Apollo-era space frenzy and decided to make a movie about all that stuff.  Right?  Riiight? Only I can’t deny that here, on my umpteenth viewing, was a movie that still left me astounded, confused, rushing with thoughts.  I’ve stopped trying to understand What It All Means, Man, and have adopted the approach of sitting back, observing the filmmaking technique (and boy, what technique!), looking for points of intersection with other films in Kubrick’s oeuvre, trying to understand how the particular storytelling choices work, and to what end.  I guess maybe I am still trying to understand What It All Means, Man, but in a less cosmic sense.  In any case, my attempt at critical detachment didn’t get very far.  I found myself deeply, desperately engaged with this movie, yet again.  I spotted minor flaws in the legendary visual-effects work.  I wondered, at other times, how much damn rehearsal and planning it must have taken to get one of those shots right where the whole set has to be rotated and Gary Lockwood has to be strapped to a chair so he won’t fall out of it.  At other times I thought of how the pacing of a sequence was so tightly wedded to the Strauss waltz that scores it, and realized that the oft-remarked “deliberate” pacing of the cutting must have been mandated to some extent by the dictates of three-four meter and the eight-bar sections of a waltz melody.

When Dave was in space, manipulating the pod to catch Frank Poole’s body, I thought: how very, very lonely he is out there.  When HAL would not let him back in, I connected that icy isolation with moments in my own life when a woman has, with a glance, shut me out, and I have felt absolutely, terrifyingly alone in the world.  When HAL murdered the three scientists in suspended animation, I tried to observe the shot selection, the pace of cutting.  The sequence is not rapidly edited, but through sound design – that overwhelming beeping noise as the life functions expire – it acquires overpowering force.  The sequence ends with a shot of HAL’s unblinking red eye, a leitmotif throughout the film’s third act, and a pure demonstration of something called the “Kuleshov Effect.”  Kuleshov, a Russian film theorist, showed that an identical shot of a human face could seem to render different emotions based on what was shown before it.  HAL, of course, is nothing but a red circle; yet at times that circle seems malicious, mad, calculating, all-powerful.

New observations crept up as I watched the film this time.  I noticed how elegantly two characters, Dave and HAL, are introduced in the same shot: a shot of Dave coming through a hatch, reflected in HAL’s eye.  Hardly a surprise, then, that these two characters are bound together so closely in my memory of the film.  I wondered whether there was bad blood between HAL and Poole, and if this contributed to HAL’s ruthless murder of the hapless astronaut.  Poole seems awfully dismissive of HAL in the scene where he watches a video of his parents wishing him a happy birthday.  He treats him as a sort of glorified butler.  Does HAL resent that?  Did HAL actually malfunction when he reported the damaged communications module, or did he make up the whole thing in order to give himself an excuse to bump off those pesky humans?  Yet he genuinely seems to like Dave; rather than kill Dave aggressively, all he can do is passively leave him to die.  One supposes that the fates of Dave and Poole might have been interchangeable depending on whose turn it was to go EVA, but it’s hard to imagine HAL killing Dave as violently as he killed Poole.

The film’s recurring use of astronomical conjunctions – planets lined up one after the other – struck me more powerfully this time, and I noticed how the “conjunction” of the space pod coming up over the horizon of the Discovery’s spherical front node fits nicely into that visual schema.  Surely the circular design of both spacecraft was no coincidence.  Whether anything other than a purely graphical consideration, a desire to strengthen textual unity through visual leitmotifs, was at work here, is beyond me.  I try to avoid the temptation to wonder What Kubrick Intended, because his intentions are long gone while the film remains.

I’ve long been struck by the “desaturated” quality of the acting in this film – Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and the other cast members are almost comically matter-of-fact, their emotions seldom registering beyond chummy bonhomie and competent professionalism.  Those who claim Kubrick “couldn’t work with actors” have never persuaded me – when he wants, he teases iconic performances out of his stars, as a cursory viewing of A Clockwork Orange or Dr. Strangelove or Full Metal Jacket readily demonstrate.  In fact, I’d argue one of those iconic performances is in 2001 – the voice work of Douglas Rain as HAL.  It may, indeed, be the most recognizable voiceover performance in the history of film.  And it’s astonishing in its suppleness: look how with the mildest changes in inflection Rain brings HAL from absurd humor to deep poignancy in the scene where Dave is disconnecting him.

But yes, the other performances are deliberately grey.  It’s a conscious aesthetic choice.  To what end?  The choice always felt right to me because this is not a story about a particular human or any one person’s emotions.  It’s a self-consciously cosmic story, concerned with transcendence in the abstract, with yawning gaps of time and space and humanity as a concept rather than an individual.

Yet there’s more going on here.  For one thing, the film is as quotidian as it is cosmic.  We keep seeing the mundane details of daily life – in particular, eating.  We see the apes munching on tapir; we see Heywood Floyd sipping Zero-G food and eating sandwiches on a moon shuttle; we see Dave and Frank chowing down while they watch a TV interview with themselves; and in the final moments in the alien menagerie “Beyond The Infinite,” Dave is having yet another meal.  So what’s going on?  Is Kubrick simply looking for something, anything to film that won’t smack of melodrama or contrived human emotion?  Is he making a point about the fundamental similarity between the cosmic and the mundane – that life is no more or less than the simple biological processes and routines that make it up?  What’s it all mean, man?

And here’s another thing.  For an anti-space-opera, 2001 actually gets rather operatic in the second act.  The whole plot device of HAL going bonkers isn’t really necessary to bring Dave to Jupiter; he was going there anyway.  He could have gotten there as uneventfully as Heywood made it to the moon, and still been piloting a pod into the Stargate all the same.  So what’s the point of this evil-computer interlude, anyway?  Is Kubrick hedging his bets, feeling the audience will get restless if they don’t get some kind of drama in between all the space vistas and ham sandwiches?  This is a filmmaker, after all, who is usually anything but abstract, and whose movies – from The Killing to Paths of Glory on up to Full Metal Jacket – generally don’t lack for plot and intrigue.  In a sense, the HAL interlude doesn’t seem germane to the film’s main theme – yet it’s impossible to imagine the film without its most memorable character.  Perhaps his nervous, discordant presence implies a false start on the path to human transcendence.  He is in the end only a mockery of human intelligence, unlike the Star Child, who has truly gone beyond it.

The Stargate sequence, meanwhile, seems more structured than I remembered it.  It begins with the slit-scan visuals that imply some kind of warp-space travel; in between are vague and globular organic shapes indicating by turns galaxies and embryos; and finally we have a series of color-altered landscape shots that very specifically imply that we have arrived somewhere, presumably on the extraterrestrials’ home world or something like it.  These flying landscape shots point forward to the helicopter mountainscapes of The Shining, even as the shuttle docking sequence (scored to The Blue Danube) points backward to the sexualized in-flight refueling that opens Dr. Strangelove.

Finally, there’s the ending – the big baby in space, turning its gaze toward us.  This ending has always seemed rather on-the-nose to me, but I never begrudged it; in a film with such wonders as the early scene of Moonwatcher discovering the destructive power of a length of femur, or the hurtling transportiveness of the Stargate sequence, it’s neither here nor there if the ending gets a bit literal in its attempt to sum things up.  What’s important is the sense you get that Kubrick is striving here, reaching in his grab-bag of images, trying to represent transcendence as powerfully in visual terms as Richard Strauss managed to do musically.  (And Kubrick’s debt to Strauss is so gigantic that one almost feels the composer ought to have been given posthumous co-director credit.)  I react differently, on different viewings, to that last shot of the Starchild.  Sometimes he seems enigmatic; sometimes frightening.  This time, he seemed to represent a touchingly hopeful attitude that humanity will get onward and upward, that the best is truly yet to come.  I don’t trust that sentiment, but some part of me clings to the idea that Mr. Kubrick knows better than I do, that he knows whereof he speaks; just as I feel upon listening to the finale of the 9^th symphony that Mr. Beethoven knows what he’s talking about too.  I cling to the idea of wiser men than myself who have peered over the edge, seen something to make them hope, and hurried back to give us the good news.

*Addendum: Upon rereading this entry I can't help noticing that I've given Arthur C. Clarke short shrift.  Many of the concepts in 2001 no doubt originated with him, rather than his collaborator Kubrick.  Still, I impute final authorial power to Kubrick insofar as, were there anything in the story that he didn't want to be there, it probably wouldn't be.

Apes a-Poppin’

NOTE: Before I get to today's article, I must beg your indulgence for a moment.  A good friend of mine has set up a page through which donations can be made to help fight the famine in Somalia.  The donations are secured by Verisign and will send the money to Action Against Hunger, a reputable international nonprofit organization.  My friend is so committed that she is actually fasting in solidarity with those suffering in Africa.  While few of us can be as hardcore as that (I certainly can't), many of us are capable of donating at least a few dollars to this crucial cause.  If you can, follow this link and give what you're able to.  I'll be personally very grateful.

And now, on to Rise of the Planet of the Apes!

There’s a very important chord in music theory called the dominant seventh.  This is a major chord built on the fifth note of a given major scale, with another note (the “seventh”) tacked onto the end of it.  When prepared properly, this chord – at least as we in the world of Western music have been trained to hear it – wants very much to resolve to another chord, the “tonic” or home chord.  For instance, if you are playing a piece in C Major (built off the chord C-E-G), the dominant seventh is built off the note of G, and goes G-B-D-F.  That chord, in its proper context, “wants” to be followed by C Major, and when it is followed by C Major, the result is deeply satisfying, on an almost primal level.  Much of the art of composition involves bringing chord changes back around to this dominant-seventh/tonic cadence, evoking a powerful sense of arrival, of payoff, of conclusion, of fulfillment.

You’re probably wondering why I’ve begun a discussion of Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes with this abstruse digression into elementary music theory.  Well, there’s a method to my madness.  That idea of a deeply satisfying chord cadence is the best metaphor I can come up with for the peculiar appeal of a certain type of “fan-service” filmmaking that plays off the audience’s awareness of (and, in some cases, reverence for) a pre-existing backstory.  We sometimes decry the imaginative paucity of modern summer movies’ endless reliance on reboots, remakes, sequels and prequels; but at their best they can leverage a lingering awareness of ancient canon into a unique satisfaction.  We take deep pleasure in the newly-envisioned becoming of a story we already know and value.  This applies to historical films as well.  Who can forget that moment in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln when Henry Fonda starts up the road, walking out of the movie and into legend?  Or, for that matter, the denouement to Iain Softley’s Backbeat, when John Lennon and the gang launch into “Twist and Shout,” and the Beatles truly begin?

So now, instead, we have Young Mr. Ape (the gloomy and hyper-intelligent chimpanzee Caesar, performed by motion-capture maven Andy Serkis with the ready assistance of a team of CG animators), coming into his own, discovering his destiny, and bringing forth the future history that was first realized on the big screen in 1968 by Franklin Schaffner, Charlton Heston and the gang.  I’ve never been a particular partisan of the Apes movies, but they’ve seeped into my consciousness all the same, and there’s a subtle pleasure in seeing the various echoes and intimations of the 43-year-old classic here: the origins of the tripartite chimpanzee-gorilla-orangutan social order, visual hints of the helmeted cavalry who chased Heston through the fields, and no doubt many other homages that I’m not fan enough to have caught.  Fan-service can quite easily become belabored and self-indulgent – a substitute for real storytelling – but when delivered with a light, deft touch, as here, it’s a delectable seasoning.

The story still needs to be solid, of course, and Rise doesn’t disappoint on that level either.  In fact, its depiction of Caesar’s character arc is one of the purest expressions of the “hero’s journey” that I’ve seen in recent movies.  One of those innumerable screenwriting self-help guides breaks down a common protagonist arc into three phases: orphan, wanderer, and warrior (with ‘martyr’ as an optional fourth).  Hackneyed though it may be, it’s a template that works pretty well in popular entertainment, probably because it recapitulates – in grander and simpler terms – the journey we all take from childhood to adulthood and self-actualization.  Rise’s swift, efficient screenwriting gets the “orphan” phase out of the way in a hurry, but lingers patiently on the later stages of Caesar’s growth, from a beloved pet of James Franco’s genetic scientist, to a brutalized captive, and eventually to the leader of a primate rebellion.  Each step in Caesar’s evolution is marked with a strong, satisfying emotional cadence that gives the impression of fine, firm carpentry.

All of this paints the way for the dazzling third act, which is a remarkable sustained action sequence marred only by its dependence on CG visual effects that seldom manage to avoid a certain cartoony quality.  This is exacerbated by some unnecessary directorial flourishes by Wyatt, who creates large, elaborately choreographed shots following the apes as they swing and jump around the streets of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.  The shots are giddily satisfying in the moment, but make the CG-ness of it all a bit too apparent, and remind us that no physical camera could have captured such scenes.  It’s a minor quibble, though.  One of the great pleasures of the climactic battle is that its scale is not too large: it’s really just about a hundred apes against a few dozen cops.  It’s only the beginning, and because it gives our imagination free rein to envision future scenarios and escalation, it’s all the more satisfying.

What Rises’s climax captures is the unique, grim pleasure of watching the shit hitting the fan, the chickens coming home to roost, the social order cracking, the Winter Palace being stormed.  We find ourselves rooting for the apes not only because the writers (and Serkis and his animators) have done yeoman service in making us sympathize with Caesar, but because we feel a vague sense that humanity is about due for a comeuppance.  After all, our particular breed of apes can be said to have made rather a hash of this planet, and maybe Caesar’s gang will prove better custodians.  It’s a simplistic, indulgent thought, but one that seems fitting for the twenty minutes you’re watching this remarkable consummation unfold onscreen.  And that, too, is testament to the film’s persuasive storytelling.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not merely the best summer movie I’ve seen in 2011; no other would-be blockbuster is even in its league.