Picture's Up

My Top 10 Movies of 2013

10. American Hustle: This movie evaporated from my mind like snow falling on warm ground. Yet it left a pleasant aftertaste. The strength of the ensemble is difficult to ignore. Jennifer Lawrence puts another feather in her cap here, believably creating a woman far removed from Winter’s Bone’s Ree Dolly but possessing a similarly fierce, leonine strength. Christian Bale, as always in his collaborations with David O. Russell, is weirder, funnier than he is elsewhere (e.g. in his work with Christopher Nolan). Bradley Cooper creates another motormouth role; has there ever before been a Sexiest Man Alive who could so effectively channel neurosis? I could not follow the effervescent twists of this movie’s plot but its essential tone is celebratory, embracing the American con man as an archetype of ingenuity, ambition, and even deep-down good-heartedness. As Roger Ebert said of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the very term makes being one okay. But that good-natured quality also imparts a slightness to this film; nothing really seems to have been at stake in the end and the final impression I have is that all the characters should have danced together as the credits rolled, while, somewhere, Rodney Dangerfield looked down upon them and smiled in benediction.

9. Drinking Buddies: I knew little of Joe Swanberg’s work prior to this film except for watching perhaps forty minutes of Hannah Takes the Stairs, which I found borderline incomprehensible. Swanberg is known as a mumblecore stalwart, discoverer of Greta Gerwig, and a few other things. This time around he has crafted a fine, if modest, comedy-drama about the tactful management of inappropriate sexual tension between friends and coworkers whose romantic attachments and obligations lie elsewhere. As has been said of Nicole Holofcener, Swanberg here creates characters who seem actually to be trying to navigate their lives, rather than blundering into dramatic confrontations and life-changing mistakes. The result, while hardly likely to set the cinematic world ablaze, is highly satisfying.

8. Her: Here is a companion piece to James Cameron’s The Terminator: another vision of the Singularity, filtered through the lens of a different genre, the romantic drama rather than the action-adventure. Where Cameron’s post-AI future imagined Armageddon, Spike Jonzes’s film contemplates something almost scarier – abandonment, indifference.

Hoffman

The late, greatly lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman, with Baxter Harris, in 1992's Scent of a Woman.

 

Stunned, shocked, depressed. He was not supposed to go this young. I confess I was not aware that he had a drug problem, so this news came completely out of left field to me.

What can one say about Philip Seymour Hoffman that hasn't been said a million times before? It's a banality to say that he is almost always the most vivid, interesting, surprising, intense, and entertaining thing in any movie that he appears in. A banality, but also true.

With the exception of his Oscar-winning turn in Capote, Hoffman wasn't a particularly transformative actor; his external mannerisms tended to be much the same from role to role, although his singular achievement was to bend those mannerisms to a wide spectrum of different personalities and stations in life. Whether playing a snotty private-school kid (Scent of a Woman), a repressed homosexual porn film technician (Boogie Nights), an ethically flexible businessman trying to keep his life from flying to pieces (Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), or a hyper-competent and socially maladjusted CIA operative (Charlie Wilson's War), Hoffman took his peculiarly dyspeptic temperament, his rapid-patter basso profundo voice that seemed sometimes to get lost between his diaphragm and his larynx before reaching his lips, and his flittering distrustful gaze, and made them absolutely appropriate for that character in that moment in that movie.

It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that, in terms of sheer on-screen incandescence, Hoffman is worthy to be ranked alongside Cagney, Brando, Dean, Pacino, and De Niro.

Hoffman's death is an incalculable loss to movies. I'm trying to temper my sadness at the contemplation of what he will not give us in the next thirty years, with appreciation of the tremendous value of what he did give us in the previous twenty. But it's damned hard to do that right now.

O'Toole

I know little of Peter O’Toole’s career, and I have seen only a fraction of his output: Lawrence of Arabia, Becket, The Lion in Winter, My Favorite Year, and perhaps a few other films. His death, all the same, was a blow. 

He is beautiful in Lawrence; the blue of his eyes and the pure white of his clothes mark him out visually so that he is a pictorial component of the film as powerful as the dunes and the camels and the shimmering heat waves. The performance itself is difficult to empathize with. Aided by the construction of the script, in which everyone views Lawrence with a certain bewilderment, O’Toole creates a character who seems to be trying on different affects as much out of curiosity as anything else: one moment compassionate, another cruel, another bellowing with amusement at his own absurdity. He seems alien and apart, even while we admire his relentless energy and his evident love of his adopted home. O’Toole in Lawrence goes on that list of performances – Bogart in Casablanca, Joel Grey in Cabaret, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs – where it’s very difficult to imagine anyone else playing the role.

Though Lawrence is a superior movie to 1964’s Becket, in which O’Toole portrays the impulsive King Henry II (a role he would reprise, in a very different context, in 1968’s The Lion in Winter), Becket contains perhaps my favorite of O’Toole’s scenes. The film centers on the troubled relationship between Henry and Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), whose friendship is sundered when Henry unwisely appoints Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that he will still be able to count on his loyalty. Becket, who begins the film as a sort of nihilist, is so amazed at the sense of purpose his new job instills in him that he devotes all his energies to the greater glory of the Church and finds himself on a path of unavoidable conflict with his old friend.

Becket is the protagonist in this film, and Henry the antagonist. Yet we do not love Becket: he is too cold, too remote, too abstracted in his attachments. It’s Henry who really moves us. He obviously loves Becket, with a desperate intensity that transcends the question of whether their relationship is platonic or homoerotic. There is a scene late in the film in which the two men, now firmly on opposite sides of a great church-versus-state conflict, meet astride horses on a beach and try to negotiate a way out of their impasse. The dialogue is mostly about matters of law, and about the different responsibilities of a bishop and a king. But O’Toole plays it as a breakup scene, or, more precisely, as a post-breakup scene. If you have ever come to a fresh ex’s apartment to pick up your last boxed items, and have felt the sting of recent arguments intermingled with shame and regret and a flickering hope that it may not be too late to save this relationship, you will understand exactly what Henry is going through in this scene. He is in so much pain, and there is nothing to be done, and your heart goes out to him.

Dispatches from Lonelyland

I've been watching Stephen Merchant's Hello Ladies since it debuted and have mixed feelings.  As comedies go, it is only intermittently funny, and tends to rely too heavily on the tic of modern comedy (powerfully inaugurated in Merchant and Ricky Gervais's The Office) wherein awkwardness functions as a stand-in for humor and uncomfortable pauses often constitute the dramatic focal point of a given scene.  In The Office, the development of social discomfort was often exquisitely managed and left us in a limbo state, suspended between laughter and projected shame.  Here, though, it sometimes feels as if the writers just aren't sure where else to go with the scene.

But the show gets two things right.  First, it captures a sense of the tantalizing, imagined social scene in Los Angeles, at least as it is pictured in the libidinous imaginations of lonely males.  The action is placed against a backdrop of Sunset Strip clubs, brightly-lit LA boulevards, and Edward Hopper-esque all-night restaurants.  There is always the sense that the real party -- inextricably linked with the allure of the music and movie businesses -- is happening just out of reach, and that amid the gorgeous gym-toned bodies and free-flowing chemicals, there is a Dionysian glee that we (in the persona of the show's hero, Stuart Pritchard, played by Merchant) can never reach, because we aren't cool enough, hot enough, rich enough.

Secondly, the show uses farcical situations to evoke a psychological principle that we are often our own worst enemies in life, staging scenarios in which our deepest fears about our own inadequacies are confirmed.  At first, it seems that Stuart merely embodies the sin of Icarus -- he reaches too far, striving for women both physically and financially out of his league -- but it becomes apparent that there's more at work here.  Merchant and his writers bend plausibility, allowing Stuart to all but attain seemingly-impossible goals -- usually involving hot-tubs, exclusive venues, and statuesque models -- the better to give him room to sabotage himself.

Again and again, through an ill-timed joke or a mistaken impulse of snobbery and control-obsession, Stuart conspires to create a situation in which he is the excluded one -- looking longingly over his shoulder at the models entering a hot tub at a party he's just been ejected from, or futilely trying to scale the fence of an apartment complex to get into his own party, which he has locked himself out of with a too-stringent ticket policy.

Stuart, in other words, is trapped in a hell of his own creation, doomed to roll the Sisyphean boulder up the steep social incline of LA night after night.  His predicament isn't poignant -- he's too much of an ass for that -- but it is sternly instructive.  The question is, can the show develop something resembling a character arc for its forlorn hero without breaking the engine that drives it?

Aliens: Hitting The Fan

All together now: "They mostly come out at night... mostly."

One of the themes in James Cameron's Aliens is meritocracy, and the way extreme circumstances can enforce it.  The ascending chaos which dominates the story functions as a kind of sorting mechanism, through which false hierarchies are upended and true character is sifted down to its rightful place.  The officious, incompetent Lieutenant Gorman is effectively removed from command after his paralysis at the atmosphere-processor battle reveals how unfit he is; after he regains consciousness in mid-Act II he meekly cedes authority to Ripley and Hicks, and has little else to do but redeem himself in the eyes of Vasquez by blowing them both up rather than submit to capture by the aliens.

Hudson, initially one of the main voices of military bravado among the Marines, is first reduced to impotent whining by the series of disasters befalling the expedition, and then finds his inner steel after a couple of terse pep talks from Ripley.  He dies, but -- like Gorman -- has redeemed himself.

Alongside a hierarchy of competence is one of morality, in which yuppie-scum Burke, who at first shows promising signs of okay-guy-ness (he backs Ripley's bold move to commandeer the APC and rescue the trapped soldiers, and later gamely hauls supplies to assist in waiting out the alien siege), rapidly declines in the second act -- from shifty dissembler to out-and-out murderer.  He gets an alien in the face as a reward, but Cameron is not so simplistic as to kill only the evil and useless.  Apone, Drake, Frost and Dietrich -- all good, serious soldiers -- are quickly iced in the first major battle, while (in one of my favorite moments) ultra-cool dropship pilot Ferro shows a moment of steely decisiveness (going for her gun rather than gaping in terror) before an alien does her in.  Cameron keeps us guessing by at first obscuring, and only later illuminating, the relationship between moral/professional stature and survival.  More and more, the bad or stupid meet a sticky end, while the redeemed are granted at least a Good Death.

The power structure at the beginning is a sort of hypermasculine, inflexible, and overconfident military hierarchy, but after the sorting mechanism has done its work, what we are left with is a nuclear family with Ripley as the mother, Newt the child, and Hicks the father.  (It's less clear where Bishop fits in, but significantly, he has no military rank.  Asexual and unfailingly courteous, he comes across by the end as a sort of helpful butler.)  If our emotional response to the first power structure is jarring and discordant (note the loud, obnoxious behavior of the soldiers, which initially alienates Ripley), a sense of harmony is restored in the final scene of Ripley and her adoptive family going to sleep, appropriately scored by James Horner with gentle woodwinds.

At the film's midpoint, after the drop ship has crashed and apparently stranded everyone, Cameron drives home the inversion of authority with a key shot in which Ripley and Newt are placed in the foreground, gazing with steely determination into an uncertain future, while behind them Hudson and Burke uselessly bicker amid the flaming wreckage of once-intimidating military hardware.  From here on in, Ripley is ascendant and all the Good characters will follow her lead.

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.