Re: Despicable Tedium
Tom, you must be joking. Whatever else Nolan is, dreary he’s not. His films have refreshed and elevated popular entertainment. Employing the tool box made available by contemporary filmmaking technologies, he never settles for what other directors so often do today: spectacle for spectacle sake. His films from Memento onward challenge the audience to think about the issues of constructing a moral identity and accepting responsibility for one’s acts. Granted, Inception disappoints on a number of planes and is conspicuously self-indulgent, but it’s also gloriously daring in what it undertakes. What other contemporary movie do you know that takes seriously one of Western culture’s most important themes: the inevitable tragedy of temporal creatures trying to rise above their mortal limitations? The protagonist’s wife has chosen to exist in a beautiful abstraction of life rather than accept the consequences of time and change. (Though French, she’s very American.) Both she and the protagonist pay dearly for her hubris. I was hard on this film in my review, harder than I should have been it now occurs to me. Nolan has been bringing an entirely new dimension to popular film and though he fails in some outings, he deserves to be honored for his attempts to invest the medium with a vision generally missing from today’s screen. Besides, how can we dismiss a film that so astonishingly reprises Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding?
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To be honest, I am not entirely surprised.
Too many American conservatives, no matter how otherwise smart and engaging, tend to wear all their perspectives on life like a sleeve, even when entertaining themselves.
Thus, those excellent German silent films are denounced by some American conservatives as "Weimar decadence", and some thoughtful abstract films from the Soviet Union are "Communist propaganda". One conservative, I remember, denounced City of God as "immoral pornography of Third World poverty and violence".
Mr. Piatak is the ultimate anti-elitist warrior, in a really cool way, but his dismissal of Inception as "dreary and self-indulgent" somewhat seems like an extension of that anti-elitism that he vigourously upholds.
My main objection with film is that despite shouting at the screen, as happens in the 'hood, there is no back and forth between the actors/producers ond their audience. Fortunately, I'm blessed to live where they have Shakespeare In The Park (Fredericksurg) where the crowd is part of the show, Williamsburg for more of the same, and a vibrant punk-rock scene where band members go outside to smoke and thus interact with their fans. And I can always go and see John Dr Dirty Valby somewhere within a 5 hour drive of home.
Movies' only advantage is that they're cheap, and cheaper when they run on TV.
George,
I greatly enjoy your film reviews and have seen and enjoyed several movies on the strength of your reviews, but we disagree on "Inception." I looked forward to the movie in part because it was being compared to Nolan's breakthrough "Memento," which I thought was an excellent movie. Sadly, "Inception" is no "Memento." Watching it in the theater, I found myself thinking that it was 45 minutes too long, and I think "dreary" is an apt word for a movie about dreams that that did not present one dream where I would want to linger. I can understand the allure of living in a dream world, but I cannot understand the allure of living in the type of dream worlds shown in "Inception." After looking at the dream world DiCaprio's character and his wife had created for themselves, I was not surprised at her fate.
I of course agree with you about most Hollywood directors' overuse of special effects. And I agree with you that Nolan is better than most of his peers in Hollywood. But, sadly, that is not saying much.
I'm sorry to disagree with our esteemed film critic, but I want to ask this: Is "daring" a synonym for good or well-made or serious or virtuous? William Burroughs was daring, Ornette Coleman was daring, but were they any good? Now, it is interesting that one of the most daring filmmakers was certainly Jean Luc Goddard, whose often tedious films explored the vapidity both of bourgeois life and of the anti-bourgeois revolution, but, George, you panned Goddard. Is it the deliberate crudeness of technique or the postmodern silliness that inspired such hatred. John Simon also hated Goddard and even ridiculed his Ana Karina's nude torso. I've never understood this hostility toward a director who always managed to have at least 15 minutes of entertainment, even in a flop like La Chinoise and gave me many happy hours in Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, Weekend. I am not going to see this film, because I don't watch any current films these days--I find the big Hollywood films stupid and tedious but am even more repelled by arty movies that are even more stupid and more tedious. I have been talked into seeing Gladiator--unspeakably bad in every way, from soundtrack to script to history to acting--and even some of the Chinese aerial ballet vampire films, to say nothing of the Korean vengeance movies. For several hours after seeing one of these I experience a dramatic drop in intelligence, to say nothing of taste. By contrast, I recently rented one of Don Siegel's worst movies--The Lineup, a film whose script was partly ruined by the producer--and could not help liking over half of it. With no budget, mostly mediocre actors and worse--Eli Wallach being the exception--Siegel creates more interest in his rotten characters than I have felt for movie characters in the past two decades.
And, finally, if you like Royal Wedding, you can always watch it again.
Comic books and films are, like most pop fiction, not art but entertainment. Once upon a time pop novelists and filmmakers knew how to tell a story. Today they know how to titillate and shock but not how to entertain.
I admit I have a weak spot for these sort of mind bending films, but I think Memento belongs in the conversation for one of the best films ever.
I was very excited to see Inception because of all the hype (It is #4 all time on IMDB.), but I left disappointed. It wasn't a bad movie. I thought it was entertaining. If I hadn't gone in expecting to see the 4th best movie of all time I probably would have enjoyed it more, but to me if was just a fast paced action flick (like Bourne or Taken) with a twist. I just wasn't that impressed with the twist. It was a good movie, it was just nowhere near the 4th best movie of all time.
For Tom Piatak,
Yes, compared to Memento, Inception is decidedly a disappointment. Further, films that seek to dramatize dreams risk being tedious by that very choice. One person's dream is another's sleepless night at the 24 diner over cold coffee. Still I found much to enjoy in Inception's spectacles, however silly they were. My complaint is this: why didn't Noland elaborate on the fantasy in which his principal characters, the husband and wife, supposedly spent 50 years? This Grecian Urn sojourn seems to come closest to his theme, but he leaves it curiously under-explored. As you say, this particular dream’s environment doesn’t seem very compelling. Perhaps I’m giving Nolan too much credit for his ambition, but I’m struck with how much he’s been trying to incorporate substantive philosophical and moral themes into the precincts of popular entertainment. The Prestige and his Batman films stand as examples. I can’t think of another contemporary director who would risk having Batman appear to be what he certainly must be given his make up: a near psychotic vigilante.
I thought I should support a young man who seems to be committed to making films that are thoughtful, moral, and entertaining. If ever he gets his way and makes a James Bond film, I expect it will be one that the franchise’s first choice Patrick McGoohan would have been willing to play. McGoohan famously turned down offers to do the role twice on the grounds that it was excessively violent and sexually libertine. I feel confident in saying Nolan’s Bond would be neither which, come to think of it, is why he’ll not likely get a chance to make a Bond film. All to the good. Maybe he’ll return to his Memento mode.
George
To Tom Fleming,
Tom, I know you must be joking. You cannot possibly have found an entertaining moment in any of Godard’s films. He is tedium incarnate both in style and substance, from his boring tracking shots to the warmed over anti-bourgeois propaganda he seems to have garnered from communist blowhards. As for daring, he’s about as bracing as New York University lecturer plumping for the virtues of Marxism at an afternoon tea. He’s only found daring by those who hate their middle-class parents but haven’t quite been able to tell them so. I’ll concede there is one amusing aspect to Alphaville: that’s Eddie Constantine’s bug-eyed imitation of Humphrey Bogart and that’s because Constantine so completely misses his mark. As for Burroughs, he was an addict, a class reprobates singularly devoid of either energy or originality. Coleman, if I recall correctly, was one of those talented black musicians who was encouraged by white critics to take jazz with a seriousness that bled it of it of whatever interest it might otherwise have had. Daring? I’d say his music was sadly prescriptive. One might admire it, but could hardly be charmed by it.
Nolan is daring in that he goes so entirely against the tide of what appears to be Hollywood establishment thinking. Of course, you’re right to say daring is not synonymous with good. In our time, however, the terms may be said to have come fairly close to overlapping. To be daring is so evidently to be the enemy of the vile.
As you know, we share an interest in Siegel who seems never to have realized what talent he had after his extraordinary showing in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Why this was, I don’t know. His industry’s unforgiving economics, I suppose.
Let me conclude by recommending you see more contemporary films. Sure, most films are junk. They are today and they were 40, 60, 70 years ago. So are most things produced in any field. There are exceptions, however. Try Dominick Moll’s With a Friend Like Harry, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, and Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor, for starters.
I agree with Evelyn Waugh when he wrote in 1929 that film was the one vital art of the century. He hastened to add that he doubted the medium would ever create a masterpiece. This was because it had to appeal to a mass audience in order to recover its investment. Still, he was convinced movies were teaching “a new habit of narrative” to novelists, one that he exploited in almost all his novels. If Waugh were living today, I’m sure he think of most films as you do, but I’m equally sure he would find reasons for hope in the wider channels of distribution that are at hand. It’s become possible to make small-budget films that do not have to fulfill the traditional Hollywood profit expectations. This should over time make possible films of genuine “daring” and interest.
As for Astaire, like all civilized households, ours includes whatever of his films have been transcribed to DVD. I watch those parts of Royal Wedding worth watching at least once a year, the dancing on the ceiling and some of the routines with Jane Powell. The rest of the film doesn’t come close to Astaire’s earlier work so we ignore it. I referred to the scene from Royal by way of saying that Nolan gives every evidence of a cinematic taste in such short supply elsewhere in his industry.
#4
I know there will be disagreement, but a filmmaker's job is not to tell a story.
If we looked at Encounters at the End of the World, the film is captured in the primeval, unchanged, unmarked Antarctic landscape extending to no end in all directions, the entire world of water existing under the thin ice layer, the hidden enclosures, caves, and tunnels in frozen Antarctic mountains, and so on. If we looked at Lawrence of Arabia, the film is captured in the large bands of nomads trekking across the hottest and most lifeless part of the desert, the Turkish planes echoing across the canyons, and camel riders braving Turkish machine gun fire to overwhelm their forces in a fortified city.
Yes films are entertainment, but are not really meant to be a substitute for written stories. If we were to criticise movies for poor storytelling, we would eventually have to dismiss nearly every movie ever made, even down to Japanese period pieces and German silents. Because no movie can hold up to a good story of a written medium; movies weren't even meant to offer the same things as then.
The problem with film and with photography, as George knows very well, is that they are too explicit, too easy, too unimaginative, whether the film attempts to imitate the novel, the drama, or the painting or all three. Then there is the massive amount of money required even to make a small film, the need for collaborators. Somebody talked me into renting Scanners. Set aside the stupidity of the plot, the boring pseudo-avant-garde style, the hilarious comic-book speech of Michael Ironside near the end, proclaiming an empire of Scanners (Even Magneto gets better lines in the awful X-Men movies), the director might have pulled it off if an actor instead of someone called Stephen Lack (de nomine de facto, indeed) had not played the hero. Similarly, poor Don Siegel in the Lineup wanted to cut straight to ELi Wallach but was forced to insert a pair of wooden policemen who sink the plot for a good half hour. Imagine poor Beethoven introducing the 9th Symphony with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and the First Methodist Chorus.
I enjoy movies for what they are--a mixed medium that often rises to the level of, say, journalism or light fiction but never to art. When filmmakers do become arty--e.g. Antonioni and most of the French over the past 50 years--they must try too hard not to make movies and the result is typically stultifying drivel. Bresson, Chabrol--I rest my case. Bergman, I grant you, came close to art without ceasing to be entertaining, but since I don't care much for Swedes, I can hardly call myself a fan. I do not at all defer to Waugh's judgment on this. He was a good novelist, but, then, the novel is a pretty lowbrow medium that shares some of the problems of film. When the novelist becomes arty--e.g. Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, he becomes unreadable. Proust is as far down the road to art as I can tolerate. When Waugh did try to soar, the result is the moving but lamentably pretentious Brideshead or the war novels. Overall, I think Ford Maddox Ford did it better.
For 50 years I have read English and American fiction at a rate that some would regard as pathological. (In recent weeks I have read or been reading novels by: Patricia Highsmith, my friend William P. Baldwin, John Derbyshire, Muriel Spark, William Gilmore Simms, and Dashiel Hammet. ) But none of them, either as a whole or in a particular place, can stand comparison with an OK poem by Housman, much less Horace. And what is true of novels is much truer of movies. I should add, I love Fred and Ginger movies, even the worst movies in the way that I enjoy being in the fantasy world of mediocre operettas.
What I have said about film applies to the great filmmakers who lived in a more wholesome world whose "values" are reflected in the films. But why should I spend two hours in the mind of a life-hating soul-destroying degenerate or, in some better cases, of some confused poor devil who sees a distant light at the end of the tunnel but thinks he invented the sun. I have step by step withdrawn from a world I find disgusting in every way and have no desire to be drawn back into it. Even when I like a movie for certain themes, as I liked Eastwood's Unforgiven, I find I am in the long run very disturbed by not just the violence and immorality but the way I am manipulated by film and score. A good example is the way Branagh ruined Henry V--as opposed to the very clever Olivier film. In the case of film, less is more. I like old black and whites with no technique and lots of dialogue. Last night we watched the very charming "She Wouldn't Say Yes" even though I cannot, ordinarily, endure the face much less the voice of Rosalind Russell
I think, George, you are being a bit disingenuous. You know that I loathe Ornette Coleman and Willliam Burroughs and all the "daring" "artists" of that type. But that is my point about "daring." Trollope was not daring nor was Fellini in his good movies (the White Sheik, I Vitelloni). He was daringly unwatchable in Juliet of the Spirits and Roma and nearly all his later works, whose only virtue is that they have Fellini's imaginative touch here and there. Watching them is a bit like having dinner with an 80 year old woman once famous for her beauty.
Godard is often quite witty and Belmondo is perfect in his films. You didn't see any point in the daily index of proscribed words--a true reverse dictionary? Or the hilarious use of the hack Eddy Constantine in his signature role as a cheap detective? Or the yard fight that turns deadly in Weekend? Or, my favorite from his worst film, Un + Un, the line of black panthers escorting beautiful white women to their execution (the real agenda of black militants)? Next you'll be telling us you don't like Pasolini. We all have our blind side, I suppose. I have never found Jerry Louis even faintly amusing except for The Delicate Delinquent (if that is the title) in which he does a parody of Humphrey Bogart's testimony on the stand, in The Caine Mutiny--admittedly, I was a kid when I saw it.
I can take a look at a contemporary avant-garde poet and it only costs me a minute or two, but a film, even one seen at home (the rude behavior of Americans makes it impossible to go out to the theater) is too great a commitment of time. Nope, I'd rather see the Palm Beach Story the 10th Time than take a chance on a film some fresh-faced kid thinks is brilliant or original or, shudder, daring. I think I may be coming to the end of my film-watching days; then it will be fiction. I may come around to the older Jefferson who said in a letter that in the end there is only Homer and Vergil, or perhaps only Homer.
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. The cinema is not a slice of life, it’s a piece of cake."
Alfred Hitchcock
"The great directors, from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock, have never lost sight of the fact that the art of the movies is not a verbal art. Words have come in with the "talkies" but a decade of effort has so absorbed them into the primary function that they are no longer disturbing as they once were-and indeed the term "talkie" has ceased to be in common use. We still go to "movies' and can take the dialogue in our stride. The gloomy predictions that dialogue would kill the art have only their historical interest....A silent picture of 1927 or 1928 was likely to be superior in sophistication to any talkie of 1931. Had not audiences been trained to interpret movement, gesture, change of scene and flutter of symbol-and to interpret these things with the eye alone? Sometimes we had to lean over and talk to our neighbors about what was going on behind the door." That window was not open before; the burglar must have entered while the party was going on downstairs." This is the girl who fainted at the factory," And so on. We can no longer indulge in such confidences. We must be as silent as the films themselves used to be."
-Mark Van Doren "Let the Movies Be Natural" Autumn 1937
"I enjoy movies for what they are–a mixed medium that often rises to the level of, say, journalism or light fiction but never to art."
I agree, which is why it's almost painful to think of all those filmmakers who, well, took filmmaking seriously. Like Andrei Tarkovsky. The poor man spent his entire life making movies with scenes like a five minute shot of shack, then resenting those who criticized his films, and then trying harder to elevate his work to some "art" form that it could never be. And then died.
Such a man is akin to Samuel L. Jackson's character in Unbreakable, who is both physically weak and spends his shortened life on this earth curating a "serious" comic book museum.
The point is that it is entertaining to see those pretty images on the screen. And ever since the invention of home video, we don't have to do it at a stretch.
PS Against my better judgment and despite the pretty semi-nude on the box, I am ordering With a Friend Like Harry, just to show support for our film reviewer, under siege from hidebound colleagues. It had better be good. The last time I took George's advice I went to see the worst movie ever made, Gladiator. Forget Ed Wood as the worst campy director of all time. that prize should be divided between Ridley Scott and James Cameron, both of whom have shown they know how to make an entertaining movie and have spent the rest of their careers degrading the "industry."
Speaking of renting films, has anyone watched the TV series Foyle's War? It's a bit smarmy and self-righteous but well put-together. It's hard not to like Michael Kitchen. My wife and I also enjoyed, speaking of English TV series, House of Cards, though the final series was inferior to the first two. I happened to run across a copy of the book version in a cheap hotel on the island of Aegina. The show is much better, richer in its characterization and more Machiavellian in its analysis.
De gustibus etc but I find pretty images on the screen pretty much of a bore to watch. Perhaps it is because I have such poor eyes, but I like to watch part of a movie with eyes shut. I remember how pretty a film Elvira Madigan, backed by a Mozartian sound track, was, but has anyone ever watched it again. I used to like Jean Renoir for the prettiness of his painting, but I can no longer abide his nasty infantile mind.
Finally, I never really liked Fritz Lang, but he is one of the few furriners to do well in America. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, a semi-talkie, is terrifying and the Big Heat one of the most moving and intelligent film noir masterpieces. Enough.
Dr Fleming, I defer to knowledge of the history of the ancient world to you; in doing so, what are some actual good or even passable films about the ancient world? They nearly all fall in the same vein as Gladiator.
Dr. Fleming, I have watched Foyle's War and though I have to put its preaching (for example, one episode dealt with homosexuality and the military) out of my mind, I have enjoyed the series--but my opinion may be suspect since period pieces that cannot but reflect a more civilized time are a form of escape for me. (I also enjoyed House of Cards.)
I am pleased to see Dr. Fleming mention Foyle's War; I think it the best of the mystery series available to us in recent times. Kitchen is excellent, likeable and believable and the series has at least the courage to introduce some uncomfortable bits of history into the stories - witness the issue of repatriating Russian POWs back to the USSR to face certain death under Stalin.
Of course, as mentioned it does pay obeisance to the PC bedrocks - homosexuality, anti-Semitism and racism (the final season episode dealing with black American GIs is virtually unwatchable; the script must have been written by Al Sharpton) but overall it is an entertaining and worthwhile series.