Suspect Zero

Not so easy to find the sort of low-budget genre films today that might make a latter-day Manny Farber rhapsodize ... at least, not without heaps of psychological explications, gilded lily bouquets of atmosphere. The cheap films these days are so often just bloated with self-awareness of their own potential powers. It seems one must inevitably make this compromise. Suspect Zero (2004), starring Ben Kingsley and Aaron Eckhart, is a cheap, "dark" serial killer film, much of it cribbed from Se7en and elsewhere, with all the typicalities you'd expect. The "antagonist" lives in subterranean lairs where his bizarre OCD habits belie some deeper virtuosity, some deeper truth he represents in almost mystical conjunction with our protagonist. (The nature of this connection is soon apparent.) And: Moooooood music. Quick cuts from dark to darker images. This was helmed by E. Elias Merhige, after all, the man responsible for grotesque experimental film Begotten ('91) and Shadow of the Vampire (2000, shamefully, unseen by me), as well as a few Marilyn Manson videos, for crying out loud.

What differentiates Suspect Zero from the mumbo-jumbo it's already fated to half-be, are (1) the sheer material-tactile pleasure the film seems to have in all the suspect's paraphernalia (sketches, numbers, collages); like certain shots in Se7en, when one appreciates the singleminded craftsmanship of Kevin Spacey's re-sewn composition notebooks; this detail extends into other elements of the production design, like an old, worn-in suburban home with a mom wearing tights on her way to a PTA meeting, not (I think) played for "provincial" laughs; (2) there's a pervasive loneliness about this film and its cross-country wanderings, one that really does seem to sketch at something like a dark heart of America. A lot of the standard ominous-mysterious mood plays well because, I think, Merhige is himself a believer in occult/paranormal stuff (if you believe his Wikipedia entry), and respects religiosity in ways that a lot of filmmakers don't. There is a beautiful apropos-of-nothing black church scene where the congregation sings "And He Walks with Me." A lot of foreboding dark cloudy skies: a choice of effects that is dime-a-dozen but here works quite well (the tones, the colors, seem absolutely right in a way that oncoming storms rarely are in Hollywood ... the much-maligned Twister actually seems to me to be a respectable example in this department). Pixellated surveillance-style footage stands in for the psychic flashbacks and flashforwards the characters experience: not an inspired decision in itself, but pulled off with gusto (a b&w close-up of Kingsley has black holes for eyes, deep chasms).

There are bad choices too, hackneyed ones: a character walking down the street in the rain to show the depths of his alienation; Carrie-Anne Moss' character in general is utterly superfluous: she's played merely & blandly as a composite of every thinkable female second fiddle that might appear in a role like this in a movie like this (maternal, professional partner-friend-lover).

In short, though, there's enough invention here, and the film takes itself seriously enough on these modest terms, that Suspect Zero warrants a look from anyone who is interested in the legacy of B-films in today's commercial genre releases. Though everyone's decided (and not wrongly) that Zodiac represents the great American serial killer film of the past decade, and this film is anything but close to that kind of superlative, something like this is worth a few attentive glances from intrigued parties, before it plunges into serious obscurity forever.

Montage

Cobra Camp Sublime

A pristine archival Technicolor print of Universal's Siodmak-helmed camp exotica arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan to play to a few scores of people. I tend to be sensitive (oversensitive?) to audiences laughing campily at an old film, but Cobra Woman is so insistently and robustly itself that laughing at it just makes it stronger. Mesmerizing, possessed of a weird logic all its own, this is a film that is too serious a fever-dream to be anything but taken seriously as just that. (And an entire huge facet of the postwar North American avant-garde now seems more legible...) It is no facile paradox (by which I mean merely an unsound suggestion of paradox) that this is both a bad movie and a wonderful one. The colors in the print we saw, which no images I can find online even approximate, are astonishing.

Bergman Soap

I hadn't seen any of these commercials before.

Wrong

"Who's Joe?" they ask in Only Angels Have Wings. Joe - forgotten - is never really forgotten. He haunts the film, he is honored by people in their own ways, even among a people who do not explicitly honor memory. Poor Manny in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, on the other hand, is precisely the opposite kind of forgotten man: victim of a bureaucratic oligarchy (which is what we live in in the US - not a 'democracy'). Explicitly remembered by those around him, he is quickly made to be missing by the powers exerted by bureaucracy (silence, procedure, leverage). He vanishes for a while, a living phantom.

Kick-Ass

Dear comic-book blockbusters,

If you are going to be 'ironic' about pathos or 'self-aware' about sentimental plot machinations, please do not just immediately, directly, and shamelessly fulfill the conventions you are being 'ironic' or 'self-aware' about. At least pretend that you're going to do something else. Make the effort to fake us out even if it doesn't work. As it stands, one can see the stilted writing on the screenplay page: "Hit Girl smiles wryly as she blah blah blah."

Also, I would appreciate it if one would either be honest about it, or at least do a better job hiding the fact that your film is really a preview for your next film. Bald, shameless promotion in itself is almost refreshing because it's rare ... everyone (like this movie Kick-Ass) has to dress up their bullshit in layers of sonic rapture & slo-mo.

The fact that you made a movie that so deeply involved an 11-year-old girl in bloody violence is, however, commendable.

Cheers,

--Zach

Image of the Day

Live Forever

One of the beautiful things about Brad Neely's vulgar, puerile, hilarious net 'cartoons,' which I've loved for years (!?) now, is how he'll insert subtle hints that there's more to it than lazy, merely adolescent provocation. Highbrow? No. Compex, multi-faceted, carefully made? Yes! Exhibit A - around 2:29 of the Baby Cakes diary #1, you see an image of a scientist testing on a rat in a cage as Baby Cakes talks about living forever ("but I'm leavin' that up to science right now"), and the scientist is a caricature of Aubrey de Grey. Yes.

Sense of Things

"We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved's gestures, at the very moment they are addressed to us, still express that unknown world that excludes us. The beloved gives us signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred." (Gilles Deleuze, trans. Richard Howard, Proust & Signs, p. 8)

Why did cinema not produce "historical analyses, theories, essays, memoirs" (as Guy Debord asks in In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni)? When Susan Sontag advocated an "erotics" for art in the 1960s (a call-to-arms that would have many a sensuous-formalist gearing up even today), I wonder how healthy any of that would have been. That is, an erotics which seeks only to find satisfaction in its own pleasure - a cinephilia dying that couldn't come to terms with its own obsolescence. This despite the fact that nothing like it ever really lived long. The erotics of a particular mode of elite spectatorship (though this 'elite' is not definitively elitist, nor could it be unduly described, simply, as just marginal) ... this passes, this family resemblance of cinephilias that have nevertheless been quick to forget and quicker to forgive its own common afflictions.

(If someone has sought out Serge Daney's work on television, who among these have done some more to really search out critical discussion of television? Can a given cinephile can take a stance on television that is well-considered? It's worth thinking about.)

The sense of a thing, and the "erotic" attachment to it, when robust does ( - must - ) create an offspace, the field of other possible worlds; myopia reinvests this kind of negativity in a continual reworking of the cinema, so that we find all the answers to all the problems we think we've discerned, located, worked on. But all we've done is bury deeper a certain lack. (This is why that fellow who's chained to the cinematheque quotes: "Cinephilia is a lack of ambition.") Cinephilia is among other things historically marked by a confusion over what's to be found in an image, why we're looking there in the first place.

Quote of the Day

"Currently, for many people in the upper-middle class in the United States and perhaps in other parts of the world, face lifts and the cheaper alternative, botox, have become the norm, a regular medicalized procedure they undergo to increase job potential, gain status or erotic opportunity, and achieve control over their social mobility and class position in a constantly unstable world. If Lily Tomlin no longer has the wonderfully expressive face she had as a comedienne, in Damages her appearance well matches her role as a tastefully coiffed and botoxed rich-man’s-wife. In this show, most of the characters are upper-middle class, so that the actors’ cosmetically worked-on faces fit well with the narrative’s entrepreneurial psychology, one that neoliberalism now imposes on the managerial class: work on yourself, develop yourself, make good choices, take charge of your life—especially in terms of services you can buy.

"In current television and popular culture, there is a significant division between connotative imagery, as in the photos above of actors and public figures, and the televisual narrativization of plastic surgery and other personal “makeovers.” On the one hand, we have that which is merely suggested. On the other, we have shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Biggest Loser, or What Not to Wear which depict how people, often lower middle class or working class, submit to regimens of authority dictated by experts in the fields of fashion, personal appearance, and physical culture. These are disciplinary regimes, as described by Michel Foucault; the shows’ participants are expected to internalize the experts’ norms. Both within the shows and in the eyes of viewers, all the minute aspects of the participants’ bodies are judged, evaluated, objectified, and constantly measured for deviation and conformity. Those on the makeover shows are rehabilitated through monitoring and regulation—both the authorities’ taste and their own internalization of the authorities’ norms."

—Julia Lesage, "Watching for Botox" (here).

Image of the Day

... the other customers ...

So as not to disturb the other customers. This deadening of the language marks the convergence of all people being some kind of consumers (or "customers") with the controversial sham that all people are in all situations nothing but consumers (or "customers"). Public transportation speaks of its passengers as customers; schools and universities are likely to cater more and more to customers instead of students (what is education now but a service provided?), clinics and hospitals treat customers. Nobody reading these lines needs me to perform for them an indignant rebuke of the wicked consumerist core of this enterprise. (At least the vulgarization here is on some level honest.) What else does bother me is the homogenization of multiple meanings, which had enjoyed multiple corresponding words, into a single word, a word which itself may have different meanings and contexts, but whose sameness could very well be used to spackle over differences and arrive at ridiculous sociopolitical or juridical conclusions. As with corporations being "individuals."

"If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed." (Pound/Confucius)

Going Places

Belatedly

Exiled

About a decade ago, Nicole Brenez wrote of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that academicism has never been so brilliant. I'm tempted to say the same thing of Johnnie To's Exiled, which I finally saw not long ago. How shrewdly and confidently it employs narrative shorthand! (The device of photography, frozen, suggests an entire prehistory for the film, when in fact there isn't much back-story suggested except through the ambiguous nostalgia of a picture, of sets and costumes designed to tastefully evoke spaghetti westerns.) It all works so beautifully, however. The compositions are often eye-popping, as in the two screengrabs that illustrate this post. It's very moving too; another thing I'm tempted to say is that it's the greatest gangster film since Once Upon a Time in America.

Image of the Day

Richard Jenkins during the quail dinner in Flirting with Disaster. I just revisited this online, not though with very strict attention to it. Maybe my third or fourth go-round of this one over the years, and Jenkins' comic performance is one of the things that stands out most this time around. It's integrated into the rest of the film so well, blink-and-you-miss-it quick faces and reactions, almost seamless.

Lookalike

(Above: the great filmmaker Raoul Ruiz, top, and the character actor Steven Geray, from Gilda).

Image of the Day

Recently Seen

A big difference between Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a lot of Judd Apatow stuff is that the former has a good time with 'mall culture' and its space (like Romero's Dawn of the Dead), while the latter just figures it as a form of contemporary naturalism.

*

That said, I have been persuaded recently, finally, to watch with Freaks & Geeks (I'm not quite finished with the entirety of its run), which Apatow had a hand in. It is as amazingly good as most stuff bearing his name is just grimace-inducingly bad.

*

For the first or second time in a decade, I've seen five Best Picture nominees before Oscar night. Unfortunately this is the year they extended the field back to ten. (Would you like my rundown? Avatar: eh. Hurt Locker: eh. Inglourious Basterds: some strong elements. Up in the Air: some strong elements, fine middlebrow cinema.) Just today I watched District 9 and it's quite something. Stupid, sure. But also clever. Both 'anti-apartheid' and 'blatantly racist'? You bet. It's one of those films designed to be "read," "interpreted," whose ostensible progressivism can really be taken in any number of ways. It's nice that non-whiteness doesn't necessarily, ultimately signify irrationality, mythicism, etc., here ... though that's the take-away from certain isolated scenes. At the same time, there's a tone to the critique, as though multicultural liberalism is the blind flaw and enemy of humanity, the worst and weakest of (codedly white) militant liberalism (which is good, well-meaning, sane). There's a line to be crossed that situates criticism of "liberal" policies not anymore from a progressive standpoint but rather from the standpoint of downright hatred, opposition, fear. (Comedian Louis CK, whose stand-up I've also been sampling recently, exploits this very line.) The best thing about District 9 is the savvy with which it plunders generic codes (surveillance footage, handheld cameras, allegorical sf) as well as the sense of humor it maintains throughout, and the fact that the narrative never totally succumbs to a central conflict theory, but rather feels 'on the run.' The freedom in this respect is kind of breathtaking. I would say it's the best film for the adolescent male demographic featuring CGI bug-aliens since Starship Troopers.

*

Shutter Island, maybe my favorite Scorsese film in 15 years, is a bit like David Fincher's Panic Room: shallow, genre-bound, beautiful, trying (successfully in my case) to play and tug upon deep-seated feelings. I liked it much more than I expected, and probably a bit more even than Roman Polanski's very fine, quite beautiful anti-Blairite film The Ghost Writer. (Polanski's is a serious genre movie with actual political commentary; Shutter Island is openly a 'mere' entertainment—and I wouldn't dispute that label—that is nevertheless vastly more intelligent than most pro critics ever grant mere entertainment to be.) One problem is that everyone expects or hopes the culture industry product they like to also align with their political sympathies on some level, and to express their political (dis)tastes. Sometimes this is the case, but not always, and rarely is great art (especially when we deal with cinema) distinctly aligned with a viable political critique. (It exists in the off-spaces; its operationalized in its afterlives through real people in real contexts.) Especially as politics change but a film is not as open to rearticulation in the same sense that a play is (or even a novel, perhaps?).

*

The last multiplex-type film I saw that was roughly as bad, as bored with itself, as cynical, as The Wolfman (Joe Johnston, 2010) was Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009). Though the latter, at least, had Robert Downey, Jr., in its corner. Iron Man 2 is probably going to be absolutely awful, but ... the first third of Iron Man was quite decent, the only worthwhile blockbuster superhero cinema I know from the past ten years, aside from the first half-hour of Batman Begins (fascistic-militaristic but at least openly, interestingly so) and the first two Spider-Man films (Raimi delivers minor plastic fun). OK, I didn't bother to see Watchmen, readers let me know if this is a serious omission on my part.

Shyamalan Notes

In my head the template for Shyamalan's career is George A. Romero's masterpiece Knightriders: a film, a genre film, that is baldly ludicrous on its face ... and yet taken so seriously that it arrives at a certain admirable, mesmerizing intensity. But wait—can't zealous, solemn, deliberately meaningful genre films be a buzzkill (to say the least)!? Of course, of course. Obviously. But I'd say there are two broad kinds of elevating seriousness open to the mere genre entertainment. One is externalizing, communicative: communicating above and around the trappings of "genre" or "entertainment" to impart a series of messages or postures. (The sort of genre film that tends to win awards & critical hosannas.) Another is internalizing, an invitation down a rabbit hole.

Shyamalan often works on both registers, I think it should be admitted. The most ferocious critics of Signs, for instance, focused on the cheapness of its New Age nondenominationalism, the gracelessness (or unconvincingness) with which it peddled its "signs" and coincidences. Quite guilty! At the same time, the singlemindedness with which Shyamalan pursues his themes and expresses his stylistic tics also has its virtues. I don't know that I'm very interested in making (or reading) a case for Shyamalan as "auteur" that identifies his consistent themes, as these are, in his case, merely obvious, repetitious. But the way Shyamalan (consistently) constructs timing, line delivery, perspectival planes, the "weight" of the image (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, in one of the very best commentaries on MNS I know, says "When the camera is stationary, it isn’t resting, it’s bolted down.") ... these things are fascinating, and possessed of an integrity of their own.

I can understand why someone would say Shyamalan's cinema is ultimately bad. I wouldn't even necessarily disagree with them. But I can't understand anyone saying they can't see anything of authentic and rare interest in Shyamalan's cinema. None of Shyamalan's work is as good as Knightriders; but aspects of it are far above 90-95% of what else is getting made in Hollywood. There's the intensity of focus, the sheer glee in working with 'restricted' elements (e.g., color palette), the willingness to create nonsensical stories and premises with ordinary heroes (Shyamalan's people aren't ubermenschen or anything of the kind, whereas a Bruckheimeresque blockbuster is populated by gifted experts of mind & flesh).