"Stop playing Beethoven!"

Two notes: First, the movie under discussion is violent and profane; don't see it unless you're comfortable with that. Second, spoilers follow, and I wish the context clue of "it comes very late in the movie" were enough to tip everyone off to that, but might as well follow Internet etiquette on this one.

There's a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained that's sticking with me. It comes very late in the movie. The plot to that point: King Schultz is a German bounty hunter working in the American South. As a German, he finds slavery distasteful and racism ridiculous, but he's an ironist rather than a radical. He's fond of casually comparing the violence of his job, which he does with skill and panache, with the violence of slavery. He and his ex-slave protege Django have spent the middle third of the movie infiltrating a horrifically corrupt plantation in order to buy and rescue Django's wife; their plot involves pretending to be fully amoral slavers. Django, because of his great love, plays his role fully; Schultz finds it increasingly difficult to keep his poker face in the presence of cruelty. Eventually, Schultz and Django's scheme fails, and the pair is exposed.

So here's the scene: the furious plantation owner, Calvin Candie, has decided to humiliate the intruders by terrifying them into a financially ruinous deal, so that they'll escape with their lives and little else. While Candie draws up the papers, Schultz stews in a sumptuous parlor. A harpist plays Fur Elise. Schultz sees memories flash before him of the day's terrors. For the first time in the film, he loses his composure, lurching angrily toward the harpist. He can't abide this refinement and beauty in a place just outside of which slaves can be murdered by dogs. "Stop playing Beethoven!"

Candie, noticing Schultz's outburst, first shrugs it off as the bitterness of a man bested in intellectual combat. But it's not shame, it's moral contempt. And when Candie understands this, he decides to complete the humiliation, saying that the deal can't conclude without a handshake. He offers his hand, so that Schultz must visibly signal accommodation with and hence submission to a system of racism and slavery that now disturbs him to the core. And Schultz has reached a point where he can no longer ironize his morality. He cannot cross this line. Some things are more important than survival. Schultz shoots Candie through the heart. For this he's quickly shot down by a henchman, and... well, the movie is really Django's story, and I won't ruin any more of it.

For those of us that thought the meta-concerns of Inglorious Basterds blurred out the moral realities required for a consideration of Nazi Germany, this moment of moral clarity is a blessed relief, and a challenge. Which hands are we shaking? And must we refuse?

The movie's not perfect. It's troubling how what is badass crowds out what is good in so many American movies, and this line of thought applies to Django Unchained. But it should also be known that Tarantino's taken the old trope of the out-for-only-himself gunslinger's self-sacrificial awakening (see also: Han Solo) and deployed it more than just convincingly, with the special help of Christoph Waltz's acting. I can't get the scene out of my mind.

Batman.

If you want a good perspective on Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, read Richard Brody's review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Nolan doesn’t hang dollar signs on his screen; he’s not looking to impress viewers with the colossal scale of his project, but, rather, with his own grim and relentless labors. “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

But for the sake of the kid that read the whole Knightfall series over a series of summer Saturdays spent not buying anything in Borders, I'll say I enjoyed the way they handled Bane in this movie.

But, hey, everybody's got a review of this movie. I've got a theory about Christopher Nolan's artistic past and future. Inception was a movie about making movies, right? What if we read Nolan's whole career this way? Here's what I'm thinking:

• At some point in the hazy past, the Nolan brothers wrote a script for a romantic comedy. It would have been their All the Real Girls. It would have summed up all their hopes, dreams, and joys. The writing retreat was perfect, idyllic even. They were sure that this would be their classic.
• Something went wrong. Perhaps a professor critically eviscerated the screenplay in cold blood, or perhaps it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe it turns out that Christopher Nolan DESTROYED IT HIMSELF AND CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER.
• The Nolans, tormented by the loss of the screenplay, turned their anguish towards the obsessive creation of clockwork thrillers about obsessive men trying to solve the problem of the past by mastering some dark technique.
• However, several years ago, Christopher Nolan found a new idea for a screenplay. Perhaps it's not the story of young love he wrote and lost as a young man. But it involves children somehow. He wants to write a movie about parenthood. (We see the first hints of this turn in The Prestige, where one of the men obsessed by his craft far beyond the point of reason has a child and thereby gets a little perspective on life.)
• But he's in too deep with the studios. They won't let him get out. Desperately, he takes on one last big-budget blockbuster. This one's the toughest of all. He puts together the best team he's got, but there's just not enough time. The script doesn't make any sense. They improvise. They have to. Because if they can just make a gazillion dollars for Warner Brothers, Christopher Nolan can go free.

So that's the coded message here. Nolan, like Bruce Wayne, needs to put the thriller business behind him. The question is, what kind of movie is he going to make next?

My money's on a comedy about two zany suburban couples each trying to secure their respective toddlers a spot in an elite preschool, starring Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Scarlett Johanson, and featuring Michael Caine as the quirky headmaster. But there's also some chance it's a story that follows a married couple (Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard) for two decades as they raise a family in a weird composite of Chicago and London, featuring Michael Caine as the husband's dad or publisher. The possibilities are endless, but the actors are few.

Movie report: Czech animation.

As I've mentioned before, some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a film club. The newest member of our club studied animation in Prague, and her first selection was a set of short films from notable Czech stop-motion animators. My favorite of the bunch was Jan Švankmajer's "J.S. Bach: Fantasia in G Minor", which sets images and animations of windows, walls, and doorways to Bach's organ music. About two-thirds of the way through, there's a marvelous series of doorways...



We also watched Jiří Barta's "The Vanished World of Gloves," which I imagine is a must-see for any student of film history.

Tree of Life spoiler alert.

There's a rapturous review of Tree of Life up at Books and Culture. As an aside, I'm not faulting the reviewer for being enthusiastic. Had I written a review, it would have been, if possible, more positive. But the interesting part comes at the very end, when the reviewer argues that everyone (including me) misinterpreted the end of the film:

Contrary to nearly every review, the final scenes of the film are not a vision of the afterlife (Jack never dies) but rather a highly abstract rendering of the experience of stepping into faith. After nearly two and a half hours of recounting the tuggings of grace, The Tree of Life attempts to capture the moment of reconciliation with God.

If I were tasked with responding to this, I'd say that in the nexus between conversion and eschatological vision lies Christian hope. That is, the moment of conversion is bound, not to a literal vision of the afterlife, but to a taste of the life of the world to come.

Movie report: Heart of a Dog.

Some of my friends here in Baltimore have put together a little Monday night movie club, and we've watched some interesting stuff. (My picks so far have been The Lady Eve and Spirited Away.) This week's pick was a 1988 Russian film called Heart of a Dog. It was adapted from an old book of the same name by Mikhail Bulgakov; this book was an important piece of samizdat (underground literature) under the Soviet regime.

The movie is set in mid-1920s Moscow, as Russian society is adjusting to the communist regime. A hungry stray dog is taken in by a famous doctor, only to become the subject of the doctor's experimental cross-species pituitary-implant surgery. The experiment's unexpected result: the dog slowly turns into a human being, and a wretched, brutish one at that. As the dog-man falls in with the local Soviets, he makes life more and more unbearable for his wealthy caretakers. There's quite a bit of barbed humor: when the doctor asks his research subject to demonstrate his skills on the balalaika for a crowd of scientists, the dog-man's song and dance decays into feverish proletarian doggerel (so to speak). When the dog-man needs a job, he becomes the city's official stray cat catcher/killer, and takes an unseemly joy in his work. All in all, it's a biting satire on Soviet attempts to elevate human nature.

Now, this was clearly a product of the perestroika era: at no point before Gorbachev could a director have gotten away with portraying the Soviet functionaries as officious morons. But it was interesting that it took me a few minutes to understand that the wealthy doctor's decadence was also meant to be off-putting, even immoral. My eyes, apparently, are used to a Hollywood glamorization of wealth (not our only approach to wealth, but nevertheless a common one). But if you pay attention, it appears that most of the doctor's surgeries involve transplanting animal organs into rich people to "rejuvenate" their libidos. In that light, the doctor's insistence that he deserves his well-decorated seven-room flat rings as hollow as the dog-man's later claim, on the grounds of a certificate he somehow managed to acquire from a bureaucrat, to his own "thirty-seven square feet" of the place.

I want to party with you, cowboy.

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I just have to transcribe some of this stuff:

Herzog: "I do believe that these very intelligent people invented God, but it took God a while to grow up and create the world."

Colbert: [long pause]

Colbert: "I don't usually have guests this deep, so you shook me there for a second."

And:

Herzog: "In Cave of Forgotten Dreams there's a postscript when all of a sudden you see radioactive albino crocodiles in the film. I called the producer from when I was shooting and he was in a pet store in Vancouver and just had bought a cage for a hamster and he said 'I just bought a cage of a hamster' and I said 'I'm filming albino mutant crocodiles, radioactive crocodiles.' And I hear this clatter. He dropped the cage! And said, 'you are shooting WHAT?' And I said I am shooting albino crocodiles, and they will be in the film."

And:

Herzog: "You see, if I were only fact based... you see, the book of books then, in literature, would be the Manhattan phone directory. Four million entries, everything correct. But it dusts out of my ears and I do not know: do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check all the correct entries in the phone directory. I'm not this kind of a filmmaker."

Kiarostami.

A while back, I saw Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. On Monday, I watched Taste of Cherry, a Kiarostami film from 1997. Both of them were entrancing and baffling in nearly equal measure, paced like Antonioni films but somewhat looser. (I liked them.) Found this great bit from an AV Club interview:

AVC: You’ve said in the past that you’re not offended if people sleep during your films, as long as they dream about them afterward.

AK: I’ve said that many times, and I’m not sure if it has been understood right, because very often they take that as a joke, whereas I mean it. I really think that I don’t mind people sleeping during my films, because I know that some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep or snoozing. It’s not to be taken badly at all. This is something I really mean.

I know he must have seen Certified Copy a hundred times in editing, but it's funny that he dozed off during his own Cannes screening.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

If anyone reads this blog, lives in New York, and didn't hear it from me in person last weekend, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another treasure of a documentary, and should be seen in the theater. I'll spare you an attempt at a description of the quality of the limitedness I felt when staring at resonantly beautiful art made by humans who lived in Europe three hundred centuries ago.



Here's hoping the 3D projection takes a trip through the rest of the USA.

And the release of a new Herzog film brings gifts beyond the film itself: we always get a new round of Herzog interviews. For example, here (via Kottke):

"The Polar explorations were a huge mistake of the human race, an indication that the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety. They are one of the indicators.

"Adventure doesn’t feel right anymore. And something doesn’t feel right with artists anymore, the whole term. If you look at contemporary figurative art, you can tell there is a crisis of the term there."

And here:

"Sounding deep into the abysses of time, and into the origin of the modern human soul. It’s strange, I’m now doing a film with death-row inmates, and as a general umbrella title, I thought about “Gazing Into The Abyss,” and then I thought that would have been a fine title for the cave film. It fits for almost every film I’ve made. Bad Lieutenant, Aguirre, you just name it.

Weekend movies.

Your Highness

Out of a sense of loyalty to David Gordon Green that now appears to be quite misguided, I went to see Your Highness last Friday evening. I didn't find it boring, and parts of it were wild enough to be funny, but overall... well, star Danny McBride explains it pretty well.

“And then he's explaining Your Highness, as best he can. How it all started as a joke. How he and his old film-school buddy David Gordon Green [...] used to play this movie-nerd game years ago, where Green would throw out a title and McBride would start pitching him back 'f— retarded ideas for movies.'

“Green would say something like Face of Danger, and they'd come up with ‘some weird story about Steve Danger, who's a plastic surgeon and he solves mysteries.’ Your Highness was one of those. Green said it; McBride said, ‘What if I was in the Middle Ages fighting dragons and getting stoned all the time?’ ”

All the Real Girls was the first David Gordon Green film I saw, and along with Green's other early movies George Washington and Undertow it's part of an impressive trio of Southern films. McBride is in All the Real Girls, and he's great. But after getting in on Seth Rogan's Pineapple Express, it looks like Green and McBride jumped at the chance to have studios give them tons of money to put an old joke on the big screen. Surely it's fun to make this kind of movie -- coming up with the costumes, goofing off with James Franco, wandering up and down hills in Ireland, etc. -- but I wish Green would undo his regression. Looking at his next few projects, I'm not optimistic. From here on out, I guess I'm setting my hopes on Junebug director Phil Morrison's triumphant return to the big screen.

Certified Copy

I don't remember the last time I saw a movie twice in the theaters, but I'm definitely going back for another viewing of Certified Copy. At this point I can't say I have a solid theory on what's going on. I can tell you that a man and a woman wander around Tuscany talking about art, and eventually about more, but whether the movie should finally be judged as realism, pastiche, or something else, I can't yet say. Oh, and the woman is Juliette Binoche. I'll be writing more on this one after I see it again.

Tarantino, honor, morality.

FLG's trying to get ahold of Tarantino's major theme as a filmmaker, and settles on "savoring the moment you have with the people around you because, well, they might kill you the next second." I don't think this is quite right. There are all sorts of reasons that Tarantino likes these strange conversations that lead up to moments of intense violence, but they're not ends in themselves. FLG's right that the juxtaposition of trivial topics and looming violence serves to raise tension to unbearable levels, but the tension is the goal, not the moments leading up to it.

And FLG's missed the other thing in Pulp Fiction, which is that the arguments -- about foot massages, or what it feels like to kill a man, or the ethics of tipping waitresses -- these conversations reveal things about the characters that explain their actions in later scenes. Tarantino's scripts are really dense in this way. (Pulp Fiction is a good read in script form.)

Tarantino's writing has always made sense to me as a study of codes of behavior. Reservior Dogs is perhaps most clear on this point: every character has a different approach to the idea of honor among thieves, and, as I said before, you can get figure out the characters' positions on honor from the conversation about tipping in the first scene, though on a first viewing it might not be clear that this is what going on. Likewise, Kill Bill focuses on codes of honor, revenge, and obligation from Asian cinema.

I'd argue (and I'm not the first to do this) that the main thing standing between Tarantino and greatness is that he's interested in film-based codes of behavior rather than morality.

Bad Lieutenant.

The A.V. Club: What did you tell [Nicolas Cage] about how to play the character?

Werner Herzog: You see, with actors, normally I don’t like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this. I think on the first or second day of shooting, Nicolas, who is a very shy man, came to me and said “Werner, I know you hate these kind of Lee Strasberg Actors Studio questions about motivation, but what makes him so bad? Is it the drugs? Is it Katrina? Is it his injuries?” And I said, “Yeah, well, let’s not discuss that. But there’s such a thing as the bliss of evil. Let’s go straight for that. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, doing the worst thing, the most debased and vile things, but enjoy yourself, because the audience will somehow, I hope, be in a secret conspiracy with you that sometimes we love to be vile and debased.” It’s a secret joy, and that makes it so hilarious, I think.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is not a great movie, but it is amazing in its own way.

Kubrick the machine.

Though I know I shouldn't talk about Kubrick until I see Barry Lyndon, it's funny that in this 1969 interview the famously "cold" director keeps talking about people as being "essentially" objects:

"Actors are essentially emotion-producing instruments, and some are always tuned and ready while others will reach a fantastic pitch on one take and never equal it again, no matter how hard they try."

And later:

"A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it's the director's job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible. Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate -- and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It's not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage is has is that you must do it, and you can't procrastinate."

Via Kottke.

By the way, I'm finally going to watch 8 1/2 this weekend.

Two on Hypatia.

There's a new movie that's supposed to be about the life of Hypatia, an Alexandrian Neoplatonist philosopher and her murder at the hands of a Christian mob. But the details are off:

• David Bentley Hart is supremely irritated, and he hasn't even seen the film. Working from a New York Times article, he goes over some of the territory he covered in his last book.
• But in case you don't trust a movie that's being reviewed at such a level of remove, Nathan Schneider's posted a review at Religion Dispatches. Though he comes to substantially the same conclusion about the accuracy of the history, he's got some kind words for the film's larger perspective.

Either way, not the sort of movie I'm planning to see.

A thought after watching the LOST series finale.

At the end of the series, I was tired of the Island. I started watching LOST in the middle of the third season, after the ending had been announced and the plot started rolling. For the last several years I have spent a far too much time on pop-culture escapes*, holing up in my apartment for a week, watching an entire seasons of some TV show and trying desperately not to think about the future. Hours and hours, trying to stare through the screen of my laptop into someone else's world. LOST and its layers of mystery…

It's no real spoiler to say that "letting go" is a theme of LOST. Which is weird for a show that spends so much time trying to hook you, to make you keep on watching, to get you invested in theories, characters, and mythology. But with a new job and a new city — and an apparently bright future — it's clearly time to put these little vices behind me to whatever degree I can. To get off the Island, so to speak.

And though the creators surely didn't have this interpretation in mind, I am taking that beautiful final scene as a valediction for adolescent obsessions.

*I mean, not exclusively: I did serious things during this time. I'm talking about one theme among many.

Politics and LOST.

I've been wondering if there's a good way to tie LOST to politics. I'd wanted to chase the leadership angle that Noel Murray at the AV Club often writes about, but Brett McCracken at The Search has beaten me to it by a mile. I really like his explication of the show's geopolitical themes:

“As I reflect on the show having seen all six seasons, I think the central thematic tension of Lost has always been that of the global vs. the local, the big view vs. the narrow view, “for the greater good” vs. ‘my own private island.’

[…]

“The show presents a way forward for our chaotic, treacherous, ‘WTF?! Where are we??’ world. And the way forward is sacrificial love for our neighbor– ‘neighbor’ meaning our children and love interests, but also our broader global family… those who are very different from us and yet nevertheless struggling to make sense of ‘the island’ we all inhabit.”

The whole post is much longer, and all of it is worth reading. My attempts to come up with something similar kept foundering on the difficulty of pinning characters to the leadership styles of actual leaders — I thought I might have had something with a comparison between George W. Bush and Locke at the height of his man-of-faith phase, but I couldn't really make it fit. But where my allegorical readings stumbled, McCracken's analysis of themes really succeeds.

Cousin, bidness is a-boomin'.

Cautious praise for Inglourious Basterds. It worked for me structurally and stylistically. I'm still trying to decide where I land on Tarantino's distance from history — am I with the New Yorker's David Denby, who called the movie “a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously”? Or do I put this aside in favor of sharp and interesting critical readings?

Clearly, there's a few high-order issues to clear up before I can settle on a valuation for Basterds. History, evil, violence, entertainment, irony, escape: it all swirls around in Tarantino's latest opus, and there's a lot I could try to sort out. Of course, a southerner's got to work these things out anyway, and it's a process. So the best verdict I can give right now is a kind of deferral that affirms Basterds as a movie worth coming back to once I've made some progress.

Communitarian Movies.

Via John's “linkage,” Russell Arben Fox has got a top-five list communitarian movies. The writer's obviously aware of the dangers of such a list and the flaws of NR's list, so he's specific: he wants movies that explicitly claim “that human beings do, and should, belong to (and thus are invariably somewhat defined and limited by) communities within which, and through which, traditions and associations and virtues are strengthened, examined, and made meaningful.” Check it out.

Conservative movies.

Daniel Larison describes perfectly the problem with lists (or books) of “conservative movies”:

“For quite a while I have raised objections to trying to read specific political messages into film and TV, and more generally I have always been skeptical of the sub-set of conservative arguments dedicated to appropriating elements of pop culture. On the whole, I think the exercise is mostly futile, and to the extent that these assessments of pop culture products are at all accurate they tend to dissuade conservatives from their own non-kitschy cultural production. “We don’t need to go into cinema or television–look at all the conservative movies and shows we already have!” These efforts tend to reinforce the “this is a center-right nation” complacency that assumes that some core cultural conservatism exists as a given in America and does not need to be actively cultivated. Worse than that, it causes conservatives to start to define what makes a film or television show ‘conservative’ largely by how much it is loathed or criticized by their opponents, such that 24 receives embarrassing praise when it depicts a near-omnicompetent security state that breaks the law at will so long as the targets of its violence and lawlessness are terrorists.”

The posts I've looked at in the series tell their readers how they should go about interpreting the films so as to get a specific conservative moral at the end. They do this by ignoring thematic complexity where it exists and often praising banality where complexity is absent.

Larison's right about the frightening militarism of the list.

I'd rather watch good movies than conservative ones.

UPDATE: How could I not post this comment whole?

“The Dark Knight deserves to be considered a political film in the broader sense of what politics is, but I wouldn’t say it falls under the severely constricted political understanding portrayed by NRO. Through the movie I couldn’t help but see the major themes of Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue come to light on the screen. The Neitzschean (the Joker) has come to demonstrate the ineptitude of the Weberian bureaucrats (Commissioner Gordon, the prosecutor) with his will to power. In fact the Joker’s Neitzschean power is strong enough to turn some Weberians like the prosecutor into a Neitzschean Two-face. The only tangible response to the Neitzschean is the Aristotlean citizen who seeks to live a life of virtue and engagement in the polis (the Dark Knight, who makes a decent hero as one who struggles with virtue). So, The Dark Knight deserves the label as a political movie, however, it is not ‘conservative’ but Macintyrian.”

Well done, Casey Khan. Well done. I'll definitely watch MacIntyrean movies.

Validated, sort of.

Should I feel bad about liking Talledega Nights as much as I do?

Not anymore, because I'm not alone. A closing sentence from Millinerd led to a quick Google search, which yielded this from George Weigel:

“Yet [Richard John Neuhaus] could spend the late evenings howling with laughter over DVDs of Talladega Nights, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind.”

-George Weigel

I would not have guessed that Neuhaus liked Apatow comedies. I wonder what he thought of Pineapple Express…

Good news, bad news.

So a few of my favorite bloggers have gotten together to start a group blog called “The League of Ordinary Gentleman.” (Funny that Freddie DeBoer, a Watchmen hater, is now on a blog with a name derived from another Alan Moore comic…) In a set-up that I hope to see appearing more and more on group blogs, the ongoing conversations are specifically grouped for easy browsing and reference. This is the good news.

The bad news is that I'm going to have to cut back on my own blogging this semester. I'll do my very best to keep this site from turning into a dead link, and maybe I'll find a rhythm that lets me keep up the pace I want, but real life is intruding.

Quickly: I'm going to mostly endorse Freddie's take on the incoherent plotting of The Dark Knight. The point of the movie was never to tell a compelling story; it was to mix and match a series of political symbols in such a way that people in the audience can draw on its mythic structure to examine their own unarticulated questions about the use of (super) power in an age of terror. But in order for for such mythic structure to stand, it needs a solid foundation, and can't have these gaping plot holes and out-of-character decisions.

(I have similar problems with Battlestar Galactica, where Apollo seems to become a different character every few episodes just to fit some plot twist that the writers want to hit us with.)

That being said: what the comics fan enjoys in the movies is seeing big-screen versions of their favorite characters that somehow carry through the soul of the comics character. And Nolan got that right, unlike the awful Joel Schumacher. So the comics fan in me had to give the movie a thumbs up, whereas the movie fan in me had to give it an ambivilent sideways shaking thumb.