Friday Review: Gravity

I'm certain about one thing went it comes to Gravity - director Alfonso Cuarón and his technical team earned every one of those Oscars they won last year.  The film is a technical marvel, seamless and incredibly real, particularly given that all but the last few minutes take place in space.

But beyond that - well, I'm conflicted.

Because, here's the thing - aside from the visuals, there isn't a whole lot else going on.  This is either a bold rejection of most storytelling conventions, in which case props to Cuarón, even if it doesn't quite work, or it's yet another example of a movie that's all about on-screen dazzle at the expense of things
like characters, plot, and the like.  Just because the visuals are used to bring to life something realistic and dramatic, instead of (for an example) giant robots that transform into easily sold commodities, doesn't give it a pass.

A regular flick, I suspect, would have given us some scenes on the shuttle before the big accident, or even on the ground during the run up to the mission, to get to know the characters.  As it is, only through some clumsy dialogue while they drift in space do we learn anything about them.  As a result, we can't really engage with them on an emotional level.  Yes, it would be tragic if they died while in space (as with the rest of the redshirts), but aside from that, why care?

But on the other hand, I respect that choice.  I have a short story where the main character escapes from many years of captivity.  One of the notes I got on it from my crit group wondered if he needed something more specific to "get back to" as motivation.  I didn't see it that way - he was a prisoner, for fuck's sake - but I can see the point.

I've often heard that short stories are better for adapting to movies than novels.  They have less material to start with, of course, so a director doesn't have to worry about cutting great swaths of material to tell the whole of the story.  Gravity feels like a short story, reminding me of something like "The Cold Equations," where it's less about the characters and more about the situation they struggle against.

Ultimately, it's hard to fault Gravity for not being the kind of movie I would make.  It's a visual showpiece, a true movie - something that would be nearly impossible to pull off in another medium.  In that way, it's a bit like 2001, which doesn't have the world's greatest script, either.  So that's good company to be in.

Gravity isn't much more than a trip, but it is one hell of  a ride.

The Details
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Gravity
Released 2013
Directed Alfonso Cuarón
Written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón
Starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney

Friday Review: The Monuments Men

The story of the Monuments Men - a group of about 350 Allied soldiers who were tasked with safeguarding and liberating looted art during World War II - is fascinating and a part of the war that's frequently been overlooked.  That, thankfully, changed last year with the George Clooney flick, even though it didn't turn out to be the awards season champ it seemed designed to be.  The movie a fictionalized account of the story laid in the book by Robert Edsel.  For such an interesting story, it's a shame it doesn't get a better telling.

Edsel makes an admission right at the beginning of the book that doesn't bode well:

I have taken the liberty of creating dialogue for continuity, but in no instance does it concern matters of substance and in all cases it is based on extensive documentation.

I admire them for being up front about this, but it immediately calls into question what comes after.  More problematic, however, is that if the dialogue doesn't concern "matters of substance" then why include it at all?  In the end, the dialog doesn't add much drama or tension to the book, which is otherwise sorely lacking.  It's both an odd choice and a missed opportunity.

Perhaps one reason I'm particularly down on the dialogue is that in the Audible version, the reader tries to do most of them in accents and fails miserably.  I've rarely cringed while listening to an audiobook, but did so time after time with this one.  It was particularly jarring because early on when all the speakers were Americans, there didn't seem to be any accents at all (this changed, unfortunately).  The cliched French and German that came later, therefore, really grated on the ears.

Beyond that, part of the problem with the book is that the Monuments Men tend to blend together until it's hard to remember who's who.  They have very similar backgrounds and face the same kind of obstacles so that none of them really stand out.  In fact, the biggest help I had in keeping them separate in my head was to picture their counterparts in the movie (fictional characters based on actual people).

In fact, the two most memorable people in the book (aside from Hitler, Eisenhower, etc.) are ones that don't quite fit the "Monuments Men" label.  One was Rose Valland, a French woman who spent the war in the midst of Nazi Paris keeping track of plundered art, then became the key figure in tracking it down and recapturing it.  She, obviously, was not a man (nor American, which is the primary focus of the book and film).

The other is Harry Ettlinger, who was a man, but unlike the more sophisticated, educated, and high class art types who became Monuments Men, was just a private who wound up doing his part.  It's his back story that makes that part compelling.  Ettlinger was a Jew, born in Karlshrue and forced to flee before the war.  He was, we are told, the last person to have a bat mitzvah in that city's synagogue before it was destroyed.  That he returned to Germany an American GI, helping right the cultural wrong perpetrated by the Nazis (including a fulfilling personal mission) is the best part of the book.

The other problem is that, once things get going, the activities of the Monuments Men are pretty redundant.  During the initial periods after Allied landings in Italy and France, they are tasked with keeping valuable buildings and works from being carelessly destroyed.  Important, no doubt, but not that thrilling once we're past the initial instance.  Things pick up a bit once they're on the trial of looted art, but those trails mostly lead to a series of mines in Germany and Austria where the Germans stashed the loot.  The mere fact that untold treasures are stuffed down mines, much less the challenges of getting them out, are interesting but, again, become a bit redundant.

In the middle of this section comes an interesting, if not altogether relevant, diversion.  The most impressive of the salt-mine stashes was found in the Austrian town of Altaussee.  The Nazi governor of the area planned to blow the whole mine up, destroying all the looted artwork rather than let it fall into Allied hands (all based on an order from Hitler that may, or may not, have been rescinded and/or modified).  A group of locals managed to trick him into delaying the plan long enough for the Allies to arrive.  It's a neat story and, from Edsel's telling, one that's been untold in its true depth, for years.  However, it doesn't really have much to do with the Monuments Men, as they arrived after the drama was done.

But most of that is nitpicking.  What Edsel has done is to celebrate not just a group of people who did important (and often overlooked) work.  He notes just how unusual this focus on preserving and repatriating art was and what a worthy endeavor it was.  Armies just didn't do such things.

Nor do they much anymore.  Edsel wonders why we haven't had similar operations (at least in terms of scope) in future wars.  Sadly, I think it's pretty easy to figure out.  Edsel frequently refers to the Monuments Men's goal as no less than the salvation, not just of particular cultural artifacts, but of "our" culture in general.  He even goes so far as to call the Altaussee plot one of the great turning points of civilization.  So why, then, were there no Monuments Men units in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea?

Simple - those places aren't part of "our" culture.  The Nazis, after all, were still Europeans and thus part of a long heritage that extended to the United States.  Not so much some others. It's not for nothing that the Monuments Men effort was confined to Europe, with no mention of the Pacific theater.  Nor should it be lost that the genesis of the group that became the Monuments Men was concerns about protecting American art in case of invasion.  We care most about ourselves and those who remind us of ourselves (Bender was onto something), whether that is how it should be or not.

Edsel himself has an interesting story (according to Wikipedia).  He grew up in Texas and made his money in (what else) oil and gas drilling.  He sold out to Union Pacific in the 1990s and moved to Europe.  It was there he first became interested in the subject of the Nazis and art during the war.  He's done yeoman work to bring this issue to national attention and clearly cares deeply about it.  None of the criticisms of his writing should minimize that.

The Details
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The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
by Robert M. Edsel, with Bret Witter
Published 2009

If You're Worried About Rosebud, You're Missing the Point

It's his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just saved you two long boobless hours. 

- Peter Griffin, spoiling Citizen Kane

Saw Gone Girl last weekend.  It's really good, particularly if you like the kind of movie that takes place in an air of dread that's perfectly summoned by David Fincher (with able assists from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).  I say that even knowing the big twist of the film going into it.  Not because I had read the book on which it's based, but because my wife blurted it out during a TV commercial. She didn't know I wanted to see it.

Point is, she didn't really "spoil" the movie for me, in the true sense of the word.  That's because the flick is good enough that it doesn't rise or fall on the big "twist" (which, for what it's worth, happens about halfway through - this isn't The Sixth Sense we're talking about).  In my opinion, any movie/book/TV show that rises and falls on that twist isn't really worth watching.

What's more, people seem to enjoy things more once they know how it turns out.  At least that's what some research says.

Back in 2011, as The Atlantic reports, a study was published that sounds pretty neat:

Scientists asked 900 college students from the University of California, San Diego, to read mysteries and other short stories by writers like John Updike, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Carver. Each student got three stories, some with "spoiler paragraphs" revealing the twist, and some without any spoilers. Finally, the students rated their stories on a 10-point scale..

The results?  Readers preferred the spoiled stories.  But why would we want to know how it ends ahead of time?

One theory is that our anticipation of surprises actually takes away from our appreciation for the 99 percent of the movie that isn't a monster twist. 'The second viewing is always more satisfying than the first,' Sternbergh said, 'because you notice all the things you missed while you were busy waiting for the twist.' Psychologists have observed that when we consume movies and songs for a second (or third, or hundredth time), the stories become easier to process, and we associate this ease of processing with aesthetic pleasure.

Think about this for a second.  Most of us have some piece of culture that we go back to again and again.  I know that the big escape at the end of Brazil takes place all inside Sam's head, but I still watch it.  I know that Arthur and Ford wind up on a primitive Earth populated by a bunch of idiots expelled from a better planet, but I'll still reconsume Hitchiker's Guide . . . again (in its many forms).  And I know Tommy goes back to being blind, deaf, and dumb at the end, but that doesn't make "Pinball Wizard" kick any less ass.

Of course, there might be other reasons why spoilers really aren't, including the uncomfortable recognition that we really like predictability more than we let on.  But, in this area at least, I'd like to not be completely cynical* and think that, deep down, we realize that works built on the big twist only are, as someone else put it in the Atlantic piece:

like artistic flash paper: It excites for a moment but offers little lasting wonder.

After all, we want to be better than Peter Griffin.  Right?

* I know, you're shocked, right?  How's that for a twist!

Friday Review Year In Review

2013 wasn't the most productive year here at Feeding the Silence, but if there was one thing I returned to time and again, even in fairly fallow periods, it was the Friday Review.  Partly, I'm sure, that's because if I have something to say about a movie, album, or book this is the best place to do it.  It's also due to the fact that, based on page views at least (meager though they be), this feature is fairly popular.  So, here's what you might have missed in the past 12 months:

Music:

• Dare
• Harbor Lights
• The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)
• ROSFest 2013
• Selling England By the Pound
• Yessongs/Tales From Topographic Oceans
• The Weight of the World

Books:

• Dies the Fire
• Earth Abides
• The End of Eternity
• State of Jones
• Under the Dome

Movies:

• Compliance
• The Exorcist
• Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie
• 9012Live
• Zero Dark Thirty

More to come in 2014!

Friday Review: Compliance

Some movies are labeled “inspired by a true story” to avoid lawsuits and distance the film from the real life inspiration. Others are labeled that way because, if they didn’t, you’d think “there’s no way this kind of shit could really happen.” (Still others do it just to fake you out).

Compliance needs the label because what happens on screen shouldn’t ever happen in real life, but it did.

Between the mid 1990s and mid 2000s there were a string of incidents – more than 70 in all – in which a man would call some retail establishment, claim to be a cop, and convince a manager to “investigate” an underling for some alleged offense. The orders included a strip search, confinement while waiting for the “police” to arrive, and a constant search for purloined funds (for a lengthy article about the scam see here).

Compliance dramatizes the basic outline of one of most heinous incidents – one that progressed so far that it included forced oral sex and cavity searches. Along the way, it asks an awful lot of questions about why people do things others tell them, based on nothing more than what the courts call, in another context, “apparent authority.”

Compliance tells the story of Becky, a 19-year old front-counter employee at a nondescript chicken-based fast food joint. Her manager, Sandra, has lots of things on her mind - $1500 in spoiled food, a “fiancé” who won’t pop the question, and a parcel full of unenthused teens for a workforce – when a man calling himself “Officer Daniels” calls. He accuses Becky of stealing from a customer within the last hour. He also claims that he has the customer with him, that there’s video surveillance of the whole thing, and he’s got Sandra’s boss on the other line. Won’t she help him with this investigation?

Of course she says yes, even though she’s seen nothing to suggest Becky is a thief. The caller uses that initial agreement to drive Sandra (and, eventually, her would-be fiancé) into being his agent on the scene, doing all sorts of degrading things to Becky in the name of “clearing things up” and keeping Becky from being taken to jail.

One of the interesting dynamics in the film is how there are multiple levels of “compliance” happening. First, and most obviously, there’s Sandra who acquiesces to the authority of an alleged cop and, to a lesser extent, her boss. Second, there’s the dynamic between Sandra who has to both bring some of her employees into the action or, at the very least, fend off their questions about what’s going on. In the end, they defer to their boss. Finally, and more esoterically, there’s the entire idea that regular ideas about how the world works should come to a grinding halt in order to secure evidence of criminal wrongdoing. It hangs over the people involved here just as much as it did to folks in Boston when parts of the city were locked down following the Boston Marathon bombing.

Particularly fascinating to my defense lawyer brain was how Sandra used the certainty of Becky’s guilt to keep her own underlings in line. The incident as described by the “cop” doesn’t really make any sense – as several other employees point out. It would have caused a huge scene and the allegedly wronged party would’ve sought out Sandra to complain (indeed, we see another customer complain about a poorly made sandwich – it’s a tough crowd!). Nevertheless, whatever doubt Sandra has about Becky’s guilt is suppressed on behalf of a clear narrative – there’s been a crime, I’m in charge, don’t fuck with me.

In the end, a little bit of skepticism on Sandra’s part would have gone a long way toward averting the whole situation. A simple call to her superior or to the police to confirm the investigation (we learn in a postscript that the police station is only a few blocks away) would have put an end to the farce from the beginning. But that requires the ability to disbelieve, which is hard for some people to do, particularly when it comes to people presented as authority figures. Compliance shows how far some people will go without pushing back against that kind of authority.


The Details
------------------------
Compliance
Released 2012
Directed & written by Craig Zobel
Starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, et. al.

Lawyers Come Out of the Sky, They Sue There

Let’s be honest, the only thing Avatar really had going for it was that it was visual eye candy, a truly impressive thing to look at. I mean, come on, the “Dances With Smurfs” plot was old and hackneyed when Eric Cartman came up with it! But, at least, the move was pretty to look at and immersed you in something you’d never seen before. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of Yes or Asia or many other prog (and related) bands. Not for nothin’, but when Avatar first broke a good number of prog lovers made the point that Pandora looked an awful lot like some of the album covers done by Roger Dean for those bands (and others). Things like:

Yes, Fragile (1971)

Yes, Yessongs (1973)

Yes, Keys to Ascension (1996)

Asia (1982)

Uriah Heep, Sea of Light (1995)

Now Dean has filed suit against James Cameron, looking for a cut of the bounty Avatar raked in (and that the in-production sequel surely will as well):

In his legal action, Mr Dean - described in the papers as ‘an international artist and designer, whose evocative and visionary images... created a new genre of work’ - has claimed Cameron had ‘studied and referenced his art in preparation for the film’. The papers continued: ‘The similarities of each such work are substantial, continuing, and direct so as to rule out any accidental copying or similarity in scenes common to the genre.’

Now, I’m not an IP lawyer, but I wonder how much of a case Dean really has here. For one thing, the history of art is a history of appropriation, between which and outright theft there’s a slim and sometimes blurry boundary. For another, I’m not sure this:

Mr Dean said his claims were backed up by ‘numerous comments on the internet’.

counts as controlling, or even persuasive, legal authority. On the other hand, as this article points out with some side-by-side comparisons, the similarities are striking. And it’s not as if Cameron is completely ignorant of the potential influence:

Meanwhile, since we pointed out the resemblance between Avatar and Roger Dean’s artwork a month ago, there’s been a flurry of discussion on the subject online. Entertainment Weekly asked director James Cameron whether he got his idea for the floating mountains from a Yes cover, and he laughed. ‘It might have been... Back in my pot-smoking days.’

Those are some mighty profitable weed sessions, then, James. Throw Roger a bone for the homage that was much of Avatar. It’ll at least keep him from designing the state set for Yes’s next cruise ship adventure (for which we’ll all be thankful).

Are You a Copyright Scofflaw?

That sounds like an odd question to ask in the 21st Century, in the era of Bittorrent, when the breakthrough of Napster fades like a crumbling building in the rear view mirror, doesn’t it? But I’m not talking about anything electronic, anything dealing with the Internet, or even the complaints that the modern generation thinks everything should be free. I’m talking low tech. I’m talking old school. I’m talking something you do only around your closest family and most dear friends. I did it just this past Sunday. I’m talking . . . about singing “Happy Birthday.” Yes, that’s right, it appears that “Happy Birthday” is copyright protected:

If you want to sing the song on TV, or in a restaurant, or whatever, you have to pay a licensing fee to Warner/Chappell, the music company that owns the rights. The company makes about $2 million a year off the song, according to one estimate. 

* * *

The story of the song is long and weirdly complex. The short version is: A pair of sisters published a song called ‘Good Morning to You’ in 1893. Over the next few decades, the song morphed into ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ In the 1920s and '30s, a couple versions of the birthday song were published in copyrighted songbooks.

That’s why, for instance, when you see some poor schmuck being embarrassed by a phalanx of unenthused waitpersons on her birthday at some restaurant they’re never actually singing “Happy Birthday.” It’s cheaper to have someone write a song just for that chain (and, hey, you get the brand out there more!). But that may soon change, thanks to director Jennifer Nelson, who made a documentary on the song’s history and place in the culture. When it came time to put an actual performance of the song in the film, she found she had to pay Warner/Chappell $1500. She’s not alone:

Ms. Nelson is not the first documentarian to confront the issue of paying to use the Happy Birthday song. The filmmaker Steve James paid $5,000 to use the song in the acclaimed 1994 documentary ‘Hoop Dreams,’ in which it is sung at a man’s 18th birthday party. ‘It was an important scene,’ Mr. James said in a 2005 article in The New York Times, ‘there was some amazement that Arthur had made it to 18. Of course, we wanted that in.’

What Nelson has done is take the whole matter to court, seeking to have the song declared part of the public domain (the suit is based on work done in a law review article a few years ago). I don’t know enough about copyright law (or the tortured history of “Happy Birthday”) to offer an opinion on her chances of winning. I hope she does, though. Who needs the threat of Warner/Chappel’s enforcers breaking down your door just as the cake and ice cream gets handed out?

Friday Review: Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s begin with the thought that no representation of a historical event can really accurately capture that event. Even first-hand news accounts based on interviews from people who just witnessed the event often get things wrong, either the minor details or broader strokes. Which is only to say that any movie, even a documentary, isn’t able to present “the truth,” but rather only one variant of it, a variant that’s molded for reasons of art and, sometimes, politics or propaganda.

When Zero Dark Thirty came out last year I wrote about the controversy swirling around of whether it justified torture as the means by which the United States learned the location of Osama bin Laden, ultimately leading to him being killed by Navy SEALs. On the one hand, it was an apologia for torture that shows an efficacy that isn’t borne out by the historical record. On the other, it’s a movie that, perhaps, is taking aim at broader themes. As I concluded:

Which is just to say, you really need to see the movie before you decide its morally horrific. Is there some reason to think that critics, who have actually seen it, just check their moral compasses at the door? Or is the film perhaps more nuanced and subtle than Bruni, et. al., are giving it credit for? Who knows? I suppose we common folk will need to wait until January to find out.

In the end, it’s best to judge for yourself.

So now that I’ve finally seen Zero Dark Thirty, I suppose it’s time to do some judging. Putting to one side Kathryn Biggelow’s ill-advised remark that the film is “journalistic,” I think most of the furor about the film was ill founded.

First and foremost, does the movie come out and say torture was effective in getting crucial info on bin Laden and thus allowing us to track him down? Sort of yes, sort of no. The real problem is that, for dramatic/streamlining purposes, the dozens of people questioned and, in some cases, tortured for information during the search are pretty much reduced to one guy, Ammar. We see him brutalized in multiple ways, during which he either provides no information or incorrect information (in one scene he feebly recites every day of the week as potential answers to try and avoid being crammed into a tight wooden box). Later, after an attack in Saudi Arabia, he’s treated to lunch and a little kindness (in addition to false information about the attack) and only then does he provide some relevant information.

Is Ammar’s story one of torture working in the end? After all, during their little lunch the chief interrogator tells Ammar that he can hurt him again, if he doesn’t cooperate. The threat of more brutality hangs over the conversation like a circling bird of prey. Or, alternately, is Ammar’s story one that shows how torture doesn’t work, since he only gives up important information after the torture stops? Honestly, it’s both.

If Ammar was a real person, a single identifiable individual, I’d say it shows that torture had been effective. The brutality he experienced is a bell that cannot be unrung. After all, the whole reason the bad cop/good cop dance works isn’t because the suspect wants to please the good cop, it’s because he wants to avoid further pissing off the bad cop. Once tortured, any further questioning while the threat (explicit or otherwise) remains is tainted, at least within the short time frame presented in the film.

But Ammar isn’t a real person. He’s a character in a fictionalized account of a real event, one that serves as a stand in for numerous detainees, if not damned near all of them. Dramatically, the distinction between what produces no information (torture) and what produces valuable information (kindness, or at least humane treatment) is stark and dramatically effective.

So, is it a movie that argues for the triumph of torture or not? Did Dick Cheney really love it? Ultimately, I think it works as a sort of Rorschach test for the viewer. There’s enough there for viewers looking for a pro-torture message in the film to find it, such as later repeated references to new limits on torture making the hunt for bin Laden more difficult. But there’s also enough there to read it as a statement on the ultimate futility of torture as a useful information gathering tool. There is never, to be fair, a full-throated moral objection to torture, however. It’s a purely utilitarian argument.

Personally, I see the film as a meta commentary on the United States reaction to 9/11 and our behavior during the War on Terror. In addition to being a stand-in for the person (or persons) who led the hunt for bin Laden, the main character Maya strikes me as a stand-in for the American people as well. She is spurred to action by 9/11, is uncomfortable with some of what that means, but ultimately she’s not willing to completely repudiate it. Her laser-like focus on bin Laden is contrasted with the world moving on around her, raising questions about the need to expend resources on the hunt. And, finally, when all is said and done, what has Maya really accomplished? She heads home, alone, in the back of an empty C-130 transport plane, to an uncertain future. The air of melancholy at the end of the film seems to me to be a giant question mark – like someone’s asking “was all of this worth it?”

Having said all that, is the movie any good? It’s not bad, but there isn’t much greatness in it. Most of the film is a slow, slogging procedural that’s only of interest because of the inciting crime and the target of the manhunt. There’s no real character development, things just move from point A to point B, efficiently and competently, but not very compellingly. The exception to the rule is the depiction of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Rather than pump it up artificially to be the kind of loud, bright, fast action sequence we’re used to on the big screen, Bigelow lets it play out in real time. It’s a slow, methodical execution of a meticulously assembled plan. It’s all the more chilling for the cold efficiency of the SEALs in doing their thing.

Good art, at some level, is about confronting the audience with something they don’t want to see or think about. On that level, Zero Dark Thirty succeeds in spades. Whatever your ultimate takeaway from the film, it’ll make you think about what’s in it, think about it, and make you reconsider your own thoughts. That’s not a bad result, all things considered.

The Details
------------------------
Zero Dark Thirty
Released 2012
Written by Mark Boal
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, et. al.

Friday Review: 9012Live

In honor of the release of Side Effects (which is pretty good, for what it is), acclaimed writer/director Steven Soderbergh is retiring from the biz. Given that milestone, I thought it was a good time to take a look back at where it all began for Soderbergh. You might think of Sex, Lies, and Videotape (which is also pretty good), and while that was his big breakthrough, it wasn’t his first cinematic rodeo. Rather, Soderbergh’s first gig was a small project for a group of aging English rockers struggling to stay relevant in the early 1980s.

Said rockers at the time were Yes, although they weren’t originally supposed to be. Cinema had coalesced around ex-Yesmen Alan White and Chris Squire, along with South African guitarist Trevor Rabin. Demos lingered and eventually fellow Yesman/garden gnome Jon Anderson came into the fold. The band got renamed (much in the same was as their contemporaries, Discipline, morphed back into King Crimson), added another Yes alum in Tony Kaye, and released a new album. To the surprise of many, it was a hit.

90125 (named after the catalog number from the record company) was produced by another ex-Yesman, Trevor Horn, and veritably screamed out its modernity. From its sound to its oh-so-early-80s digital artwork (made “utilizing Apple IIe 64K RAM Micro-computer”!).

I doubt any Yesfans will claim 90125 is their best work, but it’s not their worst, either. As an attempt to reshape their sound for the new decade, it came out at sort of the midpoint of similar efforts from the band’s 70s colleagues (nowhere near the aforementioned Discipline, not quite as good as Signals or Grace Under Pressure, but better than the self-titled Genesis and Civilian). And it did produce the band’s biggest hit, “Owner of Lonely Heart.” Once the tour started it must have seemed as good a time as any to make a similarly modern concert film.

Enter Soderbergh, fresh out of film school. Rather than follow the footsteps of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense and go for a “you are there on stage” effect, Soderbergh went completely the opposite direction, mixing concert footage with outtakes from 1950s educational films (at least one of which eventually made its way to Mystery Science Theater 3000). Some are given day-glow colorization that bounces off the very 80s look of the band on stage.

Does the effect work? Certainly lots of people are put off by all the cross cutting. It is a concert film, after all, so what’s up with the extraneous shit? But it’s also what makes 9012Live unique. Nothing else I’ve ever seen looks quite like it. Besides, since that’s how I first saw it lo many years ago on MTV so maybe my brain’s hardwired to expect it. However, if you’re one of those people who can’t stand the non-concert stuff be consoled by the fact that in its current DVD version you can watch only the concert itself, without any extra visual stimuli.

Well, not the entire concert. Only a little over an hour was released, relying heavily on tracks from 90125, plus a couple old favorites from The Yes Album (“Roundabout” appears as a bonus track on the DVD). The band’s in pretty good shape and most of the album material is better here than in the studio. The old stuff even comes off well, with more muscular takes on the tracks than the band trotted out on tour during most of the 70s. No, Rabin is not Steve Howe, but he knows that and plays his own way. Give the man credit for hewing to his own skill set.

As it happened, the careers of Soderbergh and the band he chronicled have gone in opposite directions since 9012Live. Soderbergh, of course, went on to great critical acclaim as one of the most prolific directors of our time (seriously, he’s made 29 feature-length movies since!). Yes never hit the commercial heights of 90125 again and this variant of the band dissolved in 1994. They’ve done good work musically since, although they’ve recently sunk to nearly parodic levels of lineup changes and being the headliner on a prog-themed cruise.

Soderbergh’s retirement may not be permanent, but if it is he can at least be assured of going out while on top of his game. That might be a good lesson to learn for other aging artsy types.

The Details
------------------------
9012Live
Released 1985
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Featuring Trevor Rabin, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Alan White, and Tony Kaye (plus another keyboard player under the stage, IIRC)

Friday Review: The Exorcist

Yes, I know, I’m 39 years old and I’m only just getting around to seeing The Exorcist. In my defense, I’m not much of a horror movie fan in the first place. Plus, I do own a copy of Tubular Bells, purely for its musical exploits. That must count for something, right?

This is a hard movie to evaluate with a fresh eye in 2013. It’s become so much a part of the culture, referenced and riffed upon so many places, that it’s difficult to separate expectation from the movie itself. I had a similar problem with The Godfather – by the time I got to it I’d seen so much of it elsewhere that it didn’t land much of an impact on me.

I’ll not go so far as this review, written in 2000 when this “version you’ve never seen” was released in theaters:

It's good stuff but, basically, "The Exorcist" is a museum piece, something to be enjoyed for its historical value, its datedness and its almost quaint shock value. It's so low-tech! Those once-vaunted special effects, in which Regan apparently levitates into the air, were done by hidden pulleys and cords. Nowadays, that would all be achieved by computer-generated effects.

Sad to say, various crucial moments in the film made me think if comedic connections instead. The actual exorcism scenes bring to mind the Saturday Night Live parody. The demon involved, Pazuzu, leads me to Futurama. Even the famous “spider walk” scene, added for this 2000 version, brings to mind not abject horror, but rather Family Guy (Fonzie be praised!).

What makes the film still worth watching today, even if the effects creak with age and things sometimes verge on parody, is that it takes its own sweet time setting up the characters involved. As a result, although it’s nominally a horror flick, it doesn’t fall into the usual horror flick trope of having gory things happen to a bunch of cutouts you don’t really give two shits for. That’s particularly true of Father Karras, the young priest who first investigates the possession and then aids in dispatching poor Pazuzu. He’s a deeply conflicted, interesting character wrestling with his own demons (ha!) who has to be dragged into the central conceit of the movie, rather than rushing into it with enthusiasm and something to prove. If anything, in spite of the collar, he’s more Scully than Mulder.

Just yesterday I was writing about resisting the need to change nonfiction works just because the facts reported in them have been called into question. Likewise, it can be tempting for purveyors of fiction to go back and “fix” things in a finished work. Based on Roger Ebert’s review of the 2000 version, several of the changes, particularly the ending, were for the worse. Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m lukewarm about The Exocist.

Still and all, it’s worth a watch. Even after all these years.  Is it the scariest movie of all time?  No, but there is nothing wrong with that.

The Details
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The Exorcist
Released 1973, "Version You've Never Seen" in 2000
Written by William Peter Blatty
Directed by William Freidkin
Starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Linda Blair, et. al.

Friday Review: Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie

It’s impossible to look and the broad swath of progressive rock and pinpoint one instrument as the one that defines the genre. After all, prog is all about pushing boundaries, which includes incorporating non-traditional (for a rock setting) instruments and combinations thereof. But if there’s a candidate that might fit the bill, it’s the Mellotron.

The Mellotron is a primitive, analog sampler. Press a key on the keyboard and a tape is triggered. Not a loop, but an 8-second piece of tape. On the tape is whatever sound has been recorded to it, but the most used sounds were strings and choirs, although there is a pretty wide array of tapes out there (I have a virtual Mellotron, made by GForce, which uses files taken from original tapes). Perhaps most famous of all, however, are the Mellotron flute tapes, as heard here:

Mellodrama is the story of the Mellotron, from its fairly humble beginnings as home entertainment product, through its ascent in the 1970s, to its slide into oblivion in the age of digital samplers, and through its more recent resurrection. Most interesting, to me, is the early history of the instrument.

I knew that the Mellotron shared a lot in common with a similar instrument, the Chamberlin. What I didn’t know was that the Chamberlin came first and the Mellotron was essentially a knock off built by a British company based on samples pawned off by a Chamberlin sales rep as his own design. But even with that common ancestor, the instruments built and sold by the two companies diverged in interesting ways (they worked out a deal whereby only Chaberlains were sold in the United States, with Mellotrons sold in Europe). The Chamberlin used tapes that used higher quality recordings and produced “cleaner” samples, whereas the Mellotron was built more robustly and had fewer issues with reliability and staying in tune (although they’re still notoriously difficult beasts to wrangle).

Mellodrama deftly covers all of that history, mostly through the use of various talking head interviews. There’s some vintage interview footage with Harry Chamberlin himself (sort of the Bob Moog of the Mellotron) and recent discussions with David Kean, who began rehabbing Mellotron’s back in the 1980s. A whole lot of the interviews are with musicians, as you might expect. Usual suspects appear, such as Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues and Tony Banks of Genesis, but so do others I wouldn’t have thought had a part to play, such as Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick (who was, at one time, a would-be Mellotron importer).

As cool as the interviews are, they also highlight the film’s main weakness. For some reason, which I’m assuming has to do with budgetary limitations, we don’t hear very much of the music that these guys talk about. Banks, for example, tells of how the massive opening of “Watcher of the Skies” actually involved jamming the Melltron’s tapeheads between two sets of tapes, so the resulting sound was a mix of the two taped instruments and the white noise/hiss from in between. Hearing the result of that tinkering right after the description would have been very effective.

But that’s a minor quibble. And I’ve got no problem with the film’s original soundtrack, filled as it is with ‘tronny goodness from the likes of Anglagaard’s Mattias Olsson.

In the end, Mellodrama succeeds in doing what it sets out to do – tell the story of a unique instrument and its influence in modern music. It’s not a personally focused film like Moog, so don’t expect that kind of compelling central character to carry you through. But, if you’re interested in music technology and the history of that kind of stuff, by all means check it out. And if you’re a prog fan and you want to see how part of the “prog sound” came to be, likewise, check it out.

The Details
------------------------
Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie
Released 2009
Directed by Dianna Dilworth
Featuring Mike Pinder, Ian McDonald, Tony Banks, Brian Wilson, et. al.

Friday Review Year In Review

As with last year, here's an easy to navigate list of Feeding the Silence's accidental regular feature, the Friday Reviews.  Sorted helpfully by review type, just because I'm that kind of guy:

Music

• Authobahn (1974)
• Clockwork Angels (2012)
• Diving Bell (2010/2012)
• King of Number 33 (2011)
• The Long Division (2012)
• The Sole Inhabitant (2006)
• Sounds That Can't Be Made (2012)
• Storia O Leggenda (1977)
• Le voyage dans la lune (2012)
• Short Takes, Part 1 (featuring Mars Hollow, Moon Safari, Aranis, Mahogany Frog, and Mike Keneally) & Part 2 (featuring Steve Hogarth & Richard Barbieri, Big Big Train, Anglagard and echolyn)

Movies & TV

• The Apostle (1997)
• Biutiful (2010)
• Destination Moon (1950)
• Mad Men (Season One) (2007)
• Red State (2011)
• Senna (2011)
• Super 8 (2011)
• Tabloid (2010)
• Take Shelter (2011)

Books

• Clockwork Angels (2012)
• The Confession (2010)
• Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion (1989, 1990)
• The Martian Chronicles (1950)
• Palimpsest (2009)
• Redshirts (2012)
• Slavery By Another Name (2009)
• Thunderstruck (2006)

See ya' in 2013!

Zero Dark Bullshit?

Do you have to see a movie before you can judge it? I don’t mean on a “thumbs up/thumbs down” kind of level. I’m talking about on a moral level, deciding about whether the message of the movie is worth condemning. Do you have to see Birth of a Nation to know it’s profoundly racist? Do you have to see Triumph of the Will to know it’s a blinkered piece of propaganda?

Zero Dark Thirty, the new film about the hunt of Osama bin Laden, from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal (the team behind Oscar winner The Hurt Locker), is raising that issue. Specifically, the films brutal depiction of the torture of terrorists by CIA operatives is causing some folks to wonder if it’s an apologetic for the torture. The debate’s been simmering since the film’s gotten into the thick of the awards season, showing up on numerous “best of” lists for the year (it doesn’t officially open outside of NY and Los Angeles until January 11).

Blowback began in the New York Times, where Frank Bruni commented that:

I’m betting that Dick Cheney will love the new movie ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’

That’s because:

‘Enhanced interrogation techniques’ like waterboarding are presented as crucial to that search [for bin Laden].

* * *

And by the movie’s account, it produces information vital to the pursuit of the world’s most wanted man. No waterboarding, no Bin Laden: that’s what ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ appears to suggest. And the intelligence agents involved in torture seem not so much relieved as challenged by Obama’s edict that it stop. Their quest for leads just got that much more difficult.

Glenn Greenwald picked up on Bruni’s criticism. Although he explicitly noted that he hasn’t seen the film and was only working off of reactions to it, he writes:

With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.

And as Greenwald catalogs, his reaction is not unique:

Other reactions to the commentary from film reviewers from those who haven't yet seen the film was offered yesterday by NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen (‘WTF is Kathryn Bigelow doing inserting torture into her film, Zero Dark Thirty, if it wasn't used to get Bin Laden?’); Mother Jones' Adam Serwer (‘The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture’); The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan (‘Bigelow constructs a movie upon a grotesque lie’); and The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky (‘Can I just say that I am equally bothered, and indeed even more bothered, by the fact that the movie opens with 9-11’).

It is true, as Adam Serwer over at Mother Jones recounts that numerous sources have established that the information that led to bin Laden’s eventual demise was not procured by torture. So if a film that’s tagline is “The Greatest Manhunt In History” and which the director claims was made using “almost a journalistic approach,” getting such a fact wrong is pretty inexcusable.

But is that really what the film shows? After all, Greenwald and many others haven’t actually seen it. Are film critics so swayed by the technical aspects to check their morality at the door?* Consider this take from Spencer Ackerman at Wired:

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden begins with an unsparing, nauseating and frighteningly realistic look at how the CIA tortured many people and reaped very little intelligence. Never before has a movie grappled with post-9/11 torture the way Zero Dark Thirty does. The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended.

He goes on to describe what happens on screen in some detail:

These are not ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ as apologists for the abuse have called it. There is little interrogation presented in Zero Dark Thirty. There is a shouted question, followed by brutality. At one point, ‘Maya,’ a stand-in for the dedicated CIA agents who actually succeeded at hunting bin Laden, points out that one abused detainee couldn’t possibly have the information the agents are demanding of him. The closest the movie comes to presenting a case for the utility of torture is by presenting the name of a key bin Laden courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, as resulting from an interrogation not shown on screen. But — spoiler alert — the CIA ultimately comes to learn that it misunderstood the context of who that courier was and what he actually looked like. All that happens over five years after the torture program initiated. Meanwhile, the real intelligence work begins when a CIA agent bribes a Kuwaiti with a yellow Lamborghini for the phone number of the courier’s mother, and through extensive surveillance, like a police procedural, the manhunt rolls to its climax. If this is the case for the utility of torture, it’s a weak case — nested within a strong case for the inhumanity of it.

Likewise, Emily Bazelon at Slate suggests things are a bit more nuanced:

The movie thus doesn’t show a vicious act of torture leading straight to a game-changing piece of intelligence, or even a unique piece. After all, the interrogation of Amar takes place in 2004; Bin Laden remained free for seven more years. And yet it’s Amar’s information that feels crucial, because it’s presented as the root of Maya’s obsession with this particular lead. This is the way in which the movie credits torture: It suggests that the tenacious agent who led the hunt wouldn’t have been moved to do so without this piece of information given up by a detainee who’d been tortured.

Is this actually what happened? It’s hard to say for sure.

And, for what it’s worth:

Boal told TheWrap.com that despite the gruesome torture scenes, viewers who come away thinking torture was the pivotal tactic in nabbing bin Laden, rather than one method used in a decade-long hunt, are ‘misreading the film.’

I can’t say whether either Ackerman’s or Bazelon’s impressions are accurate – I haven’t seen the movie yet, of course – but neither can Greenwald and others who haven’t seen the movie say it isn’t. Context matters, particularly when you separate the work itself from how it’s either promoted or described shorthand. From the advertising, one might expect the focus of Zero Dark Thirty to be on the raid itself and the time period just before when it was planned and the intelligence gathered to support it. But perhaps the movie tells a broader story, one in which the national urge for revenge took some ugly and dead end turns before it turned out the way it did. Maybe it’s a metaphoric examination of the entire war on terror, in which we gain the ultimate prize (bin Laden in a watery grave), but at tremendous cost? Who can tell without actually seeing it.

I saw some similar criticisms, in reverse, of Argo, Ben Affleck’s slick depiction of the rescue of a small group of Americans who escaped the embassy in Tehran in 1979. People argued it didn’t go far enough into the background of the Iranian revolution or that it didn’t deal enough with the hostages who didn’t make it out of the embassy. But that’s not what the movie was about. It was about a specific event that occurred against the backdrop of those events. It was never supposed to be a long form examination of the Iranian revolution.

Which is just to say, you really need to see the movie before you decide its morally horrific. Is there some reason to think that critics, who have actually seen it, just check their moral compasses at the door? Or is the film perhaps more nuanced and subtle than Bruni, et. al., are giving it credit for? Who knows? I suppose we common folk will need to wait until January to find out.

In the end, it’s best to judge for yourself.

* Who do they think they are, lawyers?!

Friday Review: The Apostle

When people complain about whether a particular story works or doesn’t, most of the time they focus on how things end. Either “it just ends” or “the ending doesn’t make sense” or “I thought it was over but it kept going.” You know what I’m talking about. But just as important to the success of a story as when and how it ends is when and how it begins.

After all, most characters in any story exist before and after the story we actually see. They have backgrounds, histories, triumphs and setbacks that inform who they are, but that we never quite figure out. The question is, how is the best way to spend time with them?

The biggest flaw of The Apostle, written and directed by Robert Duvall, who also delivers an amazing performance as the titular pastor, is when it begins. That’s not because the flim’s too long (although, at just north of two hours and 15 minutes, it is), but because by the time the story really gets going, we know too much about Duvall’s character, Sonny. It’s a tale of redemption, but we get to know Sonny too well to actually want him to be redeemed.

He’s a preacher. And not one of those quiet, speaks in metaphor, Unitarian types, either. I’m talking full blown gonzo, just short of speaking in tongues (he refrains to get on the radio), revival tent firebrand. He doesn’t just talk to God, he shouts. He is the kind of asshole who, upon finding a car accident along his drive, stops not to provide first aid, but to confront the dying driver with the fact that he’s going to hell if he ain’t right with Jesus.

If that was the only thing wrong with him, the following tale of redemption would mean much more. Instead, we see Sonny stalk his estranged wife (throwing a rock through her window in the process), drag her around by her hair (in public) in a way that shows he’s no stranger to domestic violence, and smash her new boyfriend in the head with a baseball bat, killing him. What’s worse, Sonny wraps his problems up in his religion, such that his problems aren’t caused by his own violence and rage, but by the devil.

But that’s only the first half hour of the movie. At that point, Sonny flees and finds refuge in a small town as the “apostle” E.F. The rest of the movie tells the story of how he establishes a new church and builds it into a community landmark. It could be a moving, even charming, tale, did we not know what an asshole Sonny really was. I’m not one to argue that a person is beyond redemption – I’m a criminal defense lawyer, after all – but killing a man in a blind rage and then waving it away as part of some religious world view is a pretty high hurdle to cross.

Which is to say that the question of when to start the story has a great impact on what comes behind. I’ll be honest – Sonny was never a character that was going to worm his way into my heart. Having said that, had his backstory been a little more mysterious, or at least doled out along the path of his attempts at redemption, it would have made for a more compelling story. As it is, my main thought for most of The Apostle was “is he really going to get away with this?”

Which is, perhaps, the question Duvall wanted viewers to be asking as the film progressed. I kind of doubt it, but it’s possible. Whether he does, in fact, “get away with this” depends on your perspective and whether you value the enforcement of secular law or spiritual redemption.

The Apostle isn’t a great film, mostly because of how it tells its story. It does revolve around a great performance, however, so it’s well worth seeing.

On an ironic note, The Apostle and last week’s Friday Review subject, Red State, both end with a fundamentalist preacher incarcerated and unwilling to stop trying to preach the good news. Red State’s response (delivered by Kevin Smith, off camera) is “shut the fuck up.” Nobody does the same in The Apostle, but I imagine someone was thinking it.

The Details
------------------------
The Apostle
Released 1997
Written and directed by Robert Duvall
Starring Robert Duvall, Farah Fawcett, Miranda Richardson, et. al.

Friday Review: Red State

Disclosing my bias up front, I’m a big fan of Kevin Smith. Ever since my college roommate and I first rented Clerks way back in the days of VHS. I recognize his shortcomings as a filmmaker (as he does himself), but I like the overly talky scripts and, yes, the dick and fart jokes. Besides, it’s always nice to see a self-taught fat fuck make good (we can all dream). And the man tells some mean stories.

Unfortunately, when he steps out of his comfort zone, things get rocky. I didn’t think Jersey Girl was as awful as most people did, but it clearly wasn’t the bold breakout from the View Askew universe, to which he ran right back for Clerks II. I was hoping that Red State, which is ever further outside his comfort zone, might fare better. Sadly, it doesn’t.

Red State is actually three different movies, thrown together and jostling for attention during its run time. It begins in the most Smith-like way, with three high school boys excitedly planning to meet an older woman for sex via some kind of online service (one kid says, “it’s like Craigslist for people who want to get laid,” to which another says, “I thought Craigslist was all about people who want to get laid?”). It is, of course, a setup, in which the three are entrapped by their hookup (Melissa Leo, of all people) and drugged into unconsciousness. Like a setup for a teen horror flick.

But then one of the three kids awakes in a cage in a church, home of a Phelps-like clan of ultrafundie Christians. They not only spout the hate of the Phelps bunch, they take action – executing a gay dude (Saranwrapped to a cross, no less) they had earlier abducted from somewhere. Through a lengthy sermon from the leader (who is more long winded than even Jay), it becomes clear that our horny teens will meet the same fate. So, it’s a movie about a cult or fundamentalist religion, right?

Shift again. Contact with local law enforcement at the compound goes badly, which brings in the ATF to conduct a Ruby Ridge/Waco style siege that, of course, turns horribly bloody. There’s a layer of modern post-9/11 terrorist hunting in there, too. Things spiral down into a confusing firefight that seems to last longer than the war in Afghanistan. To top it off there is, possibly, the actual apocalypse, in a head fake that might have truly gone somewhere interesting.

Any one of those flicks might have worked on its own merit, but bumped up against each other none of them really get a chance to breed. The ATF materialize out of nowhere, for instance, without even the wherewithal to keep the local sheriff from carrying on in his own stupid way. The cult/religious stuff can only go so far, as we don’t really get beyond the placard slogans you’d see on the evening news (although Michael Parks, as the leader, is suitably chilling). By the end, with one exception, there’s no character to care about to the point that when the bullets start flying and the blood flows, you just want it to be over with.

I’ve read that Smith is basically done as a director, turning his attention to being a full time talker and social media personality (perhaps the Gore Vidal for the 21st century?). I hope he goes behind the camera for at least one more shot at a movie that exists outside the View Askew world. I’m pretty sure he’s got a good one in him, even if he hasn’t been able to find it yet.


The Details
------------------------
Red State
Released 2011
Written and directed by Kevin Smith
Starring Michael Parks, John Goodman, Melissa Leo, et. al.

On the Stupidity of “Worst” Lists

Humans love lists. Or at least the modern American version of humans love lists. There are entire websites that exist only to make lists of largely irrelevant things. I wonder what it was in our ancestors’ history that made us evolve a love for lists.

Maybe it’s just that lists are good fun. They start heated arguments that are ultimately meaningless and wind up with everybody agreeing to disagree and having a beer. It’s a lot easier to bury the hatchet about whether Citizen Kane or The Godfather is the best movie ever made than it is about whether an extension of the Bush tax cuts are a good idea.

That being said, there’s a species of list that seems completely pointless to me – worst of lists. Particularly if you’re talking about art. Best of lists are at least aspirational and tend to be based on some shared idea of quality, even if the details get fuzzy. Worst of lists, on the other hand, tend to be a list of stuff the person making the list doesn’t like or, at best, stuff he thinks is overrated.

Case in point, this piece at Salon titled “Ten Bands I Will Be Forced to Listen to In Hell.” My first thought reading this was, “whoa, and I thought I was a music snob/asshole.” This guy really brings it and against some suspiciously mainstream targets. I’m not a huge fan of any of them (I’ve never gotten the appeal of The Beach Boys), but I have a hard time thinking that any of that stuff could be the grist of eternal torment. It is funny, though (of Sting he writes, “[i]f pretension were bullion, Sting would be the third Koch brother.”).

Because, honestly, anything that’s released in the mainstream culture, much less something that’s wildly popular, is at least competently produced. I don’t mean that it’s “good” in an ascetic sense, just that everything’s in tune and the end product sounds like some care was taken with it. Seriously, does this guy think that some kind of out of tune, obscenely loud, dissonant caterwauling* drilled directly into his ears at Disaster Area decibel levels would be better than anything Creed ever produced? I kind of doubt it.

I see the same thing while reading through the regular-person reviews at IMDB or Netflix after I watch a movie. Someone will breathlessly claim that a particular movie (in this case, it was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) is the worst ever made. Not just the worst they’ve seen, mind you, but the worst film ever made. I can only assume that such people either haven’t watched a lot of movies or have never seen Mystery Science Theater 3000. There are movies out there where things are out of focus, the dialogue is barely audible, and you can see the boom mike in the shots.

Which makes the whole enterprise kind of pointless, right? It’s just a chance to vent about stuff that aggravates you. I got no problem with that – how could I? Just don’t think you’re making some kind of objective assessment. And think twice before you pop off like that. Like I said last week, hate isn’t really good for you and what does spouting off like that really accomplish, anyway?

At the very least, be funny about it.

* K would not doubt think that describes some of my favorite music, I’m sure!

Does Genre Matter? Sould It?

Let me tell you about a movie I watched recently . . .

It’s about a 17-year old girl, A, who is on the verge of big things, about to go off to a very prestigious college. She makes a grave mistake, driving drunk and causing a car wreck that leaves a man, B, in a coma and kills his wife and young son. A few years later, after A is released from prison, she seeks out B in order to atone or apologize or . . . well, maybe she doesn’t quite know herself. B, a shell of his former self due to the accident, doesn’t know who she is (juvenile records are sealed, remember). Predictably, yet improbably, they bond, until the awful truth is revealed. A makes one last gesture seeking forgiveness. The end.

If I asked you what genre that film would fit in, what would you say? Drama, broadly, and possibly tragedy, in the classic Greek sense. It’s also a small indie film, of the kind that focuses on only a few characters and their relationships with each other. So far, so good.

Now, let me add a little twist.

The story of A and B play out against the backdrop of a superbly improbable event – the appearance in the sky of a second Earth that, by all accounts, is just like ours (down to having the same people on it). And the last act of forgiveness A does for B is to give up her spot on a spaceship to the other Earth to B, so that he might find his alternate wife and son there.

OK, now what kind of genre are we talking about? It sounds like science fiction, except that the movie almost goes out of its away to avoid any “science,” ignoring the real world calamities that might arise if another planet suddenly appeared very near to ours. Fantasy then, maybe? Or maybe just the general rubric of “speculative fiction” – a simple “what if?” story, without any grander world building ambitions?

The film I’m talking about is Another Earth, a low-budget indie that took Sundance by storm a couple of years ago. It’s very good – the slow dance of the two main characters, although fairly predictable, is very well done – but I’ve seen more than one person up in arms that it dares to call itself sci-fi. Not just in a “this isn’t marketed the right way” sense, but in a “this isn’t sci-fi, therefore it’s crap” sense. As if they feel they’ve been duped. Does that make any sense?

In one way it might. If something is presented to a reader/viewer/listener as “science fiction” or “progressive rock” (to use another genre with hotly contested boundaries) that triggers some particular expectations in their mind. If those expectations aren’t met, they’re disappointed. I understand that. I’ve got albums in my collection that came out of the prog world but don’t really fit the genre, if we’re honest. It took me a little while to let go the “but they’ve got the wrong label!” observation and just get down to the music.

Similarly, while Another Earth is sold as sci-fi (by some, at any rate), it’s pretty clear early on that it isn’t really interested in any of the scientific ideas or problems raised by the sudden appearance of the additional Earth. It’s more of a big blue metaphor, hanging in the sky promising a second chance for our characters. I could understand the frustration if they had tried to deal with the scientific stuff and did it badly, but where that is so clearly not the focus of things, why get hung up on it?

At the end of the day, however, a movie, book, or album stands or falls on its own merits, not how its described, packaged, or sold. To say negative things about a movie because it doesn’t conform to your preconceptions of what you thought it was going to be is awfully closed minded. That doesn’t mean you have to like it – art is subjective, after all, and what moves some people will seem pointless to others. Fair enough. But unless you reach that conclusion with the blinders removed, it doesn’t really count.

At best, genre labels and descriptions are signposts that might guide you to art you would like. If you’ve seen movies X, Y, and Z and they fall under the heading “film noir,” you might want to explore other movies with the same label. But that label doesn’t guarantee quality. Sturgeon was right (or perhaps too generous) – 90% of everything is crap – even within your own pet genres.

I’ve written before about how frustrating it is when writers from outside the genre dip their toes into the speculative fiction pool but furiously deny that’s what they’re doing. It suggests that they have negative preconceptions of what science fiction or fantasy is – pulpy, poorly written, simple escapism, etc. – that they don’t want linked to their work. It’s unseemly and reeks of snobbery. Readers or viewers who do the same thing, and link genre purity with quality, aren’t any better.

Friday Review: Destination Moon

In his penultimate column for FilmCritic.com, John Scalzi laid out nine sci-fi flicks “you should see that you probably haven’t.” I was pleasantly surprised to have either seen all of them or have them in the Netflix queue, with one exception. I knew the name Destination Moon, but had no idea it was a George Pal production and was co-written by Robert Heinlein. With that kind of pedigree, I immediately hit Netlfix and put it at the front of the line. So, was it a journey worth taking?

I think so, although more for archaeological purposes than sheer entertainment. Made in 1950, Destination Moon has a hilariously overwrought “American industry, fuck yeah!” setup that makes you wonder if Ayn Rand, in addition to Heinlein, had a hand in the script. After a governmental rocket program is scuttled by sabotage (done, probably, given the times, by filthy commies!), private industry takes over. A rocket is built to take a crew to the moon (the mechanics of which are explained by Woody Woodpecker). Meddlesome bureaucrats try to stop the launch (due to concerns over its nuclear propulsion system), which proceeds just steps ahead of a court injunction. Really.

Once the rocket launches, things really get off the ground, so to speak. From there on out, Destination Moon is a solid piece of 1950s hard sci-fi, complete with mathematical calculations and legitimate concerns about the safety of the whole enterprise. Of course, some of what is on screen we know now is wrong – laughably so, in some cases – but given where we were at the time, it’s pretty solid.

Unfortunately, the focus on hard science makes for a somewhat dry dramatic arc. Our heroes reach the moon, but this isn’t the moon of Georges Méliès or H.G. Wells?. There are no natives who take our heroes hostage. Not even any man-bats or what have you. Only rocks, dust, and a spectacular view of the Earth. Supreme credit to Pal and his crew for not trying to create excitement at the expense of accuracy. Shame it makes things a little bloodless.

More to the point, it forces us to focus on the heroes themselves who are, to put it mildly, barely defined at all. The notable exception is the second-string radio operator, the walking stereotype of a Brooklyn dimwit, who becomes the audience surrogate when things need explained, in spite of the fact that we all saw the damned cartoon not too long before. He’s hammered in as comic relief that just doesn’t work.

Thus, when drama finally arrives on the Moon, in the form of a variant on “The Cold Equations,” it’s really hard to care that one of the four crew members might have to get left behind to die, especially if it’s the annoying guy from Brooklyn. In perhaps the only real sop to story ahead of realism, the crew has a “Eureka!” moment and figures out a way to leave the Moon safely. So nothing’s really lost, for all that.

If only they would actually get home. It’s ironic that Destination Moon ends with the rocket on its return journey to Earth, but before reentry. We know from Woody that the rocket will deploy a series of parachutes to slow its descent before landing. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have addressed the problem of reentry temperatures and, thus, it seems that our heroes are destined to escape from the Moon only to burn up upon return to the Earth (or die in a fiery crash). Again, it’s likely they didn’t know any better at the time, but still.

While Destination Moon lacks quite a bit as a film, one thing going for it are its exquisite visuals (it won an Oscar for visual effects). It’s clearly dated to 21st Century eyes, but they do a fantastic job of servicing the story and providing some unique views of places nobody had ever been before.

Destination Moon is a odd one. It’s got a cheesy 1950s B-movie sentimentality, but it’s visually impressive and scientifically rigorous (given the times). We rarely see that in modern sci-fi. So maybe it’s more impressive than I give it credit for.

The Details
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Destination Moon
Released 1950
Directed by Irving Pichel
Written by James O'Hanlon, Robert Heinlein, Rip Van Ronkel
Starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, et. al.

Friday Review: Take Shelter

King Crimson’s sole full-length album in the double trio format, THRAK, is one of my favorites. But I don’t listen to it precisely as Fripp and friends intended. The album kicks off with the instrumental “VROOM” and returns, in the end to a reworking of its themes with “VROOM VROOM.” Somewhat oddly, for me at least, the album then proceeds to the short “VROOM VROOM: Coda,” which is completely superfluous. “VROOM VROOM” is a perfect summing up of things and a matching bookend to the opener. So, when I listen to THRAK, I just stop the CD after “VROOM VROOM.” Problem solved.

TRHAK and its ending popped into my head while I was thinking about Take Shelter and realized that they had a lot in common. The film, for nearly all of its (admittedly a little overstuffed) two hours, is a slow but fascinating character study of a decent man grappling with emerging mental illness. Then in the end . . . well, something happens that may or may not make all that meaningless. Whether it does or not might not even change your mind about the overall worth of the film, which is saying something.

Michael Shannon (who, between this, Shotgun Stories, and Boardwalk Empire really needs to be cast as the witty gay friend in a romantic comedy just so he won’t explode) plays Curtis, who appears to have a pretty good life. Solid job in construction, loving wife, cute daughter. But he’s also begun having seriously vivid apocalyptic dreams, from which he awakes in terror. They involve a huge storm rolling in, accompanied by rain that looks like fresh motor oil, and a host of other odd things. They never end well. Even worse, some of the bits of his dreams – unexplained sounds of thunder, for example – are starting to crop up in real life.

Curtis begins to suspect he’s going mad, and not without reason. His mother is schizophrenic, having been diagnosed during his youth. He is determined not to abandon his family the way she did and, so, while dealing the prospect of insanity, Curtis also builds an expensive storm shelter in the family’s back yard. In essence, he’s covering both his bases. Thus, the movie plays with you, playing it loose with the question of whether Curtis is really nuts or whether something supernatural is going on.

There is a storm, severe enough trigger the town’s tornado warning system, and the family does run for cover into the storm shelter. But it’s hardly apocalyptic. When Curtis’s wife finally convinces him to open the shelter and see what’s up, he sees like going on pretty much like normal. Neighbors are picking up downed limbs. The sun is shining. It seems to confirm that it’s all in Curtis’s head. He and the wife go to a psychiatrist and commit to some intensive treatment, just after a family vacation to the beach.

But that’s not where things end. The “VROOM VROOM: Coda,” if you will, happens at the beach where another storm shows up. This one is more like the ones in Curtis’s dreams, down to the oily rain. Except this time, there is no waking up, only the end credits (with only the sound of thunder for a soundtrack – very creepy). So, is this real? Is this another dream? If it’s real, does it ruin the whole damned movie? Those questions (and others) are hashed out ad nauseum over at IMDB.

Personally, I’m not sure it matters. As with THRAK, a little extra appendage at the end of an otherwise brilliant work doesn’t ruin the whole thing. Furthermore, I’ve convinced myself that it really was another dream (so he doesn’t wake up before the movie ends – you think Curtis exists only within the confines of the film’s run time?), one that shows how Curtis has accepted both his illness and the knowledge that his family is there to support him in dealing with it. Dare I say it, when looked at that way it kind of works as a happy ending. And I’m not one to go looking for those.

The Details

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Take Shelter

Released 2011

Directed & written by Jeff Nichols
Starring Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Shea Whigham, et. al.