CHINESE OPERA

When Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was released this summer, you could practically hear the sigh of relief from cinephiles like myself: at last, "our" Zhang was back, the Zhang who made tiny small scale dramas of domesticity and relative intimacy, the Zhang seemingly in abeyance after a brace of colossal wuxia epics. So, of course, his follow-up film turns out to be an epic.

What's striking about Curse of the Golden Flower, however, is that it successfully avoids the trap of both Hero and House of Flying Daggers, being lovely to look at and dramatically inert. Make no mistake, the cinematography in Curse, by Zhao Xiaoding, is very lovely indeed; it's just that I was able to walk of the theater this time with a feeling that I had seen something more substantial than just an explosion of well-choreographed colors. While Hero and House of Flying Daggers are primarily martial arts epic, Curse of the Golden Flower is primarily a Zhang Yimou film, one that just happens to involve vast armies and action setpieces.

The story, for all its complexity and palace intrigue, is essentially reducible to a soap opera about family discord (in fact, I was rather pleasantly reminded of Kurosawa's Ran, which also treats an epic tableau as ultimately just the background for a domestic drama): the Emperor (Chow Yun-Fat) has secretly arranged to poison his wife (Gong Li), who retaliates by grooming her eldest son Jie (Jay Chou), the second of three princes; meanwhile, the crown prince Xiang (Liu Ye) is sleeping with the daughter (Li Man) of the court doctor (Ni Dahong), while she poisons the emperor, the stepmother with whom the prince has had sexual relations in the past.

You don't need me to point out that unlike e.g. Raise the Red Lantern, there's nothing even slightly "realistic" about any of these goings-on, but there's not a hell of a lot in Macbeth or Richard III that passes much of a logic test either. What matters is that given their operatic surroundings, the characters still ring true as recognizable humans. As with any opera, the elevation makes the emotional core of things bigger and more powerful, and if you feel a little bit overwhelmed by everything, well, that just means that it's working. What Zhang has done is to construct a ludicrously baroque machine, with every single cog and gear in place before the film starts, and then inviting us to watch what happens when he starts it. The machine can only work if each character behaves precisely as the person that they are, and this is the joy of the film: characters who are in complete control of their destiny being destroyed by Fate, simply because they refuse to change themselves.

With all that plot going on, there's not a whole lot of space for fight sequences, but this is recognizable wuxia. The reason it works where Zhang's previous forays into the genre really don't is that for the first time, the director is using the rules to his advantage, rather than treating them like a straight jacket. We recognize that wuxia is fantastic, and he uses this essentially as an excuse for his convoluted story: it has a heightened tone to match the genre, if you will. "Getting away with it" in genre films is a long a glorious tradition stretching across the whole of cinema, from character studies to political satire, and it's always a privilege to see it done well.

Of course, there are battle scenes, and they are well-executed, but they are not particularly imaginative, and they don't violate reality too much (i.e. nobody is fighting on a floating whirlwind of leaves). I am torn on this. Seeing a brilliant fight scene is a pleasure in and of itself, whether it has a good script backing it up or not, and I'm a bit disappointed that Zhang's story took up so much energy that could be put to slightly fuller passages with the silent rappelling assassins. For example.

The film's construction largely takes the cue of its heightened melodramatic story: the colors are lurid, the designs of every article of clothing and every wall hanging and every rug are relentlessly Byzantine, and the acting...the acting is fantastic, but it's so extremely stylized that it veers towards off-putting. Not so in the case of the film's de facto lead, Gong Li, though. Ah, Gong Li! I often find myself thinking that she would be a great silent film actress: she is beautiful, and communicates volumes with her facial expressions, but I often find her recitative somewhat unmemorable. It only takes a role like this, which by all appearance was tailor-made, to remind me of just what she is capable of. Admittedly, it's a role suited to her limitations, but she can do Icy Imperious Bitch like nobody's business - it's evoctive of her Memoirs of a Geisha performance, without the concommittant language proble, and it's unforgettable. The rest of the cast largely succeeds at acting "big," except surprisingly for Chow Yun-Fat, who kind of mumbles through most of his performance and generally looks uncomfortable wearing a big golden suit of armor. Indeed, he seems to give the film's only "real" performance, and while it works at the end - there's a scene that is far more disturbing thanks to his general flatness - he's mkissing the point and frankly, the fun. This is a great mad Tennessee Williams/Shakespearean style melodrama, and chewing the scenery is a positive virtue here.

So actually, it's not really a Zhang Yimou film at all, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.

8/10

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, BUSBY BERKELEY? A NATION TURNS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU

And now we come to 2006's requisite "film that everybody already has an opinion about because it's been so very thoroughly written about, thank you Oscar-pimping media": Dreamgirls.

First things first: you've heard right. Jennifer Hudson's performance of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" at the midpoint is beyond phenomenal. Once upon a time, I showed a girlfriend the "Dancing in the Dark" number from Vincente Minelli's The Band Wagon, proclaiming that "movies exist so that scenes like that one can be put into them." I feel much the same way about "And I Am Telling You..." Hudson - I repeat this even though we all know it, goddamn the entertainment media - was rejected from American Idol back in the day, despite (because of) her extraordinarily powerful voice, and if losing on a TV show means getting to sing this song in this movie, then hurrah for reality TV. Hudson takes the song, an anthem of a scorned woman defying her absent lover as well as the best number in the show just on the merits, and tears into it with so much power and energy that names like Billie, Janis and Big Mama Thornton floated across my brain unbidden. Half of the theater I was sitting in burst into applause at the end, spontaneously and honestly, because dammit you had to do something at the end of something like that.

It's all by itself a reason to plunk out your money and your two hours, and it's also a huge liability, because the moment it's over, you find yourself thinking, "the movie just peaked. No two ways about it."

Dreamgirls suffers from a whole lot of little problems and one great big one, and that great big one is so endemic to the very concept that I can't believe nobody cared about it in 1981, when the show premiered. Namely, we have the following situation: Effie (Hudson) has a fantastic voice, but it's not a "pop" voice and she is fat, so she is replaced by Deena (Beyoncé Knowles), who has a thin and lifeless voice. It is established over and over again that Effie has just about the finest voice ever heard to man. Would you like me to tell you, or will you try to guess?

Ding! That's right! For the musical to work as a story, one of the leads has to possess a noticeably crappy voice. I'll say this for Dreamgirls as a story: I believed it. There was never a doubt in my mind that Effie White was getting screwed over and that I should be horribly upset about it, because Jennifer Hudson really does have the best voice in the movie, and whenever anybody else was talking or singing or doing anything whatsoever, my thought was consistently:

"Why am I not watching Jennifer Hudson right now?"

I consider myself a connoisseur of movie musicals, and I can't think of another example it that genre's long and beautiful history that hinges on making sure we get that Character A can't sing. You might as well retitle the thing Dreamgirls: Fucking Pointless, because nobody in the history of time has ever watched a musical in the hope of hearing bad singers.*

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show? Pretty thin. Bill Condon is a decent director and a better writer, and it's really obvious that he's never worked with a musical before. More than any other genre in cinema, musicals represent a heightened reality - that's not an opinion, it's a fact, like "film noir tends to have a lot of black in it" - and you can either run with that, or run from it. Given that Condon scripted Chicago, a film whose fantasy structure made it seem positively mortified that it had song-and-dance routines, it's not terribly surprising that he chooses to run away. His style, while not massively realistic, has always been fairly subdued and straightforward, and while that's okay for a film about a college professor, it's not okay for a musical. Show of hands, who can tell me how many good realist musicals there have been? One? That's right! And the director himself said it doesn't count!

Realistic musicals are dull. I am prepared to defend that statement with my life. And yet here is Dreamgirls, shot with a very nice and sober camera, and very proper film-school style editing. Mr. Condon, you have people rehearsing for a dance routine in a body shop. Please accept that you are not shooting a documentary. Choreograph your camera movements accordingly.

Not that the show gives him all that much to work with. It's a musical very clearly based on the rise of Diana Ross and the Supremes, and the birth of Motown. And around 50% of the music sounds a lot like low-grade soul (the exceptions: "And I Am Telling You..." and "One Night Only" are both fantastic, and both sung by, surprise, Jennifer Hudson). Which leaves around 50% that sounds like Broadway music from 1981. Maybe you, dear reader, enjoy Broadway music from 1981. I'm not sure why that's the case, but you are entitled to your opinion. Anyway, it has a bad beat and you can't dance to it.

6/10 (One whole point for "And I Am Telling You..." and another for Hudson in general)

*DO YOU HEAR THAT TIM BURTON, YOU SON OF A WHORE?

RISING UP TO THE CHALLENGE

When we think of great writer/director/actors, most of us, I hope, will come up with names like Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Charles Chaplin, Jacques Tati.* I think most of us will not think of Sylvester Stallone. And while Rocky Balboa won't convince anybody to add his name to the extremely short list of supremely talented hyphenates, it's more than a little shocking just how good he manages to be. The sixth go-round in the venerable yet horrendous franchise, and the fourth directed by the star (after II, III and IV) is, as you've probably heard by now, pretty much a fine movie. There's no doubt it's the best since the first Rocky; hell, it might even be better.

The plot is a neat metaphor for the film itself: the onetime champ, reduced to a respectable punchline, must beg for the right to get one last fight, where victory lies not in winning, but in not making a complete fool of himself. The point isn't to be a champ, it's simply a matter of remembering and respecting your past, and being proud of what you used to accomplish. Not hard to see the value in that.

The past is a constant companion in Rocky Balboa: throughout the film we see snips and scraps of Rocky, although happily none of its godforsaken sequels (it's not that the film is a complete reset, just that the first four sequels are not necessary). I think it's probably the most obvious and most surprising sign of Stallone's facility as a director that these flashbacks are neither intrusive nor overused, but appropriate and tastefully done, even poetically in some cases, where the images from the first film are literally superimposed over the same locations, ragged and ruined but still recognizable.

Ragged and ruined - that's the overwhelming look of the film, and the tone. Rocky Balboa isn't a weak man, but he's no longer very strong: he's a shell of himself. Everything is a shell of itself. Like its predecessor, this film was shot on the streets of Philadelphia as they are, touched as little as possible by the overdetermined hands of the production designer. And Philadelphia is thirty years older than it was then, just like Stallone, just like Rocky. Things fall apart. It's not sad, not really, but it is elegiac. "Do you remember how things used to be?" Stallone asks. Do we? I imagine somebody somewhere must be unfamiliar with Rocky, and I'm sure more people haven't seen it than have, but this film wasn't made for them at all. Nothing is here to make the film easy for people entirely new to the mythos, which must have made for some very nervous executives, but it is vital to make Rocky Balboa what it is. This is an old man's story, and old men are never particularly anxious to make sure that you know what they're talking about. They were there, and if you weren't that's really your fault, isn't it?

Of course the film shifts, as it must, as we all want it to, from elegy to action, to being a Boxing Picture, and it loses nothing. It's not a fantasy - I won't tell you what happens in Rocky Balboa's final match, but it's not surprising and very emotionally true to the series' roots, if not entirely plausible - but it is fun. Scratch that, it's not fun it's...touching? Hearing Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now" in all it's mid-70s synthesised glory is certainly invigorating - no human with a pulse can find that song dull, at the least - but it's also winsome and bittersweet. There's a training montage, on the steps of the Philly art museum, of course, equal parts parody and duplication and homage. With the knowledge of three decades of copycats, it shouldn't work, but it does - not because it is wonderfully inspiring, but because it is kind of sad. Implicitly, Stallone is asking us to remember how amazing it was when this happened the first time, when there weren't X-hundred other sports movies, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone hadn't musically informed us that we're "gonna need a montage." And like everything else in the movie, it's different because Rocky is older, and that makes it both inspiring and sad.

What a lot of words to say nothing at all. But the movie is too simple to need explication: Stallone does not invent anything, he merely uses the language that others have perfected, and there's nothing wrong with that, because Rocky Balboa is not supposed to be a challenging film. It is meant to be a crowd-pleaser that reminds us that time keeps going forward, no matter what. It is not a very great film, but it is a very nice film, and a very bittersweet film, and a very honest film.

7/10

*Okay, so most of us wouldn't think of that last one.

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPIE

A feel-good Christmastime movie titled The Pursuit of Happyness is sort of obligated to be at all pleasant to watch, and that is the first compliment that I will pay to the film: it's bravely anti-commercial in its willingness - hell, its eagerness - to wallow in the dark places of American capitalism, the poverty and homelessness and misery.

The second compliment I will pay is to Will Smith, starring as real person Chris Gardner, who fought his way to the top of the heap in a competitive Dean Whitter teaching internship while living out of hotels and on the streets of San Francisco in the early 1980s. Smith is not a good actor, I think I can say without fear of raising controversy; he has never quite moved out of his early-career persona of Damn I'm Cool, and while he's done a good job of picking scripts that play to that weakness, I guarantee that you've never heard of someone walking out of e.g. I, Robot saying, "that movie wasn't too good, but Will Smith was fuckin' fantastic!" You still can't say that about this film, exactly. More like "that movie blew, but Will Smith was pretty okay."

I am out of compliments.

Here's the problem: right at the start we find that the movie is "inspired by true events," that most toe-curling and frightful of all movie title cards. And I'm pretty sure that even if Smith and the release date didn't clue us in that this was going to be a story of happy things occurring to deserving people, the true story of a man who lived in extreme poverty, spend six months trying to get out of poverty, and ended up in poverty is not the sort of story that would make a very interesting movie. In other words, from about 20 seconds into the film, you just know it's going to have an uplifting ending with Chris getting all the best things in the world. Which makes nearly two hours of watching Chris get shat on a bit wearying.

One of the direst criticisms most people can make, including me, I guess, is that a film is full of "padding." That is, there isn't enough story to support the story being told. Now, when a film clocks in at 80 minutes with a half-dozen scenes that don't need to be there, we can safely blame the writer & director (and producers, let's be honest) for trying too hard to make a feature out of something that would be much happier at 40 minutes, and decry the distribution model that leaves no rooms for the "featurette," or what you will. The Pursuit of Happyness wouldn't be a good film at 40 minutes. It would be a good film at no minutes at all, because in literally every single beat of the story - Chris and his wife spar, Chris goes to Dean Whitter, Chris does this, Chris does that - all I could think was, "and then...he was successful." Thinking "and then..." for that long is frustrating.

I feel vicious for saying it. After all, this is a real man's life I'm talking about, and Mr. Gardner doubtlessly experienced all of the indignities the film presents. And the film works, mostly, as an exploration of a subset of these United States that most white Americans usually avoid thinking about: the obscenity of poverty, and the systematic degradation of African-Americans. And if this film serves to make some suburbanite think a bit harder about poor people, then I cannot possibly thank it enough. But good intentions and good art aren't often close bedfellows, and this film stands tall with Ladri di biciclette as a film that I just can't not hate, no matter how much it makes me feel like a guilty child of privilege for hating it.

Name-dropping what I lovingly refer to as "That Goddamn De Sica Movie" reminds me of something else: Smith's real-life son Jaden Christopher Syre Smith and his portrayal of Chris Gardner's son Christopher. There is nothing in the whole wide world more embarrassing than lobbing hatebombs at a seven-year-old actor, so I won't do it. Let's just say that he has natural rapport with Will Smith - obviously? - and that is the whole of his performance, and I'd rather not have to watch him cry again, because rolling one's eyes at a seven-year-old crying makes one feel cynical and uncharitable.

I must add, in defense of the film's rather undistinguished look (actually, constant over-lighting is distinguishing, but not very interesting to talk about), that San Francisco is one of the two or three most photogenic cities in the world, and refusing to take advantage of that is very brave. Again with the "society most white people don't think about." But bravery only takes you so far; being dull and pointless and predictable take you farther, and in the wrong direction.

(For the record, the titular misspelling does have a point: it's the graffiti on Christopher's school, and we are made to realise that how you spell "happiness" doesn't matter as much as pursuing it. This is a reasonable observation, if a shallow one).

(Also, the film has a horrifying gender politic along the lines of "boys ought to be with the fathers, because their mother is a fucking bitch," and the movie failed completely to convince me to agree with it).

5/10

BLOGIQUETTE

Not entirely sure what one is supposed to do when a sometime President dies. Is it rude to spend 1000 words explaining why the new Will Smith movie kind of sucks? Because I was going to get caught up on movie reviews today, and with the totally unaffecting death of Gerald Ford, I feel kind of guilty about that.

Later tonight, I suppose. Pursuit of Happyness and the shockingly competent Rocky Balboa after I get unpacked and all that jazz.

THE LAST GOOD FILM OF 2006

Author's note: this review was originally submitted to and rejected by a certain alt-weekly of my community. If it seems like it lacks the editorial joie de vivre of my customary work, that is doubtlessly why.

The most apparent reason for Steven Soderbergh’s moderately confusing The Good German to exist is that of style, a style that has been lifted intact from the films noirs of Hollywood in the 1940s. I say “intact,” and that is precisely accurate: the director shot the entire project using only those techniques which were available in 1945, after consulting the shooting notes for a number of classic Warner Bros. films (primarily Casablanca; fittingly, The Good German looks like nothing so much as a series of outtakes from that film). Vintage fixed-length lenses were used, the all-but-dead effect of rear projection was trotted out in a few scenes, even the methods used to record on-set dialogue hearken back to the lo-fi days of yore.

The result is a gorgeous black & white film that, excepting a few moments with a visual sharpness rarely found in the softer stock of the time, looks and sounds exactly like a lost work by Michael Curtiz or Raoul Walsh, newly unearthed from the Warner vaults. Of course, a Curtiz picture could never have starred George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, could never have traded so frankly in violence and sex. This is both the triumph and the curse of The Good German: it never lets you forget that it’s an old-school film of the modern age.

The story, as with so many noir films, is a bit of a mess, and it never completely resolves itself: Jacob Geismer (Clooney) is a New Republic war correspondent dispatched to Berlin in the summer of 1945 to cover the Potsdam peace conference. Almost immediately, he encounters his former lover, Lena Brandt (Blanchett), currently sleeping with his driver Tully (Tobey Maguire). Within a few days, Geismer finds himself investigating a murder with ties to the Russian sector of Berlin, exploring the Nazi connections of Lena’s apparently deceased husband Emil, and generally learning that in a time and place like Germany in 1945, there are no “good” people, only desperate survivors.

The plot is too twisty to recount any further, and most of what happens in the first hour is nothing but a string of red herrings anyway. Not that it matters, by and large: the events of the film are simply a tour of the venality of reconstruction. The American Col. Muller, played by Beau Bridges in what they used to call a “Special Guest Appearance,” may or may not have anything to do with Geismer’s investigations, but that is not really why the film visits him; it’s really so that we can see how depraved an American military officer can become. Both the script and the general tone hearken back to Rosselini’s Germany Year Zero or Reed’s The Third Man: when Europe is in ruins, what good is morality?

Being a “good German” is said to mean, supporting the efforts of the Allies to bring order to the country and helping prosecute Nazis, but it’s worth remembering that the phrase can also mean “one loyal to Germany,” and when Lena says of her husband, “He was a good German,” it’s not clear that she means one or the other, or some combination in between. But in the film’s cynical worldview, being a “good” anything is meaningless: the good German is one who killed Jews, the good American is one who steals money and power, keeps German prostitutes, and kills to keep Nazi secrets from the Communists.

None of which has much of anything to do with Soderbergh’s work as director, as cinematographer (under his pseudonym Peter Andrews) and as editor (under the name Mary Ann Bernard). As is almost always the case in a Soderbergh film, The Good German is first and above all an experiment. The experiment is not always completely successful: notably, the score by Thomas Newman sounds a bit too operatic, closer to John William’s work in the Indiana Jones trilogy than anything actually written in the 1940s. And much has been made of Soderbergh’s efforts to guide his actors to the declarative performance style of the era, and while it works brilliantly for the most part, certain performers, especially Maguire, wildly overcompensate. (The film is lucky to have its two leads: Clooney has made a career out of channeling the leading men of the postwar era, and Blanchett is a standout, with her smoky and obviously-affected German accent, and her piercing dark eyes keeping her firmly in the fatale end of the femme scale).

The film has come under attack for being soulless, and it’s not terribly hard to see why. Certainly, no vintage noir could get away with such a ramshackle plot (except for the The Big Sleep, but that movie traded on the irreproducible chemistry of its stars), and the characters here are not nearly so engaging as they should be; this is almost entirely the fault of a screenplay that keeps hopping from protagonist to protagonist without any understandable reason. Besides, it is simply impossible to argue that this isn’t something we’ve seen before.

We haven’t seen it for a very long time, however, and that is what makes The Good German interesting. Ultimately, it’s not “about” Germany, or the morality of World War II, or the acts people commit to survive. It’s “about” the relationship of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood (and how strange indeed that the great defender of Old Hollywood is an indie filmmaker, and that this most Hollywood of films is getting the art theater treatment). The ideal audience for this film, I think, is precisely the one that will be least surprised by it, the audience that has memorized and internalized all of the classic Warner Bros. pictures and their style. Watching for all of the ideas that Soderbergh stole from other ideas isn’t frustrating, it’s part of the point: here’s the plane from Casablanca, here’s the sewer from The Third Man.

This isn’t 1945, however, it’s 2006 and there can not be a film made like Casablanca anymore. Film is more cynical now, more adult (although not necessarily more mature), and The Good German exploits that shift fully, exploring what we’ve lost and gained in the last 60 years of cinema. It’s hard to say what Soderbergh feels on that question – the film is unabashedly nostalgic, but both in the specific (the increasing amounts of bloody cuts all over Clooney’s face; scattered nudity) and the general (the frank way the film discusses the Holocaust), this could never have been made in the studios’ golden age – but the film is unquestionably an elegy; a song of the loss of innocence for the whole world in the aftermath of the Last Good War, and for the loss of a way of filmmaking that gave us some of the finest motion pictures imaginable, and will now never return.

7/10

HO!

Special Bonus Rush: an image made at the special request of a friend who, I want to make absolutely clear, is himself Jewish.

CHRIST, WHAT AN ASS

For Christmas, I decided it might be fun to share with everyone this atheist's favorite cinematic depiction of the life and passion of Jesus of Nazareth; a story borne of the most gut-wrenching spiritual intensity; dare I say it, one of the most challenging & therefore greatest films of the 1960s European cinema.

In today's film, the role of Christ will be played by a donkey.

"Le film, c'est le monde. Vraiment, en une heure et demi, en une heure quarante, voir le monde." -Jean-Luc Godard

In the opening moments of Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar* something remarkable happens that sets the tone for the entire piece: we see the credits, a simple affair of white letters over an indistinct grey background, listening to Franz Schubert's piano sonata no. 20, when the music slams to a halt, replaced by the agonized braying of a donkey in the throes of labor. For several seconds, the credits unassumingly roll along while we listen to the animal's screams. Then Schubert begins again, and the credits end, and we see the only truly blissful moment of the film: a donkey mother and child, at peace in a field.

A book could be written on the use of sound in Balthazar, but it all begins with that jarring, shocking moment. To begin with the simplest possible reading (simple, but not therefore inappropriate or inaccurate), this is setting us up for the rest of the film, ninety minutes of the suffering of mankind at the hands of mankind. If Balthazar is the world in an hour and a half, then the credits are Balthazar in two minutes: a moment of beauty torn apart by pain.

Perhaps more importantly, this is the first moment of what is, for me at least, the most significant element of the film: the way in which, at all times, sound is used to refer to off-screen action. I wonder if this is closer to what Godard felt when he uttered his famous words - the film is not merely a metaphor for the world, it contains the whole world. Few films possess such a complete, omnipresent sense of the world outside the camera frame, but it is impossible to to ignore here. We hear planes flying overhead, there are unseen cars driving all around us, birds sing constantly. Virtually every shot in the film - 95% or more, anyway - is accompanied by a sound produced by an object or person not directly visible in the frame.

Bresson's radical blocking is part of this scheme, as well: not only does he use sound to expand the boundaries of the frame, he uses the frame itself to the same end. It is only rarely the case that a person or object is shot in the mere documentary style of a Hollywood film: "here is a person." Rather, we usually see just a part of them: here is someone's nose and chin, here is a portion of a door. Things spread chaotically beyond the edge of the image. Life cannot be contained.

Sound, image, and the third great component of cinema is the editing, and that is of a piece with its sisters, although in a much broader way. Read much about this film, and you'll quickly come across the world "elliptical" to describe the editing...well, why not? It is elliptical, in the dictionary sense of that word: there are events which are erased in a single cut, leaving their trace only in the fact that things have changed. An early example: two children beg their father to adopt a donkey. He refuses. After a dissolve, the children are walking with their new donkey. It is obvious that we missed a step: how did they change his mind? That the film acknowledges this moment occurred precisely by refusing to show it is certainly "elliptical," and part of the overall plan: make the audience unable to ignore the fact that things happen outside of the movie. There is a whole world we don't see, and only a tiny narrow fraction that we do.

Well and good, I suppose, to dwell on such things, especially in a film as challenging to decipher as this (if you think that I just gave some sort of Rosetta Stone for the editing, you obviously haven't seen the film), but this was supposed to be about Christ, or at least that's why I picked the unhappiest fictional film that I own as appropriate holiday fare. Christ is a donkey named Balthazar, after a fashion, and that fashion is influenced by Bresson's strong Catholicism: the innocent who suffers all manner of indignations and abuses, symbolically taking the burden of mankind's sins upon himself, and dying with the weight of those sins on his back.

The plot consists of two strands: in one, Balthazar is shuttled from owner to owner, always ending up a little bit worse off than before; in the other, his first owner Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), the only person who ever felt love for the donkey, is shuttled from domineering male to domineering male, always ending up a little bit worse off than before.

I am unfamiliar with the great majority of Bresson's cinema, and so I do not know how many of this story's themes recur in his work (though I am told that his film following this by one year, Mouchette, is a thematic sister film to Balthazar), and so I do not know if it's fair to call him a raving anti-modernist, but it's hard, and by "hard" I mean "impossible," to ignore the basic point that technology and the modern world are generally horrible things and they cause people to do horrible things to each other. That sense of a complete world beyond the camera that I was talking about before? It's used, practically, as a matter of bringing home to us how crushing and overwhelming the world is (not for nothing are most of those offstage sounds the sound of vehicles and tools). The two young men chasing after Marie's affections are Gerard (François Lafarge), an immoral young biker with a leather coat who steals things and comes thiiiiis close to raping the girl, and Jacques (Walter Green), a landowner's son who does not appear to own a bike or even a car (he is also a complete pill, but that's a side-effect of Bresson's unwillingness to create a sympathetic human figure).

This is the point at which most reviews turn into an explication of the meaning of some vignettes from the film, but I believe that these are all fairly obvious and you, my brilliant readers, are more than capable of figuring out simple plot things. But I must bring up the elephant in the room for any discussion of Au hasard Balthazar, the ending scene.

It's the received wisdom that this scene, in which Balthazar, laden with contraband and bleeding from an errant bullet, lays down and dies in a field of sheep with bells ringing, is transcendent. I imagine that this comes out of our knowledge that a practicing Catholic is unlikely to make a Christ allegory that doesn't end in transcendence, but I don't believe it's right. For one thing, it violates the spirit of the movie, which is unendingly bleak. The use of the Schubert piece in this scene is, admittedly, an indication that we should be looking for spiritual vindication; but given Bresson's later declaration that using Schubert in this film was "sentimental" and "a mistake," I think we can avoid putting too much weight on it.

Besides, there are good reasons to read against transcendence. The most pointed one is what happens at the moment of Balthazar's death: the sheep in the field all walk away from him, their backs literally turned. While this mirrors the rejection of Christ in the moment of his death, nothing about it is peaceful or glorious, or anything else that would imply transcendence. It is lonely and empty. I would also mention that the shepherds' bells we hear, often called an evocation of church bells, are thin and out of tune and clamorous, and in a film that has put so much effort into the specificity of its soundscape, I refuse to believe that crappy bells are meant to sound like church -anything.

Lastly, and I feel most importantly, the final shot of the film does not show Balthazar dead (this may not have been Bresson's desire, but it's the case anyway). We can clearly see the donkey breathing - the final moment of the film is not the peace of death, it is a moment of suffering. There is no transcendence in this. There is only agony.

Which is all in keeping with the film's forthright misanthropy. It has been 95 minutes of indignation and pain, and in the end a mute, non-human animal, the only thing in the film which has been good or loving, fails to achieve a moment with the divine. How could it? It's a donkey. This is the black punchline to the anti-joke that Bresson has been telling. In the absence of true human morality, we have allowed ourselves to think that we can find truth and beauty in Balthazar's story. But really, as the title has been telling us all along, we've just been watching some random ass.

*The title translates into By chance, Balthazar, but I prefer Randomly Balthazar, as it suggests a sense of madcap lightness that film could not possibly possess to a smaller degree.

THE SECOND GOOD FILM OF 2006

The Good Shepherd is a movie like finest crystal: it is breathtaking and gorgeous and made by skilled craftsmen, but it falls into tiny useless pieces the instant you give it a good whack.

Was that an overly precious metaphor? God, it totally was. And kind of useless. Nobody whacks crystal.

And obviously, nobody gave The Good Shepherd a good whack at any time during production, because this is a classic textbook example of one of our more common Oscar Season diseases: the epic-length film with a really dynamite 90-minute movie buried somewhere inside.

Billed as the "story of the birth of the CIA," The Good Shepherd is really the story of one man's experience with that agency from its inception to the fallout from the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle, told in extremely specific detail. I say with some feeling of absolute certainty that there is no character in any film out right now that the audience comes to know as well as Matt Damon's Edward Wilson, partly because they experience along with him almost every significant event of his life from his early twenties to his mid-forties, and partly because he is not a particularly interesting human being.

Now, here's the thing: its fantastically made. Robert De Niro, directing his second feature, turns out to be rather capable at marshaling people in front of a camera, even though he seems to steal a lot of tricks from the 1970s playbook, especially Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather (and look who produced The Good Shepherd! Wotta coincidence!). I suspect it helps that he was surrounded by very skillful people: not just the cast, but also cinematographer Robert Richardson, one of the flat-out geniuses of his field. I can't help but imagine that most of the appearance of the film can be attributed to him and not the director, especially given how many of the film's grace notes seem to be lifted more-or-less intact from The Aviator. Of course it doesn't really matter who makes a film look good, just that it looks good, and this film has a perfectly wonderful look full of dramatic shadows and dim rooms that remind us, yes, we are watching a film about Shadowy Men and Dark Plots.

The cast is mostly great: Damon stands out, naturally, just for the size of his role, but Angelina Jolie gives her best performance in years, spanning the gamut from flirtatious ingenue to embittered, lonely wife. Alec Baldwin continues to be the best character actor in Hollywood, a fact which surprises me every time I encounter it, with his...I don't know...I lack the technical words to describe acting, but Baldwin is fantastic here. I found myself very sad when his scenes ended. I could stay here all day going through the good performances: just look at the cast. Of course they're good.

Thing is - and of course there's a thing, I as much as said so up top - the thing is, the film is long. Hurtfully long. And it's literal. So damn literal. When I say "literal," what I mean is this: the theme is basically the idea that the CIA was born of America's not-so-secret desire to be run by benevolent totalitarians, and that we're basically trusting their good sense to not do things like install wiretaps or invade countries, and that their sense is in fact not good at all, but just about the worst sense of anyone who lives in America. The subplot involves people who ruin everything around them because they have daddy issues.

Some paranoid people claim that this has modern-day relevance, but I'm not sure what they're talking about.

So anyway, that's a good theme. That's a theme I want to see in a movie. And I'll be damned if I didn't see just that, over and over and over and over again. And without much if any subtlety. I shall provide an example: a major recurring motif in the film is the Yale Skull & Bones Society, which apparently basically invented the CIA. Now, in 2006 - the year The Good Shepherd was made - most of us will instantly think "George W. Bush" when we hear "Skull & Bones." And I'm all for movies which associated the current president with semi-fascist secret clubs that want white people to rule all non-white people in America, but the way that it's done here - constantly bringing the group up, constantly talking about the father-and-son nature of it, constantly reminding us of the political clout of the Bonesmen - is akin to having De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth sitting behind your left should the entire movie, and coughing loudly every five minutes:

"You get that it's about Bush, right?"

"Yes, Mr. De Niro."

"Great" [beat] "Yeah, so that's really about Bush, you got that?"

"Oh my God, go away, you starred in Hide and Seek."

And so on with everything: the CIA kills men's souls. Liars beget liars. The Russians and Americans are indistinguishable. The hell of it is, this could all be really fantastic, "top five films of the year" sort of fantastic, if it wasn't so thuddingly repetitive. There is quite literally not one single scene in the whole movie that isn't materially recreated elsewhere. The result is simply insulting, as though we can't get what's going on without hearing about it constantly. The word "boring" is simply an awful thing to use about a movie unless you're 13 years old, but it's entirely satisfactory and accurate here. This is a boring film.

But a monumentally well-crafted boring film, and if the 1+ hour of deadwood were carved away, it could something approaching masterpiece status. As it is, there's no life, no energy, and the whole thing feels as soulless and airless and suffocating as the cloak-and-dagger world it seeks to reveal.

6/10

BALLAD OF A CRAPPY MOVIE

2006 has been a year of crisis for film criticism. But that's been talked about here, there and everywhere (but not actually here), and I'm not going to rehash all of that.

Now, if you read many film blogs - I have virtually none on my roll, for reasons that will shortly be apparent, but I read close to a dozen - you know that one of the "fixes" that Bright Young Cinephiles are striving for is to replace "advocacy criticism," the sort of thumbs-up/down, 4 stars consumer report fancied by most print media, and this blog, with a deeper appreciation of how films work. Don't say, "this is better than that," say, "here is why this film has the effect it does."

My usual response to this is to growl, "well, obviously someone didn't see A Good Year," and then ignore them. But it's worth at least commenting on it, because it's symptomatic of something: the Post-Modern approach to pop culture, easily my least favorite intellectual trend of the last decade, in which a film/song/play/book's "goodness" is totally immaterial; being a cultural artifact is enough to make it "good," and the job of the consumer/critic is to deal with its cultureness. "Quality is subjective," these people cry, "one man's trash is another man's camp icon - a movie is good because it is enjoyed."

Bullshit. There may not be objectively "good" art, but there sure as hell is objectively "bad" art. It's all well and good to claim that movies are most important because of how they reflect the Zeitgeist, but that doesn't mean that The Da Vinci Code isn't a sack of crap. It most certainly is a sack of crap, and while I'm sure that somewhere there's some fifteen-year-old who thinks that it was the best film of the year, his criteria for judging cinema are so infinitely distant from my own that his good opinion is of not the slightest value to me. Nor is mine of value to him. That's fine: I don't pretend to be God sending criticism down from on high. I have my opinions, and I express them, and being aware of that does not mean that I have to rescind my judgment that the world is a lesser place because of the existence of Lady in the Water.

And that's what it comes down to, really: let's not hurt people's feelings. Lady in the Water must be grappled with because somewhere somebody liked it. That only really means one thing: that person and I shouldn't ever discuss Lady in the Water. I am perfectly willing to dismiss it as a totally ineffective movie, and as long as I can provide reasons why that is my opinion - and I think I did - I see no reason why I can't make jokes about M. Night Shyamalan snorting coke.

Because that's fun: mocking bad movies is so much fun to write, and fun to read, and it doesn't work if all films are created equal. Nobody ever once said "I really just hate Mystery Science Theater 3000,"* because we all know that we're just plain superior to bad films. They're not suddenly "worthy films" because we can enjoy at them in any way. They're beneath contempt. They are good only for laughing, and for realising that we are infinitely better & wiser & more moral than, say, Coleman Francis.

(Incidentally, this is all certainly because I am not in my heart of hearts a consumer of pop culture; I am in my heart of hearts a movie craftsman. I'm mostly looking for a coeherent & distinct logic behind the technical choices made in a film. And discipline, always discipline).

All this has to do with Eragon how? Because this is a bad film. And I'm not interested in talking about it, frankly. I don't want to explain why it had poor this or ill-advised that or why the editing wasn't such-and-such or discuss the history of American filmmaking in Eastern Europe.

Instead, I'm just going to serve up some of the thoughts that came to me while I was watching:

-Callow youth loses his adopted family, learns from an aged tutor that he is a chosen wielder of a sacred force, is chased by a man in black robes, diverts to save a princess, and saves the rebels with the help of an assholish buddy? No idea where they got this plot.

-I think you can tell from each performance what drug the actor needed to get through this horrible exercise in check-cashing: Jeremy Irons (Obi-Wan) is clearly drunk, John Malkovich (the Emperor) appears stoned, Robert Carlyle (Vader) is on a cocktail of many illegal narcotics, but cocaine is obviously one of them, and Rachel Weisz (voice of the dragon/Force) is right pissed that they wouldn't let her have cigarettes in the recording studio.

-The first two signs of trouble, in the first 75 seconds: it opens with Irons slurring his way through some narration wherein every third word is some idiotic fantasy slang for a simple concept (the Varden = rebel army, for example), and you can just tell that Irons hates every moment of it, and is probably having flashbacks. The second sign is that the first line of actual dialogue, delivered by John Malkovich, is this: "I suffer without my stone."

-30-year-old Sienna Guillory (Leia) has made the bold choice of making every reaction her teenaged character has to anything, to fake an orgasm.

-Every time a character says the name "Galbatorix" - the Emperor - it takes several seconds and they have to really think about it, kind of like "Gayull...baah...torrrr-icks."

-The angsty teenage hero Eragon (Ed Speleers, who Can. Not. Act.) actually looks at a sunset to express his angst and desire to be off adventuring. At least there was only one sun.

-Eragon and his cousin are totally screwing.

-The relative killed while LukEragon is away has the bald-faced indecency to be his uncle. If you're going to steal, why can't you pretend?

-The score is such a sad thing...it wants to bad to be cheerful and upbeat, and it's so thin.. You keep wanting to go "da-da da de da-di-da" along with. Don't though, the people sitting next to you will find it annoying, if they're at all like the people next to me.

-Stefen Fangmeier is a great name for the director of a dragon picture.

-Hey, I just realised: D-ragon. E-ragon. Christ on a crutch.

-You know, when I was fifteen and thought Tolkien was the best author of all time, I wrote a little fantasy story as well. I didn't seek publication. And it was way better than Eragon.

-The best part is that just when you're starting to get bored, something huge and inane will happen to pick you right up, almost always involving Ed Speleers trying to...anything.

-Eragon and his dragon are totally screwing.

-Burst out laughing count: 8.

-Would have laughed if my neighbors weren't getting pissed: 14.

That was good for my soul.

3/10

*And if they did, there is not a pit of Hell deep enough for them.

A MOVIE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE THE TONYS

The British, they do know how to romp. That's all The History Boys is, really: a romp, a frolic, just a bit of fun to fill the time between here and there. There's a healthy bit about growing up, and adolescent sexuality, and a great huge pile about the changing face of teaching, but it's all much less profound than e.g. a spot on the National Board of Review Top 10 would have you believe it is.

Happily the film, and the filmmakers, are not particularly fussy over the movie, and so it fails entirely to live down the standard for Inspirational Teacher Pictures. I suppose this is partially because the Inspirational Teacher is a bit more erratic than beloved, and also because he gropes his male students. But I get ahead of myself.

Based on the Six! Time! Tony! Award! Winning! Play! by Alex Bennett, The History Boys is the story of Hector (Richard Griffiths), an aging teacher of "general studies" at a middling boys' grammar school in one of the less classy parts of England, during the receding half of the New Wave era in 1983. Hector is a believer in a sort of "kitchen sink" theory of pedagogy, guiding his students in the study of poetry, classic movies, 1930s show tunes, and above all the French subjonctif - the tense of "might have been." Into Hector's cozy little fiefdom comes Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a ruthlessly efficient young man whose approach to teaching the school's eight best and brightest how to game the system for their university applications is to be scandalous and interesting, without giving the slightest damn whether or not they're right. Who will reign supreme in this mighty battle: the forces of Knowledge For Its Own Sake, or Knowledge To Impress People?

Nope, sorry, you're thinking of an American film. Bennett's script is not concerned in the least with "right" or "wrong" or in any way judging the characters. They're all flawed, even the eight boys, and not one of them is in any sense a villain. Even when the actual mechanics of a plot begin to happen (it's more of a situational piece, really), as Hector is revealed to be a serial groper of his legally adult students - the audience has known this since the beginning - there's nothing at all like censure; indeed the reedy headmaster who uses this as the wedge to drive the teacher out of the school is just about the only person who we don't like, and only then because he finds Hector's teaching out of step with the modern world, not because he's a sexual prude. (That all looks like a spoiler: it's really not).

I suppose it's my respect for the film's egalitarian goodness that leads me to declare it a charming, worthy bit of a thing even though in my heart of hearts I know it's pretty disposable. That and the iron-clad fact that British stage actors are the most wonderful people in the whole world. There's not much "there" there, it just a standard coming-of-age-with-a-wonderful-teacher story, kind of like Dead Poets Society without the shrill Robin Williams performance. Although originality, I think, is overrated.

Nicholas Hytner isn't much of a film director (hi, The Object of My Affection), but he does open up The History Boys rather successfully: I honestly tended to forget that it was ever a stage play, even though fully 80% of the scenes take place in one of three stuffed schoolrooms. There's a constant, unintrusive score of New Wave hits and not so much hits, underlying everything that doesn't remind the audience of the film's setting so much as it keeps everything energetic and fast-moving. If I have a complaint, it's with the bizarre over-reliance on hand-held cameras running the grainiest damn film you've ever seen in daylight, but other than that it's a very nimbly-executed film that doesn't try to hard to be much of anything: none of the scenes that could easily fall into High Dramatic Camp are filmed in any style other than the brisk, uninflected tones of the rest of the film. It's very pragmatic. Can I say that, or is that too vague? Well, it's my blog: the cinematography here is brilliantly pragmatic.

Saved the best for last: the amazing cast. Good God. Richard Griffiths, almost undoubtedly best known in this country for playing Harry Potter's venal Uncle Vernon, is one of those fantastic British character actors who is in damn near everything, and it's only when you start to look at his C.V. and start realising "wow, he was in that?" that you come to appreciate his full quality. This film is no exception to that (it's a Tony! Winning! Performance! after all), other than that he is in an entire picture rather than three minutes of it, which tends to make it easier to bask in his amazing stagey goodness. The rest of the cast is entirely more obscure, which perhaps make their performances seem better than they actually are; I'm going to be generous and assume that's not the case, and give the appropriate love especially to Frances de la Tour as the dour history teacher, and Samuel Barnett as the student of most anxious sexual confusion and sturdiest character arc (only the British could stuff a film this full of men, young and old, who have no idea whether their sexual desire for men makes them homosexual). I suppose I could defend these statements, but it's that whole, y'know, British thing. It's entirely possible that some people do not agree with me on the point that British stage actors are inherently & objectively good, and it's not small relief that I am not in the least bit required to engage with such heretical nonsense.

7/10

ALL ABOUT THE ARKADINS

In the mid-1950's, Orson Welles - once the Brightest Young Thing in Hollywood - found himself begging for scraps among the film producers of Europe. This is all well-known, and not worth repeating. What matters is that there came a time when Welles began shopping around an idea for a story about a shadowy man of mystery, a plot gathered together from some dead-ends explored on Welles' weekly radio show The Lives of Harry Lime. The untitled film was the story of a criminal with amnesia hiring a shiftless conman to prepare a report on his forgotten-past. Over the course of 1954, Welles shot a film's worth of footage under the title of Mr. Arkadin, starring himself as the title character and Robert Arden as Guy Van Stratten, the amateur sleuth.

As was so often the case, the film was taken away from Welles, and then given back, and then lost, and then found, and then taken away, and this is how we ended up with a remarkable number of distinct cuts of the film, under at least two titles (Jonathan Rosenbaum's vital essay on the subject takes its title from this glut, "The Seven Arkadins"). For many years, the film was impossible to find in anything other than its most unsatisfactory edit, until the spring of 2006, when the Criterion Collection released a three-disc set containing three versions of the film, three episodes of Harry Lime, and the novel Mr. Arkadin, itself a microcosm of mystery and anonymity: credited to Welles and translated into French by the director's friend Maurice Bessy, but more likely written by Bessy from Welles' script and translated into English by an unknown figure.

I'm giving myself an early birthday present: having purchased the set in May and never finding enough time to really dig through the thing in a comprehensive way, I've decided to finally sit down with the whole damn thing. I've read the novel, I've listened to the plays, and I'm about to start the first of the three editions of the film: as I finish with each edit I'll return here with my thoughts.

The Basics (the plot as it stands in all versions, with spoilers):
Petty conman Guy Van Stratten, while smuggling cigarettes into France, finds himself involved in a murder, along with his girlfriend Mily. The victim breathes one final word - the name "Arkadin" - and Van Stratten recognizes a chance to blackmail the international crime lord (taken from the Harry Lime episode "Blackmail Is a Nasty Word"). Upon meeting Arkadin's daughter Raina, Van Stratten's plans change; even more when Arkadin hires Van Stratten to prepare a confidential report: what happened to Arkadin before his memory begins, in Zurich in 1927 with 200,000 francs? (This from the Harry Lime episode "Man of Mystery"). A globe-trotting adventure brings Van Stratten to learn tha Arkadin was once the lover and right-hand man of a woman named Sophie, operator of a white slavery ring. Van Stratten also learns that Arkadin has never been amnesiac, but was following the younger man to find all of the people who know his past, so that they may be killed. Van Stratten lies to Arkadin that Raina knows everything, Raina confirms this, and Arkadin jumps from a plane, believing he has lost the one thing he cares for: his daughter's good opinion.

Confidential Report
Prepared by: produer Louis Dolivet, autumn 1955
Released: summer, 1956 (Europe). Distributed by Warner Bros.

No filmmaker was so delighted to be a liar as Orson Welles, and thus it's appropriate that this film begins with a lie: we are told (by the director, in voiceover) that the story is a fictionalised version of an actual event, the mystery of how a plane came to land without any pilot or passengers. Of course that's not the case, the film is really an outlandishly overbaked bit of postwar intrigue with an extraordinary jolt of Citizen Kane's "inner life of a mysterious tycoon" melodrama.

It is easy to overvalue any work by Welles, just as it's easy to undervalue any work which Cahiers du cinema breathlessly declared to be one of the 12 greatest films of all time only two years after its Cannes debut. It's a remarkable visual work, to be certain: grotesque and Gothic, full of absurdly made-up character actors such as Michael Redgrave, Akim Tamaroff and Mischa Auer; baroque setpieces, the most notorious being the Goya-themed masquerade; and endless canted camera angles, enough to make the Welles-starring The Third Man seem positively tame in comparison.

Then there's the story, an utter mess, incoherent and rushed, the flipside to the film's visual brilliance. But why call it the flipside? It's all part of the same impulse, a desire to be as outré with other people's money as humanly possible. For all that it collapses at every moment on the back of clumsily edited scene transitions and inane dialogue, the script is a great marriage of content to form. It's a mad film about mad men.

Fitting then, that Welles' performance as Gregory Arkadin loom large over the proceedings within the film, much as the auteur looms over the project's history (and what history does he not loom over?). It's hardly his greatest performance - it may indeed be among his worst, even comparable to the hamfisted anti-acting of Casino Royale - but it's doubtless arresting. When Welles is onscreen, you cannot look away, and despite the patently fake make-up (famously, you can often see the seems of his nose prosthetic, in those scenes where he did not forget to wear it), and the lamentable cod-Russian accent, he is a commanding presence. For this we must certainly thank the director's self-serving low angles, and the deep focus that keeps Arkadin in the center of every scene he appears in. But self-serving or no, it's impossible to look away or forget.

The Confidential Report cut, the only version of the film existant on 35mm, was not prepared by Welles, and therefore many of its problems are not best blamed on him: the speed with which scenes are raced through, the arbitrary A-B-C plot thudding that could only exist in a chronologically-straightened version of the film. It is also hard to argue that any of the dialogue (all dubbed; the film was shot entirely without sound, and this means that almost every version of the film had a customized script) should be viewed as the final word on things.

Without having seen any other cut of the film, my immediate thoughts are these: Confidential Report is a sloppy film, with most scenes, especially at the beginning and end, suffering from needlessly frantic editing. The story is perfunctory and is "gotten through," more than anything else; but it looks amazing at all times, and the performances, none of which are "good" in the usual sense (I would single out Robert Arden's Van Stratten as being particularly odious), are of such a heightened, silent-film style that they contribute to the grand sense of nearly operatic craziness throughout the film. It is a dazzling misfire.


Mr Arkadin
Prepared by: Orson Welles, summer-autumn 1954
Released: autumn, 1962 (New York). Distributed by Corinth Films.

Every film is ultimately made in the editing room. John Ford knew this; that is why he never shot coverage, giving the editor only the bare minimum of footage needed to complete a film. Jean-Luc Godard knew this; that is why he made grandiose claims about the morality of the cut. Orson Welles knew this; that is why he spent so many long months editing all of his films, and why an impatient Filmorsa took Mr. Arkadin away from him.

The "Corinth" print, or Mr Arkadin (no period) is probably the most "authoritative" cut of the film, although such a thing does not exist. It was the basis for two Spanish cuts, as well as a highly degraded version released in the US illegally; yet it was kept out of theatres for seven years because of a distribution deal signed with Warner Bros. By the time it was made public, all that existed was a low-quality 16mm print, which leads to one important way in which it is inferior to Confidential Report: it does not look very good, and for any Welles film, the sharpness of a print is entirely related to the quality of watching it.

Despite that, it is a better experience, and this is largely because it restores one of the most important aspects of the film: its flashback structure. Confidential Report, after the opening narration about the pilotless plane, drops in for one scene between Van Stratten and Jacob Zouk (Akim Tamaroff), the last of the gang that knos Arkadin's secret. Without explanation, the film then returns to the death of Bracco (Grégoire Aslan), the event that launches the plot. In the Corinth version, Van Stratten tells Zouk the story, and throughout the film we cut back to the two men in Berlin. This is a useful framework that allows for a much easier plot to follow, and with the copious alteration in dialogue (that, incidentally, makes the dubbing far more obvious), the entire story makes more sense. Indeed, aside from the flashbacks, the most important difference between the two versions is that the Corinth is much plottier: the scenes between Van Stratten and Arkadin, Van Stratten and Raina (Paola Mori), any combination you like, are all written with a much stronger eye towards exposition. I somehow doubt this would have long remained the case, but it is an easier and more enjoyable film this way.

It's important to note that the films are identical for about 50% of the shots, and a healthy bulk of the remainder are simply alternate takes, and occasionally alternate angles (the last twenty minutes of the film differ only in one shot showing Van Stratten closer to the camera in the Corinth print, and the duration of shots in the final confrontation between Van Stratten and Raina).

For some 15% of the film, however, the changes are anything but cosmetic: most notably, the shot of Mily lying dead on a beach (which Welles wished to include as the first shot of the film, a detail only present in one of the Spanish prints) has been cut from the Corinth version, making the reveal of her death much more effective. Indeed, the scene in Confidential Report which ends in Mily's death has been shifted so that the character has another entire scene afterwards (this introduces a continuity error, ironically enough).

Although it sacrifices character niceties, such as a lengthy Arkadin monologue about his graveyard dream, the Corinth version generally makes motivations much easier to follow due to more specific dialogue (one example that springs to mind: Raina at one point laughs at Van Stratten's gullibility towards her father's story: "Who heard of amnesia lasting thirty years?" Confidential Report dumbfoundingly omits this line, including only her laughter. It is much more "about" Arkadin, in the way that The Third Man was "about" Harry Lime - there are conversations about Arkadin's businesses absent in Confidential Report, and much like the novel, it is very clear that Arkadin is an internationally known businessman and crime boss.

There is one hideously important way in which Confidential Report is a more evolved work, and this is the sound design. Welles oversaw most of the sound creation in the time between leaving the editing room and the film's 1956 release, and the later film is much fuller (strangely, while the rough editing in the Corinth Mr Arkadin implies an unpolished cut, this has not been corrected). The two scenes where this is most significant are Bracco's murder and the Goya masquerade, both of which fall flat, or simply confuse in the Corinth print. The ending scenes are also much degraded in comparison, with their provisional soundscape. The Paul Misraki score is also used to much lesser effect, or at least there is less of it.

Still, as I stand right now, the Corinth Mr Arkadin is a better experience, and as it is almost certainly closer to Welles' unknowable goals, it is the best choice for the busy cinephile who can't put the effort of multiple viewings of a single film.


Mr. Arkadin
Prepared by: Welles historians Stefan Drössler & Claude Bertemes
Released: spring, 2006 (Criterion Collection DVD). Distributed by Janus Films.

In the words of one of the men who assembled the "Comprehensive Version": "we established two principles that we followed strictly: including all the shots with sound that were ever used in the editing, and always using the earliest cut in cases where there were different variations of the same shot, scene or sequence."

The longest version of Mr. Arkadin that exists, it would be tempting to call this therefore the most official, but even the editors don't make that claim. Rather, this is the cut that one turns to as a compendium of everything that could have ended up in Welles' final version: it contains the opening beach shot, the flashback and dialogue from the Corinth version, as much of the audio from Confidential Report as was practical, and a great deal of establishing footage of Van Stratten's globetrotting (including a solid eight seconds of Amsterdam) that is found only in one of the Spanish prints.

There are many incidental changes from the Corinth print, but only four of great significance, besides the beach shot mentioned above: an extended sequence involving Mily early in the film, dialogue between Raina and Van Stratten near the end that clarifies his plans, and Spanish footage of the ending (rather than sharing the same final shot as the previous two films in the Criterion box, the Comprehensive version ends with a view from Arkadin's empty cockpit). The most important change is one that exists in none of the five known version, based on a single dissolve found in European archives: two scenes set in Mexico have been flipped, bringing the film in line with the novel and eliminating a significant continuity error.

There are many charms to this cut, primarily that it allows the plot to breathe. Welles was not a director given to extensive establishing shots, but they are used here to rather calming effect. It is easy to believe that no authoritative version would have included these shots: score one for the bootleg. The masquerade, one of the most striking moments in any cut, is longer here by every bit of fifteen seconds, solely because of extensive crowd shots.

Despite this, I find myself still turning to the Corinth print, and for a simple reason: true to their word, the restorers included every possible shot in this print, including some places (especially in the first thirty minutes) where it causes the editing to be rather frantic and disorienting. A conversation that is shown in three shots in both Confidential Report and the Corinth version suddenly takes place over ten cuts. It is a significant liability; if I had not seen the story twice already, I would have frequently been unable to follow several scenes.

Furthermore, the order of certain scenes is ineffective. The film follows the superior Corinth version for the introduction of Arkadin, first seen in conversation with Van Stratten, but it includes a scene from Confidential Report and the Spanish print that makes little sense when it occurs as late as it does (this is the graveyard dream: a good scene, but here it dilutes the bargain between the two anti-heroes).

Make no mistake, it's a valuable reference: but it's a reference. This is the cut for people who have watched the film already, and preparing for academic papers, or over-long blog posts. For your introduction to Mr. Arkadin, either or both of the other cuts in the Criterion set are vastly preferred.


The film as a film

My thoughts while watching the Confidential Report version, I have decided, were ungenerous and inaccurate. Seeing a film three times in a row will start to make you focus on the tiny details, and re-evaluate the big picture over and over again.

In partcular, I regret implying that it was a worse Orson Welles performance than e.g. Transformers: The Movie. Repreated exposure to Welles and Robert Arden makes it ever more obvious that what initially seems to be a pair of overbaked hunks of scene-chewery is actually a rather mirroring of two men who self-consciously create their personas, and act like drama queens as a disguise. Not for nothing is there an overarching theme of masks and costumes; indeed, I've even come around to the idea that Welles' makeup (being as it is so worse than Michael Redgrave's or Mischa Auer's) is not so much of a cheap accident as it appears. Not that Arkadin wears a fake nose; but that Welles' fake nose is there to make us constantly aware that Arkadin is, essentially, a fake person.

Nothing can really help the plot, of course; but with a film whose editing history was as blighted as Mr. Arkadin, the story is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all. Nothing could have kept plot holes from creeping in, nor could we expect every question to be answered, or every character to act at all times in keeping with what we have already seen. That it is coherent at all is a not-so-minor miracle.

As I mentioned before, the real draw is the cinematography, always the highlight of a Welles film. What I hadn't noticed is how obsessively the film trades in extremely deep focus, here achieved by use of the widest-angle lens Welles was able to get his hands on. The results are striking: the scene that jumps out at me is when Mily stumbles drunkenly around Arkadin's stateroom on his yacht, and a combination of focal depth and blocking keep him constantly towering over her like some demented god. I might as well join in with every viewer ever in singing hosannas to the tracking shot down a dark alley - you'll know it when you see it. I'm sure every viewer will have their own favorite scene; why take the fun out by detailing everything?

So, with 48 hours under my belt, is it the greatest film of Welles career? Certainly not. Nor is it one of the twelve best of anything you might want to list. But is fascinating, endlessly so, made by a certifiable mad genius. It's a lot of work to watch it if you want to watch it right, but it's worth it. Not every day that you get to watch a new Orson Welles film three times in a row.

ALL MY FRIENDS STAND UP AND CHEER AND SAY, "MAN, YOU'RE OLD"

I'm getting my quarter-century mark on today. Hip-hip-huzzah.

You may congratulate me on my continued failure to die in comments; or better still, you may not.

YOUTUBE IS GOOD FOR WHAT AILS YOU

From the files of "lazing around vaguely ill watching things on the internet":

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog thing in the first place was so that I, the independent filmmaker, could share my experiences in the wide world of movie production, and hopefully let others learn from my triumphs and mistakes.

Hasn't panned out so well. Writing screenplays is hard, yo.

That doesn't mean that I can't point out important lessons for all of us, and that we can't all learn from other people's mistakes together. In this case, I have an important lesson for anyone who is thinking about directing music videos:

Do precisely none of the things they did in Toto's "Africa" video.

MY RACE WEEKEND II: EDWARD ZWICK IS CONDESCENDING

(Yeah, I promised this would be up yesterday. Anyone willing to come to Evanston and help me bake 10 batches of cookies before Friday has freedom to complain).

Previously: Mel Gibson disappointed me with the degree to which Apocalypto wasn't batshit insane.

It takes approximately no searching whatsoever to find the conventional wisdom that Blood Diamond is an archliberal film. Balls. Blood Diamond, like every other Edward Zwick-directed film I've seen, is very "politically correct," which is not inherently the same thing as "liberal" at all. Blood Diamond is liberal only in the sense that it has the bravery to say that widespread bloodshed and civil war in Africa are very bad things.

(Of course, that is pretty much a leftist position in America these days, isn't it? Fucking neocons).

Like so very many films from the sublime to the unwatchable, Blood Diamond is really about white guilt. If I had to sum up the theme of the film in one sentence, it would be something like this: "Thank God those silly Africans have brave white Westerners to save them from themselves." Zwick and company would probably phrase it a little bit differently: "White people buy diamonds. Diamonds bad for black people. Grr white people! Yay white people who save black people!" I do not wish to give them credit for being too articulate.

The plot: Leonardo DiCaprio gets to trot out an admittedly a really good South African accent as Danny Archer, a vicious diamond smuggler helping to finance unspeakable violence in Sierra Leone in 1999. A series of believable coincidences bring him into contact with Solomon (Djimon Hounsou), a prison camp escapee who has secreted a fabulously large pink diamond on a riverbank, and Danny tricks, cajoles, threatens and bargains his way into a partnership to go on a diamond quest. Along the way, Danny consistently knows infinitely more about everything than Solomon, and scenes such as the following play out:

"'Not that way, Uncle Tom,—not that way,' said he, briskly, as Uncle Tom laboriously brought up the tail of his g the wrong side out; 'that makes a q, you see.'

'La sakes, now, does it?' said Uncle Tom, looking with a respectful, admiring air, as his young teacher flourishingly scrawled q's and g's innumerable for his edification; and then, taking the pencil in his big, heavy fingers, he patiently recommenced."

I'm sorry, I was thinking of something else. What I meant to say is that Danny is the planner; it is Solomon who always causes trouble by being impatient and reckless. Danny thinks: Solomon is the muscle, at one point near the end literally bellowing with inarticulate rage.

Along their journey, Danny and Solomon are joined by the noble white journalist Maddy Bowen and her cleavage (played by Jennifer Connelly and Jennifer Connelly's Cleavage, and if you think I'm being sexist for arguing that Conelly's rack is a separate character, I'd recommend that you watch the film and get back to me). Maddy and Danny have several arguments about the proper behavior of white smugglers on a black continent, and generally treat Solomon like he's the pet dog that Maddy knew, just knew that Danny wouldn't really be willing to take care of, and now who has take him on walkies? If Danny isn't using his street smarts and military connections to get Solomon out of a jam, then Maddy's using her journalist friends and understanding of the UN bureaucracy. I need hardly mention that Danny and Maddy fall in luuuuv, and Danny is eventually cured of his venal smuggling ways, because this is That Kind of Movie.

If this is liberal, than I would really hate to see what racism looks like.

Funny though, how I was just able to watch and mostly enjoy a film by a notorious Jew-hater, and this well-intentioned film is bringing the hate. Do I expect more from Zwick than Gibson? Maybe. But "the whites must save the blacks" is racist, pure and simple.

Now, I fear any practice, however slight, that ends in judging works of art based on their ideological purity. That road ultimately leads to mental fascism: first we call that piece "bad" because we disagree with it, then we seek to prevent the creation of wrongthinking art, then we seek to prevent the wrongthinking itself, and eventually Andrei Tarkovsky starves to death in prison.* Anyway, saying "that is bad" because one disagrees with it is a hallmark of the Right, and I'd be sad indeed to see the Left pick up any of their bad habits.

So it's a bit of a relief that Blood Diamond is still a pretty crappy movie, and I can still harsh on it.

I think it wants to be an adventure film on the Gunga Din or King Solomon's Mines model, and given that neither one of those are precisely anti-racist, that might go a long way to explain the film's problems. But neither one of those are polemics, either, and that's where Blood Diamond falls apart even on the level of mere popcorn entertainment: every ten minutes the characters stop and address the audience with a very important message about how the diamond industry thrives on the exploitation of Africa. To say that it kills the film's momentum is an understatement.

(Hopefully, no one will think that my problem with the film is the idea of conflict diamonds per se. On the contrary, I remember when this became a major international issue five years ago, and I support any and all diamond boycotts. But five years ago is a long time, and I now question the film's need to exist; even my mother, usually my go-to person on not knowing what's going on with the world, was aware that the diamond industry lives on the blood of Africans.

I hope that one of the consequences of retaking the Congress is that we liberals don't feel the need to make so many arch and unpersuasive docudramas about politics).

This constant preachiness isn't necessarily Zwick's fault, I suspect: the last screenplay by writer Charles Leavitt was the execrable K-PAX, so I suppose that I can only criticise the director for doing what he always does: having no clue how to film actors or their cleavage.

Despite all this, the film does a couple of things right. Zwick is a great visual artist. Even when his films are poorly written and flatly staged (which is to say, in all cases), they are beautiful, and it helps very much in the case of Blood Diamond that his cinematographer is an outright genius, Eduardo Serra. A lovelier picture-postcard version of Africa you've never seen (and yes, the film is about Africa-as-Hell, but the cinematography is the only thing that doesn't pound you over the head with that, and I'm grateful).

The other thing - the BIG thing - is Leonardo DiCaprio. I am simply at a loss to remember the last time I saw him give such an arresting performance. His career renaissance, I think, is complete - this might well be the best work he's ever done as the venal, conflicted, romantic, idealistic, father-worshipping, fatalistic Danny Archer ("venal" was the only one of those in the script. That's how good the performance is). Indeed, so perfect is this actor in this role that one can almost find it in themselves to be grateful that Danny is the lead character, and that Blood Diamond explores his arc, not the plight of suffering Africans.

But no, not while Zwick is such a smug asshole. How the hell did this get on the NBR Top 10, exactly?

5/10

*Andrei Tarkovsky died of natural causes in Paris, and besides some concern over the Christian nature of many of his films, he never came under any scrutiny for subversive or politically suspicious writing. But wouldn't it have helped my argument if that hadn't been the case?