Category Archives: Movies

On movies, video, projection, and the like.

Doubt at the Little

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Ali and I went to The Little (240 East Ave.) to see Doubt. It's a fascinating film which, although obviously different from the play (which neither of us saw), is extremely strong. I suppose it could only help that the film was written and directed by the original playwright, John Patrick Shanley. The story primarily follows Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the minister of St. Nicholas in the Bronx in 1964, and Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the principal of the affiliated school. Flynn takes an interest in one of the students: Donald Muller — a black boy in an otherwise all-white school. Sister Aloysius fully believes Flynn molested Donald and intends to ensure he [Flynn — duh] is punished.

The audience is left to their own beliefs to ascertain whether Flynn molested Donald. I found this fascinating, as I maintained his innocence throughout the film but realized afterward that I could experience the film again completely differently by believing he was guilty.

Sister Aloysius is someone who would act to destroy based on their beliefs. I think it's a particular kind of logic that permits this: believing that one's belief alone is more true than having no factual basis — perhaps a manifestation of the nature of faith (although in the case of religious faith, it's more about filling a gap in that which is knowable). The trouble is, there is an element of circular justification: if she succeeds in destroying Flynn's reputation, she feels justified, but by putting her own reputation on the line in making such an accusation, she has no choice but to fight to destroy Flynn's reputation no matter whether he was guilty or not.

Sister James, meanwhile, acts as a foil to Sister Aloysius by believing in the kindness of others. Sister Aloysius' long-time experience as disciplinarian provides her only with evidence of sin and wrongdoing. So is it Sister James' naiveté or Sister Aloysius' limited perspective that is at fault?

For myself, I find that when factual evidence is not available, belief in kindness is the more fruitful path. As is the case with Sister Aloysius, believing more in evil makes you a destructive force in the world whereas believing more in good opens up the possibility of being constructive.

But equally important is that it makes you happier to believe that people are generally kind.

Watching The Exiles with Ali at the Dryden

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Ali and I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see The Exiles. The description given in the Eastman House calendar was tantalizing, as the film has almost never been screened for 50 years, and it documents Native Americans living in Los Angeles in the 1960's. Sprinkle in phrases like, "seamlessly mixes documentary and narrative techniques" and "deeply emotional and personal achievement", and I'm sold.

Our reaction to the film, however, was one of grand disappointment. It's an arduous film to watch full of interchangeably unlikeable, apathetic characters. In addition, the dialog was dubbed in the studio and loses all of its emotional expression in the process — in fact, according to the program notes authored by K. A. Westphal, the entire soundtrack was meticulously recreated long after shooting was completed [definitely read it for some unbelievable trivia]. In total, though, the film completely neglects the audience and instead slowly stews in its own world.

As such, the film is considered a masterpiece — in part because it deliberately rejects a serviceable narrative, and simply documents the lives of people who are essentially unremarkable jerks. As other reviewers noted, this undesirability of the characters seems to work against the cause of helping Native Americans. However, I took away the point that it was far too late — even in the 1960's — for the Native American cause. The people depicted on screen are the walking dead of a lost civilization. They drift from heartbeat to heartbeat, resigned to a purposeless fate: their entire culture having been wiped from the earth in what amounts to a mass genocide.

So in a way, I agree that it is a masterpiece. It spoke of the situation of recently-displaced Native Americans (who have been generationally displaced to boot) and what happens when you do that to someone. However, it's akin to experiencing the beauty of a sword by having someone slice your arm open with it. You can appreciate the workmanship and detail, but its true function is to cut and to kill, so what better way to truly immerse yourself in its beauty than by taking part in its primary function? The amoral, artistic side of me understands that that would be the pinnacle of sword examination, but the rest of me, well, doesn't really want to get cut.

And so, with my mighty blog and website and stuff, I set forth a demand to appeal to the audience. [And by that, I mean that I know that there are some Eastman House employees who will read this, and might consider bringing it up at a programming meeting, if the mood suits them.] My friends and I have had this kind of experience many times before: when a film is considered "great" or "important" for reasons other than how well it is appreciated by the average audience, but is noted for being altogether brilliant in its cinematic quality. I, personally, tend to enjoy these films too, but I need to be mentally prepared for them, and when I'm unprepared and end up getting blindsided, I find myself alienating the Dryden. I seek other avenues for entertainment … at least for a while. And I always end up coming back, and hopefully sooner than later.

I propose, therefore, that the Dryden begin offering "audience appreciation" films. This is different from "popcorn movies" which offer purely an experience of entertainment; rather a delineation of cinematic masterpieces that overlaps the "popcorn" genre. It's movies where the filmmakers consider the audience to be the most important part of the process.

Understandably, it's a difficult aspect to divine — after all, The Exiles had the audience at the forefront of its production as much as any other movie, and perhaps even more for respecting their knowledge and wisdom. Consider how different it is from Encounters At the End of the World, though: it's as if the audience is a cherished friend invited to explore something new and fascinating rather than colleagues already insatiably interested in the topic at hand.

Put simply, there's a difference between "cinematically important" and "enjoyable".

Frownland at the Dryden

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I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Frownland. I was reluctant (and, in fact, Ali passed on it entirely) because we had both seen The Pawnbroker the night before. The Pawnbroker, while a powerful movie about the lifetime of suffering the Holocaust caused, it fell a little flat as I had already explored those issues; so in other words, if I had seen the movie at an earlier time in my life, I would have been blown away, but now it was just an exercise in excellent movie-making. The Eastman House calendar seemed to imply that Frownland would be similar to The Pawnbroker — largely because the central characters in each movie is at best unlikeable, and at worst, intolerable.

I was glad to be pleasantly surprised. While I guess it's not incorrect to describe Frownland's central character, Keith as a "chain-smoking, stammering, excessively needy, terribly annoying, yet fascinating nobody," I gravitated toward the more concise description that he's the personification of insecurity. He's cripplingly so, in fact, yet not through any definable mental illness — while he'd most certainly benefit from some form of psychological therapy, he appears to be only circumstantially dysfunctional. What I mean is that he would probably be able to function if it weren't for his antagonistically unsympathetic roommate, his door-to-door job, or the simple fact of being so unavoidably exposed to people by living in New York City.

Filmmaker Ronald Bronstein was there to discuss his film. He's a remarkably articulate guy — particularly when it comes to his understanding of his own work on this particular movie. He was drawing from his own insecure times in New York, and from the insidious nature of insecurity. He gave the analogy to hunger: that hunger's solution — eating — is not blocked by being hungry, whereas insecurity's solution — self-confidence — is blocked by insecurity: you're unable to develop meaningful relationships with others and ultimately it's only through innovative lateral thinking that you can build self-confidence.

So in a way, it's kind of a horror movie: a man trapped in an insecure mental state and who seems to be permanently so. Curiously, Bronstein worked on Frownland for 6 years whenever he was able to afford more film, and he found it challenging to keep touch with the very idea of this constant state of insecurity.

My Winnipeg at the Dryden

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I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. Maddin described it as a "docu-fantasia" (or was it "docutasia") about his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada, duh). And, barring a better word, it was exactly that.

It's hard to discern what was fact and what was fantasy — for instance, did Maddin (also acting as narrator) in fact rent out his family home to stage reenactments of his childhood? Were the events described real in any way? Does it matter? I had a similar reaction to the feverish dream of his former film, Brand Upon the Brain!. Winnipeg shared the poetic and metaphoric use of visual effects (rather than the more traditional use of creating a false reality).

My friend Christina has a theory about Rochester: that people don't leave because it's hard to move in winter, but when spring arrives, everything comes up green and beautiful, summers are fantastic, fall is beautiful in its own right, and before you know it, it's back to winter and you can't leave. Maddin shares a similar view of Winnipeg: that people are so sleepy there that they are unable to stay awake long enough to stay on the train that leaves town — to escape.

So I guess, in the end, it succeeds in being a documentary about Winnipeg — that which he was supposedly chartered to do (and evidenced by the title card announcing funding by The Documentary Channel) — albeit an extraordinarily personal one. But, nonetheless, one that appears to succeed in documenting the spirit of a city.

Idiocracy at the Dryden

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I headed out to the Dryden Theatre at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to catch Idiocracy — the seldom-seen Mike Judge film, which was released … er … buried just a few years ago. It's about an absolutely average guy in the army, Joe Bauers, who takes part in a human hibernation experiment, only to accidentally be left for 500 years. When he awakes, he finds himself in a bizarre world where stupefyingly stupid people are running the place, and impossibly-stupider ones populate it. Automated systems somehow keep things marginally running [something like "Matrix Vista", I guess] — albeit in a totalitarian dystopia to which the population is absolutely complacent with. Joe is arrested and given an intelligence test which places him as the smartest person in the world — by a huge margin.

But the real brilliance of the satire is that it's a believable amplification of what we have today. The Brawndo corporation bought the FDA and FCC, allowing them to pump their energy-drink beverage through the plumbing for drinking — leaving people to refer to plain water as "toilet water". And, like in today's spirit of anti-intellectualism, people of the future referred to rational speech as sounding "pompous and faggy". It's relentless in its celebration of stupidity.

The film proposes that it was because stupid people have lots of kids but smart people don't that the world was getting dumber, but genetics don't work like that: stupid people breed smart kids just as often as smart people breed dumb kids. Remove that presumption, and the film becomes much more melancholic. For it's not that nature is failing us, it's that we arrogantly and tenaciously believe that because we think intelligence is a good thing that it should necessarily be — in Darwinian parlance — "selected for": that the "good" traits in a species should necessarily become more dominant in the population. Yet that has causality backwards and isn't even a valid comparison. Dominant traits in a population are simply most common, and "good" traits are at the whim of the era. Having ten toes is completely unrelated to being an oil baron in the 20th century or a king in the 16th century.

In Jim Healy's introduction, he believed the screening we were about to watch was the first 35mm screening in New York State — and possibly the entire American northeast. According to IMDb, it opened on 6 screens then peaking the next day at 130 screens — by no means large numbers, but it's unlikely this was the first screening. Anyway, Jim sided with the most rational and least controversial theory for the lackluster marketing for an otherwise hilarious and simultaneously biting film: that Twentieth Century-Fox simply could not figure out how to market it. While I don't doubt that's true, I don't think it's the full story since the Fox corporation has been aggressively courting anti-intellectualism as a philosophical mainstay. So I find it hard to believe it was as simple as a film without a market, but that Fox was the wrong group to try. After all, they opened drivel like Glitter on 1,201 screens and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties on 2,946 screens yet intellectual fare like Fast Food Nation began on only 321 screens and Waking Life was seen on only 4.

If only they had smarter people working for them …

Dinner and a Movie with Ali

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Ali and I tried out that whole dinner-and-a-movie deal — the one where you can get free tickets for The Cinema TheatreMySpace link (957 South Clinton Ave.) for everyone at your table at Highland Park Diner (960 S. Clinton Ave.) if you spend at least $12.50 each. It's not that the Cinema is all that expensive, but it was a good excuse to spend a little more than usual on dinner. After all, even though Highland Diner is pricier than average, it's still kind of hard to spend that much per person.

The first film was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which Ali enjoyed more than I did. The thing I always enjoyed about the series is the way that the highly improbable circumstances are at least physically possible — it's set in the past of our daily world with a twist that there's a bit more magic and ancient booby traps continue to function flawlessly. In the latest installment, however, the action is just too far beyond unlikely: getting blown-clear from a nuclear blast, or going over a waterfall and surviving completely unscathed, for instance.

I also condemn the film for having internal inconsistencies indicative of a changing script. In one instance, Jones has strong knowledge of an unusual artifact but later claims he was kept in the dark and knew nothing. That artifact was supposed to be magnetic — able to deflect hanging lights from tens of feet away — but could be easily loaded into a steel Jeep. I also recall at least one instance where a character starts arguing with another, but that argument was almost edited out, and in the next shot, they're all fine again.

Ali had to skip Hellboy II: The Golden Army but I went back to see it. I liked it a lot more than Indiana Jones. I wasn't all that keen on it being so comic-book-like because some of the scenes would have worked as a comic book panel — where your imagination fixes the incongruities as if in a dream — but when rendered in film-form, they're shown to be rather absurd. That said, the dialog is snappy, funny, and overall the film is just fun to watch.

Duck, You Sucker at the Dryden

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I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Giù la testa (A Fistful of Dynamite, or Duck, You Sucker). According to Michael Neault in his introduction of the movie, Sergio Leone — after having made several movies celebrating political revolution — Duck, You Sucker takes a much more cynical view of it.  It also happens to be that there are no fewer than four versions of the film, and the one we got to see was presumed to be the "original" director's cut.

I immediate thought that as much as The Bridge on the River Kwai is a testament to the rational insanity of war, Duck, You Sucker shows war as a black comedy. In the film, John — a former Irish Republican Army explosives expert — gets paired up with Juan — a poor thief in Mexico. That is, despite John's best efforts to avoid it. And to avoid getting roped into another revolution … sort of … it seems that getting involved in revolution is more of an addictive habit than anything. Juan, in the mean time, is also trying to avoid getting into the revolution. But he accidentally keeps saving people and making terriffic progress for the revolutionaries.

As revolutions are, there are advances made by each side, making it seem like no progress is made on either front overall until perhaps, one of the parties involved just gets too tired of fighting — or forgets what the point was in the first place.

Breaking Away at the Dryden

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Ali and I biked to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Breaking Away. A lot of people took advantage of their "promotion" to get $4 tickets if you rode a bike — after all, the film is about bicycling and the dreams of one guy to ride competitively.

Neither of us had seen the film before but we both enjoyed it a lot.  It's kind of funny, really — that the movie can be such a standard story of the underdogs triumphing, yet also come across refreshing and inspirational. Perhaps it's because the characters are so fully formed. More often than not, the characters are written from the perspective of a solitary writer, and as such, they end up being pretty closely aligned in personality. Of course, the college kids were pretty one-dimensional, but it was, after all, the story of the town kids more than anything.

Vanishing Point at the Dryden

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Although it was a double feature, I decided to go late to see just Vanishing Point at Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.). On the surface, it was a simple tale of a guy running from the law in a fast car. But my take on it was that the guy — Kowalski — represented freedom itself. Super Soul — the black, blind DJ — seems to recognize this, and even spells it right out.

I found Kowalski's encounters on the road to be one-dimensional allegories where you can just substitute "freedom" for "Kowalski":

  • At every turn, the law is out to stop freedom.
  • The hippie couple gets along with freedom.
  • Racists try to stop Super Soul from talking about freedom.
  • The gay couple tries to rob freedom — perhaps out of desperation.
  • Freedom goes all over the desert.
  • The religious group sees freedom only as a malicious stranger.
  • When the law finally wins, freedom dies.

Fantastic Planet at the Dryden

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I also went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see La planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet). The woman who gave the introductory presentation was new-to-me — she was young, and I believe attending The University of Rochester. Among the other tidbits about the film, she mentioned that it was an allegory to the way the USSR treated its satellite states. I was surprised to find this caused me to try and make direct comparisons for the first 20 minutes or so, at which point I finally freed myself of that thought and could just absorb it as a work of art — and do the analysis later.

Anyway, it was amazing. It's an animated work of speculative fiction about these two species of intelligent beings: the Om are small and human-like and are treated like pets by the Dragg: the more advanced, 8-times larger, blue bipeds. Wild (that is, not domesticated) Om learn from the Dragg and become more adept, even learning to read the language. I was struck by the attention to detail (two examples: the doll-like clothing the Dragg make domesticated Om wear, and the debate between wild Om where each one ties himself to a vicious creature and the two fight until one Om is killed) and the lack of explanation (i.e. no attempt is made to explain how anything works, and no attempt is made to identify this world's relation to our own world — not in deep space, nor a tiny sub-world). My only disappointment was how abruptly the film concludes.

I thought it also interesting to note that the film is French, and the central character is a domesticated Om named Terr (both in French and subtitled): "Om" is a homophone for "homme", the French word for "man" and "Terr" is a homophone for "terre", the French word for Earth. I suspect the film would have been far more campy if it were about a Man named Earth instead.