Movie Memories: Lost in Translation

In September of 2003 I was consumed with the sort of melancholy that can only set in when you are a particularly privileged seventeen-year-old. I was halfway through high school, and at this point had, quite successfully, lived the persona of the guy who didn't give a second thought to dating. It served me well as long as it did; I didn't get too broken up over missed opportunities, made a lot of friends very easily - people are quick to latch onto the carefree - and altogether was fairly pleased with myself most of the time.

The trouble is, when the girl I found myself dating in the summer of 2003, a girl I'd been quite crazy about over the preceding year and change, decided to break up with me a little before the start of the school year, I suddenly had nowhere to turn. Everyone knew me as the easygoing guy who didn't worry about anything, especially the idea of the high school relationship, so not only was I heartbroken, but completely unable to talk to anybody about it.

So I turned, in what would become a common coping mechanism in the years to come, to the movies. This was really at the cusp of when movies were taking over my life, so I started going fairly regularly, typically an early afternoon showing on a Saturday. And, for the first time, I'd go alone. I figured I watched movies by myself at home all the time; what's the difference, really? It turned out to be one of the most wonderful experiences, one I still quite enjoy but, like many things, will never quite reach the heights of those first few outings. Sitting in the dark, alone yet surrounded (well...as surrounded as one gets on Saturday afternoons), I found peace and serenity.

As Lester Bangs says in Almost Famous, true music...it chooses you. I've found the same too often true of movies, and I can't help but feel that Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola's ode to undefineable, momentary relationships and exploring foreign countries, chose me. At the Regal Cinema inside the Pioneer Place mall here in Portland, on that Saturday afternoon in September of 2003, Lost in Translation reached out from beyond the clutter of pop culture and life and said "I'm here for you."

The whole world opened up to me. I discovered a cinema not of ideas or laughs or thrills, but of feelings. Emotions and impressions were the landscape of the film. I was introduced to people with completely different life experiences from my own, feeling exactly as I had been for the past month, asking the same sort of questions. I learned the value of simply walking and exploring. Not because it was spoken - nobody in the film had to make fun of people who use a guide book to show how wonderful it is to just go.

I learned it was possible to identify more with the woman in a movie than the man (being a straight white male, the majority of American cinema is more or less about me). There's a moment, and this is exactly what I'm talking about in saying the film's all about moments and impressions because it lasts...maybe a second, but it's the kind of breathless perfection you dream of experiencing in art. It's when John (Giovanni Ribisi) is heading out to leave his wife, Charlotte (Scarlett Johanson), alone in Tokyo while he does business in a neighboring town. He gives her a kiss goodbye, and she grabs his face, holds him for an extra second, lingering in the moment of that kiss as he's trying to be someplace else. It's simple, it's easy, but it's effective. I knew that feeling so intensely that even now it gets me a little choked up. I'm sure more than a few of you understand how closely knit your life can become to a movie.

It could have been depressing to learn that these things don't go away as we get older, that they only become more complicated; but it wasn't. It was comforting to see acceptance, and the possibility of a new surprise. It encouraged me to open up to new experiences, new people, and within a month I found myself in a platonic relationship very similar to the one depicted in the film, one in which trust and openness were everything. She moved away the following summer and I hardly ever speak to her anymore, but for a brief period of time, we had something amazing. Something that I can honestly say wouldn't have happened if not for this film.

Many movies impart certain values and life lessons; Lost in Translation taught me how to live. I know, for many, it hasn't aged well, and for many others, it never lived up to the hype. But seeing it before any of that set in, in a vacuum all my own, the movie became an inextricable part of me. And whatever problems others may find, to me it is perfect - its mysteries, its conclusions, its suggestions...most of all its suggestions.

Thanks to my lovely girlfriend Julie for the inspiration.

Was This Really As Bad As It Gets? - Summer 2010

I am completely stumped. For months now, beginning all the way back in April or May, all I heard was how awful the summer 2010 line-up was. And it seemed as though, in spite of whatever new film came along, that perception was to remain regardless. I was skeptical then and I'm outright baffled now, as I found this summer to be, pound for pound, lightyears better than last summer - and all things considered, oddly inspired. For all intents and purposes, we'll say this summer began in April and lasted until...well, the end of this month, but I'm all done with my summer viewing so how do you like them apples?

In spite of the public and critical perception that superheroes have taken over the box office, there were only two honest-to-goodness superhero films this year - the sublime Iron Man 2 and the better-than-expected Kick Ass (unless I'm forgetting something). I maintain that Iron Man 2 is the most exciting development in the superhero genre since Ang Lee's Hulk, a statement I realize says more about the superhero genre than it does Iron Man 2, but which nevertheless makes it noteworthy. It excites not through action and spectacle but dialogue and character, a trait just as exceptional and important as the more overtly groundbreaking The Dark Knight. The critical reception of each parallels those in the classic era who ignored Howard Hawks but elevated Fred Zinneman or Elia Kazan (though, as a stylist, Nolan has more in common with Fritz Lang, his storytelling is regretably far more blunt). Its few action scenes make it count - the anxiety in Tony fighting Ivan on the racetrack in particular - but it's the banter and competition between Tony and Pepper, and the continuing development of Tony as the only interesting protagonist of the superhero genre, that makes this a winner.

Action films as a whole had a pretty good go of it, with the summer's most important film (in the contemporary landscape anyway), Inception, delivering best on that accord. Though it wasn't, as Jean-Luc Godard wrote, "the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts," Joseph Gordon-Levitt's hallway fight scene is still one of the best bits of action to ever hit the screen. Pushing past those that would seemingly seek to damage the genre in spite of some clever ideas (The Losers, The A-Team, The Expendables), we find the two films that made me believe in action cinema again.

Enter Knight and Day and Salt, which not only boast pitch-perfect execution of action as entertainment, but also use action to reveal character and develop plot. This puts them in a much higher, more rarefied league that the inexplicably acclaimed Star Trek never reached. Oh, AND the acting is great, you say? Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz have wonderful chemistry, and Angelina Jolie's performance is as raw and committed as any I've seen this year, regardless of genre. While Inception more aggressively invaded the public consciousness, James Mangold and Phillip Noyce quietly executed the summer blockbuster masterfully.

After a banner year in 2009, animation has sort of resigned to more of the same, a model which yielded one masterpiece (Toy Story 3), one solid ground double in baseball terms (How to Train Your Dragon), and one complete miss (Despicable Me). None of these, it's worth noted, were particularly interested in doing anything truly unique to their form. In the age of the computer, animation has grown more and more content to keep the physics of the world and biology of the characters grounded when they have the perfect outlet to do otherwise. It should be noted, however, that Day & Night, the short that played before Toy Story 3, is something that could have only been accomplished in animation, and it better for it.

The summer's biggest loser, genre-wise, was comedy. To be fair, I've yet to see MacGruber, which I've heard great things about from the right people, but the only thing that really carried me away was The Other Guys, which is just awesome. It executes the easy (smacking Mark Wahlberg with a wooden gun) and the conceptual (a cliche "break it up, fellas" tussle done in whisper) with equal ease and conviction, and any film that lets Michael Keaton and Mark Wahlberg do comedy this confidently is great in my book. But otherwise...Dinner for Schmucks? Get Him to the Greek? Laughs were had, but I can't recall many of them, and they were fairly empty in their attempts at reaching our heart. And don't even get me started on Hot Tub Time Machine, which thankfully came out before the summer and thus will receive no further consideration.

So all that leaves is the art house, which saved last summer for me, but this year alternately provided some of the best, worst, and dead-center films of the year thus far. Wild Grass and I Am Love provided two of the most shattering, enlightening experiences cinema will likely provide this year, while Exit Through the Gift Shop, The Square, and The Secret in Their Eyes were totally engrossing in their handling of plot and character. Winter's Bone, Cyrus, and Get Low were well-intentioned films, though their execution left everything to be desired, whereas Micmacs was a perfectly executed film with nothing in the way of intention. Solitary Man, The Kids Are All Right, and Please Give were perfectly fine films in most respects while admittedly inconsequential and fairly disposable.

Oh, right...and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. An unclassifiable, imperfect, but magnificently realized film that will live on forever in my heart (and, finances providing, on my shelf). If I begrudge it anything, it's that many of its techniques and developments were actually pioneered in the Wachowski Brothers' superior Speed Racer, but that is a problem of perception. It's not the film's fault. The film's just out there on its own, being awesome. Seriously, why have you not seen Scott Pilgrim already? Do it! Bring your friends!

If you feel I've missed anything, neglected my duties in any way, or want to try and convince me all over again that Star Trek is somehow worth anyone's time, sound off in the comments. In the meantime, between dozen or so great films that have come out thus far and a truly stellar fall slate ahead, I can tell already that it's going to be near impossible to whittle down a list of the ten best.

One Punch Away

Boxing is far and away my favorite cinematic sport. The three types of dramatic struggles are contained within the ring - man against man most obviously, and man is constantly fighting his own limitations within a less than forgiving environment. Particularly, the further back you go in history, rings would often have the blood of the last fight on them, and even if the crowd is in your favor, nine out of ten of them would be just as fine seeing you clobbered.

Most of all, it takes a whole other kind of mindset to step into the ring time after time, and that's certainly the position in which we find Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) as Robert Wise's masterpiece opens. Already in his mid-30s, Stoker is considered an old man, washed up, and he's set to fight a kid in his early 20s that very night. The only thing keeping him going - his wife Julie (Audrey Totter) - can't even bear to watch him fight anymore.

The film unfolds in real time over a scant seventy-two minutes, much of it spent in the milieu of the boxing world, all of it captivating. Wise reportedly spent a good deal of time soaking in the real-world environment, and to this writer's uneducated eye, it feels like the best kind of movie real. Gritty without laying it on, establishing a rapport amongst the characters that is just a smidge beyond believability. Wise's direction on the whole is masterful, from iconic shots in empty hallways to a breathtaking boxing match that had me on the edge of my seat - rarely have I been so uncertain of the outcome.

The film also sidesteps the least compelling aspect of many a boxing picture - the mob. When given the choice between going along with a mob order to take the fall or to stand up against them and fight the good fight, we're left either way with a dramatically weak set-up (you'll pardon the pun). Either the guy is too righteous, or too soft. In this picture, we learn pretty quickly that Stoker's manager has taken mob money on the promise Stoker will take the fall, but he's so certain Stoker will go down, he figures there's no reason to tell him. That's the kind of Hitchcockian suspense you never see in this kind of picture, and it adds just the right twist of the screwdriver to the proceedings.

It's a great film; I'd go so far as to say a perfect one, with so many surprises still in store for you. It's available on DVD as part of a quite impressive box set.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (dir. Edgar Wright)

If cinema is to have a future, there are already a small group of talented filmmakers ready, willing, and able to guide it towards what it will have to become to thrive in the 21st century. Edgar Wright is one of those filmmakers.

Making his film debut with two genre parodies/deconstructions following fourteen episodes of a reference-heavy sitcom, I suppose it's unsurprising that most of the talk surrounding Wright was in postmodern terms at best, and spot-the-influence terms at worst. With Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a film that wears its cultural touchstones on its sleeve, only one true comparison comes to mind - Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Because in spite of its many clear influences, what Edgar Wright does here is all about invention for a new generation.

In a recent article in The New York Times, A.O. Scott recounts a story of reactions gathered as people  exit a Paris theater, having just seen Breathless, in 1960:

A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively.

Now let's not get ahead of ourselves - if Scott Pilgrim ends up as important a film as Breathless, it's only something we'd know about decades down the line. But let's just say I wouldn't be surprised. It unquestionably will be, and already has been, dismissed on similar terms as Godard's breakthrough film - a silly film for young people - but it's really quite astounding. Wright has never been given his due in the editorial department, and here his achievement is more striking than ever, building transitions into the frame and script in new and clever ways even for him. If this is the film for the multitask generation, it's simply because he communicates so much information so quickly and simply, one would have to have built up the skill required in a world overrun by the Internet and smart phones to understand and appreciate what's happening here. Which is to say, it's a film for people of any age who can process visual information quickly.

And quick it is, but there can be grace in speed. Whereas Christopher Nolan's laborious rush of exposition in Inception came off as forced, its speed the equivalent of an unyielding freight train, Scott Pilgrim has the grace of a Bob Clampett or Frank Tashlin cartoon. This, as you may have gathered even from the frames in this article, is hardly the only comparison one can draw between the film and cartoons, but in the age of CGI, this is no longer a viable separation. Every major film, to one extent or another, is a cartoon - Scott Pilgrim, like Speed Racer before it, is just more cartoon than most.

Wright's thorough commitment to this world, one in which people break into fights or songs at the drop of a hat and vegans can read your mind, is beyond admirable. In an age when even musicals have to meekly shuffle their main attraction to an imaginary realm, where comic book characters have to have "realistic," "believable" origins, Wright's unapologetic zest for pure creation is the monsoon after the drought.

Like Breathless, this is a very youth-oriented film - it addresses young concerns of hopping from relationship to relationship, getting over your girlfriend's sketchy past (echoes of Chasing Amy here), and the weird malaise that sets in over your mid-20s, where you have no idea what to do with any aspect of your life. These were central concerns in Spaced, the British sitcom Wright directed, and while he's now in a place to look at this struggle more humorously and distantly, it's sort of charming to see that Wright still identifies and sympathizes with these concerns.

And, like Spaced, he does it in the most insane way possible. Adapted from a series of comic books (that I haven't read) by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the story of a twenty-two-year-old slacker, Scott (Michael Cera), who meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and has to fight her seven exes in order to date her. The sly conceit of the story is that this is not a battle to win her, but rather literalizing the emotional turmoil that comes with accepting your new girlfriend as a person, and not simply an idea. For most young men, that's all women are at first - a lovely image upon which we can drape whatever suits us. And that's exactly how Scott, and consequently we as an audience, see her for much of the film. What makes her worth fighting for isn't anything defineable; it may not even exist. Scott's battle is for purpose, the realization of every young man's dream, that his life is an epic battle, and at the end of the road, a woman who is everything he's ever wanted.

It's also thoroughly entertaining. The fights, which could have so easily become episodic and repetitive, are consistently offering new angles and are the most electrifying I've seen all year. Visually, the film is an absolute feast, but one never without motivation (Wild Grass for the multiplex), shifting color, aspect ratio, depth, whatever it takes to convey the emotional stakes of the moment with willing abandon. And if the film comes up short emotionally, conveying Scott's growth too literally, it hardly matters by that point. By then, Wright's complete authority over his chosen medium and the ease with which his cast (about whom I could, and perhaps will, write a whole other article) assimilates to and enriches his landscape have completely won us over.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is cinema. And you should experience it for yourself.

If Time Moves Slower in a Dream, Why Did This Go By So Fast?

I got around to seeing Inception again with a friend who was seeing it for the first time. She really loved it, emerging from the film as excited as I've seen anyone about it. I, on the other hand, was reminded only how intermittently I actually enjoyed the film. A second viewing was helpful to be reminded just how strong the narrative drive was at points (and, it's worth pointing out, those two-and-a-half hours fly right by), but the emotional shortcomings were as dire as I feared, and worse, the film had little to support itself thematically. All that was left were moments of intense, pure excitement.

In the weeks following The Dark Knight, after the initial enthusiasm died down and we (that is, my fellow nerds and I) were all able to gain a little bit of perspective on the whole affair, I still defended the film even in the face of the massive wave of very convincing criticism it received. One element made it essential cinema - the narrative drive. The pace of the film is relentless, a charge often lobbied against it, but one I felt was very fitting to the story it was telling, which was all about the concept of "elevation;" that the world was becoming dangerous too fast for the forces of good to keep up with. While also exciting, the pacing fit thematically with the picture.

Inception has a whole lot of none of that. The pacing is absolutely punishing, to the extent that I told my girlfriend after seeing it the first time that it too often felt like a trailer for itself, an admittedly snarky complaint that felt all the truer in the second viewing. Gone, gone from this place is any of the elegance Nolan brought to his earlier work, most notably Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige, all of which dealt with memory, regret, and guilt more deftly and effectively than the sledgehammer approach of Cobb simply telling the audience how guilty he feels. Not that those three films didn't have similar moments, but the confessions were dramatically motivated; you got the sense, by the time they came out, that these characters needed to tell someone. Cobb's come because he's asked more than once.

There are interesting concepts, but as in The Dark Knight, they are mentioned rather than explored - that, for example, Cobb has actually been alive for eighty or so years (maybe more, I forget), and has reverted back to youth since emerging from limbo. As this was revealed, I thought instantly of Francis Ford Coppola's criminally underrated Youth Without Youth, which needless to say explored this concept far more elaborately - that is, at all - than Nolan does here. For Coppola, it was a starting point from which he explored more fundamental, human questions than I have the inclination (or the memory for that matter) to list here, but for Nolan, it's nothing, and that this comparison was drawn so instantly in my mind brought to full bear how intellectually empty Nolan's film is, even in the face of contemporary cinema, itself so often charged with shallowness.



It's fascinating that Inception has sparked so much discussion, with many bloggers and podcasts doing extra posts or episodes purely to dissect it, because for me, the more I looked at it, the less I found (though I suppose it's telling that I, too, have now done two posts on it). Both times I saw it, it proved to be tremendously entertaining in spite of Nolan's inclination to stop and explain every...little...thing, but there are few aspects that hold up under scrutiny. Make no mistake, is all a film is doing is trying to excite me, that's great, but Inception attempts to offer more (and I went into greater detail about the emotional shortcomings here, but suffice to say I didn't find anything more this time around). Further, Nolan's insistence on literalism, logic, and structure makes it impossible to excuse the film's smaller, but nonetheless essential, flaws. We'll finish it off with some simple notes to this effect:

-Structurally, the end of the heist is a huge letdown. Nolan sows the seeds to wow us in the scene in which Ellen Page learns the possibilities and limitations of shared dreaming, but when it comes to the main heist, Nolan goes big either too soon or not enough. The first level, with the freight train and the van chase, is reasonably exciting stuff. The second level, in the hotel, is absolutely stunning, and easily the best thing in the film. But by the third level, we're in a paint-by-numbers snow shootout, and in limbo, everything hinges on an emotional hook that, for me, never landed. The snow scene, at the very least, had to be staggering, but it was limited both in execution and imagination. Which brings me to...

-If Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and Eames (Tom Hardy) can summon weaponry out of nowhere (in the "you can't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling" moment), why can't they just sit it out in that warehouse for a week? They could rig up a couple motion-sensor guns with never-ending clips, plant a few mines, dream up an HDTV, and just chill.

-Limbo is set up to be a fate worse than death (or at least something very undesireable), but apparently you can come out unharmed simply by killing yourself. We see this not only with Cobb and Saito - which could be explained away with the ending being a dream or death or whatever - but more damningly with Cobb and Mal. Cobb's mission to rescue Saito, teased at the beginning in the most delicious way possible, proves a mere footnote, and appears to have been designed more for a compelling opening than a gutting finish.

Three From Last Weekend

I saw three movies at the theater last weekend that are...of little consequence. As such, writing a full review of any of them would be stretching at least MY interest. Possibly yours. Who knows? But a paragraph or two? That seems juuuuuust right.

The Kids Are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko) - Well, the good news is, it's not nearly the abortion the trailer made it out to be. In fact, it's actually quite a good film. Annette Bening, Julianne Moore...hell, everyone is uniformly excellent. Turns out Mia Wasikowska CAN act, not that we'd know it after Alice in Wonderland, and quite splendidly - the last shot of her will go down as one of my favorite moments from this year. It is a very convincing, real-feeling portrait of marriage (I'm twenty-four and unmarried, so I only know so much here), and deals with the conflict between people who live together very well.

At the risk of playing the part of "white guy who decides to take offense for other people," though, I thought the film's treatment of an ethnic character was deplorable. What was briefly, and refreshingly, taken seriously was tossed aside for laughs. And, vague spoilers here, Mark Ruffalo's character really gets the shaft for no good reason, aside from being the film's only disposable character. Overall though, solid little drama.

Here we see Steve Carell, half-heartedly trying to sell you on the idea that this is a good movie.

Dinner for Schmucks (dir. Jay Roach) - If you've seen the trailer, you may suspect that the film is trying to have it both ways, encouraging you to laugh at dumb people, and then putting you on their side and standing in righteous indignation of...people who laugh at dumb people. Well, you'd be right. I guess the redeeming characteristic is that we're not laughing to their face? No, sorry, doesn't fly. I'm all for laughing at idiocy - and I did, frequently, during this film - but you can't expect me to suddenly take their plight seriously. Doesn't work.

And I am done, done, done with comedies that rely on situations that really are "just a big misunderstanding!" If Three's Company is on in the background, it's fine, but there is nothing more infuriating than watching a conflict play out that could be completely dismissed with a sentence. Maybe two. What you're telling me when you do that, movie, is that you don't have what it takes to make your character actually do anything wrong, but still want the comedic/dramatic benefits of someone who does. Like I said, funny movie, but not terribly good.

Kids, lesson number one is, if a stranger suddenly reaches into his coat, don't keep standing there. Just run. It's over.

Despicable Me (dir. Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud) - You know...people complained that Iron Man 2 was just a long commercial as though that was something new. Despicable Me is only a film insofar as it's character interacting in a motion picture show over an hour and a half. It's really just pure product. Imagine the most disposable kid's movie you can...okay, this isn't totally fair. This is not completely disposable. It doesn't, say, actively decompose or anything. This metaphor is going nowhere...the point is, there's nothing at all interesting about this film. Nothing unexpected. No delightful surprises. No real bad points either. It just sort of plays.

The one thing that is kind of awful is the 3-D, which I know is "same old, same old" for most of ya'll, but dammit, as someone who knows in his heart of hearts that 3-D is the most exciting artistic possibility to hit cinema since CGI, I am just depressed when it's used this shoddily. Especially since it gives the depth-haters some ammo. There are some fun moments with it, and there are some jokes with it during the end credits that are irresistible, but during most of the film, the depth of field kept changing for no readily apparent reason. Characters or objects that were in front of the "line of scrimmage" (or the proscenium arch for the drama nerds) would suddenly fall behind it, and vice versa. Just sloppy.

So yeah, that was last weekend. This weekend's a whole bucket of nothing, though one of these days I've got to get around to seeing Salt, but really, I've got no reason to be at the movies 'til the 13th, for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Expendables, and the catch up on The Other Guys. I'll keep this blog a-rolling with plenty of talk on older movies though. Promise.

The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes

The title refers to a Stan Brakhage film I will likely never watch (I can only stomach so much), but - I'm sure I'm not the first one to note this - it could just as easily refer to what it's like to watch any of his work.

It's like how in Inception, Cobb says, "She'll be back. After what she's seen, the real world won't be enough anymore." I may have gotten the exact verbiage wrong, so Inception fans, do forgive me. But I'll be damned if Criterion's by Brakhage Blu-Ray set isn't the most astounding thing to dance across my screen. I had toyed with buying it during the 50% off sale at Barnes & Noble, but ultimately decided it was too big a risk as I was only sort of familiar with Brakhage. Big mistake. Always dive in.

These films are extraordinary. Not every last one of them will work for everyone (Mothlight, the one film of his I'd seen prior to renting this, still doesn't do anything for me), but when they work, they are completely unlike any other experience. I...Dreaming, Delicacies of a Molten Horror Synapse, and most of all a technically untitled film known as For Marilyn are suddenly fundamental cinematic touchstones. Obviously they're not for everyone, but if you've managed to develop your visual vocabulary, I simply cannot recommend picking up this set (one way or another) enough. I'd like to think I'll have more to write later, but I am not nearly advanced enough to speak with any authority about these...things. I just know that, like for Ariadne, "regular" movies feel like they just won't be enough anymore.*

 *A note for literalists - I do not actually mean this.