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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Wednesday, June 25, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="231" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/x71SA0t4YYkU9nit7lm0Yn9qvmw11MAmKbMImfhvEJwd0-R3S2dK0vDIaTmyTX_rwE7dcru_gCA_nkle01_z2J_FBzi7of-S6P6I3TruHJIR%3Ds0-d" width="500"><br>
<span class=SpellE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Otilia</span> </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'> (<span class=SpellE>Anamaria</span> <span class=SpellE>Marinca</span>) contemplates the price she has already paid <br>
for helping her roommate obtain an abortion</span> </p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you saw Christian <span class=SpellE>Mungiu&#8217;s</span> masterful, if harrowing, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.4months3weeksand2days.com/blog/index.php"><span style='color:black'>4 Months, 3 Weeks &amp; 2 Days</span></a> </i>in the theater and haven&#8217;t had a chance to catch it on DVD &#8211; it just came out &#8211; I recommend that you get hold of the little round platter just so that you can see the few extras burned onto the disc. If you haven&#8217;t yet seen it, I recommend that you do that now &amp; return to this discussion later, for much of what follows will contain spoilers. There is a discussion that moves toward poetics in the last five paragraphs &#8211; beginning with &#8220;In a sense&#8230;&#8221; &#8211; that can be read separately. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>4 <span class=SpellE>luni</span></span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, as it might be abbreviated in its original Romanian, is the tale of a college student who helps her roommate obtain an illegal abortion during the last days of the (big C) Communist Ceau&#351;escu regime in 1987. One of the most repressive &amp; financially exhausted of all Soviet bloc countries, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> was a nation with a police state infrastructure that routinely depended on the black market for many, if not most, of the items of daily life. For a student able to obtain quantities of western cigarettes, coffee, shampoo or milk powder, the black market is an easy way through college. For those buying, it&#8217;s all about who you know, who they send you to, waiting around for each &amp; ever item &#8211; one didn&#8217;t shop for pleasure under Communism. If daily life was a hell of waiting under the old regime&#185;, obtaining something that was dangerous &amp; illegal was much harder. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>For his police state, his cult of personality &amp; his laws against abortion, the citizens of </span><st1:country-region> <st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> let <span class=SpellE>Nicolae</span> <span class=SpellE>Ceau&#351;escu</span> feel their displeasure. He &amp; his wife were shot to death by firing squad on Christmas Day, 1989. The prohibition against abortions during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy did not last out the week. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;m not going to recount the film&#8217;s narrative fully here, other than to note that this is a film all anti-abortion activists should see, since it shows in painful details what occurs when the procedure is illegal. And it&#8217;s one film that all volunteers at Planned Parenthood should see as an in-service training, not just to remind themselves why they put up with the bullshit of picket lines &amp; death threats (and on occasion far worse), but also why every abortion itself is a tragedy of bad choices &amp; poor planning, &amp; why it&#8217;s so important to get contraceptive tools &amp; information distributed far more widely than they are today. In <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>4 Months, </i>the traditional risks of illegal abortion &#8211; arrest, death &#8211; are skirted, in part because the main characters are all educated people in their early 20s. Imagine this same film with 13-year-olds &amp; the movie you get is a far cry from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Juno. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But what interests me here are some decisions writer / producer / director <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> made in putting together this film, which won the <span class=SpellE>Palme</span> <span class=SpellE>d&#8217;Or</span> at Cannes &amp; earned him a gold medal from the current president of a still impoverished Romania. The first is the absence of music, which appears only toward the end of the film&#8217;s credits. The second are the obvious dramatic threads that are picked up &amp; left hanging, most notably a sequence in which <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span> surreptitiously picks through the abortionist&#8217;s bag &amp; steals a knife, an item that foretells all manner of bad endings but never otherwise is used dramatically in the film (I think she notices it again much later, but does so I think just so we recall its presence). <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> discusses these in one of the most intelligent director interviews I&#8217;ve seen among the added features. In real life, <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> argues, life isn&#8217;t accompanied by a sound track, things occurs for which there is no closure, experience isn&#8217;t aestheticized &#8211; to replicate this he has had to build them into the film, adding details that then don&#8217;t get followed, eschewing music, refusing to make jump cuts within scenes so as to coerce an audience&#8217;s perception of the action. The result is that the film is a series of very long takes, that often <span class=SpellE>Anamaria</span> <span class=SpellE>Marinca</span>, the amazing actress who plays <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span>, has her back turned to the camera &amp; that actual camera shifts within scenes &#8211; as when <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span> comes into the bathroom to wash herself out after having been raped by Mr. <span class=SpellE>Bebe</span>, the abortionist &#8211; almost cause a kind of vertigo because they&#8217;re so rare. In one key scene, the characters&#8217; faces are entirely in darkness. Often the characters are not centered (an issue if you see this in the <span class=SpellE>unletterboxed</span> DVD version) onscreen. <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span> is left waiting in Mr. <span class=SpellE>Bebe&#8217;s</span> Soviet-era automobile while he steps out to argue with his mother, who otherwise has no role in this film. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But I don&#8217;t think that the only role these elements serve is to heighten our sense of the film&#8217;s imitation of real life &#8211; I think that <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> is being disingenuous in the interview when he suggests this. Rather, I think he is playing quite deliberately with the audience&#8217;s well developed expectations, and that the knife in particular is an exceptionally cagey choice for just such treatment. It&#8217;s not just that it&#8217;s a detail that doesn&#8217;t go anywhere, but <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> knows full well that we are all waiting for it to be used, to save <span class=SpellE>Gâbita</span>, to kill Mr. <span class=SpellE>Bebe</span>, whatever. <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> does exactly the same thing with a remarkable dinner sequence, as <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span> &amp; her boyfriend <span class=SpellE>Adi</span> sit silently at dinner (she&#8217;s at the table, he&#8217;s behind her, as they celebrate his mother&#8217;s 48<sup>th</sup> birthday). With ten guests around a table that, in the U.S., would never be asked serve more than six, we can see the young couple&#8217;s alienation, from his parents &amp; from one another, as the roomful of doctors (and doctors&#8217; wives &#8211; <span class=SpellE>Mongiu&#8217;s</span> own parents are doctors &amp; he was only a little younger than <span class=SpellE>Adi</span> when this story would have taken place) jabber away, a key detail being that the head of their &#8220;unit,&#8221; wherever they all work, got their not on his medical skills, but rather on his &#8220;healthy&#8221; ability to get on &#8220;in the [Communist] party&#8221;. Everyone talks, not quite at once, <span class=SpellE>Otilia</span> &amp; <span class=SpellE>Adi</span> remain silent, the center of our screen &amp;, with <span class=SpellE>Adi&#8217;s</span> mother, our attention. With few if any cuts, the scene took five days to film. Onscreen, it runs less than five minutes. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a sense, <span class=SpellE>Mongiu</span> recognizes that, just as a poem is a &#8220;machine made of words,&#8221; to quote Dr. Williams, a film likewise is a &#8220;machine made of cuts &amp; scenes&#8221; and thus has to achieve &#8220;artlessness&#8221; as a surface by building it in, not unlike the way Judy Grahn deliberately builds in artlessness to her very best (&amp; relatively early) poems, such as &#8220;A Woman is Talking to Death&#8221; or &#8220;A Common Woman.&#8221; It isn&#8217;t inherent in the medium, whether film or poetry. Clarity, after all, isn&#8217;t a given &#8211; it&#8217;s an effect. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In the past few weeks I&#8217;ve noticed several comments, laments really, from people about the alleged &#8220;elitism&#8221; of post-avant poetics, including several comments the other day to my note contrasting flarf &amp; conceptual poetics, but also on my nephew <a href="http://danielsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/06/than-has-been.html"><span style='color:black'>Daniel&#8217;s blog</span></a> as well. As I noted on my links list Monday, connecting to <a href="http://headylit.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/flarf-v-conceptual-poetry-or-sorrow-abundant/"><span style='color:black'>one such complaint</span></a>, it&#8217;s an argument that could have been made against some of the work of the troubadour poets in the High Middle Ages (1100 &#8211; 1350). And it&#8217;s become increasingly the case as other genres, from the novel to reality TV, have come along to absorb some of the social roles traditionally encased in the poem. The one function &#8211; the only one &#8211; that no other genre can take from poetry is its role as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>the art of language without limit</i>. And in a nation in which 90 percent of the readers (and 100 percent of the editors) of the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>New York Review of Books </i>are insane if they think that they&#8217;re literate, that does make poetry something that can only work for the masses under two circumstances &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#9829;</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-tab-count:
1'>&#160;&#160; </span>the poet her- or himself is capable only of a handful of surface effects (the Kooser / Collins road)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.75in;text-indent:-.25in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Arial;color:black'>&#9829;</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-tab-count:
1'>&#160;&#160; </span>the poet her- or himself makes conscious decisions to build in hooks that give the appearance of dumbing it down for the &#8220;average Joe&#8221; (the Robert Creeley / Judy Grahn / Frank O&#8217;Hara road)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>One of these is, I would submit, a legitimate aesthetic choice. And one of these strikes me as having more to do with neurological pathology than it does literature. (If someone no brighter than George W. Bush wrote poetry, would Garrison Keillor think it &#8220;good&#8221;?) I think it&#8217;s clear that <span class=SpellE>Mongiu&#8217;s</span> road is that of the aesthetic choice. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A second &#8220;bonus&#8221; feature on the DVD gives us some indication as to why. One of the &#8220;benefits&#8221; of post-Communist life in </span> <st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, a nation with twice the population of </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Pennsylvania</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, has been the destruction of its film industry. Without state sponsorship, there is little in the way of funding for films. And most of the old theaters are in commercial districts where more money can be made by putting the buildings to other uses. With a population of 22 million people &#8211; 2 million in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Bucharest</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> alone &#8211; </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> now has just three dozen cinemas. To show a film like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>4 <span class=SpellE>luni</span> </i>to Romanian audiences, some of whom have not seen a film in a theater in the 19 years since the fall of Ceau&#351;escu, the filmmakers put together a caravan that traveled to thirty cities over one month, showing the picture in auditoriums or even on outdoor screens &amp; walls &#8211; they brought their screen with them in addition to all the projection equipment needed for 35mm viewing, Over the month, the film reached an audience of nearly 18,000 people &#8211; a great success for Romanian cinema, but frankly pathetic numbers compared to the 5+ million tickets sold the first weekend of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sex and the City </i>in the USA. (In fact, film caravans exist throughout </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> as an alternative means of distribution for regional &#8211; non </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>US</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> blockbuster &#8211; or serious cinema, the problem&#8217;s not unique to </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Romania</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, just more pronounced.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I have always &#8211; even as a teenager &#8211; been interested in what the troubadours called <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>trobar clus, </i>that writing they reserved for their best readers / listeners, themselves, the origin of the sestina. I want a poetry that does the very most it can do &#8211; all of the 19 books from the Poetry Society of America contest that I really loved (I have seven still to profile here) reflect that. Some do so in terms that enable them to reach broader audiences, but others don&#8217;t avail themselves of that choice, taking what I might call the Stein / Zukofsky / Beckett / Joyce / Watten road instead. The idea that one road (the Creeley / Grahn et al road) is morally superior to the Stein et al road is, I think, defensible only &#8211; and I do mean <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>only </i>&#8211; if you think that the population of the US, and the other English-speaking countries, is so deeply, even permanently damaged that a truly literate art of language can never fully exist. That&#8217;s a possibility, but I&#8217;m much more of an optimist than that. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; My experiences in </span><st1:country-region> <st1:place><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Russia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> two years later confirm this. Under Communism&#8217;s last stages, life was logistics. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, June 10, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="384" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/MZu1zfXlCMsxhT4bUzabbtkXPvFxDDrSY94uqDv_HfRjMc7MqG84PH3kNDnrIrY3cMIS7LBzu0NNs4wFWLhoZ7CwxXdlkXnaEpKPHvHvv4C_vWE5BRzTJiTKd5_a1kHxdBUVNt1l10xaNwwwrat-G6fqwytNMEk%3Ds0-d" width="328"><br> <span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8221;Carrie&#8221; has the arms of a weightlifter in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sex and the City</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><o:p></o:p></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>My guess is that &#8211; just <span class=SpellE>speculatin</span>&#8217; here &#8211; I&#8217;m not exactly whom writer/director Michael Patrick King had in mind when he created the movie <span style='color:black'>version of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.sexandthecitymovie.com/"><span style='color:black'>Sex and the City</span></a>. </i>But when a key member of my wife&#8217;s girl gang ended up seeing the film with her husband &#8211; <span class=GramE>which</span></span> led to interesting discussions (the word &#8220;traitor&#8221; was used) &#8211; I ended up taking </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> to see the surprisingly long version of what feels for all the world like an episode of the HBO show stretched to fit a Holiday-special time slot. As such, it&#8217;s a diverting two-and-one-half hours, but not so diverting that it kept my mind from morphing into something akin to a film anthropologist. What <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>really</i> is going on here? <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The plot will be familiar to anyone who&#8217;s seen even a few of the shows &#8211; the gang of four (Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a freelance writer whose topics are sex &amp; love, Kim <span class=SpellE>Cattrall</span> as Samantha Jones, the ultimate cougar [a women whose preference is for younger men] and a longtime marketing exec, Cynthia Nixon as lawyer Miranda Hobbes &amp; Kristin Davis as Charlotte York, a bubbly airhead whose money is strictly inherited) are all roughly ten years older than we saw them last. Two are married &#8211; Charlotte &amp; Miranda &#8211; while the other two are in what have become longtime committed relationships, Samantha to a hunky young TV star who is shockingly nice &amp; considerate to the partner who also serves as his manager, having moved with him to LA, and Carrie to financier Mr. Big (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Law &amp; Order&#8217;s </i>Chris <span class=SpellE>Noth</span>). Over the course of the next 150 minutes all four women will be tested &#8211; Charlotte will get pregnant, Samantha will wonder if monogamy is all that great, Miranda leaves her marriage after her husband admits cheating (&#8220;just once&#8221;), and Carrie &amp; Big decide to get married, then split after he gets cold feet literally at the steps to the event after Carrie has let their &#8220;little&#8221; wedding spiral out of control &#8211; full spread in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='color:black'>Vogue, </span></i><span style='color:black'>the wedding itself at the New York Public Library, the &#8220;no name&#8221; dress transforming into a <a href="http://www.viviennewestwood.com/"><span style='color:black'>Vivienne Westwood</span></a> gown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Ostensibly this film is about the choices these women make &amp; how they resolve their issues. Yet given that three of the women are having major relationship difficulties, it&#8217;s curious that the one woman in a happy marriage, Charlotte, is the character least on view here, her husband, played by Evan Handler (whom <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>West Wing </i>fans will recognize as the acerbic campaign consultant with the shaved head), has almost no dialogue outside of one hospital scene after Charlotte delivers. Both Cynthia&#8217;s marriage &amp; Carrie&#8217;s wedding collapse after the husband makes a critical mistake &amp; Samantha finds her goody-two-shoes <span class=SpellE>telly</span> star isn&#8217;t enough to keep her from longing after her neighbor, Dante, who is wont to have trysts with different women every day (the curtains are always open) and who likes to shower on his back porch. Particularly after her beau has to work late on Valentine&#8217;s Day while <span class=SpellE>Cattrall</span> <span class=GramE>lies</span> waiting for him dressed in nothing but homemade sushi (&#8220;places where wasabi has no right to go&#8221;).<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So the men give the women an excuse to opt out, which three of them do, and they&#8217;re all there for each other (save for a curious subplot regarding Miranda and Carrie&#8217;s betrothed), then two of them learn little lessons about forgiveness &amp; all&#8217;s well that end&#8217;s well. There&#8217;s another little tale-within-the-tale involving a personal assistant to Carrie, portrayed by Jennifer Hudson, who does seem to handle these film cameos with great élan. But that&#8217;s basically it for two-and-a-half hours. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>So what takes so much time? First, it seems to be harder to introduce characters whom 98 percent of the audience already knows than it would have been on their own &#8211; the first 30 minutes of this film are really awkward &amp; slow, so that it&#8217;s all uphill from there. Second, the main narrative arc &#8211; Big &amp; Carrie finding &#8220;the perfect apartment&#8221; (it&#8217;s a penthouse) gives them time to contemplate making over the shell of a unit (the object of desire here is a closet) &amp; Carrie has to decide what to take &amp; what to pitch after 20 years in her previous place, which occasions much trying on of vintage wear. Then the run up to the wedding takes a great deal of time as every little item suddenly gets bigger, from the dress (from a &#8220;no name&#8221; dress to high art couture), to the location (the aforementioned NYPL), to the guest list &#8211; 75 to over 200. Somewhere in there is a trip to Fashion Week &#8211; I&#8217;m not kidding &#8211; and we <span class=GramE>get</span> to see one collection its entirety. Not to mention the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Vogue </i>shoot. Finally there is the item that drew the loudest and most awed gasps from the audience I saw the film with in Plymouth Meeting, PA, the closest thing in this film to pure porn <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span> the redesigned walk-in closet, larger than a lot of New York apartments. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>This is a film all about surfaces & labels &#8211; indeed, it admits as much in the very first sentence of Carrie&#8217;s voiceover at the start of the film &#8211; &#8220;young women come to </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> in search of the two Ls, labels &amp; love.&#8221; And it&#8217;s intriguing, actually, that the <span class=GramE>quartet are</span> all (save maybe for </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Charlotte</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>) allowed to show their age. There are moments here when Carrie, Miranda &amp; Samantha all look quite tired, even haggard &amp; scenes in which Sarah Jessica Parker&#8217;s neck, her arms &amp; her knees may well make her cringe, in spite of the fact that she obviously puts a lot of time in at the gym. In fact, each is much more interesting when they're not being beautiful and that may be the point (also why it&#8217;s the airhead who&#8217;s not included in this). There are several scenes later in the film that are nothing but shots of Carrie, her hair dyed a darker brown, looking pensive, like any woman in her forties contemplating the question of age in a society that is so heavily marketed to the young.<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Which is why, I suspect, that only one of the couples thinks about therapy &#8211; Miranda &amp; her philandering ex-.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> If you have to choose between psychology &amp; shoes, the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sex and the City </i>franchise will opt always for the latter, even as it knows, in the pit of its guilty stomach, that the former really is more important. In a film that is all about surfaces, it&#8217;s difficult to create a tale of insight. Perhaps this is why the decision of Miranda &amp; Steve to meet midway on the  </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Brooklyn</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Bridge</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> if they&#8217;ve decided to put his affair &amp; her rigid punishing ways behind them seems so terribly hokey. Not to mention Carrie &amp; <span class=SpellE>Big&#8217;s</span> romantic reunion <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>in the closet. </i>Or why the decision of Samantha to move back to </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; return to her role as constant sexual predator isn&#8217;t commented on at all, even as they celebrate her 50<sup>th</sup> birthday. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It would be interesting actually &#8211; I mean this in a completely serious way &#8211; to revisit this quartet again in ten years &amp; just maybe another time ten years after that, not unlike Michael <span class=SpellE>Apted&#8217;s</span> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Up </i>film series<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  </span>(the last episode of which was <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>49 Up </i>after following the same real people since they were seven). At what moment, do you think, does life become about something more than shoes given <span class=GramE>who</span> these people are? Will Samantha ever contract a serious STD? Or figure out that her lifestyle, the female equivalent of Joe <span class=SpellE>Namath</span> or Wilt Chamberlain, is itself terribly lonely? At what moment will 25-year-old men stop responding? Will Miranda ever get beyond being uptight? <span class=GramE>Perhaps as a judge?</span> Will parenting turn </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Charlotte</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> into an adult? The whole text of age would be interesting to explore with this set of characters, but it&#8217;s not clear to me that the makers &#8211; its primary writers have always been men, Darren Star on the TV series &amp; King here &#8211; have the intellectual perspective to make it work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Seeing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sex and the City</i> the same weekend that Hillary Clinton finally withdrew from the presidential race gave this film&#8217;s overlaps with feminist subtexts a sharper edge than they might have had some other time. This is, after all, a franchise that shows women as successful <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>superficial all at once, a contradiction it never fully owns or <span class=GramE>explores,</span> tho it does seem from time to time to be conscious of its presence. Clinton&#8217;s candidacy was sunk more by her vote on Iraq &amp; poor planning &#8211; ignoring the caucus states will live in infamy as Mark Penn&#8217;s dumbest move &#8211; than it was by the continual misogyny of cable news &amp; others (try to imagine a black stereotype piece of merchandise equivalent to the Hillary Clinton nutcracker!) but that misogyny was a constant irritant &amp; has, I think, rubbed a lot of people quite raw over the past several months. I&#8217;m not convinced, frankly, that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sex and the City </i>itself is free of such misogyny, even as it markets itself as the ultimate female guilty pleasure. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>You&#8217;re always aware that the hierarchies here are in place. Not just as in label versus no-label, but even among the actresses. Parker never disrobes (to the degree that in the final love-in-a-closet climax, the two are lying on the shag rug fully clothed afterwards, their hair perfectly in place), while it is Nixon who has the hot sex scene with everything out there for the audience to see. It&#8217;s <span class=SpellE>Cattrall</span> under all those </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>California</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> rolls &amp; we even catch a glimpse of a Kristin Davis nipple in a brief love scene. It all reinforces the hierarchies that are in place elsewhere not just in this movie, but in society with regards to women. There is a scene in which personal assistant </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Hudson</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is given a Louis <span class=SpellE>Vutton</span> purse by Carrie, so that she can return to St. Louis a success because she got a name purse! Is that what African American women want? Somehow I have my doubts.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 25, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><img height="263" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh6.googleusercontent.com/proxy/t6pENjTv1ZQ-_ApY4zBZQWzi0vuYQZ9DtqdeLN93mMP6wjchJHe086tnD-KtWTb2u64v6eda7o--GB90aNwjQ9l19GFn3Xq-PN-ocZJwTlmX%3Ds0-d" width="396"><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Llewelyn and the satchel<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Okay. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/"><span style='color:black'>No Country for Old Men</span></a> </i>finally made it to DVD &amp; I got it from Netflix right away, watching it twice in the same evening, once with Krishna who gave up shortly after the first coin toss scene because it was too violent &amp; creepy, once with my son Jesse, just to make sure I wasn&#8217;t missing something.&#185; My sense after the second viewing was that, yes, it was a good film, tho not a great one &amp; hardly the best I&#8217;d seen made in the past year. Not only was it not better than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>There Will Be Blood, </i>it was a steep step downwards from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>It&#8217;s Not Me, Once, Into the Wild </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. </i>Maybe even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Juno. </i>Among Coen brother projects, I&#8217;d put it somewhere around <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Man Who Wasn&#8217;t There, </i>a good little flick with lots to look at, but also deeply flawed. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Well Hollywood has been known to give the Best Picture Oscar to lesser films before, whether to a bon-bon like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Shakespeare in Love </i>when <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Saving Private Ryan </i>was sitting right next to it, or to real dogs like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chicago, Out of Africa </i>or, the most feral of all pooch <span class=SpellE>pics</span>, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Rocky. No Country </i>isn&#8217;t in the canine category, but still it makes you wonder. I know that a lot of the Academy&#8217;s voters are older &amp; no longer really active in the industry, tho I would have expected them to react not unlike my wife to this updated version of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074906/"><span style='color:black'>The Missouri Breaks,</span></a> </i>the Arthur Penn-Marlon Brando-Jack Nicholson fiasco that attempted to construct a film around violence the way a porn director paces sex scenes (or did at least before the web wiped out the big budget XXX-<span class=SpellE>travaganzas</span>). This felt instead more like a remake of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086979/"><span style='color:black'>Blood Simple</span></a>, </i>the debut flick the Coen brothers made over 20 years ago. Tho <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blood Simple </i>won Best Picture at the Independent Spirit Award (&amp; it won at Sundance the year before), it wasn&#8217;t even nominated for an Oscar.&#178; Maybe the voters this were feeling guilty for only giving the truly gifted Coen brothers one Best Picture for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Fargo. </i>After all, they&#8217;d passed on everything from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The <span class=SpellE>Hudsucker</span> Proxy </i>to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Big <span class=SpellE>Lebowski</span> </i>to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Brother, Oh Wherefore Art <span class=GramE>Thou.</span> </i>You can&#8217;t say the Coen boys weren&#8217;t due. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>A large part of the reason that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>No Country </i>didn&#8217;t work for me was Tommy Lee Jones, one of the finest actors around. In fact, that was precisely the problem. I have seen Jones in so many movies &amp; in so many roles &#8211; including the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>In the Valley of <span class=SpellE>Elah</span> </i>for which he was deservedly nominated for Best Actor &#8211; <span class=GramE>that</span> the sheriff of rather limited intellect just doesn&#8217;t come off right. If you listen to his lines &amp; look at his actions in the film, this guy is no bright light. He never catches anybody &amp; doesn&#8217;t seem even clued in to the important detail that there are multiple sets of villains after Llewelyn&#8217;s ass for absconding with the suitcase with $2 million after he comes across a drug deal turned &#8220;OK Corral&#8221; in the </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Texas</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> desert somewhere around Marfa in the year 1980. Sheriff Bell might even had led Llewelyn&#8217;s poor little Carla Jean to her doom just by not understanding the nature of the threat. All he does is ride around to squint at the aftermath &amp; pontificate &#8211; which he does a lot. To his addled deputy Wendell, to Carla Jean, to a lawman down in El Paso&#179;, finally to a half-crazed paraplegic relative who&#8217;s gone from lawman to cat herder himself out there in the <span class=GramE>desert.</span> Only Sheriff Bell&#8217;s wife appears not be buying any, but she&#8217;s not enough to keep Jones&#8217; folksiness from turning him into Yoda with a ten-gallon hat. That&#8217;s not who Jones wants to be, but it&#8217;s who we got. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a sense, Sheriff Bell should be the most interesting part of this film&#8217;s structure. He is the counterpoint, the non-psychopath, the minimalist who doesn&#8217;t even draw his gun when he &amp; Wendell first enter Llewelyn&#8217;s trailer. Both Javier <span class=SpellE>Bardem&#8217;s</span> sociopathic Anton <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> and Josh <span class=SpellE>Brolin&#8217;s</span> wannabe tough-guy Llewelyn are <span class=SpellE>maximalists</span> &#8211; they will do <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>anything </i>to accomplish their goal. A lot of the film is nothing more than watching this excess at work. <span class=GramE>Like getting across the border with no clothes on.</span> Like the coin-tossing scene, <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>friendo</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>It has no narrative function whatsoever other than to let us linger awhile watching <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> toy with life &amp; death, so that later we will understand the implications when the accountant asks <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> &#8220;Are you going to kill me?&#8221; and <span class=SpellE>Bardem</span> responds, &#8220;Well, that depends. Can you see me?&#8221; We know <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>without watching </i>what comes next. Ditto the scene at the end with Carla Jean, <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> checking his boots on the front porch on his way out for any bloodstains they might have picked up. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Those moments of carnage implied but not shown are part of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>No Country&#8217;s </i>shapeliness &amp; this is a film that cares deeply just how good it looks &#8211; like with the cloud over the desert when Llewelyn is aiming at the deer right before he finds the trucks. Or <span class=SpellE>Chigurh&#8217;s</span> picking his boots up off the floor and resting them against the bed in the hotel so that Carson Wells&#8217; blood doesn&#8217;t sully them while <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> chats with Llewelyn on the phone.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Which is why the editing at the Sands motel comes across as so patchwork.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> There is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>no </i>reason to show us <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> hiding in the shadows as Sheriff Bell enters the crime scene motel room <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and not to have him kill Bell </i>other than the realization that audiences might not get it from just the unscrewed air vent alone that <span class=SpellE>Chigurh</span> is now the one with the money (the boys on the bikes later comment on the size of the bill he offers for a shirt). Clearly it was the Mexicans who took care of Llewelyn, leaving one of their own dead outside the motel room they never got into, leaving <span class=SpellE>Chiguhr</span> to stroll in knowing right where the money would be hidden. This sequence is so clumsy that it jumps out as possibly a last-minute edit. But even with it, I had to watch the film twice to extract everything that was going on.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a film that is as controlled as this &#8211; I wondered if that cloud was a CGI effect, in fact &#8211; such cringe-inducing moments are truly curious. Afterwards, I kept wondering who might have done a better job as Sheriff Bell &#8211; Bob Duvall is too obvious &#8211; someone <span class=GramE>whose</span> challenged logic wouldn&#8217;t come across as shorthand for wisdom. Then I realized that the choice was obvious all along. There is only one human being truly believable as the kind of bumpkin the Coen brothers want to invoke, and that&#8217;s the original: George W. Bush. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; In fact, I had. I had not gotten the first time through just who killed Llewelyn &amp; who got the money &#8211; that whole sequence at the El Paso Desert Sands motel went by too fast for me, especially with that one gaping edit there at the end.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#178; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Platoon </i>beat out <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hannah and Her Sisters, Children of a Lesser God, The </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Mission</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></i><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Room with a View. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#179; </span></i><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Who gets stuck with the film&#8217;s worst lines, complaining about &#8220;green hair and bones in their nose&#8221; of today&#8217;s youth. <span class=GramE>Really?</span> <span class=GramE>In 1980 </span></span><st1:City><st1:place><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>El   Paso</span></span></st1:place></st1:City><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>?</span></span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Unlikely.</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The most successful actor in film history is the late John Cazale. He made five full-length motion pictures, every one of which is a film classic: the first two <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Godfather </i>films, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Conversation, The Deer Hunter </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dog-Day Afternoon. </i><span class=GramE>The last of these finds Cazale, best known for his role as sad sack mobster Fredo <span class=SpellE>Corleone</span>, playing a bank robber opposite, of all people, Al Pacino.</span> Based on a true story of a bank job gone wrong &#8211; the cops quickly surround the bank, but there are hostages &amp; Pacino&#8217;s character turns out to be a natural with the crowd that soon gathers &#8211; Sidney <span class=SpellE>Lumet&#8217;s</span> best movie&#185; plays not just with any memory we might have of the event itself on the evening news, but with our expectations of film genres as it gradually becomes clear <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>why </i>Pacino is robbing a bank &#8211; to pay for his lover&#8217;s sex change operation.<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I thought of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Dog-Day Afternoon </i>last night as I was watching <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Bank Job, </i>which, although it is also about the robbery of a bank with unintended consequences, is a very different movie than <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Afternoon </i>in all respects but one &#8211; just how much it plays with the audience&#8217;s sense of expectation. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Bank Job </i>claims to be the account of an actual event &#8211; there&#8217;s not a lot of documentation for this, tho that may be because of official British secrecy &#8211; in which a local group of petty thieves are persuaded to dig into a bank vault that just happens to contain compromising photographs of the late Princess Margaret. Safety deposit boxes being what they are, there are a lot of other incriminating things to be had along with several million dollars in currency, jewelry &amp; trinkets. Soon, everyone who has something to lose is searching for Our Gang.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Bank Job </i>really asks is what <span class=GramE>would a franchise</span> like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Oceans 11, 12, 13 </i>look like if, in actuality, their elaborate heists were in any way real. The answer is that not everybody lives to tell the tale. As presented in this deliberately <span style='color:black'>unwieldy plot, the initiators are not just concerned with  protecting the Princess&#8217; reputation, but with the fact that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_X"><span style='color:black'>Michael X</span></a>, a black power advocate &#8211; in reality a pimp &amp; drug dealer &#8211; has them &amp; thus is beyond the reach of the law. But a local madam also keeps her photos of customers &#8211; including MPs &amp; other government officials &#8211; in a box, and the local porn merchant keeps his books there with records of which cops are being paid</span> off, how much, &amp; by whom. The MPs &amp; the cops &#8211; both the ones on the take &amp; a certain officer Givens who is not &#8211; also have an interest in this project. <span class=GramE>As does even the undercover agent who has slept her way into the black power advocate&#8217;s entourage.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The first half of the film is very much a poor man&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Oceans </i>XX, as Terry, played effectively by Jason Statham, a good character actor with looks that are just borderline leading man (imagine a younger &amp; serious Bruce Willis), scrambles to put together a team after having been recruited by Martine Love (Saffron Burrows, whom <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Boston Legal </i>fans will recognize as Lorraine <span class=SpellE>Wellers</span>), an old flame who, unbeknownst to him, has been busted for trying to ferret drugs in from <span class=SpellE>Morroco</span>. Two of Terry&#8217;s team <span class=GramE>come</span> from his own garage, which specializes in the resale of stolen vehicles. To these are added a front man &#8211; they have to rent a nearby shop in order to have somewhere to dig from &#8211; in the person of a con artist turned men&#8217;s clothing salesman &#8211; and someone who knows about digging tunnels, a local Cypriot immigrant. Finally, when they get ready to dig, they decide they need somebody as a lookout &amp; turn again to Terry&#8217;s garage, picking up the junior mechanic who has just married the bookkeeper. His job is to stay on top of a nearby building with a <span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>walkie</span></span><span style='color:black'> talkie and keep them apprised of anything going on outside the bank. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Needless to say, much goes on, even tho the bank is closed all weekend. Not the least is a local ham radio operator who overhears the <span class=SpellE>walkie</span> talkie and soon has the cops in his bedroom listening in, trying to figure out just which bank is being targeted. I&#8217;m not going to recount what happens next here &#8211; the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bank_Job"><span style='color:black'>Wikipedia plot summary</span></a> is over 1250 words long, and needs every one of them. I&#8217;m more interested here in two things. One is the narrative structure of undercutting genre expectations. The other is the role of truth claims in an otherwise genre flick. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Obviously the two questions are related. Director Roger Donaldson (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Species, Dante&#8217;s Peak, The Recruit</i>) and writers Dick Clement &amp; Ian La <span class=SpellE>Frenais</span> (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Across the Universe</i>) flood the latter half of the film with so many threads of &#8220;X is out to get Y&#8221; that it is all but impossible to tell who, for example, suffocates the Cypriot or stabs the Colonel, loose ends that are never fully resolved. In the end, all of the &#8220;really bad&#8221; guys are dealt with, but one of the mates from the garage is dead as well as the undercover agent in the </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Caribbean</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. All of this would work more effectively if &#8211; and really only if &#8211; we had more of a sense of the gang as individuals, but Clement &amp; La <span class=SpellE>Frenais</span>&#8217; script here &#8211; and the film&#8217;s pacing is often right out of their work on the ersatz Beatles&#8217; movie as well &#8211; is too hurried to spend time on non-plot-driven moments like character. In an odd way, even as they&#8217;re blowing up their genre, it&#8217;s taking the ultimate revenge on their movie. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The awkwardness &amp; loose ends are, of course, justified by the claim that all of this is &#8220;real,&#8221; a claim predicated on the assertion that the writers got the story from one or more of the parties involved. Some of the details here &#8211; Michael X&#8217;s behavior, for example, including the murder of Gale Anne Benson &#8211; are matters of public record. Others, including Princess Margaret&#8217;s sexual behavior, are matters so widely rumored (e.g. her relationships with Peter Sellers or Mick <span class=SpellE>Jagger</span>, with members of her own sex, or with a gardener 17 years younger than herself) that they might as well be public record. But this is documentation much in the same way as we get in a film like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, </i>in which we <span class=GramE>learn</span> that TV game show entrepreneur Chuck <span class=SpellE>Barris</span> (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show, Treasure Hunt</i>)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>spent his off hours as a CIA hit man. You can prove that Chuck <span class=SpellE>Barris</span> exists, that he had these shows, even that he wrote the Freddy Cannon hit &#8220;</span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Palisades</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Park</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>.&#8221; But that doesn&#8217;t mean you can prove anything about a career in intelligence, let alone 33 assassinations. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Not unlike the robbery in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Bank Job, </i>the film itself almost works. The raggedness at the end of the film is far more &#8220;real&#8221; than the neat summing up one might expect from an <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Oceans </i>caper flick, but the trip to &amp; through this moment just isn&#8217;t done quite as effectively as it needs to be. If, after all, this is all &#8220;true,&#8221; why does Terry&#8217;s relationship with Martine feel like such a studio stereotype? <span class=SpellE>Keeley</span> Hawes as Terry&#8217;s wife has a great, if small, part &#8211; her reaction to the whole plot, right up to the final scene, is one driven by a sense of what risk Terry has put her family in. <span class=GramE>If only <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>every </i>role had been governed with that same sense of necessity.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></i></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; From a career that includes <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Pawnbroker, Network, <span class=SpellE>Serpico</span>, Fail-Safe, Long Day&#8217;s Journey into Night, Before the Devil Knows You&#8217;re Dead </i>&amp; many of the great early television dramas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, March 10, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:right'><span style='color:black'><img height="320" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/k49FuRPd9a_neGPG61NS_rn_REWwyZy8W-ldVL8gxaaaz1TD_XV8bxIJslPfu-t6kprAnvFc0siIafH8-cuFtBZcRJ955n1xuQ%3Ds0-d" width="179"><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>[Warning: There is a &#8220;spoiler&#8221; below, tho only if you don&#8217;t know Gregory Corso&#8217;s history or have never read his entry on Wikipedia.]<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>My very first thought, the instant I began watching <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.corsothefilm.com/index.php"><span style='color:black'>Corso: The Last Beat</span></a>, </i>which opens literally on Mount Parnassus, was to wonder what Michael McClure, Gary Snyder or Lawrence Ferlinghetti must think of that subtitle. Ninety minutes later, sad to see this sweet movie end, its subject, Gregory Corso, now buried literally at the feet of his beloved Percy <span class=SpellE>Bysshe</span> Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, I realized that just like Kerouac&#8217;s tossed-off phrase that got taken over &amp; caricatured by the media, the term <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Beat </i>in the title here means many different things, only one of which &#8211; and perhaps the least important &#8211; would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>beatnik </i>or even <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>beat poet. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Reininger"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Gustave</span></span><span style='color:black'> <span class=SpellE>Reininger&#8217;s</span></span></a> documentary is many things &#8211; a partial history of the Beat Generation, an account of a particular school of poetics, a travelogue of important sites for poetry that ranges from the Acropolis to the Beat Hotel, San <span class=SpellE>Remo</span> Bar &amp; Clinton State Prison, a partial history of the last four years of Gregory Corso&#8217;s life, even a mystery story with a remarkable ending &#8211; but most importantly it&#8217;s the tale of the end of life &amp; watching a man summing up his victories &amp; losses over the course of 70 years. So what I hear in that title now is the suffix that comes after <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Heart-.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The story is in fact framed by two deaths &#8211; that of Allen Ginsberg, right near the film&#8217;s start, which has some amazing footage of the entourage surrounding Ginsberg&#8217;s bed in his Lower East Side apartment as Allen lay dying from the after effects of a stroke in April 1997, monks proceeding through a death ritual, Patti Smith pacing, Corso literally draping himself over Ginsberg&#8217;s body as if to protect him, and that of Corso&#8217;s own death at the film&#8217;s end, told in a far more circumspect manner, even as we see him carted in a gurney to the hospital &amp; watch family &amp; friends all come to say farewell.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The &#8220;core circle of the Beats&#8221; in the telling here consists of just four people: Ginsberg, Corso, William Burroughs &#8211; who dies just four months after Ginsberg &#8211; and Jack Kerouac. Brion Gysin is mentioned, but only in passing. None of the western poets turn up at all. Instead, the gut of this film consists of following Corso as he returns to </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> to see the places that inspired him as a youth: </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Greece</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, his ancestral Italy &amp; Paris. In </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Europe</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Corso is not the wasted space cadet living modestly on royalties from a few books that sold in the millions in the 1950s, but a cultural hero to a generation of bright-eyed fawning youngsters amazed to see at last one of the figures who actually lived the romance they envision from the books of the Beats. Where Burroughs (Harvard), Ginsberg (Columbia), Kerouac (Columbia) all came from good educations with all that entails, little <span class=SpellE>Nunzio</span> Corso &#8211; Gregory is his confirmation name &#8211; got his in the Tombs &amp; especially Clinton State Prison for various acts of petty theft (Corso&#8217;s greatest crime appears to have been the theft of a second-hand suit). </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Clinton</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> was distinguished by the fact that it had, by prison standards, a good library, thanks to previous tenant Lucky Luciano, the original Godfather. The youngest inmate, <span class=SpellE>Nunzio</span> was encouraged in his self-education by the made guys who literally watched the youngster&#8217;s back. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The teenager who emerged from prison was a poet well before he first met Allen Ginsberg in a lesbian bar in the Village. Indeed, Corso somehow managed to get Archibald <span class=SpellE>Macleish</span> &amp; others at Harvard to let him audit classes &amp; even had his first book &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Vestal Lady in Brattle </i>&#8211; published there before <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Howl </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>On the Road </i>changed his publishing life forever (<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lady </i>was later incorporated into <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gasoline, </i>one of the best-selling books of poetry ever). In the film, Corso is presented reading from the same few canonical poems again &amp; again (including &#8220;Sea <span class=SpellE>Chanty</span>,&#8221; written at </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Clinton</span></st1:PlaceName><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>State</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>) &#8211; there is a great reading of &#8220;Bomb.&#8221; He comes across very much aware of himself not as a new formalist <span class=SpellE>maudit</span>, but as a satirist. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There <span class=GramE>are</span> any number of genuinely magic moments in this movie, perhaps the first of which is Corso&#8217;s visit to Clinton State Prison where he talks to a group of young inmates, every one of them black. You can see their suspicion in their body language as Corso begins talking, trying to figure out why this character, who looks just one step removed from being a street alcoholic pushing 70, should be talking to them. But you can see their body language change as it becomes clear that Corso&#8217;s own experiences there parallels <span class=GramE>their own,</span> and what begins as a painfully awkward moment turns into a real dialog. As he walks away from the institution, Corso has nothing negative to say about prison &#8211; it was literally his education, tho I don&#8217;t think that was exactly what the state of </span><st1:State><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New York</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> had in mind. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Even more profound is the story of Corso&#8217;s childhood. His mother abandoned him on the steps of Catholic Charities and disappeared when he was only an infant. His first poem, the aforementioned &#8220;Sea <span class=SpellE>Chanty</span>,&#8221; focuses on this primal experience. Corso imagines that she&#8217;s returned to her native </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Italy</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> and is long since dead. His father, clearly a brutal man, farmed the child off to foster care and soon Corso was in &amp; out of trouble with the law. When his father was in prison, Corso spent his days living on the streets &amp; his nights sleeping on rooftops in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Manhattan</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, all at the age of 13. Reininger is circumspect &#8211; too much so in fact &#8211; about Corso&#8217;s own marriages or his own role (or lack thereof) as a father &amp; you don&#8217;t even get a sense from the movie that Corso died in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Minnesota</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> where he was being taken care of by a daughter. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Instead, we see Corso the son with functionally no parents. When in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Italy</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, Reininger &amp; Corso attempt to track his mother down, to find her grave. But there is no record of her, even tho in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Italy</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> all records go back to your birthplace, which should make people easier to find. At different points in the film, this becomes a foregrounded part of the narrative. Eventually, though, <span class=SpellE>Reininger&#8217;s</span> various attempts pay off. The trail leads not to some remote Italian village, but to </span><st1:place><st1:City><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Trenton</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>New Jersey</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, and to a small house in which his mother has been living for decades. The film actually captures the son, nearly 70, meeting his mother really for the first time. She is as amazed as he is, and other than insisting that he needs a haircut seems not <span class=GramE>phased</span> in the slightest to have a Beat poet for a child.  <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, January 29, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000759/"><span style='color:black'>Paul Thomas Anderson</span></a> makes intelligent, well focused films: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Boogie Nights, Magnolia, <span class=GramE>Punch</span> Drunk Love </i>&amp; now <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.paramountvantage.com/blood/"><span style='color:black'>There Will Be Blood</span></a>. </i>Because of the first two, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Anderson</st1:place></st1:City> is acknowledged as a master of the ensemble film &amp; it&#8217;s true that he says his favorite movie of all time is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Network </i>&amp; that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>There Will Be Blood </i>is dedicated to the late Robert Altman, the Picasso of the genre. But <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>There Will Be Blood </i>is much more like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Punch Drunk Love </i>in that it&#8217;s a character study, a film fixed firmly on a single individual whose narrative unveils their personality. I recall Kathy Acker once telling me that character was, for her, the most mysterious element in fiction, that it was one thing to have sentences &amp; paragraphs integrate upward into a story line, but something altogether different to give a sense of a living, breathing person, especially somebody who might be altogether different from the author. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Daniel Plainview, the misanthropic oil speculator portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, presumably is quite a bit different from <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Anderson</st1:place></st1:City>. Who <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City> is not particularly different from is Fred C. Dobbs, the paranoid prospector at the center of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Treasure of the Sierra Madre. </i><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Anderson</st1:place></st1:City> admits that when he wrote the screenplay, adapted from Upton Sinclair&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Oil!, </i>he would watch <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Treasure </i>each night as he fell asleep. If Lewis plays Plainview as though he were living the role thoroughly, it may well be that he both understands this model uncommonly well &#8211; and he knows that his real competition here is Humphrey Bogart at his most extravagant. Dobbs&#8217; paranoia is a little more wild-eyed than <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City>&#8217;s, but under the surface the same DNA beats in both. You can still see the remnants of Upton Sinclair&#8217;s moral tale about the evil that capital <span class=GramE>wreaks</span> on the men most determined to have it. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City>&#8217;s a man determined to win and the simplest way to do that is to deny the humanity of one&#8217;s competitors. That in turn might justify just about anything. Who a competitor is proves highly situational: it might be the man who owns the land you seek to lease or buy; it might be Standard Oil; it could be the baby-faced evangelical who wants to minister to your employees; it could even be your son. <span class=GramE>Or your brother.</span> But once you are competition, however <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City> defines it, you are outside the infinitely small circle of what he might care about. In a sense, this film, like Martin Scorsese&#8217;s not too dissimilar <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Aviator, </i>chronicles just how that circle tightens the more successful <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City> is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Success does isolate an individual. Just ask Britney Spears. But, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Anderson</st1:place></st1:City> suggests, more than suggests, some people succeed <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>because</i> they are driven to isolate themselves. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City> says as much at different moments in the movie. I&#8217;m not convinced of the psychology of this, but it does make for an effective story arc. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Anderson</st1:City></st1:place> accentuates it by surrounding Day-Lewis with character actors who haven&#8217;t been overused &#8211; David Willis, who plays the preacher&#8217;s dad Abel Sunday, is an actor roughly my age <span class=GramE>who</span> has been in exactly four motion pictures, one of them 26 years ago. You might remember him as Franz <span class=SpellE>Bettmann</span> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Good German, </i>but the roles are so different it&#8217;s improbable. Indeed, the one person you might recognize in this production besides Day-Lewis is likely to be Paul <span class=SpellE>Dano</span>, who plays the baby-faced preacher as well as his opportunist brother. <span class=SpellE>Dano</span> was the silent teenager in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Little Miss Sunshine </i>who wanted to be an astronaut. Again the roles are so different that neither my wife nor son recognized him. Russell Harvard, who plays the grown-up son H.W. Plainview, has just short film credit to his name, plus a single episode of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>CSI: <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:State>. </i>Kevin O&#8217;Connor, who plays Daniel&#8217;s brother, has bounced around as a character actor for years, but his biggest role to date has been as Igor, Dr. Frankenstein&#8217;s assistant in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Van <span class=SpellE>Helsing</span>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Surrounding Day-Lewis with actors you can&#8217;t name is a great way to make the file entirely about his character. It&#8217;s one of many subtle devices like this throughout the film, which does not go out of its way to explain things. For example, one question that neither I nor my wife or my son could answer is what was in the diary that young H.W. read &amp; did it cause him to set the fire to the cabin? Was H.W. trying to &#8220;get&#8221; the brother? It&#8217;s actually possible that the answer is there on the screen, but unlike most <st1:place w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> movies, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Anderson</st1:place></st1:City> doesn&#8217;t bludgeon you with details. I wonder how many viewers even notice the
narrative of how <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Plainview</st1:City></st1 place> acquires the boy, which occurs in the first 90 seconds of the motion picture (he&#8217;s not <span class=GramE>lying</span> when he later denies that the son has any of his blood). And I myself missed the moment of transition from <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Texas</st1:place></st1:State> to <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">California</st1:place></st1:State> until I suddenly started to recognize landscapes and hear names like <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place  w:st="on"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>San Luis Obispo</i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, Tehachapi </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Modesto. </i>I&#8217;ll wager that there are more than a few viewers who think the whole film occurs in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Lone</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Star</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">State</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Day-Lewis isn&#8217;t always my cup of tea as an actor. I wasn&#8217;t particularly impressed with him in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gangs of New York, </i>tho he received an Oscar nomination for the role. And it was impossible to see him in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Left Foot </i>(for which he won the Oscar for best actor) without thinking that I knew a much better writer with many of these same issues in Larry Eigner. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Left Foot </i>thus came across as melodramatic, sentimental &amp; wildly overacted. What would it have looked like if I hadn&#8217;t known somebody whose physical vocabulary was every bit as restricted as Larry&#8217;s? I really have no clue. But in fact I generally have preferred Day-Lewis&#8217; earlier performances, especially in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>My Beautiful Laundrette </i>&amp; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Unbearable Lightness of Being, </i>both of which came out at least 20 years ago. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>This film, however, was made for Day-Lewis. In many ways, it&#8217;s about what he can do as an actor. He&#8217;s on-screen 98 percent of the time &amp; often is asked to do nothing more than glower or convey an intense-but-withheld emotion via his lower lip. Most of his dialog is a lie, and we have to see this in a way so that we understand it and the characters on screen would not. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Plainview</st1:place></st1:City>&#8217;s walk prior to the broken leg is as distinct &amp; <span class=SpellE>unmodern</span> (or at least unsophisticated) as his limp is later. His eyebrows are always &#8220;in character.&#8221; There are a couple of moments, particularly when he&#8217;s expressing anger, where I don&#8217;t quite believe him, but they add up to less than a minute&#8217;s worth of this film&#8217;s total of 158. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s become fashionable in recent years, especially in westerns &#8211; and the Texas oilfields around Marfa a century ago certainly qualify &#8211; to have the protagonist come across as scruffy, which helps strip the veneer of glamour from Day-Lewis&#8217; presentation. Russell Crowe in <st1:time Minute="10" Hour="15" w:st="on"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>3:10</i></st1:time><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Yuma</st1:place></st1:City> </i>looks like an escapee from the Village People by comparison. But the origin of this approach, of course, is precisely Bogart&#8217;s Dobbs in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sierra Madre. </i>In the inevitable comparison between the two actors, Bogart wins hands down. Not only is Bogart&#8217;s role permanently memorable &#8211; once you&#8217;ve seen the wild glint of Fred C. Dobbs, you&#8217;ll never forget it &#8211; but Bogart has to share the screen with some major performers in Walter Huston &#8211; he had once been D.W. Griffith&#8217;s Abraham Lincoln &#8211; and Tim Holt, not to mention classic character actors in Barton <span class=SpellE>Maclane</span> and Alfonso Bedoya.&#185; Anderson really gives Day-Lewis only Paul <span class=SpellE>Dano</span> &amp; Kevin O&#8217;Connor to work with. Although <span class=SpellE>Dano&#8217;s</span> baby-faced evangelist appears not to age a day between 1902 and 1927, the young actor does a decent job standing up to Day-Lewis under difficult circumstances (tho he does far better when confronting his own father, played by Willis). It&#8217;s not a fair situation for <span class=SpellE>Dano</span> or for Day-Lewis.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;m not convinced that I&#8217;d vote for Day-Lewis for best actor were it up to me &#8211; I think Emile Hirsch actually handles a more difficult role with far greater subtlety in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Into the Wild</i>, but Hirsch didn&#8217;t even get nominated. On the other hand, if you want to spend an evening watching one of the best give us a damn fine version of Bogie, then <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>There Will Be Blood </i>is your film. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Sierra Madre </i>made <span class=SpellE>Bedoya&#8217;s</span> career in the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region>, although he&#8217;d already made over 50 films in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Mexico</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, January 08, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><a href="http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/39578/"><span style='color:black'>Pierre Bayard</span></a> is of course correct &#8211; there are many different ways to consume books. This is true for films also. Seeing a film for the second time is always a different experience than the first. But there are also different ways to see a film for a second time. The most common is to have seen it originally in a theater, then later to catch on DVD or perhaps on television (worse yet, on an airplane). I can&#8217;t even tell you how many times I&#8217;ve seen different parts of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Godfather. </i>I joke with the kids that sometime on any given day <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Godfather </i>is playing somewhere on cable, in some configuration. I can turn it on, see five minutes anywhere &#8211; maybe just Robert DeNiro stealing the rug or Al Pacino walking through the Sicilian fields with his new (and doomed) infatuation, or Sofia Coppola, shot in the chest at the end of the still deeply underappreciated <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>III, </i>looking at Pacino, saying &#8220;Daddy&#8221; before she slumps to the steps &#8211; and feel completely satisfied, as if I&#8217;ve watched the entire trilogy once again. Indeed, one of the secret pleasures of cinema is clicking the remote through the cable spectrum seeing five minutes of this, one or two of that, just identifying each film before clicking on. Who hasn&#8217;t played that game?<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Seeing a film twice in the theater is an experience I used to have fairly often as a young adult &#8211; there are films like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Weekend, Blow-up, The </i></span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Saragossa</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> <span class=GramE>Manuscript, <span style='font-style:normal'>that</span></span></span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> I saw over &amp; over when I was around 20, even </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Casablanca</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, Treasure of the Sierra Madre </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Forbidden Planet. </i>With both <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Casablanca </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Forbidden Planet, </i>anyone whom I was newly dating but who had not yet seen those films was fair game for taking to see it the instant it showed up at one of the art houses in San Francisco or Berkeley. I knew they would be grateful to be turned on to these treasures &amp; a film like </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Casablanca</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>led one almost directly to the bedroom. Monsieur Rick has been very <span class=SpellE>very</span> good to me. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In recent years, I&#8217;ve seen films in the theater twice only on rare occasions. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Matrix </i>is one film &#8211; it totally blew me away when I first saw it on a business trip to </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; I had to be sure that it really was as powerful as I thought. Unfortunately, it wasn&#8217;t. I did almost the exact same thing for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Saving Private Ryan </i>and it was as powerful the second time &#8211; Spielberg is a much better filmmaker than most critics are willing to acknowledge. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>A third example, but a different kind of experience, was the first <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lord of the Rings </i>movie. </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> had not wanted the boys to see it &#8211; they were just nine years old &amp; </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> is pretty militant about avoiding violent films. But they&#8217;d read the books &amp; were dying to see it. </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> went out of town for a few days so there was nobody around to tell us not to go. And it is a great way to spend an afternoon with nine-year-old boys, in a theater filled with other parents doing the same thing. The following week was Christmas and the family visited </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s sisters down in </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Virginia</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> &amp; they&#8217;d all seen <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Lord of the Rings </i>(one sister is a certified Tolkien fanatic) &amp; were raving about how wonderful the movie was. Any controversy had to do with the absence of Tom <span class=SpellE>Bombadil</span>, not the level of combat or gore. This was good, because it got me out of the doghouse I&#8217;d constructed for myself taking the boys when I &#8220;should have known&#8221; that their mother would have disapproved. By the end of the evening, </span><st1:place><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Krishna</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> made me promise that we &#8211; the boys included &#8211; would take her to see it, which we soon did. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>That was a film where the spectacle &amp; being able to share it was a central part of the pleasure of the reiteration. It&#8217;s a well-crafted trilogy overall and I can watch two minutes of it on the <span class=SpellE>telly</span> these days in somewhat the same way as I do <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Godfather. </i>The difference here is that I often don&#8217;t remember all the scenes, and I have a much harder time telling the three films apart. <span class=GramE>It&#8217;s</span> successful cinema, but I don&#8217;t think of it as one of the lasting masterpieces of the genre, where <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Godfather </i>is almost the perfect instance of </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Hollywood</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> narrative. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One week after seeing <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There, </i>the so-called Dylan anti-biopic by Todd Haynes, with a bunch of friends, I took one of my sons to see it out in Phoenixville, an old mill town on the far side of </span><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Valley Forge</span></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> that has survived the loss of its mill. Because the film was playing at </span><st1:time Hour="19" Minute="0"><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>7:00</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, it had a decent turn out, much better than the later showing we had seen in closer-to-the-city collegiate Bryn Mawr. But it&#8217;s worth noting that my kid was the only person in the crowd under 40. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>One of the obvious differences on re-seeing a film is that foreshadowing is now all marked out. The title of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There</i> comes on as Cate Blanchett &#8211; she&#8217;s so distant you don&#8217;t realize in the first viewing that it&#8217;s her &#8211; revs up the motorcycle &amp; drives off stage right. That very same scene is a critical moment roughly two hours &amp; ten minutes later. Similarly, when we first see Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin, pictured above) hop onto the freight, he does so from the same field where, near the film&#8217;s end, Billy the Kid sees his wayward dog, Henry, chase after the train he too has hopped. That&#8217;s just an understated part of the same big red bow I referred to being tied together in that second scene. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Some scenes that had been difficult to follow the first time through &#8211; such as Claire&#8217;s pausing to watch the filming of Robbie Clark portraying Jack Rollins &#8211; now seem completely coherent because I know what it means &amp; where it&#8217;s going. You can follow the dialog more closely &#8211; I realized, for example, that I misquoted the sexist comment in my review the other day. Robbie (Heath Ledger) says &#8220;I worship women. Everyone should have one.&#8221; I actually think my original mishearing was stronger and to the same point. It&#8217;s just not what actually gets said on screen. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Timing changes almost entirely. When you can&#8217;t see what&#8217;s coming next, timing is experienced as very open-ended. You feel the timing but you don&#8217;t necessarily sense it, if I can make that distinction. The second time through, pleasure in the timing comes as a result of everything hitting its position perfectly, which is to say &#8220;as you remembered it.&#8221; Yet one result is that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>feels like a much shorter picture the second time &#8211; the few scenes I had complained about dragging on first viewing turn out not to be nearly as long as I had thought. I still would have edited the run-up to the second confrontation with <span class=SpellE>Mr</span> Jones a little, but quite a bit less than I would have expected after my first viewing. <o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>And there are the elements you simply didn&#8217;t get at all before, here most notably realizing that Canadian character actor Bruce Greenwood plays both <span class=SpellE>Mr</span> Jones <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>and </i>Pat Garrett. There is even an instantaneous flash of <span class=SpellE>Mr</span> Jones interspersed into the scene where Billy the Kid (Richard <span class=SpellE>Gere</span>) confronts Garrett, only to be arrested, but was I alert enough to catch the implication of that? <span class=GramE>Not the first time, I wasn&#8217;t.</span> Similarly, I didn&#8217;t even notice Lyndon Baines Johnson quoting &#8220;Tombstone Blues&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;The sky is not yellow, it&#8217;s chicken.&#8221; I&#8217;ll wager that Haynes used the exact footage where LBJ infamously quoted another song of that era, &#8220;We Shall Overcome.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Some of the jokes <span class=GramE>work better</span> the second time because you click into the timing of them in anticipation of the punch line. An interviewer asks the Mighty Quinn if he/she wants to change the world and Cate Blanchett replies, leaning forward one hand cupping her ear, &#8220;Change the word?&#8221; Actually, the second time through really cements my respect &#8211; astonishment almost &#8211; at the quality of the writing in this film. A lot of it may be verbatim from existing Dylan materials, but the degree of making it fit together, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>including here the lyrics of whatever&#8217;s on the soundtrack at that moment, </i>is much more tightly stitched than we get in Dylan&#8217;s own <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chronicles: Volume One, </i>let alone <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Tarantula. </i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Because of comments to my review on the blog by Andy Gricevitch &#8211; also by Luther <span class=SpellE>Blissett</span> and <span class=SpellE>Levari</span> (Lee <span class=SpellE>Sternthal</span>) &#8211; I really looked closely at the relation between the Billy the Kid / Riddle </span><st1:State><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Missouri</span></st1:place></st1:State><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> narrative and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Basement Tapes, </i>Dylan&#8217;s period of recovery in </span><st1:place><st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Woodstock</span></st1:City><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, </span><st1:State><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>NY</span></st1:State></st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, from the motorcycle accident &amp; the drug detoxification it occasioned. It made me realize that, while I didn&#8217;t have the dissatisfaction with that scene many of the professional reviewers professed, part of its difficulty is that Haynes is really trying to make the material do multiple things simultaneously, and that it doesn&#8217;t quite come off.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The first is the long fallow period Dylan had from the mid-1980s up until roughly 1995, which is what I saw in having the aged <span class=SpellE>Gere</span> look even more grizzled as he wanders around Riddle hearing tales of how Pat Garrett is planning to put down a six-lane highway, forcing everyone to evacuate &#8211; there are several images of what look like deep West Virginia-style hillbillies turned into refugees. But it&#8217;s true also that Haynes borrows heavily here from the imagery on and about <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Basement Tapes, </i>both the songs and the original album cover art. Yet he&#8217;s gone to this palette before in young Woody Guthrie&#8217;s brief period with the circus &#8211; Gorgeous George, the Nebraska-born wrestler whose flamboyant style would be the template followed &amp; elaborated on by everyone from Liberacé to Little Richard to Elvis to Elton John, and who makes an appearance in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Chronicles: Volume One, </i>is a key figure here. Plus the Riddle funeral sequence &#8211; one of the most powerful and surreal moments in the entire film &#8211; uses My Morning Jacket&#8217;s lead singer Jim James wearing the same mime&#8217;s whiteface that Dylan adopted for the Rolling Thunder tour as he sings &#8220;Going to Acapulco,&#8221; which Gricevitch is right to note is the best rendition that song&#8217;s ever received. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Haynes I think wants the Riddle material &#8211; the town is, as young Guthrie tells the hoboes on the train, a &#8220;<span class=SpellE>composé</span>&#8221; of many different places <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span> to serve multiple narrative lines simultaneously. This of course is one possible advantage of telling a story that everyone already knows. It&#8217;s only after we&#8217;ve begun this narrative thread, for example, do we get the story of Jack Rollins&#8217; conversion to Christianity and resurrection as Father John (told in part by one sad sack member of the congregation named T-Bone&#185;). So I think one might see this as being at least three parallel narrative lines simultaneously &#8211; convalescence, conversion &amp; his artistic resurrection in the mid-nineties. If Haynes ultimately gets tangled up in the threads here, it&#8217;s not for underestimating his audience. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of </span><st1:City><st1:place><span   style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#8217;s submission to the principles of marketing as a narrative practice is the tendency in American movies to have each shot or scene equal one &#8211; and only one &#8211; idea. That is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>not </i>the problem in <i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There. </i>It&#8217;s as rich &#8211; richer even &#8211; on a second viewing as it was on the first. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There</i> really is one of the finest American films ever made. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; One version of Dylan&#8217;s conversion to evangelical Christianity credits T-Bone Burnett for bringing him to the Lord during the Rolling Thunder Tour. <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>seems generally to follow the alternate version that Dylan was brought there by one of his spouses.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Thursday, January 03, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>You start to realize that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001331/"><span style='color:black'>Todd Haynes</span></a> has nailed it, produced something close to a miracle, a reasonably big budget motion picture with A-list players that is as intelligent as its audience, even before you&#8217;re through the opening titles to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imnotthere-movie.com/"><span style='color:black'>I&#8217;m Not There</span></a>. </i>Very close to the last thing I did in 2007 was finally get together with a number of friends, have a big old Cajun meal at Carmines &amp; head over to the <a href="http://www.brynmawrfilm.org/"><span style='color:black'>Bryn Mawr Film Institute</span></a> where the so-called Dylan biopic is finally playing, albeit only at 1:30 in the afternoon &amp; 9:45 at night. Tho the Bryn Mawr, in spite of its collegiate name, tends to skew to boomers, we saw it in a large theater with a sparse crowd &#8211; had everyone else see this film downtown? Or is it that the absence of a </span><st1:time Minute="0" Hour="19"><span  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>7:00 o&#8217;clock</span></st1:time><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> show (which it got only for the opening weekend at the BMFI) is the kiss of death for a crowd that now likes to be tucked in bed before Jay Leno comes out to play. Still, this was a great, thrilling movie experience, one of the best American motion pictures I&#8217;ve ever seen. <span class=GramE>Period.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>It&#8217;s not any single shot that convinces you of this at first &#8211; tho some of them are stunners, especially the pans of lines at what appear to be homeless shelters or food missions &#8211; is that <a href="http://moondogscorner.de/bilder/17.jpg"><span style='color:black'>Moondog</span></a> waiting in line? &#8211; as it is the constant shuffle between shots, now in black &amp; white, now in color, this image grainy, that one clear as contemporary cinema can manufacture. Everything you&#8217;ve ever heard about six different actors portraying Dylan, not one of them actually named either Dylan or Zimmerman, pales against the realization that this film is not six sequential vignettes, but rather going to be a continual shuffle of all six, from beginning to end, that its fundamental commitment is to keep you off balance from train ride to train ride. That is a brilliant challenge to take on, probably the most difficult thing any director can attempt. The film that follows is not perfect, but it is damn near close enough to keep all its major promises. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I had found myself finally approaching this film with some trepidation &#8211; how many times have I heard great things about a film only to be let down by the actual experience itself, which turned out not to be nearly as terrific as the film I&#8217;d imagined beforehand? I was almost certain that having heard so many of my friends &#8211; and especially my poet friends &#8211; rave on about <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368794/fullcredits"><span style='color:black'>I&#8217;m Not There</span></a>, </i>that I was in for another round of that experience. To my surprise, it was quite the opposite. I&#8217;d long ago stopped believing that American cinema could make a film like this &#8211; this was a level of complexity only possible in the longpoem &#8211; so when I actually began to realize just what Haynes was doing, I had a hard time sitting still in my seat. The last time I was this excited in a theater was probably the opening night for Antonioni&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Blow-Up </i>or Godard&#8217;s <i  style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Weekend, </i>both of which came out 40 years ago. Those films at the time struck me &#8211; as does <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>&#8211; as miracles, moments when the collaborative process that is a movie has come together to produce something extraordinary. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The secret to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>is simple &#8211; everyone knows the story, even down to the bullshit fictions of a childhood that Dylan put out early in his career, so there is no need here to tell it again (indeed, the weakest moments in the film are the few instances where Haynes does feel the need to recreate an historic moment, as such, whether it&#8217;s debacle of the civil rights award speech, Dylan the born-again preacher, the reaction to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Maggie&#8217;s Farm </i>at Newport, which Haynes at least has the sense to satirize &#8211; right down to Pete Seeger with the ax &#8211; or the fact that Dylan was always credited by the Beatles as being the first one to turn them onto drugs). Instead, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>most often references, <span class=GramE>alludes</span>, plays with the details. Thus a twelve-year-old African American who calls himself Woody Guthrie finds himself riding boxcars with hoboes &amp; tells them he&#8217;s been writing songs for Carl Perkins &amp; playing backup for Bobby Vee (which in fact Dylan briefly did, <span class=SpellE>Vee&#8217;s</span> band being the one post-doo-wop Tin Pan Alley act to come out of the same Midwest North Country as little Bobby Z). It&#8217;s a point, like having Guthrie&#8217;s motto &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>This Machine Kills Fascists </i>&#8211; scrawled on his guitar case, that makes sense only to a knowing audience (or, much later, Cate Blanchett as the Mighty Jude Quinn, alluding in passing to Brian Jones &#8220;and his groovy cover band&#8221;).<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>If you don&#8217;t know Bob Dylan, if you don&#8217;t know the details of the lore surrounding him, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>is apt to seem entirely opaque &#8211; why is a tarantula crawling across the screen? Why does Blanchett ride a motorbike off screen followed by the sound of a crash &amp; a single (now suddenly in color) image of bike &amp; body covered in the woods? Why do Quinn &amp; Arthur Rimbaud &amp; Jack Rollins seem <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>so completely uncomfortable</i> in their own skins when questioned &amp; prodded by the media? What&#8217;s going on here with this paunchy, scraggly, middle-aged Billy the Kid,  portrayed by, of all people, former &#8220;Sexiest Man in the World&#8221; (and one-time Paoli resident) Richard <span class=SpellE>Gere</span>? <span class=GramE>Most of the reviews &#8211; even extremely positive ones like that of Roger Ebert &#8211; have seemed at a loss with this sequence in Riddle, </span></span><st1:State><st1:place><span   class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Missouri</span></span></st1:place></st1:State><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>, a town that doesn&#8217;t show up on the maps of either Google or Juan de la Cosa.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> Readers of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0743228154"><span style='color:black'>Chronicles: Volume One</span></a>, </i>however, will recognize it as what I think of as the San Rafael sequence from Dylan&#8217;s autobiography, where Dylan, burned out &amp; bored, reduced to being an opening act for the Grateful Dead, has an epiphaney in the Marin County town about a new way of thinking through &amp; enunciating his repertoire that will lead him not just to the rebirth of his music, with the albums <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Time Out of Mind </i>(Platinum)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, Love &amp; Theft </i>(Gold)<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>and <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Modern Times </i>(Platinum), the latter making the one-time boy genius of folk the oldest performer ever to have an album debut at the top of the charts, but also return him as one of the hottest performing tickets in the music industry, even as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome has forced him off guitar apparently for good. Richard <span class=SpellE>Gere</span> getting back on the train &#8211; from which little boy Woody Guthrie was hurled into the river years before &#8211; is the most allegorical moment I&#8217;ve seen in ages in a major film. Finding his old guitar under the empty sacks &amp; floorboards of the boxcar, complete with the <span class=SpellE>ol</span>&#8217; motto covered by dust, all but ties a giant red ribbon on it. <span class=SpellE>Gere&#8217;s</span> own aimlessness up to that moment isn&#8217;t a problem of the film &#8211; it&#8217;s the theme, as such, followed by a closing sequence of Dylan himself doing an impossibly long sequence on harmonica.&#185;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Besides the story that everybody already knows, the other elements that hold this fabulous collage together are (1) Haynes&#8217; sense of rhythm, which he only loses once or twice as scenes carry on too long (cf. the aforementioned Beatles&#8217; appearance in the midst of the too-long run-up to the revelation of a BBC producer &#8211; made to look &amp; sound exactly like George Plimpton &#8211; as Mr. Jones).; and (2) Cate Blanchett&#8217;s ballsy spot-on  performance. Because the six Dylan surrogates and their tales are shuffled throughout, Blanchett&#8217;s on screen continually from beginning to end. If there ever was any question that she&#8217;s the best actor of our generation, this should put it to rest. There isn&#8217;t <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>any </i>role for which she wouldn&#8217;t be the right performer &#8211; she could do Barack Obama, Tony Soprano or <span class=SpellE>Jabba</span> the Hut if she had to, and she&#8217;d make a great <span class=SpellE>Tinkerbell</span>. Here you will be shocked to recognize afterwards just how many times her performance made you realize (a) oh yeah, Dylan&#8217;s a woman, (b) this really isn&#8217;t a guy in this role and, conversely, just how much of the time you were completely oblivious to the question of gender altogether. It&#8217;s never <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>really</i> the point Haynes is making, tho he clearly wants us to consider the degree to which Dylan benefits from being in touch with his feminine side (which is why the material confronting Dylan&#8217;s unreconstructed sexism &#8211; &#8220;<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I love women. Really I do. I think everyone should have one.&#8221; </i>&#8211; is so important). <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Haynes&#8217; strategy makes great sense in trying to tell the story of someone for whom the contradictions are what matter most. I&#8217;ve noted before that my favorite part of any motion picture is almost always that period at the beginning where the viewer is being pummeled by details that have not yet gelled into a coherent &amp; increasingly narrow narrative that resolves finally into a chase scene. Haynes has made a motion picture that strives to be entirely composed of opening moments. It&#8217;s amazing just how much of this he&#8217;s able to do. As the credits began rolling, I said out loud &#8220;I could see that again tomorrow.&#8221; When the time comes, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I&#8217;m Not There </i>clearly is a film to buy, rather than just rent. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#185; One of the small surprises of the film is just how much of the singing is Dylan himself, not the recordings of the &#8220;sound track&#8221; double CD, even tho that turns out to be the best collection of Dylan covers ever assembled. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<br /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Desktop/silliman2a.jpg" / /><img alt="" src="file%3A///Users/Lynn/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/moz-screenshot.png" / /><span style="color: #990000; font-weight: bold;">RON SILLIMAN</span> has written and edited 40 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 16 languages. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow, the 2010 recipient of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />(c) 2002-2019 by Ron Silliman.
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