When I first met Abigail Child in the mid-1970s, she had just moved to San Francisco from Boulder where she had been studying dance & poetry at the Naropa Institute. Tho Child was (is) a film-maker, the costs of her first independent “feature” film, Tar Garden, had left her without the resources to pursue film-making for the time being, and had also left her with a deep critique of the manipulative elements of normative (or “Hollywood”) narrative. Writing, however, appeared to require but a pen & a notebook and a dancer’s palette is her or his own body, art forms that one might pursue with a minimum of cash.

“The essence of dance is fund raising,” represents the polar position to this, something I once heard Margaret Jenkins, the dean of Bay Area choreographers, bemoan. Sets, costumes, studio space, salaries, touring costs all quickly turn the art of dancing into what is literally a major production. Back in the days when Margy’s dancers were my age, I used to see them around San Francisco in their day jobs. Larry McQueen might well have been the finest male dancer in the City then, but he also managed a copy shop forty hours per week. Dancing can be very nearly as inexpensive as poetry to pursue, but to be such, you have to dance alone.

What then does it mean for a 19-year-old to attempt to establish a dance company? That’s exactly what Braham Logan Crane did three years ago, founding ASH Contemporary Dance, a Philadelphia-area ensemble that is starting to show signs that it just might succeed. The son & grandson of professional dancers, Crane, who has won several awards for his dancing and choreography, such as the Gold Leo at the Jazz World Dance Congress in 2003, starts with some serious advantages. The most obvious is that he himself is a great dancer, a joy to watch. The second is that he knows what he’s doing choreographically, which has enabled him to attract two other great male dancers to the company: Carlos Lopez, ASH’s “permanent guest artist,” whose day job is as a soloist with the American Ballet Theater – he’s appearing in ABT’s Romeo and Juliet in Washington, DC, this week – and Billy Larson, who was the first American ever to win the gold medal in the solo division in the World Tap Dance Championships in Germany in 1998, merely the first of a long list of similar accomplishments. Larson & Lopez, as you might imagine, bring very different skill sets to the company & Crane’s view of choreography, which incorporates elements of jazz, tap, contact improv, modern, ballet & even gymnastics, touches them all.

Krishna & I caught the company’s current show at the Annenberg Center on the Penn campus last Saturday night. We sat far enough back to get a good view of the stage as a whole, which turned out to be the right way to approach it – Crane has an excellent eye for the stage as a canvas & his works have a sense of energy that is boundless. He makes demands of his dancers that would send a bulimic to the hospital – as it is, the seven-work program Saturday used two solo dances by Lopez and one work performed by the ensemble’s training company, ASH Contemporary II, to enable the full company to make it through their four pieces.

The company is at its best when Crane’s choreography follows his personality – lively, humorous, deliberately busy, not unlike the way an R. Crumb comic overpopulates any given frame, with slightly exaggerated gestures that carry the effect forward. Dancers dart about the stage, some being pulled by their ankles, others literally doing tumbling runs barefoot on the hardwood floor, then everyone huddles into a cluster while one woman, then another climb over, a game of King of the Mountain turned into a slow motion version of leapfrog. Using music by Deathcab for Cuties, Suger Rios or Lamb, the effect is often as breath-taking for the audience as it is for the dancers.

Crane is at his weakest, tho, when he tries to single out just one side of his work, as in the case of a modern solo performed by Lopez to Andrea Boccelli’s signature Con Te Partirò, that may have been terrific technically, but aesthetically proved a cliché that reminded you just how young this choreographer really is.

The other element of Crane’s vocabulary that needs to be strengthened is choreography for women – there was hardly a solo moment in the entire evening for female members of the full company, tho they’re all strong dancers (they have to be) & Kara Bason in particular stood out.

In 1964, Michelangelo Antonioni, an Italian director already famed for a painterly impressionism in black & white cinema, moved into color with Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti & Richard Harris. Il Deserto rosso was a landmark film in the use of color not merely as found material, but as a thematic element of the film itself, with long languid scenes in which hardly anything happened but the passing of a tanker outside seen through a window. In one scene, Harris finally beds Vitti in a white bedroom. The lights go out, but when they come back on, everything is bathed in a pale pink glow. Color, some people said, would never be the same in cinema.

Well, hardly. Antonioni’s next film, Blow Up, was a huge international hit – one of the defining films of the sixties, along with a few by Godard, the Beatles films, Bonnie & Clyde, Woodstock & Peter Fonda’s adventures as Captain America in Easy Rider. Antonioni used color, and a whole palette of other devices borrowed from photography in Blow Up, but where you saw this obsession with pigment or hue next was in Godard’s 1972 collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker, One P.M., requiring extras to show up in brown sports coats, literally gluing fake leaves onto trees to create the right seasonal effect, then again with Antonioni’s 1975 The Passenger, an attempt on the director’s part to again get back to the world market with Jack Nicholson traipsing through a scenic Sahara that directly anticipates Bertolucci’s Sheltering Sky.

But the painterly use of color from film largely dissolves after this, only to return in, of all places, China, first in the hands of Yimou Zhang, himself a former photographer, especially in Hero, each of whose Rashômon-like versions of the tale is accorded its own thematic color – red, green, blue, white. Now I see it again in Kar Wai Wong’s 2046, a film that could have been subtitled Son of Red Desert. Why am I not surprised that, along with Steven Soderbergh (director of Sex, Lies & Videotape, Traffic and Solaris), Kar Wai Wong & Antonioni are directors of the anthology project, Eros? Color as a drug, anyone?

2046 has done well enough playing in the art houses in the US, that this year’s tally by the Village Voice of all the top ten, top twenty lists in American newspapers found it to be the second-highest rated film of the year, behind only A History of Violence. That’s pretty good for a film whose structure is prolix & almost haphazard (and which sort of dissolves toward the end). It’s a tale about that interesting border in relationships where friendship becomes love or love becomes friendship & what happens when one of the characters – the protagonist – really is closed off to love itself. Because his lovers seem invariably to live in the apartment next door, 2046, he writes a science fiction novel about a train that goes to that year, where nothing ever changes & from which only that tale’s protagonist has ever returned. All of this is set in Hong Kong, tho frankly it could have been shot in a studio anywhere in the world. Hong Kong, as you might remember, was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997, with the promise that the PRC would not interfere with its autonomy for 50 years: 2046.

But what makes this film is its lavish use of color & with the idea that the screen need not be filled – that one could show just its right side, as tho it were a swatch of paint on a larger canvas, or possibly just the left. The film is almost entirely shot in the deepest reds & palest greens imaginable. As is true in Red Desert – or in a black & white classic like Eustache’s The Mother & the Whore – the film develops slowly & often feels like an attempt to slow time down. Conversations are held with only one head showing, or only the torsos, there are repeated scenes focusing only on the feet as characters walk down a street or twirl round & round in a slow conversation.

What makes 2046 most interesting is the way in which it challenges the idea that films come in rectangles, yet of course it never fully breaks free – it was filmed to be shown in theaters, not on the side of art school walls. I had a sense – tho Krishna disagrees with this – that the bright yellow subtitles (the film itself makes ample use of Chinese inter-titles) often distracted from the pure red or pure green essence of a scene & I wondered what might have happened had the color of those words been coordinated with that of the screen itself. And then I wondered what this film would seem like to a person who was color blind.

For a film that is basically the cinematic equivalent of a roller coaster ride, King Kong is surprisingly effective, making the Indiana Jones series, for example, seem as creaky & old-fashioned as King Kong’s 1933 original on which Peter Jackson has lovingly based this remake. The new version has been well-received critically – four stars from Roger Ebert, no less – and both are now listed among the top 250 rated films of all time at the Internet Movie DataBase, with the new version coming in considerably higher than the original.

Much of what makes is the new film work is not simply Jackson’s magic with CGI effects – there is nothing here technically that you haven’t seen already in Lord of the Rings, save possibly the scene in which Lumpy the cook is devoured by something that appears to have wandered over from a Tremors remake – nor in Andy Serkis’ continuing mastery of non-human roles. What fills the screen and dominates this film from first scene to last is the luminous presence of Naomi Watts.

Watts is a tremendous actress, as anyone who ever saw Mulholland Drive must realize. Here, she plays Ann Darrow as if the soul of Harrison Ford has dropped into the body of Marilyn Monroe. She’s not at all the passive screamer of Fay Wray in the original. Indeed, the scene in which she confronts Kong on the streets of New York – new to this version – is one of the film’s best, recalling as it does gunfight sequences from any number of American westerns as well as the seductiveness of Mae West. Wearing more clothing than Wray does in the original – the scene in which Kong removes her garments is not repeated here – Watts has to make an amazing range of different kinds of scenes all work, from physical comedy to action to romance. In one scene on the tramp steamer, Watts even has to parody Kate Winslet from Titanic, and does so just enough to let us see the echo without ever stepping out of character. Perhaps most importantly, Watts is the one actor in the film who successfully plays against both Jack Black, whose version of movie director Carl Denham is a cross between young Orson Wells & Phil Silvers, and love interest Adrian Brody, a much quieter, more sensitive actor whose scale in a scene is completely at odds with the broad comedic gestures (even muted as they are here) of Black. This film works because Watts makes it work. King Kong is almost a master class in the number of ways one character, and one actor, can function in a film, and Watts is completely equal to the challenge.

When Krishna first put 3-Iron into the Netflix cue, I could not understand why she wanted to see a movie about golf – I was thinking that it must be the Kevin Costner clunker that I’ve flipped past on cable a few times. But it turns out instead to be the newest film available in the U.S. by Ki-duk Kim, whose film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring I looked at here on November 30. Golf is a theme, tho not in any way I could have imagined.

A young man delivers flyers to homes in Korea – I have no way of knowing if this is Seoul or not, and it doesn’t really matter – riding around on his motorbike, taping the flyers to front doors. Later he comes back, finds one that has not had the flyer removed and, using a very professional looking little burglary kit, breaks in. He stays the night, checking out the lives of the people whose home he’s appropriated, then moves on the following day or so – the exception being if their answering machine message suggests that they will be gone longer. He’s closer to Goldilocks than to a traditional burglar in his approach – he invariably fixes broken objects, from toys to clocks to scales. He takes his photo with a digital camera as a keepsake and washes and dries any dirty laundry he finds. This is homelessness with high style.

All of which works until he enters a home whose flyer hasn’t been removed not because the occupant is away, but rather because she has been so battered by her husband that she has spent the last day cowering in her bedroom. He doesn’t see her at first, so she watches him as he fixes her scale, does her laundry then goes out into the yard – this couple has serious money – and begins practicing his driving skills with the husband’s 3-iron and a tacky driving cage set up in their garden. She watches as he cooks and bathes and doesn’t confront him until he’s in her bed.

When the husband returns home the next day, he finds the young man still driving golf balls into the cage & goes predictably ballistic. The young man renders him harmless (by means of golf) and he and the wife escape on his motorbike, taking only the 3-iron and a golf ball or two, returning to his life of homelessness. In the afternoons, after putting up their flyers and before returning to find their home for the night, they hang around parks where he takes a golf ball that he has tethered with wire around the base of a tree & practices driving. At one moment in the film this has horrific consequences, tho not for either of the protagonists who at this point are both still curiously immune from the implications of their actions.

I should note that at this point in the film – well over a half hour of it – neither character has spoken. In fact, the woman goes some 85 minutes into this 88-minute film before she says a word. The young man never says any. There is dialog, but it occurs around them, from the husband, from returning homeowners, from cops and the like.

Their adventures as a couple follow a predictable enough narrative – basically, every way they can have problems with the premise that nobody’s home turn up – and the film follows a sequence as stately in its own movement as Spring was in its five stages, tho in this case the segments might be called before jail, in jail, after jail. The photography – especially in the jail sequence – is often spectacular, and once you settle into the realization that these characters are just never going to speak (or almost never), it’s a lovely little film, sort of When Harry Met Sally as told by some combination of Samuel Beckett & Quentin Tarantino.

“The reason that in my movies there are people who do not talk is because something deeply wounded them,” Kim has said. It is also a strategy that enables a director to more fully control the experience of overseas audiences – and Kim’s films play to larger crowds in Europe, apparently, than they do in Korea. Language’s absence changes the chemistry of cinema itself – dialog, when only spoken by secondary figures, comes closer to the role reserved in Greek drama for the chorus. Eyes & the corners of mouths becomes suddenly much more important – both players here are seriously poker-faced throughout, with only hints of smiles or alarm. There is one moment, early on, in which she screams, just a shriek, into a telephone, but that’s it right up until the final scene. Indeed, the one scene that patently falls flat is one in which he cries. Not that it’s not appropriate, narratively, but that it falls outside the palette the film has established.

So often I’ve seen American movies in which tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on everything except – it would seem – paying for a writer. 3-Iron is exquisitely plotted & choreographed – even its use of the edges of silence is well-written, as with a scene in an interrogation room at a police station in which the taciturn nature of the hero leads to a beating. The film’s use of cuts is such that – early on in particular – it’s not clear whether or not the characters are speaking, just not in the scenes on camera, any more than it is whether or not their relationship is carnal or platonic – I’ve read reviews that come to diametrically opposite conclusions. Beyond a certain point, tho (it comes when the heroine returns to one of the homes they’ve burgled & simply walks past the startled inhabitants to take a nap), the absence of language is so thoroughly written that this seemingly realist caper takes on all the trappings of a fable. 3-Iron is a film that is going to take a long time to fade from my imagination.

Perhaps nothing could be further from the swell of extras, computer-generated effects & dizzying pace of Harry Potter than Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, a (mostly) Korean film written & directed by, and starring, Ki-duk Kim, available now on DVD. The film is a fable of five seasons in the life of an infinitely small Buddhist hermitage, a one-room temple set atop a houseboat in an isolated mountain lake. There an older monk is raising a child to follow in his footsteps. In the first of the film’s five segments – each “season” framed by the mountainside’s foliage &, in winter, with snow & ice – he teaches the boy to discern safe medicinal herbs from deadly ones and, when the boy plays a cruel game with some of the neighborhood wildlife, teaches him what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such a prank. As the seasons progress we see the younger monk as a young man setting out into the world, then returning once at 30, then returning again much later to take over from the now deceased older monk, himself being left with a child to raise, and finally teaching some of the very same lessons. There is a lot more that goes on in these various stages than I’m conveying here – some of it violent & with some fairly graphic movie sex – but I don’t want to give away more details since this is a film all about the details.

There are eleven actors in this film only because four different ones play the younger monk at different stages in his life. Young-soo Oh plays the older monk with a stillness that is a keynote for this film. The remaining six work mostly in pairs, a woman who brings her daughter to the monk for a cure, two police detectives, and finally a woman who has come to abandon her infant son to the monk. But, save for the daughter, played by Yeo-jin Ha, and just briefly that second mother, this is a film almost entirely about the two monks, their interactions & their own inner lives. There are, toward the end, some scenes of contrition by the younger monk that will last longer with me than anything in any of the Harry Potter films.

There are long passages of this film that are entirely silent. Not one of the characters has a name. With just one exception (that may be deliberate), every actor deliberately underplays each scene. And every scene is within walking or rowing distance from the floating temple. Parts of this motion picture are utterly predictable – which itself is the point. When we see the younger monk, now aging, with his new toddler acolyte in the final scene, we feel certain that we can see just what their futures may hold, and the seriousness within the older monk lies in the fact that he understands this also now.

But parts of this motion picture are utterly unimaginable until you see them on screen. Ki-duk Kim spent some formative years studying in Paris & the image of the second mother in the winter passage draws upon a classic surrealist trope that is stunning to see fitting in “naturally” within the context of this fable on a remote mountain lake. It is, in fact, flat out breathtaking right at the moment when you imagine that all of the drama – the sturm und drang of the young monk’s life – are finally behind him.

This film makes a powerful device out of doors – inside the temple, there is a door between the monk’s sleeping quarters and the main area, but no wall. Similarly, there is a door to the mainland, but again no connecting wall. At first, this seems like a quirky little detail, but by the film’s end the acknowledgment of invisible limits seems like an objective correlative – can I use that term in this blog? – for the tale as a whole. Ki-duk Kim has woven together a masterful act of cinema.

Coming out of a showing of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire the other evening, the film that my mind free associated over to wasn’t any of the earlier trio of Harry Potter (HP) flicks, but rather the Star Wars sextet. The new HP had, I felt, achieved something that always escaped George Lucas in his space operas, something that The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) only occasionally glimpses – a serious perspective on life itself. It’s hardly news that Harry Potter, in addition to its many other aspects, is a coming of age story, the tale of an orphan boy right out of Dickens, but this time with wizardry as a backdrop. But Goblet of Fire suggests that a reasonable comparison might not be so much Oliver Twist, such as in the recent Polanski retelling that got decent reviews but which sank instantly at the box office, as it might be darker films about the transition to adulthood, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, the 1993 film that starred Johnny Depp as a troubled teen with a morbidly obese mother & developmentally challenged brother (a role that won Leo DiCaprio his first Oscar nomination) or Spanking the Monkey, a less widely seen film from that same year about a boy (Jeremy Davies, best known now as the gun-shy translator in Saving Private Ryan) trapped in an incestuous relationship with an alcoholic mother. All three are films about kids caught up in worlds they did not make just at the moment when the double-consciousness of adulthood begins to hit. There is a horror at the heart of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire that comes far closer to Grape & Monkey than it does to LOTR or Star Wars. That horror is the secret & heart of this film.

Like Star Wars & LOTR, however, Harry Potter is as much a franchise as it is a tale. Goblet of Fire introduces the series’ third director (one who envisions Hogwarts on the edge of a fjord that has not played much, if any, role heretofore), Mike Newell. In addition to the film’s primary stars – Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint & Emma Watson – whom the audience has by now watched grow up in these roles, and of course master mind J.K. Rowling (whose books both of my boys swear are “infinitely better” than any of the films), the most consistent & important presence to date has been screenwriter Steve (Wonderboys) Kloves, who is about to take a one-picture hiatus from the series to work on some of his own projects when the next episode is filmed (piloted on the screen by David Yates, a British TV director) for release in 2007. Michael Goldenberg, screenwriter for Contact, the Jodie Foster-meets-her-father-as-a-space alien film, will handle the screenplay.

Such franchises have been relatively rare in cinema history, rising first out of Saturday afternoon fluff aimed at kids, such as the Bowery Boys or Our Gang comedies, serials (Flash Gordon) & adult crime genres (Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, the Thin Man series). James Bond & Indiana Jones still reflect those origins, the latter playing to its retro roots in ways that are not so interesting. Like LOTR, presumably, Potter is predicated on a story with development toward an end, which may well save it from the intellectual exhaustion that have reduced Bond films to their weary formula, and which exposed Star Wars as a phenomenon whose sum was increasingly less than its parts.

In a way, the Potter films depend now far more on their main actors than the Bond series ever has on whichever smooth Brit is reiterating that surname to whichever new “Bond girl.” The new Potter shows us 15-year-olds portraying 14-year-olds, a gap you catch in Grint’s arms, just starting to show the musculature of adulthood & in the way Watson – the best actor among the three – fills out a gown. But Matthew Lewis, whose character Neville Longbottom plays an important part here, has taken that teenage growth spurt that renders him all limbs, albeit still very much with a boy’s face. And Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry looks less & less like a boyish Everyman with each advancing film. In the next installment, we will see 17-year-olds portraying 15-year-olds, and nobody knows how old they might be by the time the seventh volume has been published & converted to the screen.

All of which sets up the sixth installment, due in 2007, as one fraught with danger for the film series as film series. With a new writer as well as an untested film director, and with actors increasingly old for the roles they’re playing, will the next film understand that dark vision that is at the pit around which everything else revolves. It is quite a bit more – and other – than just Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort, dolled up in a slicker & slightly damp version of his old English Patient burn.

The Kibera slums in Nairobi, where over one million people live
is an important setting for The Constant Gardner
tho images of it show up in none of the film’s promotional material.

 

Fernando Meirelles uses a John Le Carré story, one part spy mystery, one part tragic romance, to tell a tale of Globalization: The Dark Side in The Constant Gardner. Viewers familiar with Meirelles’ majestic City of God may be disappointed to see that he has made what is largely a more sinister, contemporary version of The English Patient here – Ralph Fiennes has the franchise for tragic romances set in Africa – but this is an instance in which the plot is not particularly the story that Meirelles is telling. Rather, like City of God, he wants you to see just how it is people in the Third World live today – there are long aerial pans of the endless Kibera slums of Nairobi, a desert refugee camp in the Sudan, not a lion or elephant to be seen. The only hint of the old indigenous culture emanates from the sound track.¹

At one level, the film is standard Hollywood fare – anyone who has seen the Harrison Ford blockbuster The Fugitive knows almost instantly where this film is headed – but it really is as if Meirelles has made two movies, one for the studio that financed it, another for viewers’ back brains, images that won’t easily fade, even if the characters’ comments about them blend easily enough to a typical genre – the evil pharmaceutical conglomerate whose clinical trials are going badly, burying its mistakes more or less literally in a local lime pit, failing to note that its forthcoming wonder drug kills some people some of the time. It’s not so much that Meirelles wants you to see the corporation acting badly, with the aid of more than a few British foreign service officers, as it is that he wants you to see what a clinical trial of western medicine looks like in Kenya period. It’s a scene of poverty that might have looked more stark three weeks ago, before the anarchy at the New Orleans Convention Center ripped the veil off our own version of desperation & put it on the evening news, but ultimately it’s not all that different. “Disposable people,” as one of the characters puts it, look remarkably similar regardless of where they suffer.

The story turns a few of the usual narrative conventions upside down – the protagonist, British foreign service officer Fiennes is not Harrison Ford-like cool under fire or heroic. Indeed he’s filmed at several key points in postures intended to make him seem smaller than his six feet. Rachel Weisz, who plays his wife, on the other hand is filmed to seem taller – she’s actually five inches shorter – he’s often looking up at her, literally. She is the character who sets the plot in motion, a firebrand of an international aid worker who weds the phlegmatic diplomat at least partly so that he will take her to Africa. She’s perpetually asking the embarrassing rhetorical question of public officials, making her spouse’s colleagues cringe before whispering to her husband that he needs to do a better job keeping her under wraps. This, of course, she has no intention of doing.

The story is told in two arcs, starting with the discovery of her murder (the wheels of her overturned jeep is the very first image up on the screen) & her husband’s attempt to understand what happened – she hasn’t told him anything about the scandal concerning the tests of Dypraxa, a "cure" for tuberculosis, she was about to expose. Gradually he comes to understand what she was doing, to & with whom, and, as he does, the very same forces that got her begin to come after him. I’m not going to tell you more than that, except that the ending both is & is not familiar.

Unlike Andrew Davis, the director of The Fugitive, Meirelles obviously cares passionately about the corporate relationships that exist to bring a modern medicine to market. The manufacturer of the drug is not the subcontractor who tests it & the motives of the British government in aiding either of these corporations is as simple as 1500 jobs in a manufacturing plant in the north. Fiennes eventually is forced to understand how all the parties are motivated differently, ending up in a Sudanese refugee camp where Dypraxa’s original inventor is expiating his own sins by bringing aid to the victims of that nation’s civil war. It is a perfect Meirelles’ touch that Fiennes confrontation with Pete Postlethwaite in the camp is interrupted by bandits on horseback “recruiting” new members at gunpoint.

This film has gotten rave reviews in part because anyone who saw City of God understands what a great filmmaker Meirelles is, and in part because it comes at the end of cinema’s summer season, when the market is flooded with mindless fare for out-of-school teenagers. If it’s not quite the great film the reviewers would like it to be, it certainly is a fascinating, often wonderful project to watch. If I have problems with it, it’s partly because of the compromises Meirelles makes to get this tale to market – there is a sex scene early on (a flashback, actually) that is filmed in lighting fit for a perfume ad. Indeed, one of the largest distractions of The Constant Gardner is that it is visually so damn beautiful – whether it’s a scene of herons erupting from the surface of a lake at sunset or a long scan of the Kibera slums. This is a level of romanticism on the part of cinemaphotographer César Charlone that was never evident in City of God when he & Meirelles were dealing with their own continent. This film, however, was made for a different audience, or at least audiences beyond those that saw City. It will be interesting to see which ones show up.

 

¹ Again like the English Patient. When the CD comes out, it’s certain to be a success financially – world music as easy listening.

Having watched the chaotic personal style of Terry Gilliam documented in Lost in La Mancha, I’m amazed that anyone in Hollywood would extend him the budget to make a motion picture. This is also apparently what the Brothers Weinstein thought when they advanced him some $90 million to make his version of The Brothers Grimm. They nixed Gilliam’s choice for a lead – Johnny Depp wasn’t deemed famous enough (this was pre-Pirates of the Caribbean) – and also Gilliam’s selection of Samantha Morton as the female lead. They fired his cinemaphotographer halfway through the production & refused to let Gilliam put a prosthetic nose on Matt Damon’s face – they wanted a mug front & center that said “movie star!” Gilliam is said to have been so frustrated & furious that, once the shooting was complete, he went & made another motion picture – Tideland, due out later this month – before sitting down to edit Grimm.

The miracle is that this film works, better even than Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (which we watched one evening at our cabin south of Lost River in West Virginia), tho maybe not so well as 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King – and certainly not as well as Brazil, Gilliam’s masterpiece. Most of the critics reported on the pre-release squabbling between Gilliam & the folks at Miramax & simply missed the motion picture in front of their eyes. Since Gilliam is the sort who makes films for people who like to think, even when it’s a farce, the reviews ensured that it would open weakly, failing to dislodge a pedestrian Hollywood comedy from its top spot in the weekend earnings. Once the film has gone global, moved to DVD & been shown on TV a couple of times, Miramax won’t lose a penny. But they won’t make the megamillions they’d obviously hoped for, either. And one suspects that the 65-year-old Gilliam won’t be working for Miramax again anytime soon.

More than any other film maker since Fassbinder, Gilliam cherishes chaos. If the opening moments of a great movie are characterized by forcing viewers have to make sense out of a world in which unfamiliar elements are occurring right in front of their (our) very eyes – one could build a quite credible theory that the secret to great cinema is just sustaining that sense of bewilderment, the moment before the parsimony principle has clicked into place & given us our predictable genre with its anticipated moments & ultimate conclusion – Gilliam’s strategy is to churn up as much hoopla as is possible from beginning to end, behind which the narrative machine can, from time to time, be glimpsed in motion. None of his films are about character & the plots themselves border on the gratuitous. Benicio Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo in Fear & Loathing is an amazing performance, precisely because Del Toro has almost nothing to work from other than a beer belly (acquired apparently just for the role) & an equally resourceful Johnny Depp to bounce off. Matt Damon & Heath Ledger (probably best known as the actor who portrayed Billy Bob Thornton’s suicidal son in Monsters Ball) don’t have the depth or chops of Depp or Del Toro, but they do have a major advantage in that the film’s reliance on computer generated (CG) effects appear to have forced Gilliam into story-boarding a plot together.

But plot & narrative are two different things. And hardly anybody makes this more self-evident than does Gilliam. Narrative is the unfolding of meaning in time, whereas plot is the sequencing of events in a referenced world projected by the work of art. Plot, Gilliam seems to be arguing, is necessary but not terribly important. What’s important is what’s happening right now in front of you. Thus it is not that the child is being spirited away to become the necessary 12^th part of the sleeping queen’s centuries-old spell that matters, but how her eyes disappear when they are taken over by the emerging (if Ghostbuster referencing) horror that is the Gingerbread Man.

This insistence on the present detail is a Gilliam trademark, one that is accentuated by his preference for weird angle shots, minimal lighting, crowded sets, with unexpected faces filling up the entire screen (even better if something busy is going on as well, such as the emergence of many little bugs from a cuff or mouth). His films never pause for a breather & one reaction that you can see happens is that some viewers (Roger Ebert is pretty clear about this in his own reaction to the film) take their own psychic pause, as if the constant bustle ejects them from their own viewing experience. They may not – as Ebert obviously did not – ever return completely to the film.

Gilliam films are thus exhausting & not everyone makes it all the way. The Brothers Grimm is unusual in this regard in that it’s a reasonably compact project – one could even call it “neat” by Gilliam standards. Part of how this works is, I suspect, the result of one of Miramax’s interventions. Matt Damon is a stolid, phlegmatic type compared with Johnny Depp, the human chameleon. It is precisely Damon’s pint-sized version of Robert Mitchum at the center of all this rumpus that acts as an ongoing focal point, a still center amid the ongoing circus onscreen. To some degree, that is what Del Toro gave to Fear & Loathing¸ tho it’s not Del Toro’s basic style.

It’s always interesting to see who does, or does not, get it among Gilliam’s supporting cast. Just as Tobey Maguire as was completely clueless as to his role’s function in Fear & Loathing, Peter Stormare, normally a great character actor (his role as the back-alley eye doctor in Minority Report was one of that film’s high points, and he remains famous as the gangster who fed Steve Buscemi to the wood chipping machine in Fargo), can’t seem to figure out who he’s supposed to be. In fact, just as Maguire should have represented the “sane everyman” aghast at the antics of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing, Maguire played it as tho he were a reject from a Dumb & Dumber casting call, Stormare is the one figure whose character – an Italian adjunct of the French occupation troops in 19^th century Germany¹ - actually changes over the course of the film. We need to see that in order to understand that the lack of development on the part of the others is not an accident. But Stormare is all over the map, as if he were a different character in virtually every scene.

That’s a risk that Gilliam’s improvisational approach to movie making maximizes. If he doesn’t get away with it 100 percent of the time in The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam manages to do so often enough. Somebody some day will no doubt offer a deep Lacanian reading of all the psychic lightning bolts Gilliam is hurling here – the film’s basic message is that fairy tales are rooted in real lives & that, read literally, they can be horrific because the reality they reflect is as frightening as what happens to a small town when twelve small girls go missing. But I wonder who, exactly, will ever see that movie, even tho it’s the one right in front of us.

 

¹ The idea of setting the film in “French-occupied Germany” is a typical Gilliam gesture, so wry that you almost miss it.

I finally got around to seeing Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango the other night & it makes for a fascinating study of what makes narrative. It was fortuitous since earlier that same day I’d gone ballistic reading the opening of Robert Pinsky’s column in the Washington Post:

Poems have plots. A poem happens in time: sometimes with an explicit, actual story and sometimes as the more implicit story of a feeling as it unfolds.

A poem does happen in time – even a single-letter poem has a beginning, middle & end – but the unfolding of meaning in time is narrative. Ascribing this to a projected external world beyond the language – a far different & much narrower thing – is plot, an exercise of the parsimony principle. Assassination Tango is a film with a lot more narrative than plot & in the difference lies much of its charm.

At 71, Robert Duvall wanted to make a film that revolved around his two abiding passions – his love of dance & his 30-year-old Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza. Assassination Tango is the result. John Anderson (Duvall) is an aging hit man, a one-time mercenary doing small-time assassinations for the local godfather (former boxer Frankie Gio) in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, living with a manicurist & her ten-year-old daughter, when he gets a three-day job to travel to Buenos Aires for a hit on an old general, a man responsible himself for many disappearances & murders. John’s experience hunting Sandinistas have given him the language & cultural skills to be the best man for the job. But when he gets there, he discovers first that his contacts in Buenos Aires are comically inept & that his target has had an accident & won’t be returning to the capital for another three weeks. With time to kill, he gets involved in the local dance scene & initiates what borders on an affair with a beautiful young dance instructor. The general arrives, Anderson completes his contract, but does so in a way that upends not one, but two counter-conspiracies the Buenos Aires police & Argentine federales have in motion, making Anderson a wanted man. He barely gets back to Brooklyn, end of story.

But Assassination Tango isn’t about its story at all. It’s about the construction of John’s character, about the tempo & timing of interludes, about the quiet discourse between two people who aren’t all that proficient in each other’s language as they get to know one another. In its best moments, Assassination Tango has a feel to it that I associate with the films of the late John Cassavetes, which mumble & lurch toward much deeper truths than one can get out of Hollywood’s overlit steadycam worldview.

John’s character is built out of details & bits. The details are what we know about him – he was a mercenary, his love for the manicurist is notably less than his delight in her daughter (he’s never had children before), he talks to himself, he hangs out at a bar that offers dance lessons out by Coney Island. The bits are moves derived from a lifetime of acting by Duvall, not all of it his own – he’s borrowed elements of DeNiro and James Caan from the Godfather films, aged them to a man vaguely in his sixties. The character’s politeness toward the Argentine dance instructor & her friends & family is as much a code for a certain kind of person as is the tantrum he throws when he learns that he won’t be able to get home to Brooklyn in time for the ten-year-old’s birthday.

The trick in all this is to get the audience to root for the assassin to get away with the murders he commits (four in all during the course of the film, two for hire and two others in the process of getting it done & getting away) – to see him as a human, vulnerable & plausible. It’s not that there haven’t been sympathetic hit men in the movies before – Jean Reno in Léon (also known as The Professional, the title under which it seems to show up on cable these days) is almost as adorable as he is inscrutable, an excruciatingly difficult star turn, poised as Reno is between two of the great scene stealers of our time, Natalie Portman (at the age of 12, no less) & Gary Oldman in his most over-the-top villain role ever, the psychotic narc who kills while listening to classical music over headphones. But Duvall the dancer is the antithesis of Reno guzzling milk from the carton – even if both like to wear dark glasses indoors.

The crux of Assassination Tango comes in the scenes that have the least to do with advancing the plot. John takes the Argentine out for coffee & they just talk – Pedraza has the flattened affect of someone who has never acted before (& Duvall manages to make it work in ways that his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, does not with his own daughter in Godfather III, largely by keeping Pedraza’s dialog to scenes with himself and other very low-key actors – she never appears opposite Reubén Blades, Kathy Baker, Frankie Gio or anyone who might create a stylistic contrast). They just talk, she smiles, he smiles, we learn that he’s not going to lie to her about his relationships in the States (just as, before and after, we see him lying to Kathy Baker, the woman he lives with). Was that the point of the scene or was it, in fact, the give & take? Duvall, the director, is letting the audience here see what he sees when he looks at Pedraza. It's a remarkable moment, the key in many ways to the entire film.

In another scene, John is leaving a club with her & her friends & one shows him a trick to help him get over his bow-legged way of walking, by placing a quarter between his knees & holding it there as he walks down the street. This is like one of those scenes in a Harrison Ford film in which Ford creates a back story for the little scar on his chin – it doesn’t particularly move anything forward. But Duvall takes the time to stretch the scene out & films it from up high & across the street (the same angle John has been practicing for shooting the general). The pacing of the scene, its timing (the night before the hit), the dialog, both familiar & yet between people who will never know one another well, are more than incidental. It’s what you talk about when you don’t know that the moment you’re in stands on the precipice of great events. Except that one character in this scene knows that.

At the same time, Duvall also goes out of his way to give his own character an edge, to leave questions open. There’s a scene with a prostitute in the hotel in Buenos Aires that makes no sense in the movie until much later when the woman is questioned by the police & says that John made her call him Daddy, a term that suddenly casts his relationship between the old hit man & the young dancer, not to mention the old hit man & the manicurist’s ten-year-old daughter, into a totally different light.

Critics have generally not loved this film because they see Duvall moving the chess pieces around as he creates this piece. Yet shoving the pieces into position is so much what this movie is about that the charge feels churlish or just beside the point. There is a reason this movie’s title conjoins words from such dissimilar schema, like Godzilla Banana. Far from concealing the film-maker’s art, Assassination Tango renders the constructedness of it all as the absolute heart of a remarkably human film.

It’s been about a week since my twelve-year-old sons & I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 in nearby Oaks, Pennsylvania, a dot of a town northwest of Valley Forge. I’d gotten our tickets over the net ahead of time in order to ensure that it wouldn’t be sold out, but I was surprised, frankly, to see that the theater was showing the film in a room larger than the one reserved for White Chicks. In fact, our theater wasn’t sold out, but it was 97 percent full, maybe a smidgen more. Afterwards, we stood around with some friends who passed out voter registration cards – we were lucky, as it happened. At a mall in nearby Downingtown, another acquaintance got busted for passing out such cards. Five state police cars arrived at that theater within a couple of minutes in spite of the fact that the nearest barracks is 20 minutes away. Did I mention that I live in a community that has elected exactly one Democrat to anything – the schoolboard in the 1940s for a single term – since the 1890s, but that Al Gore won here in 2000?

 

I’ve reseen all of Moore’s major films in the past few weeks, ever since one of my sons picked up the book Stupid White Men & noted that “this is a guy who makes funny movies from a left perspective & writes funny books from a left perspective – this is like looking at my future.” Just how big of a hint does a father need? After we’d watched Roger and Me, we’d discussed how Moore didn’t present the entire picture with regards to globalism – rather, that film was a look at the short-term impact on a specific community. But that’s a view that is sustainable only if you argue that the United States has the right in perpetuity to utilize one-quarter of the world’s resources for the benefit of just four percent of the world’s population. The problem with globalism isn’t that it’s happening, but rather how it’s being done: for every dollar that is being shipped overseas, something like 30 cents is dropping to the bottom line (in the form of profits, executive pay & bonuses) & virtually nothing is being done to mitigate the impact on workers impacted by what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

 

When we watched Bowling for Columbine, we discussed how Michael Moore points out the stunning detail that gun control advocates never explain adequately – which is that Canada, with the same level of gun ownership as the United States & a culture that is more similar than different, has only a fraction of the gun deaths per capita that afflicts its neighbor to the south. But Moore doesn’t explore this anomaly at all. Instead he focuses on the gun lobby, which frankly is low hanging fruit. Possibly the topic is too large, or perhaps when Moore & the kids from Columbine provoked K-Mart to change its policy on selling bullets he found himself with a different story than the one he’d anticipated. But Bowling for Columbine strikes me as a major missed opportunity, going for laughs by focusing on the NRA rather than trying for an insight into why Canada & the U.S. have such different experiences under roughly parallel circumstances. For that matter, Moore doesn’t do a good job in explaining how the NRA has gotten to be the largest membership organization in the United States. They aren’t all psychotic fascists, even if that’s what the leadership wants to project.

 

So I approached Fahrenheit 9/11 with some trepidation. And what surprised me the most wasn’t that Moore spins an imperfect narrative – the topic is far too vast for any film shorter than The Godfather, if not Berlin Alexanderplatz. No, given everything that I’d read online or in the papers, plus everything I’d heard on TV, what most amazed me was how fair Moore is. Fair & ultimately balanced. Bill O'Reilly had not prepared me for that. But neither had Roger Ebert.

 

Consider the impossibility of the project, and how Moore in turn responded. In order to set the context – the “before” part of the tale – he chose to focus on how Bush got into office & what he did once he got there, which frankly was not much. In the “after” portion of the film, Moore makes three major arguments:

 

·         The Bush family dynasty cannot be extricated from its relationship to the triangle of oil, the intelligence community and the Saudi elite.

 

·         Wars are not fought by elites, but by kids who are swept up into the military for want of other economic alternatives in their lives.

 

·         The loss of a loved one in war is overwhelming.

 

The first of those points has been detailed in far greater detail by none other than Kevin Phillips, the man who first gave Richard Nixon’s Republican Party the Southern Strategy it follows to this day, in his anti-Bush tome, American Dynasty. It may be a bit much to suggest, as some viewers see Moore doing, that Bush’ primary goal in invading Iraq may have been profit – there are other reasons* why the far right might well want to be in Iraq – but the problematics created by our entanglement with the Saudis are hard to underestimate. The difficulty in unpacking the problem of Islamic fundamentalism when your “best friends” are just such fundamentalists is the trick that has to be solved if the West, and especially the United States, is ever to extricate itself from the jihad against modernism.

 

Moore’s second point, tho hardly new or original, is really this film’s great contribution to the debate over Iraq. He outlines in the clearest possible terms the great secret of the American military – that it is, especially now that it is all voluntary, the GOP form of welfare state. It does precisely what welfare has always done: provides for those who cannot provide for themselves, connects them to opportunities, education & security. Only it does so without admitting that this is what it’s all about, and its one major requirement is that beneficiaries aren’t supposed to complain just because they’re being asked to kill & be killed. Furthermore, as Republicans have known for generations, it cannot be attacked on these terms, precisely because to do so can be characterized as “unpatriotic.”**

 

Moore’s third point, Lila Lipscomb’s extraordinary story within the film, functions as the synthesis or conclusion in the director’s narrative syllogism: elites make war; the underclass fights wars; it is hell for the underclass. I’ve been surprised, frankly, that there haven’t been more complaints on the left about this being emotionally manipulative, given the left’s preference for complexity, for a tale not just in black & white, but with the grays left in. Moore’s great talent, his unique contribution to the left, has been his ability to make entertaining progressive films that are not at all subtle. Unlike, say, Jim Hightower (on the humorous side) or Alexander Cockburn & Naom Chomsky (on the ponderous end of the scale), Moore doesn’t scratch against the blackboard of the soul with his oversimplifications & just-plain-got-it-wrongs, even tho he has just as many.

 

In the battle for political hegemony, the American left has always been hamstrung by the fact that it usually has to fight not over any given political point, but over the issue of depth & complexity simultaneously. The moral absolutism & simple-minded arguments of the right – say, over abstinence instead of sex education in schools or over needle exchange programs to prevent AIDS, or that support of our troops necessarily means support of the war – are not just endearing quirks of the right, but in fact an important political dimension to their argument, one that plays itself out powerfully along class lines. When Lila Lipscomb describes how she felt about anti-war protestors against the first Iraq war, she is saying a lot about the inability of the left to communicate to anyone other than itself. It’s the same point that Bill Clinton has made repeatedly when he says that the American voters would rather have a leader who is strong, but wrong, in times of crisis. And it is also precisely the risk that John Kerry runs whenever he responds to any question in a way that looks too cautious – which is mostly all the time.

 

Moore’s film is an argument that it need not be this way. It can, I think, be faulted for any, perhaps all, of the individual choices he makes in constructing an argument that you can reach people with a skeletal but powerful narrative far more readily than through the nuances of true debate. You might cringe at how he steals the “plastic bag in the wind” scene from American Beauty as his model for conveying the transcendant power of September 11 through pages & dust drifting in the air. But the simple fact is that Michael Moore has managed to go over the heads not just of his fellow ambiguity junkies on the left, but over the right as well, including the very same media mavens such as Bill O'Reilly & Brit Hume who effectively ganged up on & dismantled an unprepared Howard Dean campaign just three months ago. Is it any accident that the greatest master of agit-prop since at least Bertie Brecht happens to look just like a real-life Archie Bunker?

 

 

* I tend to agree with the Stratfor Group’s analysis that putting upwards of a dozen military bases in the second largest oil producing nation, thus completing the “chain” of western military presence in the Middle East from Israel to the west to Afghanistan in the East was the foremost political goal of the invasion.

 

** The closest we have come to having any public recognition of these dynamics has been around Clinton’s concept of a civilian service core, which should have been the other half of his own welfare “reform” program. GOP attacks on civilian service are exactly what they are not willing to make against the military, not because it serves a different function, but because it is, almost in the Mafia sense of the phrase, their thing.

When I first heard that Alfonso Cuarón was hired to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I’m sure my eyebrows must have twitched. Recruiting the auteur of the masterpiece of adolescent sexual fantasy, Y Tu Mamá También, to direct one of the two most bankable franchises of preteen cinema may not be as risky as naming your childcare coop after Michael Jackson, but it absolutely suggests that J.K. Rowling’s trio of main characters, who in the first two films existed in a timeless – and largely genderless – Dickensian childhood will now become something quite other. And Other the new HP film certainly is. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) & Rupert Grint (Ron) are now young teens – they dress like teenagers, stand like teenagers & have gone lanky, as indeed have virtually all of the returning student characters. And through a series of looks, touches & blushes, Cuarón suggests a realm of surging hormones that give these characters an edge their counterparts in other preteen fare – think Spy Kids – will never have. It’s not coincidental that several of the films first reviews have pointed to Emma Watson for her fine acting – Cuarón in many ways has made her the star of HP3, or at the very least Harry’s equal. She not only proves capable of undoing the fatal results of the tale’s frame narrative, she’s the center of an unspoken Jules et Jim ménage binding Ron & Harry to each other.

 

But that’s not what’s really most interesting about HP3 (which I admit to calling HP3: This Time it’s Sirius) – this after all is a dimension that could dissolve entirely in the hands of Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral), currently directing HP4. That the screenplay for at least the first 5 HPs will all be done by Steven Kloves (Racing to the Moon, Wonderboys) will simply, I suspect, deepen the ongoing demonstration that the director’s vision – let alone product – is something very different from a screenplay.

 

For what really matters about HP3 is something that is mimicked structurally in the film when Hermione & Harry turn back time in order to redo the narrative, rescuing two critical characters, one of whom is unambiguously “good” only in the second version of the tale. HP3 appears to occur in a completely different universe than the first two installments directed by Chris Columbus. In the first two Harry Potter flicks, the only moments in which the viewer senses that we’re not on some sound stage are the train (or train & flying car) sequences. In HP3, however, Hogwarts seems to exist in a gothic physical universe. One sees Hogwarts, looking more angular & goth, set into a landscape. Rain pelts the characters & blurs the camera’s lens. The Whomping Willow is both smaller & in a different location.

 

These are not insignificant changes. Indeed, whether or not Newell turns out to be half the director Cuarón – and half the director would be pretty good – it’s almost inevitable that the universe of HP4 cannot be the same as either Columbus’ or Cuarón’s. What we have here is Rashoman for kids, a demonstration of deconstruction as an inevitable critical practice. The idea that the remaining films in this series of seven might continue this cinematic cubism is, to my mind, one of the most compelling promises these films can make.

 

How is this different from other kids’ serials that have had different directors – Star Wars, say, or even Godzilla? The intense identification many juvenile readers have with the fictive universe created by Jo Rowling’s books is approached by only the Tolkien trilogy and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. I don’t think it could have worked if the books had not existed prior to the films as a social phenomenon – and I don’t think it could have worked without the success – and imaginative continuity – of the Chris Columbus films of the first two Potter volumes. That acceptance – that these films present that world – is the key. This means that, later on, the films probably can’t serve that function for a future generation of youngsters coming into a world in which both the books & films always already exist.

 

But this of course means that I’m presuming that it does. And that is a presumption I am making – at least for some kids some of the time. My own sons and their best friend, all avid 12-year-old fans of the books, saw the distinctions as being related to the development of the story itself. Characters changed because the books forced them to evolve. Indeed, the lone major complaint my focus group had about the film was its failure to fully identify the origins of the magical map of Hogwarts as being the four old friends Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Periwinkle & Harry’s father. Will they, I wonder, feel the same way if HP4 isn’t consistent in its stylistic extensions of what has already come before? Or is this kind of reading even developmental? After all, I know middle-aged Tolkien fiends every bit as literal as this? Or is this, as Paul Verhoeven is said to have characterized the layers of political commentary in his Total Recall, something that was put in because the director thought it was “fun,” and because it could broaden the appeal of the movie?

 

At least for once, I find myself interested in how Harry Potter the Movies will evolve.  

Much of what makes Hellboy so much fun as a motion picture relates, I think, precisely to this question of influence I was mulling over yesterday. Hellboy is not only *not* original, but is very nearly slavish in its overt sampling of its sources. Just a few of these include Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, X-Men, Frankenstein, Mimic — director Guillermo del Toro is quoting himself there — Spiderman, Men in Black, Lord of the Rings (notably the Balrog & troll sequences), Harry Potter, Shrek, Edward Scissorhands, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Girl Interrupted, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft & the songs of Robert Johnson. I know that I'm missing more references than I got, especially since I don't follow either the American slasher or Hong Kong kung fu genres.

 

What holds this anthology of low rent devices together is editing. The film virtually never slows down — the few scenes that give the audience a chance to catch their breath & build the nominal depth of character for the narrative's four main characters — Hellboy, his girl Sparky, their FBI keeper John Myers, and HB's "father," good ole absent-minded professor Broom (John Hurt made up as Albert Einstein) — are short & filled with both edits & flashbacks so as not to let go of the film's underlying, relentless pace.

 

As you might anticipate from this circus of allusions, the film's focus isn't on hanging together narratively — indeed, there are large gaps, most notably in the lumbering way that the film takes Hellboy's primary partner, "Blue," a creature from the Black Lagoon type who appears to have cribbed his sensitive soul from 3CPO, the Star Wars bot, out of the story line for the film's last third so that it can concentrate on the love triangle between Sparky (Princess Lea) and Hellboy (Hans Solo) & Myers (Luke Skywalker) as they  try to keep Rasputin from opening the portal to the Other Side. For all of the energy that has gone into creating Hellboy, a sort of red Shrek, Blue & Sparky or Liz, a gal with a pyrokinesis problem, the film's bad guys are remarkably lacking in charisma.

 

That this gumbo hangs together at all is a considerable achievement, yet, as should be obvious, this is a film that eschews greatness, depth, insight or real affection. The film is so firmly focused on its roster of homages that it never looks up to consider what it might add to this pantheon of Saturday afternoon thrillers. The result, I suspect, may be that the film will rake in the requisite hundreds of millions of dollars, but have no impact whatsoever even on the genres it holds most dear.

 

Hellboy, in short, is a filmic equivalent of new formalism. If, that is, new formalism took its marching orders from the livelier venues of poetry. Which, in turn, new formalism emphatically does not.

 

Which brings me back to the question of influence & originality vs. derivation. Robert Duncan, the most thoughtful of those arguing for a derivationist perspective, for the idea that no poem is born disconnected from the whole of literary history, nowhere argues that poetry itself does not thereby evolve. Indeed, I think it is clear from his work that poets necessarily write the poems they themselves need & that this need can be seen (or, perhaps better, felt) as a lack or absence in the poetic constellation. Hellboy, like new formalism, works from the presumption that the map of the heavens for its genre is largely, if not entirely, complete. The most one might strive for is to add one's own name to an already crowded roster.

 

I used to think — and still do, mostly — that what so animated the Poetry Wars of the late 1970s & early '80s was that language poetry, simply by existing, demonstrated that the constellation of possibilities articulated by the New American poetries of the 1950s where themselves not complete. Langpo's most animated opponents where those, like Tom Clark, who had signed up for a particular flavor of the New American mapping, and who were passionately committed to the idea that their universe not change. It was, to say the least, a teleological reading of literary history. What was most objectionable about langpo therefore was simply that it existed. Had langpo presented itself as, say, third-generation projectivism, nobody would have complained. Perhaps, precisely, because no one would have noticed.

 

To date, newer tendencies, such as the New Brutalism, have yet to articulate exactly how the map of the constellations itself must change. As certainly it must. Langpo's origins in the Vietnam conflict may position it with regards to the issues of today, but they hardly render it adequate to a post-Soviet universe in which the issue of anti-modernism, whether in failed states — where anti-modernism comes out as a mode  of theocratic fascism — or in post-industrial centers (where one form of anti-modernism shows up as the School of Quietude), is inescapable. The langpo position, I would suggest, is that the tasks of modernism itself were never completed, that the bulb of the Enlightenment has mostly flickered without giving full lumination, & that much remains yet to be done.

 

So I look at Hellboy as a guilty pleasure for a world in which guilt itself is no longer palpable, and it would be easy to despair. What happens when there are no more films to make, no more poems to write? Hellboy's solution, that we should make the old ones over & over, feels to me woefully inadequate. What is excluded from this motion picture is precisely what cinema needs.