Allen Ginsberg typing 1956.

James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in Howl

Over the years, some versions of the top photograph have alleged that Ginsberg is typing (or writing) Howl, tho the date is one year too late. With regards to the bottom photo, our first thought is that the typewriter has changed – it’s gray instead of the more common black. Our second thought is to wonder if that particular model was even available in 1955. Franco has stripped to a t-shirt because he’s hunkier here (Allen would like that!). And he’s moved from the kitchen to a dining room or study. But you gotta love that lamp. It’s the light source for the original photo, tho not for the recreation.

Translation is everything. Just as prosody, if even if you didn’t know the language nor had any clue of the meaning of the words, Otto E Mezzo manifests a concision, balance & exactness that is flat out gorgeous. So much to be conveyed with just five letters. Brought over from the Italian into English, the title of the great film by Federico Fellini looks off-balance & awkward: 8½. The film is the dreamlike tale of a famous director, Marcello Mastroianni in his canonical role as Guido, a transparent cipher for Fellini himself, who finds himself confronting a horrific case of filmmaker’s block as he sets out to make a new movie. One could argue, no doubt, as to the role of Fellini in the history of Italian cinema, but it would be much harder to contest the fact that 8½ was the apotheosis of Italian film in the 1960s.

Imagine now, if you can, the entire project recast as a British musical with Daniel Day-Lewis in the role of Guido, Marion Cotillard as his long-suffering wife Luisa (originally played by Anouk Aimée), Penélope Cruz as his mistress Carla (Sara Milo in 8½), Nicole Kidman as Claudia (Claudia Cardinale), Fergie as the whore Saraghina (Eddra Gale), plus Sophia Loren, Judi Dench & Kate Hudson in roles that have antecedents in the earlier film, but not precisely as configured here. The result is a very odd concoction, a giant love letter to Federico that isn’t quite willing to take the same risks that made him what he was, and that is being marketed to U.S. film-goers in such a way that, if they don’t already know Fellini, they won’t hear about him here.

Obviously, this is an homage done with much love – the music for Mario Fratti’s original play in Italian was composed by Andrea Guerra, the son of the great Tonino Guerra, the screenwriter who authored virtually all of Antonioni’s greatest films & even Fellini’s Amacord. If young Guerra (he’s been a top composer for Italian TV & film for 20 years) isn’t quite Nino Rota, Fellini’s composer & collaborator, trained right here in Philly at the Curtis Institute, that may be because nobody is Nino Rota. By way of contrast, this is a much better musical qua musical than, say, Baz Luhrmann’s ponderous Moulin Rouge or Chicago, which Nine director Rob Marshall also made.¹

But a musical? If one looked at this project as “let’s do a remake of 8½,” one would not think of a musical, except as a giant concession to contemporary filmgoers who might be unwilling to sit still for the dream-like looseness of Fellini’s original narrative. Sophia Loren – not in the original, incidentally – as the rather omnipresent dead mother, for example. Or the boy who is Guido at the age of nine (one of at least three meanings of that title here²). Not elements that go down all that easily with the literal-minded US audience, unless it’s off chasing Na’vi, hobbits, vampires or he who shall not be named. (Consider the flack Peter Jackson, of all people, is getting for not making the afterlife “real enough” in The Lovely Bones.) And some of 8½’s more nightmarish moments, such as the opening sequence of a man being gassed in his car stuck in traffic while he’s unable to kick his way out & bystanders just look on, are gone altogether here.

As one might imagine with a pastiche like this, the performances are uneven, ranging from the tremendous (Day-Lewis, who was brought in to replace Javier Bardem, who had first signed to play Guido; Dench, who is a revelation in her role & steals this film from all the young stunners in the cast; Cruz, whose role plays a little too close to what she’s done before; and Cotillard, who is just getting started in the English-speaking world, but appears to have no limits) to the okay (Loren, who is required mostly to look like Sophia Loren; or Hudson, whose biggest musical number is so enhanced via rapid jump cuts that it’s not clear if she can really do all that) to the barely undead (Kidman, still the worst actress in Hollywood, tho her “ice queen” Ur-goddess role suits her as it would have Catherine Zeta-Jones, who’d originally signed on to play Claudia). And once you realize what a mish-mash this homage is turning out to be, the performances are what remain to be watched. Which brings it all much closer not to Fellini’s masterpiece but that other autobiographical tale told at least partly through music, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz.

 

¹ None of which come even close to John Carney’s Once as a musical, but that low-budget Irish indie did have the advantage of being a musical designed for film & not the stage, plus it had the music of Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová, who also brought the best screen chemistry to the film since Bogie met Bacall.

² Fellini’s 8½ referred to its placement in his cinematic resume – having made six features, two shorts & a segment in a collaboration previously – as well as winking at the whole notion of cock size. We are told that this is Guido’s ninth collaboration with his producer & there are nine key women in the narrative: the mother, the wife, the mistress, the star, Guido’s confidante who is his costume designer, the whore in young Guido’s past & the reporter who wants to bed him, plus two young actresses who go through screen tests in the next-to-last scene just to keep the count right.

Avatar is that most curious of creatures, a film that is clearly one of the best of the year and one that is also clearly one of the worst. Visually, it takes motion pictures – and sci-fi in particular – onto a whole new level. The world of Pandora is wonderfully conceived & beautifully crafted. Not coincidentally, so is the far more limited & gray world of the sky people, as the marauding earthlings are known by the clans of Pandora. James Cameron, the auteur of Aliens and Terminator, has conjured spaceship, robot & helicopter technology with a thoroughness of detail that will endlessly delight anyone who has ever cringed at the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. At the level of sheer nerdy craft, this is one of the great teenage boy movies of all time.

“Imagine what he could have done if he had hired a writer,” my wife sighed as we watched the credits roll, with special effects studios (Weta, Industrial Light & Magic, the Pixel Liberation Front…) nearly as numerous as actors. Cameron himself takes credit here as author, though all he has done is take one of the standard Hollywood plots – you can find it down to the footnotes in Dances with Wolves, but even Harrison Ford’s turn as the cop hiding among the Amish in Witness uses most of the same tropes – the outsider going native within a fragile-but-unique society threatened by some variant of Western Civilization. I think Cameron’s answer to that objection would be the same one he might have applied to Titanic or that George Lukas could have used with regards to Star Wars – a writer would only have gotten in the way, injecting characters & thought into what really is a tremendous roller-coaster ride. Anything that doesn’t contribute to the ride, the onslaught of special effects, is in fact extraneous. That is why, for example, the potential for a conflict between Jake Sully (or as the Na’vi call him, Jakesully) and Tsu’Tey, Neytiri’s betrothed & the Na’vi heir apparent, never develops. The outsider waltzes in, captures the girl, takes over the clan, saves the day & the displaced young Turks don’t do much more than snear at this interloper. Consider, for example, Viggo Mortensen’s reaction to Harrison Ford in Witness. There’s none of that here. Even the tribal pantheism of the Na’vi – which appears to have been lifted right out of The Lion King – is just given the lightest (and silliest) treatment. Nothing to slow things down.

Even worse than the absence of writing for this film, however, is the absence of music. James Horner’s score is intrusively stupid, coming across – at its best – like a knockoff of a Putamayo compilation of world music as easy listening, or out-takes from The Hollywood Strings do Clannad. Music is essential to the pacing of a movie, especially one that seeks to suck readers down an increasingly rapid luge course of visual effects, but the music here ranges from the infinitely bland to overt scratching on the blackboard of one’s aural soul. Ry Cooder noodling on a slide guitar for 160 minutes would have been one hundred times better.

The terribleness of the music points, I think, to what the real weakness in Avatar is. Which is that James Cameron set out to make Pandora the most beautiful Eden ever filmed, but his image of Eden is whack. Specifically, his palette is closest to the Pre-Raphaelites, especially John William Waterhouse (which is the tail-end slushy part of that movement), and especially as recast through fantasy novel cover art over the decades. It’s not just the tall blue natives whose women are not quite topless – and not a C cup in the species – or the flying dinos that are a cross, so help me, between a dragon & a rubber chicken (indeed, I was thinking of them as funky chickens whenever they turned up on screen, especially the big red Ur-chicken). It is within this framework that Cameron has painted his portrait of unspeakable beauty. Oh Lordy.

It’s worth contrasting Avatar with the other big blockbuster released Christmas week in the U.S., Sherlock Holmes or as I prefer to think of it, Sherlock Holmes and the Temple of Doom. Unlike Avatar, Holmes has two bankable stars to headline its cast, Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law, each so wildly miscast as to telegraph precisely how loyal to the Arthur Conan Doyle franchise it intended to stay. Indeed, in the IMDB credits, Doyle is cited for only the two lead characters in spite of the fact that several others are likewise extracted from the Holmes’ series.

Unlike Avatar, whose director takes himself more seriously than anyone else in the film business, save possibly for Meryl Streep & Jerry Lewis, Holmes is directed by Madonna’s ex-, Guy Ritchie, best known for directing action thrillers, including Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, which is still in IMDB’s rankings among the top 250 films of all time. What Ritchie has set out to make is, like Avatar, a rocking good roller coaster in the guise of a film. The Holmes-Watson duo is a convenient frame – he plays them as closer to Abbott & Costello than Doyle’s characters, but Abbott & Costello as really smart, terrific at martial arts &, at least in Downey’s case, tres buff. Downey is so built-out that it may well be CGI – it goes well with the fact that he’s actually a smallish actor, under 5’9” (he’d still tower over Tom Cruise).

In Downey, Ritchie has one of the great comic character actors in film history – every movie Downey makes is a gift – and Law is just good enough to play the straight man to Downey’s combination of Charlie Chaplin & the Hulk (as projected through Irwin Corey). It’s an effective combination and with the exception of maybe one or two scenes in the middle where you can almost feel the narrative taking a deep breath before plunging ahead, Holmes is minute-for-minute a lot more fun than Avatar.

I compared Holmes to the Indiana Jones franchise above, but actually – with its interest in distinctly urban & historic environments – the real doppelganger is the Nicholas Cage / National Treasure franchise. National Treasure exists to remind us of what these sorts of films might be like if they did everything wrong, if every effect was cheesy, the writing terrible, the acting just altogether sad. Cameron wants to invoke awe – indeed, shock & awe is explicitly part of its plot – while Ritchie wants us chortling all the way, and maybe is competing secretly with The Pirates of the Caribbean series for jokes-per-action-sequence. The result here is that I’m almost certainly going back to see Avatar for a second time, just so I can catch whatever I missed on first viewing, but ten or twelve years from now – probably much sooner – that film, like Titanic before it, will become unwatchable. Twelve or 15 years down the road, Sherlock Holmes will still be one helluva lot of fun.

Finally – on my third try in ten days – I got to see a film as good as its promotion suggests, and it’s a remake. Brothers is Jim Sheridan’s version of the 2005 Danish film Brøde, which won a variety of awards at film festivals or reserved for European films. From what I gather, Brothers is a very close approximation of the original. In fact, Roger Ebert knocked it down half a star because it seemed too finished compared with the imrpovisatory feel of the original. I can imagine that – Sheridan’s one superhit, My Left Foot, left me underwhelmed, perhaps because I knew a writer far better than Christy Brown & at least equally disabled in the late Larry Eigner. Still, I’m not sure how fair either comparison truly is. Plus I can just imagine Walter Benjamin howling at the idea of retaining an improvisatory feel on a remake. What’s wrong with that picture?

There’s nothing wrong with this one. Ebert’s one-time TV collaborator, Richard Roeper, has been widely quoted calling this the best movie of the year. I haven’t seen enough films yet to make that call, but it’s certainly the best of the three I’ve seen in the December award-seeking film season, and by a long shot.

For one thing, the film has four, maybe five, incredible acting performances, that could justifiably end up as Oscar nominations. Natalie Portman is excellent, Jake Gyllenhaal even better as the ex-con fuck-up trying to help his sister-in-law & put his life together again after his brother, Tobey Maguire in the best role of his career, is lost in Afghanistan after his chopper is shot down. Sam Shepard, normally an actor who makes me wish he’d stick to writing plays, is fabulous as the brothers’ hard-ass unforgiving alcoholic father. And Madison Bailee, who just turned ten in October, gives the best performance by a child actor I can recall seeing since Patty Duke was Helen Keller.

But the center of this film is Maguire. He has to be the most widely miscast actor of his generation, cashing in fat checks for Spiderman & generally unsuited for every role he’s been in since he nearly stole The Ice Storm, one of the best American films ever made, twelve years ago. In Brothers he undergoes a physical transformation on the scale of early DeNiro or more recent Matt Damon, looking almost ghostlike thin. Far more important, he keeps a stillness to himself that starts off as the typical Marine’s buttoned-down attitude but later comes across as nearly volcanic containment of equal amounts of rage & guilt. He’s been forced to look right down into the center of his soul & been horrified by what he’s seen & done. He’s inconsolable, paranoid, with every nerve-ending absolutely raw. It is easily the best film performance I’ve seen this year, or in many years. And I can barely believe I’m typing that about Tobey Maguire.

Maguire gets less screen time than do Gyllenhaal or Portman, the family left behind when the helicopter goes down. Gyllenhaal is trying to get through parole by spending his evenings in bars, while his father does nothing to hide his contempt for him, contrasting him constantly with his high-school quarterback turned Marine captain brother. “He was too small,” Shepard says, “but he could throw,” and “he didn’t quit. That was the biggest difference.” Most of the film is about Portman grieving & Gyllenhaal trying to figure out how to stand up on his own two feet. The key to this comes when Gyllenhaal talks friends of his into redoing the kitchen in Portman’s tiny house. The three members of the crew, led by Ethan Suplee (best known for his own role as the fuck-up brother, Randy, on My Name is Earl), would be the film’s one clunker moment, an instance of Hollywood shtick entering into the space of the drama, were it not for the anger one of them expresses when Madison Bailee drops a bucket of paint on him. Her reaction to his anger – and that of her mother – are important indexes for what’s to come. And, indeed, it comes in the spanking new kitchen when it happens.

If the film does have one moment that I think you can fault it for, it’s the ending. Any number of conclusions are possible, and the one chosen is the road of least resistance – you can almost imagine focus groups recoiling at any of the others, even if they are more real or true. Still, you can feel the filmmaker flinching right at the critical moment. Not having seen Brøde – whose co-author & director Susanne Bier gets a writing credit for Brothers – I can’t tell if both films are identical on this point, but I’ll be surprised if they’re not. This is, counter-intuitively, not nearly the cop-out it might seem. Rather, I think the fear is that having dragged you through hell to get here, one of the louder, more likely conclusions might erase what came before. This way, the film permits it to linger in the imagination. And linger it will.

Anna Kendrick & George Clooney

There is a gap in Up in the Air between what the film wants to be and what it is. Not unlike Invictus, which is well intentioned but too stitched together to really work without major doses of unearned forgiveness on the part of its audience, Up in the Air seems destined to be loved by the people who see the movie for what it wants to be, but will prove a disappointment for those who see it for what it is.

Also like Invictus, the movie comes in distinct segments, which in this instance might be characterized as “before the wedding” & “after the wedding.” What comes before the wedding is smooth & elegant & charming & fun – Jason Reitman, whose last film was the breakout indie hit Juno, has three first-rate actors in George Clooney, Vera Farmiga & Anna Kendrick, engaging characters & the makings of a dynamite plot. But the wedding is supposed to be a transformational moment & instead it’s an embarrassing lump of the gooiest sentiment & cliché, excessively long because Reitman can’t figure how to direct his way out of it & not even faintly believable, after which the three characters move on to three very different places. The film is supposed to leave you with a sense of ambiguity & indeterminacy about each, but if you’ve stopped believing in them as characters, what you get are loose ends. Big letdown.

There are three real problems with the wedding scene, but the biggest one is that Anna Kendrick isn’t in it – we have arrived at a point in the film beyond which she has relatively little narrative use. The real confrontation here is between Clooney’s character, Ryan, a terminator who is brought as a consultant to fire people for major corporations, and Farmiga as Alex, a fellow road warrior who has become Ryan’s latest fuck buddy. She logs as many air miles as he does (350,000 per year), echoes his philosophy of traveling emotionally & physically light – “I’m just like you, just with a vagina,” she tells him –, and is also a member of the Mile High Club who is even more sexually adventurous than he. Kendrick is Natalie, the 23-year-old whiz kid whom the corporation has brought in to help cut costs by switching over from on-site terminations to outplacement via video terminal. She doesn’t have any reason to be at the wedding, that of Ryan’s kid sister, and so she’s not there. But from this moment forward, the extraneous nature of her character feels more & more out-of-place. Kendrick’s portrayal of the buttoned-down go-getter is one of the best things about this film, second only to Farmiga’s Alex, but as it moves toward a conclusion Natalie comes across less as a person & more as a plot device. Bad sign.

The second big problem is Ryan’s family, one sister who is older, one who is younger (Amy Morton & Melanie Lynskey respectively) – they don’t mesh onscreen at all, feeling like three actors who have just been introduced for the first time, which makes Ryan’s intervention at the wedding feel totally off-key. As an action, the intervention is also out of character for Ryan – you’re supposed to get that & then buy the idea that this process somehow transforms him. Unlike Juno, the anti-abortion movie with a heart, the transformation at the center of Up in the Air doesn’t work, I think, for the simplest of reasons: the director, Jason Reitman, doesn’t believe it. But he knows it’s the “appropriate” message, so he sets the gears in motion anyway. After all, investors are waiting. Big mistake.

Because this silly little intervention transforms Ryan, at least in theory, he looks at Alex differently. The problem is that she doesn’t reciprocate. She is the one character here who really knows what she is doing & what she wants. She really does want a fuck buddy & nothing more. “I’m a grown up,” she tells Ryan, who has already been compared to a 12-year-old by Natalie (who also makes a point of telling a friend that she doesn’t think of Ryan sexually “because he’s old”). Meanwhile Natalie comes to understand the consequences of her work & quits. All three are left having to figure out the future in ambiguous terms. But the only one with the tools to do so is Alex.

George Clooney is an interesting actor to watch – he’s one of the most generous thespians around, which means that his co-stars often come across looking their very best. Tilda Swinton won an Oscar for her work in Michael Clayton, Jennifer Lopez became a cross-over pheenom with Out of Sight, David Strathairn was nominated for an Oscar in Good Night & Good Luck, Tim Blake Nelson, a wonderful but underappreciated character actor, has never used to better advantage than in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Farmiga & Kendrick both benefit greatly from this, so much so that you almost forget that Clooney himself has a narrow range in what he does well on screeen. As the gad-about road warrior who only spends 45 days a year in his thoroughly anonymous apartment in Omaha, lectures on how to minimize commitment & prefers one-night stands to relationships, Clooney is totally believable. As the love-sick puppy who impulsively hops on a plane to surprise Alex at her home in Chicago, Clooney comes across more as Bruce Willis than, say, Tom Hanks.

Maybe if the wedding scene had been written effectively, or if they had cast an actor who could have handled Ryan both before & after well, the film could have worked. But they didn’t and it doesn’t. Imagine, if you will, what Juno might have looked like if the unfaithful husband were shown as the only character who really knew what he was doing. That’s Up in the Air.

Matt Damon & Clint Eastwood with crew & extras filming a scene
in which the Springboks conduct a rugby camp in a shanty town

As a director, Clint Eastwood likes to make well-architected narratives with few loose ends. Films such as Million Dollar Baby & Mystic River have the virtues one might normally associate with short fiction – nothing occurs that does not lead directly toward a conclusion that ultimately should feel “inevitable.” And Eastwood is by now as veteran a director as one can find – his 34 credits (including the forthcoming Hereafter) are not so terribly short of the four dozen acting credits he’s had since he quit his television role as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide & struck it rich with the first of the spaghetti westerns, Serge Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. As one of just three living directors with two Oscars, Eastwood can do whatever he wants. He’s only appeared in one film that he hasn’t directed in twenty years. And if he wants to tell the story of Iwo Jima from two perspectives, one American, one Japanese, he can. I haven’t seen Flags of Our Fathers, but Letters from Iwo Jima, the Japanese half of that pair, benefits enormously from Eastwood’s desire to pare the chaos of war into an intelligible structure.

The story of South Africa’s 1995 World Cup rugby victory isn’t half so messy as the Pacific Theater of the Second World War & yet it presents some complex narrative challenges for Eastwood’s film that it almost gets right. Because it’s such a positive film, with its heart so self-evidently in the right place, you want it to work fully. And yet it’s such a fragile construction at the same time that almost any challenge to the expository house of cards that is being built could cause the entire project to come crashing down. I think it’s a film that some people will love enormously while others will dismiss it as a do-gooder veil tossed over what otherwise is a very predictable sports movie.

In some ways, the film to compare it to might be Kyentse Norbu’s The Cup, a tale of budding soccer fans in a monastery of Tibetan monks exiled in India. Both are heart-warming films that hinge on the social meaning of a sport for cultures in transition. The Cup, which was an indie hit ten years ago, is by far the better movie. And yet Eastwood and star Morgan Freeman have already won one award each for their roles in Invictus (National Film Review) and been nominated for another (Washington Area Film Critics Association), and the awards season hasn’t really gotten under way yet.

Unlike the Iwo Jima films, this isn’t a project Eastwood developed himself. Morgan Freeman bought John Carlin’s book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation, and brought people in to bring his dream of a Nelson Mandela film to reality. Two-thirds of this movie are about how Mandela, only a couple of years past his 27-year imprisonment, much of it on the infamous Robben Island, took office and dealt with the fundamental issue that threatened South African democracy – the resentment and desire for revenge of a black population reduced to poverty through Afrikaner colonialization and 46 years of explicit apartheid, and the fears of revenge & marginalization of a white population. Since rugby was the white sport, blacks in the RSA generally preferred soccer. Since the Springboks national rugby squad had been to white Afrikaners what, say, the New York Yankees are to the citizens of New York (sorry, Mets fans), the black population tended to root for whoever was playing  against the Springboks. And the Springboks had just one “colored” player on its squad at the time, Chester Williams.

Much of this part of the story is told not by focusing on Mandela directly, but instead on his security detail. One of the first actions on the part of Madiba – as Mandela is widely called throughout Africa – was to blend his own African National Congress (ANC) security detail with the white team that had previously served the last Afrikaner president, F.W. de Klerk. This gives Mandela his chorus narratively, particularly as the ANC members have to explain Madiba to the Afrikaners & they in turn explain rugby to the ANC team. It also sets up a subtext of potential assassination that haunts most of the picture, upping the stakes for many of the actions Mandela takes, from his daily predawn walks to his public appearance at the World Cup finals.  

But Mandela wants people – especially investors from the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia & Taiwan – to see him surrounded not just by ANC veterans, but by whites as well. And what better, faster way to make that impression than to ensure that his security team is blended. Then he prevents the national sports authority from stripping the rugby team of its hated Springboks name and green & gold colors. He wants Afrikaners to know that what is important to them will continue to be important to South Africa. In fact, he goes further, inviting the captain of the team, Francois Pienaar, to his office for tea. Pienaar (who is not the Springbok’s coach, but more the equivalent to, say, the role Derek Jeter plays with the Yankees) is very much a jock & his family, particularly his dad, is perfectly willing to use the worst racial epithets & stereotypes in front of their black housekeeper. What, Mandela asks Pienaar, can he do to help the Springboks win the World Cup next year? The finals will be held in South Africa.

Pienaar is played by a bulked-up Matt Damon in a role that feels like an extension of Private Ryan, the basically patriotic, open minded but not exactly intellectual character of Stephen Spielberg’s film of D-Day & the days thereafter. And the actual change that we see & feel in the film is figured more than anything by the changes we see in Damon. It’s a difficult task, but one for which the mostly muted Damon is well suited. In the story as told here – Chester Williams’ autobiography has a version at odds with this one, tho he served as the film’s rugby advisor  – Pienaar gradually gets his teammates to grasp how their role transcends just rugby. The team gives rugby clinics in the slums – to much grumbling by the players, many of whom appear startled at the corrugated tin huts where so many of their neighbors live – and the morning after a major victory, they go for an early run that leads to a boat that takes them out to see Robben Island. Damon’s best moment in the whole film comes in Mandela’s own cell, as he reaches out in either direction with his arms and realizes that he can just about touch all the walls. And that Mandela lived there for many years (18 in fact, tho the film makes it sound like 30).

Gradually as the film proceeds, the focus shifts from Mandela to the team and its unlikely series of successes to reach the championship match. Eastwood is remarkably faithful to the actual events of the title game itself, which goes into overtime before somebody other than Pienaar kicks the winning shot. And – perhaps the very best thing about Invictus – it doesn’t over-explain rugby. I don’t understand the sport, but I learned a fair amount just by watching – tho not enough to pretend I really get it. The absolute eroticism of these muscular guys locked arm-in-arm, head-to-head is completely apparent from the final rugby match, with amped up sound effects and film speed slowing down & speeding up so that we can tell who is doing what.

Perhaps nothing signals more thoroughly how these parts of this film are stitched together than the one extraneous detail Eastwood feels he must include, the explanation of the absence of Winnie Mandela. We have maybe three, maybe four scenes in which Madiba’s unhappiness at her absence and the absence of his children is underscored, but they have nothing to do with either half of the plot, save perhaps when Mandela declares that his family is all South Africa now. But if these scenes don’t have a narrative function, they do play an important role in the film itself. They are the only moments here in which Nelson Mandela doesn’t appear thoroughly Christ-like in his beneficence and forgiveness to the monsters who ruled South Africa before him.

And this is the real challenge of Invictus, how to make Nelson Mandela seem like a human being. It stuns almost everyone – from the Afrikaners in his security detail to the ANC members in the sports union to Pienaar – how somebody who was caged for so many years in such a small cell and permitted out only to break rocks in the lime quarry (the film passes over the worst aspects his imprisonment) can so consistently reach out and preach forgiveness. Nelson Mandela, one suspects, got much further in his presidency than anyone anticipated simply because nobody knew quite what to expect.

And this is where you will either buy the film or not, as the case may be. I’m inclined to buy this, but then Mandela is one of only three living presidents I’ve ever seen, and the sole one where I actually made an effort to do so.¹ That he even survived his captivity was something of a miracle.² That he lived to lead his country is even more of one.

It is impossible to watch this movie and not think, of course, of all the compromises the Obama administration has made in its first year in office – with Wall Street, with the hawks in the Pentagon, with the insurance companies on health care. I’ve felt much of this year as tho the American people thought they’d elected Václav Havel and what they’ve gotten was Alexander Dubček. It’s a significant and unhappy difference: the former was a transformative figure, the latter merely a reformer of the Bad Old System. But every single action Mandela is seen as taking in this picture can be read (and is, in several instances) as giving in to the Afrikaners, who control the military, the police & the economy.

A word, finally, about the title and the poem by William Ernest Henley, a minor 19^th century British writer whose major contribution to world culture was that his daughter, who died at age six, had difficulty pronouncing words and called family friend J.M. Barrie “fwendy-wendy,” from which he coined the name Wendy he gave to the female character in Peter Pan. “Invictus” is a cringer of a poem, tho its sentiments are noble (and it is all about sentiment), and it apparently gave Mandela some comfort on Robben Island. But it has very little to do with the story itself and is mostly a mechanism for letting us know that this film is (a) important and (b) uplifting. It’s one of those things that tells you that all is not perfect in this film you very much would like to like.

 

¹ The others being Corazon Aquino of the Philippines and LBJ.

² Something Mandela credits Ron Dellums for making possible, by making Mandela’s imprisonment an issue in American politics & foreign policy. No matter how badly Dellums muddles in his role as mayor of Oakland, he will always have accomplished that.

Bright Star, Jane Campion’s portrait of Fanny Brawne & her relationship with the boy next door, John Keats, is a weepy, and if it weren’t marketed as a biography of Keats, I suspect that the gender balance in the cinema would tilt heavily female. As it was, when we caught the movie at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, the average age of the audience must have been on the high side of sixty, though the theater itself was packed. Senior date night.

For what it is – a weepy, not a biography of Keats – the film is quite decent. Campion is an efficient director & the acting, with one notable exception, is excellent, especially Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne. She gets first billing on the posters and thoroughly deserves it. In a way, she is exactly whom you would turn to if you were looking for Kate Winslet, but ten years younger. Cornish here lacks the raw wildness that is at the heart of Winslet’s best roles, but then so did Winslet once upon a time. Ben Whishaw, having recently played Bob Dylan as Arthur Rimbaud in I’m Not There (where he was the weakest of the Dylan surrogates), is fine as the young man dependent on everyone else for everything – money, food, shelter, love. If I have problems with Whishaw’s Keats – and I have huge problems – it’s not with Whishaw’s portrayal but with Campion’s presentation of the finest of the second generation Romantics as a weak, mostly passive nincompoop. Mouthing Keats’ lines does not make you Keats if every other action you take in the picture suggests utterly no ability to see into the world with the intensity necessary to craft such poems. Staring dreamily out the window is not insight. The one moment where Whishaw’s Keats comes close to seeming a poet is when he compares poetry into diving into a lake, but Whishaw’s presentation seems abstract – he’s saying the lines, but he doesn’t appear to get them. You have to go back to Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love to find a major poet presented in such underwhelming fashion.

Campion doesn’t make Whishaw’s job any easier. Of all the characters, his Keats is the one most apt to use terms – pantaloons – that don’t come easily to a modern tongue. For the most part, Whishaw makes them sound like part of the discussion, not an excerpt from Shakespeare. This is an improvement over, say, Paul Schneider’s Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ friend & patron, who appears to have wandered in from a sitcom. Where every other portrayal in the film is muted, Schneider overstates everything. His postmortem confession to Fanny that “I failed John Keats” is pronounced with all the subtlety & heartfelt emotion of a Billy Mays infomercial.

But the person whom this film depends on, around whom everything centers, is Cornish & she handles all Campion throws at her, up to & including a final scene where, in mourning, she traipses off into the snow reciting a poem aloud. It’s such a cliché that it’s hard not to guffaw, right at the film’s end. It’s a sign of how well Cornish performs that we don’t ask what she sees in this callow slacker.

Whishaw recites one of the six poems that turn up in this 119-minute feature over the closing credits, but it was literally impossible to tell which one over the rising & shuffling bodies of departing movie-goers. I’m a devoted credits reader & could go on at length about the imbeciles who bolt the instant they start to roll. You could see how involved in the poetry they were.

Focusing on the female character may be a convention of the weepy, but it also gives Campion more room to work, since Brawne is less well known, still without her own Wikipedia page. She’s older here than she was in real life just because Cornish is, but that also makes her emotions come across as all the more tragic because all the more adult. One could of course argue that 17-year-olds were indeed adult in the early 19^th century in England (my great grandmother had the first of her 13 children at 15, and that was nearly 50 years after the 1818-21 time period figured here). But Campion goes further, neglecting to mention that Brawne did indeed marry at the age of 33 & bore three children. Campion also makes Brawne the one who appears more completely committed to the relationship, where Keats’ letters to her suggest otherwise – as does La Belle Dame Sans Merci – that to some degree she toyed with his affections. If you think about it, the tragic ending would have been even deeper had they played it by the book.

So this finally is not a film about two historical characters so much as it is about two possible characters. The world they inhabit may be interesting even if it’s not the one we inhabit. That film has yet to be made.

Fanny Brawne

Although Meg Ryan has been in over 40 motion pictures, her career to date has largely been defined by her starring roles in three huge romantic comedy hits – When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle & You’ve Got Mail – films so successful that everyone knows what you mean if you call something a Meg Ryan movie, even if Ryan is nowhere to be found in the credits. Although these films have made her a ton of money, this is too bad in the sense that Ryan is a brave and sometimes terrific actress whose career has been stunted by the typecasting of these films. But it’s been 11 years since Mail came out, 20 since Sally. When Nora Ephron, who wrote all three Meg Ryan superhits & directed the last two, was casting for Julie & Julia, she didn’t think of the 5’8” Ryan to play the 6' Julia Child, turning instead to the 5’6” Meryl Streep.

But somebody decided to release a Meg Ryan movie this summer, most likely producer/director Mark Waters, who appears to have developed (500) Days of Summer as a vehicle to promote the careers of director Marc Webb and actors Zooey Deschanel (you can catch her singing about how cotton is “the fabric of our lives” on TV these days) & Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the one-time child actor who played Tommy on 3^rd Rock from the Sun). The only thing that's missing is Meg Ryan. This film, which could have been called When Sally Dumped Harry, so closely follows the Ephron formula that instead of Ryan faking an orgasm over lunch in a coffee shop, we have Deschanel & Gordon-Levitt hollering penis in a park.

The film’s claim to creativity lies in the premise underlying the parentheses around the number in the film’s title, Summer being the name of Deschanel’s character. The film jumps around the not-quite-17-months relationship from the day when Tom (the name of Gordon-Levitt’s role & the closest he will ever come to being mistaken for Mr. Hanks) first meets Summer until the day when the page finally turns on this affair & he meets a young lady named – you got it – Autumn. Each scene is preceded by an intertitle, the number of the day in the relationship in parens. This gives the film a hopping, happening-like feel that probably would seem fresher to me if I hadn’t seen effects like this for 40 years or more. But it is one way to tell a story to an audience with no attention span or one that might begin to get bored by the film’s clichés if it stretched out in chronological order. Just to keep it from being avant-garde or anything, there is a narrator (veteran voice actor Richard McGonagle) to keep us on track. That’s just one of a hundred ways this film holds back from doing anything too terribly risky with its material (the one “nude” scene is shot so close that Deschanel’s naked shoulder is blurred out of focus & we see just enough of her back to get the idea).

The narrative of this film is built around the idea that Tom, trained as an architect but unable to find work in his field & wasting his youth writing greeting cards¹, is a romantic & believes that there is One Right Girl in the world for him. Tom talks about the One as if he’s stolen his lines from The Matrix. Summer, traumatized by the divorce of her parents during her childhood, is an anti-romantic. She’s in it, it being the relationship, because it feels nice, it feels right, at least right now. He’s cute, he’s willing to sing karaoke & have sex in the shower – a funny & very chaste little parody of a Hollywood stereotype there. But she’s not making a commitment.

At least until she does, but not to Tom, who at least uses the break-up to wake up from his funk at not being a real architect in a town of not-real architecture (LA). He quits his job and starts taking his portfolio out on interviews – that’s our happy ending, give or take. A more serious or thoughtful film might have looked at Tom’s lack of commitment to his career more carefully. Or set it in Chicago where they really could have explored the architectural visuals. The closest (500) comes to a real investigation of this is a short discussion of Los Angeles’ first skyscraper, looking rather short & forlorn amidst the multistory parking garages of the landscape. As the camera moves from the skyscraper to Tom & Summer, we can see John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure fuzzy in the background as if to say “we’ll talk architecture, but we won’t really talk it seriously.” That knowing wink, for me, was the best moment in the entire film.

A more interesting (and far better) romantic comedy to compare (500) with would be Once, the Irish musical about a busker & an immigrant girl who’s not willing to commit to a relationship because she knows (or at least hopes) that the father of her child will be joining her in Dublin. This too helps provoke the hero to take his career to another level, cutting a demo disc & heading off to London in hopes of making it big. The characters in Once feel real & their chemistry on screen is amazing – they did in fact get together for awhile after the film took off & won an Oscar for best song. The characters in (500) feel like they’re playing Meg & Tom, or maybe Meg & Billy (but mostly Tom) & while they’re both attractive & likeable & have okay chemistry, it’s romance by the numbers here & Nora Ephron did it better.

 

¹ Iowa City grads who’ve trooped down to Kansas City to work for Hallmark, please take note.

Henry Goodman, Demetri Martin & Imelda Staunton: the family Teichberg

Taking Woodstock is a sweet, little film, surprisingly unambitious coming from Ang Lee – one of the few directors who could get this many extras & such gigantic sets for what really is a coming-of-age / coming-out story. The film follows Elliot Teichberg, a budding New York City painter who’s returned home to White Lake, NY, where his parents run a decrepit motel, after the Stonewall Riots. The narrative is that Elliott, nominally the head of White Lake’s Chamber of Commerce, reaches out to the Woodstock promoters after they’re turned down for a permit to play in another upstate hamlet, introduces them to Max Yasgur, another Brooklyn Jew gone rural, & before you know it a half-million hippies are tripping in the mud.

It hardly matters that nobody else remembers it the way Teichberg (now Tiber) tells it in a co-written memoir Lee uses as the basis for the film. What nobody disputes is that the motel functioned as the headquarters for the crew as they put the festival together. Which meant massive reconstruction to bring the place up to code while people were staying there – sometimes with rooms divided by hanging sheets – helicopters were landing in the front yard & hundreds of thousands of vehicles and foot travelers passed by on the street.

All of which is essentially a backdrop for the family story that is the heart of the film, a tale of the kid who may be gay in the city, but is closeted at home – at least until he hires the butchest drag queen ever for security during the event. Played by Liev Schreiber, Vilma is one of two characters who function principally to enable narrative & meaning, the other being Tisha, played by Mammie Gummer, the female friend of Michael Lang, the music promoter who is handling all of the details of the event on Max’s farm. Tisha & Vilma periodically step forward to tell Elliot what Ang Lee wants us to be thinking. The other principal characters in the plot don’t add much. The best are Billy, the Vietnam vet with a bad case of PTSD (played with great intensity by Emile Hirsch) and VW guy & gal (Paul Dano, the “baby-faced preacher” of There Will Be Blood) & Kelli Garner (whose prior career consists of not much) who give Elliott some acid principally so Lee can evoke a sense of the grooviness of it all via CGI of patterns of hippie batik and, a smidgen later & to better effect, the entire field of Yasgur’s farm undulating in the music.

Oh, and the music. There’s relatively little of it, virtually all in the background & much of it deliberately inaudible – probably the most realistic effect of all. What this movie is not about is the concert. Narratively, the concert is irrelevant, or at least relevant only as an excuse to set things into motion at the motel.

At the movie’s start, the hotel is in greater danger of foreclosure than the sheets are of getting washed. Woodstock Enterprises take care of that, and the mortgage is paid off. But Elliott’s parents, Jewish immigrants who’ve moved up from Brooklyn to take advantage of the Catskill traffic, hardly live in the United States. His mother, in particular, played brilliantly by Imelda Staunton (the lead role in Vera Drake, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Dolores Umbridge to Harry Potter fans), is a Russian Jew who still is haunted by every harmful thing since the pogroms (and the neighbors, upset at all the hippies descending on the town, paint swastikas on some of the motel buildings, just to keep the paranoia real). This is a woman entirely governed by fear & loss & grief & anger – and Staunton gets her exactly right. If there is a single reason to see Taking Woodstock, it’s to watch Staunton, who lights up every scene & is unpredictable in all the right ways. This is a film in which there are two types of scenes. Those with her in it, and those without. Those without are never nearly as good. Henry Goodman, another British actor, plays her husband by channeling Peter Falk, rather the way Martin plays Elliott as a younger version of Zach Braff. They’re nice, inoffensive characters but that’s hardly what you go to the movies to see. All of which makes Taking Woodstock a curious trip indeed.

The end of summer is notoriously the dumping ground for motion pictures that nobody knows quite what to do with, the Terry Gilliam projects of this world. Sometimes there are gems to be found in August – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, released August 15, 2008 because the name Woody Allen has itself been enough to keep some of his former fans from the theater, contained numerous fantastic performances. The Illusionist was technically a September release, coming out 9/1/2006, a film that depended on its complex plot & various twists, but didn’t spin them out as effectively as it needed to. But summer is really when the world tends to divide into boy films & chick flicks, as theaters (and film distributors) concentrate on younger demographics out of school with disposable income. Occasionally, there will be a great example of the genre – The Bourne Ultimatum was as well-executed action roller coaster as has ever been made. But generally, August is when you get the Hellboys of the world.

This year there are two films that noticeably want to achieve more, a lot more, within the traditional genres of the guy flick – The sci-fi film District 9, which gives you aliens, exploding humans & chase scenes that aren’t quite as athletic as a Bourne or Bond venture, but certainly more paraoid, & Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a “Dirty Dozen” fantasy on how WW2 should have ended. Both films are well worth the effort, unless you’re the squeamish sort. As I’m writing this, viewers are currently rating District 9 as no. 37 on IMBD’s roster of the top 250 films of all time, Inglourious Basterds as no. 35.

District 9 is well done & its premise – the fate of a bureaucrat, Wikus Van De Merwe, played by newcomer Sharlto Copley¹, placed in charge of a massive, coercive movement of a huge population, displacing the aliens for the benefit of the locals, in spite of the fact that he is entirely unqualified for the position. Not unlike, say, Michael D. Brown, the head of FEMA as it failed to cope with the population of New Orleans & Hurricane Katrina. Wikus is picked only because his father-in-law is the head of the mercenary/consulting firm, MNU, selected by the South African government to do the job. But Wikus is also picked because MNU & earthlings in general have no respect for the prawns, as they call the aliens. The aliens may have tremendous technology – their massive spaceship hovers like a dark cloud over Johannesburg for decades – but they’ve lost the command module that would enable them to escape earth’s atmosphere & they arrived so listless & sick that their superior weaponry proved useless. Humans can’t even use it because it requires “prawn dna” to operate the guns. Nonetheless, there is a speculative black market dealing in such weaponry, run by a parasitic group of Nigerians (who also supply prostitution services to the prawns). All of this is told in the seedy, handheld camera mode of a documentary, the sort you might find on MSNBC on the weekends, or on the History Channel in off hours.

District 9 does a lot with its unstated allusions – the word apartheid never is uttered, Katrina is never referenced & the role of the Nigerian gangs as a cipher for the fate of failed nations is never explored. There is a scene early on when the supercilious Wikus has a building housing alien eggs torched. He notes that it sounds like popcorn, literally giggling at the “abortions” taking place as eggs explode behind him. Yet he is the person, ultimately, with whom we are to identify as an accidental exposure to alien chemicals begins to turn into one of them. I don’t know how much the aliens are puppetry & how much pure CGI – none are listed in the credits, not even Christopher whom we get to know pretty well after he rescues and befriends Wikus. Once Wikus & Christopher realize where the container with the necessary chemicals to resurrect the buried command module are, the film rapidly focuses on their attempt to fetch it and Christopher’s attempt to get the ship going so that he can go back to his original world for help. Meanwhile, MNU steps up its efforts to get Wikus – the father-in-law has no hesitation in eliminating Wikus to achieve MNU’s goals, tho Wikus’ sudden ability to fire alien weaponry has them intrigued as all heck – and the film very quickly narrows into a chase film a la Bourne.

It will be interesting to see, three years hence, when presumably Christopher will return with his friends to rescue the prawns & turn Wikus back into a person, if director Neill Blomkamp (who has mostly been a 3D animator throughout his career), can sustain a film that doesn’t have a fundamental chase roller coaster dynamic to it.

Inglourious Basterds is by far the richer movie. It is, in fact, flat out a great film, the second I’ve seen this year (the first being Up). All of this has to do with Tarantino, who not only is smarter than his peers in the directing community by some order of magnitude, but who is capable of showing it off in ways that strengthen the film. Detail: Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine first addresses his volunteers. You notice that there is a scar on his neck from ear to ear, exactly what you would expect from someone who survived having his throat cut. It is never once referenced or explained, but it is totally “in character” with Pitt’s role, the best he has ever had. Detail: the “Bear Jew,” so called because he clubs Nazi’s to death, turns out to be baseball-obsessed (shades of Hank Greenberg). Detail: Col. Hans Landa, one of the creepiest villains ever, has film star Bridget van Hammersmark reach into his coat pocked to extract a shoe that he then places on her foot, thus proving to them both her role as a spy, not one mention of Cinderella ever having been made. Tarantino makes the flammability of old film stock a plot point, brings in both the director & star of the 1978 Quel Maledetto trendo Blindato – released in the U.S. as The Inglorious Bastards – for cameos &, to top everything off, gives us an apocalypse that echoes everything from the fires at numerous clubs & theaters where panicked patrons found the exit doors locked to gangster movie massacres right up until all that dynamite that’s around Hitler’s bullet-riddled body goes off in one Big Bang.

Told in a series of “chapters” – key characters never come together until the final one (“The Revenge of the Giant Face,” surely the best chapter title ever in the history of cinema, especially once we realize just how literal it is) – built around two parallel plots of different conspiracies to blow up &/or burn down the same theater on the same night, and focusing on four key players, only one of whom is Brad Pitt – Inglourious Basterds is one of those films that just makes you happy cinema exists. You will have to watch an inordinate number of scalpings, not to mention one scene in which Aldo Raine sticks his finger into the bullet hole in Bridget’s leg and just pokes around a bit to make her scream, but much of this occurs amidst the richest film dialog since the last good Tarantino flick.

Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa has been foregrounded in a lot of reviews as being Oscar worthy (he is), but really all four of the principals (Pitt, Waltz, Diane Krueger & Mélanie Laurent) are terrific here. Waltz’ creepiness as a villain is surprisingly close to Wikus’ role as a “hero” in District 9, especially once the plot twists toward the end cast him in a fuller (albeit even sleazier) light. The difference being that Wikus knows he’s a silly little doofus where Waltz takes enormous satisfaction in his sadistic games. Pitt’s general hokeyness is used, as it was in Burn Before Reading & even all the way back in Thelma & Louise by directors who got it that he was an offbeat figure who wouldn’t work in any role you might offer to Tom Cruise or Christian Bale, to enormous good effect by Tarantino. And the women, especially Laurent, are better than the men.

 

¹Copley’s most significant prior credit was producing the visual effects for the cult film What the #$*! Do We Know?

In 2001, the stars of Harry Potter were 12, 13 & 11

Harry is back, and, though he’s changed somewhat over the years, one settles back into a Harry Potter movie rather the way one greets a dear friend after a long separation. This says a great deal about the series, which is well on its way to establishing itself as one of the most successful long-running film franchises of all time, equaled perhaps only by James Bond, an owl of a very different feather.

And yet not. Just as each Bond film features a characteristic “Bond girl,” a role that defines not only the individual movie, but has made more than one or two careers, the Potter films each foreground a single secondary character, typically a visiting Hogwarts professor, in this instance Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn, professor of potions & a man with a secret. Unlike the Bond girl slots, which have gone to actresses both great & terrible, the Potter films have featured some of the finest British actors alive, and Broadbent is among the best. If you never saw Broadbent as W.S. Gilbert in Mike Leigh’s 1999 Topsy-Turvy, you have one of life’s more delicious minor pleasures yet in store. Broadbent won an Oscar for Iris, is a five-time BAFTA winner (for those two films, Moulin Rouge plus two television roles) & is a textbook example of the great character actor who is largely underappreciated by the general public. In a series that has featured Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson & John Cleese, not to mention the late Richard Harris, Maggie Smith & Michael Gambon – and in an episode that has Helena Bonham Carter chewing on every curtain she can find (including, figuratively at least, Tom Felton’s ear) – Broadbent’s Slughorn is one of the gems of the Potter films.¹

One of the reasons for including such breath-taking talent in what are essentially secondary roles is not just because one can – the British approach to acting careers is infintely more sensible than the American star system – but because such stalwarts could bolster some very expensive films that otherwise relied on children for key roles. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson & Rupert Grint were, after all, just 12, 11 & 13 respectively when the first Potter film was released in 2001, even younger when it was filmed. For the trio of stars – and those like them who have appeared in all six films to date, including Felton & Bonnie Wright – one benefit has been that they’ve had the opportunity to learn their craft in the presence of some of the best actors alive. And by now it’s paid off – all three of the primary figures have become credible thespians and Radcliffe is, for the first time really, quite good in The Half-Blood Prince.

Still, a franchise is a franchise – there are expectations, and the individual film is less important than the brand overall. In this sense, it may have been a cagey move to turn the final four films in this series over to veteran tv director David Yates. He wastes almost no time at all setting up background & characters – it’s understood that, by now, you know who they are.² The Dursleys, heretofore the principle representatives of the Muggle world, are nowhere to be seen. One brief scene in which Harry flirts with the waitress of a train station café & we’re back in the thick of things, a ransacked suburban home where Slughorn is hiding out in the guise of an overstuffed chair.

By the time the eighth film is released in the spring of 2011, the only elements that the series will have held onto for its entire run are a handful of the actors & J.K. Rowling herself. The series will have had four directors, an even larger number of producers & even screenwriter Steve Kloves, who penned seven of the scripts, managed to go absent for The Order of the Phoenix (which in turn was written by Michael Goldenberg, screenwriter for the most recent Peter Pan and the sci-fi film Contact). Having Yates direct the final four films may heighten the consistency between them, though he is by no means a perfect director, even for this property. He doesn’t quite know what to do with Emma Watson, the best actor among his three leads.³ And a comic interlude in which Ron is put under the spell of a love potion is woefully overdone. Still, Yates does seem to get the dynamics of a series – where most episodes must begin & end in the middle – and it’s worth noting that this is almost certainly the best of the six films to date.

But what the film series will be remembered for is, I think, something very different altogether, something quite apart from the chronicles of Hogwarts, tho not out of line really with Rowling’s ultimate vision. Very much like Michael Apted’s documentary series x-Up, which returns every seven years to chronicle the lives of a handful of British youngsters of different social, regional & racial backgrounds (the next installment, 56 Up, is tentatively due in 2012), by now quite middle-aged and scattered about the English-speaking world, Harry Potter’s greatest gift as a film series is its embodiment of time. Roger Ebert makes a decent case for the Up series as one of the ten greatest film accomplishments ever. I don’t think that anyone (other than a hopeless Hogwarts fanboy) would make the same argument for this series. But it is remarkable – utterly – to be allowed to watch this very talented group of youngsters grow up together. That the individuals are not their characters hardly matters – they inhabit them, even Evanna Lynch’s inspired portrayal of eccentric Luna Lovegood. They are emerging as men & women right in front of our eyes. I can’t think of an equivalent in the history of film, and the closest approximation in television – David and especially Ricky Nelson’s roles on Ozzie and Harriet nearly a half century ago – demonstrates the superiority of film in that the gap between one episode & the next (seven years in the Up series, an average of 18 months in Harry Potter) is sufficient to make the transformations palpable. Just seeing Rupert Grint a few inches taller than Daniel Radcliffe is a shock precisely because it’s not an effect. That’s what happens – the real world, visible even in Hogwarts.

 

¹ A fun game would be to identify all of the major age-appropriate British actors who have not appeared in a Harry Potter film, such as Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Patrick Stewart, Pete Postlethwaite, Ben Kingsley or Ian McKellen. Dench of course has the Bond franchise & McKellen’s Gandalf may yet be reprised in the forthcoming The Hobbit. Mirren & Stewart have had their franchises in television. Kingsley & Postlethwaite must be slackers.

² Just how pervasive have these characters become in our culture? A friend of one of my sons who had not seen the last two installments found Half-Blood Prince to be superb. He had no difficulty sorting out the characters & action, in spite of the absence of set-up.

³ It isn’t Hermione’s story, finally, which may be the great tragedy of Rowling’s books. But if the brainiac girl neither gets to be the ultimate hero, nor gets the romantic lead, Rowling’s point seems to be that it’s just as important for the hero and the girl to be friends.

One Fast Move or I’m Gone:
Kerouac’s Big Sur

Up is the finest American full-length cartoon feature I have ever seen, and the first one that approaches the best work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose influence is palpable in this extraordinary project even more than those of Disney or Pixar, the two companies that combined to bring it to fruition. Both have a long and serious commitment to the cartoon form. Disney virtually invented it, as the conglomerate ghost of Uncle Walt loves to remind consumers everywhere. Disney even became Miyazaki’s American distributor principally so that it wouldn’t be threatened by his inventiveness. And Pixar has been, along with Miyazaki, a primary source of innovation in animated film over the past 15 years. Indeed, Bob Peterson, who wrote Up, got his start as a layout artist on Toy Story, Pixar’s break-through feature. His one previous feature-length screenwriter credit was for Finding Nemo in 2003, although he contributed material to Ratatouille & Monsters, Inc. and has served as a voice actor in many animated projects. In addition to writing Up, Peterson voices Dug, the mongrel who decides that elderly Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) is his master. Peterson also serves as co-director with Pete Docter, another director with more than a few writing credits – Wall-E, and the original stories for Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Monster’s Inc. Like Peterson, Docter has done pretty much everything one could do in an animated film, and was a dialog director for the English version of Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, another tale about a building on the move.

I’m focusing here on the directors as writers because I think the writing is crucial to Up’s success. Watching the film – the first cartoon I’ve found myself tearing up over (more than once) since I first saw Bambi as a boy – I thought of the first paragraph of my review of Watchmen this past March:

This is the golden age of movie effects, or at least it should be. Computer graphics have been enhanced to the level that anything is possible, anything you can dream of can be presented as a plausible physical reality on film, a phenomenon that leaves directors, screenwriters & stuntmen drunk with the potential. Yet the problem remains that for the golden age to actually exist, these same individuals have to envision it, have to make it happen. Just as early motion pictures owe a great deal of their narrative structures to the imaginations of D.W. Griffith & Sergei Eisenstein, men who figured out how to transform a story into the new medium, the potential of today’s film technology is just waiting for someone to come along and imagine what it truly might be.

Up demonstrates what can be done when that imagination is in play. It doesn’t look all that much different technically than any of the other recent Pixar projects, because its core isn’t technological. This is really a tale about dignity, something all but a couple of the villains have to spare. And about love, loss & dreaming. Like Miyazaki, this film pairs a young person, rotund Wilderness Explorer Russell, with an elder, and like Miyazaki, this film takes a fundamentally surrealist trope – the old man tethered to his house & all it represents – and makes it seem only the slightest bit strange.

The key lies in the director’s taking the time to tell Fredricksen’s back story, from his days as a child when he first met Ellie, the neighborhood Tomboy, with whom he had a long & loving marriage, although not without its problems & even heartbreak, even though they never got to take the great adventure they’d always imagined. This part of the film takes at least a half hour and it motivates the entire picture, which doesn’t really begin until after Ellie’s funeral. The ways in which the old house – it’s in the Oakland/Piedmont area, tho we don’t find this out until very late in the going – becomes Ellie once she’s gone are manifest and handled with utter confidence and balance.

I could tell you what happens next, but I won’t. I’ve raved enough to set expectations unnaturally high as it is. I’m not alone. As I write, Up has a 98 rating (out of 100) at Rotten Tomatoes. The only films with higher ratings there ever have ten or fewer reviews. IMDB currently rates it as a 9.1 (out of 10), a score that ties it with Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. I actually expect these ratings to generally stay high, even tho it doesn’t really qualify as the best movie ever made. (At IMDB, the highest rated animated film is Wall-E at 8.5). Since IMDB breaks its ratings down by demographics, it is also possible to see just who doesn’t like this film: older women. Women over the age of 45 rate Up at just 4.6. When I mentioned that to Krishna, who loved the film, she complained, “But Ellie motivates everything, this movie is about how somebody gone stays alive in your thoughts & your heart.” Fredricksen & the “short postman” (as the evil jungle dogs call him) Russell bond because they have parallel wounds, the boy with an absent father who “travels a lot.”

One thing that did surprise me in the film is a Pixar in-joke: Russell’s love of the ice cream parlor Fenton’s. As everyone in Oakland & Piedmont already knows, the creamery next to the Piedmont Theater is a local institution. Now I’m afraid that it’s about to be inundated. I can’t imagine how anybody who sees the film at the Piedmont (or at the Grand Lake, or anywhere in Berkeley or Emeryville) will be able to resist going to Fenton’s after the show. And I can imagine it suddenly becoming a stop on the Oakland tour for people in Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, and of course Venezuela. While it was a great joke to see it pop up incongruously in the film, I wish the folks at Pixar had remembered Yogi Berra’s comment about a restaurant that became impossible to get into: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too popular.”