Monthly Archives: December 2009

Movies – Best Of The Decade 2000 – 2010

Posted by jdewitte on

As long as it’s understood that I’ll change my mind on half of these over the next few days, here’s my Best of the Decade list.

– 2046 – most people prefer Wong Kar Wei’s ‘In The Mood For Love’ (a wonderful film, don’t get me wrong). But I preferred this rangier, riskier, more abstracted tour-de-force. Visually stunning, unashamedly romantic, petulantly non-linear; not many films approach the depth and complexity of a good novel, but this one really hooked me. I find something new every time I watch it.

– The Best Of Youth – originally made for Italian TV, Marco Tullio Giordana’s six hour family chronicle follows two brothers from the sixties to the present. The ‘culture seen through their eyes’ idea is one of the oldest motifs in narrative cinema, but I’m having real trouble imagining when it was more compellingly done. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, don’t think of it as six hours long – think of it as six hours deep.

– Mulholland Drive – As magnetically lurid melodrama, as mind-boggling surrealism, and as a practical puzzle-to-be-solved, David Lynch’s film delivers. You’ll wanna do homework on this one, and gladly.

– Memento – another puzzle movie, told backwards. Sounds like work, but Christopher Nolan and Guy Pearce grab you by the sleeve from the first minute and propel you through one of the most original and innovative stories ever.

– 25th Hour – We all know Spike Lee can direct his ass off – like them or not, his films are unapologetically personal, professionally and efficiently presented, filmed fast and budget be damned. So what he does with David Benioff’s script is a surprise, yet no surprise. Without so much as a plane or a fireman in sight, Lee presents Who We Are circa 9/11 in this small but substantial story of a small-time crook’s last night before serving a seven-year prison sentence.

– The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow’s superb film doesn’t tell you about war, it shows you the war, through its effect on Jeremy Renner’s character, a sergeant / technician who disarms explosive devices in the Iraq war. We may actually get a Best Picture that deserves it this year.

– The Two Towers – ‘King Kong’ was almost unwatchably bad (Thank God for Naomi Watts!), and early word on ‘The Lovely Bones’ is foreboding, but Peter Jackson brought it magnificently in his ‘Lord Of The Rings’ trilogy.

– The Royal Tenenbaums – another true original – I still think ‘Rushmore’s a better film, but this is the one I think of more often. Unfailingly gracious humor and humanity in the service of some pretty dark ideas about Family in America. And I’m as over Gwyneth as you are, but the woman can act.

– Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – I could list six or seven films here – OK, I will – Hero, House Of Flying Daggers, Curse Of The Golden Flower, The Banquet, Iron Monkey, Emperor And The Assassin, Red Cliff, Ashes Of Time – that benefited from being able to enter the league that CTHD created for them. No mangled subtitles, pristine duplication, serious budgets and real international marketing and distribution. Jackie Chan and Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen and Zhang Ziyi and Brigitte Lin and Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung and Yuen Wo Ping weren’t just interesting and novel acquired tastes – now they were hip, and their films were the equal, or, sometimes better, than their Hollywood mainstream competition. This film is certainly on par with anything Hollywood put out over the last ten years – thrilling, funny, well-acted and, in the end, transcendently heartbreaking. Ang Lee did this. And ‘Brokeback Mountain’. And ‘Sense And Sensibility’. And ‘The Ice Storm’. The man’s a director.

– Let The Right One In – nothing here flat-out scares you or grosses you out or has you pulling the stuffing out of your theater chair with tension, but everything that evokes those reactions is here, cleverly disguised as an awkwardly elegant coming-of-age romance. There’s real Clive Barker-ish, Lovecraftian nastiness just underneath, but director Tomas Alfredson isn’t interested in hitting you over the head with it – you’ll just feel it, quietly and insistently, over the next few days after watching it.

OK, there’s ten. Honorable mentions: In The Mood For Love, No Country For Old Men, Far From Heaven, The Dark Knight, Collateral, Iron Man, The Piano Teacher, House Of Flying Daggers, History Of Violence, Eastern Promises, The Class, The Descent, Priceless (Hors de Prix), Amelie, There Will Be Blood, Sicko, Big Fish, Grindhouse, Caché, Gangs Of New York, Waking Life, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, Spider, La Vie En Rose, Hot Fuzz, Innocence, Revolutionary Road, Nine Queens, the Red Riding trilogy. And, oh, all right, Almost Famous.

Mind you, I can only pick what I’ve seen. I missed Happy Go Lucky, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and many other worthies.

Socioculture

Posted by jdewitte on

All I’m gonna say about Tiger Woods is, actually, what Mark Morford has to say about Tiger Woods. Word.

“Tiger has transformed. Tiger has transcended. He is right now entering another glorious, rarefied realm, a unique stratum of American iconography, that of the fallen hero, the broken god, the disgraced saint soon to be abhorred and mocked by millions, only to be — and you may take my word for this right now — loved and adored again in about, oh, I’d say two years and change. Maybe less. Just you watch.”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/12/11/notes121109.DTL

And his 101 reasons Why Men Cheat. Word up.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/12/16/notes121609.DTL

Politics/Socioculture

Posted by jdewitte on

While the Bart Stupaks and Ben Nelsons of the nation throw their morally misguided weight around, an NYT editorial highlights some very good things happening under the circus radar.

“The omnibus government spending bill signed into law last week contains an important victory for public health. Gone is all spending for highly restrictive abstinence-only sex education programs that deny young people accurate information about contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. The measure redirects sex-education resources to medically sound programs aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy.
“Unfortunately, some of this progress could be short-lived. The health care reform bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee includes an amendment, introduced by the Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, that would revive a separate $50 million grant-making program for abstinence-only programs run by states. Democratic leaders must see that this is stricken, and warring language that would provide $75 million for state comprehensive sex education programs should remain.
“In another positive step, the spending bill increases financing for family-planning services for low-income women. It also lifts a long-standing, and utterly unjustified, ban on the District of Columbia’s use of its own tax dollars to pay for abortion services for poor women except in cases when a woman’s life is at risk, or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
“Ideology, censorship and bad science have no place in public health policy. It is a relief to see some sense returning to Capitol Hill.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/opinion/20sun2.html

Health Reform

Posted by jdewitte on

The drumbeats are getting louder to kill this bill and start over after the midterms. It’s a tough choice – pass it for the politics, or start over for the common good?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/16/expanded-health-care-cove_n_394775.html


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/18/taibi-kuttner-debate-heal_n_397757.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff12172009.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/slouching-toward-health-c_b_395795.html

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Un Chien Andalou & L’Age D’Or

Posted by jdewitte on

Surrealism isn’t just interesting nonsense. Back when I was in high school, knee-high to a grasshopper and almost as intelligent, I cultivated an interest in Theater of the Absurd. The idea of the absurd tugged at the aspiring anarchist in me, the aspiring anti-establishmentarian. But the more I read Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, et. al., the more I discovered that those works were genuine reactions to genuine events, not the least of which were the various Civil and World wars that rocked Europe in the early-to-mid 20th century. Especially for Europeans, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Absurdism – all of those –isms – were actually rational reactions, either heartfelt cries of despair at the extremes of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, or, in the case of the futurists, an acknowledgement of the powerlessness of politics and socialization in the face of mechanization and technology. The easy example of the former is Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ – his abstracted rendering of the result of German Luftwaffe target practice sanctioned by Franco upon his own disgruntled Spanish subjects in 1937. But, even earlier, the twenties and thirties were equally influenced by the introduction of mechanized warfare in World War I, and the economies of scale concerning human slaughter that were introduced into their own back yards, their own countrysides. Europeans were also having second thoughts about colonialism, and social divisions in general – racial, religious, economic, classist. What constitutes an inferior society? What’s the rationale for subjugating people, any people, besides snobbery and profit?

Another big issue for the surrealists was Dream Logic. They figured, as most of us admittedly do when asked, that the disjointed weirdness of dreams and dream imagery is our brains’ way of working out all of the stuff we see completely differently, i.e. ‘normally’, in our conscious awoken state. Dreaming is essentially a mental battleground for a host of unlinked associations trying to connect themselves. They don’t make much direct rational sense to us in-and-of-themselves, but they come from somewhere, by God. So the aspiring surrealist assumes that if these ideas and images are true to me, and interesting to me, then they might have a resonant truth or evoke a resonant interest in others. This is an especially good assumption when you apply dream logic in expressing ideas about The Big Three: Sex, Death, and Religion.

worldscinema.org/

Like any young artist/student, Luis Buñuel was aware of these early cultural movements. Two of his acquaintances in Madrid at the time were Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. Upon moving to Paris in the late twenties, he co-wrote a short surrealist film with Dali – Un Chien Andalou (1929). They, of course, were mindful of the socio-political currents of the age. They were also fascinated with Freudian theories of dreams, sex and death, and the influence of these forces on everyday life. And, lucky for us, they were a couple of intellectual hipster goofballs in their mid-twenties.

Un Chien Andalou’s first scene is a powerful evocation of the surrealist prerogative. Based on a dream of Dali’s, a thin horizontal cloud passes in front of a full moon in the night sky. Then a straight razor, in close-up, slices through a woman’s eyeball. Huuuhhh??!! Objectively, the compositional parallels are obvious, and brilliant, but the surge of subjective emotion accompanying the scene in each viewer is what they really wanted to evoke. And it’s effective, to say the least. The woman appears soon after, unmolested, in her apartment. Time goes out the window with logic in these films – events occur that have no bearing on subsequent events. (The Polish playwright Stanislaw Witkiewicz was notorious for killing characters in the middle of his plays, only to have those same characters appear in later scenes) (Hello, Aeon Flux!) (…and Kenny!).  She’s waiting for a man who arrives shortly, on bicycle, in a partial nun’s habit, carrying a mysterious striped box around his neck. I won’t relate each and every thing that happens subsequently, but Bunuel’s astonishing parade of characters and events within the broad framework of a seemingly conventional drawing-room melodrama is easily the most fascinating, and mind-bending, sixteen minutes you’ve surrendered yourself to lately. And, yes, it’s only sixteen minutes long. And yet he finds the time to involve a man pulling ropes, the Ten Commandments, two priests and two grand pianos draped with dead donkeys. And books turning into guns. And a man’s mouth disappearing from his face. (Hello, Neo!)

Dali contributed to, but did not directly participate in, Bunuel’s second feature, L’Age D’Or (The Golden Age) (1930). Both features are obsessed with the idea of seduction and rejection, isolation and socialization, fetishism and conformity. He also adds a healthy dose of satiric venom towards the government and the church, which got the film banned for years. Five days after its initial French premiere, right-wing extremists rioted and public exhibitions ceased. It wasn’t screened again until 1979, at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.

cinematheque.fr

The film starts with a hungry and destitute band of eight men who turn out to be soldiers, of some kind, patrolling the coast. (Actually, the film starts with a quick documentary on scorpions, but, apparently, I digress…). One of the men, on patrol, spies a group of chanting priests on a hillside by the sea, and reports back to his squad. “The Majorcans are here!” “To arms!” cries Max Ernst. And off they dodderingly go. When they arrive, though, rather than any battle, they find boatloads of visiting government dignitaries performing some kind of civic founding ceremony. The aforementioned priests are now a heap of skeletons, dessicated. The ceremony is interrupted, however, by a couple howling, writhing and making out in a nearby mud bog. We can’t have that! The man is led away by the police, but not before he kicks a dog belonging to an elegant female dignitary. The police must also wait for him to step on a bug. Now striding down a city street, the man produces papers establishing that he, too, is a very important dignitary, and the police release him. Thank goodness – how else would he able to then accost a blind pedestrian?

Meanwhile, the woman is back in her resplendent home. The household is preparing for a grand soirée – for the woman, this, of course, means getting that live cow off her bed and out of the bedroom. Minutes later, the party’s in full swing – all of the guests are in evening wear and black tie, skillfully avoiding the horse-drawn hay wagon rolling through the foyer, and hanging on every word of a distinguished man whose face is crawling with flies.

The Man arrives, and finagles his way to a garden reunion with The Woman, a tryst which is constantly being interrupted by elements of the party. Infuriated, the man re-enters the house and starts tossing things out the window – pillow feathers, furniture, plows, priests, giraffes,…

Meanwhile…the film concludes with a brief staging of the seemingly calm aftermath of 120 days of bacchanalian debauchery involving four ‘scoundrels’, eight adolescent girls and four older, more experienced ladies-of-ill-repute. The men are, as it turns out, noblemen, one in Christ-like robes and beard, thwarting the exit from the chateau of one of the young girls. After a muffled scream, the religious man emerges alone without his beard, and the film closes with what appears to be six female scalps, affixed to a crucifix, blowing in the snowy breeze.

Recasting Jesus and three government officials as the main characters of the Marquis de Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’ is not how you win friends and influence people. At least not then. Bunuel thought it was a good time, understandably, to return to Spain. His next film there, ‘Land Without Bread’, will be examined here later.

If you’ve been inclined to pursue these amazing films, and like them, you may be inclined to dig a little deeper and check out the 1920s films of the talented Germaine Dulac, who made wonderful silent films like The Smiling Madame Bendet and The Seashell And The Clergyman. She employed surrealist imagery, feminist politics and photographic special effects that predated most cinema by forty or fifty years. Great stuff, and they’re all an hour long or less. Happy hunting!

Politics/Warfare

Posted by jdewitte on

NYT’s Jane Perlez has contributed a terrific, and scary, overview of the almost hopelessly tangled alliances and antagonisms in the Afghanistan war. The United States wants Pakistan’s help to target a particularly powerful Taliban warlord operating out of North Waziristan. The Pakistanis would like us to go suck eggs.

“The core reason for Pakistan’s imperviousness is its scant faith in the Obama troop surge, and what Pakistan sees as the need to position itself for a regional realignment in Afghanistan once American forces begin to leave.
“It considers Mr. (Siraj) Haqqani and his control of large areas of Afghan territory vital to Pakistan in the jostling for influence that will pit Pakistan, India, Russia, China and Iran against one another in the post-American Afghan arena, the Pakistani officials said.
“Pakistan is particularly eager to counter the growing influence of its archenemy, India, which is pouring $1.2 billion in aid into Afghanistan. “If America walks away, Pakistan is very worried that it will have India on its eastern border and India on its western border in Afghanistan,” said Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is pro-American in his views.
“For that reason, Mr. Fatemi said, the Pakistani Army is “very reluctant” to jettison Mr. Haqqani, Pakistan’s strong card in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Pakistanis do not want to alienate Mr. Haqqani because they consider him an important player in reconciliation efforts that they would like to see get under way in Afghanistan immediately, the officials said.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/world/asia/15haqqani.html?_r=1

This also serves to confirm Christopher Hitchens’ perspective that we’re inadvertently messing with India, which is a really bad idea.

“Hitchens argued that the plan is based on a “keyhole view of the region” that involves us in a much wider conflict between Pakistan and India:
“The problem is that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was originally imposed on that country by Pakistan as an attempt to take over Afghanistan as part of a proxie for its fight against India over Kashmir. We’ve now got drawn into this much wider picture, broader conflict with the regional superpower, which is India.”
“This puts us in opposition to India, Hitchens claimed, which is the opposite of where we want to be. He see McChrystal’s plan as designed to keep India out of Pakistan, which “is 100 percent wrong. Our policy in the region should be based on being India’s best friend. So we’re being played for suckers by the Pakistani elite.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/10/hitchens-greenwald-debate_n_387508.html

Warfare

Posted by jdewitte on

I couldn’t help but think of Lady Di, rolling in her grave, when I heard of the United States’ latest, and ongoing, snub of the land mines treaty.

“The United States has not actively used land mines since the first Gulf War in 1991, but we still possess some 10-15 million of them, making us the third largest stockpiler in the world, behind China and Russia.
Like those two countries, we have refused to sign an international agreement banning the manufacture, stockpiling and use of land mines. Since 1987, 156 other nations have signed it, including every country in NATO. Amongst that 156, more than 40 million mines have been destroyed.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/moyers12112009.html