The era of collecting movies may finally be on the wane. Eminent film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has the centerpiece article in this summer’s Cineaste Magazine, which is dedicated to the video formats of DVD and Blu-ray. It’s not the old debate of whether home video will replace the cinema–it’s an auxiliary point. In what ways have these technologies brought cinephilia new life?
Well, not half the ways that streaming video will, if sites like Netflix and MUBI have their way. The cinematheque of the future is online.
While Blu-ray is more costly than DVD, which cost more than VHS, web video portals are breaking that pattern. With a monthly subscription, you can get unlimited monthly movies in your web browser for less than a single ticket at the multiplex. With subscriptions, the financial incentive is finally flipped in favor of fans: there is value in watching more movies.
But not everything is online… yet. This gave me an opportunity to ask a question web cinephiles have been wondering for years. Who decides what to stream?
“The streaming catalog is pretty much what we can afford to buy,” said Steve Swasey, VP of Corporate Communications at Netflix. “But the less we spend on the US Postal Service, the more we can spend on acquisitions. Right now the streaming catalog is short on new releases because those tend to be very expensive. But we’ve got just about everything you could want in documentaries, great foreign, tons of TV, and independents. I think the key point here is: put up something that’s interesting, people want to watch, and you get a big uptick.”
Netflix and MUBI (formerly ‘The Auteurs’, so you can tell they’re catering to the Sarris-savvy crowd) both include impressive selections of important and unusual films, ranging from silents and old Hollywood to contemporary independent and foreign. Both sites have deals with Rosenbaum-exalted Criterion (whose “Online Cinemateque” site streams rentals too, though not by subscription). Netflix has upwards of 20,000 films available to Watch Instantly, including 8 by Fritz Lang and 6 by Don Siegel. MUBI just announced 19 Agnès Varda films, including shorts.
“There is no canon,” Efe Cakarel told me, founder and CEO of MUBI. “We want to show the best films from around the world. This means films that were distributed locally, award winners, silent masterpieces, and festival gems that were forgotten or dubbed undistributable.”
As online libraries grow, cinephiles become important. At a video store or even a repertory theater, the only way to measure demand is to put out a movie and count how many times it’s seen. In the new model, Netflix members have the ability to ‘queue’ a movie from the time it goes into production, and those numbers are seen by an 80-person team in Beverly Hills, who spend their time negotiating with studios. It’s not limited to what’s already available on DVD or even VHS; many unavailable films appear on the site too. MUBI members simply click the words ‘I want to watch this’.
“The ‘I want to watch this’ button is a powerful tool,” wrote Cakarel, “one that not only tells rights holders how much their new or old films are desired by audiences around the world, but also a virally powerful one that let’s interest in supposedly niche titles ripple out through audiences’ social graphs. Suddenly a small film becomes known to all your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter–it’s a great way of spreading awareness and interest in these films.”
In some cases, this user activity has made movies available for streaming that aren’t on video at all. Films are instantly available in regions where they have never seen DVD release. This doesn’t just help rare films. Rosenbaum cites the massive sales of Robert Greenwald’s controversial Outfoxed on Amazon. “It’s the long tail Chris Anderson talks about,” Netflix’s Swasey said, namedropping a theory whose original articulation namedropped his company. Accessibility is poised to breed new audiences for more and more different films.
As a means of discovery, streaming video’s unique features encourage even casual viewers to be more experimental. There’s instant gratification, including the elimination of endless previews and scare tactics from the FBI. Subscription-based services make renter’s remorse obsolete. Navigation is based on ratings and recommendations–so prominent criticism, and criticism 2.0 (from users and friends) both have their place. On MUBI you ‘become a fan’ of directors and films the same way you might make a Facebook friend. When one of those directors’ films becomes available for streaming, it appears in your news feed.
On the other hand, more movies will inevitably be watched on computers, which has a thousand pitfalls. Even a TV 6′ away is very different than 18″ or on their lap. A smaller screen makes for a more solitary experience. Pausing a movie is more expected. Often this means viewers are multitasking in other windows. I get particularly frustrated with the progress bar announcing how soon a film is going to end.
There are alternatives. Netflix supports dozens of internet-connected peripherals, including every current-generation video game console, Blu-ray players, and a proprietary ‘Roku’ box… even the iPad. At Cannes this year, MUBI announced a Playstation 3 application. On many newfangled notebooks, your TV can easily mirror your desktop.
Of course the web can’t approach the quality of Blu-ray, and smooth gradients and fast motion show digital artifacts you wouldn’t see on DVD. But the sites encode their content from an original master–”oftentimes the film,” said Swasey–so with enough bandwidth and a big enough screen, content can display in HD resolutions.
“Streaming video won’t eliminate DVD–I don’t know if the available titles will ever be commensurate with our DVD library,” said Swasey. Nobody’s forgotten that DVD was the successor to Laserdisc as a fan’s format. It justified its high original price-point with behind-the-scenes extras, commentaries and collectible packaging. But while Special Editions reward fans, they put a premium on seeing a movie for the first time, and channel their audience’s enthusiasm into collecting, not watching, movies.
At Cannes in 1995 (transcribed by Film Scouts), Jean-Luc Godard worried that “technology–CD-ROMs, the Internet–will determine ‘the classics’, the ‘necessary’ films, unless Cinemathèques and Film archives manage to protect them.” He may have been right about technology’s role, but so far it looks like there are enough cinephiles on the web to ensure his work is seen more, not less.
While collectors clutch their discs, and celluloid die-hards don’t read articles on the internet, those seeking the hard-to-find have never been overly precious. The great local video stores still stock VHS (support your local video stores). In truth, these websites have been slow to catch up. The great treasure trove of old and unusual films is already the internet: private forums, torrent trackers, and peer-to-peer networks. There are legions of film fans sharing rare movies freely, sometimes illegally, online. Rosenbaum calls it “noncommercial and utopian effort of international collaboration.” That’s what streaming video has to compete with, in quality and convenience.
What’s obvious is that successful distribution in the future will not be based on what’s subjectively ‘best’, but where there’s an audience. The theatrical experience, watching a film in a crowd of strangers, will never be replaced. Netflix and MUBI want to make the internet the best way to discover new films. And your collection of video discs? Hang onto the classics in case of a nuclear winter, since they don’t require an internet connection. Although you might have to power the TV with a stationary bike.
It’s hard to agree with all of Robert Bresson’s dogma, but in his tiny book Notes on the Cinematographer, he coins a few great metaphors about editing and the way it informs the live-ness of film, and performance on film. Yeah, he called all his actors “models”.
“Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.” p.80
“Your images will release their phosphorus only in aggregating. (An actor wants to be phosphorescent right away.)” p.82
“Cutting. Phosphorus that wells up suddenly from your models, floats around them and binds them to the objects (blue of Cézanne, grey of El Greco).” p.77
Countless blurbs have been published in recent weeks about Bob Dylan and the October 13th release of his 34th studio album, 47th official album–and first Christmas album–Christmas in the Heart. The instant meme was that the record, comprised of traditional songs in a traditional setting, was a bridge too far, that Dylan had lost his mind, or worse, succumbed to the same pitiful commercialism that Christmas had. Plus, Robert Zimmerman, raised Jewish.
The sixties are dead and buried, and Bob has appeared in Cadillac and Victoria Secret ads, but he has always rejected the mantle of antiestablishmentarianism. And those of us in Dylan’s audience–which remains sizable, including many who consider his present output amongst the most interesting of his career–may actually find this record in tack with the direction of his recent work. Writing off his Christmas record in premise speaks as much to the withering state of holiday music, as the media’s fickle treatment of its own “legend.”
Role-playing has always been a part of the Dylan mystique. He’s written countless first-person story songs. Half a dozen actors played him in 2007′s I’m Not There. He invented an alternate voice for himself, to sing his 1969 country record Nashville Skyline, which is considered a classic today. His recent writing has even more fidelity to character and song form. Although he’s lived in Malibu for years, the state of Texas and its musical tradition figure into several songs on his last album, Together Through Life. Christmas in the Heart just suggests Bob believes in the Christmas tradition likewise. It might not be as serious as his recent records, but that doesn’t make it fundamentally different. There’s no shortage of humor, even in his most serious work.
Christmas songs are some of the best-loved, most enduring songs in popular music. But in spite of the ‘Christmas creep’ of November airtime, few people are still writing Christmas songs. Today, releasing a Christmas album is often at record company behest, an attempt to cash-in on holiday airtime, or as a gift idea for the child whose parent had been a genuine fan of, say, The Moody Blues, in their heyday. (I did buy my mother their album, December, but it was seemingly their last act as a band.) On the upside, if your Christmas album is deemed a modern classic, it gets played endlessly (ala Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas).
Even if it were exclusively a commercial venture, Bob Dylan’s Christmas album would still be cashing in on the part of hungry Americans. During a recession winter when U.S. unemployment is hovering near 10%, US royalties from Christmas in the Heart are going to the charity organization Feeding America. International royalties are going to charities in the UK and the developing world. Prior to the album release it has already guaranteed more than four million meals to people in need. Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” it ain’t, but it’s not as over-the-top either, so it might actually be better.
Consider that Johnny Cash hosted annual Christmas specials on CBS throughout the seventies. The Beatles made seven Christmas singles for their fan club, with original songs and sketches thanking them for their support. To imagine Bob Dylan is out of touch with the symbolic value of making a Christmas album–as hilarious a sign as it is–is just underestimating him.
Dylan’s approach is decidedly Christmas–not “holiday”–oriented; about half are hymns about angels and drummers, and half are about Santa or sleigh bells. No original songs here, and the arrangements are impeccably, absolutely traditional. Horns and strings aplenty. The backup vocals are angelic, like they weren’t recorded on the same planet as Bob’s lead. True, without his singing, some of this could be anybody’s Christmas record. The album is so unironic, fans are already fighting over whether it’s meant ironically. At times you will laugh.
Believability. That’s what Sam Cooke cited as the reason people endured Bob Dylan’s singing voice, which today is more world-worn than ever. If this were an elaborate prank, the way he sings this album, there’s no telling. As with Nashville Skyline, the difference between Dylan prank and a serious choice isn’t a meaningful difference in credibility. Besides “The Christmas Blues,” which is truly contemporaneous with his recent work, “Must Be Santa” is probably his first polka, and with “Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles),” I believe we have the first instance of Dylan singing in Latin.
Whether or not it’s a genuine album in Dylan’s discography–and Bob has admitted to making deliberately unserious albums–it’s at least a genuine Christmas album, a fun and funny listen, which was probably fun to make. And it exonerates The Moody Blues, and other credible artists who might like Christmas music. Even if Dylan’s just tipping his hat here, Christmas in the Heart is an acknowledgment of an underappreciated musical tradition from one of the most important innovators and interpreters of American popular song.
It’s 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last few months in the life of bank robber John Dillinger, as Public Enemies does, has been done at least four times before. Michael Mann’s version isn’t historically definitive, nor narratively the most cohesive, but it looks and feels different than any predecessor — or any of this summer’s other blockbusters. Its raw aesthetic evokes a violence not of John Dillinger’s time, but of ours: the movie looks, arguably, cheap.
There are many economic and production-related reasons that filmmakers choose to shoot digital, but its flat, uncorrected look, muddy, half-visible blacks in low-light and clipped overexposures in the sun, are considered its flaws and carefully avoided. These days the technology can so closely approximate the look of film, telling the difference has become a matter of trivia (did you know that Benjamin Button and Superbad were shot digitally?). Public Enemies, shot with a mixture of non-film cameras from to the cinema-resolution Sony F23 to the $6K prosumer EX1, brings digital production’s unique — some would say, ugly — qualities to the fore. The elaborate nightclub is nearly invisible. Cotillard’s bathtub is eaten up by glare. Aside from the cast, you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t cost $80 million. Production value be damned, this is the Great Depression — er, Recession.
But there are advantages to shooting this way, too, and these are the audience’s surprises. With multiple simultaneous cameras, the editors often find unflattering, unusual and sublime angles. In a car chase the cameras nearly scrape the dirt road, as likely to fall out of the car as the gangsters. Distant pursuers appear in a deep focus impossible with a film camera. Pretty Boy Floyd is gunned down at such a static angle, it looks like Purvis set up the tripod himself. That’s the conceit: a renegade production for a renegade’s biopic. Hushed dialogue strains the ear, and sudden, unsweetened gunshots blare. These might be flaws, but it’s hard to argue that the volume, in the life of a gangster on the lam, ought to be normalized, or that gunfights ought to be prettier.
The raw video aesthetic would be less jarring were Public Enemies not set in 1934. The documentary style makes the action seem more real; the impossibility of video cameras during the Depression makes it all the more unreal. At its best, the movie uses this tension to great effect: paparazzi invade crime scenes, conflating Dillinger’s celebrity and Depp’s. When a police interrogator abuses Cotillard, the anachronism emphasizes his barbarity, while the verisimilitude makes it painfully familiar.
Anachronism enters Dillinger’s life within the film, too. The outlaw was famously gunned down on his way out of the film Manhattan Melodrama, and the final aria in Public Enemies is a montage of Dillinger reflecting on his jailed lover in the smiles of Myrna Loy. One has to imagine that as dated as it seems in the middle of a 21st Century crime picture, for a man who’d lived so hard for so long as Dillinger had, the fighting between Gable and Powell was impossibly cute.
For all its aesthetic sophistication, the film’s spontaneity runs roughshod over a lot of true history. There’s the false premise that John Dillinger was made a priority after Purvis killed Floyd; in reality Floyd and Baby Face Nelson were shot after Dillinger. It’s glossed over, but the women were prostitutes whom he took to the movies that night, and Dillinger never sauntered into the Dillinger squad, pining for his lost love. Michael Mann sides with Dillinger on the standing question, at the heart of the film’s title — whether he was a friend or an “enemy” of the public good — and transforms him into a sentimental hero whose death was sort of a careless martyrdom. Guess there’s nary an American who wouldn’t like to rob a bank, these days.
Public Enemies doesn’t confront Dillinger with questions or historical nuance; it doesn’t make his heists nor his love life seem very sexy. It tells the story, true or not, of a man who tries and fails to escape a construct he’d made of himself. The history and melodrama are a lot of pretense — independently unsatisfying — but the spirit of the film, taking aesthetic risks and chasing what elsewhere would be considered flaws, manages to produce something nearer the spectacle — or that construct, however unspectacular — of John Dillinger.
Fifteen years since the release of Toy Story, Pixar has made it very clear that they would like to be considered a movie studio in the classic sense: their films all seem to illustrate a singular creative perspective. As their individuals films do incredible things with franchising and merchandise (Cars and Toy Story especially, notably the two with sequels in-progress), with industry-defining productions and unparalleled quality control, every Pixar film promotes the big brand name, the studio. So it was, once upon a time, with studios-cum-corporations Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM and yes, Disney.
Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 after a long distribution partnership, but the agreement doesn’t conflate Disney’s and Pixar’s product (Disney has their own CG studio, which recently released Bolt). Where the Animation Studio at Disney has trademarked princesses and fairytales with happy endings, Pixar–aptly, given the nature of 3-D computer animation–makes worlds. Most Pixar films open a portal to a fantasy where toys or cars or fish can talk and have adventures. They explore their exotic world, meet loads of funny characters, and in the end demonstrate they’re all just like us. Usually there’s a coming-of-age message in there, whether it’s learning to share (Toy Story), let go (Finding Nemo), or grow the hell up already, entire human race (WALL-E).
Up is Pixar to the core, but framed a little differently. We start familiar, with human characters in suburbia, but they find two adventures: getting to their exotic world, and the adventure that world presents when they get there. Carl Fredricksen is a grumpy old man who’d really like to simply deposit his suburban house on top of the waterfall his dead wife always imagined. That’s adventure number one, already a little more grave than most childrens’ fare, and it’s all the trailer might lead you to expect the movie is. And the story of the old man and his wife–practically a silent movie, complete with newsreel film, further nods to a cinematic era gone by–is heartrending. By the time Carl’s quest begins, the audience is completely invested in seeing that floating house get plopped on that cliff.
Then again, we know Pixar. Carl accidentally acquires a fat-faced cub scout named Russell and we’re off to the races. The trip is shown in ellipsis: beautiful shots punctuated by mayhem. The physical comedy is tightly directed, nearer the style of network television animation than Disney’s. The dialogue–written in the smart, contemporary voice of The Incredibles–jeers the old man and the dopey kid equally, making Up more like a buddy picture than the age gap might suggest. When they arrive in Venezuela, characters (I won’t ruin with explanation) pile on until the adventure is more their story than Carl’s. Facing that fact–and reinventing himself accordingly–is the old man’s Nietzschean coming-of-age, and the real adventure.
Framing the story in reality briefly touches just how deeply our lives today are segregated by ageism; the elderly disappear to retirement communities and assisted-living facilities, and children are instructed never to speak to adults. Extending that to the critical reception of Up, it’s typical that the debate centers around the appropriate subjects for a children’s movie, whether we’ve exhausted 1930′s adventure tropes, or whether Ed Asner just makes a boring toy. In Up, Carl’s quest begins with his displacement from his lifelong home, but he proves he doesn’t need to be taken care of, and it may contradict everything we tell kids, but it’s only through talking to strangers that Russell can attain his last merit badge, and most importantly for him, make friends.
There’s never been a neat division between Pixar’s children and adult audiences, as evinced by Disney’s campaign to get WALL-E one of last year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations. Up‘s cast personifies that. It persuades its curmudgeon to feel young again, just as Pixar’s inclusive approach grows its audience with every film. It’s exciting to see a cutting edge animation studio debut their first feature in a new format* with a nod to the past. It’s very telling about who they are as a company, but also, who they’re setting out to be. Like classic Disney or the Termite Terrace (Warner Bros. Cartoons), today’s Pixar is not just a children’s entertainment franchise, they’re the best animation studio in the world.
*Note on 3-D: The recent rebirth of 3-D in cinemas has–so far–had some success in the extra dimension with scale (Monsters vs. Aliens) and texture (Coraline); Up does crazy things with depth, which is to say, vertical depth. I’ve never felt so afraid of heights. Recommended, if it’s available.
In some ways the tart title Star Trek seems ridiculous for the eleventh movie in a series plus six television series, almost ignoring the episodic nature of the franchise. Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are obviously and admittedly no Trekkies, and they bring back a young Kirk and Spock without exactly making it an origin story, in the alternate-dimensions/Marvel multiverse mode (ala Batman Begins), which the series has never exactly done before. But despite the action-movie makeover Star Trek appears on its surface, the title suits because the movie is about the franchise.
Anyone who’s ever seen a Star Trek before knows its aesthetic feels weirdly dated for a series set in the distant future. Continuity with Gene Roddenberry’s original creation has always trumped cool spacegear; even the small advances have been justified by setting subsequent series further ahead in spacetime. But the series has always been contemporary as an allegory, making analogy to current events, ethics and philosophy. The integrity of that analogy has always been more important than kinky duds, and its effect on ratings may be one reason the latest series “Enterprise” was canceled.
This Star Trek doesn’t take enormous liberties with costume, starship or even Spock’s hair, but it does action and storytelling in a dramatically different way. The way it’s lensed and color-corrected instantly shout “this ain’t your daddy’s Star Trek“. Kirk and Spock do a lot of punching, for Kirk and Spock. This is Star Trek with the Beastie Boys in it. People get naked.
Like Captain Kirk, the series is reborn young, sexy and a lot less sensible. The story centers around a tiny blob that creates black holes called ‘red matter’, which, having falling into the wrong hands, has led to the creation of… black holes. It’s so silly a plot device they had to have Leonard Nimoy explain it to the audience. A far cry from the meditative Star Trek: The Motion Picture, this Star Trek‘s moralizing doesn’t hold a lot of red matter, so to speak. It gives an obligatory gloss over what it means to be Vulcan — whether intellect and emotion are mutually exclusive — but it’s not a really important struggle in the world today, a superabundance of logic, whatever Maureen Dowd says.
Despite its departure from the rest of the series, in some ways Star Trek is a paean to nerdom. Ironic as it is to be sentimental about a Vulcan, the film is most deeply felt in its reverence for Nimoy as Spock — plus he’s given the best jokes at the end. There’s an inexplicable scene where Scotty accidentally beams into the plumbing (because nerds love schematics, right?) and after a cheap laugh about fencing, Sulu saves the day with his incredible swordsmanship. Those little episodes are done with unabashed style, giddy with invention, and they reinforce the fact that Star Trek has its nerdy cult for a reason: it’s great entertainment.
But the biggest shift is that Star Trek, as a prequel, reworks characters and events in the Star Trek universe, even to the prohibition of events from previous movies. Entire planets don’t exist anymore. We can infer that Spock gets laid. More importantly, if Shatner isn’t Kirk, what is Kirk? Apparently being raised by a single mother has made him flamboyantly angsty. And the rest of the crew: is eastern European really an archetype? Is that why Chekov is suddenly a child prodigy? Just mention a wormhole and the audience forgives these leaps, but it makes very clear that they’re not continuity problems they’re reinventions, that the franchise has nowhere to go but everywhere, and that this isn’t meant to be the series’ origin story so much as a re-origin story.
Star Trek actually does go where the series has gone before… but it boldly goes. If there is a cohesive philosophy underwriting Star Trek, it’s discovering a way to win whatever the odds, and that sometimes the best logic is to behave erratically. And as the new Kirk fights harder and thinks less, so does Star Trek, and it certainly finds its way to win: beating expectations, the box office, and inaugurating a new era for the franchise. While it isn’t the series’ most nuanced message, its masterstroke is that the new crew’s brash ethos is completely endemic of the film itself, which makes it a hugely satisfying package.
If last year’s spate of big political movies (from Milk to Wall E via Che and Changeling) reverberated with protest and populism, the three shorts by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho that comprise the omnibus film Tokyo! might give a taste of this year’s political cinema as, in the wake of the Obama election and economic collapse, we struggle to renegotiate our social contract. Though the three films are about individuals, they contextualize one another, and though not every piece will be to every taste, together they make a weird picture of personal politics right now.
The films aren’t as touristy as the jaunty intro sequence, international directors, or the other recent city-omnibus Paris J’Taime might suggest. Besides shooting in Tokyo and their surrealist tendencies, the most obvious similarity between the films in Tokyo! is that they might be set in any modern city. (Notice that Gondry’s film was based on co-writer Gabrielle Bell’s comic “Cecil and Jordan in New York”, and that Carax’s end credits promise its villain will return in a New York-based sequel.) Tokyo appears less as the postcard of a city and more as an idea: collectivism. All three films tell the stories of private, misunderstood people as they test their limits in this big, modern world.
The unease many critics have with Tokyo! actually seems to reflect the characters, whose experiences in the city of Tokyo are likewise uncomfortable. Without Leos Carax’s all-caps MERDE between them, the sad, introversive films by Michel Gondry and Bong Joon-ho might make the exclamation point at the end of the title seem ironic. In fact, an antisocial omnibus film is kind of ironic simply because of the way these things are financed. Carax has admitted never seeing the other films before Cannes, so who knows whether the producers expected to make such a unfun series, or whether these are just movies for our times.
Michel Gondry’s Interior Design tells the story of a young couple who move to the city and rapidly find themselves alienated from one another by the job and housing markets. Gondry gets in a bit of self-deprecating business with the aspiring-director boyfriend’s art film, and it’s all very tender until the girlfriend, Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani), feels she’s become a burden on him. Here, nearly two-thirds of the way through, the trademark Gondry visual effects begin, representing her addled psyche. But watching this leper girl trek through Tokyo as her clothes and body parts fall off is unsettling and almost cruel. The sudden surrealism and public nudity transform a weepy story of low self-esteem into a harsh, sort of ominous film. I won’t spoil its jocular ending, but she becomes objectified, literally.
Leos Carax’s MERDE is the most exuberant and the most menacing of the three films. A milky-eyed, long-nailed Leprechaun monster (Denis Lavant) erupts from the sewer with a Groucho Marx gait; he steals a cigarette, eats some money and flowers, and licks an armpit. Immediately the TV news kicks in and the city is in instant freakout about the “terrorist attack”–the obvious joke is Godzilla, but the pranks and long digital-video tracking shot are equally reminiscent of Jackass The Movie (the first one, where they go to Japan). The exploits get much bloodier in his next adventure, and this creature we’d adored for being funnier in one shot than Gondry’s whole movie is suddenly a mass-murderer. Carax then spends an absurd amount of time on the media and courts’ attempt to decode his hateful existence, involving two separate translators (since his gobbledigook language–replete with face-slapping–is only spoken by a milky-eyed French lawyer who must be then translated into Japanese), and further refracted through a split-screen technique that, like the 24-hour news cycle, is all the more confusing and never lets its audience settle. Japanese society is confounded and polarized too; the trial creates Merde imitators and protestors. As a satire of the War on Terror, it’s especially savory that the acts of terror and interrogation (in their crazy language and untranslated) are captivating physical comedy, and that the institutional attempts at resolution are long and deliberately difficult to watch.
Bong Joon-ho delivers a softer side than audiences of his hit The Host, might expect. Shaking Tokyo is a portrait of an urban hermit (in Japanese, ‘hikikumori’) who’s coaxed out of hiding by an attractive young girl, only to learn that most of Tokyo has become similarly reclusive. The film is very visual; it contrasts pictures of order vs chaos, the private vs public, robots vs humans… yes, the girl. Maybe. A detailed portrait of the man, we learn as little as he knows about the outside world, until the aggregate mysteries–and lust–compel Teruyuki Kagawa on a quest into the quaking outdoors. It’s our first opportunity in any of the three films to see famous Tokyo locations. Ironically, they’re abandoned.
The result is an omnibus that’s less about Tokyo than the economy, terror, and isolationism. Tokyo! is interesting taken as a whole, but the easiest reason to recommend it is MERDE. Lavant and Carax don’t flip over this city the way they did Paris in their last collaboration (1991′s The Lovers on the Bridge), but chalk that up to the times. They’ve got an awesome energy, probably all the greater for having not worked together in so long, and if Gondry and Bong are overshadowed here, there’s no shame in that.
So Hollywood finally pulled the trigger on Watchmen, the landmark graphic novel, after twenty years in the making as a film. They got a lot of smart people to make the movie, but it doesn’t seem like they thought about it the whole time we were waiting.
Watchmen lasts three hours partly for its liberal use of slow motion. Contrasted with the dominant action-movie style (Transformers or The Bourne Supremacy), which overwhelms with a violence of rapidity, Watchmen instead shows the result of each act, the picture of a broken bone or pool of blood: a violence of shock and distance. The action sequences hang on the screen like a slideshow.
In this respect, there is a great fidelity to the form, at least, of the graphic novel. At once dingy, gaudy and cinematic, Watchmen is far more successful at evoking the look and feel of its source material than most contemporary comic adaptations. Bryan Singer’s X-Men films shoot every fight in close-up, playing out the battles on their players’ faces like a TV soap; Ang Lee’s Hulk with its proscenium of panels never lets the audience forget that the green Kong is comped into every shot. Iron Man and The Dark Knight succeed as action-movies by letting that genre supplant the comics’ style. None of these undertook to render the symbolic power of individual pictures on the imagination in the way that Zack Snyder does here.
But Watchmen isn’t important because it’s the most beautiful or most violent book, it’s important because it’s smart, experimental, and very successful. The heroes that comprise the Watchmen (with the exception of Dr. Manhattan) don’t have superpowers; they fight crime because their personal ethics incline them to it. So besides being gluttons for glory and punishment, each is an amateur philosopher. The Comedian’s a nihilist and imperialist; Rorschach a moralist; Silk Spectre believes in love (naturally, she’s the woman); Dr. Manhattan in science; Ozymandias in ideas. The story plays out a pre-Apocalyptic moment, humanizing the archetypes, pushing them to fight and to work together.
In telling that story, the movie breaks with its source. The adventures are so much more effective than the exposition, the characters are all but lost. The philosophical component of the filmed Watchmen mostly takes place in long soliloquies on Mars, and the characters back on earth are less as agents of their philosophy than agents of the continuity.
Jackie Earle Haley comes off best, since Rorschach’s brand of justice most closely joins philosophy with violence, but Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl is so pathetic, it’s hard to tell what drives him at all. We learn more about his goggles than his life. The style, which adapts the visual aspects of the comic so well, actually fights our involvement with the actors. (This was less important in 300.) Jeffrey Dean Morgan is caked in age makeup and costume design, but we never hear his Comedian deliver a joke. Billy Crudup is not actually in most of the film; he’s just the voice-actor of a goofy-looking atomic avatar.
Although the movie delivers a tight if weirdly-paced narrative, the omissions of character amount to genuine flaws in the story. Silk Spectre, the only active female hero, goes perkily from Dr. Manhattan’s bed to Nite Owl’s within the space of fifteen screen minutes. We know little of the challenges she faces, as a hero/sex object and the heroes’ sex object, and her reasons for adopting her mother’s costume. Her kisses punctuate many important moments in the film, but leave the audience in a vacuum: is it even a problem for her that she’s loving two men?
There has been a lot of press about audiences seeing the movie more than once, but that would really only reward aesthetes and those who found the basic plot incomprehensible the first time. Watchmen is complex but not rich: a spectacle of blue penises, slo-mo kickboxing and a really ugly giant clock on Mars. To a fault, it’s consistently imagined–maybe too simply to deliver on its ambitions.
In the end, Watchmen‘s superheroes are just symbols of other superheroes, and the whole enterprise has the effect of a world-destroying Commedia dell’Arte, whose nuclear MacGuffin becomes a metaphor for the entire film: an epic yet unserious misdirect. It’s ironic that a director so ambitious with symbolic imagery–the nuts and bolts of all storytelling–doesn’t appreciate that the heroes are constructs, and Watchmen‘s stories are the mechanism that deconstructs them (according to co-author Alan Moore, amongst others). This movie version just doesn’t promote deep reading. Maybe they thought three hours was too little time to do the postmodern thing. It probably would have made a better miniseries.
