on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart (2009) by Paul Snyder

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.” » More «

on Public Enemies (2009) by Paul Snyder

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.

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on Up (2009) by Paul Snyder

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. » More «

on Star Trek (2009) by Paul Snyder

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. » More «

on Tokyo! (2008) by Paul Snyder

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. » More «

on Watchmen (2009) by Paul Snyder

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. » More «