Quantum of Solace: A Word About Pretention

Quantum of Solace is the title of an indie rock band's second album, not a James Bond film. Yes, I know what you think it means, but you don't get brownie points for replacing what might have made a perfectly good sentiment regarding the new direction of the Bond films with big fancy words like quantum. Look it up. It's a physics term that has only tangential relation to its intended meaning here. What makes Bond's melodrama too cool for words like "measure" or "comfort"? And if you have to resort to manly words that don't actually mean what you mean them to mean in order to avoid the inevitable sticky sentimentality, maybe your damn Bond should man up and stop being so broody.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

I find Philip Seymour Hoffman to be almost unbearably truthful an actor. His commitment to his characters as suffering human beings is at least as transparent as Brando or De Niro at their best, and often more visceral in effect: his body is a fat precision instrument - from his thinning hair to his shapeless waist - that seems capable of tuning into complicated, discomforting emotions like a divining rod. His eyes are eternally heavy, his mouth half closed, unmotivated to hamper or temper the flow of oxygen into his round chest. His breathing carries at least as much expressive force as his words. If he does not divine truth with his body, then his body is simply a conduit for it, a smither or an artisan of truth.

Actors could argue this is the essential quality of their craft, and that his craftsmanship is impeccable; it's not alchemy, it's intelligence, concentration, and mastery of body language. But craftsmanship does not ring. It may convince, but it does not reverberate, any more than a tin bell tinkles without sweetly resounding. To make us consistently smell the very living odor of life onscreen requires such an unflagging grip on the discordant business of existing as to render the rest of the film irrelevant to it. Hoffman may be too good for conventional cinema. He too easily reveals its architecture.

But that I am mentioning his performance at the beginning of a discussion of a film as structurally undisciplined as Synecdoche, New York should be cause for concern. I'm not prepared to argue that Hoffman is the strongest element of this film, because I'm not sure that dramatic strength is an appropriate diagnostic tool in this case, but I will say that he reveals truths that Charlie Kaufman overlooks. To pair Hoffman's gutty ectoplasm with Kaufman's esoteric preciseness (not to be confused with precision) only underscores Kaufman's problem of not knowing when a point has been made.

There's a lot to be admired in Kaufman's strange and loving dreamscape, in spite of the overwhelming depression it may inspire. As a director, Kaufman is about as gifted as his probable mentors Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, and of a similar visual bent, but unlike them he never really knows where a camera should be, or what it should be doing. I don't think he really cares that much; he seems to feel that a camera is a functional piece of equipment, like a light stand or a wing, that achieves a practical end rather than contributes to a film's mood. And here I am not talking about the lighting or the costumes or the set design, which are fine, but about his framing and sense of visual rhythm. They lack visceral cohesion with the performance Hoffman is giving.

As a writer, Kaufman suffers from terminal inertia. This is the real source of his troubles. It's clear from the outset of a Kaufman-written film that the writer has a thoroughly inhabited sense of his story, his characters, and his narrative's quirky, spunky dynamic, and Synecdoche is no different. It may even be clearer here. He slides his way through tart and amusing character development, shuffling along what promises to be a strange and perplexing series of interactions and setpieces toward a climax of rumbling profundity, but about halfway through Synecdoche, the wheels come off and the wagon begins sputtering of its own momentum down the crabgrassy slope of self-important self-doubt, as Kaufman dramatizes and redramatizes the same points, and every possible offshoot point, his story generates.

It is not enough to explore the pathetic life of Hoffman's theater director Caden Cotard, or the genuinely magnificent conceit of the theater piece he begins to develop from his own pathetic life, but also the sea of pathetic supporting players around him, as well as their iterations within his play, as well as the pathetic state of affairs they are all in, and the patheticness of death, the last curtain, and the patheticness of death as the encroaching end of a pathetic life. Nobody in the film sees a way out of misery, which Kaufman sees as the ultimate truth, since he jettisons the few characters who try. He revels, and repeatedly rerevels, in a sort of bland, effortless depressiveness as, evidently, the only codifier of existential truth.

And this clashes painfully with Hoffman's performance. Say what you will about the depressing quality imbued in the performance; that is a matter of preference and pain threshold, not acting quality. But it has no place in a film committed to bleakness as a truthful outlook. It's a question of sieve-like reception versus re-re-reenforced assertion. They blend like oil and water in the subconscious, refusing to gel, like things do in a great film, into a colossal, unified statement of purpose and intention.

As cinematic failures go, Synecdoche is no crime. It's enormously ambitious and, in spite of the obvious indifference to convention, eager to impress. It doesn't hate us or think we're stupid, and it does have moments and whole scenes of low-key comic enlightenment. But Kaufman behaves like the friend of a friend you met at the bar who had a few confidence-building scotches and became oblivious to the fact that his stories have grown quite boring. Like the drunk, Kaufman is so intent on making sure you got his point that he leaves you with nothing to think of for yourself.

UPDATE: THE HAPPENING

Just heard on TV: "The director of The Sixth Sense brings you his first R-rated film: The Happening. Starting Friday the 13th".

We are FUCKED.

Film: Steven Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

1989.

Summer. Maine.

We are in the process of tearing down an ancient red tin shed in the backyard and building a new wooden one in its place. I spend my evenings running barefoot in the cooling grass, sweaty and grungy and entirely happy with my place in the universe. I am ten years old.

There came a late morning - surely a Saturday, since my father was home from work - with the sun streaming through the kitchen window, when the natural order of my cosmos took a sudden turn for the monumental. My father suggested we go see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Not for my birthday, not in return for mowing the lawn (my brother was still burdened with that one), but simply because the man must have suspected I would be in awe. Even at that age, I would pore over the TV Week to see what movies would be playing on Cinemax or TBS, and what time, so that I could pop a tape in the VCR and record whatever segment of whatever movie I couldn't catch in person, for whatever reason. Jaws was a favorite. So was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, of which I had the last twenty minutes on a tape that regularly saw the wheels of the VCR early Saturday mornings - often before sunrise - while I ate a bowl of sugar with Golden Grahams or Shredded Wheat.

This may have been my third or fourth movie seen in a theater in my life, after Return of the Jedi, ET, Flight of the Navigator, and possibly one other. We weren't a theatergoing family; I think the next one I saw was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for my birthday in 1991; the intervening two years were a long boil on the stew of my imagination, in which moments from that summer 1989 event simmered and fermented and solidified into cardinal benchmarks of my moviegoing sensibilities. The rats. The tank chase. Books aflame. Rapid decomposition. That sweet, sweet Alison Doody.

It's fair to say, with respect and deference to the influence of, say, Tarkovsky, Tarr, and Herzog, that outside of the sight of a woman jerked violently back and forth by her legs through the calm evening waters off Amity Island, no other film provided such a lasting basis for me as a filmmaker and a film viewer. Two years ago I saw Last Crusade at the Ziegfeld, and I'll be damned if it isn't one of the most unadulteratedly entertaining films Spielberg's made, full of delightfully kinetic action setpieces, fantastic bickering between Harrison Ford and Sean Connery, and intoxicating sights such as the canyons of the American West and Petra. And a veritable cornerstone of my burgeoning sexuality in the form of sweet, sweet Alison Doody.

It is with a sense of deep betrayal and personal affront that I report that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has taken pornographically blunt advantage of my youthful memories, cashing them in for a quick, cheap fuck on a warehouse floor against a green screen, with no thought toward romance or protection. I cringe for all of the many single-digit-year-olds slurping sodas and crinkling candy bags in the theater around me, who, if they remember the movie at all tomorrow, will have no idea that they have been violated already, their moviegoing identities badly skewed before they're self-aware enough to notice, for somewhere down the road they will find themselves critiquing other films against the formative influence of this lazy, wretched half-baked ratatouille of pilfered joy.

Lazy is the key word. Not long ago, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg gave a joint interview in which Lucas warned that audiences would reject the film, and Spielberg denied as much. This speaks volumes, since Lucas is given story credit, and the movie's problems start there. The stuff that made the Indiana Jones films so enthralling in the past is almost entirely absent here: deft dialogue (delivered swiftly), expedient character development amid and between action sequences brimming with wit, muscle, and fluid grace. Lucas mentioned the audience rejection of his recent Star Wars films as evidence of the certain failure of Crystal Skull, but stops short of suggesting what twenty minutes of this movie make abundantly clear: that the problem is Lucas, and his inability to fashion any communicative cinematic element, such as interesting action or insightful interactions among characters. He's also got an astounding way with dialogue in those films, and has evidently schooled screenwriter David Koepp here with truly astounding results.

Ineptitude seems infectious, or perhaps the input of too many executive-level folks in the development stages proved too diverse to coalesce; either way, Crystal Skull holds together about as tightly as a gob of wood chips, and with far less, I don't know, grace. That word keeps coming to me in describing the Indiana Jones films, because at their best, they're remarkably graceful in pace, plotting, and cinematic fluidity, cutting like butter and zipping along with high-end invisible grease. The impetus to tackle not only Indiana Jones as an older man, but also his Brando-son, and Marion, and John Hurt - I'm still not sure what he's all about - and Ray Winstone - just, come now, STOP already - and THEN the plot (I think it's about aliens. At some level) overwhelms any hope for cohesion to the degree Spielberg has attained in the past with at least two of the three previous films. Oh, and let us not discuss Cate Blanchett here. Let us forget we saw her in it. Goddesses shouldn't be crucified like criminals. Forgiveness implies judgment, and that's for other people.

Here, there is one thing worth admiring, in the same way one can admire a turkey sandwich or modern air travel. For the first time since possibly Schindler's List, Spielberg has taken his Aderol and not tried to infuse every frame with so much Steviepants. Actually, the graphic calmness of this movie is so out of character with contemporary Spielberg that I'm filled with enormous doubt that he actually directed the thing. He may want to consider taking me up on my doubt. Not that he should return to the chaotic perfectionism that ruined Munich. I just think maybe he was bored to tears this time around. Like everyone else, it seems.

You know, I didn't need this. Three solid movies worked fine - better than fine, really; dramatically fine, even classically fine. Indiana Jones didn't need to achieve military rank or graduate away from thugees and Nazis. Marcus Brody didn't have to die, and Marion Ravenwood never had to come walking back onto my screen again. It's not because I don't care, guys, it's just that I own you now, and you don't get to change.

Film: Tim Burton: "Sweeney Todd" (2007)

I was excited to watch and then review “Sweeney Todd” because there was a period during my teenage years during which I was completely obsessed with the original cast recording of the Broadway show. At the time I was struck by both the music and the unusual setting and plot for a Broadway musical. The genre isn't entirely without darkness, but “Sweeney Todd” was revolting, gory and frightening, with no real catharsis, a long night's journey into night (Editor's Note: LOL)*. It debuted in 1979 but still has some fairly shocking material (some which the film doesn't include). The new film loses a lot of the sheer force of darkly comic terror that the original cast recording has, but is still a fairly flick, if largely as a result of the moments from the original that it gets right (and a few functional diversions).

I must start with the performances. Johnny Depp was adequate, if un-amazing. The comic menace he displays towards Beedle Bradford as he promises him “the closest shave of your life” was an excellent moment. His tiresome lack of anything like depth is not. I used to have great respect for Johnny Depp as an actor but I'm beginning to think he should stick to character roles and any leads like Captain Jack Sparrow, which require no real depth but plenty of transient inspiration – something Depp excels at. Bonham-Carter was slightly less adequate. I thought her lazy delivery didn't particularly fit the role. Admittedly, I may be partial to Angela Lansbury's original performance, which couldn't be more different. She was all desperate energy and hyper-rational ambition, so much so that she seems more psychopathic than Sweeney Todd. Bonham-Carter plays the role as a weak-willed romantic (with some morbid tendencies, granted). Blah. Alan Rickman plays Judge Turpin very well as Alan Rickman. Fucking Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows up and gets his throat slit. I think he had like two lines but I get all pumped when I see random Buffy cast-members everywhere because I am a nerd that way.

Tim Burton's typical stylistic over-eagerness was on display everywhere. Sometimes it works very well, more often not so much. I've seen it much better applied in previous efforts (“Ed Wood,” “Edward Scissorhands,” the underrated “Sleepy Hollow”). The final image of Todd's death felt like the most quintessentially Burton moment but it also completely misses the real tragedy of the moment. It's a beautiful shot, but it's the exact kind of moment where you wish Burton would stop being so goddamn Burton-y for a moment and just show something like the reality of the scene. The drama of the moment is so powerful on its own – why comment on it so loudly?

I have to address the music, too. I prefer writing about music, anyway, and the original score is such a quirky, brilliant piece of music. The film makes a few mistakes here. First, they decided to cut the Chorus which occasionally shows up in the original to comment on the proceedings. The music written for the choruses is among the most impressive of the score. Sondheim employs baroque counterpoint, leitmotif and all sorts of other surprising things that you don't normally expect to hear in a fucking Broadway musical. Second, the orchestration employed is much lighter, softer and watered-down. Which is a real shame. It loses a lot of its angular menace. Indeed, the entire score is almost entirely built around leitmotif, being more or less comprised of maybe 20 different threads of music. It's a marvelous effect when used so liberally, as previously sublime melodies show up in the darkest places and are smashed together in surprising ways. The new recording keeps a lot of this but the cuts, in places, hurt. Also, Johnny Depp does an admirable job of trying, but Len Cariou's original is incomparably superior. It's like comparing Mozart's 40^th Symphony with the Verve's “Bittersweet Symphony” (zing!).

Anyway, right. Uhm. So the new movie's worth seeing, but I wouldn't make it a top priority. It's a bit of a disappointment in how it mishandles such excellent original material – this really should have been a better film – but perhaps those with little or no familiarity with the original may enjoy it a bit more. So...three stars.

Also, for comparison's sake, here's a bootleg video from the original theatrical production and the new soundtrack version of the same song, “Epiphany.”:

Sweeney Todd on IMDB

Sweeney Todd (Original Cast Recording) on the iTunes Store:


Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton Recording) on the iTunes Store:


*I don't have an editor, of course, just talking to myself.

Film: A Preemptive Word About M. Night Shyamalan

Ten days from the eve of the release of Master M. Shyamalan's latest magus opus The Happening, a speculative gesture toward the universe of individualistic profundity that inhabits his films. I feel uniquely suited to The Task, having seen every major film he's made since The Sixth Sense, easily the worst of M.'s progressively brilliant catalogue.

At the time of The Sixth, M.'s problem was a distinct lack of commitment to the personal nature of his plot twists. "Alive" to "dead" has a certain mythic stature, but lacks M.-based dimension. Surely he saw the problem at once, and moved to correct it in the subsequent Unbreakable, giving witness to The Cinema's first (to my knowledge) and heretofore only whip smart ending involving naturalistic comic book heroism. Fantasy and salt-of-the-earth reality coalesce to form a striking indictment of purple-clad men, but M. shot into The Stratosphere of personal filmmaking three years later with the jolting psychological revelation in Signs - psychology of otherworldly proportions.

Not content with the earthly sideshow melodrama of Mel Gibson's religious fanaticism, the wearing of foil hats, and the crushed-car death of his wife, M. posits a race of aliens who would consciously travel potentially light years through space and certainly time to make art in cornfields - on a planet overwhelmingly irradiated with a toxic liquid. Nevermind the artistic drive of these sentients; the psychosis compelling them to risk life and scaly limb for the sake of creation alone inspires a complex mix of anxiety, awe and, really, personal introspection. Would I do the same? Would I support a friend doing the same? Alone with my thoughts at night, the question still Haunts me.

The quandary frightened us, upending the illusion of self-willed destiny we maintain as a matter of necessity. M. graciously scaled back a bit in his next outing, confining his great paradoxes to this, our own, mortal coil - and answered the fears of The Many. Conjuring a pod of intellectuals going out of their way to force their own destiny, of The Village M. fashioned a blazing blood-red beacon of hope for those of us jangled to the bone by insecurity, by the untidy, discomforting rigors of programmatic modern life, by Bush and his scare-mongering control tactics. The albino savior, raceless and more or less sexless, leads us to freedom from the arch confines of intellectual oppression. And we are redeemed.

Abject irresponsibility undoubtedly led most of the studios - and here I am talking about Disney - to pass on M.'s next project. They saw The Truth layered throughout, and yielded shamefully. Lady in the Water, a searing, scathing, rapacious diatribe against evil itself, shocked and disturbed in ways M.'s previous work could only think about, lightly. Expansively addressed to both The Everyman and the giant cat-wolf monsters of Wolfgang Petersen's inimitable The Neverending Story, M. adds a touch of class and grass to the proceedings with the sensitive casting of Paul Giamatti, and with grass, but he does not stop there. Conscious of the thematic limitations of his prior work, M. addresses himself, as Himself, the god and creator of the rapidly strengthening M. Night Shyamalan universe. The boundless Storyteller. The Prophet. The Lord of Redemption, attacked and belittled by those of no faith and less intellectual and aesthetic authority. The Power of the Story Denied. Thought Denied. Belief Denied. Life Denied. Consciousness Itself Denied.

We are drained. It may be impossible for M. to top himself here, although the title The Happening suggests a keen awareness of the perils of excessive directness. His latest may have to be an entirely black screen with a silent soundtrack to completely destroy our blown minds.

Film: Jon Favreau: Iron Man (2008)

I concede, I have never seen Swingers. I've also never seen The Princess Bride, or The Grifters, and I really don't remember Beautiful Girls. Missing a part of Rob Reiner's ouevre - or Stephen Frears', or the late Ted Demme's - doesn't seem to preclude me from catching enough references to pop culture to enjoy my social life, or from fully grasping the cavernous depths of When Harry Met Sally... or...whatever else Frears and Demme did (IMDB, currently decked out in fantastic Sex and the City garb, reminds me that they also did the respectable High Fidelity and the Boogie Nights wannabe Blow, respectively. What an adorable pink trim below the Flatiron Building beside the IMDB logo!).

I suspect the same holds true of Jon Favreau and his magnificent attention to Robert Downey, Jr's outfit in Iron Man, which isn't afraid to combine graphic contemporary war violence with the multilayered comic iconography of its star. Oh, and there's Gywneth Paltrow too. No, really. She's in this, but you might miss her behind the glare coming off Jeff Bridges' bald pate. If you care. You might. Some do. I'm told. There's nothing really wrong with this film, in the sense of causing offense, or failing to satisfy the thematic demands it establishes, or in not providing the necessary scene coverage so that you think the characters have suddenly, inexplicably moved from shot to reverse shot, causing a catastrophic rupture in your suspension of disbelief (unless you couldn't care less, or if it's raining on your wedding day), although it might come as a surprise how quickly Downey's character goes through his Crisis, and how early on in the film. Or not.

No, Iron Man does exactly what it says it will, giving Downey a bright shiny red flying suit of impenetrable non-iron alloy packed with concealed weapons with which to kill bad weapons-smuggling Afghanis (weapons supplied by Tony Stark - Iron Man's businessman alter ego - the implications of which frontload the movie with a curiously unsustained moral dilemma. Why not pursue that? In this dangerously hi-tek day and age of militant WMD-wielding cavemen, there's no foreseeable end to the mileage Iron Man might have gotten from extended rape-like exploitation). There's an energetic sex scene, plus the unbearable sexual tension between Paltrow and Downey, which, who knows, they could consummate onscreen. Suit optional. Thrusters recommended. Oh, and Peter Billingsley's in this, and Terrence Howard. I don't really remember either, but in fairness to the movie, I'd been working all day on a prison shoot in Georgia and entered into the movie exhausted and profoundly distracted by the nearby crunching of popcorn. Or the sipping of soda. Whichever.

A friend of a friend - not exactly a friend of mine, more like a second friend - observed that using RoDo, J in a film like Zodiac is cheap, essentially capitalizing on his iconic stature to lend prepackaged dynamic weight to his part. That you're getting Robert Downey, Jr, as opposed to a performance in a role. I argued against this stance vigorously at the time, certainly over drinks in a bar-type atmosphere somewhere in Manhattan with other people I probably knew vicariously through friends, but now I think I missed her point. She denied it, but she CLEARLY HATES RODO, J. She hates his quirky mannerisms, his way of investing subpar lines of dialogue with legitimacy and fantastic lines with angel dust, and his near androgynous appeal as a screen presence. She HATES all this. Or she hates the star system. Honest to good sweet Jesus, if I find out she went to Sex and the City, or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Secret Realm of the Hidden Power of the Platinum Cock Ring, or Lord help me, shopped for designer footwear, I will track her down and defend RoDo's honor with a swift beat. I swear. That kind of lazy pretension has no place in mass culture, and only serves to underscore the hateful, exclusive nature of High Art. In a movie like Iron Man, he binds us in a warm woolen comforter of familiarity, pacifying our deep-seated personal fears and anxieties, and lulling our sore strained minds into a preternatural calm, like Ambien, like weed, like a warm spring breeze in the park on a Saturday.

I can't say how loyal Favreau is to the comic book source material, but I only recently got into the comics world. I just finished Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", a vastly entertaining and insightful analysis of the ways narrative operates in the frame-based visual media. I would bet my next income tax return that Favreau's read it, loved it, digested its every observation, and distilled them into his filmmaking craft. I might not know for sure until I saw Swingers. Somebody lend me the DVD. Or VHS. I know you've got it.

Iron Man on IMDB