Picked Flick #34: Bram Stoker's Dracula

Normally, I would avoid stacking so many entries so swiftly atop one another, especially since Illusions, the previous Picked Flick, is an underseen gem that I'm eager to call attention to. Still, today is the happy day of Nathaniel's long-incubating Vampire Blog-a-thon, marking an ideal showcase for the next film on my countdown. I hope you enjoy this post, as well as all the others in the Blog-a-thon ... but at the risk of sounding self-serving, don't forget to scroll down for Julie Dash!

Bram Stoker's Dracula portrays two ardent, flamboyant, and perpetually haunted love affairs, one of which begins in the 1400s and spans more than 500 years until the 1890s, the other of which begins in the 1890s and spans more than a century, through 1992 when the film was released, and through 2006, and after. The first of these loves, exquisite but also inhuman and adrift in its timelessness, is the erotic, spiritual, and finally organic bond between Count Vlad Dracula of Romania (Gary Oldman) and his wife Elisabeta (Winona Ryder). Dracula fights with fervid conviction in a holy war in distant lands, impaling his enemies in an intended tribute to his God and to his wife; already we may sense some confusion between the two, a confusion which Francis Ford Coppola's absintheate mise-en-scène of lurid colors and superimpositions works hard to amplify. Returning home to find Elisabeta tricked into despair and excommunicated as a suicide, Dracula perjures his soul with such grandiloquent acts of blasphemy that he is doomed to live forever, no longer a man yet marooned among mortals, alienated from his love but tortured by her reincarnations (which torture all the more because Ryder inhabits them with such prissy and dumb discomfort). Meanwhile, as the shape-shifting Count chases Mina Harker, his wife's uncanny duplicate, to her home in Victorian England, a new sideshow technology of shadows and silhouettes, of cranks and flickers and distractions, has bemused the urban populace. Dracula's London is a London of kinetoscopes and zoetropes, and Coppola is witty, risky, and besotted enough to saturate his movie with the ghosts of the cinema's own beginnings, to plumb the antique past of the medium as an adventurous artery into a new and heady present.

The movie is proudly, almost over-emphatically vampiric, toying with its own shape, purloining liberally from all of the arts, confusing its chronologies and sometimes confounding its own plot, reflective of and awestruck by the mercurial methods of lead actor Gary Oldman, and almost cruelly willing to lay bare the limitations and vulnerabilities of an unlikely supporting cast. Bram Stoker's Dracula is made of equal parts folly and terror; its very definition of love amounts to a fusion of these two elements, each drinking liberally from the other, interfused so that we are less and less prepared to observe any difference between the two. The film is both a strange and a logical one for Coppola to have made, merging the generational torments of the Godfather series with the hallucinogenic anti-dramaturgy of Apocalypse Now and the curious, occasionally abject self-ridicule of Peggy Sue Got Married. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a movie that slides outlandishly between an extraordinary belief in itself, writ large as a belief in the cinema, and an equally extraordinary drive to flout and undermine its own ambitions. How else to account for the scrupulous production design and exacting star performance that we behold in Dracula's castle, while Keanu Reeves stumbles and falls, resolutely unsaved from himself, through every moment of the very same scenes? How else to receive a movie that can locate and even sublimate a persuasive romanticism within the guise of wild expressionism, culminating in scenes as beautiful as Mina's candlelit seduction by the forlorn and raven-haired count, but also trash itself out with shock-cuts from a kitschy beheading to a bleeding, fatty slab of English roast beef? When I first saw the movie, I marveled only at the beauty in Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, so rich in its colors and proud in its artifice, but now I can detect something of Ballhaus' history with Fassbinder, the way the images shuck us unpredictably between immersion and bafflement, sometimes flattering the actors and sometimes catching them off-guard, ironizing their presence in the movie as well as our own.

For me, Bram Stoker's Dracula distills and sacralizes a form of aestheticized passion, the kind that insists on both the virtuosity and the foolishness in artistic experiment and self-exhibition. The film finds its director living on the outward edge of his mind's eye and inviting a plethora of fellow artists to join him there, all of them enraptured with the arts that constitute the cinema if also a bit skeptical, maybe even a bit cynical, as regards the final product. This peculiar, prevailing attitude both for and against art, both for and against camp, deliriously carnivalesque, is a mighty challenging climate for a movie to grow up in, but then again, it fosters the kind of creative highs that a more serious movie or, in some ways, a less serious movie would never be able to touch. I'm thinking here of Eiko Ishioka's costumes, a nonpareil panoply of wacko but prepossessing conceits: an external armor of internal musculature, Victorian gowns in saccharine shades of mint and pink, a funeral shroud topped with a reptilian headdress. I'm thinking, too, of Wojciech Kilar's churning and thunderous score, which would be too overfull and insistent for almost any other movie but which sees right into the brutish, beating heart of this one, running up and down the scale of ardor and violence. I'm thinking, too, of the expansive and sometimes incongruous sound design, which gets away with inserting some whirring, chirping electronics into a scene where Dracula's brides encroach upon Mina and Van Helsing inside a Wagnerian ring of fire; and of Greg Cannom and Michèle Burke's hair and makeup designs, skewering Victorian masculinity, recycling but also satirizing stereotypes of feminine delicacy and Slavic swarthiness, ushering Oldman's Dracula through not just an array of wild guises but entire phyla of bestial existence. In many ways, Bram Stoker's Dracula is just too, too much, but its fusion of literary and cultural archetypes with avant-garde novelties of vision and sound makes so many films look thin, frightened, and underfelt. It's as though Coppola, his own career all but scuttled and his chosen medium increasingly eulogized, is throwing every new and old inspiration he can find at the screen, and saying, baying, crying, laughing, joking, fuming, declaiming, "Here, for better and for worse, is a movie that's alive." (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1992 Columbia Pictures/American Zoetrope

Picked Flick #35: Illusions

If Boyz N the Hood, one notch down on this list, represents a high-water mark but also a truncated possibility within the black commercial cinema, Julie Dash's Illusions survives as a gleaming nugget of underexplored, almost esoteric potential in the black art cinema, and the feminist cinema, and the formalist cinema, and the cinema of satire, and all of the other cinemas that Illusions embodies, upbraids, and smartly reassesses. Dash would eventually achieve greater notoriety as the director of Daughters of the Dust, a shimmering and polyvocal fable about the non-asssimilated Geechee cultures off the Carolina coast, and a complex and idiosyncratic miracle of markedly independent, culturally embedded filmmaking. A major foundation of Daughters' enduring mystique, not to mention a doleful fact about American movie culture, is that no feature film directed by an African-American woman had ever circulated in stateside commercial release until Daughters—a full year after causing a stir and winning an award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival—finally bowed in select American cities in 1992. Even without its consequent status as a cultural benchmark, the syncretic and oracular view of history in Daughters, simultaneously anthropological and mythological, as well as the detailed mise-en-scène and the ravishing manipulations of light and montage are the cornerstones of the film's success.

Illusions, though it lacks any trace of Daughters' dazzling visual palette, and though it concentrates on a smaller and simpler cast of characters, clearly prefigures the pliable and critical perspectives on history that would characterize the director's justly famous feature. Indeed, part of what makes Illusions so cogent and transfixing, despite a muddy sound mix and the other technical vicissitudes of a film-school project, is that its deceptively straightforward scenario is so rife with contradictions and diverse implications that a half-hour film about a handful of people can reverberate in so many directions. Illusions' central figure is Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee), a mid-level producer and project supervisor on a fictional Hollywood lot called National Studios in 1942. Few if any women of that time would have occupied a position like Mignon's, but her intelligence, diplomacy, and stern persistence quickly impress, and the wartime context—we see rows and rows of female telephone operators and office workers, many of them charmed by the military officers who are "advising" the studio's output—furnishes its own alibi for Mignon's unlikely post. The present day's task requires Mignon to oversee the re-looping of a musical whose soundtrack was poorly synchronized, and whose female lead isn't much of a singer anyway. Mignon, brusquely managing the technicians in the soundbooth, is calmed and then engrossed by Ester Jeeter (Rosanne Katon), the young, gregarious, and unsophisticated session singer whom the studio has hired to salvage the number. Ester sings beautifully, utterly unconcerned with the political frissons surrounding her recruitment as an invisible black vocalist to redeem an all-white film. Meanwhile, Mignon's behavior grows erratic and her comportment unsettled in response to Ester's singing, leading to the revelation that Mignon herself is passing as white in her professional life. Her intuitive connection to Ester and their logical alliance within the ideological hierarchies of America's dream factory are nonetheless dangerous to Mignon's own security, not just in her job but in her very skin.

Illusions proceeds through some deft and subtle sleights of hand, building toward an emotional climax that may or may not qualify as "empowering," and demonstrating considerable resolve in leaving so many of its key questions unanswered. What is the nature or future of Mignon's acquaintance with Ester? How long has Mignon been working at National Studios, and how long will she remain there? Has she actively dissembled about her racial identity or has she simply (if "simply" is the right word) allowed her colleagues to naturalize or ignore the signs of her own otherness? These are all examples of the narrative riddles that Illusions elects not to resolve, but even more fascinating to me is the complexity, if not the inscrutability, of the film's politics. Is Mignon's labor, even her very presence in the flowchart of power at National Studios, a progressive achievement in itself, or must she use her position on someone else's behalf—and how or for whom is she to do this? What to make of the fact that the film's discourses on gender and race grow both richer and narrower as it continues, and Mignon's personal traits and circumstances subsume our earlier perspectives on other women, other races, other battlegrounds, literal and political? What to make of Dash's technical gamesmanship, using a vocal track of Ella Fitzgerald to dub Rosanne Katon in the role of Ester, such that the "real" singer isn't "really" singing, and thus refusing a clichéd linkage of blackness to authenticity? Illusions has been considered and critiqued from a multitude of positions in the decades since Dash made it, but rarely among more than academic audiences, and seldom with a full account of the movie's countless and enigmatic significations. Like Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, another monument within black women's moviemaking, Illusions resists the diminishment of black women within documented history and within Hollywood scenography, not by excavating a true-life tale of improbable heroism but by fabulating a scenario that never exactly happened, tugging at our gullibility while nonetheless stating a powerful case for the necessity of invented archives, origin myths, interbraided politics, and historical revisionism. Illusions might speak most powerfully to and from the standpoints of black women's experience, but in one way or another, as we make our way through this nifty hall of mirrors, we're all liable to catch some wisp of our own reflections. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1983 American Film Institute

Picked Flick #36: Boyz N the Hood

I remember like it was yesterday the televised moment when Kathleen Turner and Karl Malden strode onstage to announce the 1991 Oscar nominations, transcending the usual levels of obligatory hype by unveiling two Academy "firsts" that surged with real excitement. And what different breakthroughs they were: Disney's tuneful and resplendent rendering of Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to earn a nomination as Best Picture, and in a double-barreled achievement, 24-year-old John Singleton became the first African-American and the youngest filmmaker to be nominated as Best Director, for his severe and proudly didactic debut Boyz N the Hood. The times truly seemed to be a-changin', even if Singleton's rallying cry, born equally of anger and despondency, was still jockeying for space with the avatars of white middlebrow liberalism; in the category of Best Original Screenplay, Boyz stood side-by-side with Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, another hit film about race relations in contemporary Los Angeles that nonetheless appeared to spring from an entirely different cosmos. Bear in mind, too, that 1991 was also the year of New Jack City and Jungle Fever, with Ernest Dickerson's Juice and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust lurking just around the corner in January 1992. In the same twelve months that witnessed the public proclamation and the first, pathbreaking successes of the "New Queer Cinema," a New Black Cinema seemed equally viable and just as culturally urgent, furnishing common cause to established (mostly white) critics, urban (stereotypically black) audiences, and a rising and complicated tide of suburban (white youth) enthusiasm. Boyz was, in every way, the biggest hit of the bunch, and despite the grim despair that permeates its climactic cycle of violence, it augured most brightly for the future.

Is it possible now to watch Boyz and feel no pangs about Singleton's subsequent trajectory? Despite their generic diversity and ambitious premises, neither the distaff road-movie rumination Poetic Justice nor the inflammatory campus drama Higher Learning nor the historical commemoration Rosewood nor the sexually cautious but adventurously acted Shaft remake nor even Baby Boy, styled as a sort of post-date to the Oedipal tensions and turbulent maturations in Boyz N the Hood, generated much heat; by the time of his relative commercial successes, 2 Fast 2 Furious and Four Brothers, Singleton seemed to have capitulated to strict studio mandates, starting over at a lowly rung of an industry he was once so keen to crack open. Perhaps it is a convenient, retrospective fallacy to see in Boyz an allegory for the cruelly limited ecosystem of black Hollywood, where even the brightest talents have a hard time breaching the stern perimeters of ideology and corporate subservience. Or maybe Boyz—scripted, shot, acted, and edited with a clenched and gathering force that excuses its occasional gracelessness—derives its very potency from Singleton's first-timer energy, and the proper response is therefore not to mourn the disappointments that followed but to preserve our marvel at the might and the moment that Boyz so definitively embodied. As obedient as the film is to Hollywood grammar, conceived and rendered through utterly conventional and occasionally overstated techniques (dramatic close-ups, portentous inserts, dated and trivializing music), it sits almost wholly at odds with mass-manufacturable Hollywood sentiment. The passion behind the story, the hotheaded political outpourings, the relentless dichotomies of hope and danger, lucidity and impulse that fuel the montage bespeak the kind of personal signature that no one much expects from Hollywood movies anymore. Singleton strips his art of almost all ambiguity in the service of thematic and emotional and political transparency. Whether he was or is capable of greater formal sophistication than this seems beside the point; Boyz finds the boldness, the directness, the persuasive power in Hollywood style, rousing its audience toward renewed belief not only in the script's Afrocentric memes of economic and educational self-determination but in the modes of Hollywood storytelling, marshalling every beginner's trick in the book toward a tragic purgation of pity, anger, and fear.

The annihilation of Ricky Baker, harrowingly realized as both a repulsive coincidence and a graven inevitability, remains one of the most shocking and affecting deaths in modern movies. It occasions a test of virtually every character and relationship in the movie—the patient pacifism of Tre Styles, the flinty and precautionary wisdom of his father Furious Styles, the frightened but solicitous empathy of Tre's girlfriend Brandi, the unappealing but ferociously optimistic favoritism of Ricky's mother Brenda, and most of all, the loyalty and heavy-browed pessimism of Ricky's brother Doughboy, whose unexpected inheritance of the movie's moral weight is one of Singleton's most audacious moves as both writer and director. Through Doughboy, and through Ice Cube's superb inhabiting of the character, Boyz articulates the very logic and credence behind retaliatory, intramural violence that so much of the movie—particularly Furious Styles' various sermons on various local mounts—has worked hard to denounce. The impossibility of Tre's choice at the end of Boyz, whether to help avenge his closest comrade or to honor his family and his own beckoning future by recusing himself, strikes equally at our heads and our hearts, positing an ethical dilemma that is all the more gruesome for its very rootedness in everything Boyz has recounted and reflected up to that point (as opposed to abstracting a moral paradox and erecting a thin, beatific scaffolding of Movie around it, as in Sophie's Choice or The Green Mile). However forthrightly the film implores us to "Increase the Peace," Boyz conveys a rigorous sense of how difficult and self-alienating this seemingly faultless imperative can be, and Ice Cube, without glamorizing or glorifying Doughboy in the slightest, invests the character with his own critical, introspective grasp of this predicament. The choices these characters must make, so thickly in the midst of their youth, their frustrations, and their desires, present a crucible that no one really escapes; even when some closing captions inform us that Tre and Brandi succeeded in their quest for an all-black college education, the film never actually leaves their neighborhood. I suspect that Singleton believes that part of Tre and Brandi will always be stuck on these small lots and gridded streets of South Central L.A. No one, Singleton included, makes it out of this film unscathed, but instead of simply hectoring us with the hypothesis of cruel cultural determinism, Boyz enables us to feel this tragedy. We grasp the paucity of choices that present themselves in a world like this (the racial ghetto, the working class, the abandoned city) while the film nonetheless exhorts us, as well as its own characters, to choose—to change, quite simply, the world. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1991 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flicks #37: Hud & Cool Hand Luke

Exactly five minutes and thirty seconds of Hud transpire before Paul Newman enters. The time is hardly wasted, resplendent as it is with James Wong Howe's widescreen black-and-white photography, marrying pristine formal composition and sublime light and contrast to the parched desolation of a fossilized Texas; shimmering as it also is with a quiet Elmer Bernstein score that both shares and fosters the brimming-heart melancholy of the images. Long, flattened horizons; long, flattened cars; grass and scrub flattened by wind; long, wide roads; wide brims on tall hats atop tall men and boys with long gazes and flat voices; longing; ways of life, long but now flat. Hud evokes all of these things, quickly and fully, and if the tone and camerawork sometimes tilt into self-mythologizing, the myth exerts a strong claim, a persuasive allure. And then, speaking of allure, Brandon de Wilde's awkward, proud, lonely, and sentimental adolescent Lonnie Bannon goes looking for his roustabout uncle Hud, tracking his pink Cadillac (inevitably) to the curbside of some under-attended housewife, pipping and then blaring the horn on Hud's own steering wheel to call his uncle forth from some lithe, clammy iniquity. The screen door pops open: Hud. "Honcho," he calls to his nephew, leaning against a porch railing, insolent, the cock of every walk, "I just hope for your sake that this house is on fire."

Child, the house is definitely on fire. In a crossword puzzle, Hud, in or out of italics, would serve well as a three-letter synonym for sex. And yet, for an actor so universally and deservedly associated with the quality of decency—with bounteous charity, compassionate politics, a legendary marriage, faultless generosity toward his co-stars—Newman's haughty indecency in Hud is a perennial shock, feeding risk and danger into the movie but also into Newman's own performance, because it doesn't come naturally. Newman shapes Hud's libido into something elemental to the character and the story but also, from an actorly standpoint, far from effortless. Where Brando's Stanley Kowalski melds virility with vulgarity at the character's core and mantle, Newman's prowess but also his limits as an actor open up an interesting chasm between his essential, irrefragable manliness, inhabited as casually as a flannel shirt through a five-decade career, and his technical, occasionally studious projection of sexuality. Among the actors to whom he was initially most compared—Brando, Clift, and Dean—Newman is simultaneously, for me, the least gifted and the most interesting. Brando's acting, practiced and deliberate though it is, feels buried down in his marrow, Clift's and Dean's wound and tangled around their nerve endings. Newman's the only one whom one can imagine spending his life another way (in business, in public service, in friendship, in good health), and though the urge to act seems to run deep, allowing him a physical spontaneity and a palpable conviction on screen, what he delivers as acting comes across as a very conscious, careful process, self-reflective and scrupulous. His casting in Hud is therefore even more inspired than it looks. Everyone on screen, especially Melvyn Douglas' humiliated patriarch and Patricia Neal's tart housekeeper (disillusioned and saddened by her own self-protective wisdom), wrestle with those id-level responses to Hud that are a grounding conceit of the script, but they also, because of Newman, engage mentally with Hud. Their questions hum in the air: how could a son so insistently disappoint and rebuke a father? How could a man so degrade himself before a woman, seizing what he might have gotten by asking? How could Hud be so careless with a brother's memory, so inadequate to his shadow? These questions are richer than they might have been in Hud because Newman—tactfully and artfully, but also because this is the sort of actor he is—creates Hud as a sum of conscious choices, not an animal or an icon. His vicissitudes, shames, affronts, and inadequacies are the evolving products of a human life, not the contours of an allegorical figure. He seems like he could change, but he doesn't, or won't. He retains a core of decency which he rarely allows to breathe, for reasons which are his own, though Newman invites us to guess at them.

Four years later, in Cool Hand Luke, Newman stepped into another leading role that the screenwriters and the director can't help but position in the realm of the parable. They haven't fully agreed, with each other or with themselves, about what kind of parable, so Christic imagery dukes it out with midcentury rebel chic and also, amid the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, with a vision of lean, able masculinity Taylorized beyond belief and slung between the alternatives of compliance and execution. Conrad Hall, as gifted a cinematographer as Howe but temperamentally dissimilar, dapples the cast in natural light and allows the camera to draw energy from their exertions, their impudence, their bonhomie. Interior scenes are less visually interesting, though one of Luke's best scenes is one of its quietest and most static: the hero's covert interview with his dying mother, Arletta (the incomparable Jo Van Fleet). Through it all, Stuart Rosenberg's movie toggles back and forth between a portrait of community and an ode to the individual, but somewhere along the way, its thematic ambivalence and episodic structure start to feel like major virtues: Cool Hand Luke is one of our most lived-in and pleasurably paced odes to nonconformity, magnifying the athletic, good-natured gratuitousness of the hog-wrestling scene in Hud to full feature length. Newman looks and acts much more at home in Lucas Jackson's skin than in Hud Bannon's eroticized armor, basing this performance not on productive paradox but on flexibility, charisma, alertness in the moment. He trims the more florid gestures and supporting performances to human size—adding a further dimension to Luke's eventual plea that his comrades start living for and through themselves, not vicariously through him. Those interesting moments of crisis notwithstanding, Newman's utter confidence as an actor steadies the movie through its shakier passages, and he thus lifts the curtain on the second, long stage of his career. By this bifurcating arithmetic, Hud is the best example of Newman as Student, adapting himself to a difficult movie, deepening the film through his own hard work and contradictory traits; Cool Hand Luke is the best example of Newman as Teacher, of a movie adapting itself to Newman, surviving its most dated effects and questionable story choices by dint of the actor's contagious aura of integrity, versatility, credibility, and good sense. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

(Images © 1963 Paramount Pictures and © 1967 Warner Bros. Pictures)

Picked Flick #38: Home for the Holidays

One of my favorite costume-props in modern American movies, right up there with Margo Tenenbaum's Izod dresses, is Claudia Larson's ribbed and massive magenta coat in Home for the Holidays. As Claudia (Holly Hunter) is quick to observe, especially when cornered by an enminked high-school classmate from a lifetime ago, this isn't her enormous coat: "I, of course, lost the stylish one that fits me in the airport." Upon arriving to her parents' crammed and gewgawed home for an inevitably awkward Thanksgiving, Claudia is coerced into this mulberry nightmare by her huskily antic mother Adele (Anne Bancroft), who foists it upon her before Claudia has even claimed her baggage. This means, yes, that Adele brought the coat along before she could possibly know that her daughter needed one: an early sign that the impossible yet possible family in Home for the Holidays is both perceptive and preposterous, knowingly and even uncannily predictive of each other's needs and hurts even though they are unable to salve them, for themselves or for each other, which state of affairs the film regards as merry, sad, and a little bit grotesque.

Home for the Holidays is a tottering but strangely durable object, just like the Larson family it chronicles. The Time Out Film Guide dismisses Home as "a modest film (in every sense)," but I take exception on two grounds: that the film's modesty is just as much a credit as a demerit, and that the structural detours, lopsided gags, and vastly disparate tones in this film are often quite immodest. Nothing in the movie asks you not to notice these asymmetries, and the resulting chaos of moods and performance styles illuminates something in the script, and in holiday rituals themselves, and maybe even in middle-class American families, that a firmer directorial hand and a more balanced film would never be able to access. So, skimming away the elements that plainly don't work—Steve Guttenberg, the farting grandmother (Geraldine Chaplin being less to blame than her silly part), the deliberate spilling of a stuffed turkey carcass over the head of a fuming sibling—a good deal of Home for the Holidays feels nervy, adventurous, and unapologetically disillusioned. The script, for one, is full of broken syntax, non sequiturs, lines that are interrupted or else just trail off, and distended sentences that cry out for loopy, riffy enactment. Here is Bancroft's Adele admonishing her grown daughter for abandoning her love of painting: "All I know is, whenever anybody comes in here, they make a beeline for your brother Tommy's picture. 'Who did that?' they say. 'My oldest, my smartest daughter,' I answer, but she's busy squandering her God-given talent filling in the holes in some dead people's pictures in Chicago, the Windy City." What makes the whole line, the whole speech, is "the Windy City." Aside from the gratuitousness with which a mother reminds a daughter of her own brother's name; from the rude way she actually reminds herself, mid-sentence, to name favorites among her brood; from the implication throughout the movie that few (if any) outsiders ever do pass through this room; from the indictment of the portrait itself, which bespeaks no talent whatever; from the bruising obliviousness with which Adele gets the nature of Claudia's job totally wrong; there's the standing fact that Adele doesn't end her thought anywhere near where she began it. In fact, she dead-ends herself in a little cul-de-sac of empty, accumulated knowledge. The film teems with off-rhythms like this: lighting and makeup are insistently unflattering, despite several scenes of dressing, bathing, and primping; Claudia always loses the words of the songs she sings; the whole cast, stunningly well-matched for physical resemblance, are vocally all over the place; speeches and toasts digress into outright opacity; everyone in the film drives poorly, and too quickly. Like one of Adele's rattling speeches, the film doesn't end anywhere near where it began, charting an arc from comically embittered candor to wild romantic mythmaking. But then, there are deep structural rhymes, too, as in the twinned prologue and epilogue. At the outset, the hermetically closed serenity of a Renaissance painting that Claudia restores in extreme close-up, breaking the whole of the artwork into isolated vignettes. At the end, more vignettes: a montage of faux home-movies depicting islands of ecstatic happiness in the life of every character, though we have already learned by now that the surrounding context for these moments is something less than happiness. Surely, we must apply this pattern to the optimistic mirage of new love that almost concluded the movie. Of course, we hope we're wrong, and I don't think the film faults us too heavily for hoping.

Home for the Holidays has a spirit and an ostensible shapelessness that are pure Cassavetes, enveloping a script that only seems to reach for the precise calculations of 1930s screwball comedy. Gene-splice Cukor's Holiday with Cassavetes' Love Streams, deny the mise-en-scène either beauty or the defensive affectation of obvious unbeauty, and assign as director one of our most controlled, businesslike, coolly mannered actresses, who had helmed only one movie before this one and none since, but who is clearly jazzed by the vandalish act of producing an id-driven, deeply felt, but sloppy-at-the-edges movie that rewards all the impulses and admits all the angers that she tends to suppress as an actress, and you get a movie as weird as this one. An off-kilter prose poem of run-on sentences. And sentence fragments. A raucous comedy tuned to the chords of middle-age, and thus closed off, almost by definition, to the typical (young, male) audience for raucous comedy. A cast of top-flight actors, united only in having been so underutilized in bright but vaguely disappointing careers, and pushed in this instance well away from their comfort zones. Note, though, that Foster's embrace of cacophony at the level of acting, to include her heroic patience with Robert Downey Jr.'s exhilarating overplaying, has been firmly prevented from afflicting either the soundtrack (prim, predictable, Polygram-stamped) or the stabilized color palette (chestnut browns, burgundy, gold, black, and winter white, plus those offending yet scrupulously managed splashes of hot pink).

I know what you're thinking: much of the above reads like reasons to dislike the movie. My partner, aghast at this film's inclusion on this list (and at such a high rung!) gently exhorted me to reiterate that this is a list of favorites, not a list of "bests." Home for the Holidays is indeed a favorite, but also, for me, something of a best: a dramedy about the funny-harsh messiness of families that truly doesn't blanch at being funny-harsh and messy. A middle-brow entertainment, a holiday picture of all things, that preserves the spiky energies of a rehearsal and the dubious, even iconoclastic instincts of a passive-aggressive analysand. And a movie that halts, three or four times, for moments of truth between characters—the final antipathy between two sisters, the gorgeous love between a sister and a brother—that differ entirely from almost anything the movies ever show us, and that carry the rest of this shaggy-dog film to glory. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1995 Polygram Filmed Entertainment/Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #39: The Hours

The Hours, both Michael Cunningham's novel and Stephen Daldry's film, continue to frustrate and upset me, in ways that are at this point indistinguishable from fascination. Sometimes that fascination is purer, more awed. At other times, both the book and the movie emanate a powerful mediocrity, a distinct aroma of cliché, of unmet ambitions. I often furrow my brow at the relentless lyricism of Cunningham's prose, which, in this book as in others, strives rather arduously for showy, synesthetic images where more modest narration would happily suffice. He writes as though with each paragraph he hopes to secure our vote, some badge of our readerly devotion, even though the heady conceptions of his books sometimes trip over all the stylistic filigrees. And yet, Cunningham broaches subjects and themes that are difficult to articulate, or even to acknowledge, and he is capable of real astuteness in how he treats them: the ways in which death can feel impolite, just as caretaking can be officious and desperate; the worrying, thin line between liking someone enormously and loving them merely adequately, and how a shift from one to the other can be more painful than any dislike or hatred; the ways in which people look to art, especially books and music and movies, for telepathic prompts for their own life-choices.

The movie version of The Hours shares the arresting ambitions and the psychological acuity of the book, as well as its prosaic and vaguely elitist excesses. To my mind, in recent popular cinema, American Beauty is the movie's closest cousin, both of them built atop scripts that can seem courageously lucid and dismayingly glib within single scenes or transitions, both directed in a glossy, theatrical, actor-friendly style that serves and also sabotages the material by playing up the artifice. You can hold your ear up to American Beauty or The Hours and hear a worrying howl from deep within the upper bourgeoisie, demanding and deserving to be taken seriously, but you can also somehow hear the production teams slapping their own backs about the casts they've hooked, the certainty of prizes, the Big Issues they broach. However, while the moods and structures of American Beauty, for all of its technical audacity, feel smaller and more market-tested as the years go by, The Hours totally engrosses me. I keep sitting before it, open-minded, sometimes open-mouthed. It becomes clearer, for one thing, that the movie has darkened the book considerably. Disapproval of Richard Brown's esoteric, self-obsessed novel is more general. Vanessa Bell is more unhinged, almost repulsed, by the ravenous loneliness of her sister Virginia Woolf. Laura Brown already intends suicide as she drops her son with an indifferent neighbor. Clarissa Vaughan lets slip a major, unwitting insult to her daughter, and instead of nursing a fond, fumbling reminiscence with Louis Waters on her comfy living room couch, she erupts and nearly dissolves in her cold kitchen, where the light is the color of frost, the faucets detonate for no reason, and Louis looks on, agitated and annoyed, from practically a mile away across the countertop. This last scene is my favorite in the movie: its scary unraveling of Meryl Streep, usually so composed and sometimes to a fault, encapsulates the wholly credible and almost lymphatic unease beneath the film's mannered language, the roiling score, the sometimes precious match-cuts.

I suppose it's no mystery that such a disciple of modern film actresses as myself would get swept up in this movie. I have been known to listen to the Kidman-Moore-Streep commentary track on the DVD while I clean or cook. Still, The Hours collects so many disparate, exciting actors into such a range of parts that it's almost hard to get a bead on the performances: secondary players like Miranda Richardson and Eileen Atkins grow more interesting over time; my regard for all three star turns cycles up and down; and character approaches that click well in one scene, or against one particular co-star, feel subtly wrong in or against another. In some ways, the movie cuts more to the point of Cunningham's novel than his own prose really can: the whole piece activates such complex, elliptical relationships among notions of acting, essence, ritual, privilege, performance, gender, art, sex, and death that it somehow deepens the themes to see the bodies, scrutinize the faces, smell the money, feel the flatness of the screen. A major concern of The Hours is the ambivalence of love, the working out of conflicted emotions over time, even over generations. Fitting, then, that I keep wrestling with this book and this movie, frowning at their shortcuts and platitudes, hooking onto their sublime moments, assigning both texts in course after course, wondering where our attachments to art really come from, how fraught they can be with disapproval as well as wonder. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2002 Miramax Films and Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #40: Bring It On

An infelicitously timed telephone call from my father made me late to the theater for my first screening of Bring It On. I hate to be late, and I'm never ever late to movies. Making matters worse, I made my friend late, too, which means that we didn't even know until the second time we watched Bring It On about the all-cheering character introductions at the film's beginning. In other words, having already gorged ourselves gleefully on the movie's unflagging and ennobling pop energy, the pristine palette, the tartly drawn characters, the strength and economy of the editing, the freshness of the script, the giddy spectacle of the cheerleading routines, the infectious teen spirit of the actors, the robust but delicate tenor between spoof and sincerity, we waited and waited for the DVD release (having caught Bring It On on the very last night of its second-run tour through Ithaca, NY) and discovered to our delight that there was even more movie to enjoy. Bring it on, indeed!

I haven't met anyone who thinks Bring It On is a bad film, though I can only assume such characters exist. Rather, in my experience, Bring It On cleaves its viewership into two camps: those who see a merely adequate but derivative and utterly unspecial movie about cheerleading forchrissakes, and those who see the Grand Illusion of modern high-school comedies. I have found that it is difficult to communicate across the divide between the agnostics and the devotés. It's even a little bit difficult to communicate among the devotés, because for the converted, to be in the presence of Bring It On is to be bathed in total, self-evident pleasure. Explanation falters out of what amounts to unnecessity, but let's try. Let's start with the single frame I have reproduced here, from a mutedly climactic scene where duelling squad captains Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) and Isis (Gabrielle Union) exchange succinct, slightly tense, but generous advice about how to keep their cheerleaders in perfect formation during their respective routines at the national competition. Note that almost every primary color as yet discovered by man is evidenced in this shot, but the overall effect is more engaging than garish. Note that the strong, diagonal, and yet flattering designs for the uniforms of the Rancho Carne Toros and the Compton Clovers toe a precocious line between a silly, unexploitative sauciness and a tough, sporting conviction about the tasks at hand. Note that the framing plays up a symmetry between Torrance and Isis, conveying that these longtime rivals have entered into something like a mutual understanding, even as the sharp contrast between the two backgrounds—blue and white color bars behind Isis, a percolating crowd behind Torrance—continue to set them off from each other. Actually, I emend myself: Torrance is the Prime Meridian of this shot, exactly dividing the two background fields on either side of her, subtly reminding us that the scene isn't so much about a standoff between the mavens as a turning point within Torrance herself, who now meets Isis as a fond equal without relinquishing any of her own competitive zeal. Chicas, you can pause or replay Bring It On liberally and find care, undertones, and tiny formal ironies like these. It isn't Orson Welles, but for crying out loud, when was the last time color, composition, blocking, and design were this precisely calibrated in a teen comedy?

And not just any teen comedy, either, but one with a bevy of diversely likeable characters? Starring a pedigreed teenage actress who bounces right into the kind of role that pedigreed teenage actresses often convince themselves, understandably, that they should avoid? Scribe Jessica Bendinger knows what she's doing, basing things around a somewhat standard-issue plot for movies like this (the rich white girls are stealing the poorer black girls' routines, but the latest white girl Feels Bad About This!), but sticking the expected resolution (the white girl makes guilty, philanthropic amends) into the center of the picture, where it elicits a properly brusque refusal from characters who don't want or need to be condescended to. Bring It On manages to get its PC cupcake and eat it, too: double-standards are memorably laid bare, but a strict, objective meritocracy remains firmly in place. That means, the best bringers still win, and how! The final plume in the movie's hat, or maybe the pom-pom in its hand, is director Peyton Reed, whom nobody seems to have told that teen flicks require impersonal direction, largely to keep the actors in frame and under Seventeen lighting. Instead, Reed shapes the scenes he wants, none of them better than a piquant flirtation at a bathroom sink that doesn't need any dialogue. He even wrings some fresh laughs from one of those boilerplate sequences I hate, the kind of montage in which 19 stereotypes and walking punchlines fail at a task, nearly failing at their own humanity, so that the 20th person looks like a comparative gem. Bring It On isn't a comparative gem. It's just a gem, rallying all the pep that pop movies can muster and sticking with you afterward. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2000 Universal Pictures.

Picked Flick #41: Jackie Brown

Reservoir Dogs wasn't my cuppa, but I can see that it has its virtues. Pulp Fiction glistens and grooves, an almost immaculate pop object, and yet I never seem to reach for it when I'm shuffling through my old favorites. The first Kill Bill boasted a beguiling structure and some whizz-bang craftsmanship, especially in the action scenes, which made it only more surprising and intriguing that Kill Bill, Vol. 2 slowed to such a relative crawl, plumbing for feeling instead of laying on the pizzazz. These movies all hold together beautifully, and yet—when you absolutely, positively got to thrill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes. Jackie Brown is the AK-47 in Tarantino's arsenal, which is all the more surprising because, on the surface, the director seems to have more on his mind than blowing us away.

Jackie Brown starts hitting pitch-perfect notes in the opening credits, and it literally never stops. Pam Grier, dolled up for her job as a stewardess for Cabo Air, glides into the right edge of the frame, while Bobby Womack's creamily desperate anthem "Across 110th Street" sets a pristine, hummable stage for both the character and the movie. It's such a simple gesture, capturing Jackie so quickly at her coolest, then gradually hastening her toward the airport gate as she realizes she's running out of time. The whole movie will plot this same course, not just because Jackie stays all but invisible for the next half-hour (and therefore has to hustle a little to reclaim her own film), but because Tarantino's direction and his script are so exquisitely keyed in to Jackie's pragmatism and her panic: "I make about sixteen thousand, with retirement benefits that ain't worth a damn... If I lose my job, I gotta start all over again, but I got nothing to start over with." Jackie's basic, wholly adequate motivation for lawlessness is that from where she's standing, she can see the dying of the light. When she drags herself out of jail, she worries about how bad she looks. When she sits down with her obviously smitten bail bondsman, the first thing they discuss is how to quit smoking without gaining weight. Pam Grier is so pert, charismatic, and funny in the role that there isn't anything cloying about Jackie's anxieties, just as there is nothing overly precious about the film's presentation of them—even when Tarantino lays down a vocal track of a much younger Grier singing "Long Time Woman" as a funky and succinct counterpoint to this older, soberer, but still very funky version of herself. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Jackie Brown is how unfoolish and—a very un-Tarantino word—how wise this film looks and sounds while espousing a then-34-year-old, nonblack, male filmmaker's vision of Jackie's predicament. Though the colors and songs are all Tarantino-brite, the framings are contemplative and often very simple, even amidst key episodes in the criss-crossy plot; as the narrative accelerates and the vise of possible failure closes around Jackie and her weathered but plucky accomplice Max Cherry (an invaluable Robert Forster), the film never deviates from its carefully restrained pace and rhythms. Almost every sequence is designed such that seemingly simple actions communicate several things at once: Jackie trying on a new suit, Bridget Fonda refusing to answer a phone, Robert De Niro looking for his car in a parking lot, Lisa Gay Hamilton making nervous contact with Jackie in a food court. Every one of them is crucial to Jackie Brown's plot, but they've all been filmed with the frisky, on-the-fly texture of grace notes and improvs. The film has an exacting, exquisitely calibrated structure, loping forward and then looping backward, but the steady hand and living, breathing humanity behind every moment lend Jackie Brown a warm, plausible, and deeply enjoyable spontaneity.

Tarantino and Grier have "got" Jackie the way Mankiewicz and Bette Davis "got" Margo Channing, within a comparably ambitious script and a similar marshaling of the actress' own backstory and persona into the service of the character. Too, if Jackie is Margo, Samuel L. Jackson is the Addison DeWitt of ghetto crime. His charisma, irony, and verbal dexterity are such that the audience instantly falls for him, but then our breath really catches as the actor and the film lay bare the discomfiting essence of the character. Ordell Robbie is, obviously, an even tougher, more vicious piece of work than Addison, but he still profits mightily from Tarantino's knack for spinning wily fun out of a fundamental, uncompromised melancholy—since Ordell, no less than Jackie or Max, lives and acts from a critical juncture between his youth and his legacy. Almost any one-line sample of Jackson's dialogue and delivery is a devilish, delicious, highly profane movie unto itself: "My ass might be dumb, but I ain't no dumb ass" or "You think I'm gonna let a little cheese-eating nigga like this fuck that up?" or "Shit, Jackie, you come in this place on a Saturday night, I bet you need nigga repellent to keep motherfuckers off your ass!" Jackie's response to this last is a very modest "I do okay," but for Jackie, as for the film, that's a monumental understatement. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Miramax Films/Mighty Mighty Afrodite Productions.

Picked Flick #42: Kiss of the Spider Woman

Do titles get any better than Kiss of the Spider Woman? When I first heard about the movie, reading over the lists of Oscar nominees in the local TV Guide—it was the last year before I actually watched the telecast—I couldn't imagine why anyone wouldn't vote for it, or how a movie with that title could be anything but hypnotic, dangerous, creative. When a poster appeared under a "Coming Soon" placard at the single-screen theater of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, I marveled at the exotic graphic design, the enticing indigoes and aquas of the central image, the diagonal affectations of the fonts. When I learned at the beginning of high school, amid the faintest inner whispers about my sexual dispositions, that the story concerned a gay man and a political radical sharing a prison cell in South America, and that the Spider Woman was one of several fantastic movieland figures that the window-dresser described as vicarious pleasures for the Marxist, I knew I had to find the movie. I didn't know what either a window-dresser or a political radical was. Even as I gobbled the movie three or four times during my five-day rental allotment from Mr. Video in Hanau, Germany, I never quite absorbed Valentin's role or perspective. Even as I read the superlative novel, and then performed Molina's opening monologue in theater classes and local drama competitions, my hold on the story was only half-formed, tipped voluptuously in favor of one of its protagonists. Only in college, during my almost annual returns to this story I thought I knew so well, did I start to comprehend not only that a whole second movie awaited my discovery, rooted in forms of protest and discrimation that I had only begun to grasp, but that my early adoration of the film, which hung (I thought) with such sophistication on the shoulders of a young teenager, floated atop a complex network of projections, evasions, narcissisms, misreadings, and a rather blithe giving over of myself into the most comfortable aspects of fantasy.

And so Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film in which I had recognized glimmers of myself with such early and total astonishment, stunned me just as much by calling out my naïvetés and myopias—not from some new or rejected frontier of knowledge, where I was used to being shocked or upbraided by life, but from an already treasured and intimate object. It's no mystery to me how Babenco's film sets this sort of trap, at least for a certain kind of viewer. Where the early sequences are lusciously cinephiliac, with their mocking but affectionate recreations of dubious melodramas, and their willowy transitions from that universe of screen memory to the clammy, witty, and exciting reality of the jail cell, the later sequences assert their politics more forthrightly, with the hard lighting, strained faces, and tightened editing of other Latin American political dramas, like Luis Puenzo's The Official Story or Babenco's own magnificent Pixote. Fans who take Molina's epicurean escapism at nearly face value, as I did, are likely to feel like the second hour sells them out. The seductions of John Neschling's music or Patricio Bisso's versatile costuming don't evaporate as the film reaches its grave climax, but they shape-shift in a way that requires a full immersion in every side of what Babenco, working from Puig's ingenious template, has constructed up to that point. Almost by definition, the movie divides its sympathetic audience of marginalized liberals, forcing them to recombine by movie's end in a richer, more expansive spirit of solidarity: quite literally, and purposefully, less fabulous than the earlier chapters. It's a hugely ambitious journey that the movie takes, with impressive if erratic artistry. Nothing in the movie, not the acting or the editing or the camerawork or the story structure, is immune to miscalculation here or there, but Kiss also achieves substantial, flavorful successes in each of these areas. Best of all, because it is subtle and intelligent in raising questions about storytelling, spectatorship, sympathy, borderzones, clichés, stereotypes, and sexual politics—terrains where a great many movies start bonking you over the head, or else just flee in all the wrong directions—Kiss of the Spider Woman consistently surpasses its own flaws, challenges your own sureties, turning them all into productive questions rather than simple blemishes.

Kiss of the Spider Woman debuted the same year as The Purple Rose of Cairo, just a few rungs down on this list. Both movies understand and reward the unique devotions and pleasures of the passionate moviegoer, even as they dissect such devotion with an often uncomfortable accuracy. I learned even more from Kiss, and I feel even closer to it, because its range of themes and arguments is a little broader, and it humbled me from ever assuming that I've got any movie fully pinned down, no matter how much I love it or how many times I've seen it. Several of the film's pleasures are "simple": Sonia Braga is exceptional, Hurt and Julia have terrific moments, the screenplay's twists are truly surprising, and the whole movie looks and sounds great (especially for its low budget). It's a medicine wrapped in a morality lesson baked into a succulent dessert. When the damned thing ever finally arrives on DVD, we'll all have cause to celebrate. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1985 HB Filmes/Island Alive.

Picked Flick #43: The Corporation

As delightful and hopeful as it has been to observe the popular renaissance of nonfiction film within the mainstream market during these last five years, I've been worried by the trends of self-righteously simplified rhetoric and of over-reliance on arbitrary stock footage (e.g., random bombs while we hear about the Cold War, random Arabs while we hear about Bush family interests in Saudi Arabia). I keep my fingers crossed that more documentarians will show the stamina to live alongside and observe their subjects in real time, as in the superb Love & Diane, instead of building retroactive jigsaws from available archive materials; and that more filmmakers will trust that your subject doesn't need to be explicitly political in order to yield major intimations about social structures and hierarchies, like Spellbound did; or, best of all, that historically and politically premised documentaries will harvest meaty, substantial connections between past and present circumstances, without always prescribing the responses of their audience.

This kind of haughty, anti-intellectual approach is most thrillingly avoided in the tantalizing and fact-soaked film The Corporation, an emblem of leftist cinema at its most honest and effective. Indeed, The Corporation does a magisterial job of raising all sorts of urgent alarms about the traumatic effects of modern capitalism, without privileging reductive cant over concise, illustrated argumentation, and without preaching only to the pre-converted. The premise of the film's opening sequences is sublimely simple, but unexpectedly imposing: that is, to define what a corporation is, exactly—one professor at the Harvard Business School abashedly realizes that nobody has ever quite put this query to him before—and then to sketch the conceptual contours and legal entitlements that don't just allow but require corporations to maximize profits without any ethical qualms or qualifications. From here, the movie hurtles into its second conceit, aligning the hard-wired behaviors of corporations with the basic symptoms of diagnosed psychopaths, and then through a roulette wheel of eloquent case histories. Many of these, like the extended pièce de résistance about how FoxNews quashed their own story about America's contaminated milk supply, achieve the expected goal of arraigning white-collar pirates and amoral dollar-chasers, but the detail and power in the arguments are more supple and lifelike than one usually finds in films of this type. Plus, the pirates often furnish their own swords on which to fall. Wall Street trader Carlton Brown admits that he and every other trader he knows spent September 11, 2001, gleefully selling gold to the highest bidders and relishing the market's good fortune, quite literally. Lucy Hughes, a chirpy vice-president from Initiative Media, tips her hand about how she abets toy manufacturers and other clients to brainwash children into demanding their products. "Is it ethical? I don't know," Lucy admits, but it's the job she has to do, and she does it well. Chris Komisarjevsky, a corporate spin doctor whom some Orwellian neologist has rechristened a "perception manager," describes his job as though the corporations themselves—rather than, say, impoverished laborers or lampooned environmentalists or snookered consumers or corraled protesters or, in one especially vile anecdote, Bolivian citizens who were taxed by Bechtel for the privilege of drinking their own river and rain water—were the victims of an enormously sentimentalized marginality. "I help corporations have a voice," Komisarjevsky testifies, "and I help corporations share their point of view about how they feel about things." Though we almost never hear the interviewers' prompts, it takes a seasoned and careful approach to draw out motivations and rationalizations from such a broad spectrum of CEOs, activists, traders, historians, professors, consultants, and spies. Furthermore, these accounts always refine our sense of how capitalism operates, from its skyscraper summits through its middle management to its immiserated workers: the full canvas of the movie is richer and more important than the local shocks, cheers, or hisses occasioned by any given detail.

Even more to the filmmakers' credit, they film all of their interview subjects before the same black background, in the same light, so that we must actually listen and ruminate on our own behalves in order to assess the value of each person's perspective. If we have trouble discerning whether Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, ex-CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, is an unexpected voice of reason or a miscreant in heavy denial, or whether Roy Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpet, is an epiphanic convert to geo-friendly policy or a canny soothsayer bending to the shape of a new market, the film offers no editorialized clues to sway us one way or the other. Some of the factual assertions are sobering and intractable, and you walk away edified, as from an especially potent lecture: who among us realized that, in practice, the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution didn't so much enfranchise former slaves, as per its stated intention, as it enfranchised corporations with newfound permission to own property, engulf other businesses, perpetuate themselves indefinitely, and assert the same rights as living citizens? Other material in The Corporation is energizing and practical, like the rising success rates of anti-corporate agricultural crusades in India, and the concatenation of websites and NGO referrals that conclude the movie. The movie's moral barometer is sensitive, and its funny bone is lively. Sure, some of the stock footage feels like empty accompaniment to voice-over accounts, but the film's overall graphic conception is smart and elucidating: one particular motif, resembling a maze or spreadsheet of problematic corporate practices, is a terse, purposefully overstuffed reminder of how effulgent and multifaceted the problems of corporate capitalism really are. The Corporation knowingly bites off more than it can chew, but it still chews on more than most films even bite off, and it is persuasively grounded in our world's complex reality, without drying up into a husk of scholastic finger-wagging. It's the Lord of the Rings of modern documentaries: epic, vivid, wise, well-paced, expansive. It's the kind of movie that makes you want to do more with your life. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 2003, 2004 Big Picture Media Corporation/Zeitgeist Films.

Picked Flick #44: Shame

Across all of the arts, I think that the most urgent and sophisticated depiction of war is the one Bertolt Brecht constructs in his play Mother Courage and Her Children, in which the rumbling of military convoys and the cracks of artillery are mostly offstage echoes. The focalizing character is Anna Fierling, dubbed "Mother Courage" for both laudatory and facetious reasons, who strains to make a living for herself and her three bastard children while trudging through the muddy, scabbed grounds of the battlefields and surrounding towns, selling her second-hand wares to whomever, on whatever side, of whatever nationality or political persuasion, is willing to part with a buck, or a mark, or a krona, or a pair of boots, or whatever. Brecht helps us to understand war as a series of dark negotiations with one's own ethics, with one's own being, and with the competing ways of construing oneself as a communal figure: as a partner, a parent, a patriot, a pragmatist, a profiteer, a bystander, an objector. No one now living—at least no one paying any attention—can doubt the continuing relevance of this viewpoint, and the need for its proclamation: war, when it is happening, and it is almost always happening, is never "over there," it is always here, in its reverberations, its roots, its dollars and cents, even in the most isolationist refusals of war's reality.

Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame presents itself in as un-Brechtian a style as it possibly could, but the intelligence and the inclusiveness with which it examines war as a social and human condition are very nearly on a par with Brecht's. In Bergman's Persona, made two years previously, Liv Ullmann reacts with mute shock and terror to televised images of martial atrocities in Southeast Asia, and to the horrifying conviction of a Buddhist monk setting fire to himself in protest of man's inhumanity. War provides a crucial context for the vicious psychological retrenchment that Persona subsequently explores, particularly via the Ullmann character, but Shame confronts the issue in a much more direct and thorough-going way. Eva and Jan Rosenberg (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) are married concert musicians who live out a rustic existence on a Scandinavian island—farming and raising chickens, struggling to get the radio and the truck engine to work, ferrying to the mainland for necessities and the occasional luxury indulgence. In Shame's first scene, Ullmann and von Sydow wake in their beds (not, crucially, the same bed), and as she rather brusquely dresses and washes her face, he forlornly recounts a dream of the previous evening. An undeniable chill, if not quite a hostility, exists between these people, though its relative severity will rise and fall through the first half of the film, sometimes warming to an optimistic intimacy, sometimes tumbling into a scary antagonism. Meanwhile, we learn quickly that whatever unnamed country of which the Rosenbergs are citizens, albeit quite secluded ones, has been rent for several years by civil war, whose armies might invade their own environs at any moment. In many films, even ones by Bergman, these dual narratives would serve as metaphors or reflections of each other: the on-and-off combat within the Rosenbergs' marriage and the literal war that, for now, is only visible in the processions of military trucks and the low-flying jets that occasionally pass overhead. The genius of Shame, though, rendered with stomach-turning immediacy and realism, is that we experience all of this as one narrative. The gnawing discontent between Eva and Jan is directly conditioned by the war; it is one of the thousands of tongues through which the war speaks. She expresses contempt for his tearful, paralyzed anxieties; he doesn't understand how she can listen to so much more of the radio coverage than he and yet reflect so much less sensitivity and fear in response; she wishes he would fix the fucking truck, partially so they will have a means of escape if marauding armies do appear, and partially because he's such a goddamned procrastinator in general. About a half-hour into Shame, with a speed, a potency, and a plausibility that are equally hard to bear, the martial conflict explodes at the Rosenbergs' very own door, frightening them to their cores, annihilating their privacy, and serving to draw them back together but also to make them scowl even more deeply at each others' shortcomings. Again, these personal clashes are not sidebars or collateral effects of the war: they are part of what war is. As circumstances deteriorate even further in Shame, so too do the relations between the Rosenbergs.

Along with how it pervades our personalities, slips under our very skins, the other vile and best-kept secret of war is its shapeshifting ability. Like a flammable liquid, it pours itself into any space or vessel, and is prone to ignite anywhere. The second half of Shame, now that the Rosenbergs realize how immersed they are in the crisis, shows how arbitrarily they are pawned between the opposing factions, how their friendships and their enmities become hopelessly confused, how in a very Brechtian fashion—if not, again, in a Brechtian idiom—war becomes a marketplace for terrible barters, including sexual ones, which give onto their own cycles of self-defeating revenge. If I'm making Shame sound like harrowing viewing, then I'm doing it justice; few films are so excoriating in their images or their trajectories. But there is nothing abstruse or reductive or inaccessible about it: it doesn't need manichean figures of good and evil like Platoon, or peekaboo movements in and out of the maelstrom like Saving Private Ryan, or even the ornate and remote meditative koans of The Thin Red Line. Ambitious and indispensable as Malick's movie is, its motivating quarry is the philosophical knot of war, whereas Shame draws the rutted map of war's psychology, in bold and grievous strokes recognizable to any audience, and liable to frighten and humble them all. Ullmann, exquisitely forceful and believable in her role, has exactly one Bergmanesque soliloquy about the states and layers of being and suffering, but even this builds to a ringing, legible, and haunting conclusion. Imagining the war-torn world as the collective nightmare of humanity, of a global conscience in a restive, inattentive sleep, she asks herself, "What happens when the person dreaming all of this and all of us awakes, and is ashamed?" (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1968 Svensk Filmindustri/Janus Films.

Picked Flick #45: Frankie & Johnny

(This is the post I really should have contributed to Nathaniel's Pfeiffer Blog-a-thon last April, but it was just too soon in the countdown to rush it up. I meant every word I wrote at the time about my second-favorite Pfeiffer performance, but things only get better here...)

Michelle Pfeiffer may well be the most beautiful actress in Hollywood, and though she's rarely cited among the Streeps and and Moores, her talent is terrific and underrated: she's extremely attuned to her characters, capable both of mannerism and intuitive openness, and malleable to the divergent needs of a wide range of directors, genres, and projects. Despite all of this, however, she seems genuinely unsolicitous of attention. One almost gets the sense that she'd prefer to go unnoticed, and that it's both a blessing and a curse for her to be so skilled and well-rewarded in a profession that requires such extraordinary levels of scrutiny. She doesn't work that often, and when she does, she frequently opts for parts in movies that feel destined to escape critical or popular regard. Sometimes the parts aren't even that good, and you wonder, why is an actress of Pfeiffer's caliber and acclaim willing to break her reclusive patterns in order to star in Up Close and Personal or To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday? Why is it that even when she stars in a film with a built-in pedigree, like the Oprah-certified The Deep End of the Ocean or the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, the films don't ignite, despite how good she is in them? Is some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy at work? Are audiences so intimidated by her Garboesque appearance that they miss how proudly middlebrow her tastes run, how, at least on screen, her fundamental guardedness gives way to such emotional transparency? Even in upper-crusty endeavors like Dangerous Liaisons and The Age of Innocence, she telegraphs emotions, very subtly shading them but still making them big enough for large crowds to relate to—as opposed to, say, the more architectural acting styles of co-stars like Glenn Close and Daniel Day-Lewis. Even while traveling among totally different filmmaking idioms and adjusting her performmances accordingly, the uniting feature is that she always finds the identificatory points, situating her characters on a perfectly even keel with the audiences (especially, you feel, the women) who will be watching her, and stressing the common humanity that links Age's Countess Ellen Olenska, tainted by divorce and decorously spurned by the late 19th-century Manhattan aristocracy, with Ocean's Beth Cappadora, a wounded Wisconsin mom who likes milk with her pizza.

In my mind, this paradoxical blend of glamour and agoraphobia, these keynotes of humility and sadness that connect the women she plays, reach their apotheosis in Garry Marshall's Frankie & Johnny, exactly the sort of film that tends to zip straight from a quick release to a rental-store shelf. Regardless of how capably Pfeiffer modifies and recalculates her looks in almost every role, the rigid preconception that she was too beautiful for a part played onstage by Kathy Bates muffled any hope of her performance being taken very seriously. Having Marshall's name attached as director couldn't have helped, but for both the star and the director, the film still represents their peak accomplishment: her apex in a career of admirable successes, his solitary but impressive excuse for calling himself an artist. Frankie & Johnny delivers one of the most elusive chimeras in mainstream moviemaking: a romance that has the look, the rhythm, the one-liners, and even the premise of a comedy but is actually not a comedy. Its low notes and minor chords are just as foundational and just as constant as its bright spots and perky exchanges. Its resolution, however proudly optimistic, is also quite tentative. In sum, it's an adult vision of two complicated people converging, finding an ointment but not a cure for the ways in which they have been hurt. It's a romance where people remain throughout who they were in the first scenes. The script, adapted by Terrence McNally from his own play, expands the action and widens the cast, but it brooks remarkably few compromises with the testy, nervous, mercurial attraction between Frankie and Johnny: the way he comes on too strong, smitten but also a little arrogant; the way she refuses what seems to arrive too easily and unexpectedly at her feet; the way he romances her and pleads with her but occasionally betrays something ugly; the way she loosens up and has some fun testing the waters, but never quite stops building up walls, slamming doors, and changing her tune. Pfeiffer, owning the movie while the wonderful Pacino agreeably serves it back to her, is eminently believable at every instant. She's funny and tart at work, she relishes small victories like bowling a strike and winning at handball, she keeps scenes alive while acting behind a countertop or inside a cramped New York bathroom. In the terrific, mood-setting opening—the one moment in the movie when we leave the city—Frankie has the nervy, suspicious jitters while visiting her family in Altoona, PA, but her candor and clarity are beyond reproach when she confides to her mother at the kitchen sink, "Maybe I'm not the happiest person in the world, but that's not your fault." Like Pfeiffer herself, Frankie wants to be left alone, but she also wants to be found.

Garry Marshall doesn't quite prove in Frankie & Johnny that he's got a firm handle on the known world—meaning, for example, that struggling busboys who quit to be screenwriters still live in fantastic two-story loft apartments. But compared to the laundered, insane exuberance of Pretty Woman, with its constant denials of its lurid and reactionary content, Frankie & Johnny feels wise, unpushy, generously ceded to the actors and the writer, peppered with punchlines and gag shots but willing to let top-drawer cinematographer Dante Spinotti do his thing. Seemingly truncated plot threads, like Pacino's reconnection with his ex-wife and alienated children, actually gain strength from being peripheral: there's a credible, refreshing sense in the movie that Frankie and Johnny's courtship does not subsume every one of their private voyages and trials. Even the song score Marshall chooses is of an utterly different species than Pretty Woman's market-friendly avalanche of radio hits; it privileges the expected and shimmering Debussy, a funkily melancholic title track by Terence Trent D'Arby, and a song called "It Must Be Love" by Rickie Lee Jones that, like the movie, is either an uptempo ballad or a cautiously muted pop declaration, depending on how you look at it. The production design of the diner is excellent. The supporting notes supplied by a then-unknown Nathan Lane and the perennially underutilized Kate Nelligan are delectable. A faux-rose that Johnny whips up out of a dyed-red potato, a fork, and a celery stalk swipes the all-time movieland prize for whimsical, endearing diner chic, narrowly squeaking past Jeffrey Wright painting Claire Forlani's portrait in his pancake syrup in Basquiat. Frankie & Johnny is so unpretentious that its fine, layered, beautifully coaxed instincts at serving its script and its characters and its audience are easy to overlook. Don't. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1991 Paramount Pictures.

Picked Flick #46: Titanic

When I first started teaching film, Titanic was invaluable to me, because every single student in my course had seen it, often more than once. As a result, for shared, shorthanded examples of camera angles, color filters, process shots, the comparative scope of a scene vs. a sequence, etc., and just as living proof that movies can unite people and endow us with common language and experience, Titanic was—in the treasure-hunting lingo of Brock Lovett & Co.—a trove, a jackpot. These days, it's hardly worth the trouble of invoking Titanic, because cracking the thick crust of derision or, at best, embarrassed affection is too arduous and digressive a task. Talk about hitting an iceberg: I recognize that even in 1997 and 1998, plenty of people were roundly unseduced by James Cameron's ballad of Jack and Rose. By now, though, Titanic seems to have sunk from a global preoccupation to an abashed recollection or a blacklisted memory.

Both the initial embrace of Titanic and its harsh disavowal, at least in the crowds where I hang out, betray a degree of emotionalism uncommon in the giddy world of movies—testament not only to how the film distinguishes itself from other epic-scale blockbusters by stoking emotion instead of cultivating detachment (it is, in this regard, the anti-Matrix) but to how the sinking of the Titanic itself, with all due respect to the people who died, resonates more in the history of affect than in any real chronicle of worldly consequence. Of course the event was triggered and conditioned by much vaster and more complicated forces—industrialism, social stratification, a booming market in luxuries, a new impetus behind global travel—but it's hard to feel as though any of these concepts operate in any truly complex way within the story of the Titanic, which unfolds as cleanly and simply as a parable. The poor paid for the luxuries of the rich, but death leveled them all. Idealism and ambition ran afoul of a major shoal of hubris. Many, many people died at once, and the foregoing circus of media jubilation around the ship's maiden voyage (as damp a phrase as anyone ever coined) made the deaths somehow more awful by making them so public—a bleak irony, too, since part of the horror of this story is the dark, freezing, lonely privacy in which the ship met its fate, so chillingly captured by that one extreme long shot of the distress flare, a pathetic white comma on the blank black sheet of the oceanic night. Titanic has an ideally sized plot for a movie, and for eliciting mass enthusiasm and identification, because despite the size of the ship and the scale of its infamy, the story's contours remain so manageable. In absolute contrast to something like the JFK assassination, the essential gist and ramification of the story can be quickly known, and since popular imagination has kept it afloat within an envelope of gently precautionary pathos, the tale offers a perfect porthole into broad fields and brushstrokes of feeling: romance, awe, sublimity, sentimentality, gravity, fear, manmade inequities as well as cosmic ones. Cameron's script isn't nearly as ambitious as those he wrote for the Terminator films or for the exemplary Aliens. Nonetheless, his extraordinary visual acumen and his keen regard for the audience's investments even in kinetic and logistic-heavy scenes prepares him perfectly as the director to animate Jack's doomed resourcefulness, Rose's coltish but galvanized resolve, the shipbuilder's avuncular regret, and all those "minor" moments of couples laid together in bed to their final rest, strangers gripping to handrails, waitstaff bolting through the corridors, deckhands crumbling in the face of the panicking crowd, "survivors" condemned to watch what they have just escaped. And he keeps all this in balance while presiding over a gargantuan, exacting, and detailed set, a mythic vision to hold alongside Griffith's Babylon.

Shame about the dialogue, and the high school lit-mag deployment of suicide as a plot device. I know, I know: that song. Many of the performances could stand some tweaking (more than that, in Billy Zane's case), even allowing that they've been evacuated of nuance so as to approximate the idioms of shipboard fictions, and also to purvey the script's distilled emotional states in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Too bad that, for all the justified finger-wagging at class oppression onboard, the world below decks is still something of a fratboy revue of gambols and beer steins, and the story still ends with a crafty and hardworking prole giving his life so that an aristocrat might live. If Titanic were truly building to an intellectual or editorial point, it would have a hard time persuading anybody that Jack's death offered the gorgeous, necessary precondition for Rose's rich, full life of riding ponies and turning pots. But palpably, these aren't the waters in which Titanic means to sail, at least not essentially. Every shot, every terrifically paced and judged cross-cut and interlude—increasingly so, in the film's formally heroic second half—squares the viewer right inside a romantic imagination of beauty and danger that movies almost never attempt anymore. The range of sentiments and the visual lucidity through which Titanic presents itself are tangible and recognizable to almost anyone of any age, and maybe that sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as an endorsement of the film's refusal to be cynical, or to be simply and flatly procedural like The Poseidon Adventure or Airport, or to wave the flag of its own virtuosity in as shrill and off-putting a way as James Cameron does in his public appearances. The movie knows when to stop showing us smashed hutches and looming rudders against the sky and to contract instead around moments like the one that always, always gets me: Rose, secured on a lowering lifeboat, realizing as Jack recedes in an extreme low-angle shot that the life she is saving for herself is not one she wants to save, and so she clambers back onto the dying animal of the Titanic and runs right back toward Jack. The most sophisticated dramaturgy in the world? No—but at least for me, it reverberates just as much as watching Dorothy walk outdoors into Technicolor or Luke discover that his archenemy is his father or a treasured, long-buried childhood toy melt away in a furnace. Call me crazy, but I'll go down with this ship every time. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1997 Paramount Pictures/20th Century Fox.

Picked Flicks #47: JFK & Nixon

People often ask me when my addiction to movies began, and I think I'd have to trace it to the years 1990-92, when I was growing up on an Army base in Hanau, Germany, where one of the most reliable and accessible entertainments for people my age was the single-screen movie theater. Movies arrived from America on a 3-6 month time delay, which at the time only added to their mysterious allure, since hype built for so long and under such different, more relaxed, and more reliable word-of-mouth conditions from the hypermediated onslaught of today's advertising. Living in a foreign country with only one English-speaking TV station (commercial-free to boot) further slowed the faucets of standard PR. These were also the years when my family bought our first VCR, so I could finally see both old and new movies of my own choosing, and with relatively little cultural noise dictating my opinions about what I was seeing. The only impediment on the theatrical side of things—a huge consideration then, though it seems now like another life—was having to finagle admission into R-rated movies. The fellow who worked the ticket counter didn't give me too much trouble despite disliking me, growling once that "you sure seem to have a lot of aunts and uncles" (read: strangers in line who agreed to shepherd me inside). The only two times I really had a problem hurdling over the R-rating, when the sleepy theater on cobblestoned Pioneer Kaserne suddenly sprang into high alert, were for Madonna: Truth or Dare, which outraged my ardent fandom and confirmed the evident social panic about uninhibited women, and for Oliver Stone's JFK. The censorious, highly disapproving vigilance that swirled around this movie was an altogether weirder case to me. American talking heads only ever supply "sex and violence" as the Scylla and Charybdis waiting to assail wayward youth, but neither appeared to be at issue in JFK. Granted, the theater staff did attempt to couch their quivering stinginess about Stone's images in terms of gore, of all things: no teenager, ostensibly, could possibly handle those wrenching replays and closeups of the Zapruder film, even though the predatory flayings in The Silence of the Lambs and the cheek-biting, family-stalking, capsizing menace of Max Cady in Cape Fear had just come and gone without similar caveats. Synthesizing the bizarrely fraught atmosphere at Pioneer with the cyclone of debate echoing from American media, I was perplexed as to what particular candy, laced with exactly what barbiturate or perverting element, JFK was offering to its endangered, corruptible audiences.

I can't remember now if my parents were unavailable or just uninterested in JFK, but my brother (good man!), hooked me up on the underground railroad with his high-school government teacher, and I was in. The movie totally blew my mind, as the phrase goes, but without just circumventing or opiating it. JFK's unimpeachable technical brio and its breathless dicing together of what feel like millions of film-fragments are enormous achievements in themselves. I can see where, as rhetorical devices, and even more as historicizing methods, they would leave much to be desired, but to cite an axiom that somehow always needs defending, JFK is not a legal brief but a movie—admittedly a movie with bullish designs on levering open the locked and sealed government case files, but also, quite patently, a "movie-movie" whose self-conscious flourishes of sound, music, montage, visual embellishment, changes in film stock, exaggerated characters, a highly caffeinated supporting cast, and pivotal arias of exposition and deduction (Laurie Metcalf's, Donald Sutherland's, and finally Kevin Costner's) all flagrantly announce the artifice and constructedness of what Stone has assembled. He and his crack team of collaborating artists devise stunning visual and audio analogues not just of paranoia but of outraged collective justice and of the massive, wormy coral reef of history, with its infinite chambers and pores, many of which never see the sunlight. Yes, it's a flawed film: Costner is too lightweight, Sissy Spacek's perspective as the lonely and agitated wife is almost nothing when it could have been something, and every time the film comes within a hundred feet of homosexuality, the performances, dialogue, and filmmaking all start stinking like wilted Southern verbena. Still, in a strange way, the lapses of JFK have always corroborated what is artful and almost frighteningly earnest about it: Stone works so fearlessly from the gut, with such unembarrassed fidelity to his sensibility, that the warts-and-all pursuit of ugly truths feels truly impassioned in this film. Not for Stone the decorous boilerplates of most courtroom dramas or tasteful liberal-historical tableaux, and almost single-handedly, JFK eliminated any need to make excuses for detritus like Ghosts of Mississippi, half-efforts like Mississippi Burning, or even decoy denunciations of invented crises, like the decidedly minor Guantánamo crisis in A Few Good Men. Stone already knows that both literally and figurally, we can't handle the truth—we can't touch it, and we can't accept what we can't touch—but he's able to use far more than foot-stomping speeches to register the point and its implications. In fact, conjoined with JFK's scalpel-edged critique of mainstream historical record is an equally sharp dismantling of our most naïve habits of image-reception. Not only does Stone recombine fresh and archival footage with the fervor of a mad geneticist, but he gamely stages illustrated versions of Jim Garrison's conjectures as well as the Warren Commission's, and of several gradations in between. Even when the script is one-sided, the film never is. JFK drives so many nails into the comortable conflation of filmed imagery with reality, is it any wonder that the film was so willfully misunderstood?

As with the Minghella duo a few rungs down on this list, JFK stimulated new appetites and ideas in my filmgoing which were even better rewarded by a subsequent effort from the same creative team. I've already posted a full review of Nixon, but if you've got seven hours free to watch the two films back to back, they remain fascinating companions. Whereas the coin of the realm in JFK is its vertiginous scrim of lightning-historical collage, asserted as an inherently greater force than the individuals scurrying around with their treacheries and truth crusades, Nixon remembers that history is still shaped by people, and that the unease and extremes of history cycle backward as the groundwater in our psyches and our private biographies. Again, some of Stone's touches are just too much: summits in China and in Texas and at J. Edgar Hoover's poolside still feel like trips to the fruitstand. Still, the broad, stentorian strokes in the dialogue and the visuals are plausibly illustrative of Nixon's mostly unsubtle grasp of his own life, and of what he was doing with everyone else's life. The ensemble of actors feel more like a united organism, rather than a series of showy walk-ons, and by allowing us more time and a slower pace to absorb the film's structure and its ironies, Nixon achieves what film biographies almost never do: it proposes a complex, counter-intuitive, and intricate new idea about an extremely well-known figure, portrayed against a detailed canvas of his intimates and his era. Nixon is almost certainly my favorite film about American politics, but it's also my favorite film of a Shakespearean tragedy. That Shakespeare didn't happen to write it is the result only of his living at the wrong time—a 400-year historical accident, though of course, in Stone's world, there are no historical accidents. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1991 Warner Bros. Pictures/Ixtlan Corporation/Regency Enterprises and © 1995 Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi Entertainment.