Manchurian melodrama*

My daughter recently returned from a study trip to Shanghai. In honour of her return, we sat and ate Pocky and watched the Hong Kong wartime and martial arts drama ‘Ip Man’ (2008).

While the historical accuracy of the nationalistic narrative, set in Foshan under Japanese occupation, was obviously complete bollocks, the martial arts sequences and choreography were supurb and I enjoyed it all hugely.

At the same time, I’d been absorbed in ‘What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting’ by Marc Norman, and a comment he makes early in the book about the popularity of melodrama as a dramatic form in the 19th Century popped into my head. Here surely, I thought, is pure melodrama.

The dominant theatrical narrative form at midcentury – the one everyone enjoyed rather than admired – was melodrama. No longer the inner torments of giants from Shakespeare or Goethe, not even the brittle one-set comedies of Sheridan – the zeitgeist had taken a lurch and moved on. Melodrama, at its simplest, was high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation. … It was fundamentally about justice. No longer the ambiguities of a Macbeth or a Faust; with melodrama, the dark angel on one shoulder and the white on the other of internal conflict were exteranlized into hero and villain, white hat and black. … Melodrama, as it evolved on the English and American stage in the mid-1800s, was not about aspects of character or inventions of narrative – it was about action; action was its given, and from that action, the pleasure of tension.

These comments intrigue me, because I’ve been taxed by the vagueness of my understanding of this still-common term ‘melodramatic’. Here is as good and clear a definition as I’ve ever read, “high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation” with dramatic tension founded in action rather than character.

By that definition, this movie was completely melodramatic – no shame in that of course, most action movies by that measure are utterly of a piece with 19th Century melodrama as Norman depicts it, even down to an emphasis on the mechanics of the spectacle (CGI, 3D, etc). Many a theatre company bankrupted itself trying to provide ever more astonishing spectacle and realistic action for the theatre-going public in the 1800s.

‘Ip Man’ is a melodrama in this 19th Century sense because the drama is founded in action, while ambiguity is avoided. Tension is created and released after a dramatic situation is created – Ip Man, a wealthy family man who has devoted his time and energy to perfecting his martial arts, is confronted with several choices after the Japanese invade and enslave his community. The tension is created over the question of action: what will he do? There is an ‘arc’, a transformation, but it is only subtley registered and not dwelt upon; what sort of choices will the hero take and therefore, what sort of a man will he become? It is melodramatic because there is never any question about the outcome; his action is inevitable because he has no real conflict, nothing to lose. We know what he will do as soon as the situation becomes clear.

Similarly, the Japanese characters – to the extend that you can call them ‘characters’ – are presented without ambiguity; there are simply shades of evil. One is simply a stupid sadist while the other is a less stupid sadist.

This prompted a question for further research. Every Chinese film I’ve ever seen – and I am a long way from an expert – has been a melodrama in this 19th Century sense to a greater or lesser degree. Does China have another dramatic tradition that I’ve missed?

An equivalent comparision that occurs me would be India, a similarly developing country with a huge film industry. But while Bollywood’s products are certainly melodramas, there is always Satyajit Ray, so at least in India’s case the answer is a firm no. What about China?

(* Yes I know… A bit geographically imprecise but you can’t go past alliteration in a headline.)

Just another taxi driver

Paul Schrader encapsulates everything a reader needs to know about his central character.

TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good-looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous stains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and lonliness [sic]. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space.

Travis is now drifting in and out of the New York City night life, a dark shadow among darker shadows. Not noticed, no reason to be noticed, Travis is one with his surroundings. He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading, ‘King Kong Company, 1968-70.’

He has the smell of sex about him: sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.

Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, written in 1972, published by Faber and Faber, 1990, page 1.

Reading the script, it’s striking how literary and ambitious it is. This shouldn’t be surprising I suppose, since Schrader had been an incisive film critic steeped in the most serious European modernist and Japanese cinema for many years, and the survivor of a particularly muscular Christian upbringing. Surely, the anti-Tarantino.

It is also unconventional in format, lacking the usual scene and location cues and divided into titled chapters, which only increase the intensity of Travis’ deterministic downward spiral. The sense of surprise comes from the disjunction between the pulpy subject matter and the tone of thematic seriousness; Travis as a 1970s Raskolnikov.

Reportedly, De Niro flew back to New York from Rome during breaks on filming ‘Novecento’ and drove a cab for several weeks in preparation.

Ayn Rand’s inner fruitbat

Marieke Hardy attempting to review Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’:

Rand is batshit crazy. By all accounts she used to swan about wearing a swooshy velvet cape adorned with silver dollar signs which may be considered a charming sartorial quirk on someone like Flavor Flav but is less appealing on a Benzedrine-addicted old fruitbat chewing her face off and squawking about objectivism. That she’s still considered so ‘influential’ by a few raving lunatics who seem unable to fathom that Shrugged’s gun-toting erection for deductive logic go hand-in-hand with its rather firm anti-Jesus beliefs says more about her followers than it does about the work itself.

Readers might also like to follow up with a viewing of ‘The Fountainhead’ (1949), which is surely one of the funniest serious movies ever made, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that Gary Cooper, playing Rand alter-ego Howard Roark, takes the whole thing utterly seriously.

Its striding, clench-jawed phallocentrism gives Freudians everywhere something to laugh at as Gary Cooper struggles vainly against the nonentities who surround him to achieve an erection (he is an architect) on his own terms.

So stand with clenched fists, feet apart, lift your chin, look to the horizon and repeat after me (keeping in mind that this is movie dialogue!):

Howard Roark: The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature – the parasite’s concern is the conquest of men. The creator requires independence, he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power, he wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery. He claims that man is only a tool for the use of others. That he must think as they think, act as they act, and live is selfless, joyless servitude to any need but his own. Look at history. Everything thing we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from attempts to force men into a herd of brainless, soulless robots. Without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will, hope, or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name: the individual against the collective!

Irma La Douce (1963)

Pottering in the Woodend Bookshop the other week, I found a copy of the ‘Irma La Douce’ screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, published in 1963.

It appears to be a cheap movie tie-in paperback, badly typeset, a Midwood-Tower Book, “First printing anywhere”. Other books under that imprint appear to be almost exclusively ‘naughty books’ of the early sixties, the kind you still find in Opp shops, with titles like ‘A World Without Men’ in illustrated covers in garish colours. Which makes me think that perhaps the primary consideration for the publishers was the film’s subject matter and the opportunity to put Shirley MacLaine in a transparent blouse on the cover.

Opening it at random, I came across this exchange. Irma the streetwalker is complaining to Moustache, the wordly barman, of her money troubles.

Irma: If only Monsieur Camembert were still around. You remember Monsieur Camembert, don’t you?
Moustache: Do I? Big spender.
Nestor: Who’s Monsieur Camembert?
Irma: That’s what we called him – he was a cheese wholesaler at the market – used to see me twice a week – always gave me five hundred francs – so I didn’t have to see anybody else. I had lots of time then – went to cooking school and I knitted sweaters and I played solitaire – he was such a nice man.
Nestor: What happened to him?
Irma: His wife died – so he stopped coming around.

That is why I love Billy Wilder scripts so much. Even with collaborators, that sweet but sour Viennese Jewish sensibility is always there.

It been years since I saw the film, but I remember it to be only a moderately good Wilder of that strange mid-sixties period, where the things he did so well before didn’t seem to click anymore and good scripts were let down by poor casting and a general air of uncertainty. He wasn’t alone in that, of course. Hitchcocks of the same period often have similar problems.

It is reported that Wilder originally wanted Marilyn Monroe, who he had worked with on ‘Some Like It Hot’, for the part of Irma. She died before the production began, as did Charles Laughton, who was first choice for Moustache.

There are, as always, some great jokes.

The pimps’ union is called the “Mec’s’ (tough guy’s) Paris Protective Association” (MPPA), which is also the acronym for Motion Picture Producers Association.

Irma: A painter once lived here. Poor guy, he was starving. Tried everything, even cut his ear off.
Nestor: Van Gogh?
Irma: No, I think his name was Schwartz.

Other Billy Wilder posts: The Front Page, Billy Wilder: A little bit less and Stalag 17.

Toy Story, with Buzz and Woody (Allen)

The model for this stuffed toy appears to be another person called Woody…

At the Reading Cinema in Sunbury, Victoria.

Best Films of the 00s (that I’ve seen): part three

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (or just Amelie) (2001)
The very definition of joie de vivre. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s style is kinetic, the camera whipping about to follow any subjective whim of the central character (or whoever happens to narrating that particular bit). It’s tone is whimsical, romantic, often grotesque, taking place in a magical ‘Paris’ of the imagination rather than a real city. Some found the mix too rich and sweet, like a cake with too much icing. I wasn’t one of them.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)
Might as well consider them as a whole since their qualities are common to all three. Peter Jackson took the subject up like a personal crusade to convince the rest of us that Tolkein’s world was not just for hippies, and he did it straight, without a hint of irony. Could have been kitsch in the extreme (and it sails close to the edge at times), but is delivered with such bravado and conviction, I couldn’t help but be swept up in its epic wake.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Sure, it was uneven and I sensed a lack of certainty about the tone, but that’s because Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles were blazing a trail, which doesn’t happen too often, especially in comedy. Basically a mix of prepared sketches and seat-of-the-pants situational improvisation around a connecting theme, one is constantly astonished at Cohen’s preparedness to put himself in danger (literally and comedically) and “go where no man has gone before”.

Michael Clayton (2007)
Its finale should be taught in screenwriting 101: ‘The Forgotten Art of the Perfect Ending’. Written by Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of the Bourne films. A political thriller that just about restores one’s faith.

Grizzly Man (2005)
The other great documentarian of the last few decades (see Errol Morris, below) is Werner Herzog, whose fact-based films are as important as his features and whose themes are a direct continuation of his particular obsessions. This displays many of them: nature as an implacable, and often malevolent, force; a visionary central character bordering on madness. Unforgettable.

Gosford Park (2001)
Robert Altman goes at the country house murder mystery with his typical dry and ironic disregard for the conventional trappings of genre. Instead of the hollow figures which usually inhabit these kind of things (Colonel Mustard in the hall with the candlestick), he furnishes the film with insightful, wry and funny observations about character and class. Various esteemed character actors have the time of their lives.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
Errol Morris’s signature interview technique of placing his camera so that the subject speaks directly into it has an almost painful intensity and gives the traditional ‘talking head’ a confessional quality. This has been demonstrated nowhere better than this film about the life and career of Robert McNamara, the highly controversial former U.S. Secretary of Defense. We witness a man attempting to make sense of the moral ethical choices he made, choices which may have lead directly to deaths of thousands, and come to appreciate the chiasm between intention and consequence. A film whose philosophical consequences are immense.

The Lives of Others (2006)
Successfully gives the uninitiated a taste of life as it was lived by innumerable millions under Communist rule across Europe until about 1990. Sure it’s wish-fulfilment, and someone like the Stasi agent either couldn’t have existed in the first place or wouldn’t have survived long enough to perform the transformation depicted here, but it sure looks and feels like a genuine slice of the DDR, a 20th century panopticon.

The Others (2001)
An old fashioned horror movie, in the very best sense. So effective and skillfully told that it earns comparison to the best of the 1940s and 1950s. Nicole Kidman’s nervy brittleness as an actor has never been better utilised. Underrated.

Almost Famous (2000)
It’s neither as sharp or as funny as it probably should be, but has a grace and warmth that is memorable. Manages to feel perfectly credible without a line of coke or defiled groupie in sight. Owes a big debt to Billy Wilder, particularly ‘The Apartment’.

Other ‘Best films of the 00s’ posts here and here.

Best Films of the 00s (that I’ve seen): part two

Children of Men (2006)
Manages to be both an utterly convincing depiction of a terrifying near-future and at the same time look like a rough-and-ready, low budget, hand-held record of events by a doco film crew on location. The Christian allegory in the last reel had me gasping for its fearlessness. For me the last couple of minutes were a disappointment, but boy, while it lasts it’s a wild ride.

The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
A right-angled look at Film Noir. Puts the implicit sadness, loneliness and fatigue of those classics front and centre. It’s not perfect, but the result is strange, funny and unsettling.

Punch Drunk Love (2002)
A movie that grows in effect each time you see it, undercutting expectations at all times. It is short, strangely cast with Adam Sandler in the lead, with odd, unexpected musical cues and sound design, together with a preference for those empty void-like spaces we often find around shopping malls, car parks and bad motels, and yet it’s animated with an unmistakable spark of life – a love story, for all that.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Shouldn’t have worked at all: take a story about the reduction of action and human potential down to the merest flicker and give it to Julian Schnabel, one of the biggest egos in movies. He invests the plight of its main character with a furious will to live, and what should be pure schmaltz is actually quite stark and unsentimental. It also goes further into the use of the subjective camera than any movie I can think of. Orson Welles wanted to do the same thing with Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ in 1940 but the technology defeated him.

Memento (2001)
Its reverse-time scheme should be a gimmick but it works seamlessly and feels completely intrinsic to the story. Audacious, in a word.

Zodiac (2007)
I would happily agree that this film feels like a failure, that it takes a long time to arrive nowhere in particular, but its steadfast refusal to give easy answers stays in the mind long afterwards. Several scenes are extremely disturbing, not for explicit violence, but for the ordinary banal way terrible things can and do happen anywhere, anytime. For an American film, it most resembles the enigmas of Michael Haneke, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he might have been an influence on Director David Fincher.

Lost in Translation (2003)
A rarity in American cinema, a film which resides more in silences than in action. Against a situation of cultural dislocation for the characters, a kind of inter-zone, where normal codes of behaviour don’t need to apply (and they are free from social constraints), the decision not to act has consequence. A film for adults.

28 Days Later (2003)
A creepy, believable zombie movie set in a near-future London, beautifully realised on a very low budget.

Amores Perros (2001)
Films with intricate multi-story structures were flavour of the month in the early decade, but this is the best of them, even if the pitfalls are not always avoided. Like the best Latin cinema, it is bold, broadly drawn and intensely emotional.

The Bourne Identity (2002), Supremacy (2004), Ultimatum (2007)
You can take your pick of the Bournes, their virtues are common to all. Exciting, kinetic action which is also cinematic and coherent, unlike so much contemporary action footage (“Put in a dozen cameras from every angle and we’ll make sense of it in ‘post'”). Thoughtful story in a 1960s paranoid geo-political thriller vein but which is constructed to feel plausible. Bourne himself is a sympathetic character played with restraint by Matt Damon.

Best Films of the 00s (that I’ve seen): part one

It’s the end of the decade* – time for a list.

One of the interesting things about doing this is to surprise yourself with which films linger in the memory even after the passing of years. It’s a good test too, to check out which films remain good even after their cultural moment has passed. This is why second viewings are so important.

I intend to keep adding to these lists as I catch up with the decade. Just titles and a thought or two that comes to mind, in no particular order.

Adaptation (2002)
Wonky in places, but Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay is so startlingly original, you wonder how it works as well as it does. Self-referential, self-reflexive. Examines its own turning gears even while the motor’s running.

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Starts out like a brightly coloured parody of Hollywood visual syntax, then lurches sickeningly to the left, revealing a related, but tonally different alternate reality. Like an optical illusion: disorientating, but makes perfect sense when looked at from just the right angle. From David Lynch, a true original.

No Country For Old Men (2007)
Cool and unsparing. Otherwordly performance by Javier Bardem, who stands in for the Coen brothers’ recurring character of the personification of objective evil.

Spirited Away (2001)
Marriage of masterly traditional animation and a bold story, with the halls bedecked in some obscure and very weird Japanese cultural and religious references.

The Incredibles (2004)
Smart, funny and jaw-droppingly well designed in retro-futuristic style. The pace never slackens for a moment and themes of family, talent, potential and validation are touchingly explored. A movie for outsiders everywhere.

Infamous (2006)
Suffered from a badly timed release, but this is a superior depiction of the events related in Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’, his research of the disturbing murders, their historical and cultural context, and the effect of all this on the unusual personality of its author.

Star Trek (2009)
Smartly resuscitated a moribund cycle of films by looking at the familiar themes with an outsider’s eye. Energetic and often exciting.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
An apparently low budget, lots of simple hand-held camera, in unemotional washed-out colour. Just the right approach for such knotty, emotionally fraught subject matter, which, despite it science fiction premise, has the emotional predicament faced by the characters at its very centre. A typically ambitious, thematically rich screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.

Burn After Reading (2008)
Widely underappreciated and misunderstood. A comedy that is also an utterly bleak rendition of human nature, a kind of vanitas in 35mm, something that is rarely depicted in art but familiar in life: petty maleficence – if not actual evil – of the kind found in every newspaper and the consequences for those caught up in its banal grip.

Ratatouille (2007)
Breathtaking design and superb animation of the kind that would have made Walt Disney stand up and applaud, combined with an affecting story about the critical importance of art and the path to self-actualisation. Despite the cutting-edge technology, its virtues are classical.

* Of course, I know that technically we are still a year from the end of the decade, but everyone else is doing it…

‘Basterds’ the best film of 2009? Not bloody likely

So radio Three Triple R’s ‘Film Buff’s Forecast‘ program has just brought down its listeners’ votes for the films of 2009, and I’m not happy.

Every year since I was about 16 I’ve been listening to the show’s annual votes for best, worst, most overrated and most underrated films of that year. I go back to when John Flaus and Paul Harris were the only voices heard. These days it’s a whole gallery of voices, which is fine when they engage in constructive disagreement but not so much fun when some nameless voice, whose authority I have no way of assessing, goes on at length with opinions I disagree with! So I particularly enjoy the discrepancies between the critics’ films and those voted by listeners.

Some think lists are childish but I’m a sucker for lists of all kinds. In my worst moments, I’ve resembled John Cusack’s character in ‘High Fidelity’: “Ten best album tracks, side one, track one…” They’re a kind of intellectual chewing gum, designed to get the juices flowing.

But jeez, ‘Inglourious Basterds’ as the best film of 2009? God help us. The critics and listeners were united on 3RRR and I’m appalled.

Okay, so it was stylish in that swashbuckling Tarantino style that he does so well. Bravura, I think it’s called, and ten points for sheer balls. Very few film makers of any generation have the strength of their convictions to such an extent as to back themselves and their intuitions against what was, I imagine, widespread scepticism that such a bizarre idea would ever get made.

But its juvenile brutality and fascism is harder to forgive. It’s certainly not the only film of the last couple of years to show an almost autistic lack of appreciation or understanding of the experiential weight of violence in cinema; ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ comes readily to mind. But while that film also had a historical setting (or in the case of ‘I.B.’ an alternative-historical setting), it took place in a fictional space that relied on the Spanish Civil War only as a contextual frame for the hard-edged fantasy that was really the interest of the movie.

‘I.B.’ on the other hand, doesn’t make sense without the emotion and moral heft that the Holocaust subject matter brings with it. Tarantino relies on that historical and cultural burden to charge the events he asks us to experience with significance. What at first annoyed me and then by the end of the film made me angry, was that he uses the faith that we the audience place in him that he won’t exploit a historical truth (whose significance doesn’t need to be expanded upon) cheaply or to no good end. But that’s exactly what he does do.

There is no necessary connection between the events of history and their cultural reflection in this universe. The Holocaust, the Second World War as a whole, is nothing but a set of cultural tropes he can move around and play with with a grin on his face. This war movie is not a film about war, but a film about films about war. The difference is crucial. There is therefore no debt to experience, to life.

But the film has it both ways. To a large degree, it misleads badly with the first scene, which introduces the main character, the anti-hero Col. Hans Landa, as he interrogates a french farmer on suspicion of harboring Jews, who we are allowed to see cowering under the floorboards. The scene unfolds slowly, with discipline, resulting in great suspense. Nail biting, as they say. It ends badly, but its emotional kick is not just a mechanical function of the classic techniques of suspense, but also an extratextual response to the affect of the subject matter. We know what is at stake for the innocents under the floorboards because we know that their fate will be to disappear into ashes.

This scene leads an attentive viewer (I believe) to frame an expectation that what we are about to watch will keep faith with that stock of memories, images, stories we have all inherited as children of the twentieth century. This faith, having been set up, is gleefully torn up in the subsequent spectacle.

This early discipline is also jettisoned for the rest of the film. I have not heard a single critic notice how interminable is the central key scene in a cellar bar, where allied soldiers impersonating Nazi officers attempt to make contact with a resistance figure in the French underground. An English officer with a proficiency in German attempts to maintain the mask, but his unusual accent gives him away to his audience. This would have been dealt with by a classical director like William Wellman or John Ford in a few minutes of tension, but instead it drags on and on, pointlessly. What is worse, during the whole scene, one of the other impersonators remains mute – yet he is the only authentic German in the bunch! Why?

Finally, Tarantino has his English officer give himself away by making a typically English – not German – hand gesture. The only problem is that when it happens we don’t know what it means until it is explained to us by one of the characters later! A moment which should be tense beyond endurance for the audience is thrown away in sluggish editing and sloppy writing.

Lovers of the film will no doubt object that I am guilty of a lack of appreciation for Tarantino’s use of ironic self-reference and intertextuality. Maybe I am. Maybe the subject matter just doesn’t lend itself to merrymaking in the playpen of ironic detachment. It is plain that the final third of the film, which is an extended revenge fantasy where Hitler and all the members of the Nazi High Command perish in a burning cinema (oh the jolly irony!) while the fleeing audience is strafed with machine guns held by the ‘good’ guys. You can tell they’re good guys because they’re Jewish. If this sounds dumb, it’s because it is dumb, beyond words.

After this, it hardly matters any more when the brutal but charismatic Landa has his forehead slowly carved up with a very large knife. By that stage I was numb, which I suppose means that this movie was not for me. I figure I was supposed to enjoy this, feeling that the villain got his comeuppance, just as I was supposed to cheer as the cinema audience (shot from above) screamed as they were being machine-gunned to death. Instead I felt as if I was being made complicit in a bloodthirsty spectacle without moral reference point. A film that had started out doing everything it could to evoke an emotional response for the oppressed and against the oppressor, reversed the poles, asking me to cheer indiscriminate murder on the basis that it was being perpetrated against the ‘right’ enemy. There’s a name for this. Goebbels would have recognised the technique, since he virtually invented it.

This is not the first time a blindingly stupid and immoral film has been lauded by critics almost universally, but I’m mainly disappointed because people whose judgements I generally respect have either been so easily fooled, or don’t care.

Zombie mathematics

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

From Wired, ‘Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack‘ by Betsy Mason