Room 237 and The Shining: The Cool and the Crazy

With my new Netflix account (gift card), I've now had the chance to watch Room 237, right on the heels of what was probably my twentieth viewing of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

The most telling moment in the documentary comes when one of the half-dozen or so narrators remarks that it's possible to see Kubrick's face in the clouds during the eerie opening credit sequence. If any one thing sums up much of the theorizing surrounding The Shining, that's it. Just like seeing rabbits and dragons in marching columns of clouds, people project onto the film what they want to see, or, more accurately, whatever happens to be going occupying their minds at the time—and if we're talking about the voices who make up much of the audio track of Room 237, it's stuff that's been swimming around untamed and unmanaged in their streams of consciousness for years.

One person seems to believe that World War II was faked, that maybe most of history was faked, and that Kubrick was hip this chronic artificiality hidden form the public at large (if only they would pay attention!) Another more infamously thinks Kubrick was admitting to his role in helping to fake the moon landings (oddly, this same person at one and the same time believes the landings were faked but that we still actually went to the moon—what's the point of faking anything if you're really going to do it? The psychic dissonance this man experiences daily must start to sting after a while). More rational theories touch on the Holocaust, the genocide of American Indians, and the legacy of corruption and brutality in the United States.

I agree with some of the things said, or at the very least I don't think they sound like complete bullshit. It's obvious Kubrick held King's novel in some degree of contempt—he tossed most of the book out and added a lot of new stuff. (In fairness to Kubrick, he was going to leave a little more in: the living hedge animals from the book were going to be included, but Kubrick didn't think the special effects looked realistic enough.) Most of what remains of King's work is a skeleton that has been picked utterly clean, leaving a framework on which Kubrick could hang the story he was more interested in telling. Not a ghost story in the strictest sense—Kubrick didn't believe in the supernatural, and he was about more than just yelling “Boo!” at his audience, though he does an admirable job where it counts. What he's saying appears to be, seems to be, about family dysfunction primarily and perhaps, secondarily, about how violent impulses in the family unit lead to violence on a broader scale.

It works as a drama, too, without reading much into it. The last third is frantic, weird, and primal, and grips your attention like a vice, demonstrating Kubrick was as great at filming action (Full Metal Jacket and Clockwork Orange being two other good examples—and hell, let's throw in Spartacus) as he was at slow, stately, highly composed shots. It contrasts with the stilted line readings and deliberate pace of the first act, done that way, I believe, to emphasize the false fronts people put up in public to hide the turmoil going on underneath. Kubrick was often accused of being a cold, clinical filmmaker, but the raw emotional power that comes through toward the end of The Shining, thanks mainly to Nicholson's manic performance and Duvall's screaming hysterics, shows that he knew exactly when to let things fly out of control—in a very controlled way, of course.

But let me steer things back to Room 237. The problem with many of the theories different people have about The Shining is that conspiracy theorists—and I really wish there was another way of describing them, because those are two words that get way too much mileage—tend to be very literal-minded, in their loopy kind of way. Those who insist that there is a “code” to The Shining, a “right” way of looking at it, don't seem to understand art very well. Most artists, if they're good, and Kubrick was great, leave their work wide open to interpretation, which goes a long way toward explaining why the content to a movie like Room 237 exists in the first place. There's no key that unlocks the whole mystery, because any creative person worth their salt knows that mystery is half the fun.

I suppose it's possible Kubrick really did make epic cinematic puzzle boxes, and everything that shows up in frame, every piece of furniture and Disney decal, every can of baking powder and pile of luggage, is a fractal in that larger puzzle that, when all are fitted together, provides an unadulterated view into the mind of an indisputable filmmaking genius.

The genius part is what creates some of the difficulty. Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean they never make mistakes, or that they know everything, or they control everything about their work with the skill of a necromancer. It doesn't even mean they're rational—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for all his obvious brilliance, sincerely believed in fairies and the claims of spiritual mediums. It also doesn't mean The Shining doesn't have bona fide gaffes—note the shadow of the helicopter shooting the footage for the opening credits (unless you think that's a reference to the Vietnam war—Jesus Christ) Diehards might say, “Why did he leave it in, then?”, to which I'd answer, “Maybe they only had the helicopter for one day and couldn't go back to reshoot the footage once they'd noticed the mistake.” It's a mesmerizing set of images, and it's very possible Kubrick figured people wouldn't notice. Home video wasn't a thing when The Shining came out—how could he have guessed that some people would obsess over every frame like fucking maniacs in the comfort of their own darkened living rooms? Who does that?

Heavy meaning is also placed in things that might just as easily be gags. The chair behind Jack Nicholson that disappears between shots? That could be a joke, the kind a filmmaker might get a kick out of playing on an audience. The fact that Nicholson is reading a copy of Playgirl in one scene? Definitely a joke, though I'll allow that its inclusion might have had thematic significance as well (I'm referring to the incest article mentioned on the cover—text the audience could have no hope of reading, by the way).

But since we're talking about theories, I have one of my own. I read once in a Fangoria magazine back in the '80's that the sets for The Shining burned down and had to be rebuilt because shooting hadn't finished. As I understand it, movies are shot on a fairly strict schedule; extra time means more money spent, and although Kubrick was riding pretty high at this point in his career, it's unlikely the studio was willing to just throw more money at the production if it ran behind—less so in this case because they would have already blown a lot of money having the sets rebuilt. For a serious control freak like Kubrick, that would be incredibly frustrating. It's the kind of situation where someone might decide to let little things slide, let continuity errors go because hey, who's really gonna notice and who has time to go back and fix that shit? A missing chair here and there doesn't usually register in a viewer's consciousness during dramatic scenes, and a man like Kubrick was the sort of person who would understand that very well. 

Such frustration might explain a few other things, like Kubrick's inexcusable harassment of Duvall on the set. For those who like cited sources from the film itself, how about this: remember the scene where Nicholson menaces Duvall like a flamboyantly rabid coyote in the Colorado Room, backing her toward the stairs as she wields a baseball bat? I haven't read the novel in decades, but I'm pretty sure the scene isn't in there. And what does Nicholson say at one point? Something along the lines of, “I have been entrusted with the care of the Overlook Hotel until May the first. I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract, stating that I would do so. Do you have any idea what the word 'responsibility' means?”

Let's entertain the idea that this is Kubrick complaining out in the open, right in the middle of his own movie, about the fact that he was contractually obligated to bring a film in on time and on budget despite all of the setbacks he faced. There's also the scene in which Nicholson chews Duvall out for bothering him while he's writing, where he complains that interruptions break his concentration and thus require him to take time to get back in the zone. Since I'm spitballing here, I'll go ahead and speculate that Kubrick is referring to the major interruption of having to stop filming because of the fire. The frustration I'm alleging he felt might also help explain why Kubrick didn't make another movie for the better part of a decade.

It does him a disservice to say that every onscreen detail has a one-to-one correlation to some very specific idea, or carries a specific message. It implies that he was kind of simple-minded, and didn't have the skill to create rich, complex work open to multiple meanings. More like he was putting together a bookshelf from IKEA than making a work of art. And to say he was meticulous and let that justify one's insistence that every detail of the film was fully under Kubrick's control—that he would even want everything to be so totally under his control—and therefore error-free just doesn't cut it. Kubrick clearly had OCD; not the neat-freak kind lots of people claim to have but the nearly debilitating, crazy-making kind (I should know). Doing a hundred takes of one shot and then finally going with the first one or two? That's OCD, which pushes you to do unnecessary things because you feel like you have to and not because they make sense. When people with obsessive compulsive disorder are stressed out, a lot of their symptoms can come painfully to the surface, and what's more stressful than directing a big budget movie? Watch the biographical documentary about Kubrick where someone describes him handing to a housesitter forty pages of typewritten instructions on how to look after his cats. Fuckin'-A that's some serious OCD. So when you say he was meticulous, keep in mind that quality owes as much to his mental instability as it does to his genius. Some of the stuff in his movies comes from the crazy, not from the smarts. I'd put money on it.

The first time I saw The Shining was on ABC when I was around twelve. Network TV doesn't let you watch R-rated movies unfiltered, but not enough was altered by censors to lesson the impact for me. As it does for most people, it left an indelible impression. A year or two later I taped a broadcast and watched it many times during my junior high years. I was a lonely, resentful outsider kind of a kid, and Nicholson as Jack Torrence looked to me like everything I wanted to be, if that doesn't sound too fucked up. He expressed his anger in long, articulate tirades, he let his frustration hang out, his emotions boiled over and there was no one to hold him back. I memorized his more insane scenes, played them out in my head because I yearned to go off on a tear in the same way in my own life. I was a weird teenager.

Flash forward twenty-eight years to just a few weeks ago when I last watched it, after not having seen it for at least a decade. Jack Torrence is no longer the hero; he never was, but tell that to fourteen-year-old me with his stupid power fantasies. Instead, I see the sort of monster that has plagued, and continues to plague, too many families. A man set to self-destruct, and is prepared to take his wife and son with him. My own grandfather, who I thankfully had little to do with, was a similar individual, a drunk who was heavy-handed with his children and thought entirely in terms of himself. What I realized Kubrick had done was create a textbook example of a severely dysfunctional family, a blueprint of abuse, denial, and alcoholism that is perfect in its attention to detail and, yes, meticulous.

Two different versions of myself, separated by decades, have two entirely different approaches to the same film. According to some schools of criticism, they're both right. Hell, maybe they're all right. The meaning of a work has as much to do with what you bring to it as what the artist intended. If you want The Shining to be about moon landings or a return to the gold standard or whatever, have fun. I mean, you're probably not right, but more power to you for looking at a movie analytically instead of gaping slack-jawed at it. It's a much better time that way. 

The Force Awakens Probably Won't Suck--Here's Some Reasons Why

Now that I've spent the last couple of weeks thinking about the teaser trailer for the upcoming Disney Star Wars movie, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, I've got only one thing to say (followed by a lengthy explication):

It's probably going to be pretty good.  Or decent.  Maybe.

Notice I didn't say “great”. I said “pretty good” (or decent--I'm open for just decent). There's a distinct difference, one any lifelong fan of the movies knows instinctively. Great movies live forever in the minds of those who see them, they echo down across multiple generations, they influence the movies that come after in the wake of their opening day for decades. The Wizard of Oz is one of those, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the original Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight, Jaws, etc. Any one of those films, and many more, left a permanent stamp on movie history. People go back to them again and again, incorporate them into their personal philosophy, even come damn close to worshiping them in some cases. I've heard stories of people who would carry a VHS copy of The Godfather in their back pocket so they could pop it into friends' VCRs whenever the opportunity presented itself (I assume now they carry it on a tablet or nag those same friends to bring it up on Netflix, and I'm sure their lower backs thank them).

A greater percentage of movies fall into the “pretty good” category. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is pretty good. That's obviously a subjective point of view, but I'm sticking to it for the purposes of this post. I probably won't watch it that many times. Once or twice more and then I'll be in my grave. But it's still a thoroughly enjoyable, fast-moving, entertaining piece of big budget comic book movie. It succeeds with everything it set out to do, and if it didn't completely fulfill all the filmmakers' hopes, I sure didn't notice while I was watching it. I had a good time and there ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I am absolutely positive I'm going to feel the same way about the next Star Wars when it comes out. It will not, for me and many others, come anywhere close to emulating the experience of watching the Original Trilogy (you have to capitalize it) when it was new, or the feeling of going back to watch it again—as I have many, many times—to relive that experience. It can't do that, any better than the prequels could (they get the lower-case treatment), and I want to make it clear that I believe this upcoming film will be much better than any of George “I Couldn't Be Bothered To Direct A Movie For 20 Years Until My Monumental Hubris Made Me Do It And Now Look What I've Done” Lucas' cynical cash grabs.

J.J. Abrams has already demonstrated he can make perfectly fine, entertaining science fiction movies with his two Star Trek reboots, even if some hardcore Trekkers disagree. Let's also not forget Super 8, where he did a remarkable job of imitating 80's-era Steven Spielberg. Lawrence Kasdan, the man who penned The Empire Strikes Back, has returned to punch up the script, and that's probably a very good thing, assuming he hasn't lost any of his chops. Lucas' input is rumored to be minimal, relegated to suggesting which direction the story should take, which shouldn't present too much of a problem provided the people actually helming the project know how to override him—after all, he doesn't own the property anymore in the strictest sense.

I'm also heartened by the fact that Abrams has said he wants to use practical effects, as opposed to digital ones, whenever possible, hopefully giving the film (and the two or more others planned to follow it) a more grounded, real-world look—at least as real-world as you can get with a story set in a galaxy far, far away. Of the many complaints lodged against Lucas, his reliance on computer-generated settings for his prequels was among the biggest. Those movies look sterile, artificial, and drab. This one, hopefully, will have much more visual vitality. Judging from the work he did on Super 8, there is also the possibility he'll bring an Original Trilogy tone to the new entries.

What I'm hoping for is that the new Star Wars movies will fall more on the side of Disney's Marvel films in terms of quality, and less on the John Carter of Mars and Lone Ranger side (Pirates of the Caribbean would also be unacceptable). I'm close to 100% certain that will be the case. If not, it's gonna kill any chance the franchise might have had for getting back on its feet, and a lot of future movie plans are going to be scrapped (think about what's going on with the Spiderman franchise after Amazing Spiderman 2). That would be unfortunate, because I like the idea of different directors getting a crack at Star Wars, bringing a little of their own style and and attitude to the projects to the extent that Disney will let them (Marvel/Disney is known for bringing the hammer down on directors whose vision doesn't synch up with its own). They're talking about stand-alone movies to come out in between the sequel entries, opening up the possibility of some pretty cool new Star Wars films, as well as, not surprisingly, some godawful dreck (one of the proposed films is a Jedi Seven Samurai directed by Zack “I'm A Thirteen-Year-Old Boy Trapped In A Man's Body” Snyder, which is pretty much guaranteed to suck on some level).

The people I feel sorry for are the ones who will go to this new movie praying for a return to Empire Strikes Back levels of awesomeness. It's just not going to happen, and I think you should be a little ashamed of yourself if that's what you're expecting. Those days are gone; you're an adult now; lighting struck in a very particular place at a very particular time, and that's all you get. Don't hold your breath for your youth to return—you'll suffocate. If you're anything like me, you've gotten sick of the cultural saturation Star Wars has achieved, in spite of the fact that you've loved the franchise you're entire life, and you've begun to focus on other things, sort of. If you simply have a good time watching the new movies, and the studio gets rich off our collective enthusiasm, well, everybody wins then, don't they. That's pretty much what all commercial entertainment boils down to.

George Lucas on his way to the Disney/Lucasfilm offices to make some story suggestions

I Don't Think I'll Ever Watch Kill Bill Again

I can't believe I almost forgot to write about the portion of the Tarantino retrospective at The Loft Theater I checked out a few weeks ago. It was a film festival that played over the course of a couple of months, showing all of Tarantino's films, including one—True Romance—that he didn't direct. (I don't recall if From Dusk 'Till Dawn was a part of the lineup).

They sold a very cool t-shirt to commemorate the event, and I made damn sure to snatch one up.

The week I went they were showing Kill Bill volumes One and Two. I hadn't seen them in almost ten years—I caught them once apiece when they were playing the multiplexes, and then once again on cable. My memory of them was relatively positive—I've never thought they were Tarantino's strongest work, tilting a little too far in the direction of too-clever-by-half self-indulgence, but I recalled they had some great action and beautiful photography.

Some of that opinion still holds, but it's been tempered a bit now. Some sequences, such as the bloody sword battle in the House of Blue Leaves and the opening fight between Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox, I thought still held up after all these years, and I'll always dig that animated segment. Some of the other stuff, though...

I mean, I get it—Tarantino's all about hip cleverness, overwrought dialogue top-heavy with pop culture references, and visual nods to all his favorite movies. If you're going to be a fan of his work, you have to make peace with the fact that his characters tend to be a little on the shallow side--more amalgams of exploitation film archetypes than actual people—spouting lines that probably look really good on paper but sound kind of silly coming out of someone's mouth (Kevin Smith has the same problem). As one noted British film critic has pointed out, his characters all sound the same, and they all sound like him.

I don't think any of that was what bothered me during this particular viewing. What got to me was that these movies are pretty flawed in ways that, for me, are hard to overlook now. It's been said time and again that Tarantino's films are juvenile, but it's never come home to me more powerfully than while watching the Kill Bill movies back to back. They feel like the work of a fifteen-year-old; a very precocious, very, very talented fifteen-year-old who's seen almost every movie ever made, but a fifteen-year-old nonetheless.

He tries to purchase dramatic potency with weak credit—we're intended to feel outrage that Thurman has lost her child, and root for her as she travels her road of vengeance, but scenes that would give us any real grounding in the storyline are few and far between. There's a bit in the first film where she wakes up from a coma in the hospital to find that her unborn child is gone, and some more stuff between her and David Carradine at the end of the second film, but that's about it. I guess we're just supposed to imagine the rest. Undermining these scenes are vast hills and valleys of camp. Some fans and critics might protest that he was playing with the conventions of the “revenge movie”, but I honestly think he was trying to tell a more-or-less straightforward revenge story, and with all the crazy-cool stuff he was planning on including in the movies, he forgot the most important part—making the audience feel there's a good reason all this is happening.

Speaking of forgetting things: it totally escaped my mind how magnificent Gordon Liu is as the hardass kung fu master Pai Mei. His scenes are the best thing about the whole Kill Bill enterprise. He's an asshole version of Yoda, an uproariously sarcastic, curmudgeonly reworking of an old school kung fu movie expert. He's so good I wished there was more of him;  as in, I would have watched an entire two hour movie following his exploits instead of Thurman's. It makes me think maybe Tarantino, like George Lucas, needs a voice whispering in his ear, “You know, you should focus more on this part of the story instead of that—it's way better.” I'm not a filmmaker and I'm not about to tell someone of Tarantino's obvious talent how to make movies, but I do wonder if he workshops his scripts anymore with anyone who isn't afraid to tell him that not all of his ideas are great ones.

There are some cool meta-ideas going on here that I liked. Thurman's Blood-Spattered Bride (a name taken, if I'm remembering correctly, from the title of a Spanish horror movie from the early Seventies) loses her child; O-ren Ishii, her main opponent in the first film, is herself an orphaned child who saw her parents murdered. The theme of a bride covered in blood comes up throughout the two films: in Vivica Fox's house we see a white painting splashed with red; when Thurman first meets Pai Mei, she's wearing a white blouse stitched with red flowers. The idea of the corruption of children, both intentional and unintentional, comes up several times—there's poor O-ren Ishii and the training she received from Bill, who partook in her parents' murder; Fox's daughter who, unbeknownst to Thurman until after the fact, sees her mother die; and Thurman's own daughter, whom it is implied will become a killer like her mother when she's old enough, because what else happens to women taken under Bill's wing?

So it's not like I'm saying it's all bad. Just flawed. Lots of perfectly decent movies are. These just happen to be flawed enough that I probably won't watch them again for a very long time, if ever. I'd say at least another ten years. I'll watch Pulp Fiction again gladly, maybe Death Proof one more time just to make sure what I thought I saw was really what I saw (a genuinely bad Tarantino movie), and for sure I'll check out Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained again.

But not Kill Bill. Those two films, I think, I can write off for good now.

The Zero Theorem, The Congress, and Gettin' Old

Over the weekend of the 27th and 28th of last month my wife and I checked out Terry Gilliam's new movie The Zero Theorem, as well as The Congress, the new film by Ari Folman, the director of the animated Waltz With Bashir, at the Loft Theater in Tucson. We caught the trailers for both while attending part of a Quentin Tarantino retrospective there, and I thought, “Man, I've got to see those.” I really love cinematic science fiction, especially when it's thought-provoking and intelligently approached and not just space battles and robots punching each other in their angular faces.

What stood out for me is that both of these movies are about basically the same thing, but come at the idea from different perspectives. Zero Theorem is Gilliam's pessimistic treatise on where we stand today in a world dominated by personal electronic technology. Christoph Waltz plays a programmer at a futuristic firm who crunches numbers all day for reasons he can't fathom—he just does his job and wants people to leave him alone. The CEO of the company puts him on a project designed to prove a theorem that demonstrates life has no meaning. His life falls apart, he discovers he's manipulated from afar by forces beyond his control, and in the end we see that life has meaning after all, you just have to find it for yourself or something.

I don't know, I couldn't help but think the story essentially boils down to the curmudgeonly grumblings of a cranky old man who doesn't like where things have gone with technology and society. Background characters are immersed in advertising, engrossed with their smartphones and computers, have become vain and self-centered to a fault. Get it? It's all just like today, but set in a future where people have exactly the same tech as now, just with some slight tweaks. That...that isn't very profound. What is Gilliam saying, really? That we're all swallowed up in the distractions of superficial entertainment, dehumanized by the electrified world we inhabit? I'd be very surprised if that wasn't his point—a lot of his films deal with the supposed death of imagination, in roughly the same ham-fisted manner.

I can't get on board with that kind of flippant cynicism, probably because I'm one of the few people over forty who doesn't believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket (wouldn't air freight be faster?) with all these damn kids and their damn iphones and table tablet ipod whatevers. I don't think tech is a bad thing, on the whole. Sure, we lose some things, just as we did when the printing press was invented and people lost the ability to remember information as well as they could when they were illiterate, but literacy opened the way for revolutionary ways of looking at the world, and made it possible for vital knowledge to travel farther and with increased accessibility (provided you knew how to read).

I'm going to digress here for a minute with a two-part rant. First, I've never been a huge fan of Gilliam's work. I've watched a lot of his movies and liked them fine, and some, like Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are probably genuine masterpieces. Others, like the almost-great Adventures of Baron Munchausen, end up being disappointments because they show you just how magnificent Gilliam could be if he exercised a little more discipline in his storytelling (I'm aware he often has a hard time getting his films made, and I'm sure that plays a role in how haphazard they sometimes feel). I keep waiting form him to do something that has the same anarchic kick of his Monty Python animations, and it never happens. Fear and Loathing probably comes closest, but after an hour of that sort of thing you get a little bored, mainly because it keeps threatening to tell a story that it never gets around to. In my opinion, either go all out with your surrealism or just don't bother. I find that his movies can be fun, but don't often warrant coming back to.

Now for part two: remember how I mentioned Tarantino up there in the opening paragraph? Well, he recently went on record about how much he despises digital filmmaking and how it'll never achieve the rich textures one finds in 35mm film. In a way, I think he's right—for now. Digital photography, at this point, doesn't possess the same visual qualities as celluloid film. But saying that is a far cry from going further and assuming that it never will possess those qualities. Digital filmmaking, done well, looks just fine and dandy, and it'll only keep getting better as the technology improves. The day will come—you may be certain of it—when digital movies will not only look as good as 35mm, but will surpass it. You know, like how digital audio sounds better than analogue.

What's that you say? Nothing will ever be better than analogue, the One True Way to reproduce recorded sound? It's more like “the real thing” because it allegedly mimics the actual soundwaves of what it records? If you in any way resemble the straw man I've been setting up in the last couple of sentences, then I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're a big fiend for vinyl. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, some of my best friends are vinyl collectors. Used to collect it myself, before I sold off my entire collection to help bankroll a move to Hawaii. But I'm no longer convinced it's the best way to listen to music, or anything else. Sure, it sounds different, but not necessarily better. I've heard lots of digital recordings that sound absolutely fantastic, and despite vinyl enthusiasts' protestations that if you can't hear the difference in quality then you're not really very good at listening (a bit of snobbery that borders on the pathetic), I'm pretty sure the variance in sound reproduction is so negligible that not even analogue's most strident supporters could tell the difference in a controlled study (assuming they're listening to new records that haven't gotten bits of dust and whatnot stuck in the grooves already).

You're wondering what the hell my point is. Okay, I'm getting to it. Gilliam in Zero Theorem, for me, appears to be lamenting the state of change in the modern world, the way things have altered from what he was accustomed to decades ago to a culture more friendly to a younger generation that has grown up with the internet and personal computers. For him, a life spent in the company of electronics is essentially “meaningless”. First of all, no. I see people all the time who derive a great deal of personal meaning from a technologically-enhanced life. Second, change happens, you'll never stop it, you can only adapt to it, and if you don't, you'll turn into a cranky old person that people will listen to indulgently for a few moments before tuning you out, probably by watching a humorous video someone shared with them on Facebook. They grew up in this world, for them it's all there is, and they've never known anything else. The first music they heard was digitally recorded and mastered, and if they turn to vinyl (or anything else their forebears found interesting) later on as a kind of anachronistic hipster gesture, kind of like the way bow ties and suspenders, waxed mustaches and playing the saw with a violin bow have become oddly fashionable in the last few years, they do so because it's a trend, a statement of imagined rather than lived nostalgia, and all but a few of the inevitable diehards you find in every generation who hold on to the fashions of their twenties well into their forties and fifties will drop the it in time (in spite of what some folks believe about vinyl making a “comeback”--actually, we're seeing a last gasp before everyone turns to streaming everything from The Cloud and no longer owns any kind of format, a notion the minimalist in me really likes, even though the Gen-Xer in me loathes the idea of not having collections of LPs and CDs and VHS tapes to show off).

Anyway, that's my impression of Gilliam's new movie. Maybe I missed the point entirely, but I don't think I did. It's not that deep of a movie. Spiritually, it's a sequel to Brazil (and considered by some to be the third film in an unofficial dystopian trilogy that also includes 12 Monkeys), and feels as if it's set in the same fictional universe, just half a century later. I'll say this for it: it moves fast, isn't at all dull, and entertains even if it doesn't enlighten. It's a little pretentious, like most of Gilliam's work is, and has some great visuals, like all of Gilliam's work does, though none of the epic scope of his better early work. Christoph Waltz is terrific (of course he is, you saw Inglourious Basterds, didn't you?), and though I've spent the last one-and-a-half-thousand words bitching about how it doesn't have anything all that important to say, it actually does illustrate the the type of alienation from other human beings that can happen when people get too involved with the phantasmagorical worlds to be found on the World Wide Web and don't take the time to say hi to their neighbor. There, I said something nice.

I was going to talk a little about The Congress, wasn't I? It's vital that I do, or I'll have to rewrite some things. Where The Zero Theorem discusses where we are right now, The Congress addresses where we're going. Based in part on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, the story focuses on the professional crossroads at which real-life actress Robin Wright finds herself (you remember her from The Princess Bride, don't you? It's alright if you don't, because the movie takes great pains to make sure that you do). With a son steadily losing both his hearing and sight as the result of a neurological disorder, she desperately needs money to pay for his treatment, but because she's burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood (I haven't done the research to find out if any of that is true—it's possible you don't see her so much anymore because she has more important things than acting on her mind these days), she can't get acting work. So a movie studio makes a deal with her: they'll pay her one time to let them electronically copy her image, everything about her, every facial expression and physical movement, as well as use her recorded image in any way they see fit for the next twenty years, and in exchange she can never act again. She struggles with the idea and, after hammering out a contract with a lawyer who specializes in these things, signs her career away.

Jump ahead twenty years. Time to renew the contract (which stipulated, among other things, no porn and no stupid science fiction movies). But the times have changed. To visit the studio, she must drink a liquid from a vial that makes her hallucinate that she and everything around her is animated (you'll recall that director Folman's previous film, Waltz With Bashir, was fully animated, in contrast to this project, which splits the run time between animation and live action). Here's where the movie really takes off. It's a dip into the aesthetic of Yellow Submarine and underground comics from the Sixties and Seventies, a setting where espionage and avarice play out while cartoon whales and fish with penises for heads fill out the background. The point the director makes here seems pretty clear—this could be a bad thing, but it can also be incredibly liberating, just like with technology today. The idea that people could sink into a hedonistic torpor as a result of being able to blot out the world with hallucinatory drugs doesn't seem all that far-fetched, although I think this kind of thing will be realized through some sort of direct electronic/neural interface rather than with pharmaceuticals. In the film, once Wright has finally woken up from the trippy dreamworld everyone has decided to reside in, she's in a city populated by hordes of disheveled homeless zombies (who somehow still manage to feed themselves and get from place to place in spite of the fact, from their point of view, they live in R. Crumb's id), implying that this is a direction we might go, if we don't proceed with caution.

But The Congress isn't a pessimistic film, in the end. There seems to be a fatalistic attitude here toward what the director sees as a foregone conclusion—the world is going to change, the state of entertainment is going to change radically over the years in ways that will seem strange and terrifying in the very least to anyone who came of age in the last couple of decades, but that isn't necessarily bad, just different from now. It could have some incredible, life-changing uses. In the last few scenes, Wright's character (or Wright herself, if you want to be technical) relives her entire life as her own disabled son. Imagine that, imagine the possibilities. It might be science fiction now, but I sincerely believe something like this will happen, maybe not for another fifty or a hundred years, but eventually-- if the human race doesn't destroy itself in the interim--, people will have access to such a power. What will we become as a result? Probably shapeless slugs who subsist on lab-grown protein, lost in an artificial reality, unless we also find ways to separate consciousness from the body (don't laugh, certain very crazy and ambitious engineers are working on that very thing—I make no predictions about whether they'll succeed).

So, to conclude: The Congress is a movie about accepting change, and learning to live in a society that has drastically altered from the one you've grown accustomed to. Wright has to accept that the idea of an “actor”, in the age of CGI, is no longer what it was. As for the studio head who first floats the idea of scanning her onto software, he's seen later in an office that is little more than a janitor's closet, reflecting his diminished status in a future where movies as we know them no longer matter as much as they do now (although people still watch them projected on the sides of blimps). Think about it—with the current generation as enthusiastic about video games as it is, with video games slowly gaining on cinema as a narrative art form, do you really think their children and grandchildren will look upon old-fashioned, two-dimensional movie storytelling with anything more than incredulity at how anyone could have found entertainment value in something so quaint and dull? Have you ever heard teenagers talk about black and white movies, and by that I mean how they refuse to watch them? Music might have a future, but I'm not sure film does.

Yeah, see this one. Hell, seem 'em both. The performances are great, and you won't be bored. The Congress will move you much more than The Zero Theorem, I think, because the characters feel more genuine, and The Congress just means so much more thematically. Good science fiction inspires contemplation on both the contemporary and possible, and both movies, in their own way, succeed at just that.

The Wolverine: The Best X-Men Movie So Far

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The X-Men series is one that has never really distinguished itself in a major way, in spite of the fact that it's one of the first film series to be based on a Marvel property. They're not bad movies at all (well, The Last Stand is kind of lame), but with so many characters being juggled around over the course of the run time, the average viewer might find it difficult to feel heavily invested in what's going on or who's doing what, with one notable exception. As far back as the first installment, it was obvious which character the filmmakers preferred, and that character was Wolverine. He seems to be every X-Men fan's favorite, garnering several of his own spin-off series and ironically standing as the most recognizable, lone symbol of an ongoing story about a group of gifted individuals working as a team.

Hugh Jackman was a brilliant casting choice; his seamless combination of physical ruggedness and subtle personal vulnerability gives the character an onscreen depth that would have been absent if the producers had gone with a more straightforward tough-guy performer. Next to Ian McCellan's Magneto, he was the best thing in the original trilogy. Too bad it wasn't until 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine that he got a chance to be showcased on his own. For my money, that's where they should have started. The rest of the X-Men come off as shallow and bland next to Wolverine's hard-bitten, unpredictable ferocity, and it's not like the general, non-comic obsessed public doesn't have at least a passing familiarity with him after years of his image showing up on t-shirts and lunchboxes. Hell, before Tim Burton's Batman came out in '89, a lot of people had completely forgotten about the Caped Crusader, and now you can't go a day without seeing some Batman-related article of clothing or knick-knack.

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The Wolverine, interestingly, is not a sequel to X-Men Origins; instead, it seems to be a sequel to X-Men: The Last Stand, a connection you'd think the producers would want to avoid. Wolverine has recurring hallucinations involving the powerfully psionic Jean Grey, the love-interest he kills at the end of Last Stand. She's played by Famke Janssen, the same actress who played her in the trilogy, further cementing an association with an inferior movie. This doesn't hurt The Wolverine too much, but I'm surprised they didn't decide to go with a quasi-reboot and leave the other movies out of it. The main reason might be that X-Men: Days of Future Past is slated to be released in the next couple of years, preventing The Wolverine from being a true stand-alone project.

This time out, we spend a lot more time with the character, even more than in Origins, and as a result, he comes off as far more complex, layered, and sympathetic than in previous movies. From the opening shot of B-52 bombers swooping in on the city of Nagasaki in 1945 as an imprisoned Wolverine watches, you realize you're dealing with something a little more thematically rich than what has come before (I say that fully knowing that X-Men opened with a young Magneto in a Nazi concentration camp—it just works better here).

He saves a Japanese soldier from the heat of the atomic blast, an act that will have important consequences later. In the present day, Wolverine is alone and plagued by nightmares, living in the woods and rocking a serious mountain man beard. A young Asian woman with pink hair lures him to Japan, where he meets again with the soldier he saved decades earlier, now an old man on the verge of death. He has become a wealthy industrialist, and promises Wolverine he has the means to erase his mutant healing ability and grant him a mortal life. Wolverine is intrigued, though he never actually says yes to the proposition. While he sleeps, an evil scientist with the mutant ability to produce deadly toxins from her body secretly implants a spider robot thing in his chest cavity, suppressing his instant healing and making him vulnerable to bullets, knives, and aluminum baseball bats.

Taking away Wolverine's ability to heal is a good way to go. By weakening him, there's the sense that he could be in some real danger, and the audience is left to wonder just how badly he's going to be injured before he's able to heal again. Suspense is limited, because anyone who's seen an action movie before knows he's not really going to die, or even be denied his mutant powers for very long. But it works for the amount of time they elect to use it.

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The Wolverine has a strong first half, and there's an extended action sequence starting at a funeral and ending on top of a speeding bullet train that's as good as superhero fights get. The problem I had was with the overall execution of the story. There are a lot of great elements here, from Yakuza to ninjas to an adamantium Silver Samurai, but with the exception of the gangsters, these elements feel underused. There's a part toward the end that promises to be a knock-down, drag-out fight between the hero and a clan of ninjas, and it's all over before it has a chance to begin (though it does end with a cool reference to Kurosawa's Throne of Blood). You go to see a movie like The Wolverine specifically because you want to see him get in a wicked fight with ninjas; the result is kind of a letdown. The rest plays out exactly as you would expect, which is less a criticism than it is a comment on the trap nearly all action movies fall into. The hero confronts the bad guy, they fight to the death, the hero wins, and there you go. After decades of climaxes that all go exactly the same way, it's hard to muster up very much enthusiasm, especially when the final fight amounts to real actors running around in a CG cartoon, as in every other giant blockbuster from the last ten years.

I recommend The Wolverine, with reservations. It drags a bit in the middle, and doesn't realize its full potential. Still, it has some choice moments and solid performances, and by the time it's all done, we're left with a Wolverine who seems much more human and personable than in any other X-Men movie, in the best of the X-Men movies so far. 

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V/H/S, Atrocious, and Found Footage

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I talk about a couple of movies and there are some spoilers. So, you know, look out.

Anyone who hasn't been in a coma for the last five years or so has noticed the massive influx of “found footage” horror films both in theaters and straight-to-video. The feeling I get, just from cruising around the web, is that a lot of people bemoan the growing prevalence of this subgenre, saying that it's driven chiefly by the desire of producers to make and market films with next to no budget and with even less creativity. They can get away with shooting on video, using locations instead of sets, and hiring unknown actors. The Paranormal Activity series is probably the worst offender, recycling the same story from movie to movie and seldom even bothering to change up the formula: for the first half, doors creak slowly on their hinges, curtains are rustled, and objects are knocked on the floor when no one's around. Later, pots and pans get dropped from the ceiling and loud noises freak everyone out. Finally, someone—usually a woman—is grabbed by an invisible force and dragged along the floor. I've only seen the first three (aren't they up to five now?) and they all follow that same basic pattern. In between scares, we see lots of footage of bedrooms and kitchens where nothing is going on. The whole series feels a little bit like a joke on the audience, and a mean one at that.

Still, there's nothing about the genre in and of itself that makes it awful, save for the lackluster efforts of some of its practitioners. I have to admit I'm kind of a sucker for this sort of movie. I loved The Blair Witch Project when it came out, probably because I've been out in the woods at night enough times (minus the witch) to relate to the situation the characters find themselves in. The scares build steadily and effectively, and the ending is flat-out unforgettable. While many people apparently thought Apollo 18 sucked, I was actually impressed by the premise, and thought the film did a decent job of capitalizing on the idea of two astronauts trapped on the moon with a mysterious, malevolent presence and no way out. The fact that they were under attack by rock monsters was lame, but up 'til then they had me hooked. Cloverfield is terrific, one of the better monster movies I've seen. And I enjoyed the first Paranormal Activity, a movie best watched alone and at night. Once you've seen one, though, you've seen 'em all.

I find the animosity toward these movies kind of perplexing, mainly because they're not much different in kind from the crop of slasher movies that came out all through the '80's. Genre movies are all about trends, and this happens to be one that dominates the area of horror at the present moment. Just as older horror fans look back on Freddy, Jason, and Micheal Myers with nostalgic fondness, fans in their teens and twenties will remember The Last Exorcism and The Devil Inside the same way. They won't be wrong to do so; everyone has a soft spot in their heart for the popular culture of their youth, and there's some good in there that sets itself apart from the dreck.

I watched a couple of movies recently that, for me, represent both ends of the spectrum of found footage horror. While tooling around on Hulu looking for something to watch, I happened across a Spanish language film called Atrocious. The title gives ample fuel to anyone looking to make an easy joke about the movie's quality, which, after sitting through the whole thing, I feel might be perfectly justified. Not that it's a terrible movie, but it stands as a good example of why some people hate the found footage genre. The story involves a trio of siblings who stay with their parents in an old ancestral home somewhere in rural Spain, located next to a shrubbery labyrinth similar to the one in The Shining. The eldest is a young man who wants to shoot a documentary about a local urban legend. Against their parents wishes, the boy and his sister tromp around in the labyrinth looking for cool stuff to film. They see a mysterious woman, with her back to them, through a gap in the shrubbery, and later the family dog turns up dead at the bottom of a well inside the labyrinth. Not knowing the dog is dead, the youngest of the three disappears into the maze to look for it, freaking out their mom and sending the whole family on a search to find him. Naturally, all of the action is seen through the night vision of the two video cameras the brother and sister keep with them at all times. 

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Up to this point, the movie has a lot of build-up without very much happening. Once the characters are in the maze, they spend what feels like twenty minutes running around and yelling. It's pretty boring until the young man is grabbed from behind by an unseen assailant and dragged for several feet. Recovering from the attack, he picks up his camera to go find his sister, who he finds tied up at the gazebo at the maze's center. They make it back to the house, where copious amounts of blood have been spilled. They barricade themselves in the upstairs room, listening for the unknown person moving about in the house. The movie goes to news reports of a family in rural Spain that has been murdered, clearly talking about the people we've just been watching, then backs up and shows us the rest of what happened. The young man goes downstairs, then down into the basement, where a videotape is playing showing a woman with his mother's name in a psychiatric hospital. The narrator on the tape describes her as a deeply disturbed patient who has already murdered two of her children. At this moment, the young man's mother creeps up behind him, wielding an axe, and kills him.

Points go the the film's writers for not doing the obvious and ripping off Blair Witch Project. The urban legend mentioned earlier refers to a local ghost said to guide lost travelers out of the woods. Rather than telling a ghost story, which we have every reason to expect, the filmmakers go for a variation on the “someone you least suspect is really a psycho killer” formula. Overall, it's not very effective, because that kind of twist is, by now, pretty used up. Now that I think of it, it's a stripped-down version of the end to Scream. And like I said before, not a lot happens up until the end. A long way to go without much of a payoff. I wouldn't blame anyone who sees this and thinks, “Man, this found footage stuff is bullshit.” In it's defense, it doesn't feel as cynical and lazy as the Paranormal Activity series.

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Before Atrocious, I watched V/H/S, a movie from a couple of years ago. Unlike every other found footage horror film I've seen, this one takes the audacious step of being an anthology. There are, in total, five different stories in this one, hung on the the framing story of a bunch of young lowlifes breaking into an abandoned house with the intention of stealing a VHS tape. What they find are a pile of videotapes and a dead body. The presence of a corpse in no way deters them from looking for the tape they want, and one member of the gang is given the task of sifting through the stack to find the right one. As he does so, he watches a group of guys pick up girls at a bar, one of whom turns out to be a vampire demon; a man get murdered by his girlfriend's lover while they're on vacation at the Grand Canyon; a group of hikers slain by a killer who can't be filmed with a video camera for some unexplained reason; and the female half of a Skyping couple being an unwitting participant in an extraterrestrial breeding program. Once that story wraps up, the corpse comes to life and kills all the creeps. Weirdly, there's one more tale after that, though there's no one left alive to see it.

Not a perfect movie, but the anthology structure prevents it from getting dull, and all the stories move along at a good pace. It has genuinely scary moments, and there's some smart use of the found footage format. Whereas in just about everything from Blair Witch onward, characters are required to run around with a camera glued to their face in a way that seems totally unnatural, seeing as they're being chased by ghosts and monsters and whatnot, the makers of V/H/S opted for the most part to be logical: the guy in the first story films the action through a pair of glasses with a built-in mini camera, so it makes sense he doesn't stop shooting as he's running for his life. The couple at the Grand Canyon don't use their camera any more than you'd expect, and the Skying couple likewise don't use their laptops and tablets in any way out of the ordinary. V/H/S comes off much smarter than most entries in the genre, and it'll probably wind up with a cult following in later years, if it hasn't already. It gives me hope that this kind of movie can be done well when in the right hands. The concept provides the sort of immediacy the horror genre thrives on, and fans ought to rejoice that new territory has been staked out that can be explored in innovative, unsettling ways by talented filmmakers.

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World War Z: Zombies Old and New

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I went through a phase where I was absolutely sick to death of zombies and zombie movies, until I came to understand that they are now, and perhaps always will be, a dominant fixture in the pop culture landscape. They figure in about half of all movies made in the last ten years, they're in almost every video game (fine by me because I stopped gaming years ago), they're the premise of a hit TV series, I can count on most of the Halloween costumes I see being zombies, and people still tell zombie jokes on the internet. It's just the way things are, and I'll have to get used to it. On some level I wish everyone would drop the subject and find something else to amuse themselves; zombies are way past being hip or edgy, but they've become so rooted in the popular imagination that they're now as much a part of the consumer landscape as Burger King and Windows. I've more or less made my peace with it, but only because I have to if I want to enjoy contemporary entertainment.

In that spirit, I'll say that World War Z is a fine example of the genre as it stands today, even if it doesn't have anything new to say in respect to undead people shambling around taking bites out of the living. The only goal here was to make a fast, rollicking horror/adventure movie with tons of zombies and a lot of gunfire and explosions, and they accomplished that perfectly well. Where they depart from standard-issue zombie fare is in the epic scope they bring to the story; events start in Philedelphia, then move to South Korea, Israel, and finally the UK. Everything that happens is big and intense, with zombie hordes attacking in writhing, spastic waves, providing the film with some of its most memorable visuals. The undead here are of the 28 Days Later/Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead variety, running and jumping and swarming like Olympic athletes jacked up on crystal meth. The action has a feverish, skin-of-your-teeth quality that rarely lets up, and when it does start to wind down a little toward the end, it comes as something of a refreshing change of pace.

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Where World War Z fails is in its almost total lack of inspiration. I haven't read the novel it's based on, but the impression I get is that it has an episodic structure revolving around stories told by the survivors of a worldwide zombie epidemic. That's original, but none of it shows up on screen. Instead, we get the heavily-armed living struggling against the relentless living dead, a scenario so old it collects Social Security checks. World leaders and the military are at a loss, and there's a race against time to find a cure for zombie-itis. Nothing new there. I know less discerning fans don't look for subtlety, but if producers want to push back against the law of diminishing returns, they need a fresh approach. Humans vs. Zombies isn't going to cut it in the long run, even if it looks epically humongous. What saves the movie from feeling like little more than a big budget remake of 28 Days Later are good performances, particularly from Mr. Pitt, a fast pace, well-written characters, and unique imagery. I won't get the picture of zombies piling and scuttling up a wall like ants out of my head any time soon.

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I have to admit to a few biases when it comes to zombie flicks. I saw the original Night of the Living Dead (the movie that created the modern zombie if you ignore Vincent Price's The Last Man on Earth) on Halloween night when I was nine years old, and it had an indelible impact on my still-growing brain. Nothing since has ever recreated the grim, apocalyptic, unearthly feel of that movie for me, an effect achieved mainly through black-and-white cinematography, stilted acting, and a low budget. Not even Romero's follow-up Dawn of the Dead has the same power, though it did up the ante by employing Peckinpah-esque bullet hits and full-color guts. The later forays of Lucio Fulci into zombie cinema are fun, surreal, and a serious trip to watch, but generally feel more silly than scary. Living Dead is the first movie I know of to show the dead as literal ghouls who feed on the living, and while other movies have been more graphic in their depiction of the same material, none have done it more memorably (it's that freaky-ass music that does the trick).

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An interesting trend I've noticed in the zombie genre over the last several years is a tendency to tone down the gore, a weird development when you take into account that extreme gore was a primary selling point of zombie movies when the idea was new. Each new entry tried to out-splatter the last, culminating eventually in the ultra-gory finale of Romero's otherwise boring Day of the Dead, and some years later with Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, a film that was so overwhelming in its broad comedy and explosive, manic gross-out pyrotechnics that I naively assumed, right up to the point when Danny Boyle and Zack Snyder resuscitated the genre, it would be the final word in zombies. Clearly that hasn't been the case, and the next generation of dramatists have evidently decided that explicit blood and guts isn't the way to go. I was actually surprised at how tame Snyder's Dawn of the Dead was in comparison to the original, and the same goes for most of the recent crop of zombie flicks. One exception is Shaun of the Dead, which holds back on the gore until one character has his intestines pulled out by an undead mob, even giving us a good look at his empty body cavity as he dies screaming. That one bit is as shocking as anything Romero or Fulci ever did.

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You don't have to think on it very long to understand that the main motive behind cleaning up the buckets of blood is to increase ticket and DVD sales. For all its entertainment value, World War Z has a PG-13 rating and barely a drop of blood. Producers want the maximum number of moviegoers to see this stuff, and most people don't want to be alienated by exploding heads and flopping entrails. Diehard gorehounds can seek out more obscure, unrated titles, but zombies are now officially for the masses. In the same way that the iconography of punk rock and death metal has long been co-opted by unthreatening bands on the Billboard charts, the zombie movie is now a relatively safe mainstream product, suitable for Disney and children's costumes. Much like zombies themselves, the commodification of formerly obscure subcultures is not going away any time soon. One more thing old-school fans will have to learn to make their peace with.

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