continuing:

Neither of these religious films require much commitment to the traditions in question, Christianity for The Tree of Life and Buddhism for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. That is, the religious question isn't about doctrine, but the mystification of life, what tends to be called spiritualism. Both films attempt to conjure up the transcendent in quotidian living as the eternal questioning without an answer. The former is in the register of awe (juxtaposing the cosmic and microcosmic to middle class life in Texas) and the latter, contemplation (nearly still life depictions of Boonmee's family, both alive and dead, at a dinner table, at his bedside or watching TV in a hotel room). Why is there something instead of nothing? What does this something mean? Why do some brothers die while others live? Why is there a guy in cheap ape suit at the dinner table? To appropriate McLuhan, the question is the answer. Or, in the words of the Insane Clown Posse:

No one was tempted to reference Martin Heidegger to defend "Miracles" from the media lashing that went on last year (I did find this juggalo existentialist referred to as the Heidegger of the movement, though), but isn't ICP saying the same thing as Terrence Malick in Tree of Life? Scientific facts and reasons are a form of domination; a child-like wonderment is the authentic existence. Grace over nature. Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes the same point formally. Uncle Boonmee's interminable, flat, static scenes of people talking about not much of anything (when they're talking at all) are supposed to elicit mystery. As J. Hoberman says, "The movie doesn’t mean anything -- it simply is." Just like water, fire, air and dirt. Semantics, evolution or special relativity are just dominating plots, hegemonic discourses. Salvation comes through mystical revelation. Being reveals itself. Only positivists would mock white rappers in clown makeup.

These are films that I either suffered through, or whose trailers assaulted me while waiting to see something else.

These are two individuals who made careers out of dehumanizing others. Yet, we're supposed to sympathize with them because one was a repressed gay man and the other a woman who faced off against men and is now suffering from Alzheimer's. Fuck them both. There are many legitimate ways to approach biopics about interestingly evil people (e.g. Downfall), but a liberalized understanding is not one of them. 


I've previously expressed my horror at seeing simple 2D cartoonish figures rendered in photorealistic 3D detail. Who needs to count the black lines in Scooby's iris or see the snot dripping from his nose to get into the plot? But this grotesque disfiguration has really reached its aesthetic nadir with Spielberg's adaptation of the comic famous for its clear line style, Hergé's TinTin. Rather than believe Spielberg can't see how hideous these deformed monsters look, I suspect that this kind of adaptation is really a simulation of a live action adaptation. Ultimately, it's a portent of a later stage of the technological revolution in which actors and much of the old film crew will be out of a job. A perfectly realistic CG star can't join a union. Of course, that'll only happen if they can digitally create the voices, too, which brings me to why the Muppets are dead and should not be brought back as zombies. Maybe Gallagher and Sam Kinison can be safely simulated by a close relative, but there is no muppet without the original muppeteer. Kermit and Fozzie might look the same, but they're obviously defective clones, being revealed as recovering stroke victims upon opening their mouths. (Not that I've ever been much of a fan of the Muppet movies, which tend to identify more with the lame humans than the characters of interest.)

Imagine an alien archeologist in the future trying to understand human culture through our only remaining documents, existentialist literature from the 20th century. This alien might not laugh at Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.

I have not seen Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, but did see Tom Hooper's The King's Speech thanks to a free screening. The latter makes King George VI relatable to us commoners by showing the difficulty he had in public speaking (a requisite of kings) due to his stuttering. Being a monarch on the dole isn't as easy as it looks, the film says. Coppola suggested in her last film, Marie Antoinette, that royalty might even like the same indy rock bands as the hoi polloi if given the chance. Poor Marie didn't get that chance; her crippling privilege led to an early beheading. King George couldn't retreat into the background and go face the Nazis on the battlefield. Instead, he had to endure years of speech therapy in order to give a speech to all the boys who were to face death against the Axis. My inner class conflict has trouble finding this story inspirational, but I, along with all the middle aged women who read classic literature, can't deny the charm of Colin Firth. As an example of creative writing's write what you know, Somewhere is about privileged Hollywood types contemplating their up-and-out existence at the Chateau Marmont. Stephen Dorff plays the kind of guy who spends a lot of money on looking dirty and hip. There are a lot of his type in Hollywood, and now they have a movie about their plight. Dorff's not as dreamy as Firth, but has better abs.

That poster kind of says it all, a bleached blonde white queen, i.e., cheap and phony. It's interesting that when a film version of some dark fable comes up, Tim Burton springs to mind. Of course, he had to be the one to direct this film, I heard many people say. Yet, he only fucks them up: Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd. Sure, he's got a unique design sense, but he's an unimaginative storyteller, turning everything into the most rudimentary action plot. The best he could do with the headless horseman is to treat him as a supervillain. Alice in Wonderland shoehorns Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings into Lewis Carroll's world. Instead of mindgames with perverse creatures, Alice is a warrior who's brought back to Wonderland to face off against the tyranny of the Red Queen and to slay the Jabberwocky. That sounds like a well-worn joke about producer interference from The Player, but it's not.

Peter Bogdanovich likes to retell this bit where, in response to a comment he made about Greta Garbo only making two great films, Orson Welles said, "you only need one." It helps to keep that in mind when watching Martin Scorsese's films of the past 20 years. For example, Shutter Island.