End of Year Roundup--Somewhere, Forbidden, Inception, The King's Speech, The Wrestler, The Shining, Invasion of the Body Snatchers...

SOMEWHERE
I actually saw "Somewhere" long ago at the London Film Festival but disliked it so much I couldn't bring myself to write about it at length. Apparently, neither could Anthony Lane, who gave me the idea for a roundup, and whose assessment of the film very nearly matches my own--"In one prolonged shot, Johnny circles his car fast around a track, but the futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about." Indeed, Stephen Dorff's Johnny Marco is the flattest imitiation of a Mastroianni-esque character one could devise. "Somewhere" was as bad as "Nine" in its complete misunderstanding and degradation of Italian cinema, not to mention women. (The only viable female is Johnny's eleven-year-old daughter played by Elle Fanning and an obvious stand-in for Coppola's younger self.) I was a fan of "Lost in Translation" despite my big problems with its gross condescension towards the Japanese. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson were just so incredibly watchable, whereas "Marie Antionette" was entirely unwatchable. "Somewhere" has some nice shots of the Hotel Marmont and Sunset Boulevard but was mostly just plain boring and horribly misguided. But this is blissfully a roundup so I won't go on. Let's just say the highest compliment I can pay this film is that it made me think of the lyric from "Hair":
Claude Hooper Bukowski/Finds that it's groovy/To hide in a movie/Pretends he's Fellini/And Antonioni/And also his countryman Roman Polanski/All rolled into one/One Claud Hooper Bukowski.
If only Sofia Coppola had a tad more of Claud Hooper Bukowski's ambition.



FORBIDDEN
"Forbidden," seen at a Frank Capra retrospective at the National Film Theatre/British Film Institute (one of the great perks of London), was a surprise. Not your usual Capra or Stanwyck fare--the film is about a librarian who has a passionate affair with a married man--an ambitious but very likeable politician (only Capra could pull any of this off)--while on holiday and subsequently gives up everything--including their child--for him. The power of Stanwyck's performance allows the film to investigate love's complexity with a rare depth and maturity. I actually came away from the film empathasizing with her choices. Nevertheless, Capra himself loathed the film calling it "two hours of soggy, 99.44% pure soap opera." During the filming, Stanwyck fell off her horse, injured her back, and had to spend every night of the rest of the filming in the hospital in traction. Capra would blame the film and the equestrian accident for Stanwyck's definitive refusal to marry him.


INCEPTION
Glad I saw this on a plane and very post hype. But still I was bored. Doesn't even come close to the genius of "Memento" or even "The Matrix." Saw everything coming way before it did and the love story was plain stupid.




THE KING'S SPEECH
Oops, wrong King. So what if it's historically inaccurate. So what if it's a feel good story that lacks any subtlety whatsoever. It's entertainment at its best in the sense that it doesn't have any ambition to be anything more than it is so fulfills its promise from start to finish. Besides, I saw it with my mother who loved it because she remembered as a kid listening to the stuttering King on the radio and being embarrassed for him. If Colin Firth doesn't get an Oscar for this I'll eat my hat. And Geoffrey Rush deserves a nod. Without them this film would have been nothing at all.













THE WRESTLER
I saw this with my mother too and she repeated throughout the entire film: "Why would anybody ever want to watch this?" I thought Mickey Rourke's performance eerily too good. The film comes nowhere near the brilliance of "Raging Bull" but does have moments of sublime intensity. The love story with Marisa Tomei (always wonderful) and the daughter thread very banal. I was actually relieved at the lack of redemption, but could have been spared the Christ image during the denouement. Finally, I have to agree with my mother here.


THE SHINING
Quite simply one of the best films ever made. This should be required viewing for any student of film, really anyone interested in the creative process. It is a veritable primer in perspective. A multi-layered work of genius, my favorite scene, of course, is when the amazing Shelley Duvall peers down at the typewriter Jack has been writing his magnum opus on, while the camera takes precise aim up at her, the typewriter smack in the center of the frame. As she reads the by now infamous line, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," she--and we--are struck dumb by the great and horrifying truth that creation and destruction are one. The film is the enactment of T.S. Eliot's line, "There will be time to murder and create," via the inimitable horror/humor of Stephen King as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick. Unbelievable. I so identified with Jack it was disturbing.


INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
By far the best of the three versions is the one starring Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum. My mother's verdict: "This should be required watching for all citizens of the United States every six months to ensure we all don't become Republicans."


THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE
One of the most deeply feminine and feminist films I have ever seen, albeit made by a man.





THE SOCIAL NETWORK
I saw this on the plane home from LA. I had avoided seeing it because I just didn't think I could take one more film telling me how irrelevant women are. But on a plane I can take anything and yes women are entirely irrelevant here but I did enjoy the epic battle between Jew and Gentiles. Ah those Winklevoss twins really got what was coming to them (a 60 million dollar settlement). And what a hero for our times that Zuckerberg, a veritable saviour. He's given us Facebook, a monument for all time, a wonder of the world, a human cultural legacy up there with the pyramids, The Divine Comedy, Star Wars. Where would we be without him?

Howl

Howl is a howl, of laughter or pain take your pick. Poetry made accessible to the masses is a nice idea (for more and frankly more interesting see: www.motionpoems.com) but the literalization of Ginsberg's poetry through less-than-inspiring animation by Eric Drooker was just too much for me. The film is a primer on how to take a great work of literature and banalize it beyond recognition. James Franco's performance was exceptional and he'll probably win an Academy Award or something for it but to me it felt like a lot of strutting and fretting for his 90 minutes upon the stage, full of sound and fury but, contrary to Ginsberg's poem, trying to Signify Something. (In the new year I will go see Derek Jacoby play King Lear at the Donmar and with any luck--and so far all signs positive--his performance of "howl, howl, howl" will redeem all.) The obscenity trial was a pretty flat courtroom dramitization. And even though the cameos were fantastic--Mary Louise Parker and Alessandro Nivola in particular--they could do just so much. My present infatuation (I have a feeling I'm not alone), Jon Hamm, sadly couldn't muster any kind of enthusiasm for his role. I thought perhaps the casting was wrong and that Hamm should have played the prosecution lawyer (David Straithairn did the best he possibly could) instead of the defense lawyer but I doubt that would have helped. The film will undoubtedly increase sales of Ginsberg's "Howl" so I suppose, then, "Howl: The Film" won't have been a total loss.

The Kids Are All Right

I laughed, I cried (not really), I was thoroughly entertained. This is a solid comedy and about lesbians no less! Wow, did I ever think I'd see the day when a film about lesbians would make it into the (albeit arthouse) mainstream? I am a fan of Lisa Cholodenko's other films High Art and Laurel Canyon. But whereas Cholodenko's other movies are interested in the relationship between the surface of things and the twilight zone below, this movie stays rigorously above the water line. Don't get me wrong, I like the film in a superior made-for-tv-movie kind of way but wish I had seen it on an airplane instead of at the London Film Festival. Whenever I bring my objections to the film up among friends and acquaintances (of the left-leaning kind, the right-leaning kind having not even consciously registered the existence of the movie), I am almost immediately asked if I have any gay friends. So let me just state once and for all Filmfatale's Gay Credentials: Some of my best friends are gay! So here is my greatest objection to the movie: THE SEX. Though there are many sex scenes, some rather hot, there is not one viable sex scene between the two lesbians. The couple--excellently played by straight women extraordinaires Annette Bening and Julianne Moore--like to launch their foreplay with gay male porn, a hilarious scene, full of oily male torsos, but then Annette and Julianne disappear under the blankets and that's it! Mark Ruffalo (also excellent, as are the kids) has great, steamy, and graphic sex with his hot African-American goddess of an employee and then with adorable-femme Julianne Moore fulfilling two standard white male fantasies. But what about the lesbian audiences or the straight women even??? We're probably 99% of the audience! But when did that ever matter. Once again our gaze is irrelevant, especially if the movie wants to make it into the big leagues. Aargh. Other objections: It's totally unrealistic that the family had no lesbian friends. They seem to live in complete isolation from the gay community, and so very fearful (though humorously so) that their son might be gay. The only friends we do see are a very heterosexual couple. Which brings me to my next niggle. Did Annette and Julianne's relationship have to be such a straightforward copy of the typical upper-middle-class heterosexual couple? Couldn't the writers/director have given us just a bit more complexity? Yes, of course, we all strive towards normalizing ourselves to middle class values, even lesbians, but it's never as easy or as plain as all that. Lisa Cholodenko's fine comedy opted for mainstreaming over plumbing the depths.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguru is one of my favorite living authors but I will not here compare book to movie because, well, though it sits on my shelf I haven't read the book, but I also admire how Ishiguru himself said that once he signed over the film rights, as far as he was concerned whatever was created was something he could lay no claim to, he was simply eager to see what would happen.
The film describes a world, very near to our own (end-of-the-20th-century Britian), in which clones are created as living organ farms in order to increase the life-span of non-clones (presumably for those who can afford such a thing as there seem to be far fewer clones than non-clones and the clones are very well taken care of). The film had the potential to be great. The script was solid enough, though lacked a layer or two of finesse, the production gorgeous, if a little too gorgeous in that Merchant & Ivory way, which might have added something wonderfully creepy but the cinematography and production design seemed more intent on looking good than on providing contrast to the content. My biggest objection, however, was the casting. The three stars--Keira Knightly, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield--were excellent but the trio (and Keira Knightly most glaringly) had too much of the Movie Star aura about them to let this film deepen and mull as it needed to. Three unknown actors would have made a huge difference in allowing the material to truly disturb. Instead the audience is constantly distracted from the claustrophobic and horrific sadness of the story by the cult of the glam personality. (Same goes for Charlotte Rampling.) The result, I fear, is that most people will come away from this very prescient, not-so-science-fictional tale with the idea that it is a metaphor for and musing on our own mortality, when it could have been a very subtle and sophisticated damnation of our capitalist society and the rigid class system that prevails despite all attempts (albeit feeble) to do away with it under some guise of social justice. Of course, the film's greatest strength is also it's greatest flaw. It works hard to convey the idea that in this world cloning for organs seems so utterly reasonable that no one, neither the clones themselves nor the society at large, seriously objects to the practice. It's just accepted as another of life's necessary evils. We're all going to die some day anyway, the organ-donating clones just somewhat before their time and after two or three gruesome operations. This speaks to so much of what occurs every day in our here and now--organ farming actually does happen, but also horrific pracitices such as clitoridectomy or slavery or gross disparity of wealth, one country has an obesity problem while another starves. We all, more or less, accept these things, relying on the truism that this is just how it is, there's really not much we can do about it. It's a utilitarian world, after all. But the film never really leads us here. With all its high production qualities and fancy cast, implausibility reigns and the audience is sure cloning for organ farming could never, ever, happen, especially in England, or America, where there is a strong tradition of humanism and individualism and especially of fighting the enemy without (while entirely ignoring the enemy within). I was not unhappy I saw this film but it was most certainly was a missed opportunity.

The Town

As I sat through Ben Affleck's ridiculously puerile, utterly derivative The Town, I marvelled at how kind reviewers can be. What I soaked up from pretty much all and sundry was that this film was a fine entertainment, with a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Implausible from the getgo, Ben Affleck managed to make bank robbery boring. As the four heisters geared up for yet another job, all I could think was oh no not again (though the series of masks worn by the theives was the best thing about the film, referencing the long thespian tradition and allowing for some true spectacle to occur.) The film begins by making much of the fact that this was going to be a portrait (yet another) of a particularly sorry Irish neighborhood in Boston (the helicopter shots of the city were appealing but had no real purpose other than announcing the film had a budget big enough to include them). But despite the evident strain to do so, "Charlestown" never becomes a character in the film in any way.
The script was beyond bad with so many laughably unbelievable lines that I felt embarrassed for the actors--well, mostly for Rebecca Hall whose part as a toney bank manager who falls in love with her abducter (Ben Affleck) was plain preposterous. I guess she did the best she could with the role but it was not a showcase for her talents by any means. Ben Affleck is nice to look at and the camera likes him but his acting has a tendency to be very flat and though he comes frustratingly close, he can't quite project *Movie Star,* placing him in the Keanu Reeves category.
I was thrilled when Don Draper (the wonderfully named Jon Hamm) appeared on screen, and I spent most of the film studying his performance since I love him so much on Mad Men. Again, like Rebecca Hall, he did what he could with the material but that wasn't much. I have high hopes for him but so far he isn't pulling a George Clooney and making the transition from tv to film with ease and aplomb. Making it as a movie star surely rests in part on being able to recognize a dud script, or at least having people who can do that for you.
Two actors who did manage to acquit themselves impressively were Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively. Renner (The Hurt Locker) played supreme badass (typecast in the making?) adoptive brother to Affleck and gave the film any life it had. Though Lively's part was so cliched as lowlife whorish girlfriend I felt nauseated for her, she succeeded in dominating the screen whenever, albeit briefly, she was on it. Cameos by old-timers Chris Cooper and Peter Posthelwaite were welcome, lending a sense of irony to otherwise excruciating dullness, but what were they doing in this movie? All this to confirm: never believe anything you read.

Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors

A friend of mine (@gsuh) familiar with Hong Sangsoo's work, told me that I had probably chosen to see his "slowest and least enjoyable" film as my first and so far only introduction to this much-lauded Korean filmmaker. But it was the only one playing at the BFI (British Film Institute), where they are having a festival of his films this month, on a night I happened to be free, so I jumped at the chance. At last year's London Film Festival, I had been awed by a film called "Mother" by another Korean filmmaker, Bong Joon-Ho, and was hoping to experience something similar. Plotwise, "Virgin Stripped Bare..." is a Korean arthouse version of "Sliding Doors" in which we are given first the male perspective on how Sujeong (played by the stunning Lee Eunju) comes to lose her virginity to Jaehoon, the wealthy owner of Growrich Art Gallery, and then Sujeong's own perspective on the matter. (The BFI program calls the film "a cubist romcom inspired by Marcel Duchamp"--a claim this film certainly doesn't live up to but also a claim I can't imagine any film wanting to live up to.) The film is beautifully shot in black and white and this is its saving grace, but, alas, the exquisite visuals didn't provide quite enough redemption for this viewer. By the time the second version of the story rolled around, I was so bored I didn't care to learn about the nuances of Sujeong's perspective--which in any case didn't seem to me to be very nuanced. Hong Sangsoo is known for his "wry and witty unravellings of tangled sexual relationships" but in this film the "wry and witty" were sadly absent and we were left with just an endless unravelling. My friend Grace says that her Korean national women friends all adore Sangsoo because he gets the female perspective so spot on. It may be a cultural thing but I didn't get that at all. I felt the film made fun of men and condescended to women and avoided any "truth" about the sexes by sticking to cliched vignettes of their predictably unpredictable interactions. (My friend Grace doesn't get Hong Sangsoo either but more graciously says, "I guess the whole relationship between the sexes in Korea is way more complicated than I can understand.")
Nevertheless, Lee Eunju is amazing to watch, her acting subtle and powerful. And though I have yet to understand all the hype about Hong Sangsoo and his apparantly fresh, funny, and surprising depiction of the male/female conundrum, there were enough inklings here of an alternative vision to make me want to do my best to see more of his films before the festival is over.

Toy Story 3 and the Male Gaze

It may be because I saw this in New York City, where I almost always feel on some level ecstatic, but Toy Story 3 was for me nothing short of a revelation. I had heard from all and sundry that the film was exceptional. I had read how it had hoards of grown men leaving cinemas in floods of tears. I hadn't seen a film in a movie theater in three months. I was full of anticipation. But I could never have predicted what I was in for. On a superficial level, the film did everything right. It looked fabulous: the 3D was fun and elegant, never annoying or flashy. The plot twists were many and always surprising. Every character was so well drawn as to be uniquely him or herself, including the overtroped Barbie and Ken. As my six-year-old nephew summed it up: "That was funny, smart, and sad." But here's the thing: as I sat watching I couldn't help but think that this film was a very literal enactment of film theorist Laura Mulvey's famous-among-film-geeks phrase "the male gaze." Bear with me. The male gaze is for me as important an idea as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, or Freud's Oedipus Complex (ok, I'm exaggerating, but just a little). In a nutshell, the "gaze" is a Lacanian term for a person's projection of identity onto exterior objects; the "Male Gaze" is Mulvey's idea that Lacan's statement "woman is a symptom of man" is reproduced in the cinema where the viewer is assumed to be male, femininity a male social construct, the female his object of desire, and therefore she constitutes his chronic sense of deprivation ("the male lack"), and simultaneously becomes the location of his positive identity.
Toy Story 3 is a primer for the "male gaze." The narrative presents that extraordinary engagement a boy has with his toys and how those toys all become aspects of himself. Superhero, cowboy, potato head, teddy bear, but also, and this is where the film becomes brave and brilliant, Mrs. Potato Head, the cowgirl, Barbie. The male gaze also projects its identity onto female objects, absorbing the feminine back into himself. The same goes for Ken: the quasi gay, metrosexual doll with a fashion fetish. The sequence in which Ken tries on all his different outfits for Barbie must be one of the funniest in film history. But the subtext is that all men have a part of themselves that wants to dress up and parade around. Toy Story 3 embraces all these "other" selves-a crazed baby doll, an embittered teddy bear, the cowgirl, Barbie, Ken, Mrs. Potato Head--and incorportates them into the uberself Andy. And each of the feminine representations here are in no way static symbols but rich in character. Why grown men are crying, in my view, is because they are mourning for all those lost selves that, as they grow up, become too taboo to include consciously as part of the self. His gaze is reduced to projecting only the "acceptable" male selves, and to projection onto only the limited female symbols of sex object or untouchable icon. I'd be crying too.
But I wasn't crying and neither was my neice. The screenwriters tried hard at the end to include us in the gaze by having Andy--on his way to college where his definition of self will no doubt become radically restricted--pass on his toys to a little girl. But no one was fooled. In fact, another nephew said that for him, this was the saddest part of the film: the toys would now be played with by a girl who wouldn't "do it right." I understood him completely. The female gaze, whatever that may be, will be very different from the male. To assume equality is a mistake and Andy's toys will know it.
Instead, it was entirely refreshing to me to see the male psyche portrayed on screen in such a varied and undefended manner. All of the toys, as projections of the male self, revealed aspects of masculinity that I reveled in. Despite theories that have emerged, since Lacan and Mulvey, arguing for the existence of a female gaze or a "Matrixial Gaze," it is my belief that we still have no concept of what the "female gaze" might look like. There are many women filmmakers, writers, artists, but the implied audience remains male--even if more women go to the movies, read books etc. Toy Story 3 takes a very big step towards owning and exploring the male gaze and all that signifies for both sexes, most intriguingly the sense of inclusion of female parts in the male self. It makes me think that the expression of the female gaze--the female projection of her identity onto exterior objects, including her construction of the male and masculinity--is perhaps not so far off and will be a further revelation to us all.