With The Hurt Locker winning the big prize recently, and consequently finding its way into conversations more often than not, it seems like an opportune time to take a second look at the film. Admittedly, I’ll be doing this without an actual second viewing, so I apologize if things seem built on generalities instead of specificities.
To begin with the direction, the film is wired for action and she's done a thorough job. It’s solid to the point where you can feel the metallic vibrations from the explosions in your bones, and live in that environment at least as much as any movie before. It is not the kind of film that resonates with completion, with rightness, with that irrefutable stamp of the Hollywood arc and emotional push points. Instead, it feels taut, like sinew over bone, or a film budget for a female director. And to get this out of the way now, that Oscar was vicariously very satisfying, because while Kathryn Bigelow may not have been head and shoulders above the competition, she had a fierce hairsbreadth of a lead that she earned beyond a doubt. That she is intelligent and adult, a professional and an artist both in her interviews doesn’t hurt either.
It is topical, but to its credit the film is neither polemical nor pedantic, maybe just slightly juvenile in its message in the way action films tend to be (the message: blowing shit up is cool.) That’s not meant as a denigration, just as a counterargument to those who say the lasting impression left by the explosions is cautionary. The Hurt Locker is not unsophisticated in its methods or even its conclusions, but it’s telling that the film’s final image is to adrenaline-pumping hard rock music with our hero walking into the desert, about as classic an image of badassery as you can get.
It’s an action movie, pure and simple, which strangely, makes it one of the best treatments of a tricky topic that I’ve seen. It knows its aims and achieves them squarely, shooting neither too high nor too low, and in that sense it is a classic genre film, working within a known context. And little about the film pushes the boundaries—that’s not what it’s about—but like its protagonist, does a single job with unerring and unsettling efficiency. There’s something extremely satisfying, and worthy, about that kind of ethos, a film and a director who strangely favor competence over pretension.
And that is perhaps part of the reason why it was nice to see Bigelow get the Oscar, because it wasn’t just a validation but a mandate: go do more. Although I perhaps wasn’t quite as enamored with this film as many of the critics seem to be (though I did like it), I’ll be lining up to see her next movie. And one small part of me wonders what it would have been like if Kathryn Bigelow had helmed Avatar, not that it ever would have happened, or that she even would have wanted to. But a person can dream about what a movie that would have been.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The stiflingly beautiful "A Single Man"
In terms of visuals, art direction, and even emotions, A Single Man is frustratingly immaculate. The costumes and hairstyles scream their perfection; the color-drained and -flooded frame looks exactly as it should. The framing is artful, the editing precise and striking, and every choice announces itself in every second of every shot. The performances constitute the one realm that escapes this constricting network of decisions, their more human aspects coming through almost in spite of themselves. On the whole, the film is too exceptionally lovely to make an impact beyond the kind of touching beauty of the way the story is told.
But it’s also a testament to the strength of that story that the film succeeds largely with the better half of a mixed bag. Colin Firth is very excellent, and the supporting actors—Julianne Moore and Matthew Goode, principally—are just as good. When they are onscreen—and particularly when they are onscreen with each other—you almost forget about the sets, about all the choices being made, and feel the poignancy and urgency of the grief and life underwriting the story. Its observations seem fresh and strikingly modern; I guess the way people make friends and flirt hasn’t changed much since the 60s, cinematically at least.
If only the thing weren’t so damn beautiful. It’s frustrating, and irritating, the way it incessantly announces its aesthetic choices. Every time you sink into the story, every time the truth of an interaction or a facial expression captures you and makes you forget about the movie you’re watching, within a few frames the screen will be reliably flooded with sepia-toned angst or another devastatingly sharp ensemble worn by a devastatingly attractive person and there you are, watching again.
It feels strange to complain about the movie looking too good, and admittedly I didn’t mind too much in the moment. But it was a constant barrier that stood between my senses and my emotions, a constant reminder that I was watching cinema, high art damnit, and I better acknowledge it as such. Consequently, the impact of the story was only glancing at best, while the rest seemed like a particularly weighty fashion shoot. (I’ve been trying to avoid saying that since the beginning because it seems like such the expected criticism of this director, but damnit, you brought it on yourself Tom Ford!)
In short, the movie is a museum piece that’s just effective enough to make you wish it were something more.
But it’s also a testament to the strength of that story that the film succeeds largely with the better half of a mixed bag. Colin Firth is very excellent, and the supporting actors—Julianne Moore and Matthew Goode, principally—are just as good. When they are onscreen—and particularly when they are onscreen with each other—you almost forget about the sets, about all the choices being made, and feel the poignancy and urgency of the grief and life underwriting the story. Its observations seem fresh and strikingly modern; I guess the way people make friends and flirt hasn’t changed much since the 60s, cinematically at least.
If only the thing weren’t so damn beautiful. It’s frustrating, and irritating, the way it incessantly announces its aesthetic choices. Every time you sink into the story, every time the truth of an interaction or a facial expression captures you and makes you forget about the movie you’re watching, within a few frames the screen will be reliably flooded with sepia-toned angst or another devastatingly sharp ensemble worn by a devastatingly attractive person and there you are, watching again.
It feels strange to complain about the movie looking too good, and admittedly I didn’t mind too much in the moment. But it was a constant barrier that stood between my senses and my emotions, a constant reminder that I was watching cinema, high art damnit, and I better acknowledge it as such. Consequently, the impact of the story was only glancing at best, while the rest seemed like a particularly weighty fashion shoot. (I’ve been trying to avoid saying that since the beginning because it seems like such the expected criticism of this director, but damnit, you brought it on yourself Tom Ford!)
In short, the movie is a museum piece that’s just effective enough to make you wish it were something more.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Un prophète (A Prophet)
A Prophet—a long movie of the kind that gets called gritty by critics, signifying its value as honest, honestly, even while potential viewers slump their shoulders a little bit because they now know it’s going to be less fun—is actually quite good. Malik, our unremitting protagonist whose presence fills every second if not every frame, is surprisingly and intensely sympathetic. If his environs are undeniably and pointedly contemporary, his story nonetheless has the ring of the classic to it, of fathers and sons and even of the biblical. But it is young and exhilaratingly unformed at the same time, and though there might be father figures, the film is conspicuously absent a true father; this story is Malik’s alone.
And from unwilling and unknowing entry inmate to killer and back again, it is his persuasively. It is a simple but strong compliment to say that a fictional character is empathetic, that his evolution is believable and compelling, and Malik’s youthful intelligence, his ambition that arises apropos of nothing except his youth, is convincing in the slow, visceral way it should be. He and his film demand respect both.
His initiation comes early in the long narrative, a messy, labored killing of a man in response to another threat of death. The starkly gruesome scene—there is little pleasure in watching it—hangs in a surreal aura over Malik for the next several years and all of our time with him, which director Jacques Audiard lets loose with startling and even wondrous technique from time to time. I would not have thought that surrealist impulses would make sense in this case, or that occasionally mannerist touches like a title card with the name of a significant character, or softly blacking out the screen except for some small, crucial detail would work in a film like this; but I would have been wrong. Perhaps they work because of the director’s and actor’s (called Tahar Rahim by the way, no idea what else he’s been in but fantastic here) discipline in execution, because this is not a film made on sheer impulse to genius or creative meanderings. It is regimented and open at the same time, constructed and told in such a way that it mirrors and does justice to its subject.
Its moral and visual palette are strict and circumscribed, and grow in response to each other. Their formality progresses with the narrative, and by the end of the film have each discovered some sort of stability (if not quite the usefulness of a tripod) and found a heft lacking before, filling in the monochrome with richer blacks and softer whites. By the end neither has quite found solidity, or even a structure to follow up on the narrative, which is maybe as it should be. But the insistently realistic treatment almost makes you wish for a framework to lend it weight, for a camera exterior to his world by which to view it.
It is this location within his world that guides the film aesthetically and otherwise, and which makes it tempting to declare something lacking, but not in the sense that it didn’t aim high enough. A Prophet shies away from the more spectacular means and effects of film, a decision to be lauded, but not one that necessitates going to the other end of the spectrum either. To be sure, it doesn’t quite go there, and the directorial presence is subtle but unmistakable. But somehow, the emotional impact was just a touch behind the intellectual and narrative one, just a shade less effective than the rest of it. Perhaps to force it into lockstep would have been a melodramatization and had the ring of something untrue; as it stands, I saw it and I lived it, but I never quite felt it.
In the film, as Malik passes trial after trial, it is tempting to see each moment as the moment of truth. So often, coming of age is portrayed as the decision made in a single instant, a dichotomy offered without a chance to consider it: forwards or backwards? Childhood or adulthood? Are you a boy or a man? But A Prophet eludes that reasoning. Malik’s growth can be measured in the instants for sure, but their plenitude renders his metamorphosis continual rather than instantaneous. He moves and changes and kills, and will continue to do so even after the last reel has played out. There is something of a reward at the conclusion, for both the audience and their protagonist, but the more lasting revelation is of Malik’s simultaneity: he is still the same person he was at the start. His contradictions are essential, his negotiations between extremes the thing itself. It feels true but not right, over but not finished; so all is as it should be, while at the same time it isn’t, an astute observation and spur to action both, and very much a film worth seeing.
And from unwilling and unknowing entry inmate to killer and back again, it is his persuasively. It is a simple but strong compliment to say that a fictional character is empathetic, that his evolution is believable and compelling, and Malik’s youthful intelligence, his ambition that arises apropos of nothing except his youth, is convincing in the slow, visceral way it should be. He and his film demand respect both.
His initiation comes early in the long narrative, a messy, labored killing of a man in response to another threat of death. The starkly gruesome scene—there is little pleasure in watching it—hangs in a surreal aura over Malik for the next several years and all of our time with him, which director Jacques Audiard lets loose with startling and even wondrous technique from time to time. I would not have thought that surrealist impulses would make sense in this case, or that occasionally mannerist touches like a title card with the name of a significant character, or softly blacking out the screen except for some small, crucial detail would work in a film like this; but I would have been wrong. Perhaps they work because of the director’s and actor’s (called Tahar Rahim by the way, no idea what else he’s been in but fantastic here) discipline in execution, because this is not a film made on sheer impulse to genius or creative meanderings. It is regimented and open at the same time, constructed and told in such a way that it mirrors and does justice to its subject.
Its moral and visual palette are strict and circumscribed, and grow in response to each other. Their formality progresses with the narrative, and by the end of the film have each discovered some sort of stability (if not quite the usefulness of a tripod) and found a heft lacking before, filling in the monochrome with richer blacks and softer whites. By the end neither has quite found solidity, or even a structure to follow up on the narrative, which is maybe as it should be. But the insistently realistic treatment almost makes you wish for a framework to lend it weight, for a camera exterior to his world by which to view it.
It is this location within his world that guides the film aesthetically and otherwise, and which makes it tempting to declare something lacking, but not in the sense that it didn’t aim high enough. A Prophet shies away from the more spectacular means and effects of film, a decision to be lauded, but not one that necessitates going to the other end of the spectrum either. To be sure, it doesn’t quite go there, and the directorial presence is subtle but unmistakable. But somehow, the emotional impact was just a touch behind the intellectual and narrative one, just a shade less effective than the rest of it. Perhaps to force it into lockstep would have been a melodramatization and had the ring of something untrue; as it stands, I saw it and I lived it, but I never quite felt it.
In the film, as Malik passes trial after trial, it is tempting to see each moment as the moment of truth. So often, coming of age is portrayed as the decision made in a single instant, a dichotomy offered without a chance to consider it: forwards or backwards? Childhood or adulthood? Are you a boy or a man? But A Prophet eludes that reasoning. Malik’s growth can be measured in the instants for sure, but their plenitude renders his metamorphosis continual rather than instantaneous. He moves and changes and kills, and will continue to do so even after the last reel has played out. There is something of a reward at the conclusion, for both the audience and their protagonist, but the more lasting revelation is of Malik’s simultaneity: he is still the same person he was at the start. His contradictions are essential, his negotiations between extremes the thing itself. It feels true but not right, over but not finished; so all is as it should be, while at the same time it isn’t, an astute observation and spur to action both, and very much a film worth seeing.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Being here
When I took a CD out from the library for the first time today, it turned out that Acts I & II of La Bohème had been replaced with Lenny Kravitz’s Greatest Hits. It was probably inadvertent, but I like to think that some rabid Lenny Kravitz fan was nefariously replacing CDs in the back of the library just to shock and appall all the harmless classical music listeners out there. All over Brooklyn, night after night, some unsuspecting music nerd goes to listen to Puccini or Bartok and gets a dose of reasonably catchy if less than spectacular pop-rock. Bewildering conspiracies are the best.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:
1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.
All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.
And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Tino Seghal at the Guggenheim*
A friend from Philadelphia was visiting for the weekend, and she had said to meet her and another friend at the Guggenheim on Saturday. Going, I didn’t know what the current exhibition was at all; last thing I had heard, there was a big Kandinsky show up. Since I was running somewhat later than I should have been on Saturday, I received a text from my friend, which said something along the lines of “We will watch the people making out until you arrive.” I kind of laughed and didn’t think too much of it (people-watching in public places is a very legitimate urban activity), so imagine my surprise when I arrived in the Guggenheim to find that she was not referring to one of New York’s overly affectionate couples, but to the artwork.
The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.
We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.
That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.
It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.
But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.
- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine
*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.
The spiral of the Guggenheim was stripped bare, devoid of art to my eyes. In the center of the ground floor, a couple was rolling around, making out, groping each other, and occasionally striking poses from famous pieces of artwork, all in slow motion. My friends were positioned maybe twenty feet away, as were many other museum patrons, sitting on a free bench, watching the couple about as unawkwardly as it is possible to watch a couple make out in slow motion. This was a sculpture (dance piece?) by the artist Tino Sehgal, to which my reaction was, “Well. Okay,” and trying to watch without appearing too interested.
We headed up the spiral, and as I looked for whatever I was supposed to be looking for, a kid, maybe ten years old, walked up to us, said, “Hello. This is the exhibition. Can I ask you a question? (Yes.) What is progress?” I was totally disoriented and a little freaked out that someone had conscripted a child to work as a part of the exhibition, but followed him up the spiral with my friends somewhat hesitantly, talking about progress all the while. Then the kid led us up to a teenager, summarized our responses for her, and she took us up from there.
That’s the gist of the exhibition: talking and walking, a few big ideas posed to you by progressively older participants. It concluded at the very top of the rotunda, with a senior citizen, who finished by telling us the name of the exhibition and what a pleasure it was to have conversed. Simple, straightforward, direct in its methods and basic in its execution; disconcertingly one-note, but not a bad note to dwell on. I began thoroughly unconvinced, but finished energized, at the height of a spiral, looking down at a couple obliviously making out in slow-motion, feeling the same kind of subtle euphoria and optimism that I do after a good, long run.
It was effective because although it was one-note, that note wasn’t static; it grew and evolved and worked its way into my thoughts. It was staged, and it felt staged, which is part of why I was so disconcerted by both the couple and the child at first; but at a certain point, I came around to the realization that ideas spoken by actors are still ideas, that inauthentic shared experiences are still experiences shared. There was something about the medium of choice being conversation that made it invariably effective; a simulacrum of a conversation is, you guessed it, still a conversation. So that I do not know if what each actor said was utterly scripted or spontaneous, truthful or fabricated, but I do know that I had an interesting conversation with four or five different people (of increasing ages—a key point) no matter what. It wasn’t life-shattering, or even that revelatory, but it was true nonetheless. The best analogy I can think of is that it would be like taking a photo of the color red, and trying to distinguish between the photo and the original color; the distinction is in a way irrelevant: it’s still red. The truth of the perception is still there.
But with contemporary art, the question I almost always feel compelled to ask myself, explicitly or implicitly, is: is there something to mourn here? What is the loss? And with this: when all is said and done, what is left? I suppose there’s something to be said for art that is purely experiential (and this guy is all about the ephemeral, if documentation of the work is made, it becomes “inauthentic”), but something that constitutes a significant part of my art consumption is going back again and again, having the thing itself (or my experience of it) at my fingertips and eyes and ears. Perhaps part of the problem here is that this experience was good, but not great; compared to a great concert, or a great performance, I don’t think this would measure up. A lot of art that gets on my nerves confuses the intention with the result, and though I don’t think Sehgal’s committed that particular error, I don’t think it entirely works either. I often have to let things sit in the back of my head for a while before I can fully understand their impact, or before I can feel and not just know how they'll last. The problem here is that Sehgal’s piece isn’t in the back of my head; it’s still at the Guggenheim.
- the Guggenheim's page on the exhibition
- NY Times review of the exhibition
- interesting longer piece on him from NY Times magazine
*I believe the two works are called The Kiss and This Progress, though I could be wrong.
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