Bond Upon the Brain!

It's funny, you know--I finally got around to seeing (or, maybe, worked up the courage to see) Synecdoche, New York and, to be expected, it just kicked my ass all over the place. The typical rounds of self-doubt and serious introspection followed, but in the end I'm still thinking about James Bond.

Of course, it probably doesn't help my state of mind that 1967's five-director pile-up Casino Royale should be the first film I see after Synecdoche, New York. How's this for a mindfuck: seven characters carrying the title of James Bond, 007; Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynd; Orson Welles playing Le Chiffre as a jolly magician; the testicle torture replaced with a face-eating acid trip co-starring Peter O'Toole; and Woody Allen. The most I can take from this two-hour-long non sequitur is that the denizens of Swinging London already knew how fucked up they were and, moreover, didn't care. How about putting Casino Royale on a double bill with Blowup? If anything, they're self-aware enough to prove that the era didn't need a dick-filled haranguing from Austin Powers. (Even when he was relevant, was Mike Myers ever relevant?) In fact, let's just go nuts and stick Synecdoche at the end of that and make a triple bill about the follies of unfiltered creativity. Now there's an interesting haranguing, considering the ineffable passage of time in Kaufman's opus is roughly analogous to the time that has already passed since 1967. All three of these films share love-hate relationships with beautiful women that go unrealized until it's too late--and how can you not link Caden Cotard to Thomas' eternally-distracted quest to find the body that may have never existed?

For all of its proselytizing bullshit and seizure-inducing action sequences, I liked Quantum of Solace--liked what it was saying about the responsibility to protect the masses, placed in direct opposition with the desire to simply kill the people who cause trouble. But beyond that, I fell in love with the spectacle that surrounded it: I loved the title, I loved the poster, and although "Another Way to Die" was pretty horrible, I've watched the title sequence on YouTube a few more times than I'd care to admit--if only to hear those first few notes, which really did represent the throwback at which the filmmakers were grasping before it all went south. From the moment I saw Quantum's ludicrous single-letter lapel pins, I fucking wanted one. I'm not immune to the iconography, and frankly, I don't want to be. I just don't want to be shackled to it--I was genuinely surprised that Quantum of Solace's olive branch to the die-hards wasn't enough to please many of them. Why is the gun barrel sequence at the end of the movie? Why is it so fast? The reasons are obvious, but the infallible tradition outweighs such revelations. Needless to say, I'm worried about Bond 23.


But who am I, and what are my intentions? I should probably mention at this point that it was Bond who lured me into cinema. I can still remember the first time I saw Pierce Brosnan walk through the gun barrel sequence on the big screen, after about a hundred iterations passed through my VCR: the moment, I think, when I realized how different the movies were from any other form of entertainment. I knew that the movies were larger than life from the moment I first laid eyes on them, but it wasn't until that little white orb shot across the theater that I understood that fact. For all of my intellectual desire to see popular culture turned on its ear, how often do I strive to relive that moment of clarity through safe, familiar images? More than ten years later, on top of all the ideas that it forced me to confront about my life and the people in it, Synecdoche, New York reminded me that I still have a lot of preconceived notions about how art should intertwine with my life. So Casino Royale '67 brings up an interesting thought: is it really such a weird, obtuse film, or am I merely put off by a property that would dare take something so famously formulized and mold it into something that is, indeed, entirely without formula or even the most rudimentary sense of logic?

So with all of that in mind, I took the opportunity to revisit another icon of my early cinematic education: "Mystery Science Theater 3000"--or, at least, its modern incarnation, RiffTrax; more specifically, Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy's take on Casino Royale '06. I've been somewhat back and forth on how I feel about this brand of entertainment as an adult, but after sitting down and listening to this track (and a few episodes of the old show, for good measure), I wasn't outright offended by the very fact of it. It's just that these guys are... not really all that funny.

I mean, I have no qualms about ripping on A View to a Kill, as my college chums and I did on many-a drunken night. We all loved Bond movies, but from the moment Roger Moore lets loose with his first protracted moan of impending pain--out of, like, five--you're through taking the movie seriously. (Unsurprisingly, we rarely bothered to finish the film.) And forget the fact that they're turning their cannons toward a great film--I'm even on board to make fun of Casino Royale, considering that you should be willing to skewer your own sacred cows every now and then to keep your sensibilities in check. But there's something fundamentally wrong about being spoonfed by such a secondhand source, isn't there? Doubtful that I would have the same cinematic curiosity if it hadn't been for "Mystery Science Theater 3000"--which in all likelihood served as my introduction to Japanese cinema and, yep, the mod '60s, too. I laughed at the awful jokes thrown out by the hosts because it's all I knew. But there comes a point when you've seen enough movies on your own and you have to know more. Context, personal boundaries. "MST3K" and RiffTrax are indiscriminate and oppressive in their simpleminded snark: there's no real feeling of camaraderie between Murphy and Nelson, who are so carefully scripted as to make the exercise moot. They're not funny, and they're not defiant. They simply are.


Sure, I'll find it superficially impressive that you can find appropriate moments to name-check both François Mitterrand and Heike Kagero from SNES classic "Super Punch-Out!!"--but the people who would get those references should be too old for this shit anyway. Who, exactly, are you trying to please by simultaneously decrying Casino Royale as being too silly while berating it for not kowtowing to each convention of the Bond series? There's something a little pathetic about trying to please everyone at all times, and it's ridiculous to try and pretend that it still has merit when you're ten years out of the gate. Genuine subversion is a lot easier to swallow when you realize that art isn't about everything that you want. I like to think that I'm learning that. At any rate, I still love James Bond, and I'll always get a little quake from the gun barrel sequence--but I'm not thinking about it when Sean Connery retrieves his money clip from a mad assassin with infinite disdain; when Roger Moore empties his Walther into a defeated billionaire's midsection; when Daniel Craig cradles a betrayed friend in his arms before tossing him in a dumpster. It's an introduction into this world of cinema, not its alpha and omega, and I've already had my turn--so who am I to cling to it like a jealous ex?

Mon Meme Alphabette

Doing this without being tagged--do we have an antisocial rep? Probably--or tagging others (then it becomes too reminiscent of a chain letter, if you ask me), in large part as a weekend stopgap. I first heard about this "meme" over at THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR; apparently it originated at BLOG CABINS. Everyone here is welcome to counter with his or her own list, link to a favourite, or trash mine.

Rather than choose my favourite film from each letter of the alphabet, as the rules dictated, I decided to be a rebel and pick some also-rans that in a few cases haven't gotten much play around here. (Besides which, this seems to have rapidly become an Obscure-off in which no one is being truly honest with themselves.) I suspect, as Nick Davis said of his friend, um, Goatdog, that some of my choices will take even close friends by surprise. Sometimes a title just never comes up in conversation.

Also, I cheated on the letter "x."
--
Alice in the Cities (Wenders)
The Baby (Post)
California Split (Altman)
Danger: Diabolik (Bava)
Explorers (Dante)
F for Fake (Welles)
The Girl Can't Help It (Tashlin)
Hamlet (Branagh)
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Arnold)
The Jerk (Reiner)
Kurt & Courtney (Broomfield)
Lisa (Sherman)
Modern Romance (Brooks)
The Nutty Professor (Lewis)
Onegin (Fiennes)
The Public Enemy (Wellman)
Quest for Fire (Annaud)
Return of the Dragon (Lee)
The Sterile Cuckoo (Pakula)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Lynch)
Under the Volcano (Huston)
Videodrome (Cronenberg)
The Wrong Man (Hitchcock)
Pola X (Carax)
Young Frankenstein (Brooks)
Zoolander (Stiller)

Quantum Feedback (Updated)

Well, we did one for Crystal Skull and we did one for WALL·E; might as well do one for the new Bond. Consider this your Quantum of Solace talkback.

(11/17): Walter's review of the flick is live at last.

... in my giddyup

It speaks somehow to what I suspect is an interesting sea change in my life here as, in revisiting a few of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, I’m finding that I like them now in a way that I didn’t used to before. It’s not that I knew that I was more respecting a picture like Rear Window for instance, than liking it, it’s that now, freed of feeling like I had to respond to it in a certain way, I discovered that I responded to it like a motherfucker. Curious about that, I popped in his remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much to discover, to my delight, that a film I’d always sort of disdained was, in fact, tight as the proverbial kettle drum and, more, with a few years under my belt, emotionally affecting as well. My fave Hitch is still 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt, Hitch’s first truly “American” film, his only collaboration with Thornton Wilder, and starring faves Joe Cotten and Theresa Wright – but I’m coming around to the idea that what I’d always considered to be “light” late pictures in the Master’s oeuvre are not so easily dismissed. No wonder Truffaut sounds like a fawning sycophant in that interview he did with him.

Lists being what they are, I’d still like to offer up my top ten Hitchs:

Shadow of a Doubt
Vertigo
The Birds
Marnie
Strangers on a Train
Notorious
Rear Window
Psycho
Rebecca
The Lady Vanishes

Oh dear – that leaves off a great many, doesn’t it? Frenzy and North by Northwest and The Wrong Man and I Confess and The Lodger… where do they fit?

It’s also led to a couple of other skylarks nagging at the back of my head – like what, exactly, the term “Hitchcockian” means outside of specific context?

And which is the Hitch you hate the most to love? Me? Family Plot.

I’m doing a series upcoming at a local library system of “Forgotten Classics” – we’ll be showing, as Saturday Afternoon matinees, Ace in the Hole, Seven Men From Now, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Late Show, and Being John Malkovich. Better title might have been “Classics in the Rearview”. Next month, I’ll be doing a Marlene Dietrich series with the Denver Public Library.

Will be doing minor coverage of the Denver Film Festival in the next couple of weeks and catching, I hope, at last a screening of The Wrestler – the last real film I’m interested in seeing this year.

Whoa is Me Redux

Will the poster by the name of "Dan C." please step forward and claim your prize? (E-mail me - billc@filmfreakcentral.net.) Life's too short to drag this out any further. Those caps came from Witchfinder General, The Butcher Boy, and Road Games, by the way; surprised no one got the third one, since I assume the film is quite popular around here as an '80s horror movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis. (I hadn't seen it, ironically, until excerpts from it in the terrific Aussie exploitation doc Not Quite Hollywood inspired me to rectify the situation. Truthfully? I was kinda disappointed, especially as an ardent fan of Richard Franklin's other Hitchcock shrine, Psycho II.)

One other bit of business before I scram: Walter Chaw's interview with Charlie Kaufman just went up at the mothersite, and I'm tempted to say it's the best thing we've ever published. Not to overhype it. And talk about landing the whale--where do we go from here?

Whoa is Me

I have a Blu-ray copy of The Ultimate Matrix Collection I'm willing to give away to the first person who correctly identifies the sources of all three screencaps below. North American residents only, please.

Dunno when I'm gonna get around to reviewing the damn thing, for what it's worth, but in short it's demo material through and through, just a great showcase for the format. And you actually get The Animatrix in full 1080 for the first time on next-gen.

Also wanted to take this opportunity to go on record about the status of this year's book. While there won't be a Film Freak Central 2008 Annual, there will be a Film Freak Central 2008-2009 Annual, which we're hoping to release in the first quarter of next year. It's going to cost a bit more but it will also be twice as thick. (That's what she said. (Speaking of which, how great was Thursday's "The Office"?)) More details to follow.

Seaquest out. Good luck!

Politics Politics Politics

So, uh, who here has seen Michael Moore's latest film Slacker Uprising, graciously offered as a free gift to residents of the U.S. and Canada? Spoiler alert! It's about how Michael Moore singlehandedly won the youth vote for John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election. (You're welcome.) It really is a sight to see, so watch it for free while you can--formerly, and more appropriately, titled Captain Mike Across America at last year's TIFF, Slacker Uprising may be the film that cements his long-term relevance to the art world and emphasizes his newfound irrelevance to everything else. You want a movie that can definitively link Moore to Leni Riefenstahl--so definitively, in fact, that it makes the comparison embarrassingly obvious? Well, here it is: a 62-city rock-the-vote tour that finds Michael Moore energizing enormous, faceless crowds of "slackers" (read: college students) who seem less interested in his message than his presence, which is given extra weight by fawning introductions from Joan Baez and R.E.M.

Predictably, Moore also takes the opportunity to a lodge a hypersensitive defense of Fahrenheit 9/11, wagging a finger at the media for their own propagandistic tactics and refuting the guys who call him a communist without seeing his work. Apparently, Moore tells us, 44% of polled Republicans who saw the movie felt that it offered a fair portrait of the President. In presenting that little tidbit, it seems brazenly prickish (and, it goes without saying, enormously self-centered) to dare right-wingers to picket his tour, and to keep his camera solely focused on the lunatic fringe--the folks who admit their ignorance to the issues but will vote for the guy who has a personal covenant with the man upstairs. I realize that it can be more than a little disconcerting--this idea that no matter how batshit insane or ridiculously uninformed you are, you can vote so long as you're not a convicted felon--but, um, isn't Moore essentially enabling a whole new crowd of scary voters with his indiscriminate bid to get warm bodies into the polling booths? Fight fire with fire, I guess, but I don't know if it's possible to see Moore's crusade against George W. Bush as anything less than a personal vendetta: it's not specifically about the war or the 2000 vote anymore--he wants to hurt this motherfucker, bad. The so-called Slacker Uprising chronicles nothing of the sort; it's just a paean to its own creator and a sissy-slapfight waiting to happen. I'd say that Moore just wrote his own pink slip with this film--but let's wait for the election, and Oliver Stone's W., before we can come to any concrete conclusions.

Imbued with a slightly masochistic desire to watch documentaries about self-centered jackasses, I went to see Religulous over the weekend. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot to say about it, except that I wish that Bill Maher would spend more time talking about the bizarre attempts to reconcile faith and science and less time trying to discredit their interviewees with sarcastic subtitles as they fumble for the right words. In fact, let's say that I wish that Maher had spent more time implicating himself as a member of the human race, instead of placing himself smugly above it--what else can you say about a man who says that he thinks you're smart and rational until faith enters the equation, upon which time he declares that you have a neurological disorder? Oh sure, he drops little hints of his own brushes with faith and religion, but even as a kid, he was too smart for that shit.

If history has taught us anything, it's that fear and passion have a fucked-up effect on the human psyche, but what Religulous taught me is that we can avoid obliterating ourselves with a self-righteous mushroom cloud if we were more like Bill Maher; if we were to adopt his sense of all-encompassing doubt and, perhaps, his messiah complex along with it. Dare we imply that arrogance is one of the reasons why religion has helped steer us onto the path of self-destruction? "Everyone in America needs to see this movie," someone behind me remarked as the end credits rolled, and it's that kind of reaction that I fear most from Religulous, this belief that watching it will endow each and every one its viewers with some mystical sense of self-awareness--more likely, it will convince its own holier-than-thou choir to adopt a sense of apathy to world events, convinced that they're not a member of the unwashed masses. I mean, I dunno, what do you think: when you're discussing something as ostensibly universal--yet so intensely personal--as faith, how distant can/should a director/host remain from the action?

I tried my damnedest to sneak into An American Carol shortly after I saw Religulous, but no such luck--while seventeen of the multiplex's nineteen theaters could be found on the second floor, An American Carol was on the ground floor alongside Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, presumably because they are the films at highest risk to be populated by moochers. You win this round, fall releases not screened for critics! So I pays my moneys and watch the movie with seven other people present in the theater--two of whom walk out about a half hour in. I somehow managed to stick it out and, frankly, I'm still waiting for David Zucker to pop up out of nowhere and throw a pie in my face.

There's one particular scene that leads me to that flabbergasted conclusion: Before a pair cops can search a couple of middle-eastern guys, a cadre of literal zombies representing the ACLU barge in, moaning about the Fourth Amendment. ("I'm premenstrual!" the token female zombie adds. Ha ha! Bitches, man--am I right?) "Thank Allah for the ACLU," one of the Middle Eastern guys mutters, shortly before George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer) jumps in and blows them apart with a twelve gauge. We never actually get to see the bomb in question before Patton blows them to kingdom come, and... just... no. You can't possibly expect me to see this as even remotely acceptable. My own sense of doubt tends to take over during moments like these, attempting to convince me that I've missed something important. Call it cathartic fantasy if you want, but no one can possibly be this ignorant, no one can be this much of a balls-out hypocrite.

Could it be that An American Carol is actually a subtle, complex satire of partisan bickering? Hell, there's even a scene in which Dennis Hopper, playing a federal judge, takes a gun and fires wildly into a crowd of those ACLU zombies before they can take the Ten Commandments off the wall and--gasp--enact gun control! Shoot 'Em Up was a little too obvious to be truly effective, but I was willing to play along, and I thought I sensed something along those same lines here. Patton takes anti-American filmmaker Michael Malone (Kevin Farley) through vital moments in world history to demonstrate where war has been necessary (the Munich Agreement and a hypothetical modern America where slavery was never abolished)--but wait, I thought the George Clooney analogue was there to demonstrate how we shouldn't belabor the past, what with his irrelevant films about Nazis and Joe McCarthy! Malone expresses ignorant surprise that members of the Military went to college--but wait, I thought colleges were hotbeds of anti-American subversion! And so on.

Slacker Uprising more or less confirms that Michael Moore is an almost obscenely easy target, too obvious to ignore. Between the cheap fat jokes, An American Carol attempts to gain mileage by mocking the very idea that he is a documentary filmmaker--not because he routinely fudges the facts or that he's relentlessly self-aggrandizing, but because nobody watches documentaries, and maybe he's just not good enough to make feature films. Finally, after Malone undergoes his Dickensian conversion, he becomes a patriotically positive filmmaker who finally gets to make the narrative that he apparently always wanted to make. I want so badly to believe that it's all an elaborate prank--any film that acknowledges Riefenstahl as an integral building block of the Third Reich just has to be aware that the moving image carries immeasurable power in all its forms. But that little coda finally forces me to abandon any thoughts that the joke is on anyone but me: enforcing the same old ass-backwards belief that movies only exist as an escape, and that feel-good fiction is infinitely preferable to a possibly bitter reality. Maybe it's just too frightening to take seriously at first, wondering if anyone could believe that An American Carol is telling it like it is--almost as frightening as the possibility that Sarah Palin could be anywhere within twenty feet of any big red buttons.

Coming soon from yours truly: an incendiary yet logical interview with Ballast director Lance Hammer, and a leap back onto a certain wagon of insanity that I've owed you all for way too long.