don't stop here...

This will be the last post on underplex.blogspot.com — if you've been going here, go to underplex.com instead (which you should already have been redirected to).

Cheers! See you at underplex.com.

the cow is sort of like an iranian lars and the real girl

Recently, as I watched one of the first great Iranian films, The Cow, which came out in 1969, I thought about this passage from Godfrey Cheshire's summary of the Iranian New Wave in a 1993 Film Comment article, talking about Close-Up (which I reviewed in an earlier post and which is possibly the best-known Iranian film of the past 30 years):

Here, after all, is a turbaned Iranian judge listening to impassioned arguments about the practice and value of cinema… . This is not the fearsome, dark-ages Iran of the 6 o'clock news, clearly. It is something far more complex, media-savvy, and oddly sophisticated, if be-turbaned still.

Cheshire spends the rest of the article talking about that sophistication and the subtlety of Iranian films, but the message I take from this passage is that anything "oddly sophisticated" coming out of anybody with a turban is a small miracle in itself. I kind of felt the same way, to be honest, but, at the same time, I think my surprise at finding out I was wrong is the oddest thing, not the sophistication that it turns out Iranian culture could exhibit. Look, I have prejudices and biases, but when they're proven wrong, I hope my reaction wouldn't be to take them as logical or any counter-evidence as paradoxical. It's not really a surprise when other cultures, even ones with strong conservative political or cultural strains, produce amazing cinema.

what oh! technical malfunctions on the horizon!

Stick with me here if underplex.com is acting funky over the next 24 hours. I'm changing hosting, etc., and it might take me some time to figure out what I'm breaking. I'll be back in full steam shortly.

invasion of the body snatchers: no, seriously, what's with the half-glove?

I spent all of my last post criticizing Room 237 for proposing many untenable theories about the hidden meanings behind The Shining. Today, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to propose my own untenable theory about the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

(BTW, I watched Body Snatchers this week specifically because director Edgar Wright mentioned that it was a big inspiration for his new movie, The World's End.)

To wit, my theory is that you can read almost all of Body Snatchers as the protagonists' shared paranoid delusions and not an actual alien invasion. I'll just say up front that I know perfectly well it's a bit of an awkward fit to the movie, but it explains a surprising amount. More importantly, if you read the film this way, it explains a lot about the tone.

ambassador crackpot: room 237, the shining, and slacker

If you're going to make a documentary whose whole purpose and method is to analyze another movie — in this case the documentary is Room 237 and the movie it digs into is The Shining — you'd better hope it's worthy of the art it dissects. If not, it will only make people yearn for that other thing that you are commenting upon and wind up kinda awkward, like a crappy sonnet about Shakespeare's genius or a mangled portrait of Picasso.

And man, I wanted to like Room 237. I went in hoping it would give me some new takes on Stanley Kubrick's horror classic. It doesn't, though, not really: Room 237 is either a bumbling ambassador for cinephilia or an unsatisfying examination of crackpottery in general. Either way, it's not good.

In its ambassador role, it's especially bad. The theories floated range from the merely possible (yes, indeed, I do see how you could think that the genocide of Native Americans was a subtle subtext) to the plainly nonsensical (no, I don't buy that the movie is Kubrick's response to guilt and/or marital problems arising from his participation in the staging of the moon landing).

an extended argument for dropping a single word from the title of an old episode of west wing

As I've previously noted, I don't have a lot to say about TV shows for the most part, but today I want to write about an episode in the last season of The West Wing that I heard recently.

I say "heard" because I wasn't really watching so much as listening to it while I played Zuma in another window on my laptop. This seems like a bad confession to make, but I say it because a) I have a preference for embarrassing transparency in blogging and b) I'm not sure actually seeing the images would matter. Often when "watching" West Wing I'll think of Stephen Dubner's observation on his Freaknomics blog that Aaron Sorkin creations are worth just listening to, even without the visuals. (Admittedly, Sorkin wasn't still writing West Wing in season seven, but even so.)

Anyway, the episode I want to talk about, titled "The Debate," is unusual first off because it's staged as a presidential debate and not as a regular episode. And I mean that literally: Except for the first few minutes, the show looks like a televised debate, with a studio audience, a (real news anchor) moderator, and lighting that's a lot closer to an actual debate than an hour-long drama. As it turns out, the episode was shot live, but I didn't know this while watching it, and frankly, I think the effect of this knowledge is negligible. Whether you agree with that philosophy, it's what I'm sticking with for the moment.

snack break for underplex and a recommended site

So I'm taking a break this week, partly to work on a new version of the site, but I'll be back next Friday. In the meantime, you should read some of Matthew Dessem's great blog, where his snappy writing makes the Criterion collection seem accessible. I love the way Dessem writes, and on top of that, he's genuinely insightful, which is a rarer thing than you'd think (or hope). If I have a single, desert-island blog — and I mean among all film blogs — this is it. No, really.

See you next week, and thanks for reading.

photo by Ronald Saunders under cc