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

the flimsy, sad future of bartholomew's song

IMDB.com estimates that Bartholomew's Song cost $2,500, a figure that's been rattling around in my head while I've been thinking how damn good it is. The short is only about 10 minutes long, but the directors, Lowell Frank and Destin Daniel Cretton, have made a virtue out of a low budget and a brief run time.

B.'s Song takes place in a dystopia where workers sleep in cell-like rooms and assemble little cubic things at an absurdly slow rate. Life for Bartholomew 467 and his fellow Bartholomews (it seems that every man is named Bartholomew) is monotonous and comically repetitive, but their blank faces suggest that this isn't generally a problem.

This is a good world to set a cheap short in, because that basic premise can be established in only six static shots that begin Song. The simplicity of the shots echoes the mechanical, modular quality of the Bartholomews' world, where everything is as discreet and functional as the cogs of a pocket watch.

the psychopathology of lying and/or filmmaking in kiarostami's close-up

If I'm going to talk about Close-Up, the 1990 film by Abbas Kiarostami (pretty much Iran's most lauded filmmaker), I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of things I don't actually want to talk about before I can get to what actually interests me.

That's because I only engaged half-heartedly with the film's biggest idea: Close-Up's main thematic strand is the the process and illusion of cinema itself and the artificiality of the movie-making process. The film stems from the story of Hossein Sabzian, an Iranian who (in real life) passed himself off as well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a Tehran family of some means, the Ahankhahs. (As an American, I don't know how classy they were by the standards of Iran in 1990, but they have a kempt house and a gated courtyard.)

Sabzian was arrested after his lie was uncovered, and a large chunk of the movie consists of his trial, in the form of a documentary. This footage is interlarded with stagings of his interactions with the Ahankhahs — which, strangely, are acted out by Sabzian and the family themselves. In fact, as Godfrey Cheshire explains in his Criterion essay on the film, "Contrary to what most first-time viewers assume, none of its scenes are strictly documentary. Not just the reenactments but all the other scenes, too, are at least partly scripted or otherwise contrived by Kiarostami."

how did this get made?: best. test audience. ever.

The basic ingredients of How Did This Get Made?, a fortnightly podcast on the Earwolf network, are not promising if you're looking for a nuanced film critique. For each regular episode, three actor-comedians are joined by a guest to ridicule a single bad movie. Ostensibly, the show has no higher purpose than to talk about how awful that film is, which just sounds like a recipe for cheap shots and little-to-no actual insight into what makes a film terrible.

But How Did This Get Made? is probably my single favorite movie podcast. On top of being very funny, HDTGM makes very specific and valid criticisms, and it ends up doing a much better job than many amateur (or even professional) critics in analyzing what has gone wrong. In short, Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas are possibly the best test audience of all time.

mirror mirror: shrek with (too much?) ambition

I watched another movie by Tarsem Singh this week, Mirror Mirror. He also directed Immortals, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. I like to write about outliers, and Singh's movies are vivid and cinematic in a way that most modern Hollywood directors don't bother with. Think Avatar but with arty intentions and even richer detail.

Mirror Mirror is a retelling of Snow White, which saves me the trouble of summarizing the plot. Suffice it to say that in this version the seven dwarves are thieves with a hideout. To get what I meant by "vivid" above, take a look at this screen grab of their den:

Check out the meticulously arranged mess in the front there. It looks like the perfect still life, and I suspect it's a visual reference to some classic painting I don't know, but in any event, the shot gives you a sense of what the movie is like: lots and lots of texture. This is a film where the bandit hideout has elegant, patterned wallpaper. (Look at the background of that screen grab and you'll see a sort of Japanese engraving sort of motif.)

hats of the damned: pasolini's oedipus rex

I suppose I came to Pier Paolo Pasolini's film version of Oedipus Rex hoping that it would work with the meaning I had gotten out of the play, which I analyzed in some depth a few weeks ago. My conclusion was basically that Sophocles' original play works best if we think of it as a parable about the sin we do unknowingly and the dangers of knowledge.

Pasolini's film, however, doesn't really focus on these aspects, or at least not in any way I can tell, and I'm kind of unsure what to make of it overall. The movie's major innovation is that it begins and ends in 20th century Italy. In some early part of the 20th century (I can't figure out what year exactly this would have been), Pasolini shows us a young military man who is jealous of the attention his wife pays to their infant son. Shortly, the setting changes to ancient Greece and tells us the traditional story of Oedipus in chronological order (as opposed to the play, where Oedipus is already king and we only learn of his true back story through exposition). Then, where the play would end with Oedipus blind and shamed, the movie magically transposes the same actor to 1970s Italy, making him a blind beggar.

the cinematography of la dolce vita: that's deep, man

I've got an essay coming on La Dolce Vita for the Brattle Theatre Film Notes blog — I'll add a link when they put it up. The Brattle Theatre's Film Notes blog just posted my essay about La Dolce Vita, but I also wanted to post these great screen grabs that show how damn satisfying the cinematography is and the incredible use of depth.

If you want the tl;dr version of this post, just look at these two compositions, which are the opening shots of their respective scenes:

Either one of these shots is near-perfect on its own, but they're even better put side by side like this, because you can see the echoes: The top one is almost all white, the bottom almost all black; the top shot has a vanishing point somewhere on the right half; the bottom's is at approximately the mirror point on the left.

i need to stop writing this post before i convince myself that sucker punch is actually brilliant

Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's new Superman movie, is coming out this weekend. I'm going to use that as a reason to write about Sucker Punch, his last movie, because I've been wanting to write about this hot mess ever since it came out two years ago.

Although it's probably not very good in the final analysis, Sucker Punch plays with a lot of smart ideas, including an ironic self-awareness that most blockbuster action directors never mess with. In case you're wondering if I'm just trying to find something complex about this movie, worry not: This self-consciousness is plainly implied by the movie itself, and even if Snyder can't really figure out what that means or what to do with it, I like that he tried.

We're immediately put on notice by the first image, a slow crawl forward through a theater that moves toward a curtain with the Warner Bros. logo on it. That curtain opens up onto another curtain with the production company's logo, which in turn opens directly onto the first scene. In this very first image, then, we are being given a staged scene that is patently artificial, since of course we don't normally watch the action of a movie take place on a theater stage unless it happens to take place in a theater. It's the film equivalent of breaking the fourth wall.

maybe oedipus' real problem is nosiness

I don't think I find mythology worthwhile for the same reasons as most people. Often I don't "get" myths, if I may sound like an ignoramus for a second. But that's just the starting point for me; if I can't understand them at first, I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and consider what they might be a metaphor for. This is the spirit in which I read Sophocles' Oedipus Rex recently.

photo by Madeleine Burleson under cc

It starts out with a plague in Thebes, where Oedipus has been king ever since he saved the city from the sphinx and took queen Jocasta as his wife. Pretty quickly, we learn that the cause of the plague, according to the oracle, is that the city is suffering from "pollution" in the form of the man who killed the previous king, Laius. Get rid of this guy and the city will be back in business. The rest of the play consists of Oedipus interrogating people who may have information on who this terrible man could be. (For what it's worth, I read the David Grene translation from the series of Greek tragedies edited by Grene and Richmond Lattimore.)

I'm just beginning to wrap my head around Aristotle's Poetics, so I'm not even going to use the phrase "fatal flaw" in this post, and besides, it's more fun to come to these things with no ideas on what you ought to be looking for. But even if I can't define "fatal flaw" exactly, I think it's only natural that I'm looking for some significance — a mistake Oedipus makes, a character trait that damns him — that explains why he is so totally screwed. I want to get to the why of the art just as much as the who and what.

leviathan has a really subtle point if i think really hard about it

Last year, the New York Times ran a profile of the filmmakers behind Leviathan, which I just saw on Monday. Here's how the profile began:

Tucked within the syllabus for a class that the filmmaker and anthropologist Lucien Castaing-Taylor teaches at Harvard is a rhetorical question that sums up his view of nonfiction film: "If life is messy and unpredictable, and documentary is a reflection of life, should it not be digressive and open-ended too?"

Just so you know, I cannot in good conscience recommend Leviathan, as I was tempted to walk out of the theater due to boredom. That said, this aphorism from Castaing-Taylor does not even make the best case for the film, and of the reviews I've read, I haven't seen anybody else do it, either.

the squid and the whale: noah baumbach's human new york

In principle, at least, I'm skeptical of any movie about worrisome white New Yorkers of the creative or professional persuasion. There are too many movies about them, and too often you suspect they're just the filmmakers' somewhat idealized narratives of their own lives. Woody Allen has almost single-handedly created an excess supply of this genre, and he's not alone.

Noah Baumbach, who directed the new Frances Ha, would be part of the problem if the movies I've seen by him — The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg, and Margot at the Wedding — weren't wonderful. I rewatched The Squid and the Whale this week to figure out why I wanted to give it a pass even though it has the aforementioned New York Problem.

Part of what I like about Baumbach's stuff is that his movies deglamorize their New Yorker subjects, those frowny-faced writers, professors, and would-be artists who are made out to be the objects of sympathy in lesser movies. Baumbach has worked with Wes Anderson on several projects, and like Anderson's characters, Baumbach's people are can be positively craptastic to one another, at least occasionally. On the commentary of the "Special Edition" DVD of The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach puts it this way: "People would say, 'Well, where is the redemption of the character?' and I would answer, somewhat smugly, 'Not in this movie.'"

a blog that deserves be read (no, not this one)

This week I'm taking off, but I'll post again next Friday as usual. In the meantime, may I suggest The Self-Styled Siren, if you haven't already heard of her?

There are lots of good writers out there on a variety of subjects, but so few are actually consistently good or ballsy enough to write a blog in the third person and pull it off. And you actually learn about movies by reading her blog. I could go on, but you should probably just read it.

photo by Nick Jones Everybody under cc

the great gatsby as a test case for what we lose in adaptation; not a post in which i grumble about the superiority of any medium over another, i promise

Greg Olear, writing for The Weeklings, makes a good argument that Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is gay. I'm a sucker for unlikely theories about books and movies, but even more so when they rely on a close reading of the evidence. Also, since Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby is finally coming out this week, Olear's argument has gotten me thinking about the fundamental differences between the art of film and the art of writing.

Before I get to that, I'll have to convey to you the gist of Olear's argument, especially the way he uses Nick's point of view to make it. A big chunk of Olear's evidence comes from the way Carraway describes each of the other five major characters in the novel. Part of the argument comes from how Nick casts a pretty detached eye on the women, even though they are all supposed to be desirable in their own way. As an example, there is a passage where Nick describes Jordan Baker (a golfer), the woman he gets involved with: "She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet." Olear summarizes it this way: "Other than the word small-breasted — which de-emphasizes the golfer's feminine attributes — this could be a description of a man."

inception vs. the matrix: is reality overrated?

Blockbuster season approaches, and despite some moderately good intentions, I will probably go to many of them this summer. Tom Cruise's Oblivion? Already seen it and already vaguely regret having seen it.

Not all blockbusters are as bad as people make out to be, even if most of them are; it's easy to make fun of the somewhat absurd conceits they use. Although it's tempting to think of Christopher Nolan's Inception as "that movie about dreams," there's enough going on to make the movie worth thinking about.

For starters, the "movies about dreams" characterization misses the point, since the dreams are not what make the film compelling. Inception in its plot and many of its methods is really a classic heist, the genre that inspired Nolan. Cobb, played by a very sleek Leonardo DiCaprio, is leading his team on that job that occurs with surprising frequency in heist films: the one that is supposed to be impossible. The twist is that Cobb's group specializes in dream infiltration, but the obvious philosophical questions — like, is reality actually any more valid than a dream? — are not the best reason to watch the movie.