First pass: The Limits of Control

If it weren’t summer I might love Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (2009) or hate it. But it is summer, and my standards are different this time of year.

A winter movie, you see, is a movie trudged to through icy winds and over snow-covered sidewalks. It is a movie watched in damp socks and fiercely debated afterwards over multiple cups of coffee or pints of beer in a coffee shop, diner, or bar only reluctantly abandoned at closing time or last call for the long walk home. A fall movie is a movie chosen over football games and autumn leaves and bonfires and pumpkin patches and all of the other wonderful things that go along with my favorite season. It is a movie that has been singled out from the crowd of prestige pics, foreign films, and Oscar contenders that pack theaters in the weeks and months leading up to awards season. It is, like a winter movie, a film that has to be worth it.

A summer movie, though, is more often than not just an excuse to sit in the air conditioning, away from the sweltering heat, or a way to pass the hour or two between the end of the work day and sunset. It is fodder for a meandering discussion over cocktails or iced lattes sipped beneath an umbrella on the patio of a favorite café, one topic among many in a conversation that will inevitably play second fiddle to the pleasures of sitting outside in the shade.

The Limits of Control works for me as a summer movie, as an alternative to the “superspy” movies that usually number among the season’s major studio releases. The film’s Lone Man (Isaach De Bankolé) is, like James Bond or Jason Bourne, an attractive, well-dressed man on a mission who knows what he wants (to drink, for instance) and what he’s doing. He does it in a series of exotic, enticing locales populated by alluring women and interesting men.

The Lone Man is a slightly different kind of hero, though. Where Bond and Bourne are fit and ready for physical combat, he is “centered” and at peace, prepared to do battle with his wits, will, and imagination. Where B&B are in demand, the targets or prizes of evil geniuses, government agencies, and world leaders, he is off the grid (”No mobiles”). They are digital, he is analog. They are constantly in motion, he is still. They dictate the rules of the game, he merely follows orders.

What we have here, I think, is a James Bond movie for people who don’t want to be 007. Or, rather, a James Bond-type movie that has been adapted to a different set of sensibilities: it works on about the same level, but not in the same way. It is an escapist fantasy that acknowledges itself as such by offering a “real-world” source (the paintings in the museum) for everything that happens in the film and a “moment of awakening” at the end. The bad guy is not one who opposes Anglo-American cultural and political hegemony, but a stand-in for those who propagate it. It offers us a beautiful woman to look at, but it does not condone womanizing. The emphasis is not on action or movement, but on architecture and landscape.

The Limits of Control is a movie that cries out for discussion: is it just a James Bond movie that it’s “okay” to like, or is that selling it short? Which one of the many different interpretations that it supports (as S.T. VanAirsdale notes, “the beauty of Jarmusch, of course, is that the clues are almost certainly there”) do you favor and why? Do the monologues about movies in which people sit and say nothing and molecules spinning in ecstasy add anything to the film? If so, what, exactly? And would we rather talk about those subjects? And what does that mean if we do?

Maybe there’s more to the film than this: I will eventually see it again and decide. For now, though, it’s enough for me that I loved Spain, loved the suits, loved discussing the film and reading the debates held by others. Because it’s summer, and I don’t typically ask for much more from a movie until at least September.

The Limits of Control is currently playing in Pittsburgh at the CineMagic Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill. Recommendations for further reading: I basically agree with Karina Longworth’s assessment of the film, I like Dennis Lim’s profile of Jarmusch in the New York Times for its insights into the director’s intent, and Michael J. Anderson and Lisa Broad at Tativille make a compelling case for the film as one of the year’s best so far.



Post last edited: 7/1/09

The greatest individual joke in the history of The Simpsons

This is a sign that adorns the Ayn Rand School for Tots.

Why I Watch Movies #1

I value movies first and foremost as a source of images that give form to the inchoate sentiments fluttering around inside my mind, allowing me to gain mastery over them, to capture and then study them, to banish the harmful ones forever and put the others to work. The screengrab above, for instance, is taken from a scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) in which Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) uses a device called a “pensieve” to share his memories with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe). Although it wasn’t (presumably) intended to, this scene is a perfect representation of what the writing process feels like to me.

I didn’t realize this immediately; instead, this image sort of got stuck in my head, and my brain reacted to it like a pearl oyster to a microscopic intruder, adding layers, shape, substance. But that’s not right: it might have taken awhile, but I recognized this image, so maybe it acted more like a seed crystal suspended in a saturated sugar solution and attracted those thoughts that had an affinity for it and slowly grew into something big enough to be visible to my mind’s eye.

Whatever. The point is that this image helped me to transform the generalized anxiety that I used to feel whenever I sat down to write into a specific set of concerns that I’m able to cope with and work around. I can hold this image in my mind, consider it: rooting around in one’s head with a stick and extracting memories from it is, judging from Dumbledore’s expression, painful. It presumably entails a certain amount of risk: isn’t it possible that something could be lost in transit between mind and pensieve and become lost forever? And once a memory is shared it no longer belongs exclusively to its original owner: he has in giving up this part of himself surrendered control over it. But it’s worth it, yeah? The risks are far outweighed by the rewards? So why don’t I shut up and write? Or go do something else?



Post last edited: 6/18/09

How I Watch Movies #1

Watching a movie for the first time is for me a lot like going on a first date. The main thing is just to have fun and get to know the film a bit, so that I can decide whether or not I want to see it again. There will be plenty of time to figure out what makes it tick later.

Diary of a Moviegoer #2: Dan in Real Life

Yarr! There be “spoilers” ahead.

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Dan in Real Life (2007) is about an advice columnist named Dan Burns (Steve Carell) whose column is, like the movie, called “Dan in Real Life.” I expected this film to be comprised largely of scenes in which Dan behaves in a manner inconsistent with the kind of advice he dispenses to his readers to comic effect, and had I watched only the first twenty and last thirty minutes of it, that’s basically what I would have gotten. I would have been impressed by the pains the filmmakers took to flesh out Dan’s character and by their willingness to let us extrapolate from this what kind of advice he must give, instead of, say, just beginning the movie with him reading one of his columns in voiceover or something. It might also have struck me that the film seemed a bit weighty for a Steve Carell comedy vehicle, although I might have just assumed that I’d missed all the wacky bits or that it simply wasn’t very funny; at any rate, I’d have seen little to challenge my assumption that Dan in Real Life was, in fact, a Steve Carrel comedy vehicle.

The middle fifty minutes, though . . . whew! But let me back up a bit: the film begins with a carefully observed depiction of a single father first bundling his three daughters off to school, then picking them up afterwards and heading off (from New Jersey) to a family gathering in Rhode Island. Although this sequence (intentionally) isn’t especially humorous, it does fulfill all of the functions of the first act of a comedy: it establishes what kind of man Dan is (sober, conscientious, responsible) and sets the stage for the film’s primary conflict (Dan in real life vs. “Dan in Real Life”) with Dan’s emphatic statement to his 15 year-old daughter that “you can’t know in three days” that you’re in love.

As expected, the next fifty minutes of the film develop this conflict further. Dan meets cute a woman named Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore who turns out to be the woman his brother Mitch (Dane Cook) is bringing home to meet the family. Dan wants to woo her anyway, but this would be contrary to what he himself would counsel and would thus discredit him as both an advice columnist and a father, so he tries to suppress this desire. The problem is that he’s unable to control himself around her, and since the filmmakers have conspired to repeatedly place them in close proximity with one another, wacky high jinks ensue.

Except that they don’t, really. Yes, there is one scene in which Dan and Marie end up in the shower together, and another one in which he’s “forced” to stare at her ass during an aerobics session, and these are as contrived and, frankly, stupid as you’d think they would be. But the rest of this middle portion of the film is different. There is, first of all, the fact that throughout it Steve Carell plays Dan not as a hypocrite who cluelessly can’t or selfishly won’t follow his own advice, but as an earnest, well-intentioned man torn between two “right” courses of action. Check out his anguished expression in this scene, his response to hearing a line from his own book being stolen by Mitch:

This is the beaten down visage of a man who has just realized that he’s forgoing the pursuit of true love, which he believes is as rare as “winning the lottery,” for someone who is insincere and undeserving. Dan knows that he should pursue Marie because he’s the one who has “the only key to her heart,” because they are soul mates; he knows he shouldn’t because it isn’t permitted by his position within either the family or society in general. Carell is utterly convincing as a man who can’t decide what to do and is heading for a nervous breakdown as a result.

And then there’s the family dynamic:

Throughout the film the Burns family is presented as a monolithic, undifferentiated mass that is frequently arrayed against Dan and Mitch, the only two single adults in the family, as it is here. The Burns family is quirky, kind, and non-judgmental — almost oppressively so, in fact. During family time, which is pretty much all the time, one is always cheerful. Serious criticism is not permitted, but no other subject is taboo. The family cannot help Dan work through his problem, because the family is his problem: he can’t spend time with the adults, as that would involve prolonged exposure to Marie and Mitch; he can’t spend excessive amounts of time with the children, because they will reject him at some point for behaving unlike an adult, for acting “weird”; he can’t tell any one family member what’s bothering him, because to tell one of them would be to tell all of them, including Mitch; he can’t lash out at Mitch, because that isn’t allowed; he can’t spend time alone, because once it’s known that something is troubling Dan, the family will not rest until they “make it better”; he can’t leave, because he can’t abandon his daughters.

The middle fifty minutes of Dan in Real Life constitute a dead-on portrait of a man in an impossible social situation who’s slowly but surely splitting apart at the seams. Unable to either surrender Marie to Mitch or steal her away from him, Dan begins behaving in an increasingly erratic manner in a desperate attempt to provoke some sort of showdown that will resolve the matter for him. What’s interesting is that this would seemingly have to result in some sort of family crisis: if Dan steals Marie away or behaves unpleasantly enough that she either ceases to like him or leaves altogether, the family would have to either condemn his actions or effectively side with him against Mitch; alternatively, Dan might suffer a not very comedy-like emotional collapse.

None of these things happen, of course. Instead, Marie realizes that she loves Dan back, in part through her discovery — in a book inexplicably given to her by Mitch — that the sweet nothings that her boyfriend has been whispering in her ears are Dan’s. There is a brief dust-up when the family discovers them together, but it blows over quickly: Mitch has another woman waiting in the wings, so he doesn’t stay upset for long, and the family tells Dan to go see about the girl who is now unproblematically his. Dan learns that it is possible to fall in love in less than three days, which according to Hollywood movie logic means that his fifteen year-old daughter must be in love with her boyfriend, too, and that Mitch must be in love with Ruthie Draper (Emily Blunt) as well, and the movie ends with all of these singles happily coupled and those others who were already married staying as they are.

So what then to do with Dan in Real Life? It contains an accurate representation of something I recognize from my own life but not from the movies, the obligatory social situation that cannot be escaped without causing possibly irreparable harm to oneself and/or others; it does not, however, provide any insight into how such a situation can be dealt with (using as it does blatantly artificial means to resolve the conflict in the film). It contains a terrific performance by Steve Carell, but one that may be in the service of a movie that in the final analysis I don’t think is very good. It contains an interesting critique of a “perfect family” ideal, but I don’t know how intentional this is. So maybe I:

1. Being a child of the DVD age, ignore the parts of the movie I don’t like or that I’m not interested in: I basically regard chapters 4-10 of the Dan in Real Life DVD as their own film.

2. Look at the rest of director Peter Hedges’ oeuvre and see how “family” figures into his other films: Gareth McFeely says there’s something there, and maybe he’s right.

3. File Dan in Real Life away as being a “somewhat intriguing film that features a good performance by Steve Carell” and move on to take another look at Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (2008), which contains a superficially similar, but much more interesting family.

I’d be going with #3 all the way, but A Christmas Tale isn’t out on DVD yet. If I see Pieces of April (2003) at the library in the near future, I might have to choose door #2 . . .



Post last edited: 6/5/09

Ten Cannes ‘09 films I’ll be on the lookout for

Film titles link to David Hudson’s typically excellent Cannes coverage at The Daily; here’s a link to his “Cannes 09. Awards and index post.”

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10. Bright Star (2009)

How convenient! Jane Campion, whose films I keep meaning to look into, has made a film about John Keats, whose poems I keep meaning to read. Quoth Manohla Dargis: “Working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, Ms. Campion brings an extraordinary tactility to her images, particularly through her representation of touch. With delicacy and caressing light that self-consciously invokes Vermeer, she distills desire through the flutter of fingers against a rough bit of cloth, though I do sometimes wish there were a bit more wildness amid the fluttering.”

9. Mother (2009)

Bong Joon-ho’s last feature The Host (2006) didn’t seem like anything special to me, but I definitely enjoyed it enough to gladly give him another chance to prove that he’s “making the movies Hollywood should be making,” which is what Daniel Kasman says he’s doing.

8. Police, Adjective (2009)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s second film is by almost all accounts an improvement over his first, 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), which won a Camera d’Or at Cannes ‘06. Which, if true, is pretty impressive.

7. Father of My Children (2009)

Another sophomore effort, but this time by a director (Mia Hansen-Løve) I’m not familiar with. Everything I’ve read about this film — which according to Justin Chang’s Variety review “consists of a first act that builds gradually but steadily to a shocking moment of violence, followed by a second act that sadly combs through the emotional wreckage” — makes me want to see it. Like David Phelps’ review, for instance, in which it is called “probably about the best film about children and childhood there could be.”

6. Dogtooth (2009)

This year’s winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard. Praised by Karina Longworth as “the only narrative I’ve seen that really feels like it represents the work an emerging new talent” (as of five days ago, anyway) and by Mike D’Angelo as “the only truly great film I saw here this year.”

5. Like You Know It All (2009)

Hong Sang-soo is a new discovery for me. But although I’ve only seen two of his films, Woman Is the Future of Man (2004) and Woman On the Beach (2006), and both of these recently, I think I’m well on my way to becoming one of his “devoted but tiny clutch of fans,” so this new film should appeal to me.

4. Antichrist (2009)

The big controversy at this year’s festival, which, as Dave Kehr notes, probably means “that the great provocateur has once again completely succeeded in his intentions.” I love Lars von Trier. I think he’s hilarious. I’m don’t know whether or not I’ll like this film, but I’m almost positive that I’ll have some great conversations about it, and I dig that.

3. Vengeance (2009)

Johnnie To edges out Hong Sang-soo and James Gray for the number one slot on my “Directors I’m Into These Days” list. Those who “get it,” like David Phelps and Manohla Dargis, for instance, are enthusiastic about his latest effort, so I’ll be awaiting it with bated breath and rapt anticipation.

2. Wild Grass (2009)

Alain Resnais’ latest is the subject of the Pull Quote of the Festival, which comes from Daniel Kasman: “It has breathed life not just into the festival but into cinema itself, a true, effervescent delight as sad, hilarious, and wonderful as can be imagined.”

I loved Private Fears in Public Places (2006), Resnais’ last film, and this one looks (I’m judging from this still) and sounds like something along those lines.

1. A Prophet (2009)

Jacques Audiard’s last film The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), which I would put forward as an example of the absolute right way to approach a movie remake, is a shoo-in for the Best of the Decade list that I will undoubtedly make sometime next year. I don’t know much about A Prophet, which was awarded the Grand Prix, because I only glanced at the reviews long enough to ascertain that they were raves. I intend to go into this film cold in the hopes that it will knock my socks off.



Post last edited: 5/28/09

Werner Herzog on my alma mater

From Herzog on Herzog (Ed. Paul Cronin):

“I did not want to go somewhere overly fancy and so I chose Pittsburgh, a place where there were real working people and steel mills. But by the time I arrived in the early 1960s the city was already heavily in decline. The steel mills were shutting down and life for many people was falling apart. Only three days after I arrived I returned my scholarship and as such ended up with no money, no host family and no passage back home.

I did not know there was such a difference in quality between American universities, and felt that the one I had chosen [the University of Pittsburgh] was a bad place for me to be.”

I’m suddenly dying to see Herzog’s documentary short How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976), which is set in my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania . . .

Diary of a Moviegoer #1: Thoughts on James Gray

A few weeks ago I watched We Own the Night (2007) and The Yards (2000) to see what the fuss over James Gray was all about. I wasn’t overly impressed with either film. Then I saw Two Lovers (2008). In the space of its 110 minute runtime Gray went from a mildly intriguing “director to watch” to someone who might merit serious consideration as one of my favorite contemporary American filmmakers.

So what happened? Two Lovers changed my mind about Gray in two ways: first, it showcased a sense of humor that I’d only detected once before, in the scene in The Yards in which the Olchin family sits down to a beautifully set table for a dinner of Chinese takeout. The awkward dinner party at the beginning of Two Lovers is funny, as is Gray’s use of transparent (the pickles that Dan Callahan discusses in his review of the film) and opaque (the statue looming over Joaquin Phoenix’s Leonard Kladitor as he waits for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Michelle and Elias Koteas’ Ronald to arrive for their strange dinner date) symbolic imagery. The knowledge that Gray realizes that some of the situations he puts his characters in, while deadly serious to them, will strike his audience as comically absurd makes the “heaviness” that is an attribute of his work seem less pervasive, less oppressive. Suddenly certain lines of dialogue (”I feel light as a feather”) from We Own the Night strike me as less clumsy, as less like the products of a tin ear and more like pressure valves that make almost unbelievably tense scenes bearable.

Second, my admiration for Two Lovers convinced me to check out Gray’s first film, Little Odessa (1994), giving me a complete picture of his feature film work. Gray’s oeuvre, perhaps more than that any other director I’ve yet encountered, is greater than the sum of its parts. The plots of all four of his films are driven by his characters’ inner turmoil over the choices that they’re constantly being forced to make between what they (think they) want for themselves and what (they think) their families want for them and by the external fallout from their decisions. These conflicts are never handled the same way twice and always play out differently; as a result, with each successive film it becomes clearer just what’s at stake. For instance: the travails of Mark Wahlberg’s “wrong man” Leo Handler in The Yards give us an idea of the kind of fate Gray’s other characters wish to avoid by aligning themselves with more powerful (the police force in We Own the Night), more prosperous (the Cohen-Kraditor dry cleaning empire in Two Lovers), or more free (America in Little Odessa) extended families. For instance: the decisions made by Tim Roth’s Joshua Shapira in Little Odessa and Joaquin Phoenix’s Bobby Green in We Own the Night mirror each other to a certain extent, giving us an idea of how things could have turned out differently for each character.

All of this definitely adds up to a director who interests me, but is James Gray “favorite director” material? I don’t yet have a fully developed eye for the purely structural and visual aspects of cinema, so I’ll need to take another look at both Two Lovers and We Own the Night to see what exactly he’s up to before I make my mind up for sure. This blog post by Zach Campbell is one of the things I’ve read that, along with my own impressions, leads me to believe there might be something there. In the meantime I’ll content myself with looking forward to Gray’s next film.

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Briefly, since I don’t know how much I actually have to say about this: I note above that “I don’t yet have a fully developed eye for the purely structural and visual aspects of cinema.” I wonder sometimes whether this would be true if I didn’t have the luxury of knowing that most of the films I watch will eventually be readily available in a format (DVD) that allows for close study; in other words, do I watch movies differently than I would if I wasn’t born in the home video era? Am I more inclined to let myself get “swept up” in a movie because I believe I’ll always be able to go back to it later and pay stricter attention to how it works?

On the new IMAX theater at the AMC Loews Waterfront

Before you pay extra for the “IMAX experience” at the AMC Loews Waterfront, read this editorial by James Hyder in the LF Examiner (”the independent print newsletter of the Large-Format (LF) motion picture industry”). The IMAX theater at the Waterfront is outfitted with the IMAX Digital System, but it is not a giant-screen theater or a dome system like the one at the Rangos Omnimax Theater at the Carnegie Science Center. I paid an extra $5 to see Star Trek (2009) in IMAX this weekend, but I don’t think I’d do it again: my experience just wasn’t significantly different from what I usually get at the Waterfront. This theater is also equipped for 3D projection, which may very well be worth the premium; I’ll try to see something in 3D in the near future and report back.

(Hat tip to Brian for sending me a link to Hyder’s article)

Cinema in the Parks

The Department of Parks and Recreation has released the schedule for this year’s “Cinema in the Parks” series. These free outdoor screenings begin the week of June 7 and continue twice a week at the Schenley Park-Flagstaff Hill location and once a week at all other sites throughout the summer. There’s nothing terribly exciting playing, but that’s not really the point of this series, is it? I could be talked into seeing a number of these films.