22 Jump Street Falls Flat

Posted on June 20, 2014 by billnichols99

Praise piles up. That this film mocks its own silliness, refers to its generic conventions endlessly, has characters who act as if they’re in a sequel to a film they’ve already been in, has no one to really root for and no thematic density has become the ultimate compliment it seems. Critics seem to love a film that mocks its own limitations, deflates any high-minded expectations, and effortlessly does their job for them: a pan becomes a kudo and everyone’s happy.
22 does it all: which means it does nothing but does it with aplomb, irony and humor. And Jonah Hill gives some depth, or at least a superficial patina to his character while Channing Tatum struggles to fall into character, sputters through the comedy, comes alive when he has to dance spontaneously and, with his budding buddy romance with the jock star of the college football, injects a hip note of fluid sexuality into it all. Why praise this meatball mashup of lame jokes and plotless meanderings? It’s the New Paradigm, perhaps inspired by video games and text messaging, that eschews complexity, character development, narrative tautness, suspense, and thematic thoughtfulness. Things just pile up and we’re asked to be happy with the tottering heap of stuff that makes the pile. And this is all a Good Thing, at least if a number of critics, plus a very healthy box office, are the judge. Maybe in times of environmental decay, endless war, great wealth and plenty–but only for 1 or 2%, and rabid, hateful, fear-mongering politics as the new normal, this is the best escape Hollywood can offer and gratitude abounds.
I’ll just cast a negative vote into the pool and see if it floats. If there were some rich wit to it all, some dimensionality to characters, some density to the plot, and some reward for devoting two hours to this little heap of cliches, I’d lean a bit more toward praise, but for now, I’ll just point the thumb down and await further enlightenment for the devotees.

A review of Raya Morag’s Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema

Posted on May 18, 2014 by billnichols99

This review article just came out in Studies in Documentary Film. DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2014.900954. pp. 1-5 |

This link should take you to it on Taylor and Francis’s website:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cMgHpXnZNKSA659jRRZx/full

Below is another version of the link. It may show an ad, which is beyond my control.
I hope one works for you. It’s an important book.

The Q&A and Two New Films

Posted on May 7, 2014 by billnichols99

Q&As are a film festival staple. For good reason. They convert a run of the mill screening into an event, something special and often festive. But do they tell us anything we wouldn’t be able to get from the film? The safe answer is It depends, but it’s more interesting to look at a couple of recent examples from the 2014 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Child of God

is a feature directed by the ubiquitous James Franco from Cormac McCarthy’s distrubing book about a loner wild man in Tennessee who winds up cultivating a necrophiliac habit and a pile of bodies. The novel’s strength is in McCarthy’s amazing writing style. He is one of the great stylists of our time and, though this isn’t his best work, it is captivating for how he tells the morbid tale.
The film is another matter. Franco has a rather pedestrian but pretentious approach that never does find a visual equivalent for the writing style. It’s a good film but far from a great one.
We could get all this from the film itself. At the Q&A Franco was absent, itself perhaps a message about his over-extended attempt to do too many things too fast. But Scott Haze, the lead actor, who plays Lester Ballard, who, we might wonder, is or isn’t a child of god despite all his depravity, was. (IMDB, the website repository of film facts, tucks his acting credit under Franco’s and two others, perhaps based on pre-release information. Seeing him out of character was itself a relief since he inhabits the psyche of Ballard with haunting power. What he revealed, in addition to the many layers and months of preparation that he did, essentially on his own, was that Franco tends to a one take style, seldom repeating scenes, a trait that works to capture the emotional power of an actor like Hayes, but that also sacrifices some of the nuance and complexity that can come from revision, especially in terms of composition, mise en scene, lighting and so forth. An abundance of close ups of Hayes tends to erase some of the problem since Hayes is mesmerizing as Lester but a stream of close ups do not a great cinematic style make.
The other example was even more revealing.

Stop the Pounding Heart

was a documentary by Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini that focused on two south Texas families, one given to bull riding and the other to goat farming. Sara Carlson, the teen age daughter of the goat farmers, spends her days working on the farm and sometimes visiting Colby, the son of the bull riding family. Hints of potential romance hover in the air but seem very unlikely. (And aren’t realized.) From the film it would be easy to characterize the Carlsons as a family with a largely absent father (he’s seldom seen) who, when present, presides over literal-minded readings of the Bible, scolds Sara for not setting fence posts as well as he can, and supervises rifle practices, including Sara’s use of a semi-automatic rifle; a fundamentalist mother who gives compelling lectures to her kids about women’s place supporting her man and the courage it takes to make oneself subordinate; and a bevy of some dozen children most of whom get little screen time lest the film become a TV series. The sight of one boy riding his bike with a Confederate flag and of a burning cross somewhere in the Texas night adds the suggestion that the family is not just of a rural, funadmentalist stripe but racist to boot.
Then we met the family. (This filmmaker was also absent.) It became quickly clear that they were the redneck, Bible thumping stereotypes the film almost makes them to be. In fairness, the film has a deliberate, ethnographic quality to it and does not sensationalize what it observes patiently. Sara, who at one point says she does not want to get married and would just “take pictures of her sisters’ fat little babies,” tells us that she was repeating feelings she had had 4 yers before the filming happened. She had moved on. The mother and father made it clear they were university graduates, with a lot more perspective and savy than what we see in the film, that they consciously chose farm life and making artisanal cheeses over the urban scramble, that they home schooled the kids not to indoctrinate them (though that does seem a byproduct at least) but to enrich, teaching the, for example, Latin. They lives between two major cities, close to suburbs, go to farmer’s markets weekly and are not the isolated hillbillies the film might have us believe.
The Q&As, in other words, were revelatory. The trust the x family had in the filmmaker seemed a bit more misplaced and their lives quite a bit more complex after the Q&A than before. Franco’s future as a director seemed a bit less certain after than before. Audience questions helped make these insights possible, more than opening questions by festival programmers, in fact. They were good examples of what some serious questions and honest answers can teach us about the films we see.

Documentary Nomads

Posted on April 19, 2014 by billnichols99

A fascinating program for documentary filmmakers has emerged in Europe. Called DocNomads it involves stays in three cities over the course of a year: Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. Students work with resident instructors and master class guests in each location and make films in each city, and sometimes in the countryside as well. The students come from all over Europe and beyond. In Budapest Tamas Almasi heads the program and I recently visited there to offer a week long master class on selected issues and concepts in documentary. I had students from Ecuador, Belarus, Serbia, England, France, Italy, Russia, Hungary, the United States, and ten other countries, if not more. They come with filmmaking skills and an undergrad degree behind them and are ready for the new challenges the course offers. Language is one of them. The course is offered in English but in every location most of the students do not speak the local language. This makes their production work challenging but far from impossible. They are a resourceful, inventive group, among the best I’ve worked with, and the program is a brillaint model for how to think outside the somewhat zenophilic boundaries of much documentary production.

It’s a program that deserves emulation.

True Detective

Posted on March 18, 2014 by billnichols99

Along with Breaking Bad, True Detective is definitely one of the many impressive series gracing our soon to be defunct TVs (in terms of TV as a medium for banality and the ads that accompany it, and as a stand alone device).
Emily Nussbaum, a very solid TV reviewer at The New Yorker, panned it. I like her reviews and often find them a good guide to viewing, which could be either in the sense of if she likes it, I won’t, or vice versa, but not in this case.
Nussbaum finds if cliche ridden, especially in the cops as buddies, the women as eye candy, and the plot as predictable. Has she seen buddy movies that go all the way back to the 1920s, women as eye candy that go just as far back, or plots more subtly woven around slippages in time? (Emily definitely needs to see more movies.) She’s wrong on every count.
Nussbaum posits the British 5 part series, The Fall, as superior. Wrong again. The Fall opens with standard issue, cliche-ridden T&A shots of the star, Gillian Anderson, who can certainly reward such shots with visual pleasure, if that’s your sort of thing, but they are far more gratuitous than the early shots of a nude female victim of a demented killer that propels the two cops into a spiral of obsessions. The Fall follows that up with an underage baby sitter who goes through the Lolita thing without any nuance at all, and a high class brothel where the nude sex worker, who happens to be taking a shower in the other room but in plain view of the fortuitously placed camera, is there for no narrative purpose whatsoever but has a great body. The women in the bar where our two cops take shelter also has its array of attractive women but we do well to keep in mind that almost everything we see is told through flashbacks from these men’s points of view. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder would be an adage Nussbaum could have taken more to heart. Their pov is decidedly troubled, carefuly crafted (when they’re interogated by two cops some 17 years after the initial incident) and sometimes downright false.
These guys are just a bit unresolved when it comes to women. Far more than Gillian Anderson’s detective who’s got sex down cold. Ice cold. “Sweet nights” to her mean a one night stand that she initiates and terminates. This becomes an ideal because now, Man fucks woman, becomes Woman Fucks Man, and that, to her, is the feminist statement par excellence. Bravo, but it is but one way in which she, unlike Marty (woody Harrelson) or Rust (Mathew McConaughey) is a very off-putting, cold, one-dimensional character. That the editing creates numerous parallels between her and the psychotic serial killer is clearly no accident but it is not terribly insightful either and only posits a highly repressed but occasionally sex-hungry detective is not that different froma vicious, sadistic, psychotic killer. Support your local police just got another strike against it, but if there are any detectives just like Ms. Anderson’s character, I hope they will stand up.
Nussbaum also thinks The Fall is ahead of the game because we meet the killer early on and see much of his handiwork firsthand. This adds complexity. Wrong. Emily, please see Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer for complexity, or, for that matter, Psycho. What The Fall fails to deliver is any plausibilty to this nut job. He’s a grief counsellor (!), and has a happy (sort of) family, with two kids, but holds down as his night job, serial killing. Right. With no effort through the first half of the series to reconcile these insanely incongruous types, the killer becomes something of a pathetic joke, hard to believe in and impossible to identify with in any sense, unlike the socially inept Henry or the earnest and protective Norman. He just seems a mishmash of traits heaped together to get us to scratch our heads. And like Anderson’s detective, he seems almost incapable of talk that involves more than one subject and verb, preferably monosyllables, in any given utterance. If there’s a there there in either of them, the show does a great job of hiding it.
I digress. Nussbaum makes passing reference to visual style and acting but gthese qualities is the heart and soul of True Detective. McConaughey won an Oscar for Dallas Buyer’s Club and his portrayal here of a loner copy with a traumatic past is hardly inferior to his rodeo star cum AIDS victim portrayal. He mutters a lot of philosophical musings that Nussbaum, predictably dismisses. (When was the last time a mainstream critic took philosophic musings by a character in a film, let alone a TV series, seriously? They seem to get a mandatory innoculation against doing so prior to writing their first word.) But Rust’s musings are part and parcel of his character as a near celebate, ascetic, contemplative man who has lost his way and clings to the resolution of this series of horrific murders as his path to redemption. The musings make great sense and deserve serious attention but Nussbaum likes how Marty rolls his eyes at them in the early episodes and frets when he, and the show, seem to take Rust and his high-order thoughts more seriously. This means she, like Marty in the early going, fails to try to understand Rust and what troubles him and how these thoughts might be a defensive, and quite intelligible camouflage for the pain he holds within.
Nussbaum also thinks the Louisiana setting is a bit tired and cliched, but I respectfully disagree. Like Breaking Bad and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, which she and I both admire greatly (whew!), the show gives Louisiana a distinctive stamp. The aerial shots of the bayous and decrepit ruins of this countryside speak volumes to the kind of world that could harbor, for decades, a serial killer or killers in its midst. Like the opening sequence, seen in each episode, and disliked by Nussbaum, there is a density and fascination to the images that goes well beyond the usual location shot. And T. Bone Burnett’s haunting, mersmerizing music makes the opening sequence far more significant than the heroic cops and exposed female bottom that Nussbaum managed to see, to the exclusion of everything else.
True Detective deserves a place in the pantheon of great new TV series. It should stand the test of time far better than The Fall and far far better than msot of the “entertainment” that fills the dial, even as we speak, and this new marvel of TV innovation takes place before us.

Palm Springs Museum of Art

Posted on March 18, 2014 by billnichols99

The sculpture captures the feel of a waterfall, in metal, which seems apt for a desert setting

I stayed in Palm Springs to go to the Indian Wells tennis tournament and see the top players in action so wandering over to this museum was an afterthought but an inspiring one at that.

The museum reminds me of how much good to great art is outside the hallowed walls of our uber-institutions, our cultural meccas like the Louvre or the Met. PSMOA, to abbreviate, has an excellent collection of modern/contemporary art with not just examples from Anselm Keifer and Henri Matisse, or from Mona Hatoun and Deborah Butterfield, but they have situated in a site that is supremely well designed for its display.

A site specific work in the sculpture garden

Located just a block away from a vastly touristic main street the museum invites a return to something more enduring and engaging than the routine souvenires and predictable snack foods. A full-blown commentary on many of the works are needed to do justice to the museum’s achievements, but this post is merely a whet-the-appetite sort of thing so that if you happen to be in the Coachella Valley you can see for yourself what a treat this museum is.

Positioned at the top of the staircase to the second floor, this work causes a lot of double takes and creepy feelings.

Deborah Butterfield creates animal figures from driftwood

Part of a large set of panels, this is one of my favorites

The Oscar Boys of 2013

Posted on January 28, 2014 by billnichols99

Cate Blanchett is a strong choice for Best Actress, but the Best Actor category is full of strong contenders who all deserve to win. But one stands out.
Bruce Dern: very solid as the cranky old man in Nebraska. He captures the idiosyncracies of someone who never was the brightest light in the room or the life of the party but still commands the love of his son and a mix of emotions from others. His quirkiness and selective memory keeps the picture from going off the rails into the nostalgic or maudlin but the picture leans heavily that way. Not one of Payne’s best efforts. The ironies are far less rich than in Election, Citizen Ruth or Sideways. Dern deserves praise but probably not an Oscar.
Christian Bale: a terrific job as the off-balance scamster in American Hustler. As we might expect, it’s hard to know when he’s scamming himself as well as others and his shrewd playing of others against each other is brilliant. Still, it’s probably not quite as brilliant as the actor I’m leaning toward.
Chiwetel Ejiofor: great role, great performance in a fine, wrenching film. Ejiofor does not play the over the top Avenger or the simmering-inside Rebel, but a dignified man who finds himself in a world where dignity is denied, relentlessly. His expressions of suppressed astonishment and frustrated yearnings makes the movie a true stand out. Would that it were on the global sex traffic in women, teens mainly, that is with us now, but long ago is a bit safer and more nobel as a statement about injustice and abuse. That slight edge of safety may be enough to tilt the Oscar into other hands.
Leonardo diCaprio: here we go again. Marty Scorsese on a delerious whirlwind tour of male misogyny, depravity and greed. DiCaprio captures it brilliantly but he also lights up, like a giant billboard, the repetitious nature of Scorsese’s obsessions. Goodfellas and Casino covered this perfectly and now we have a selfish, heedless huckster who takes Wall Street by storm, makes his millions and learns nothing. A film more about addiction than greed, though that is clearly one addiction, DiCaprio is caught in a paint by numnbers tale that demands little growth or change in his character. In fact, he seems like an addict who never hits bottom and that one-note quality will probably be enough to send the Oscar elsewhere.
Matthew McConaughey: An amazing job as the womnanizing, drug-addled rodeo hanger-on who sees the light and becomes a beacon for HIV infected others, like himself. Like Bale, McConaughey sacrifices his body for the role, losing a huge amount of weight but, more than Bale, pulls out all the stops on a ride to heaven, and hell. His range is breath-taking and we are not hampered by the need to scam the viewer as well as other characters that leaves key parts of the Bale character shrouded in mystery. Like Jared Leto, my choice for Best Supporting Actor, McConaughey takes huge risks and they all pay off. He demonstrates what great acting in a powerful film is all about.
He’s my choice for Oscar, but not necessarily the Academy’s. On that: Ejiofor is strong choice for liberal sentiment, DeCaprio for career sentiment, Dern for hanging in there sentiment, and Bale, for playing the guy everyone in Hollywood’s seen over and over–the scam artist. McConaughey is then a bit of long shot for sheer brilliance in acting. My guess is the Academy will go for Ejiofor and it’s clear all five of these guys deserve it. How about an arm or a leg each?
Final Note: Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey show what great actors can do in terms of adapting themselves to challenging roles. They have become what many thought, including me, Johnny Depp would become: an actor of amazing range and depth willing to do whatever it takes to bring a role alive. Depp has drifted into playing parodies of that idea but Bale and McConaughey show us what risk and reward are all about and on a grand scale. This point is not uniquely mine: the Huff Post had an article contrasting Depp’s descent with McConaughey’s rise on 1/3/14 but I just found it today. That, though, makes two of us wishing McConaughey further success and hoping Depp can pull himself out of the dreck.

12 Years a Slave

Posted on November 17, 2013 by billnichols99

Chiwetel Ejiofor steals the movie. With innumerable close ups of his face contorted in anguish at the indignity of not being recognized for who is truly is, Ejiofor brings enormous emotional intensity to the role of the free man who gets thrust into slavery and only escapes, not through heroic feats of daring do but through, essentially, the kindness of a stranger who is willing to risk seeing him for the man he is. It is an implication, then, that those not so recognized and not legally declared free within the United States, ought to be, but they are left behind as Solomon Northup regains freedom and returns to his home and family in upstate New York where they seem to live with a level of comfort that would put a lot of middle class whites to shame even now.
McQueen gave us the frenzied Fassbender as a sex addict completely out of control till film’s end in Shame, and here he gives us Fassbender as a not at all genteel southern plantation owner (did the rural, cotton-economy have a different ethos from the South of the cities; where did that mythic gentility reveal itself?) whose infatuation with a slave woman (Lupita Nyong’o in her first film role) exceeds his love for his wife. Infatuation is no barrier to cruelty, though. Epps, the de Sadean sadist, is always willing to see a good flogging imposed on the slowest of the cotton pickers or on any who appear insubordinate, including Patsey (Nyong’o) when she visits another plantation without his knowlege, to obtain, as she puts it so powerfully, soap. Soap to wash away the smell and grime of slavery. Soap that Epps wife, an avenging fury if there ever was one, denies her.
McQueen is no stranger to intensity. He seems to thrive on it. A hunger strike in his depiction of Bobby Sands’ hunger strike in prison; frantic sex addiction in Shame and now the horrific violence of slavery in 12 Years. There is the profound violence of having your identity stripped away, of losing all sense of dignity in the eyes of others, of that great reduction to “property,” and there is also the appalling violence of physical punishment. McQueen shies away from none of it. Unlike the jaded, clever but empty play with generic conventions that are the cruz of Django Unchained, McQueen goes to the historical heart of the matter: what slavery felt like for those who suffered its immense indignities, without cardboard heroes riding to the rescue. Ejiofor deserves enormous credit for bring it all alive with his understated and deeply human performance, a performance that denies the unalterable assumption of his “masters” that is less than they at every turn.
This is a wrenching, disturbing, deeply affecting film and we will probably hear much more about it come Oscar time.

The Counselor …needs some advice

Posted on November 17, 2013 by billnichols99

I almost missed this film, it seemed to slip in and out of town without ado despite Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender is leads. But that’s not why I went, nor was it because Ridley Scott directed it.
It was because Cormac McCarthy wrote the script.
There were premonitions of trouble. A fragment of the script appeared in The New Yorker and I couldn’t finish it. It was not a conventional script but a series of paragraphs describing the actions of people who had no distinct personalities and fairly inscrutable actions (in the film they are indeed minor characters).
That’s wasn’t the film’s problem. It is visually memorable and Fassbender is superb as the hero who chooses crime (a big drug deal) to head for easy street. The problem is the plot is extremely unsatisfying, with a satanic deus ex machine at every turn to make sure goes things go as bad as possible for The Counselor (Fassbender). I had thought, anyone who can open a chapter with this: “Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he,” (Blood Meridian) has to have a great screenplay in them. Not yet, I’d say.
McCarthy’s fiction invokes worlds dominated by evil, not just evil men and evil doings but characters of such epic proportion that they exceed the limits of realist plausibility. No Country for Old Men has the killer who can’t be stopped; Blood Meridian has the Judge whose powers of vengeance know no bounds; Children of God has a pyschopathic killer who survives for decades where most would perish. And The Counsellor has Malkina, with a stress on mal (Cameron Diaz), the dark angel who is able to outsmart and sabotage everthing the other characters do even though there seems no possible way she could have the where-with-all to do so.
The problem this creates is that these stories operate on two levels: one realist, one allegorical, one of plausible characters, one of implausible forces. Malkina’s powers have no credible base; she is simply capable of outwitting, destroying and conquering all. The Cohen brothers managed to tame this epic figure with humor and a wink at Bardem’s exaggerated qualities, but Scott tries to play it straight and make Malkina just part of the gang when she is anything but. That leads to a very ragged plot with enormous holes all through it.
I wish I could say this is a masterpiece. I can’t. I’d say it’s worth seeing for the stylistics and to learn from flaws and failures about what not to do, but I will be hoping for better luck on the next McCarthy screenplay.

Loving Breaking Bad

Posted on October 8, 2013 by billnichols99

So, what does that title mean? Whatever it means, it captures the curve of Walter White from good to bad, from teacher to killer in some elusive way. I’m in the middle of a marathon catch up, starting season 4 and watching Walter and Hank swap positions as tough guy, Walter and Jesse become “family” more than he is with Walt Jr., watching Skyler drift further into this dark underworld, for, like Walk, very good but perhaps ultimately poisonous reasons. It all has feel of an epic Russian novel, with a denser, tighter trajectory than The Wire or Mad Men as characters actually evolve and chanage in significant ways. To see Walter get a handgun, conceal it, drive to Gus’s house, and, before leaving his car for what he imagines will be a fatal confrontation, put on his black hat and run his fingers along the rim captures perfectly the Jekyll/Hyde transformation that he knowingly enacts, with greater and greater ease. Are we all Walter Whites? Is that part of the appeal?
More later, when I’ve caught up to the finale.