Cinema Rocks

Martin Scorsese, coming hot off his Dylan documentary No Direction Home (not to mention his embarrassingly belated recognition by the illustrious Academy for one of his second-rate films, since they missed his masterpieces) has another rock film, about the Rolling Stones (Shine a Light) due for 2008 release; and yet another in the planning stage, this one on George Harrison. Todd Haynes has a Dylan film too (I'm Not There) which stars six different actors (and actresses! - Cate Blanchett) as Dylan. There are two (count 'em 1-2) films coming out about Joy Division, the short-lived but allegedly influential 1980's "post-punk" band. (Everyone after the Sex Pistols was post-punk, so the appellation is kind of meaningless.) One is Control, a biopic (which does not rhyme with "myopic") by photographer Anton Corbijn; the other is a documentary by Grant Gee. Peter Bogdanovich's latest picture show is about Tom Petty, a 4-hour (r u serious?) documentary that is, according to the Times (which has also noted the proliferation of celluloid rockers) not expected to do much for the theatre industry but should sell like hotcakes to TP fans. David Leaf's 2006 film The U.S. Vs. John Lennon was part of another tide. Need I mention the formulaic Dreamgirls, all but a Diana Ross & the Supremes bio? In 2005 there was James Mangold's Walk the Line, a biopic about Johnny Cash. The year 2004 brought around the late release of some fabled archival footage of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and others (Bob Smeaton's Festival Express), andTaylor Hackford's Ray, the Ray Charles bio. And so it goes, as we drill back in time, passing through documentaries and biopix of the Sex Pistols, U2, Richie Valens (go ahead, sing it.... dadada dada la Bamba...), The Doors, The Band, Elvis, the Talking Heads, Kurt Cobain... If I appear to have shorted the films on musicians of the female persuasion it is just that I was thinking rock, but we can always throw in Coal Miner's Daughter and Lady Sings the Blues (and Walk the Line is almost as much about June Carter as about Cash), not to mention the largely forgotten film The Rose (1979), a Janis Joplin biography starring - Bette Midler? (Hello in there... casting, I mean; anybody home?) This off-the-cuff list, you will notice, includes only films with some claim to biographical content, not mere concert films like Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same. (Anybody who calls The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense "mere concert films" will be appropriately calumnied and vilified, not to mention having their MTV signals jammed.) There are many more that I have not mentioned; quite a few I had never heard of before, such as the Y2K TV film bio The Beach Boys: An American Family, and a 1973 eponymous Jimi Hendrix bio.

Now, all I want to do here is muse a bit about the following question: Why is it that the lives of rock stars (and popular music stars in general) make such appealing subjects for films? I mean, if you think about it, who really cares about the troubled lives of rock musicians, who generally abuse their bodies (and sometimes those of others), manifest antisocial behavior, rise to stardom on the strength of their musical talents, and then quickly die, wither, or fade? Okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit; certainly not all popular music stars following this course. There are probably more living than dead rock musicians from the '60's. But given the average life expectancy today, the fact that we even have to pause for a moment over the truth of that statement is indicative of the problem. We all know that a very high proportion die young - the fictional group in Paul Simon's One Trick Pony even made a game out of naming them, and that was in 1980! Before John Lennon, Mike Bloomfield, Bob Marley, Harry Chapin, John Belushi, Felix Pappalardi, Dennis Wilson, Peter Tosh,Jaco Pastorius, Nico, Roy Orbison, John Cipolina, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Fogerty, David Ruffin, Frank Zappa, Freddie Mercury, Harry Nilsson, Tommy Boyce, and Jerry Garcia, and tons of others (according to this list) died premature deaths. A few of these folks succumbed to heart failure, AIDS or cancer in their 40's or early 50's; the rest all ended their lives with drug overdoses, murder, suicide, or transportation accidents. Are they models to follow? Are they heroes to canonize? Are they tragic figures whose lives are worth dramatizing?

If you said "all of the above" you were at least partially right, in my opinion. Models, not for their drug habits or sex lives, but for their obsessive dedication to an art form (which is the only kind of dedication worth talking about). Heroes for their mostly subversive versions of the Horatio Alger story. Tragic, because many of them followed a predictable and perhaps inevitable arc, from anonymity to fame to precipitous decline. Does this mean Britney Spears is going to be the subject of the next big documentary? Too soon to tell, but I wouldn't write it off. Today, she may seem a little ridiculous, along with Lindsay and Paris and the other bad chicks. And that seems beneath the dignity of anything with tragic pretensions. But go see Walk the Line, if you haven't already, and then reconsider the question. Jim, Janis and Jimi all imploded, and though I suspect the great Janis and Jimi films are still waiting to be made (Oliver Stone got the not-likely-to-be-surpassed Jim Morrison flick, The Doors) they all have their tragic sides.

That is, if you think of them potentially ascending greater heights, but for their swift descent into self-destructive addictions and in some cases sociopathic narcissism; consider the ingeniously disturbed Syd Barrett (careful with that ax, indeed). And who doesn't? Who doesn't think that Jimi Hendrix, for example, would have become an even greater artist had he had time to mature? But the tragic ending is built in, in a way (as it must be, to be really tragic): the same impulse that results in a maniacal devotion to rock and its possibilities, and rockets the owner to fame, makes them indulge in the temptations that success proffers, and suffer the numbing schedule of the touring musician. Always under pressure, always looking to the next gig, homeless as a vagabond, in bondage to a recording company (often with the profits from at least one or two albums written off to bad contracts), constantly having to negotiate with the endless list of self-serving personalities in the music industry, herded together in something closer than a marriage to band members they would not even want to date, and surrounded by people whose adoration blurs the line between true friends and sycophants, the young successful rock star may be open to anything that promises a night without stress, panic or depression. At the same time, as money pours in, so does the opportunity to spend it on designer drugs, wild parties and the like. Why not? Haven't I earned this? Don't I need this? Could this really hurt me, after I have risen from dank basements to the Garden and the Bowl? Personally, I have only glimpsed the very edges of this life, but it is all too easy to comprehend.

The grizzly list above stars mainly rock musicians who died premature deaths between 1980 and 1995. Rockers are famously careless with their lives. But the list could be expanded a bit to include Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Phil Ochs, Stan Rogers, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Watson, Kate Wolf, and many other too quickly departed people of a gentler and less flamboyant persuasion. One does not want to casually throw cancer victims in with drug abusers and suicides, but the high mortality rate of all but classical musicians is very striking. (Then again, classical conductors and pianists bend the average the other way; more than one classical pianist has given a 90th birthday concert, and at least one - Mieczyslaw Horszowksi - gave one at 100.)

But it is not my intention to paint everything an artificial black in order to promote a theory of why cinema loves rock. The innumerable Dylan bios, literary and cinematic, are not chasing a tragic figure, but rather an enigmatic one. Dylan has famously proclaimed how little he is understood by the Dylan observers. So, may way ask, who does understand you, Bob? Presumably, the answer would be "me". Or would it? No one would expect Dylan to be self-effacing at this point; but would he be honest? Surely anyone who understands himself doesn't have to reinvent himself every few years. As a bluesman; then a left-wing folkie; then a rocker; then a country star; then a Jesus Freak; then an eclectic guy who'll do anything from blues to cabaret to political broadsides. The question for Todd Haynes is: are you sure six is enough?

Dylan is probably the most eulogized living personality - ever. Elvis received plenty of attention in his later life, but a lot of it was negative. The Beatles fly together in the popular imagination, with the partial exception of John. But Dylan is the lone subject of epic biographies, film after film, endless interviews, articles and commentaries. Why? It is sometimes said that the more obscure the philosopher, the more ink will be spilled trying to figure him out, and the more famous he will become. This at least fits the picture of Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and plenty of other leading lights. (Though it does not explain why Fichte or Ernst Bloch failed to reach the highest rank.) Dylan steadfastly refuses to reveal the "real" Dylan - maybe there is none. Haynes's film title reflects this. One begins to suspect that nobody understands Dylan because there is no Dylan. Thus the search for him has all the mystery and excitement of Moby Dick, and is more about the searcher than the searchee. And plenty of writers and filmmakers want to play Captain A-rab.

Speaking of folkies, in 2005 the film rights to a biography of Tim Buckley (d.1975 @ 28, OD'ed on heroin, alcohol and barbiturates after a grueling tour) and Jeff Buckley (his son, d.1997 @ 30, accidentally drowned in a Tennessee river) were acquired; I haven't heard anything more about the release, though. Apparently Jeff is the main subject, and Tim is seen in flashbacks. These guys came and went too quickly, though Tim released quite a few albums before he died. His Hello Goodbye is about as prophetic a title as Jeff's best song and line, "Oh, it was so real" (on Grace). I have to ask myself a question: why do I feel a rush of excitement, even a twinge of impatience, at the prospect of seeing a movie about two musicians who I basically know from one album each? Who cares? Lots of people OD'ed like Tim, or accidentally drowned like Jeff. I could say: because I'm a musician too, so I can relate. But let's try something bolder: almost everyone envies, on some level, the artist who throws everything into his music, who manages, even once, to express himself in an adequate way, and to reach a mass audience even for a moment. We admire it, are jealous of it, because there is some urge to do the same thing, in some way, which we suppress in order to be real people. We would not want society to consist mainly of Tim and Jeff Buckleys, of Phil Ochs (a folk suicide, subject of the biopic Chords of Fame), of Dylans, much less of Jim, Jimi and Janis. We are not all ready to throw normalcy to the winds and sail off with these characters. But we admire them for having the guts to do what we know we could not have done. When I think about the film, what I feel is a kind of awe at the vision and energy behind their music, and their ability to put it into my head; and I guess I have desire to live vicariously through them, both to understand where that energy came from and to learn by quasi-experience how to avoid their downfall.

Incidentally, want to check a video of Tim Buckley performing one of his songs live? Please pick up - are you ready? - the Rhino DVD The Monkees: Our Favorite Episodes. You may think this is out of character, but the Monkees as a group were far more interesting than they usually get credit for, not least for their contribution to the rock video format. Keep in mind that when "The Monkees" show came out, rock film consisted in not much more than Bye Bye Birdie, some Elvis beach flicks, and A Hard Day's Night. The group had to somehow transition back and forth between the musical personae, the actors and their characters. To my mind, they managed it better than a lot of amateurish, lip-synched rock videos today. Granted they had the resources of a major TV studio. But my impression is that The Monkees themselves were major creative forces in everything they did after their first two albums. There is a lot of improv in the TV episodes. Davey I saw as the Artful Dodger in the Broadway production of Oliver, before he was a Monkee, and he was a powerful stage presence. We have focused on one paradigm, the documentary or biopik which follows a more or less tragic curve. A second is of course the rock comedy, which is almost never biographical, but loosely follows the foibles of either a fictional band, or a real one in fictional situations, with real rock musicians as actors. This is exemplified particularly in Richard Lester's Beatles films. The Monkees focused this into a 30-minute format. There are probably plenty of other candidates in this category; can't think of them right now. (I'm sort of ignoring the obvious and overdiscussed stuff like Spinal Tap and Rocky Horror, as well as the films that star rock musicians in other roles - Tom Waits (Down By Law), John Lennon (How I Won the War), David Bowie (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Labyrinth), Mick Jagger, Madonna, etc. Not to mention that allegedly lovable flick with Beatle-song backdrops throughout, a silly idea whose time has gone.)

There must be some other angles. La Bamba is pretty good at showing not only the personal side of the story but the sort of social tragedy involved in the loss of a pop icon. Any great life cut short by forces beyond the control of the subject can be epic material. I have not seen The Buddy Holly Story, which was widely criticized for being very inaccurate, as well as unfair to The Crickets; nor have I seen Paul McCartney's alternative film, The Real Buddy Holly Story, which is supposed to be much better. It stands to reason that such a film could capture the "American Pie" tale with much opportunity for social insight. But again, the Holly-Valens tragedy is very much a direct outcome of the kind of life that popular musicians have to lead. The media tend to glamorize rock stars, with special emphasis on their money, social and sex lives, but the tale that Paul Simon tells in "Homeward Bound" is the reality that a lot more of them face: endless travel, loneliness, frustration, and that unsung tribulation, dealing with band members who are either not up to professional level, or impossible to get along with, or dragging every through the dirt of their own nasty habits. The drugs and sex mitigate this only to an extent. The pull of these pressures and dangers is so strong that it must be difficult to make a film that avoids the stereotypical path. Dreamgirls, for all its awards (and its embedded American Idol success story) struck me as a sanitized and formulaic picture with little to say. Walk the Line constantly threatened to degenerate into formula, but seemed to avoid it through the intensity of its character portraits, not to mention a couple of great acting performances.

I think there are many more great rock films to be made. There is no way that the existing stock has adequately explored all the sides of human emotion, greatness, weakness, humor and tragedy in the lives of popular musicians. Let us hope the films get deeper and more real rather than giving in to the temptation of easy hero-worship and superficial moneymaking through peddling the name of some cultural icon. And with that hope in mind, I end where I began: what could be a better opportunity for serious rock filmmaking than a Martin Scorcese flick on George Harrison? See you there.

Spidey vs. Sandy and Gooey

Of course you're all waiting with baited breath for Spiderman and Philosophy, the inevitable next step from Open Court after The Matrix and Philosophy, James Bond and Philosophy, The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, etc. There are already 30 of these titles, with more to come, including, for example, Johnny Cash and Philosophy (hello?) and Soccer and Philosophy (a sequel to Bocce and Philosophy, no doubt). Superheroes and Philosophy (Open Court, 2005) has a lead article by Mark Waid, a former neighbor and friend of yours truly, the squawcking blogger, but it is not a big Spiderman production. (Mark is basically a D.C. guy, as far as I know. As attested to by the collection of Batman lapel pins I think I still have from a box of stuff he gave me.) Spidey the comic book character is way overdue his own philosophy book, and even in his Sam Raimi incarnation is now as grown up as Frodo or Neo. So why not Spidey and Philosophy? Stick it next to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and you've got your summer reading.

But why do people keep throwing rotten tomatoes at Sam Raimi's new flick? Are they jealous that they didn't get to suspend Kirsten Dunst 80 stories above a Manhattan sidewalk and drop large vehicles in her general direction? I don't think so... No, it's a little more than that. True, part of the problem here is that the story is going off in more directions than the particles at FermiLab, including, yes, a particle accelerator that somehow turns Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church) into a mass of loosely bonded silicon, a.k.a., the Sandman. And let's not forget the self-propelled rubbery black goop from outer space (Dark Matter, anyone?) that is on a mission to attach itself in some form or other to Our Hero (Tobey Maguire) and change him into a vindictive schmuck who alienates everyone from Girlfriend (not you, Owl - the almost as lovely Dunst as Mary Jane) to the whole of Gotham City (whoops, wrong comic; even wrong publisher).

And there are ten or twelve subplots to supplement these themes, keeping the viewer in a state of constant anticipation until the very end, when (as it turns out) none of them are worked out very well. Marko, for example, became a naughty bank robber in search of money to pay for medicine for his sick daughter, who appears early in the film; and then, as Sandman, he then joins up with a johnny-come-lately character called Venom to destroy Spidey; but the link between Marko's fatherly quest and Sandy's vengeance is awfully thin, and the unfortunate daughter drops out completely without resolution of her crisis. (I guess the kids who see this film are supposed to assume she just dies?) There are lots of other themes that sort of spin off the screen rather than leading to any useful fictional content.

Aside from the issues with the thematic content, the critics I read on Rotten Tomatoes were mostly riffing on a lot of technical issues with the special effects. But in my opinion the issue with them was not technical, but ontological. Sandy, for example, was technically well done; the problem is, what is he? He seems to accumulate body mass when he comes in contact with sand, and lose it in various ways, which include water, and, strangely enough, fire. Sand burns? At the temperature of lava, I guess, but from some ordinary scorchers that Harry fires from his flying skateboard? Maybe they were tactical nuclear weapons? Not too smart in the middle of Gotham City, Harry. But no matter what happens to Sandman, he always returns to good (?) old flesh-and-blood Flint Marko. The nukes hit the sand but missed Marko? Sometimes Marko seems to turn willfully into a sandstorm and drift away, as if he caught a tailwind and just sailed off. He comes, goes, falls apart, reappears - when he pounds Spidey he must be one pretty solid piece of beach, but then he melts like the Wicked Witch of the West. (She's just a bad dream after all, but... hey, Sandman, I get it, he's just here to put Spidey and his gal pal to sleep?)

In the end, this hunk of waterside real estate is so ontologically vague that you can't wrap your mind around him. You can say "lack of imagination", but I'll just come back with "imaginative resistance" - this character puts you in a foul mood that makes you not want to let him be. Too much work. Stick him in an hourglass where at least he's got some contours. I'm sorry, but you have to be able to get inside a character to appreciate it. When I try to get inside Sandman I just fall right out the other side and rush off to rinse my face.

Now, as for Gooey - he's just as vague, if not self-contradictory. Gooey begins life in the manner described above, a gelatinous black thing that resembles two large arachnids having sex after crawling through an oil slick on the way up from the sewer. It is not only self-propelled, but self-motivated, at least more so than some of the people in my office. For it wants to attach itself to Spidey, as if to a soulmate, and tracks him down, eventually wrapping him up in a black version of the famous red-and-blue Spidey costume. It then bonds with him - not emotionally - well, yes, emotionally - and causes him to seek revenge for his uncle's presumed death at the hands of Marko, to destroy the shards of Mary Jane's singing career, and to upend the hopes of aspiring cub photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) who wants to catch Spidey doing a no-no.

Time out. Said photographer plagiarized a photo and then doctored it to make it look like Spidey messed up. Why does it count as spiteful to set this guy on his ear? Anyway, so far Gooey is only a bit of obvious bad blood (people are not supposed to be vengeful, superheroes least of all) but things get very fuzzy soon enough. For one thing, Spidey's got a scientist friend who discovers that the jelly spider glop is a germ that can infect his blood. Right - so how is it that ripping off the black costume cures blood poisoning and its personality effects? Oh how symbolic, Spidey rips it off in a church, where some of it just happens to fall on the aforementioned would-be cub photographer. But since Cubby is already a vindictive bastard, what difference does it make? Well, never mind, he now turns into the Truly Evil Negative-Spiderman, so denoted by the fact that he has sharp fangs and is called Venom. How is it that the glop sought out Spidey like it was on a mission, but now it just happens to land a few floors below on Cubby, like some tar dripping from the roof on a hot day? Well, that's the last time we entrust an important mission to some semi-conscious gob of icky black latex.

So now, wearing the black-spidey costume, Cubby goes for Spidey's throat, but ends up... well, I can't give away everything. But of course he gets nailed, and not by antibiotics either. Gooey's morphology thus includes black goo from planet X, a gelatinous web that wraps itself around Spidey, a Spidey costume with personality flaws, a Venom costume with periodontal problems and an attitude, and finally some inanimate form that the world doesn't have to worry about anymore. Thanks, Sam - what's up next, the Pastrami Sandwich from Hell?

So there you have the real reason Spiderman 3 is a mess: ontological ambiguity! It ain't the technology, folks, it's what you do with it. Though the movie has its moments of visual interest, and occasionally tests our creativity in figuring out how Spidey will get out of this or that mess (literal and figurative), it is basically about two over-morphed bits of material and a bunch of loose ends.

Oh, did I mention the parallel jewelry thing? In a touch that makes the whole story just shy of Pynchonesqe ersatz non-randomness, Spidey (that is, Peter Parker) often clutches an engagement ring his aunt gave him, which he hopes to lay on Mary Jane, while Sandy clutches a locket his daughter gave him. I'll be darned if there isn't some good old-fashioned aesthetic device being offered here, but either its point is lost in the miasma of conflicting expectations and hanging judgments, or it's like I said, a Pynchonesque device to make us look for connections that just ain't there. True, we get forgiveness on various levels (have to, Spidey gave up the black goo in a church, after all!) and a few other sort of obvious emotional plays, but the overall feeling is not redemption, and there's too much baloney for any clear sense of resolution. Maybe Raimi should have tried a Fellini ending, with all the misfits and materials and biohazards meandering into a ballroom and doing a hora or something. It would not have solved either the ontological problems or the tangle of threads, but it would have been a substitute for closure - about the best that could be achieved under the circumstances.

Oh, did I mention the bit about the pseudo-romance with Peter's classmate...? Harry's effort to avenge his father's death...? The butler who tells him how Dad really died...? The truth about how uncle was really murdered...? Auntie's counseling of Peter's amorous adventures....? The editor who wants to prove that Spidey is a fraud...? Oh, what the heck, just go see the movie, you know your kids are going to drag you there anyway. What do kids care about ontology and thematic dissipation? No more than they care about the banality of the dialogue. And neither should you, if you're just out for a night of glitzy fun. Just don't plan to take this film seriously.

Grammy Schmammy

Such is the power of the Hollywood spectacle that even an opinionated parrot was moved to doing mea culpas and post hocs and caveat emptors... and parrots don't even speak Latin! Didn't I underestimate The Departed? Isn't it great that Marty final won one? Wasn't I just a bit unfair to Helen Mirren? Did I fail to recognize the strength of Jennifer Hudson's debut performance? Oh, I am so embarrassed, and I put this out on a blog for all the world to see...

There's just one word I can think of for these sentiments... resist! Let's start with the strongest case, Helen Mirren's performance in The Queen. First of all, my main point was that films with nothing special to offer are being raised to the level of great cinema because of one great performance, and that remains a serious problem with the tone of this year's Grammies. But let's talk about performances, anyway. If you saw The Queen, you know what Helen Mirren did: she subtly altered her facial expression to express a range of emotions from stern and rigid to, what shall we call it, softening up (?), and in one notable scene she shed a tear or two. Now that scene was perhaps a great one, but not particularly because she cried; every professional actress can cry on demand, regardless of how rigid a personality she is playing. What was great about it is that, as I said before, the stag is identified with Diana, through the medium of her children, and the Queen's awe at the stag's unexpected and imposing presence represents her final, hard-won identification and dignification of what her grandchildren had lost. If anything makes this a memorable film, it is the unfolding of that theme towards this moving climax.

But all this has little to do with altering one's facial muscles. It is a well known and perhaps remarkable fact that in cinema, as opposed to theater, it is the subtle gesture before the camera, rather than the grand movement, that dominates. Nevertheless, I am not particularly inclined to think of facial expressions as enough to constitute a great performance. And in this performance there was little else. (It's not a criticism of Helen Mirren, BTW; she did what she was called on to do, and maybe more. I said that the whole point and tenor of the film left me cold, and that's a problem for the producer and the writer, not the actress.) I did not see The Last King of Scotland, but from the clips I've seen, I'm quite sure that Forest Whitaker's performance there consisted of a lot more than twitching his upper lip. There is, perhaps, a difference between male and female film stars as far as the range of motion they are expected to have; but it's not as dramatic as "you guys move around, ladies just stand there and alter your facial expression". This role did not give enough scope of action to permit an all-round great performance, much less a great film.

The Departed was an enjoyable movie, albeit a remake of the Hong Kong (not Japanese!) film Infernal Affairs. I have no issue with remakes, though it is difficult to think of very many that are as good as the originals. I have some issue with mob films but not enough to fail to appreciate truly great ones like The Godfather, Donnie Brasco and Scorcese's own Goodfellas. The Academy was doing the thing that the Nobel and the Pulitzer and a million other Committees do, recognizing that a major artist has been slighted for his greatest work and playing catch-up because the failure has come to reflect more on the Committee than on the artist. (Think of Saul Bellow getting the Pulitzer for the cardboard novel Humboldt's Gift after being passed up for Herzog.) Thus he lost the Best Director award for Raging Bull to Robert Redford (Ordinary People), which is a bit ridiculous; and Goodfellas lost to Kevin Costner (Dances With Wolves). He was not even nominated for Taxi Driver (though that year sported an illustrious bunch of nominees, including Ingmar Bergman, Lina Wertmuller and Sidney Lumet, and the film had to compete with Rocky, for which John Avildsen won Best Director). Maybe it was just circumstance rather than disrespect, but it definitely looked like time to do right by one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time. But honoring him for a remake, with one dubious premise (Matt Damon's bred-for-moledom character) and one been-there-done-that idea (mob infiltrator becomes a bit too believable as mobster) must be slim recompense for failing to win the title for his best efforts. (Raging Bull was picked as the best film of the 1980's by Sight and Sound, acording to Wikipedia.)

What else? Babel! At least it won Best Original Score, losing six other nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, and two for Best Supporting Actress), all of which it richly deserved. Actually, it was not the score, but the soundtrack that was so amazing. For example, never was a few seconds of absolute silence used to more dramatic effect. And you thought someone goofed at the end of the disco scene? So did I, briefly. Talk about point-of-view shots; how about point-of-hearing sounds? What was so shocking about it is that we never notice until that moment how different it all would be to a deaf person. Anyway, big-time dis for this film, and my opinion remains that it stands head and shoulders over the rest of the bunch in almost every way.

Dreamgirls - okay, Jennifer Hudson, not bad, though frankly I thought there were plenty of better supporting actress roles around this year (Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza both deserved it more). But what about the best song award? After all that Dreamgirls bruhaha, not one of those songs won the award! That's a dis if ever I saw one! The music may have been better than the film, but I'm glad in a way that it did not get the award. Why? Partly because of something that has nothing to do with this or any particular film. Look at Broadway lately: we're treated to one after another spectacle based on this pop star or that one, and everyone from Dylan and the Beatles to Billy Joel gets their chance at being the Next Big Show; virtually all of them falling off the stage quickly, and not a minute too soon. If someone wants to make a serious popular music film, be it The Last Waltz or Walk the Line or even La Bamba, I'm all for it, but this formulaic crap is made with the prayer of waltzing into a bit of cash by way of audience identification with someone's music. And this has got to go.

Okay, I'm done. The Parrot repenteth not. Hollywood recognizes itself in the Academy Awards, not as the built-on-sand spectacle that it is but as the Holy Woods of cinema, and the rest of us have to live with that, respect it to some extent, and resist it when necessary. Speaking of which, what do you think 2005 will be remembered for, Brokeback Mountain, or the Best Picture of the Year winner, um, what's it called? Oh, Crash, the film about the stock market in 1929, I mean, a car wreck in Los Angeles. Well, that's two years in a row that a really notable film was passed over so that the big H could take care of its own. Like I said, the artists and the artworks will outlive this spectacle. Orson Welles won nothing except Best Screenplay for Citizen Kane, often considered the greatest and among the most innovative films of all time. (John Ford won Best Picture and Best Director for How Green Was My Valley that year.) And so it goes.

Oscar Schmosker

I once heard the Academy Awards referred to as "Hollywood's opportunity to congratulate itself..." Since this is literally true, the apparently intended sarcasm cannot really be achieved without adding something like "... for spending $100 millions on idiotic flops, depicting ever more brutal, graphic and gratuitous violence, sensationalizing natural and manmade disasters, and trivializing the effects of poverty, genocide, crime, illness, insanity, racism and domestic strife by singling out isolated personal victories from the mass of ruined lives". (And if a Parrot can say that all in one breath you know it must be true.)

Oh. You thought Hollywood had suddenly turned socially conscious? Well, yes - you could say, it turned socially conscious Hollywood-style, by taking up social issues and giving us superficial solutions to them; the kinds of solutions that make good movies, of course. So and so rises from poverty through force of will and becomes a financial success sort of solutions. So and so saves hundreds from death and destruction through personal strength and cunning sort of solutions. Is that all? I suppose not; we have also a spate of the Highly Sensitive to Racial Disparities films and the Post-Colonial Post-Mortem films and the Gay People Are Basically Just People films, and I suppose plenty of others. And this socially conscious cinema comes not only in the explicit variety, but dressed up as parables about mutants and mice and zebras and superheroes and whatnot. (Though if there was a gay superhero film released recently I must have missed it.)

Okay, maybe this does not all fall on Hollywood. Maybe there are plenty of independent and international films that dance to these same tunes. Fine, I don't really care if the point can be circumscribed within a few square miles in Los Angeles or if it is a much wider phenomenon. (In fact, I have had an extremely difficult time finding lists of films made in Hollywood; Wikipedia has lists by studio, but they do not distinguish between films made, produced and directed there, versus those merely distributed by the studio.) Actually most of what comes out of Hollywood is still pure pap, forgettable junk that is the cinematic equivalent of fast food. Films aimed at children, superhero/sci-fi stuff, idiotic, formulaic comedies and romances. This mostly dross that I'm not interested in here, and neither is Oscar. What I'm really talking about is the complex of production and distribution companies, theaters, DVD manufacturers and advertisers (which could be read, "Sony, Sony, Sony, and Sony...", or "Disney, Disney... etc" but nevermind) which serves up to the Masses a handful of this total output , plus the occasional foreign or independent film, nationally and pushes it into the popular mind and ultimately that of the Academy, culminating in Sunday night's follow-up to Superbowl Sunday, the Academy Awards.

In fact, I don't have any objection to socially conscious cinema. The problem is that there seems to be a conception - and if I'm not mistaken it is more central in Hollywood than among other film cultures - that in order to make an important, relevant, meaningful film you have to take up one of these themes and work it out in this more or less formulaic way. In any case, this seems to be the message of the Academy, which probably represents Hollywood in the popular mind more than the studios themselves. And this means that any number of far better films will never win a "Best Motion Picture" award or much of anything else. Which hardly affects the history of film very much, it just makes the Academy more of a dog-and-pony show and less of a historical reference for critical judgment.

All that just by way of preface to my disgruntled review of some of the top Academy Award nominees this year:

The Queen: Why exactly did someone decide to make this movie? Because they thought it was really interesting how this long faded pseudo-monarchy responded to death of one of their ex-members? What a lapse in judgment. Nobody outside of England gives a crap about what these landed aristocrats think or how they react emotionally to anything. The subject matter seems about as distant from the popular consciousness as that of John Adams' opera Nixon in China; I mean, how can anyone stand watching a detailed study of emotional nuances in the meeting of a corrupt President and the engineer of the disastrous Cultural Revolution? Much less see any significance in it (other than the purchasing Chinese non-interference in the war in Vietnam in return for trade agreements)? I really wonder what moves people to think that they can make hay out of this; probably they read some Shakespeare and figured, hey, why can't we make some great tragedy out of royal melodramas? These folks should be prohibited from reading anything earlier than Chekhov. So why all the fuss about The Queen then? Oh, yes, Mr. Frears, I do get the subtle take on the traditional aristocrats-floating-above-reality-while-the-empire-crumbles-beneath-their-feet theme, thank you, we really needed another one of those. Yes, it does put you in contention for the socially-conscious-movie-of-the-year award (aka "Best Motion Picture") because Di did a lot of charitable stuff that gained her a lot of public sympathy. (Not to mention the Clintonesque benefit of having your husband cheat on you with a woman less attractive than yourself.) La-dee-da, thanks, got all that. So what? The premise is stupid, the film is boring, the attempted heightening of tension through pictures of flowers and crowds at the palace gates doesn't really work, at least outside of the UQ (that's United Queendom for those of you who think the King has any importance at all). Okay, Helen Mirren. Again, so what? I can't get worked up about a performance in which the range of emotional attitudes is from uptight to upset. And everybody outside the UQ - in fact, outside England, period - thinks that the whole bit about British emotional restraint is just so hokey. You can't appreciate a movie like this unless you think there is some real conflict between virtues: stalwart emotional self-discipline on the one hand and true sympathy and compassion on the other. But you've got to be British and probably upper class to really see any virtue in the former. The whole emotional premise of the film is lost on anyone who doesn't really have an issue with shedding a tear or expressing solidarity with the pain of the multitude. In fact most people think emotional restraint beyond the maintenance of reasonable composure in the face of ordinary difficulties is a vice, not a virtue. Oscar Schmosker rates this film a B- at best; and that's only because the metaphor of the stag as Di (or something like that) gives it some aesthetic interest.

The Last King of Scotland: Well, I didn't see it. But I have to mention it here because it is so outstanding that TWO of the "Best Motion Picture" nominees have essentially nothing to do with the "motion picture" but with the performances of their leads. To which all I can say is, I love a good performance, but it does not make a great film or great art. I love to watch Jennifer Aniston on Friends reruns, she gives a lot of great performances, but no one is going to call these sitcom episodes great art. It seems the Academy has really lost its way if it is mistaking great performances for great films. Oscar Schmosker doesn't rate films he hasn't seen, but suspects that this one has more to say about Forest Whitaker than power, brutality, insanity, or other Important Themes.

The Departed: Saw it a while ago. Fine film, who can argue? But unfortunately, the theme of mob infiltrator becoming a bit too much like the people he is trying to send to jail was done brilliantly and definitively, IMHO, in Donnie Brasco. So I had the deja vu feeling already. Then, Goodfellas is certainly a better Scorcese gangster film, and there, let it be said, the brilliant performance by Joe Pesci does definitely lift this vehicle so far above most others in its class that this follow-up feels like a rerun, or also-ran, or... deja vu all over again. The other thing is that the idea of this cleancut kid being bred from childhood for a role as a police department mole, and remaining loyal to his harsh, ungrateful and unseemly mobster master through all of it, seemed so utterly fabricated that even if it were "based on a true story" I'd have a hard time believing it. (Some true stories are just not true in the way that can be utilized by a work of art.) So I had issues with both sides of this film. Was it erastz-socially-conscious formulaic fare? No, not really. Not terribly conscious of anything except the power of cellphones, an increasingly common plot device in contemporary film, which I hope we will get beyond fairly quickly. Certainly entertaining. Oscar Schmosker gives it a B.

Babel: Who accidentally nominated this for "Best Motion Picture"? It towers above anything else I've seen in the past few years on practically every level. Let's put it this way: the use of music in this film is better than the entire package in many other films. Dramatically it dances rings around most of the other contenders. If it occasionally tests our sense of plot integrity, the hunch that all the pieces fit together is ultimately confirmed. I still have a little difficulty understanding the focus on the daughter of the Japanese hunter who gave the gun to the guy who gave it to his son who shot... but anyway, there was brilliant parallelism in the growing sense of isolation of each set of characters. The ultimate redemption of some of them was in no case complete, and in some cases there was nothing that looked much like redemption; rather, what seemed like minor indiscretions spiraled into outright disasters; and the worst victims were of course the poor, the powerless, the people who live so close to the boundary of existence that a slight mistake means disaster, while comfortable middle class families can even flirt with death and yet ultimately recover. The ingenious use of music is not the only technical device that makes the film stand out even beyond its social and emotional depth; in fact, every cinematic element I can think of, from lighting and camera positioning to costume and staging, are employed in each of the film's distinct settings to give a real feeling for the cultural and physical environment as well as to remind one of the connections between characters and situations. Volumes could be written about this film; Inarritu is a genius. I'll stop here. Oscar Schmosker says A, maybe A+ if someone can explain to me a little better how the Japanese sequences integrate with the overall architecture of the story.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Touching, great acting, but nobody in their right mind is going to believe that this kid is so happy and accepting of the sudden and complete departure of his mother from his life. Sensitive father films are welcome, in fact, could someone please make one about sensitive parrot Dads? But I'm not buying the premise that this five (?) year old kid just says goodbye to his Mom and everything's fine hanging out in homeless shelters and railroad bathrooms with his Dad. Now as for the rest of the film, this is a great example of the American Dream story, up-from-poverty through force of Will (Smith), with a few gratuitous digs at hippies along the way (haven't seen one quite so biased against hippie counterculture since Joe). Every time things get to the point where total collapse seems likely, one of his lost scanners shows up and he manages to sell it and get back on his feet. (The evil hippies are big scanner thieves, you see.) In the end, good old cronyism and chitchat over beer turns out o be more important to business success than book learning or intelligence. Thus our Hero gets the stockborker job because he "played the game", not because he excelled at anything in particular. Call it realism if you want. I thought it was a good movie and a Fine Performance, but if there is a message here worth remembering or teaching your kids, I missed it. Oscar Schmosker says B, mostly for effort.

Dreamgirls: I walked out after about an hour, can I still review it? This is about as formulaic as the pop star genre gets. Nothing going on here except a fast-paced rise to stardom through native talent and unlikely breaks. Compared to Walk the Line, much less to older, better pop star rise-to-fame movies (The Doors, etc.) this is candy-coated popcorn with no prize at the bottom. Why this should have won the awards it did from some other film societies is beyond me. A feather in the Academy's cap that this was not nominated for "Best Motion Picture"; though they probably should be compelled to develop some new categories, like "Worst Pop Star Picture". Oscar Schmosker gives this a C out of charity.

The Illusionist: Well-made art film, sure fooled me (the plot twist, I mean; can't say much more in case you didn't see it yet). Naturally it is hardly nominated for anything. Easily a B+ in the Schmosker catalogue. See it before it makes itself disappear.

The Painted Veil: Extremely well-made art film, in the classic mould, and of course it's nominated for nothing at all. (Did more than a handful of Academy members even bother to see it?) One critic (can't recall who) quipped, "Even real Merchant Ivory films don't get Oscars". And your point is...? Sorry, but this is what filmmaking used to be about, and still can be; stories wih real emotional depth, great cinematography, top-notch acting, little or no artificial enhancement with the latest, greatest special effects technology, some real social lessons without phony morality plays, an almost total lack of gratuitous violence or grisly carnage, disasters of a slow and deadly sort without cheap-shot catastrophe sequences, a "lost era" feel without millions of bucks in artificial sets and costumes and Model-T's... need I go on? Okay, this one is a twice or thrice or five-times told story, the Somerset Maugham story having been cinematized several times before. I didn't see any of those. I saw this one. It is a fine film. Oscar Schmosker says A-, and see it before it gets old enough that people start to think it's "one of those Merchant Ivory films".

An Inconvenient Truth: Lots of charts and lots of arguments for the reality and threat of global warming. One can hardly avoid being moved to agree, even though many of the arguments are really pretty dubious. I especially doubt his claims about our ability to reverse the trend before a fairly catastrophic rise in sea levels. But the overall impact is what counts. As film, this is nothing, a lecture with a big projection tv and a lot of staging. Much more could have been done outside the lecture, other than promotional shots of Gore and his family. Everybody should learn from the message, but whether it is really necessary to see the film is another question. I wouldn't call this a great or even a good documentary; rather, an opportunity to build consciousness about an important threat that we might be able to mitigate somewhat if enough people in the right places were persuaded of it. Oscar Schmosker doesn't quite know what to do with this one; maybe a B- as film, and PG-13 as social service.

Night at the Museum: Look at the review sites and you'll see that this one gets a much higher rating from audiences than from critics. Many films do, but with this one I could see why. It is actually not as stupid as it sounds; in fact, it is a bit of an intellectual fantasy, having all these historical figures come to life and interacting with them to explore their psychology. The real-people portraits were not exactly the ultimate in emotional probing, but the whole thing hung together fairly well. Here special effects were used in a way that might be called "charming", in the good sense that might be employed in reference to the Star Wars films. The film is directed at kids but I would not hesitate to send an adult there for a bit of fun. When order is inally restored in the museum there is an uncanny sense of moral and intellectual satisfaction that for all its hokeyness is more solid than some of the bang-us-over-the-head denouements of more serious historical films. Oscar Schmosker says B+, not half bad.

Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, Flushed Away, X-Men III: Hey, do you think I have time to review every children's movie I've seen this year? No way. Mutants, rats, frogs, "the heart of Davey Jones"... the gross-out factor certainly has risen in PG films, helping kids acustom themselves to any future real horrors that might unfold (say tv coverage of a foreign war) and thus deaden themselves to the disgust this should generate. X-Men III has some definite virtues, e.g., interactive realignment of the Golden Gate Bridge... Also suggests some interesting social questions. If they invented a drug to "cure" something like e.g., homosexuality, would/should gay people take it? The recent experience with deaf-mutes at Gallaudet University suggests that members of a subculture often prefer to identify with it than integrate into the culture at large. XMen III suggests the same. But mostly, these movies are stocked with lots of unbelievable escapes from unbelievable dangers, and dubious underdog victories over the forces of evil. Compare Babel. It stands as this year's monument to film that avoids the pitfalls of ersatz-social-consciousness and cheap solutions to deep problems. Let's hope Oscar-not-Schmosker honors it appropriately.

Casino Royale: A Bloody License, and the Logic of Bond-age

Casino Royale was the first James Bond novel written by Ian Fleming, and the last of his novels to be made into a serious feature film. The dubious 1967 comedy version hardly counts as a Bond film at all, even apart from its considerable deviation from the novel - rarely has such an illustrious cast (Orson Welles as Le Chiffre, Woody Allen and about a dozen other film greats) been employed with such tepid results. I saw it when it opened, and despite my growing appreciation for serious film and great acting, not to mention belly laughs, the only thing that made an imprint on my adolescent brain was Barbara Bouchet (Miss Moneypenny). If you want a great send-up of spy movies, see the film that is simultaneously one of the greatest spy films and the greatest satire on them, Our Man Flint. (Don't ask me how it does that; but in part it turns on the ingenius interplay between James Coburn and Lee J. Cobb.)

Casino Royale has been updated a bit - international terrorism is of course the enemy rather than Soviet communism, and instead of baccarat, Le Chiffre's game is Texas Hold 'Em! (Is that au courant or what?) A lot of the detective work centers on laptops and cellphones. But the film stays largely with the outline and many details of the novel.

Although my plan here is not to do a film review, I will say that some of the plot is none too clear in the film, especially towards the end. For example, in the book, Vesper Lynd is a Soviet double agent who ultimately commits suicide. It is not a problem that this outcome is slightly modified, but the status of Lynd becomes quite murky in the film after M explains to Bond that Lynd must have made a bargain with Bond's captors to save his life. If Lynd was a double agent then M is all wet here; for it is clear why Le Chiffre did not kill Bond (he never had a chance before getting the secret code to the bank account), so Lynd had no chance to make a deal with him; and she was actually reporting to Le Chiffre's masters, so why would she have to make a deal with them? (In fact she would presumably be the reason they hurried to Le Chiffre's dungeon.) Moreover, why is Lynd so tangibly upset when Bond takes out a couple of thugs who tried to bag Le Chiffre in the hotel? I thought double-agents were a little tougher than that. There are other rather cloudy connections in the film, though perhaps no more so than in any narrative with a plot that involves several layers. There are also some chase scenes long enough to make you wistful for the brief freeway sequence in The Matrix Reloaded (was it really half the movie or did it just seem like it?) I suppose these adrenalin pumps are intended to fill the gadgetry gap. Sorry, I'm a technology guy in my other life, I liked the gadgets. (Compare Cobb in OMF: "Flint, this briefcase contains 65 gadgets..." Coburn, holding up a lighter: "Sir, this has 81... 82 if you include the lighter.") On the other hand, From Russia With Love had very little gadgetry and was by far the best early Bond film from a purely dramatic point of view. I haven't seen enough of the later films to make that claim about this one, but it has some merits in the drama department. In spite of the length, I did not find myself wishing it would be over after a couple of hours.

It is common, if not exactly mandatory, that films which sport a lot of violence - most Westerns, crime films, horror films, war films, and espionage films, for instance - should venture to get beneath the violence to explore the characters and their relation to what is going on in the film. So Martin Campbell's Bond is a human Bond. He is, for example, a Bond who makes mistakes, badly misjudging Le Chiffre's poker tactics, the woman he falls in love with, and a few other things of some consequence. Moreover, this flaw is one of character, not just circumstance: Bond is frequently chastised for his egoism and recklessness, the dark side of his virtues of self- confidence and courage. (Every virtue has its excess, as Aristotle tells us.) The dramatic architecture of the film is to some extent based on Bond's struggle to overcome his negative side, a quest that seems to be fulfilled when he declares his love for Vesper Lynd and tenders his short-lived resignation from the service. Only after this re-centering of his identity does he recite his famous byline: "The name is Bond, James Bond."

Even as film technology helped make the depiction of violence ever more graphic, directors like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and many others insisted on penetrating the souls of their violent characters and flushing out whatever it is that makes them tick. Scorsese's current film, The Departed, in part explores a theme that had previously been handled quite well by Mike Newell in Donnie Brasco, the tendency of the mob infiltrator to become more and more like those he is supposed to destroy. This in turn harks back to a classic theme about imitation and personal identity - as with the Sean O'Casey character who asks, "What harm could there be in being the shadow of a gunman?" - the grim answer to which unfolds in the second act of the play. So it is hardly surprising that our new Bond (Daniel Craig), though not exactly the introspective type, has a few things to say about the human condition. Nothing, however, very salutory. Confronted by Lynd after the hotel killings, Bond admits that he doesn't have much feeling about the people he kills: "I wouldn't be very good at my job if I did." I see. Well, that is not exactly the kind of answer one would want to hear from your local cop on the beat, I suppose. Or even the guy at the dog pound who disposes of unclaimed pets. It is rather the kind of thing we might expect from a Mafia capo. Is that what the soul of James Bond amounts to?

Consider the premise of the Bond role, the "00" number: the "license to kill". What exactly is a "license to kill"? I guess it is like a fishing or hunting license, correct? Those are, after all, licenses to kill; you pay your $25 or whatever and get a license to kill. But get this: here is Bond, in the opening sequences of the film, "earning" his double-0 status by putting a couple of nogoodniks (we assume) out of their misery. It appears that according to the logic of Bond-age the way to earn a "license" to kill human beings is to kill a couple of them. I suppose that shows that you can do it. Now, why doesn't that work for fish and deer? Let's see, um... Yes, there's something just a little too self-fulfilling about it. It's kind of like a driver's license - first at your own risk, and if you manage to survive, you get a license. Hmmm. This "license to kill" is supposed to be a very serious thing, but it turns out to be more or less like someone dragging a couple of carcasses into the game warden's office and demanding a license to hunt. The warden with any sense will take this as a demented prank and have the perpetrator dragged to the local clink. When the guidelines of his service rest on such mediocre logic, how can we expect an agent to offer anything deeper than the thought that killing is his job?

But the problem with the violence in this movie - and there is plenty of it - does not end with this licensing scheme. The "license" idea merely reflects the much wider effort at making death and pain seem unremarkable. This we might call the dark side of the introspective tendency in films about violence, a side that Quentin Tarantino has indulged quite a bit: the exploration of character humanizes the perpetrator of violence so much that gratuitous bloodletting seems like an ordinary aspect of life, like eating eggs or washing your car. Worse yet, it is unremarkable only from a strictly moral point of view. From another side, it is positively uplifting. As one reviewer commented, "I left the theater with the distinct reaction that I wanted to be James Bond". And that's just the point, isn't it? To leave feeling the thrill of having that "license", that lack of feeling for one's enemies, that pureness of animal instinct. I do not think this is an unfair way to put it. For we are meant to identify with Bond, and the evil nature of the characters he knocks off gives us a right to identify with his liberal use of that "license" as well. We want that license to take matters into our own hands. We would love to be the one-man army that shoots and knifes its way through a squadron of Al Queda thugs to take out Bin Laden; all we need is a bit of Marine training, a wireless account that works anywhere from Afghanistan to the African steppes, and a license! Bush has a license - the Iraq war resolution. Now we can too, at least in our imaginations.

Back to the real world, for a moment. A former Russian spy is poisoned with an exotic isotope and every major newspaper in the world carries the story. People are horrified, if fascinated with the technique. But Bond, in the ordinary course of business, destroys embassies, buildings in Venice, numerous spys and their henchmen; and the only hint that anything is notable about this (a newspaper report on his shooting an unarmed man at an African embassy) quickly disappears. Finally, standing over one of his painfully wounded targets, he calmly announces he's "Bond, James Bond". Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind, morphed into something like "the banality of violence in general". The point is, life constantly presents us with the reason why we should not be "Bond, James Bond", why pain and death matter, why one man must not substitute his "license to kill" for more social forms of justice, and why violence is not after all "banal", but exceptional and deplorable. So we may walk out of a Bond film wanting to be Bond, but by the next morning life has surrounded us and reminded us that this is not where it's at.

Perhaps that means that film violence can just be fun, and we should not worry about it much. I suppose that is the message of Bond in actual bondage, as he laughs ascetically while being tortured by Le Chiffre: this pain is not real anyway, so why not enjoy it? Well, I doubt that many of Pinochet's victims, or Sadam's, or Bush's, have seen it that way. But does film violence, served up with licenses and the charisma of a "secret agent", affect our behavior in the long run? Maybe there is some connection like this: as long as the violence is far enough away, it is no more real than those phantoms on the screen. So until I start seeing the body bags come home, why worry about it? Besides, you know what everyone carrying a military dog tag has: yes, that coveted certification, a license to kill.