Cinema

The Onion had a fun pair of articles recently, singling out bad scenes in great movies and great scenes in bad movies. We can play, too. My picks:

Great Scene, Bad Movie:

A Guy Thing

It’s a deeply mediocre romantic comedy with an extremely dodgy premise: Jason Lee takes home a dancer from his bachelor party (Julia Stiles) who turns out to be the cousin of his fiancee (Selma Blair). Hijinks ensue. When a movie begins with the hero attempting to cheat on his fiancee, and ends (SPOILER ALERT, LIKE YOU COULDN’T GUESS) with the hero leaving her at the altar, I didn’t find it nearly charming enough to overcome the ill-will it generated.

However, it does have a very funny scene in the middle. Through the magic of the internet, I don’t have to describe it; you can watch almost the whole scene here, by watching both clips 4 and 5.

Bad Scene, Great Movie:

It’s A Wonderful Life

I love It’s A Wonderful Life. But what’s up with the scene in which we learn that, if George Bailey had never been born, his wife would have been a spinster! With glasses! Who works at the library! Oh, the humanity!

Your picks?

I watched “Der Untergang”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/ (Downfall) last night at Bristol’s Watershed cinema. An astonishing film. Bruno Ganz is fantastic as the increasingly stressed and incoherent Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is chilling as the the unremittingly evil Magda Goebbels. The film works partly through the contrast between above-ground where Berlin crumbles under Soviet bombardment and the bunker where reality impinges on fantasy intermittently and increasingly shockingly. There’s a great scene where Hitler addresses Albert Speer across the model of his planned Berlin-of-the-future whilst the real Berlin is flattened. Hitler is petty and selfish to the end, screaming of betrayal, his hatred of the Jews, and telling all that will hear that the German people deserve to die for letting him down — personally. The only slightly false note was when Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) escapes at the end — one suspects some embellishment.

When the film ended the cinema was perfectly still for a moment or two. Everyone in the audience was, I think, psychologically winded by what they’d seen. Ganz, Harfouch and director Hirschbiegel deserve Oscars for this, no question.

Fametracker has a hysterical bit[1] placing odds on the brilliant twist ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie, in which Paul Giamatti finds a sea nymph in the building’s swimming pool.

My favorites:

The sea nymph leads Paul Giamatti to an enormous statue of Aperaham Lincoln: 25 to 1

It turns out Paul Giamatti is trapped on a planet of sea nymphs, who’ve actually “discovered” him — who’s the sea nymph now?: 17 to 1

[1]Or does it?

This post is in Estzter territory, and probably just reflects ignorance on my part, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following “one of Eszter’s posts recently”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/07/networks-and-tastes/ , I signed up to “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ and have been dutifully entering my ratings in various spare moments. Like Amazon, “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ tells me that based on the movies I like I should check out various other ones. Presumably, the program checks the database to see which movies I haven’t seen are highly rated by other people who like the same films that I liked (ditto Amazon for books, dvds etc).

Now here’s my problem. When we all come to such systems “cold” (as it were), the links between our choices provide genuinely informative data. But once we start acting on the recommendations, even chance correlations can get magnified. So, for example, suppose we have three movies A, B and C. Perhaps if we showed these films to a randomly chosen audience there wouldn’t be any reason to suppose that people who like A prefer B to C or vice versa. But if the first N people to go to the expert system happen to like both A and B, then the program will spew out a recommendation to subsquent A or B lovers to follow up their viewing with B or A. And those people in turn, having viewed the recommended movie, will feed their approval back into the system and thereby strengthen the association. Poor old movie C, excluded by chance from this self-reinforcing loop, will not get recommended nearly so often.

I guess the people who design these systems must have considered these effects and how to counteract them. Any answers?

Regular CT readers will know that “I’m a big fan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003012.html of Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/ and that I was thrilled when it was released on DVD in the UK. The “Heimat news page”:http://heimat123.net/news.html now announces that “Heimat 2”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0105906/ (the sequel) will be out in May in the UK (and slightly earlier in parts of Europe). Fantastic!

Thoughts on the Oscars? I’ve got a few under the fold.
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On Thursday night I watched “Yasmin”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0420333/?fr=c2l0ZT11a3xteD0yMHxzZz0xfGxtPTIwMHx0dD1vbnxwbj0wfHE9WWFzbWlufGh0bWw9MXxubT1vbg__;fc=1;ft=75;fm=1 , a movie by Kenneth Glenaan with a script by Full Monty author Simon Beaufoy. A somewhat didactic film dealing with the pressures on Muslims in the north of England since 9/11, it was on TV partly because it has failed to secure distribution to cinemas in the UK (or, I believe, North America). The film centres on the life of the eponymous heroine (played by “Archie Punjabi”:http://uk.imdb.com/name/nm0659544/ ), who lives a life split beween assimilation (changing out of hijab as soon as she’s safely out the door, flirting with workmates, driving a Golf GTi, going to the pub) and conformity (hijab in her community, arranged marriage to distant relative who wants to get British nationality, deference to patriarchal father). Patriarchal father is, however, a basically good man struggling to adapt to modernity; whereas gansta-rap, bling-sporting, drug-dealing (discount for a blowjob) brother is angry and alienated.

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A few months ago I expressed interest in seeing Edgar Reitz’s series Heimat again. It was finally released on DVD (in the UK) in mid-November and I was lucky enough to get the 6-disc set as a birthday present this year. It is nineteen years since I first watched it, and just watched the final, eleventh, episode of the 925 minute epic last night. It didn’t disappoint me at all. From the first scenes, when Paul Simon, returning from the 1914–18 war, walks back into the village of Schabbach, I was entranced. Many of the characters, often played by people who had never acted before and never would again, have a quite wonderful presence. Nearly everything is understated and done in an apparently matter-of-fact manner. Yet Reitz manages to reveal continuities of character over very vast stretches of time, as well as having the characters whom one is drawn to admire in one period of their lives turn into ogres in others. Of course, the Nazi period dominates the central part of the series and Reitz is very good at showing a range of reactions to it: Katharina, the matriarch, is the most hostile, after she witnesses the arrest of her communist nephew, and she is willing to confront the odious and evil Wilfried, the local SS-man. In between are characters like Eduard, a somewhat naive man who is pushed by his ambitious wife, the ex-prostitute Lucie, into becoming the Nazi mayor. The constant threads are Maria, born in 1900 whose life we trace from early adulthood to her inheritance of the matriarch role, to her death, and Glasich, the narrator and village drunk, always there with comment, but never doing much. And Paul is always there as a presence or as an absence….

I don’t want to spoil the experience by giving more plot details here. I think it one of the most wonderful filmic meditations on love, time, ageing, family, tyranny, kindness, place, restlessness, forgiveness, memory, …. Everyone should watch Heimat, several times.

Available on “a region 2 DVD in the UK”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000284A56/junius-21 , in a rather nice set with accompanying book. North Americans will have to get a multi-region player and a TV capable of displaying PAL, or wait. The “complete script”:http://www.erfilm.de/h1/frame.html is available online (in German).

Over at our other blog, my gnawed lambchop sale has been a considerable success. Cavilling critics may object that I have made almost no money, true, but it has been voyeuristically fascinating to stare in the shopping carts. After a while, all the commercial uncovering starts to make me feel as though I am privy not just to buffies but the Buffy of buffies, as Heidegger might have said. Let us try to make it funnier.

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I saw Ken Loach’s latest film, “Ae Fond Kiss”:http://www.iconmovies.co.uk/aefondkiss/ , last night. Very good it was too. I don’t want to post spoilers, but the film is about a love affair between Casim (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian Muslim with a Pakistani background and Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic schoolteacher. His family, who have arranged for him to marry Jasmin, a cousin he has never seen, and are less than thrilled at his relationship. I thought the depiction of the intergenerational tensions within this Muslim family was terrific. The film works dramatically because Loach is sensitive enough not to play it just in terms of true love versus backward tradition: Casim’s parents aren’t ogres or dictators but caring and engaging characters who are nonetheless bewildered by their children. One of the best films I’ve seen in ages.

[I also saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy in “Before Sunset”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381681/ . I’d estimate that a third of the audience walked out. I wish I had.]

Matt Yglesias had “some sensible comments”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/the_new_phillis.html the other day concerning Paul Berman’s philistine reaction to The Motorcycle Diaries. As a film, I thought it was OK, though I looked at my watch from time to time. There’s a real question, though, about how to portray Guevara and I’ve strugged with writing something about this for a week. I haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion, just assembled some provisional thoughts partly inspired by Hegel and partly by Alasdair Macintyre.

Hagiography should be out, but so should the sort of reaction that just carpingly lists bad things he did or unwise decisions he made. One reaction to that type of braying criticism is “Hegel’s discussion of critics of Alexander in the Philosophy of History”:http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm (scroll down to § 34). But Hegel’s remarks are inappropriate for Guevara because of the way in which he points to Alexander’s success in the conquest of Asia. Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

And then there’s the question of sympathetic identification with the cause. In his essay “How not to write about Lenin”, Alasdair Macintyre argues:

bq. For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one’s own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver’s biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing…..The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.

Guevara wasn’t Lenin, just as he wasn’t Alexander, but he did personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity. Thersites from Des Moines (or wherever) can carp all he wants — and much of the carping will consist in a recitation of facts — but criticism that isn’t appropriately informed by a sense of grandeur, tragedy, heroism and tragic failure just misses the mark.

I sometimes wonder about the utility of mentioning films on CT because by the time us Brits get to see them (UK release dates being later than those in the US) they’ve often finished playing in cinemas in the US and elsewhere. But Richard Eyre’s “Stage Beauty”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368658/ , which I caught on Saturday is an exception. Set at the time of the Restoration, it explores the fate of Ned Kynaston, a male actor who specializes in female roles (women being prohibited from performing). When the law is changed, first to allow women on the stage and then to prohibit men from playing them altogether, Kynaston is out of a job. I won’t post spoilers but just say that what we get includes a good deal of exploration of sexual identity and sexuality. And I also laughed out loud (a lot) at some parts and was moved by others. (Sarah from the excellent “Just Another False Alarm”:http://www.rubberring.blogspot.com/ has “more”:http://rubberring.blogspot.com/2004_09_12_rubberring_archive.html#109495045156434120 — but with spoilers).

Leaving aside the question of whether a sequel is a good idea in the first place, if anyone can give me a plausible argument why “Ocean’s Twelve”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/oceans_12/ is a better title than _Ocean’s Dozen_ then I’d like to hear it.

Pursuant to a discussion of the recently popular Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, Will Baude makes the following remarks:

My friend mentioned that she has some trouble with all of those old Bogart films because she finds Bogart so physically repulsive that he detracts from the role. To be sure, H.B. was not Hollywood’s prettiest face, a fact that (unsurpisingly) seems to bother more female viewers of the films than male ones. [Female members of my family voiced a similar complaint about Something’s Got to Give last Christmas.]

This is funny to me for two reasons. First, though Bogart’s no beauty, he’s hardly replusive. Second, Bogart is perfectly cast in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon, a movie which is marred by the single most egregious miscasting of all time. (Perhaps it is not the worst in absolute terms, but it is a hideous flaw in an otherwise brilliantly cast movie.) I refer, of course, to the wretched, wretched Mary Astor. She was only 35 when the movie was made, but she looks much older. The character she plays, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is supposed to be a knockout who can wrap any man around her finger. A sexpot. Men’s eyes are supposed to pop way out on stalks and develop pounding hearts for pupils, while steam shoots out of their ears and they make various foghorn and train-whistle noises. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Mary Astor falis to plausibly elicit this reaction.

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