The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

So, I didn't really expect to like this a lot, from what I had read about it- up to this one I liked all of his movies that I've seen, some (Panic Room) in opposition to whatever critical consensus I'd found, but the descriptions and reviews all sounded pretty bad. The most damning one compared it to Forrest Gump, and in watching it that was pretty much all I could think of.

It's relentlessly picturesque, it's slathered with voiceover, the main character has an ineffable wisdom that expresses itself as naivete, there's a central romance that ends tragically and defines the arc of the plot, and it goes through all sorts of historical moments en route. It doesn't have the underlying 'unthinking is better' motive of Gump, it doesn't have the cute little meetings with historical figures, but it does feature fate in a prominent role and it is altogther boring.

There are some moments, some bits of humor and pretty shots and cynicism slipping in, but it's just not a good movie. I don't really see anything in it of what I like about Fincher, just a central conceit that doesn't really matter- nearly everything about the story could be equally easily told with a character who ages normally. I don't hate it, but I don't think I'll keep it, either.

A Day at the Races

I like Marx Brothers movies, but for nearly all of them I feel like I'm asked to sit through a lot of fairly dull things for the fun parts. Aside from Animal Crackers and Duck Soup, they've all got these giant musical numbers and a pair of leads who aren't the Marxes- they vary in quality, and in a Night at the Opera, they're fairly well integrated, but overall I'd far rather do without them.

In a Day at the Races, one of the musical numbers is nearly all black people, it makes me feel kind of conflicted- on the one hand, there's some uncomfortable stereotyping, with all of them living in what look like slave quarters and dropping 'who dat' and 'chillun' left and right. Worse, they'res some blackfacing at the end of the scene, and that's always embarrassing, no matter what.

On the other hand, it's awesome. For the first and only time in a Marx movie, there's a musical number where the parts that don't have the brothers featured are exciting and fun as hell, all kinda swing dancing awesome moves and exciting performances and everything. The brothers love it, too, and the implication is that they fit in fairly well with the group. So- is it ok to enjoy it? Can something exploitative, with racist elements, be redeemed by just being fun? I never know how to answer that kind of thing.

Army of Shadows

I really want to like Jean-Pierre Melville, and I admire his movies, but of the three I've seen- Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and Army of Shadows, I can't really say I enjoyed them.

It's a complicated issue, 'admire' vs. 'enjoy'; the latter implies that a movie has to be fun, or exciting, or populist, which I hope isn't really right. I enjoyed, for instance, Solaris (the original) which is slow and methodical, but which hits certain notes that really moved me. In Army of Shadows, I can see the notes being hit- the moral dilemmas posed are ones absolutely worth posing, and of literary weight- but somehow they don't strike me. It may be Melville's subdued palette, which is somehow greyer than noir ever managed to be, or it maybe his characters' minimalist acting, which reminds me a lot of Bresson, another French director whose movies I am always glad to have seen but rarely excited to be watching. It's maddening, though, to try to push yourself to like something and fail, like your mind will not listen to itself.

It's worth noting that Army of Shadows is one of those movies that very clearly got mixed into the blend for some of the strongest parts of Inglourious Basterds, and I think that's something that happens a lot with movies like these- bits of Bresson movies get turned into Schrader scripts, Kurosawa gets turned into Leone, etc. etc. This feels like it should resolve the issue, but it just makes it worse- if people I enjoy can enjoy this, why can't I?

Touch of Evil

Someone I was talking to about this movie said they couldn't enjoy it that much because it was super racist- I didn't think so then, and watching it again, I still don't. It's certainly odd to cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican, and the actual Mexicans portrayed aren't portrayed particularly positively, but they're mostly just types. A lot of them are caricatures, and somewhat embarrassing ones, admittedly, but it's more lazy than racist.

What stands out beyond that, however, is that the really horrid person in the movie is Welles' character, an enormous, repulsive, and incredibly bigoted good old boy. He's clever, charming in a boozy way, and comes off like a funhouse mirror image of a noir hero, and he's corrupt as all hell. The dynamic of the movie makes Heston's Vargas the straight arrow pitted against Welles' Quinlan, who knows better than to bother with rules and regulations. As Welles' character is the villain, all of his characteristics- and his casual racism, which leads him contemptuously to dismiss Heston and railroad innocent Mexicans in for crimes he doesn't particularly care if they committed is one of the most notable of these.

It's also got an interesting and relatively refreshing take on sexism. Janet Leigh is the put upon wife, who is exhausted of waiting around for her husband to get back from work- a detective fiction trope, and generally a misogynist one. She's endangered, too, and in the construction of the plot she's as helpless as any woman written purely as a pawn. On the other hand, she's rude, eloquent, and brooks little bullshit- she may be in an unfeminist position, but she reacts like a real person, not like a distressed damsel. Furthermore, one of the other noteworthy things about Quinlan is his habit of making cruel judgments about other people's sex lives, and invading their privacy; again, since Quinlan is evil, one can assume that his characteristics are evil, and the movie is therefore arguing for tolerance.

It has its flaws- if nothing else, a lot of it is basically b movie material- but where it can't get away from them, it undermines them. So basically, Touch of Evil: a good movie.

Z

I wasn't too impressed with this at first- I was expecting something tense and involved, and it never really becomes that. Violence doesn't happen professionally, as I would expect from a modern political thriller, but thuggishly, and in spurts. The central assassination isn't a sniper with a clever scheme, it's a couple of drunk jackasses in a three wheeled cart they can't even afford.

That's where it gets interesting- it goes from a sort of document of indignation, an illustration of fascists attacking protesters as the police do nothing, to a procedural, as the assassination is investigated. In the course of the investigation, the fascists who'd been attacking at the rally are examined in depth, and they're the very people that socialists are always trying to help: the downtrodden peasantry who can't afford the basic needs of life. The right wing bribes them, and they attack the leftists. It's not surprising, but it's very well done, and a good document of how one gets widespread populist parties founded solely on false consciousness.

Of course, as it develops, the really evil characters are high level political figures. The heroes are mostly apolitical- the prosecutor who does his job studiously and efficiently, the slightly dickish reporter who nonetheless uncovers vital facts, the key witness who is acting largely out of spite etc. The movie doesn't pull a Southparkian false equivalancy by making the leftists as horrid as the right wingers, but it also doesn't really focus on them; as it unrolls, it's a battle of wills between the honest officials who do their job well, and the bastard conspirators who created the situation. As such, it's not a call to revolution, but a call to honesty and goodwill- but one that doesn't excuse the corruption inherent to the system.

Zodiac

This is one of those movies where it's pretty obviously doing whatever it's doing very precisely- Fincher is apparently a director who is obsessed with getting things exactly as he intends them, and it comes across in pretty much every aspect of the movie. What's hard to get at is what it is that he's doing; most viewers know going into it that the Zodiac was never caught, and the recreations of the killings stop about a third of the way into the running time. After that, it's following the investigators, as they follow up lead after promising lead, and run into nothing.

I think that's what the movie is getting at, in the end; certainly someone did the crimes, but the link between investigation and guilt is tenuous, far more so than in most procedurals. It's not because the cops aren't competent- they're quick, imaginative, and dedicated- and it's not because people give up- the movie spans decades, and the main character sacrifices his family to his obsession with finding the truth. It settles on a killer, in the end, but of course there is no proof of his guilt, and it is mentioned in the post script that he was disqualified with DNA evidence. So what are you left with?

In a way, it's a deconstruction of the procedural genre: in most, people find clues, follow up on the clues, and the clues lead them somewhere. The road might be twisty, or they may never actually convict anybody, but you are confident that the tools achieve what they claim they will. In Zodiac, nothing proves anything: handwriting analysis is unscientific, since while the movie respects the underlying procedure, it points out that different experts have different conclusions, which is not the scientific method. The lone fingerprint is either relevant or irrelevant depending on which suspect one favors. The tensest moments come from investigations that lead nowhere, with the sudden realization that almost anyone fits the clues at hand. It's a procedural in which the procedures conflict, each station has its own clues and its own suspects, and nothing is really certain.

This could be presented in an unbearably irritating way- the cop movie as postmodernist shifting sands and decay- but it's not, really. It doesn't try to convince the viewer that there is no truth, just that the quest for it may be futile, unwinnable. The noble hero comes off as bordering on autism before he sets off on his journey, and his personality doesn't alter much. It's a movie about failing, and the quixotic refusal to accept failure is both laudable and tragic.

Inglourious Basterds

I haven't watched this one for a little while, but I am reading a book about fascism and its depiction in movies, and it brought up some points that seem to apply. The book decries a lot of movies on the subject for oversimplification- the Nazis are evil, and the victims good- and points out that fairly frequently, this is done doing symbolic shorthand that was used in propaganda by the Nazis themselves: they are depicted as effete, impure, sexually deviant, feminized, a lot of things along those lines. They become stock villians of the kind the Nazis used to depict Jews, and describe more about what the filmmaker considers ultimate evil than the actual question of fascism and what it represents.

Inglourious Basterds, whatever else is the case, does not indulge in these faults. The titular Basterds are horrifying- they're sadistic, they're torture happy and kill crazy, they classify Nazi as a strain to be snuffed out in a way that readily recalls the viewpoint of the Nazis themselves towards 'degenerates', and they seem to have no real moral viewpoint of their own. The Nazis often display heroic traits- loyalty, cleverness, honesty, whatever. They don't come off at all well, and the movie never forgets that they are Nazis, but for the most part, their behavior is no worse than that of the Basterds, and there is quite a specific point made to humanize at least one (the new father).

What's deeply unsettling about the movie, then, isn't its use of movie tropes to explode movie conventions (this happens repeatedly in both of the main plot strains) but the audience response: in my theater, at least, the audience ate up every minute of torture and cruelty towards the Nazi soldiers. The movie seems somewhat designed for this: it's structured as a series of unbearably tense scenes, with chaotic violence always lurking a second in the future, so that when the violence is presented as something controlled- and controlled by the protagonists- it's a relief, and the laughter is almost hysterical. It's almost entirely a series of ambushes and counter-ambushes, with the closest thing to a depiction of a fair fight ending up with nearly everyone in the room dead, so the audience snatches at the violence perpetrated by the charming, amusing, familiar Americans, even though what they are actually doing is repellent.

The Adventures of Robin Hood

The first really weird line in this movie is right in the beginning, in which a guy is being bound up in chains- someone yells 'but he's a freeman, and a landowner, you can't enslave him!' It's sort of appropriate for medieval morality, but you would hope that by 1938 people would find that strange: how heroic is it to fight for a society in which, by implication, you can go ahead and enslave anyone who doesn't own land?

The strange sense that there's been no reconsideration of 13th century (as seen through probably the 18th or 19th century) ethics throughout the movie, too- Robin is a noble in this one, and he claims someone being harassed by the villain knight as his serf to defend him, then threatens the knight to defend himself. Aside from a brief upbraiding of the king for placing any priority over defending England, there's no sense that going off on a Crusade isn't a pretty solid idea. The Merry Men fall all over themselves to show how Royalist they are. Robin gets an Earldom for a reward in the end. It's sort of repulsive, really.

It's still a fairly fun movie, mostly because Errol Flynn is such an entertaining, dashing actor, and there is some specific sense that Robin and co. do actually intend to defend the weak generally and not just the weak freemen specifically, and moreover that their primary motivation isn't so much social justice but a sort of IRA style nationalism in favor of the oppressed Saxons. It's also campy as hell- when Robin and Little John are fighting, Little John wearing bright yellow, red, and blue, Robin's pal whips out a lute. Claude Rains plays Prince John as a simperingly effete guy with no real sense of menace, although there's probably some gay bashing mixed up with the portrayal, and all the swashbuckling stunts still work. It's nonetheless a situation where I yearn for a bit of postmodern gray goo, because Robin is such a character so admirably suited for reinterpretation- his campaign of guerrilla warfare against the wealthy hangs on so well for a reason- and it's disappointing to see what specificity there is in this version remaining so reactionary.

In Macbeth, he knocks off the good king, gets deposed and the rightful, honest monarch takes his place. It's not monarchy that's the problem, it's Macbeth. When Kurosawa redid it, the previous king was a bastard, and the man who takes Macbeth's place is a bastard, and it feels like a much more honest view of the world. I didn't really hope that a 1938 historical adventure movie would be as bold as that, but it would be nice if it were recognized that, to an American, a king is and should be a ridiculous figure at best- the Bugs Bunny cartoon managed it.

The Red Shoes

I watched and liked, in fits and starts, the Tales of Hoffman- it's a pure opera, but the movie is an opera mixed with ballet, and it captured me with the same sort of spirit a music video sometimes does, the mixture of sound and motion becoming something new and fascinating. I had heard from a lot of people that the Red Shoes was the masterpiece that Hoffman was following up on, and... I was let down. It's not a bad movie at all, it just doesn't work as well for me as either Hoffman or Black Narcissus- I spent the whole movie waiting for the ballet sequence, sitting through the backstage shenanigans, and then the ballet itself seemed less unhinged and less cinematic than Hoffman. Towards the end, though, the power of the narrative began to come together, and the heroine's choice between art and life is a deep enough one that what came before it is almost retroactively interesting.

Immediately after finishing, I was considering whether it was an anti-feminist movie or not- I had thought it was a choice between submissive domesticity and the freedom of art, but from my brief description, Grace felt that it was essentially a story of a woman choosing which male will dominate her. In arguing the point, I came strongly to embrace the side that the satanic impressario figure was tempting her to dance, but that he was not in control of her when she made her decision, nor when she danced- he was tempting her to revel in her highest self, to forsake the world for art. The rather thinly defined love interest had nothing on that. Some of the external information backed that up, too- the screenwriter described it as a movie arguing that it was worth dying for art, which validates her decision.

The novelization, however, does not- written by Pressburger, it consistently vilifies the impressario, making him not merely a tempter but a controller, the man pulling the strings for all the dancers. The art the ballerina dies for is thus not hers, but a function of his greater art, a glorification of him. And her love interest too comes off badly, rejecting her angrily when she begs him to let her dance one more night, to save face in front of her friends. He is imperious, and her desire to throw herself to him is somewhat inexplicable. It goes from a sort of Faustian story of a woman who consciously chooses to throw away the trappings of mortality for the promise of the greatest art she can imagine to one of vacillating between a 'good' man- a proper man, one who will make a nice bourgeois household with her- and an evil one, who wants to use her for her body.

The fairy tale is worse. It's awful. A little girl is cursed for her 'pride', her desire to look nice and her feeling of independence, to dance until her feet bleed, until her adopted mother dies, and until she begs to have her feet cut off. Even then she is not sufficiently humbled, and her mocking feet dance before her, barring her way. She must become utterly the female gender role, utterly humbled, utterly subservient, before she is allowed any grace. And the sexual subtext of dancing makes the story even more repellent, implying that as punishment for desire, she must become a prostitute until she is castrated.

Nonetheless, I think the movie itself is not nearly so anti-feminist as all this would imply, by strength of the ballet and Moira Shearer's exultation in dancing it- the movie falls in love with her when she dances, and is bored by everything else, so eventually the movie defies its own message in the same way war movies often do- the audience doesn't give a damn for her love interest, nor for what the filmmakers claim to say (and I don't really believe they had any investment in what they were claiming to say either), it is the ballerina who is in charge when she dances, and nothing is worth taking her away from that.

Hard Boiled

On the commentary for this, the source they kept referring back to was a sort of Chinese opera, the Peking opera- it's a tradition I obviously know nothing about, but it's pretty easy to see the operatic origins for how Woo's style works, all enormous gestures and huge emotions expressed through actions that, except through the filter of the stylization, don't make a lot of sense. It's
strange, though, actually watching the movie, because you can't really place it for a while- it's got the sort of murky look of a lot of American movies from the seventies, and the pitch is somewhere between a kung fu movie and more Hollywood style action.

It's also sort of gut wrenching, for all that the gunfights are chaotic and spectacular (and difficult to follow) because it actually takes a fairly unwavering stance that human life is valuable, then allows the bad guys to mow down innocents by the dozen, and the heroes to accidentally kill other good guys in the crossfire. There is a lot of balletic but otherwise normal jumping around and machine gunning guys who you as an audience member are fine with being killed- bad guys- but there's also a sequence in which a hero guns down a dozen people from his own gang, without apparent cause, both protagonists shoot men point blank in the head when they are helpless, and helpless, crippled civilians are killed by the dozen in the hospital- not sadistically, not with any sense of them being tortured to psych the audience up for a big cathartic killing later, but just as part of the crossfire, because the bad guys don't really give a shit about them. The good guys do, but they're not torn up about it when they're killed.

I say the movie places value on human life, and I stand by that- although there are a lot of deaths that aren't reflected upon, and many of those that are are standard cop movie reflections, the totems of a dead fellow officer kind of things, there is never a sense of glee in a murder, never a feeling of delight in someone actually dying in an unusual way. The gunfights are performed as a dance of violence, but nobody is impaled, no quips are made, and there is never an argument put forth that anybody is 'scum' who deserves to die. Hard Boiled doesn't hold human life sacred, but it also doesn't yearn for anybody in particular to die: there is a standoff with the primary protagonist at the end in which he is killed, but the relief of his death is as much because he was an immediate threat as any idea of 'this guy has to die, I want to watch it'. It's still there, but it's not promoted particularly forcefully, and it's one person, not a class of humanity.

A lot of American action movies loop you in by threatening a child- the bad guys hold the hero's little girl hostage, and the hero has to get her back. Hard Boiled skirts the edge of this (certainly children, neonatal infants as it happens are threatened) but they aren't hostages- they're innocents caught in a bad situation- and there's no specific connection between them and the heroes. They're babies, and that's enough. It avoids entirely the uneasy sense of rape threat on which the American movies tend to turn, and overall is far less sexual in its violence.

It's possible that Hard Boiled is just as worrying as any other action movie, but it does avoid a lot of the specific things that worry me about American action movies, and especially the 80s action movies that immediately preface it. Given that Woo seems to have been folded entirely into the American system now, and had all the subtle elements of his directorial style sanded off, it's hard to see the underlying differences between his view of the world and the American one in his later work, but this one at least combines his talents- the beautiful set pieces, the broad and effective characters, the balletic movements- with a context that may or may not be his own, but which either way is refreshingly different from the relics that were his contemporaries.

The Rock

I had an argument with someone over whether this subscribed to the standard right wing/fascist line from action movies in the 80's- that we abandoned our soldiers in Vietnam, ceased to support them, bound their hands, and that's why we lost, or need to go back, or otherwise need to do or support more brutal violence. In the Rock, the main villain is someone we're supposed to agree with: he's a black ops commander, and his men that have been killed no recognition or compensation. He talks about Vietnam- and China, where he and his men killed hundreds of 'enemies'- and one feels the underlying, very fascist argument that these were the warriors who did what needed doing, and we ignore them for that.

I think the most charitable read- and one that does hold up- is that the movie is attacking America's propensity for doing horrible things and refusing to admit what it does, and the hypocrisy of it; it fits, since Connery's character's crime is stealing a log of the (presumably awful) things America has hidden, and in response it buries him. The difference between the two readings is whether all that stuff needed doing, whether burying the secrets is evil because it insults the great men who did the dark deeds, or because hiding evil things stops people from preventing them happening again. And it's not really answered.

The Rock doesn't pit heroic Americans against demonic foreigners who can be mowed down by the dozen, and it has a sense of the moral impact of killing at some points, but it also has a sense of heroism in overcoming that horror, and unbelievable fetishization of the military. I think the queasiest fascist movies are the ones that have the artistic integrity to acknowledge that, to any normal person, a killing is horrible and revolting: it lets the movie push past that, to force you into feeling that the revulsion is something you can and maybe should overcome, that strength lies beyond it. With the Rock, the nerd who has trouble with killing at first is making quips about death by the end, but he's also Nick Cage at his weirdest- I assume one was originally meant to identify with him, but as he comes out, yelling about ZEUS'S BUTTHOLE and playing playing guitar naked, there's a lot of distance. Moreover, his final act of bravery isn't a killing, but stabbing himself in the heart, which is genuinely (or at least uncomplicatedly) heroic. Ed Harris's commander is genuinely unwilling to sacrifice the lives of innocent people for his goal, which also lends an unexpected belief in the sanctity of human life. The marines under his command are portrayed as violent, vicious men who are not at all admirable.

I think what happened here is that a normal script, a fascist one, got altered again and again, with more details about real human behavior slipping in each time, until it became ambiguous enough to be tolerable. It's what happened with the whole movie, really- Bay is as terrible a director as ever, ramming in a dull and unnecessary car chase because he doesn't trust the audience to sit through half an hour of non-action, but the script (due presumably to last minute additions by Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino) has a sense of how ridiculous it is, Harris invests his character with such genuine humanity that it becomes almost a deconstruction of normal action villains, and Cage has rewritten his own part with so many wonderfully bad ideas that he feels somewhere between an action hero and Crispin Glover. It's a wonderful movie, not in the strictly positive sense, but in that watching it fills one with a sense of wonder about how this thing happened, and why you are enjoying it so.