So C. E. Murphy is up for a Rose & Bay Award for crowdfunded fiction. You should vote for whichever fiction you like best, but if you don’t know the others and you like Catie’s stuff, you can take my word on it: she’s the right choice. LJ membership not required. Also, if you want to continue voting in that vein, you can vote for me as crowdfunding patron of the year. I think Catie nominated me for this because I pestered her until she tried patron-funded writing, which is totally kind of her.
Category: Culture
Chronicle is a sort of unfortunate title. Hard to search for it, and it’s a lousy entrance point into the film. If you hadn’t seen the trailer, you’d never know what it was about. On the other hand, once you’ve seen the movie and you’re done getting smacked around by the turbulence caused by all your exploding assumptions, it’s a huge clue about the underlying mise en scène of the movie.
If you have seen the trailer, you only sort of know what it’s about, but that’s par for the course. Let me fix that for you. Have no fear; I won’t spoil anything you don’t find out immediately. At least not before the cut.
Here’s the important thing: it’s not a found-footage movie. The movie you see on the screen cannot be an artifact from the fictional reality. Everything’s framed as a camera shot from within the fiction, but there’s nobody who would or could piece together the varying footage into what we see. At the screening I saw, Josh Trank referred to it as a PoV movie, which is a much better term. The secret piece of knowledge you need is that his dad’s a documentarian, and Trank’s intimately familiar with that form. The movie is titled Chronicle because it’s a documentary. Sort of.
It’s not a documentary from the world of the film, though. It’s a movie that’s made in the documentary style. There’s no voice over, no connective tissue, no explanation: just footage from a variety of sources. That choice works because it’s a mirror of how Andrew, the protagonist, sees the world. He fits right into the isolated teen niche, unable to relate to his peers because his adolescence has been stunted by his abusive father and the emotional absence of his dying mother. His environment is established in the first minute of the movie. He’s filming everything because it allows him to both hide and document.
Trank also mentioned that his goal is to make character-oriented films that happen to be genre pictures. He nailed it. The powers are a device to heighten the drama of Andrew’s journey. I found the movie to be rather harrowing at some points, because it’s so raw and painful. Andrew is a sympathetic character all the way through.
Spoilers and loose thoughts coming up next.
At the time, I found Sideways somewhat unapproachable. I wasn’t really sure why. Now I’m thinking I didn’t have the vocabulary, and I think it was a privilege problem. Alexander Payne made this great movie about the sad life problems of a pair of well-off guys. Yeah, Paul Giamatti is presented as a failure, and English teachers don’t make much money, but he can afford to take his pal on a week-long wine tour? That’s not realistic.
This is also the problem at the heart of The Descendants. George Clooney’s problems are more believable than Paul Giamatti’s. He’s not pretending to be more of a failure than he is. They’re still rich man problems, though. Adultery, family crisis, death — that could be anyone. However, much of the meat of Clooney’s woes are predicated on his status as one of the most important men in Hawaii. To emphasize with him, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of a guy who is about to make a $500,000,000 decision. Clooney’s a great actor, and he brings everything he has to bear in this, so it works. Still, despite his disclaimer about how Hawaii isn’t really paradise? He’s in pretty good shape.
His marital problems may also come from his money. He’s proud of the fact that he doesn’t spend the capital he’s inherited; he works every day (as a lawyer), and he spends only the interest. So he’s got a high-paying job, plus he has significant money coming from a trust. He can send his kid to boarding school and he doesn’t need to worry about health care costs. But he won’t buy his wife a boat, and there’s a strong implication that he lost her love due to his workaholic nature. It’s hard to be well-off; it’s hard when the less fortunate critique you for not spending money.
Some of his extended family have blown their money and are supposedly broke. We don’t ever see them, though. Cousin Hugh, in a very good Beau Bridges performance, is Clooney’s foil. He wants to sell the land to a local, though, so he’s a good guy. Dresses like a beach bum, drinks early in the afternoon, but he’s got a bunch of rental properties and it’s pretty clearly not going to ruin him financially if the sale doesn’t go through. He’s willing to pass up the higher sale value in order to keep the land in Hawaiian hands.
So. I don’t think Alexander Payne really has a handle on realism, as much as he likes to talk about it. Clooney made the right decision to keep the land, but Payne could and should have shown us the downside. It’s not just Cousin Hugh being pissed off, it’s someone who doesn’t have health insurance or a job and won’t get an influx of money when they badly need it. Payne’s world is a glossy one, untouched by mundane concerns. In the opening, Clooney tells us how much Hawaii isn’t a paradise. That’s the only time we see any signs that it isn’t. Show, don’t tell.
Simultaneously, he’s quite aware of race issues. The climatic speech, where Clooney acknowledges that his family — descended from Hawaiian royalty as they are — are “haole as shit.” But then he turns around and claims a connection to the land. I don’t know enough about Hawaiian issues to really judge this, so I’ll leave all that there.
All that said? It’s a spectacular movie. Clooney’s immensely good. I thought he was awesome in his supporting role in Ides of March, in the way he slowly let us see the complexities of the character. He’s better in this. I touched on it earlier: how do you create empathy for yourself when you’re as handsome and charismatic as Clooney? By being fearless about showing the character’s faults. There’s a very, very thin layer between his pain and the screen, and most of the time it dissolves. Kudos to Payne, too, because he’s good at hitting those notes.
Very sadly, A Dangerous Method wound up being the weakest Cronenberg in a long time. The material was more or less perfect, but Keira Knightley let down the side. It’s not that she’s a bad actress, it’s that Cronenberg has never been the kind of director who draws forth the exceptional from his actors. And Knightley doesn’t know how to give her role weight. So instead of getting a damaged genius/patient, she’s playing another edition of the plucky young woman who stands up to the world. This time with more jaw tics.
Briefly: Fincher’s directing and Rooney Mara’s acting make it painfully clear that Lisbeth Salander doesn’t make any sense next to Mikael Blomkvist. There are two potentially awesome thrillers in both the book and the movies: one stars Blomkvist, and it’s a story about an awesome journalist who’s pretty much an auctorial stand in. The other is a somewhat more interesting story about Swedish traditional culture and the horrible things it does to women, as personified by both Harriet Vanger and Lisbeth Salander. When you mash them together, however, you get a wish-fulfillment piece in which the awesome journalist is just another man using a woman. Blomkvist and Salander should never have met.
I don’t think Steig Larsson realized this. David Fincher might. (Edit: Fincher has mentioned Blomkvist’s misogyny.) Either way, the clarity of Fincher’s directing strips away all the awkwardness of the English translation, and it’s hard to pretend that Salander belongs with Blomkvist at all. You can’t hide the incongruity by making up your own images when they’re right up there on the screen. The parallel tracks of the two central female characters become really obvious. Consider disguises — I wonder, in fact, if that’s part of why Fincher kept the extensive coda. Larsson thought his hero was a different class of father figure, but Fincher lets the darkness through.
Worth seeing. Tremendously disturbing.
Quick note, because I know some of you like Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch: if you liked Squirrel Nut Zippers a whole bunch, you ought to check out White Ghost Shivers. immlass turned me onto these guys, and we took some time to see ’em playing this last weekend, and they were awesome: seven piece band doing 20s jazz, with a fairly punky modern attitude. The sound is way rooted in the 20s, but they aren’t afraid to sing about mullets and white trash. They’ve been playing together for more or less a decade, and are as sharp as you’d hope given that much experience together. Also the piano player played with Squirrel Nut Zippers some.
Everyone’s Got ‘Em is the first album after Cella Blue joined, and having a female vocalist available helped the music a bunch. Nobody Loves You Like We Do just came out this week and is also good. Audio follows.
Noted for my own reference:
11/20: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at One World Theater
12/9: Dave Alvin at the Continental Club
2/4: Los Lobos at One World Theater (opposite OwlCon, hm)
2/29: Dropkick Murphys, Frank Turner at Emo’s East (on sale 11/18)
3/2: Solas at UT Performing Arts Center
This is ridiculously awesome. Gollancz decided to bring a lot of classic SF/F back into print as ebooks. More of this stuff should be out of copyright by now, it’s all DRMed, and two-thirds of it can’t be bought in the United States, but despite all that I’m really happy. Cordwainer Smith, Pat Cadigan, Kuttner and Moore — lots of books that should be available, and now sort of are. It’s cultural history that matters to my tribe. There are books I’m keeping in physical form just because who knows when someone will digitize all the old Gardner Fox? But efforts like this one make me hopeful.
There I go giving away my conclusion. Ah well. Anyways: American: The Bill Hicks Story is on Netflix streaming, and if you don’t know Bill Hicks you oughta watch it. If you do know who he is, you can watch it to get all pissed off all over again, or you could watch it because there’s some really cool footage of his teenage comedy act.
The problem I had is that the movie shows Hicks as a saint. Even when he’s going through his alcoholism, it’s not really his fault. He hung around with a dangerous crowd, right? And he got off alcohol soon enough, after which it’s smooth sailing until he dies of cancer in the most polite, family-oriented, sane way possible. The movie was authorized and supported by his family, who come across as really decent people. His parents didn’t object to his comedy, which is saying something. But I still suspect the seal of approval might have gotten in the way of any real examination of the man.
I’m still glad I saw it. There’s a 60 second clip of his infamous heckler routine — the bit in Chicago where he gets heckled early on and decides to turn the evening into a brutal, stop and go, stutter-step deconstruction of the relationship between audience and comedian. I’ve seen the whole thing, cause it’s on YouTube, and the brief clip in the movie is worthwhile all by itself. I just wish the movie spent more time thinking about the alchemy that transmutes anger like that into comedy like that.