Category: Culture

I was intending to have a busy movie weekend, but after City of God I really didn’t want to see anything else. I actually went down to the Copley Place to see Intacto, but it was sold out twenty minutes before showtime, so I punted to City of God. The Copley is a lousy excuse for an art house theater, but it was the only place in town showing Intacto; thus, I wound up in a cramped little bandbox with a floor that sloped up to the tiny little screen. Pathetic.

About ten minutes into City of God, I’d pretty much forgotten that I’d get a better cinema experience from a bargain basement second run theater in Iowa.

I suspect part of my enthused reaction was just meeting a new set of cinematic conventions; I’ve never seen a Brazilian movie before, so there was a lot of novelty in it for me. On the other hand, the energy of the direction and acting was universal. The directors, Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, are fearlessly willing to use bullet time and stop motion — but only for real emotional effects. You get the sense that they’ve never thought about the distinction between pulp and real art; for them, everything’s just another technique to use when telling the story.

The same egalitarian approach applies to the casting. Most of the actors are residents of the slums the movie chronicles, cast after extensive acting workshops. It pays off. Philippe Haagensen in particular has real star charisma.

I’d heard the story was very dense, and it was fairly compact, but it wasn’t the sort of fast cut patchwork you see in the average Tarantino homage. There were a lot of stories to tell, but they don’t intercut; they weave together, and elements of one turn up again later. This allows the nuances time to grow, and gives the audience time to absorb.

Highly recommended.

It seems worthy of note that Rick Veitch did a fill-in issue of JLA this month. It’s a one issue story, so you could even pick it up and read it if you don’t read JLA. Although it’d be kind of pointless if you’re not a comics fan, but we can’t have everything. Veitch is one of those guys who slips back and forth between alternative comics and mainstream superheros; I guess you’d say he’s an alternative comics writer and artist who happens to like the superhero genre a lot. Kind of a psychedelic orientation. I really liked his JLA.

The following has some spoilers.

The weekend’s movies were Far From Heaven and Catch Me If You Can. Definitely a retro weekend, not even counting the incredibly hip Soma FM Secret Agent streaming radio station I’ve had tuned in since Thursday. I feel like a martini, and you’re just the sort of woman to drink me…

Ah, sorry. The mood took me for a moment. More a Catch Me If You Can mood, I think; that’s the lighter of the two films. It has that jazzy sixties bliss to it, up to and including invoking James Bond with a short Goldfinger clip. That makes the contrast between the two all the more interesting, though, since they’re both about transgressions against the natural order.

Frank Abagnale Jr. breaks free of social restrictions and demonstrates exactly how much we rely on social convention to fend off the intruder. In Far From Heaven, the Whitakers both transgress, with varying degrees of success. But in Catch Me If You Can, the final dynamic is very different. We’re encouraged to cheer for the young con man — and in the end we’re reassured that it was OK to cheer, because he got caught and his pursuer was his very best friend. His real father (played by Christopher Walken, in a really brilliant turn) taught him that it was OK to lie, and wound up a sad sorry corpse. His surrogate father, the FBI agent, brought him back to the straight and narrow and in the end everyone’s happy.

Far From Heaven doesn’t offer the easy out. Cathy Whitaker’s life is ruined by the combination of her transgression and that of her husband, Frank. Oddly, Frank’s life doesn’t seem to be so bad, which got me thinking about the exact relationship between her love for a black gardener and his love for another man.

Homosexuality is so far outside the comprehension of the time that the couple can barely even talk about what’s going on. Their first scene together after she catches him kissing a man is particularly well filmed; it’s an atonal song of confusion and barely spoken thoughts and stammers. Lovely stuff. As a result, Frank’s infidelities are ignored by the world around him. Cathy’s potential infidelities are not.

Did Cathy step outside her life only because she had no other reaction to Frank’s actions? I think so, to a degree. Raymond (her gardener) is a symbol, and she’s willing to reject him when it’s the necessary thing to do. She doesn’t go back to him until Frank rejects her, at which point she needs another anchor in her life. Then again, when faced with the fact that going with Raymond will only hurt his daughter, she steps back. The safest analysis is that she really does love him, and that Far From Heaven follows the line of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas all the way through, but I wonder.

Anyhow, meanderings through theory aside, I recommend both of ‘em. Far From Heaven is by far the better movie, but Catch Me If You Can is a fun little romp if you don’t get hung up on obsessing about the end. It’s hardly Spielberg’s fault that the real Frank Abagnale turned to the side of the law, after all. They’re both excellent evocations of times past, lovingly and skillfully filmed. Good weekend for movies.

Mister Sterling isn’t bad. I was kind of expecting something more draggy, and it is a touch preachy at times, but as TV dramas go it’s not bad. I like the cast, I like the characters, and I was OK with the setup. I can say that last mostly because of the nice little twist in the middle of the first episode, which I personally took as a metatextual zing at everyone who thought the show would be The West Wing II.

The back and forth between Senator Sterling and his new chief of staff regarding his beliefs lived up to the promise of the twist. Keep up the ambiguity and it’ll be a decent drama; lose track of the differences between the new Senator and the party with which he votes and it’ll wind up sucking. I’ll be interested to see how long the writers are willing to portray someone in the Senator’s unusual political position as laudable.

Cory Doctorow has another story, “Liberation spectrum,” up on Salon. It’s most definitely Transhumanist: deeply rooted in today’s technological culture, set in a fairly near future, and so on. It doesn’t have the body modification elements I’d been thinking were a key component of the subgenre, although I think there’s one or two offhand references to the concept.

I like this story more than “Jury Service” or “0wnz0red,” possibly because the conflict between the techie founder and the need for business oversight is something that crops up all the time in my day to day work. The characterization rocks too. Lee-Daniel’s got personality, and he’s real, not just a carrier for the thoughts on technology. Same goes for the other characters. I’m really impressed with how much Doctorow was able to say about Mac in so little room.

After failing to get to the theater in time to see Catch Me If You Can, my brother and I settled on Narc. It was really good; Joe Carnahan, the director, wanted to make a 70s cop movie and he succeeded.

The plot’s complex enough to be interesting and not entirely obvious, but not so unwieldy that it gets in the way of either the psychological tension or the action. I was a little worried that it would veer into a moralistic frenzy, always a danger in a movie that has so much to do with drugs, but nope. The acting’s excellent. Ray Liotta put on thirty pounds to play his role and it worked perfectly.

The directing — I said before that it was a 70s cop movie, but actually it’s not. It’s more as if Hollywood had been refining and developing the 70s cop movie ever since. Carnahan has a big bag of cinematographic tricks, and uses them with skill. There’s one exceedingly eloquent split screen moment that I won’t spoil, but it took my breath away. Confident and daring work.

Recommendation: see it before it vanishes from theaters.

I’ve watched this trailer around five times now. Last night, this morning. Watching it again right now. And I believe. Yes, I do. I have no qualms about saying this:

In 2003, Uma Thurman will Kill Bill.