First mention: "Avatar" and reductionist story theory

When someone says "Avatar is just Pocahontas" they mean the movie's just a re-telling of the story of the relationship between Pocahontas and John Smith. This is meant as a put-down. As if to say, "Well, this 3-D multi-million-dollar pic ain't really new after all, because the story is old."
As if every story hasn't been told before. But that's reductionist.
It's good to talk about reductionism because you don't want to be accused of doing it unintentionally. (It's a classic criticism of undergraduate theorising.) And, it's good to talk about reductionism because it's funny.
This reminds me of John Gardner.
John Gardner was the most famous professor at SUNY-Binghamton when Mary and I were there in the late 70's and early 80's. No, I never laid eyes on him, although you'd think a white-haired, over-weight motorcycle-riding professor would have stuck out. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1982. He's most famous for writing "Grendel", the story of Beowulf from the monster's POV, but in academic circles, I think he's well-known because he wrote two books that are often assigned reading in undergraduate writing classes: "The Art of Fiction" and "On Becoming a Novelist." I know I liked "Grendel" so much that I wrote a treatment for a screenplay based on it.
Anyway, John Gardner said (I'm paraphrasing here) "there are only two stories: "you go on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town."
And, to belabor the obvious, this is a joke, because, if you're being reductionist, then there's really only one story, because the difference between Gardner's two stories is just POV. The other reference is to Homer because there's the Iliad ("a stranger - the Greeks - comes to town") and the Odyssey (the biggest, bestest journey of all).
Laugh all you want, but there are people today who use the comedy of reductionism to make millions of dollars for themselves, and these are people who pitch movies to studio executives. You know: "It's a romantic gangster movie, like "Goodfellas" meets "Pretty Woman."

"Rashomon" and the structure of time

Mike and I watched "Rashomon" a couple of weeks ago and the thought of Narrative Cinema makes me want to list the ways movies structure time in the telling of a story. I'd like to keep a running list, so I'm open to entries.
"Rashomon" tells the same story four times in four extended flashbacks. It's 60 years old and it hasn't been done better yet - although this time I found the Western-style music really annoying (Mike was OK with it.)
"The Bridge of San Luis Rey" has been made into a movie three times and they've all been bad. In high school they called it "circular construction": the bridge collapses at the beginning and then you follow the lives of all the people who died on the bridge.
Flashbacks are more often mis-handled than not, as they slow down forward motion for (frequently) needless exposition. They frustrate the basic story-telling question: "What happens next?" The "whole-movie flashback" has been done dozens of times. The classic is "Lawrence of Arabia" where the main character dies in the first scene and then we're told the story of his life in one extended flashback. The best flashbacks are those in "8-1/2": pure cinema-as-memory.
"Memento" has to be on the list. Telling the story backwards has been used before - but in the theatre. The movie was definitely worth the effort, but I have to admit to being disappointed with the boring ending.
Two movies try to tell the story in real time: "High Noon" is one. We studied it in NYU writing class because it's very well constructed, but Gary Cooper sure does look at the clock a lot.
"Run Lola Run" combines "Rashomon" with real time: three versions of the same story are told and each version, and the action of the story, lasts for 25 minutes. Definitely recommended.

Brakhage - 1998

Brakhage - a documentary made for Canadian television

A very good 1-1/4 hour documentary, if any one's interested, from Netflix.

In the documentary, an elderly American critic says, "Film is just about over now." This is a very old-fashioned distinction which will soon be lost: he could have said, "Film as an analog medium is giving way to all the digital media out there." This distinction is most important to those who use the chemistry and physics of the plastic piece of film to create images. Still, just as CD's have not wiped out records, there are other considerations more linked to the quality of the image than to the "art" of Brakhage-style film making.

But the most interesting comments were those that applied the label "abstract expressionism" to what Brakhage was doing. Thirty years ago, this would never have occurred to me because, no matter what camera trickery is employed, I knew the camera was pointed at something in the world around us. In fact, no one can claim that every second of Brakhage is transcendental: sometimes you're sitting there just trying to figure out what the camera is pointed at. I figured he was closer to Georgia O'Keefe (get close enough to that flower and it becomes abstract) than he was to the Abstract Expressionists. But now I'm coming around to the "look, don't think" philosophy. It's abstract. It's expressive. It's expressively abstract and it's abstractly expressive. I'm thinking in particular of everything he did after "Dog Star Man" (which, after all, told a simple story) particularly "Text of Light" and on to the later films made with scratches and noxious chemicals.

Although Brakhage's life fit the counter-cultural mold of the 60's (without the drugs and the rock and roll) his personality really makes him seem closer to those Abstract Expressionist painters of the 50's: the emotional intensity, the high-seriousness, and the urge to "make it new." And here's the point where his personal life makes sense. I've said before that American avant garde cinema didn't disappear, it's images simply flowed out into the very real world of TV advertising, the impressionistic pitchmaking of the 21st century. Abstract Expressionism, in contrast, met a very real death, when Pop Art killed it in the early 60's. But Brakhage, the oblivious filmmaker, just kept going and, sure enough, starts suffering from the filmic version of writer's block. It may have been bad, but at least he didn't wind up like Jackson Pollack.

Death Proof

I saw the DVD version of "Death Proof" (2007), the one that's 1 hour 55 minutes long, and I found it a perfectly nice movie: an homage to a handful of action films of the 60's and 70's. It's filled with ontological details: little things that refer to the piece of film running through the projector, and I found it all funny and not intrusive at all.



It's a period piece, and here's a filmmaker who really wants to get all the details right, just like those fellows who do those awful Jane Austin movies.



I had forgotten how compelling real stunts are, and this movie goes out of its way to remind you, or, if you're young, to show you something you've never seen before (shades of Lumiere).



The final chase sequence involves a young woman holding onto the hood of a car and a deranged stranger who keeps crashing his car into hers in an effort to kill her. Why doesn't her friend, driving the car, simply slow down and stop so she can jump off to safety? Well, the movie has established the fact that no one here is very bright. So the chase is one extended stunt: she really is on that car hood and that car really is moving and I don't care how fast, because the whole thing feels dangerous. The blue screen comparison is the scene in "Minority Report" (2002) with Tom Cruise jumping from moving car to moving car. It probably cost ten times more to make that scene. Sorry, Quentin's girl on the hood version is much more visceral and much, much better. You knew you were watching something your mother would not want you to do. And it's a "B" movie thing: the Bond films always have great stunts, but Bond never dies. Here, we've already seen this guy kill four women with his car, so this woman definitely felt imperiled.


And isn't this plot line familiar? A heroine uses knowledge from the movie business to kill the bad guy at the end. Here, the brunette behind the wheel is a fearless movie stunt driver who uses her car, her gun and finally her heel to finish off the bad guy. In Quentin's very next film, the heroine uses flammable reels of 35mm film to send Hitler to Hell. And it was the "B" movie that was the plausible one.

Quentin's List

Somebody asked Quentin Tarentino to make a list of the 20 most important movies of the last 20 years. So, in no particular order, he posts the list.

I saw the first movie on the list a week ago: "Battle Royale" by Kinji Fukasaku. Terrible.

Then I saw another movie: "Audition" by Takashi Miike. Even worse.

I guess I had a right to be suspicious: "Fight Club" and "The Matrix" are on the list, but "The Departed" is not.

I can be fair (despite the fact that I spent my time watching those awful movies): the list tells you more about the list maker than anything else. And if the list maker is a filmmaker then the movies are ones that are intriguing to that artist. Maybe they're inspirational, maybe they're future source material, but artistic merit takes a back seat. It's OK. Tarentino doesn't pretend to be a critic.

You can say the list is useful to help you understand the filmmaker, but what's the point? You'd just be travelling down Intentionality Lane, trying to figure out what's going on in sombody's head instead of looking at what's on the screen.

Re-making Italian movies

Peggy told us about a new Robert DeNiro film that's a re-make of an Italian film she saw in college.
So I went to Netflix and instead of finding the DVD I found this grumpy Netflix review:

Why are studios remaking so many movies? Can't they find an original decent script? Everybody's Fine is a remake of the Giuseppe Tornatore film (the director of Cinema Paradiso) called "Stanno Tutti Bene" which translated means - hold your breath - "Everybody's Fine". The Italian film is charming, and beautifully shot. Why not just watch the original instead - rather than some Americanized remake. It would be a great addition to the library here.

So maybe they'll take this guy's advice. I have seen Cinema Paradiso and it was pretty good, but a real tearjerker.

BTW: Netflix lists "Everybody's Fine" under "Tearjerkers"

It's a fact: some very good re-makes of Japanese films have been made, but when anybody tries a re-make of an Italian movie, the results are usually pretty terrible. (Can anyone think of a good one?) On top of that, every movie where Robert DeNiro plays somebody's father has been bad so far, so I'll struggle to be open-minded about "Everybody's Fine." The omens are not good.
I wasn't going to bring up "Harry and Tonto" (1974) although I just saw it last week for the first time, but it fits the pattern. Art Carney won the Oscar that year (he beat Al Pacino in "The Godfather" and Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown") by playing an old man who's evicted from his NYC apartment and goes on a road trip - yes, it's a road movie. It's slow-going and poorly made and while I'm watching it I realize that the director, Paul Mazursky, took the subject matter of "Umberto D" (the indignities of modern old age), the structure of "La Strada" (a road trip with a lot of kooky characters) and the ending from "La Dolce Vita" (the beach - with all its fuzzy symbolism). Sure enough, yesterday I read the synopsis of a documentary about Fellini and it includes an interview with, you guessed it, Paul Mazursky, no doubt talking about Fellini's "influence."

A feminist critic from the 70's or 80's once said that if they re-made "Bicycle Thief" (1948) with a mother and a daughter instead of a father and a son, the movie would just be a tiresome melodrama and - maybe not for the reasons she was thinking of - she was right.

About Ridley Scott

The auteur theory holds that bad movies made by auteurs are more interesting than good movies made by lucky amateurs. Think Ridley Scott's worst ("GI Jane"? "Hannibal"?) vs. "Rocky."




Scott's style used to be described as "atmospheric." As if he'd been hypnotised as a young boy by the dust particles trapped in the beam of a movie projector, he'd fill up his movies with shots of dusty, steamy air, with lightbeams aimed at the camera, alternating with the darkness of some moving barrier. I'm thinking of all those electric fans in "Black Rain" and, the smoky Film Noir exteriors of "Blade Runner" and of course, those slimy dripping interiors of "Alien." You know you're looking at good mise-en-scene when you can identify the director from a still. I just saw "American Gangster" and he seems to have tired of all this and is now working in a no-frills Hollywood action style.



When "Alien" was first released, I read that Scott had "previewed" the film and had re-cut the last 15 minutes based on the audiences reaction (or lack of reaction.) I remember being very turned off by this, thinking "Here's a guy who's given millions to make a movie and he's learning on the job." Turns out this previewing business is a common Hollywood practice that I had never heard about. Even Hitchcock did it. (Speaking of Hitchcock, the actress Veronica Cartwright, one of the crew gobbled up in "Alien" played the little sister in "The Birds.")



And speaking of movie stills, are you guys familiar with Cindy Sherman? She's just the greatest living American photographer (go ahead and name a better one). She's been photographing herself dressed up every which way and she's been doing it for awhile now and she's very, very funny. Anyway, she made a series of photos (Untitled Film Stills) that look like movie stills from movies from the 50's and 60's. None are inspired by a specific movie, and that's part of the trick: the more movies you've seen, the more you look at her photos and think you've seen that movie.