Midnight in Paris - 2011 - 3 Stars

Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Michael Fassbender

Director: Woody Allen

Midnight in Paris, the latest Woody Allen film, is about a Hollywood-screenwriter and Allen-surrogate played by Owen Wilson who has grand literary ambitions, but can't put them on paper. Wilson does a nice job of making the Allen-surrogate his own and provides his own unique gentile charm that is nice change of pace from the typical Woody characters. Like all late period Allen-surrogates Wilson has a gorgeous, shrew of a fiance, played by Rachel McAdams. McAdams is such a warm screen presence that she almost makes the character undetestable, but falls just short. Wilson travels around contemporary Paris with a rotating cast of his fiance, her parents and a pompous intellectual played perfectly by Michael Sheen. While some of the performances make this section of the film affable, the dialogue is very heavy handed, especially in a painful scene where Wilson brings up his father-in-law's support of the Tea Party.

One night while walking around Paris the clock strikes midnight and Wilson is transported into the 1920s where he is free to hobnob with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Luis Bunuel among others. Allen wisely avoids trying to explain any of the logistics behind the conceit; the film is a fantasy and creating strict rules would weigh down the film. If the fantasy above is one you have had before, you will love this movie, if not, you will still be mildly entertained. Once Wilson arrives in Paris, there are few surprises, he meets his heroes, gets to make 85 jokes where the punchline is predicated in historical irony and lives out the fantasy of being in "a golden era". The movie's climax is a "minor insight", so anyone expecting more than a trifle will be disappointed.

There is a scene in American Masters: Woody Allen where we see Woody rummaging through loose sheets of yellow legal pad on his bed, each piece of paper has a comedic premise like, "A man inherits all the magic tricks of a great magician". One quickly realizes that even a prolific worker like Woody will generate a lot more premises than actual movies. Woody ends this scene by saying "I'll spend an hour thinking of that and it'll go no place and i'll go onto the next one." Midnight in Paris is a charming daydream, but a minor movie; maybe Woody should have grabbed the next piece of paper from the pile.

California Split - 1974 - 4 1/2 Stars

Actors: George Segal and Elliot Gould

Director: Robert Altman

"Gambling is a disease, but it's the only disease where you can win lots of money!" - Norm Macdonald

There is a myth that people will like art about subjects they are experts about. I read a lot of Moneyball reviews that said "I loved it and I am not even a baseball fan!". For me those reviews missed the point because I disliked Moneyball and I am a baseball fan. My criticisms of the movie read like Bart Simpson's commentary on Aaahhh! Wilderness!, "The guys who wrote this show don't know squat. Itchy should have tied Scratchy's tongue with a taut-line hitch, not a sheet bend."

As someone who has spent a lot of time gambling and has had every gambling movie ever recommended to me; I tend to find gambling movies infuriating and as my expectations erode my pedantry remains fierce as ever. I decided to withhold my cynicism for California Split because of Altman's pedigree and fortunately my high expectations were met. The Hustler is the best movie about gambling I have seen, but California Split is the best gambling movie I have seen. The Hustler is about being cursed with a talent that forces you to live in a repugnant world; it didn't need to be about a gambler. California Split embraces the culture of gambling and gives a frank, non-judgmental portrayal of it that I haven't seen before.

Altman's films tend to deal with fringe characters; he casts non-traditional heroes and his overlapping dialogue makes the audience aware our heroes aren't the only people in the world. California Split uses both these techniques to great effect. George Segal and Elliot Gould are run of the mill recreational gambling addicts, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but regardless they are at the casino/fights/track on payday. They leave the grandstands as soon a race is finished, why stand around when you can get fresh bets in? I am so used to seeing Gould and Segal play elderly Jewish buffoons that I forgot how cool they once were; Gould's charm carries most of the film, which has a loose episodic structure, a wise choice that illustrates that most of the events of the film are run of the mill for our leads.

The loose structure allows Altman to show that gambling can actually be fun and gives the movie a lived in feel that accurately shows that when you live in a gambling culture any event, like a fight in the crowd during a boxing match, can bet bet on and every action from "Hit me!" to "I hope this gets her to sleep with me" is viewed as a gamble. Gambling is not the most tragic vice, but it is the most melancholy. Unlike other vices gambling is scalable; it's much easier to bet 10 times up as much, than smoke/drink/snort 10 times as much. Gambling's scalablity always creates a twinge of regret; even when one wins they wish they bet more or quit at their peak. California Split's strength is presenting gambling's melancholy insatiability in a film that make it seem so damn fun.

NB: I almost gave this 5 stars, but didn't want to kick off my blog with two 5 star reviews. I think California Split is a 4 star movie, but it deals with one of my favorite subjects in such a strong way that it's a 5 star movie for me. I decided to split the difference and give it 4 1/2. I hope Zombie Robert Altman will forgive me.

Certified Copy - 2010 - 5 Stars

Actors: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Spoilers Below - This is a movie that's plot is so light that it's almost impossible to talk about the movie without having seen it. Anyone reading this should trust me and see the movie immediately, it's on Netflix WI in Canada.

Certified Copy opens with William Shimell's character lecturing about his book, Certified Copy, which discusses replication and authenticity in art. Why is a counterfeit less valuable than an original? What is the difference between being inspired by someone and copying someone? These sorts of questions are constantly asked in visual art in exhibits like Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans". Personally I find those pieces of visual art to be smart-alecky and cold. At points Certified Copy feels like it might just be a formalist exercise, which can be intolerable over the course of a full length feature: once you understand the filmmaker's thesis you don't want to watch any more of the movie.

Fortunately CC is such a well executed film that it doesn't feel clever even though it is. This is my first Kiarostami film and he is an excellent technician, each shot is purposeful and showcases the themes of the movie, especially an early shot where the streets of Tuscany are reflected through the windshield of a car driven by Binoche. CC is so successful because the performances by Binoche and Shimell, the latter an opera singer who has never acted before brings the regal iciness one would expect from a British baritone, are so strong that you need to be made of stone to not emote during the film. As the film ends I thought to myself they are just people projected on a screen, why do you care what happens to them? Exactly.

Good News Everyone!

This blog is active again. My good friend at http://thewhat-have-you.blogspot.com/ made me realize that when you watch a lot of movies you tend to forget what you liked/disliked about them and creating a journal that captures your reaction to films is worthwhile.

I will be ranking films from 1-5 stars and will generally be reviewing whatever film I saw most recently, but occasionally digging back into my netflix queue to talk about movies i saw in the last year or two. Unfortunately the incredible TV allusion in the title of this blog is now useless; life is tough.

So you can get a general idea of my taste here are the movies with 5 stars of my netflix queue in no particular order.

La Pianiste (Haneke, 2002)

Monty Python's: Life of Brian (Jones, 1979)

Fitzcarraldo (Herzog,1982)

Toy Story 3 (Unkich, 2010)

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)

Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)

Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

Annie Hall (Allen, 1966)

The Incredibles (Bird, 2004)

Certified Copy (Kiarostamii, 2010)

The Wrestler (Aronofosky, 2008)

Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970)

Hating Hamlet

I recently watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for kind of the first time; I had already seen several scenes and thought I had good grasp of the general narrative because of parody/montages/general cultural awareness. I thought the opening scene with the apes was a prologue to the story about HAL 2000 taking over a ship in a nearly perfectly executed Sci-Fi thriller. Clearly I inferred too much from my general pop culture knowledge as it is surprisingly hard to capture surreal existential symbolism in a 3 minute montage that also attempts to summarize The Godfather and Star Wars. Though I expected a completely different film 2001 exceeded my expectations. It was intellectually and viscerally stimulating in a way that most art is incapable of and is a technical masterpiece. As I was watching the movie I was given a lot of time to think (which tends to happen when you watch long scenes of satellites orbiting the earth to a score of classical music), but a couple thoughts were persistent, specifically "What the fuck is going on?", "How did Kubrick get that shot without CGI?" and "There is no way in the hell this movie would ever get made today."

The latter is not the precursor to hifalutin anti-populist rant, about movie studios inability to discern quality,* but a matter of fact. I doubt many largely plotless, dialogueless expensive movies are getting greenlit and for good reason; they will likely lose money. However 2001 did get made in spite of it's lack of commercial viability and it is considered one of the best films of all time and it has become part of the canon(and therefore is shown in montages). Despite this cultural consesus as I watched 2001 I felt very confident that most people would hate this film. They would not hate it in a reactionary way like the recent Avatar backlash or on moral grounds or because it offended their basic sensibilities, they just wouldn't find it captivating. Without the cultural awareness of its greatness I think most people would stop watching the movie within 30 minutes and aggressively warn people to never see it. With cultural context 2001's reputation supersedes most negative reactions from people who actively dislike it or would dislike it as they assume it is a "quality" film and criticizing it would be like criticizing Dickens or Shakespeare and seen as a pillar of ignorance.**

*well I hope it isn't.

**Note that exception for this is among hipsters who can sincerely argue things like Christopher Marlowe is better than Shakespeare in an attempt to express their individualism through knee-jerk contrariness.

It takes time before for any art to gain classic status; in the present we are more inclined to judge it solely on it's transient merit. In the present the illusion of quality seems more significant than actual quality, which makes speculating about current films timelessness difficult. In 1996 The English Patient won 9 Oscars, the DGA and The Golden Globe for best drama; Seinfeld made an episode where Elaine became a social leper for not instantly loving this film. It was tangibly the best film from 1996. 15 years later it seems like the lasting legacy of The English Patient is that Seinfeld episode, while movies like Fargo and Jerry Maguire are much more culturally significant.* Granted this may have occurred because the proliferation of cable channels have made those two movies ubiquitous, but I think a large reason for this was because The English Patient dominance in major award categories gave it an illusion of quality.

* It seems like I know no one who has seen The English Patient. I can very loosely prove this by the fact I haven't seen a single person mention that Sayid from LOST had a large supporting role in it.

Earlier I mentioned that a lot of people wouldn't be entertained or even like 2001 if it didn't have its reputation and while I cannot prove this, I can compare it to relatively similar films that don't have its pedigree. When There Will Be Blood was released I talked to a lot of people who hated it one even derisively (and cleverly!) referred to it as There Will Be Bored. Obviously TWBB is not a clone of 2001 but it has a lot of similar elements, such as long dialogueless sequences that focus on barren landscapes. However it is much more accessible because of an incredible performance by Daniel Day Lewis and because its subtext is unambiguous. One word I frequently heard from TWBB detractors was pretentious, which has slowly morphed from an adjective into a brand. It is the one word that can destroy the illusion of quality. It used to say the only people that like this movie are smug overly analytical intellectuals of which I don't belong. Calling these people pretentious indiscriminately allows people to rationalize their own taste when they disagree with experts, who they will gladly defer to when share opinions.* Words like pretentious are rarely used to describe 2001 and instead are replaced by words like confusing or forward thinking.

*Sort of like how comedy is only described as misogynistic or racist when people don't find it funny.

The illusion of quality benefits accessible films in the present. After it was nominated for best picture and Sandra Bullock won best actress at the Oscars. The public started to believe The Blind Side was "good". When they watch it they aren't enjoying a shallow feel good Disney film they are enjoying an Oscar-worthy film. 10 years from now people will be surprised that it won all these awards, but for a short period of time it was considered a quality film. Conversely 2001 is a very inaccessible film, but as time and passes less people see it.* As less people see the movie its pretension will slowly morph into merit or importance. Older people who grew up with the film will likely only remember scattered details, but they will want to support their generation's art so they will fondly remember it even if they actually found it ponderous. The younger generation will grow up seeing 2001 in the list of best films of all time from the day they are born and never have a sufficient reason to dispute that claim. In the meantime films like There Will Be Blood are scrutinized, since a lot of people have seen the film recently enough to remember specific details and it has yet to reach a canonical status that makes it above reproach.

*It wouldn't surprise me that much to discover that more people have already seen Iron Man 2 then 2001

I don't think that is unfair; timelessness is an important quality when judging art and instantly anointing anything one of the greatest films of all time would probably be premature. However what if the greatest film of all time were released tomorrow? How long would it take for that to become cultural consensus? I suspect it would take at least 30 years and this is what intriguing about the dichotomy between TWBB and 2001. The elements that people hate about TWBB aren't acknowledged by those same people when they watch 2001, because of 2001's reputation. There is an anti-recency bias that effects how art is viewed, I noticed this on a smaller scale when I read best of the decade lists last year. These lists had a disproportionately small amount of films from 2009 on the list and while 2009 may have just been a weak year for movies; I think it is a reflection of society's reticence to prematurely add something to the canon. Films are in canonical purgatory are subject to more criticism by the public and this lack of consensus causes best and favourite tend to converge in the present, but once these films leave purgatory they evolve from best to Best and valid or not most people don't want to criticize Hamlet.

Format Change

When I first started this blog I wanted to limit the scope of it fearing it would become unwieldy if I just documented my ephemeral thoughts. While I still think that is true, I did create this blog as a relatively productive hobby and I didn't enjoy writing a lot of entries. Writing about TV shows as they air creates a deadline, which I'd rather avoid in a leisure activity. Other people do better and faster jobs of posting their immediate thoughts on TV shows as they air and I only really enjoyed writing longer posts that touched on more abstract issues, then if I liked the finale of 30 Rock. I am going to attempt to write longer pieces that will be about things I feel are interesting and unique and hopefully will not become instantly dated, as those are things I actually enjoyed writing thus far.

SNL Gabourey Sidibe/MGMT

Last weeks SNL was a pretty typical bad SNL episode and par for the course from the rest of the season. Probably not any worse than the Blake Lively/Taylor Lautner or January Jones episodes. The only saving grace was Bill Hader and John Mulaney on weekend update. However there was something about this episode that really bothered me and that was that it seemed like everyone on the show/audience were Gabourey Sidibe's parents hoping she would do well. A disclaimer I have not seen Precious and don't plan on watching it, I am sure it is a very good movie, but I don't feel like watching a movie where the best case scenario is it succesfully tells a tragic story and makes me unbearably sad. My problem was not that the audience was behind Sidibe I am not such a cynic that I dislike the idea of a live audience supporting a green host. My problem is that it felt like most of the support came out of pity or guilt. During this episode I was reminded of all the pre-Oscar coverage, where everyone*kept saying how beautiful Sidibe is. When I saw Sidibe on SNL and talkshows I was surprised at how bubbly and charismatic she was and it is endearing, but she is not beautiful* by any stretch of the imagination.

*Everyone including reporters for shows like Access Hollywood who are possibly the most vain people in the world. As far as I can tell there job is too look pretty and read a teleprompter without shouting offensive statements.

*Yes I realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but a large percentage of both the population would not consider her beautiful. I also realize that beauty can be used to describe inner beauty, but there are several other adjectives that can be used to describe that and don't have the same connotation of aesthetic beauty.

This sentiment is such a bullshit Hollywood feel good thing where people with nice hair and fake smiles get to pretend that they aren't in an industry where aesthics superficiality is rewarded. It's almost as if Hollywood is surprised that someone who isn't a 9/10 can add value to society and Sidibe overcoming obesity is the equivalent of making the NFL with a fake leg. If Sidibe is truly as intelligent and grounded as people have said I am sure she is not delusional enough to sincerely believe the claims of her beauty. Patronizing someone doesn't change the truth. This brings me to this weeks SNL. Last week I watched the SNL in the 2000's documentary and one of the segments was about SNL's willingness to make fun of anything, because they are a comedy show and being as funny as possible should be the priority. Alec Baldwin joked about his divorce weeks after it happened, they have had a recurring joke making fun of David Patterson's blindness, etc. however when Sidibe hosted SNL they bent over backwards to not make any jokes at her expense and throughout the episode that was the elephant in the room. I am not suggesting that the episode should have turned into 90 minutes of fat jokes, but if you are trying to make a comedy show it might make sense to have some sketches where the host is the butt of some jokes. People may argue that she is an innocent child and making fun of her on national TV is cruel. That is a fair point, but that hasn't stopped SNL in the past. They made fun of Britney Spears claims of virginity when she was a teen sensation, but I guess questioning someone's fidelity is funny so long as they are sufficiently beautiful that people are jealous of you and won't feel guilty about it after the fact. Others may say they didn't have any good jokes or sketches that would acknowledge Sidibe's appearance, but given the quality of the episode a couple token fat jokes probably would have been a welcome addition. If people actually read this blog, I think some people would get up in arms about this post, but my primary contention is this. SNL you are a admittedly a comedy show first, so you should be willing to make fun of everyone and everything patronizing someone because she is one of the few people in Hollywood who isn't drop dead gorgeous is insulting to that person and a bane to your craft.